Politics

A quick review of some major areas in which Obama needs to get his ass kicked

• Add Comment
• Sunday 22nd March 2009

It’s Sunday, I’m working, and all I can do to help the world situation is point towards a few pithy pieces in this morning’s NY Times (where you need a free subscription, someone reminded me).

1) A fine, fine, superfine editorial about the resemblance of certain aspects of both the Bush and Obama administration’s actions legal actions regarding “detainees” in US custody.

…Even as they dropped the “enemy combatant” terminology, Mr. Obama’s lawyers did not seem to rule out indefinite military detentions for terrorism suspects and their allies. They drew a definition of association with Al Qaeda that is too broad (simply staying in a “safe house,” for example). Worse, they seemed to adopt Mr. Bush’s position that the “battlefield” against terrorism is the planet. That became the legal pretext for turning criminal defendants into lifelong military captives.

On Thursday, we were delighted to see Attorney General Eric Holder reverse the Bush policy on releasing documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, directed the government to assume that documents should not be released and to find pretexts to keep them secret. Mr. Holder directed all agencies to presume that “in the face of doubt, openness prevails.” And he said the policy applied to pending lawsuits against the Bush administration for refusing to disclose information.

It was great news, but also recalled our distress that the Justice Department had abandoned transparency just last month in a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The case involves five men who were seized and transported to American facilities abroad or countries known for torturing prisoners.

The Obama administration advanced the same expansive state-secrets argument pressed by Mr. Bush’s lawyers to get a trial court to dismiss the case without any evidence being presented. Even the judges seemed surprised, asking whether the government wanted a delay to reconsider its position.

2) David Axelrod, Obama’s Karl Rove, declared that “Americans are not sitting around the kitchen table worrying about AIG; they’re worrying about jobs and health care.” First of all, these are not mutually exclusive ideas, and second, there are a few people in Connecticut who beg to differ.

The identities of most of those current and former [AIG] employees remain unknown to the public. But for the handful of executives whose names – and addresses – have slipped out, life is no longer the same: guards watch over their homes, reporters seek interviews in their long driveways, and, on Saturday afternoon, a bus and a caravan of other vehicles invaded their neighborhoods.

Organizers called it “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous” – a bus tour of the Fairfield homes of two A.I.G. executives. It was organized by the Connecticut Working Families Party, a coalition of labor and community groups. For the participants, the tour was street theater or sorts, bringing the public outrage over the bonuses to the doorsteps of A.I.G. employees.

3) And last, Frank Rich wonders if, in having his industry insider financial executives defend the AIG bonuses, Obama hasn’s stepped in something he’s going to have a lot of trouble getting off his shoe.

…The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by [Tom] Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.

Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time – most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

Extra

Same shit, different source:

[Senator Christopher] Dodd defended his role in ensuring that Wall Street compensation limits made it into the stimulus. The senator expressed disappointment that Treasury let him twist in the wind until yesterday evening, when Secretary Tim Geithner admitted that officials from his department requested that Dodd’s amendment be changed to grandfather in existing bonus contracts.

And everyone gets away clean, it seems.

Screw major league sports; soon the big attraction will be watching multi-millionaire politicians call each other names while they drain the Treasury.