Deal or No Deal
A populist uprising threw a monkey wrench into the Deal — exacerbated by what Joe Klein of TIME called McSnakeEye’s “purile histrionics.” Mac is blaming Obama [??] for the Kamikaze crash ‘n burn of the latest iteration — while the GOP is blaming Pelosi for her hard-edged speech [like that would change any one's mind.]
No, these folks are responding to the rage from their constituents, visible in spontaneous protests and pickets across the country , with Code Pink “dying” on the Capital steps [over my dead body, see?] I s’pose you could say they’re finally doing their job on the Hill; this is what the democratic process looks like … and it’s about time. But Rome IS burning, and it would be good if we had some new ideas on the table, not just the same-old gang fiddling and tap-dancing. Obama is urging calm [and gaining points] but demanding quick action; the House is in chaos, and looking for another version.
Yesterday, Mike Moore was promoting revolution, so he’s pleased today. His follow-up article is below — and bookmark him, if you’re not on his list, to get the next one. He mentioned in the earlier piece that some of the fear-speak going on is the danger to retirement/IRA funds which could prove poignant for so many; something has to happen, but NOT more corporate welfare. We passed the Patriot Act without vetting the details — let’s hope we learned the lesson.
And — here’s a thought: I’m no economist, but … if the Fed had stepped in months ago and made the financial institutions renegotiate those mortgages, guaranteeing them, how would all this look today? An ounce of prevention … but not on McDubby’s watch, I guess. The gilded and the giddy can’t let a little common sense interfere with their greed.
Good reads on the revolution, and the possibilities, below. We’ll start with a terrific piece by Rick Perlstein; open the link. The bonus material is about Nine Gate — remember? Fired attorneys? Fredo Gonzales doing the two-step in front of Congress? We were caught in that stonewall energy that couldn’t get a toe-hold on corruption?
Ahhhh … what a few months can do! Turns out it was all true — no shock there. But what next? Like Dubby … who is a ghost that haunts the occasional meeting or press conference … Fredo will get a pass. But the DOJ has some ’splainin’ to do!
As for our resident POW, as I’m sure you know by now, the debate was a “draw” in which Obama not only proved presidential and formidable, but now enjoys a sizable bump with newly impressed Independents. The GOP has it that Mac won, but not by being Miss Congeniality. No, he won the grumpy, mean-spirited “When I Was A Boy” Award for boring us to tears with personal reminiscence, and proving himself irrelevant to the Times as he accused the young upstart of being … umm … a young upstart.
Some of Mac’s vitriol may have come from being one-upped by the Big O and forced to debate. Still, he certainly showed us what his foreign policy would look like as he refused to meet Obama’s eyes or speak to him directly; four more years of Bush stonewall, arrogance and petulance.
Meanwhile, we anticipate the Biden/Palin encounter later this week; Joe can avoid the traps by sticking to the superiority of Dem policies and leaving the nuance alone. Palin don’t do nuance, nor does her party. The chance that she’ll articulate past her assigned talking points seems slim.
Tina Fey’s latest send-up on SNL was a hoot; a replay of the Couric interview that has everyone worried about Palin’s readiness, even her own party. The frightening part is that Tina didn’t have to write a script — she just had to quote Sarah’s own response in that sing-song, Fargo’esque accent.
I did a coffee-spew over the comment everyone’s buzzing about, when Sarah couldn’t answer Katie’s question on Mac’s record, and Couric pressed her [ever so gently.] She’d look it up, she said, and finished, “… I’ll get ‘em to ya!” Holy crap! Right before my very eyes she turned into my Avon lady!
But that’s not deflating her Faithful, who think if you can be PTA Prez, you can lead the Free World. And apparently CBS itself was reluctant to run the clip that showed Sister Sarah’s inability to think of more than one Supreme Court ruling … but she knew Roe v. Wade, by golly! Fareed Zakaria put the cherry on her cake with his Newsweek article, Palin Is Ready? Please. And the YouTube compilation of McCranky’s ill humor speaks for itself.
So it’s back to the drawing board — on ALL of it! And NO, John — we can’t just roll the dice.
Jude
A Liberal Shock Doctrine
History teaches us that presidents have to move quickly to enact progressive reforms before the window of opportunity closes forever. It’s a lesson Barack Obama should take to heart.
Rick Perlstein | August 18, 2008
From Mike Moore:
Friends,
Everyone said the bill would pass. The masters of the universe were already making celebratory dinner reservations at Manhattan’s finest restaurants. Personal shoppers in Dallas and Atlanta were dispatched to do the early Christmas gifting. Mad Men of Chicago and Miami were popping corks and toasting each other long before the morning latte run.
But what they didn’t know was that hundreds of thousands of Americans woke up yesterday morning and decided it was time for revolt. The politicians never saw it coming. Millions of phone calls and emails hit Congress so hard it was as if Marshall Dillon, Elliot Ness and Dog the Bounty Hunter had descended on D.C. to stop the looting and arrest the thieves.
The Corporate Crime of the Century was halted by a vote of 228 to 205. It was rare and historic; no one could remember a time when a bill supported by the president and the leadership of both parties went down in defeat. That just never happens.
A lot of people are wondering why the right wing of the Republican Party joined with the left wing of the Democratic Party in voting down the thievery. Forty percent of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans voted against the bill.
Here’s what happened:
The presidential race may still be close in the polls, but the Congressional races are pointing toward a landslide for the Democrats. Few dispute the prediction that the Republicans are in for a whoopin’ on November 4th. Up to 30 Republican House seats could be lost in what would be a stunning repudiation of their agenda.
The Republican reps are so scared of losing their seats, when this “financial crisis” reared its head two weeks ago, they realized they had just been handed their one and only chance to separate themselves from Bush before the election, while doing something that would make them look like they were on the side of “the people.”
Watching C-Span yesterday morning was one of the best comedy shows I’d seen in ages. There they were, one Republican after another who had backed the war and sunk the country into record debt, who had voted to kill every regulation that would have kept Wall Street in check — there they were, now crying foul and standing up for the little guy! One after another, they stood at the microphone on the House floor and threw Bush under the bus, under the train (even though they had voted to kill off our nation’s trains, too), heck, they would’ve thrown him under the rising waters of the Lower Ninth Ward if they could’ve conjured up another hurricane. You know how your dog acts when sprayed by a skunk? He howls and runs around trying to shake it off, rubbing and rolling himself on every piece of your carpet, trying to get rid of the stench. That’s what it looked like on the Republican side of the aisle yesterday, and it was a sight to behold.
The 95 brave Dems who broke with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd were the real heroes, just like those few who stood up and voted against the war in October of 2002. Watch the remarks from yesterday of Reps. Marcy Kaptur, Sheila Jackson Lee and Dennis Kucinich. They spoke the truth.
The Dems who voted for the giveaway did so mostly because they were scared by the threats of Wall Street, that if the rich didn’t get their handout, the market would go nuts and then it’s bye-bye stock-based pension and retirement funds.
And guess what? That’s exactly what Wall Street did! The largest, single-day drop in the Dow in the history of the New York Stock exchange. The news anchors last night screamed it out: Americans just lost 1.2 trillion dollars in the stock market!! It’s a financial Pearl Harbor! The sky is falling! Bird flu! Killer Bees!
Of course, sane people know that nobody “lost” anything yesterday, that stocks go up and down and this too shall pass because the rich will now buy low, hold, then sell off, then buy low again.
But for now, Wall Street and its propaganda arm (the networks and media it owns) will continue to try and scare the bejesus out of you. It will be harder to get a loan. Some people will lose their jobs. A weak nation of wimps won’t last long under this torture. Or will we? Is this our line in the sand?
Here’s my guess: The Democratic leadership in the House secretly hoped all along that this lousy bill would go down. With Bush’s proposals shredded, the Dems knew they could then write their own bill that favors the average American, not the upper 10% who were hoping for another kegger of gold.
So the ball is in the Democrats’ hands. The gun from Wall Street remains at their head. Before they make their next move, let me tell you what the media kept silent about while this bill was being debated:
1. The bailout bill had NO enforcement provisions for the so-called oversight group that was going to monitor Wall Street’s spending of the $700 billion;
2. It had NO penalties, fines or imprisonment for any executive who might steal any of the people’s money;
3. It did NOTHING to force banks and lenders to rewrite people’s mortgages to avoid foreclosures — this bill would not have stopped ONE foreclosure!;
4. It had NO teeth anywhere in the entire piece of legislation, using words like “suggested” when referring to the government being paid back for the bailout;
5. Over 200 economists wrote to Congress and said this bill might actually WORSEN the “financial crisis” and cause even MORE of a meltdown.
Put a fork in this slab of pork. It’s over. Now it is time for our side to state very clearly the laws WE want passed. I will send you my proposals later today. We’ve bought ourselves less than 72 hours. ++
The Power of ‘No’ and the Need to Keep the Pressure on Congress
Dave Lindorff, CommonDreams
Monday, September 29, 2008
Incredible! This time, when the People spoke, Congress listened.
At least 228 members of the House listened. They voted early this afternoon to reject the Bush Administration’s scaremongering, and the cowardly Democratic Congressional leadership’s attempt at ducking and covering by attaching some meaningless verbiage to what remains a case of legalized highway robbery. At least for the moment, the bailout scam is killed.
Earlier in the day, the Congressional switchboard was jammed. You could get through, but it took a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators at the Capitol say it’s been that way for a week now, as Americans across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote “No” on the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.
That today was no exception, even after Democratic Party leaders (and both major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama) had bought into the plan following their adding of some window-dressing measures designed to make it look more palatable, showed that the public is not being fooled (calls were reportedly running better than 9:1 or more like 999:1 against a bailout, perhaps more like 99:1).
People see clearly that this proposal is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant oversight or regulation.
As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one–getting the toxic mortgages off the banks’ books and onto taxpayers’ hands. Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks’ balance sheets in the form of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which will mean they still won’t start lending money again. Left unaddressed too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system–a major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.
Stiglitz doesn’t even address a fifth problem which is that this trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you’re already talking $1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that Americans import–more than half of everything we use in daily life thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing–will rise dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding, interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what’s left of the economy to a grinding halt.
All of this is readily predictable–and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan–but that doesn’t matter to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public gets really aroused.
The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week’s nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are being sold a bill of goods.
But it ain’t over yet. We can be sure there will be arm-twisting now to try and get 12 members of Congress to change their votes and win passage in the House (the Senate, where two-thirds of the members aren’t facing election for two or four years, will probably pass the bill easily). A continued expression of public outrage and of a promise of retaliation at the ballot box against those who vote for the bailout needs to be expressed.
If you haven’t made an effort to call your two senators and your representative to demand that they vote “No” on this bailout, do it now (the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don’t give up when you get a busy signal. That’s a sign that you are not alone. Just keep hitting “redial” until you get through. At that point, get the operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard number after that. If you did call, call again and say you don’t want anyone changing their vote to become a bailout backer.
Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, we’ve shown that this latest bum’s rush can still be stopped. We did stop it.
To make your next call more impactful, make sure you tell each member of your congressional delegation that any yes vote on the bailout means you will vote against them next election. To read about this strategy, go to:
ThrowThemAllOut.com…and then spread the word.
Keep the pressure on!
And don’t forget to contact the Obama campaign too. How embarrassing for candidates Obama and McCain, who both got suckered into backing the bailout, which it is now abundantly clear the American people recognize as a ripoff.
PS: Imagine if the same kind of pressure had been brought on Congress back in October 2002 when Bush was scare-mongering Congress into approving a war against Iraq. We’d have 4500 young Americans still alive, 40,000 other young Americans would still have their limbs and other body parts. A million-plus Iraqis would still be alive. And the country would have an extra $500 billion with which to deal with the current economic crisis. ++
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic Attack as Bailout Goes Bust
Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
The vote by the House of Representatives to defeat the Wall Street bailout plan is the first act of political courage that the Congress of the United States has mounted in the last seven years. The fact that it was due largely to right-wing Republicans afraid of going down with the sinking ship of the witless leader they have followed blindly throughout his reign is a delicious irony — but the whys and wherefores of the vote are not important. What matters is that one of America’s moribund institutions has flickered to life long enough to derail a disastrous action that would have shoved the nation even deeper into the pit of corruption and ruin where it has been mired for so long.
The New York Times called the House vote “a catastrophic political defeat for President Bush, who had put the full weight of the White House behind the measure.” But this is manifestly untrue. As everyone but the nation’s media — and the Democratic Party — knows, George W. Bush has no “political weight” to use, or lose. Yes, he still retains the authoritarian powers that the spineless Democrats have given him with scarcely a whimper of protest (and often with boundless enthusiasm); but as a political force — i.e., someone whose opinions and statements can sway popular opinion — he has been a dead and rotting carcass for a long time. He is the most unpopular president in American history; and I can report from first-hand, eyewitness knowledge that he is thoroughly despised by some of the most rock-ribbed, Bible-believing, flag-waving, down-home, John Wayne-loving Heartland types that you can imagine. Even his own party — a party fashioned in his own image, the Frankensteinian melding of willfully ignorant religious primitivism and rapaciously greedy crony capitalism that he has embodied in his twerpish person — kept him away from their convention this year.
Nothing — absolutely nothing — could be politically safer than opposing George W. Bush. And yet the entire Democratic leadership, Barack Obama included, lined up to support a cockamamie plan proposed by this scorned and shriveled figure, a plan that was transparently nothing more than an audacious raid on the Treasury by Big Money hoods and yet another authoritarian power grab by a gang of murderous, torturing, warmongering toadies. This was the plan and these were the people that the Democrats decided to fight for.
What’s more, the Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder with the president on what is apparently the only issue that can now stir Americans to genuine anger and widespread protest: a direct threat to their bank accounts. Wars of aggression like the Nazis used to wage; elaborate tortures like the KGB used to practice; concentration camps, lawbreaking leaders, diminishment of liberty, the slaughter of a million innocent people in a land destroyed by an illegal and pointless invasion — all of that stuff is pretty much OK, easily swallowable, worth no more than a shrug or perhaps a frowny “tsk tsk” before going on to the sports pages or flipping over to another channel. But put out an open ploy to steal their money and give it to the filthy rich — and baby, it’s pitchfork time! Yet here, as the public face of just such a ploy, is where the Democrats chose to make their stand.
So Monday’s rejection of the bailout plan is not a catastrophic political defeat for George W. Bush; he has no political standing, no political future. But it is a vast and humiliating defeat for the Democratic leadership, across the board, who, as Democrat Lloyd Dogget of Texas said “never seriously considered any alternative” to the administration’s plan, and had only barely modified what they were given. He criticized the plan for handing over sweeping new powers to an administration that he said was to blame for allowing the crisis to develop in the first place.
Now the Democratic elites have had their collective head handed to them on a platter. It is a dish most richly deserved. And although it is almost possible to believe that they will learn anything from this episode, there is now a chance — a chance — that we can at least have a discussion of alternatives to the Bush scheme.
I still believe it is unlikely any genuinely effective program — one that could manage and mitigate the now-unavoidable effects of the Wall Street/Washington-induced disaster — will ever get enacted. After all, the Democrats are largely owned by the same corrupt and greedy elites now seeking a handout. And it seems reasonable to assume that the Bipartisan Bailout Bunch will eventually find some kind of sugar to tempt away the two dozen votes they need for their next “compromise” on the Bush-Paulson plan.
Then again, who knows? There are obviously a lot of very powerful and privileged people sweating more bullets tonight than they have sweated in many and many a year. They have roused the drowsy beast of popular anger at last, and no one can say what might happen next. Probably nothing — or rather, more of the same, in some form or another. But still, it is good to see the icy beads of panic dotting the brows of elites who have inflicted and/or countenanced so much death, destruction, terror and degradation in the past few years. Today they have suffered a very rare defeat in the relentless, remorseless class war they have been waging against us for decades. And that it is something to celebrate — at least for one night. ++
Worse than Hoover
Jacob Heilbrunn, HuffPo
September 29, 2008
So the verdict is in. The House’s failure to pass the bailout bill means that George W. Bush’s record will not be as bad as Herbert Hoover’s. It will be worse.
When Hoover entered office, he called a meeting of economists and business leaders to discuss how the country should best deal with prosperity. Then came October 1929. The stock market plummeted and never really recovered until after World War II. At least Hoover didn’t trigger the collapse himself and he didn’t mire the country in a trillion dollar war.
Hoover, unlike Bush, was a progressive president. But he was also an adherent of laissez-faire economics, which meant that he was intent on balancing the budget. The economy would never have recovered on his watch. Franklin Roosevelt averted the worst by establishing the New Deal. But not until World War II did the economy really begin to hum.
Today it is Barack Obama who has the potential to create a new New Deal. John McCain joined together with the House Republicans, most likely in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the party’s hard right, to scuttle Bush’s proposal. Now it’s back to the drawing board–if Bush even has anything to draw up. Like Hoover, Bush has been extraordinarily passive, letting his Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke take the lead. They, and he, were unable to close the sale. Will there be anything left to sell in coming weeks?
The irony is that the House Republicans may well be sealing Obama’s victory in November.
Should the economy continue to collapse, McCain won’t simply lose the election, but be crushed. ++
Wrecking, Wrecking, Wrecked
Thomas Frank, HuffPo
September 29, 2008
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat–to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
Defunding those agencies was one way to stop the killer bureaucrats; another was to stuff them full of business-friendly personnel who would go easy on regulated.
The signature conservative regulatory idea became “voluntary enforcement”, because everyone now knew that efficient markets regulated themselves. Bad practices or tainted products drove away consumers; therefore firms had an incentive to behave, an incentive far more powerful than some top-down scheme in which big brother told them what to do.
Whether people ever truly believed this nonsense or not, its application over the years makes up the basic story of conservative governance as I tell it in my book, The Wrecking Crew. This is the philosophy by which conservatives gutted the EPA and the Labor Department, turned over the Interior Department and the FDA to the industries they were supposed to regulate, let the CEO of Enron advise the vice president on energy policy, and generally came to regard business, not the public, as government’s “customer” (a word that crops up with disturbing frequency in conservative regulatory history).
But it is only now, as we watch the financial system crumble around us, that we can really see the devastating consequences of this folly. It turns out the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was responsible for regulating investment banks, did a significant part of its job through a voluntary program which firms could participate in or not as they saw fit. As the New York Times told the story on Saturday, this system had–of course–been pushed for by the investment banks themselves, who wanted it in order to avoid the stricter rules from European governments that they would otherwise have had to obey.
And now, as a consequence, the SEC has almost no industry left to regulate. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley: All of them are gone or restructured. At business’s urging, business was left up to its own devices; its own devices turned out to be precisely the things that our grandparents set up regulatory agencies to guard against: euphoria that leads to panic; perverse incentives that lead to fraud; boom that leads to bust.
As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it. The regulators have indeed killed the regulated–not by intrusive meddling but by doing nothing, by taking a nap while the financial sector puffed up the bubble and blew itself to pieces. ++
bonus
Crossing a Line at Justice
A new report lays out in breathtaking detail the politics behind the firing of federal prosecutors.
Washington Post Editorial Board
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
SOME WERE FIRED because they irritated Justice Department higher-ups. Others were dismissed after Republican politicians groused about their failure to move quickly against political enemies. One was removed to make room for Karl Rove’s handpicked candidate. For some, there seems to be no explanation of why they were asked to leave; remarkably, two were actually let go because of poor performance evaluations.
These were some of the conclusions contained in a scathing report released yesterday about the Bush administration’s firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. In a 392-page document, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility detailed incompetent, unethical and possibly criminal conduct that surrounded the dismissals. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey was right when he said in a written statement after the report’s release: “It is true, as the report acknowledges, that an Administration is entitled to remove presidential appointees, including U.S. Attorneys, for virtually any reason or no reason at all. But the leaders of the Department owed it to those who served the country in those capacities to treat their careers and reputations with appropriate care and dignity. And the leaders of the Department owed it to the American people they served to conduct the public’s business in a deliberate and professional manner. The Department failed on both scores.”
The authors of the report appropriately place primary blame for the breakdown in professionalism on former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, who showed a breathtaking disengagement from the process of disposing of nine presidential appointees. Mr. Gonzales told investigators that he delegated the task of identifying underperforming U.S. attorneys to his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson.
Mr. Gonzales never inquired about or laid out the standards Mr. Sampson would use to evaluate these prosecutors. Mr. Sampson acknowledged in the report that he did not recommend the dismissal of some “mediocre” prosecutors because they enjoyed home state political support. That Mr. Sampson placed more importance on the U.S. attorneys’ political connections than on qualifications either didn’t register with or bother the attorney general. Mr. Gonzales didn’t so much delegate as abdicate responsibility for ensuring that the department was being run in a professional and ethical manner. And while Mr. Gonzales epitomized in the extreme a “hands-off” management approach, his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, simply washed his hands of the matter. Mr. McNulty was not informed of the push to remove U.S. attorneys until very late in the process. When he was clued in, he did nothing to stop improper considerations, although the report says he objected to them.
We are normally not fans of special prosecutors. But Mr. Mukasey in this case took the appropriate step of naming Nora Dannehy, a veteran Justice Department prosecutor and currently acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to determine whether criminal laws against false statements or obstruction of justice were violated. ++
Politics Over Prosecutors
Eugene Robinson, WaPo
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
With Wall Street’s fate hanging in the balance, and with Sarah Palin’s incoherence sparking interest in Thursday’s vice presidential debate, it was easy to overlook a major story that got less attention than it deserved yesterday. The Justice Department released a nearly 400-page report with this jaw-dropping bottom line:
“Our investigation found significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several . . . U.S. attorneys.”
Remember the controversy over the sudden dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys? Remember the allegation that the Bush administration had sullied the long-held principle that justice should be administered in an impartial, nonpartisan way? Remember the questions about what then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales knew and when he knew it? Remember Kyle Sampson, the Gonzales aide who played a key role in the firings? Remember Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, who went so far as to ask prospective Justice appointees to wax eloquent about why they wanted to “serve” George W. Bush?
The Justice Department conducted as thorough an investigation as it could, and it concluded that there was evidence of White House political meddling in “at least three of the removals.” The joint probe by the department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility recommended further investigation to determine “whether the totality of the evidence demonstrates that any criminal offense was committed.”
The investigators reported being stonewalled by the White House, saying they were unable to look at all the evidence “because of the refusal by certain key witnesses to be interviewed by us, as well as by the White House’s decision not to provide internal White House documents to us.”
In other words, as far as the team of investigators could determine from the limited evidence they were allowed to uncover, what we suspected and feared seems to have been true. The Bush administration seems to have removed at least three federal prosecutors — who are supposed to be even-handed and apolitical in the way they do their jobs — for partisan political reasons.
The report says “it appears” that Missouri U.S. attorney Todd Graves “was told to resign because of a political dispute among Missouri politicians, not because of an objective assessment of his performance.” Specifically the dispute was between Republican Sen. Christopher S. “Kit” Bond and Graves’s brother, a Republican congressman.
Arkansas U.S. attorney Bud Cummins “was not removed for any performance reasons,” the report says. “Rather, the evidence shows that the main reason for Cummins’s removal was to provide a position for former White House official Tim Griffin.”
The most egregious case, according to the report, was that of New Mexico U.S. attorney David Iglesias. The evidence showed that Iglesias was removed because of complaints from Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and other GOP officials and party activists who believed he was not being aggressive enough in pursuing certain voter fraud and public corruption cases — by happenstance, cases against Democrats.
Gonzales and his deputies at Justice never looked into Iglesias’s handling of those cases and, in fact, never even asked him about them. They just fired him.
The investigators wanted to ask White House political czar Karl Rove, White House counsel Harriet Miers, Goodling, Domenici and Domenici’s chief of staff about any role they played in Iglesias’s dismissal. All refused to be interviewed.
In releasing the report, Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that he had ordered a new investigation to “pursue this case wherever the facts and the law require,” including possible criminal charges. By most accounts, Mukasey has taken pains to cleanse Justice of the partisan taint that Gonzales left behind. Whatever ultimately comes of this disgraceful episode, however, we already know enough to put it in context.
The people who have been running our government for the past eight years have nothing but contempt for government. They believe only in politics and ideology, in that order. First, win elections by any means necessary. Second, once in a position to act in the public good, govern with the ideological conviction that government is either irrelevant or harmful to the public interest.
You can draw a straight line between firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons and turning a blind eye to the ruinous excesses of Wall Street. What’s impartial justice against the possibility of gaining political advantage? Why shackle the hallowed free market with government oversight?
And, if you want to draw the line a little further, who cares if the prospective vice president appears to know nothing about anything? ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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