• Despite a favorable new CBO score and independent analysis demonstrating the Senate health-care reform bill's costs savings, the debate over controversial elements of the legislation has finally begun in the hallowed upper house of Congress. In light of this, it's worth considering the implications of an Urban Institute study that recommends triggering a strong public option down the road, regardless of whether a strong/weak public option is included in the final legislation.
• I've never agreed with the Obama administration's "look forward, not back" approach, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on how the Bush administration allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora in December 2001 is a good illustration why coming to grips with what happened to this country during the previous presidential administration is so important. The Bush administration decided that giving up on pursuing the man behind 9/11 was important because starting an unnecessary, costly, and illegal war was the best way to start the process of driving the United States into a ditch.
• Like Matt Yglesias, I am less interested in the latest climate change non-scandal than I am in what the purpose of this alleged climate change conspiracy is. What is motivating thousands of scientists, apparently working in concert, to deliberately create false evidence of global warming? What motivates the politicians, activists and interest groups who are running with this evidence? Is it the prerequisite for the UN takeover of the world? State control of the economy? The imposition of a PC regime that will control your thoughts? A little help here, please.
  
• It would seem that there are two ways of approaching the subject of assessing Barack Obama's first year in office. One is to note that despite the current mood of the country, Obama has accomplished a good deal during the first year of his administration. The other is to note that despite these accomplishments, there is the palpable sense that the enthusiasm that accompanied Obama's election and inauguration has dissipated, if not completely evaporated. Regardless, presidential legacies are written in the future, of which Paul Krugman offers a probable prognosis: years of "new normal" high unemployment and total political deadlock.
• Holiday Leftovers: It's difficult to reconcile the Democrats' alleged enthusiasm gap with the Democrats' fundraising advantage; 45 percent of Americans don't understand cause and effect, economics; I still don't understand why Republicans don't spend their time attacking actual socialists in government; and surely the newspaper crisis explains The Washington Times' regretful decision to take money from bigoted lunatics.

--Mori Dinauer

I think Matthew Yglesias misses the point of "Super 'Emo' Friends" when he writes that he'd like to "see this expanded into a real comic book." That would be redundant. With the exception of Green Lantern (and the rather offensive Wonder Woman parody), the Super 'Emo' Friends listed identify emotions that are already primary motivations for the heroes in question. Batman is traumatized by the death of his parents; Rogue is incapable of experiencing human affection; Harley Quinn is trapped in an abusive relationship with the psychotic Joker who is merely using her. The joke is that the formative experiences of superheroes are already incredibly melodramatic, not that they would be if you approached them a certain way. This is what comics are already actually about, just distilled in a particularly funny way. 

Yeah, I know I just completely ruined the joke. That's how geeks roll.

-- A. Serwer

Robert Kuttner on Sen. Maria Cantwell's approach to financial regulation:

In the showdown over the regulation of potentially toxic securities like credit-default swaps, the savviest and toughest battler for effective legislation turns out to be not Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, who chair the key House and Senate financial committees. Surprisingly, the best informed and most relentless crusader is a back-bench senator from Washington state, Maria Cantwell. If you want to see how one determined junior legislator can make a difference, Cantwell is your woman.

Cantwell, a big booster of Barack Obama, is determined to push his administration to deliver on fundamental reforms to the financial system -- and dismayed by what she's seen to date from Obama's staff. "If there are people at the Treasury and the White House who think that the way to get the economy going again is not to close these loopholes," she told me in an interview, "that's disgusting."

KEEP READING ...

Lately, I've been fascinated by Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson's blog. Although most of his posts are boilerplate wingnuttia -- health-care reform is tyranny, diplomacy is weakness, etc. -- there are a few gems here and there, most notably with his ongoing attempt to document liberal use of "the race card" which he defines as "the use of false accusations of racism to shape the political debate and stifle political opposition." Jacobson is nearly 60 posts deep into this series, and after reading all of them, I am forced to conclude that he has no idea what he's talking about.

For example, Jacobson attacks this mostly factual observation by Matthew Yglesias as a set of "gross generalizations and stereotypes of the politically acceptable kind":

The diversity issues that you see at the elite level of most of American life are, in my opinion, particularly egregious in the punditry world. People whose job is largely to express a point of view really ought to come from a variety of points of view, and it’s a huge problem in politics since demographics are so closely linked to political opinion ...

About 50 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance, but he’s overwhelmingly liked among non-white Americans and quite widely disliked by white Americans. Our punditry, however, is done almost exclusively by white people and pretty overwhelmingly by a demographic of older white men that’s pretty much the most right-wing cohort you can construct.

I'm going to have to assume that Jacobson doesn't understand what a "generalization" or "stereotype" is, since there isn't a single one in Yglesias' post. There are serious diversity issues in the world of punditry -- as Jacobson himself points out, even MSNBC is mostly white and male -- and this does shape the bounds of acceptable/mainstream political discourse. That is, there is a reason for why there has been shockingly little discussion of the racial dimensions of the "tea party" movement, or for why pundits don't seem to get that angry old white people aren't an accurate barometer for the nation's political mood.

To be fair, it might be that Jacobson is taking issue with Yglesias' racial take on public opinion. Even then, the problem is with Jacobson, not Yglesias. As Yglesias pointed out, Gallup released a poll last week showing that Obama's approval rating among white voters has since Feburary fallen roughly 20 percentage points to 39 percent. By contrast, Obama's approval rating among non-white voters has fallen slightly from around 80 percent to 73 percent. If "widely disliked by white Americans" isn't an accurate description of those results, I don't know what is.

The simple fact is that Jacobson has a skewed and self-serving definition of "racism." Like most conservatives, Jacobson believes that any examination of white racial privilege or white racial resentment is beyond the pale, and that liberals are "the real racists" for acknowledging and studying the racial dimensions of our politics. In Jacobson's apparently error-filled dictionary, commenting on Sarah Palin's exclusive appeal to white voters is "playing the race card," but railing against interracial relationships is worthy of defense.

--Jamelle Bouie

Andrew Napolitano is a former judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court who has his own Fox News show and generally offers the standard over the top fare that has come to be associated with Fox "coverage." But today in the LA Times, he offers a very good defense of the decision to try terrorists in civilian courts, with this (mostly) excellent conclusion:

Think about it: If the president could declare war on any person or entity or group simply by calling his pursuit of them a "war," there would be no limit to the government's ability to use the tools of war to achieve its ends. We have a "war" on drugs; can drug dealers be tried before military tribunals? We have a "war" on the Mafia; can mobsters be sent to Gitmo and tried there? The Obama administration has arguably declared "war" on Fox News. Are Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and I and my other colleagues in danger of losing our constitutional rights to a government hostile to our opinion?

Georgia Keohane profiles Massachusetts Senate candidate Alan Khazei:

"I've always been a dark horse," says Alan Khazei, a candidate for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. A November 23 Rasmussen Reports poll found Khazei trailing two well known political veterans. Yet in the past two months, Khazei has raised over two million dollars, been named the "rightful heir" to Kennedy's seat by Newsweek, received The Boston Globe's endorsement, and enlisted hundreds of young volunteers to knock on doors across the state. For Khazei, this groundswell is both method and message: His is a campaign of civic activism.

Khazei was born to an Iranian immigrant doctor and an Italian American nurse and grew up in Bedford, New Hampshire. Straight out of Harvard Law School, he co-founded City Year, a service organization that inspired Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps. Twenty years later, Khazei started Be the Change, a non-profit that asked young people to do exactly that and embraced the immodest goal of building a national movement of citizen activists. Its first major campaign, ServiceNation, brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain at a forum at Columbia University -- their only joint appearance outside of debates -- and helped make service a campaign priority. Khazei went on to help draft the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act to expand AmeriCorps, and worked to secure its passage in April. Only months later, Kennedy entered the hospital for brain surgery; when he emerged, he wore his red City Year jacket. In a race where succession is front and center, Khazei hopes his own record in public service will qualify him to carry the Kennedy mantle.

KEEP READING ...

One out of four homeowners is now under water, owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. Why? The biggest single factor behind the housing crisis is rising unemployment. According to the latest ABC-Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans has either lost their job or lives in a household with someone who has lost a job. Today it takes two and sometimes three incomes to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage or the rent. So if one of those incomes is gone, a homeowner can't make the payment.

The scourge of unemployment is splitting America into three groups: (1) the third just mentioned, whose households are in danger of losing their homes and whose kids are surviving on food stamps (that's up to one in four children in America today); (2) the vast majority of Americans who are managing but worried about keeping their jobs and homes; and (3) a small number who are taking home even more winnings than they did in the boom year 2007.

Prominent among category (3) are Wall Street bankers, many of whom are now concluding their most profitable year ever. Goldman Sachs is so flush that it's preparing to give out bonuses in a few weeks totaling $17 billion. That will mean eight-figure compensation packages for lots of Goldman executives and traders. JPMorgan Chase is rumored to have a bonus pool of around $5 billion. The three other major Wall Street banks are ratcheting up their compensation packages so their "talent" won't be poached by Goldman or JPMorgan.

Wall Street is booming again in large part because the rest of America -- categories (1) and (2), above -- bailed it out to the tune of $700 billion last year. The Street has repaid some of that but, according to the bailout program's inspector general, much of it is gone forever. For example, the taxpayer money that bailed out giant insurer AIG went directly through AIG to its "counterparties" like Goldman Sachs -- to whom Tim Geithner, according to the inspector general, gave away the store. As Goldman Sachs prepares to dole out some $17 billion to its executives and traders, it's worth noting that Goldman received $13 billion a year ago from the rest of us via AIG and Geithner, no strings attached.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

Which brings us back to homeowners who are falling further behind. The $75 billion federal program designed to bribe banks to modify mortgages has been a bust. No one knows the exact number of mortgages that have been modified (that will be reported next month) but housing experts I've talked with say it's a tiny fraction of the number of homeowners in trouble. Seems that the big banks can't be bothered. "Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed," Michael Barr, the assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions told the New York Times.

Barr says the government will try to use shame as a corrective, publicly naming institutions that have moved too slowly. But the banks have done almost nothing to date. "We've made dramatic improvements, and we continue to try to get better," says a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, but as a practical matter JPMorgan has done squat.

Shame? If we've learned anything over the last year, it's that Wall Street has none. Ten months ago Wall Street lobbyists beat back a proposal to give bankruptcy judges the right to amend mortgages in order to pressure lenders to reduce principle owed, just like Wall Street lobbyists are now beating back tough regulations to prevent the Street from causing another meltdown.

Shame? For Wall Street, it all comes down to PR, at minimal cost. Goldman Sachs, attempting to preempt a firestorm of public outrage when it dispenses its $17 billion of bonuses, is setting up a crudely conceived $500 million PR program to help Main Street.

Shame won't work. Only political muscle and courage will. Congress and the Obama administration should give homeowners the right to go to a bankruptcy judge and have their mortgages modified.

And while they're at it, resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment from commercial banking, so Wall Street can't continue to use other people's money to gamble.

Finally, before Goldman hands out $17 billion in bonuses, claw back the $13 billion Goldman took from AIG and the rest of us and add it to the pool of money going for mortgage relief.

Hello, everyone! My name is Jamelle Bouie and I will be your friendly neighborhood guest blogger for this week. I already have a couple posts on tap (har har har) for today, but before I get to those, it's worth offering up a few biographical details. I grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and I studied politics at the University of Virginia. As of now, I'm hanging out in Charlottesville and working for the university while I figure out what I want to do with my life.

As far as the Internets are concerned, I come to you by way of two places: PostBourgie (from which previous guest-blogger Shani O. Hilton hails) and the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. In any case, I'm super excited to be here this week, so let's start it up!

--Jamelle Bouie

You want empire? Then say so and get on with it -- with far more forces, and massive cuts in domestic spending to rebuild thankless Muslim population centers thousands of miles from home for decades into the future.

You do not want empire? Then leave.

The most pernicious trend in U.S. foreign policy -- and one that the Obama administration is in danger of falling into -- is the idea that the United States can have an imperial foreign policy without enunciating it or supplying it. When you combine a generally bad idea with an unwillingness to speak its name or even do it properly, the poor consequences are magnified. Obama's speech tomorrow night is going to be critical in determining whether the administration takes the fundamental problems underlying the Afghanistan conflict seriously. With the decision apparently made and orders already being given, tomorrow's speech is probably the last chance that administration has to offer a justification and framing that is at all different from the status quo of the last several years.

-- Tim Fernholz

Mark Schmitt on why we can't let angry minority hijack political dialogue:

Of all the aspirations set out by the newly inaugurated Obama administration one year ago, the promise to reduce the level of acrimony in American political life is the one that has most plainly gone unfulfilled.

And that's not surprising -- it's always risky to make a promise that depends on someone else cooperating. To induce failure in Barack Obama's central promise, all conservatives needed to do was to stir up acrimony, which isn't very hard. While this is not a period like the late 1960s where the country seems hopelessly divided, the white-hot fury of the minority exceeds anything from the left during the Bush years. The right-wingers who claim to feel, as Rep. Michele Bachmann puts it, that we are "losing our country" seem to be, if anything, overrepresented among mainstream elected Republicans, including perhaps dozens of members of Congress.

KEEP READING ...

[Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr, right] said the government would try to use shame as a corrective, publicly naming those institutions that move too slowly to permanently lower mortgage payments. The Treasury Department also will wait until reductions are permanent before paying cash incentives that it promised to mortgage companies that lower loan payments.

Unfortunately, I don't think shame will be enough to change these banks' behavior (what, are they going to become less popular?) and withholding cash payments will probably be an incentive for the banks to stop doing the modifications altogether.

It's time to expand the "Right to Rent" program that lets foreclosed borrowers rent their homes, and bring back cramdown, which would allow bankruptcy judges to modify loans so that borrowers can make their payments. Cramdown was killed last spring thanks in large part to the lack of support from the Obama team, but it's the best way to convince the banks that the government is serious about stopping foreclosures and shoring up the housing market without bribing the banks and ignoring their continuing, pernicious behavior.

-- Tim Fernholz

NPR has what is actually a rather good comparison of the military commissions to civilian courts, noting that the Obama version offers better protections than the Bush-era military commissions but still allowed coerced evidence and hearsay.

When NPR moves on to the Classified Information Procedures Act however, they let Andy McCarthy go off the rails:

Lawyers who conducted the review concluded that while CIPA is "subject to being improved," they were "unable to identify a single instance in which CIPA was invoked and there was a substantial leak of sensitive information as a result of terrorism prosecution in federal court."

Opponents of federal trials disagree.

That includes Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. McCarthy has been a leading voice in arguing that federal judges do not have the leeway that military commission judges do when it comes to deciding whether the government can shield certain information from defendants.

OK, McCarthy apparently "disagrees" with the idea that there has yet to be a substantial leak of sensitive information resulting from a terrorism prosecution, but he actually can't offer a single instance of that happening. So a more accurate description of what is happening here is that "opponents of federal trials sometimes deny reality even in the face of incontrovertible fact," since the substance of actual disagreement on this point is nonexistent.

The one instance McCarthy and company are fond of citing, as I've written before, is Osama bin Laden being "warned" that we were "on to him" about three years after he had already declared war on the United States. Surprise!

McCarthy is theoretically someone who is an expert in his field. He has actually convicted terrorists in federal court as a prosecutor. He should be someone reporters could go to to shed light on how this stuff works. But his expertise is marred by his casual dishonesty, his willingness to cling to sheer fantasy if it reinforces his partisan inclinations. This isn't about mere policy disagreement. This is a guy wondering about Obama's birth certificate and the provenance of Dreams From My Father. How could anyone possibly expect for him to suddenly shoot it straight when it comes to terrorism?

-- A. Serwer

(Minarette.ch)

In what can only be described as mass Islamophobic panic, Switzerland has chosen to ban the construction of minarets, the towers attached to mosques from which the call to prayer is traditionally made. This policy is likely to exacerbate the problem of Islamic extremism rather than mitigate it, by enshrining in Swiss law the status of Muslims' second-class citizens and increasing the appeal of extremists' cultural narrative. You beat terrorism by empowering moderates and marginalizing extremists, not by giving extremists more ammunition.

Calls for similar policies here abound on the far right, despite the fact that such a policy would be a textbook violation of the First Amendment. The results of the Swiss vote generally just reinforce for me the idea that putting people's inalienable rights up to a majority vote makes said rights vulnerable to the bigotries of the moment. The entire point of the Bill of Rights is to prevent that from happening. Yet while banning the construction of minarets is an unlikely outcome here in the United States, we nevertheless put the marriage rights of same-sex couples up to a show of hands over and over again.

This isn't so much "direct democracy" as it is mob rule, which is part of the reason we have a representative democracy in the first place, to avoid government being manipulated by the fleeting impulses of a given moment. These bans by referendum are exactly the kind of thing that James Madison warned about when he referred to decisions being made "not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

-- A. Serwer

Jon Meacham's column on why Dick Cheney should run for president is about as well thought out as it sounds:

But I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

A contest between Obama and Cheney, Meacham says would be definitive. "Whatever the result," Meacham writes, "there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people." This is of a piece with the far-right philosophy that elections only count when Republicans win them, despite Meacham's insistence that this hypothetical election would "adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way." All of this already happened during the 2008 election. It's just that, sensing voter dissatisfaction with the president, Meacham and conservatives would like a do-over, as though they could simply erase the 2008 rejection of of the GOP by the American electorate.

I excerpted the quote where Meacham uses "latte" as a cultural shorthand for liberal effeteness because I think it explains basically everything that's wrong with Meacham's column. Cheney of course, is a huge fan of skim lattes, the kind of trivial fact that might be well known if it fit the kind of political shorthand lazy journalists employ in the absence of actual, well, journalism.

The idea Meacham is trying to convey is that Cheney, unlike the latte-sipping "girlie men" who make up the Democratic Party, is "tough on terror," while the drone assassination–happy, secret prison–running, state secrets doctrine–abusing, unreformed PATRIOT Act–supporting, torture photo–blocking, military commissions–convening, racial profiling Obama administration is made up of weaklings who just happen to have constructed a policy that looks virtually identical to the prior administration except where it is more aggressive. Meacham doesn't realize that he's demanding a "referendum" on policies Cheney and Obama actually agree on almost entirely in substance, with the exception of torture and closing Guantanamo Bay prison. The battle between Obama and Cheney has been partisan political theater -- but Meacham, apparently lacking any real knowledge on the subject, presents "latte" as a cultural shorthand for liberalism, when it's properly a shorthand for crappy journalism that relies on political totems rather than actual research.

-- A. Serwer

• President Obama has pledged to committing the U.S. to reducing carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels in advance of traveling to Copenhagen Dec. 7 for the international climate conference, but between the parochial interests of individual senators and the energy industries they represent, as well as the denial caucus' proclivity for putting would-be political candidates in awkward positions, I have my doubts.
• Ezra Klein summarizes the unintended consequences of parliamentary rule changes: "The story of the filibuster is a story of small changes that everybody got used to, which allowed for more small changes that everybody got used to, and so on, until the Senate had undergone a large change indeed."
• It shouldn't even be necessary to point out that arguments against health-care reform on the grounds of constitutionality fail even the lightest scrutiny, but Tom Schaller has generated a list of rebuttals that ought to come in handy the next time you come across arguments like "members of Congress swear an oath to uphold the Constitution -- not the court's funhouse-mirror version of it."
• A persistent, one-size-fits-all criticism of the first year of the Obama presidency is that candidate Obama and President Obama are two different people, leading to both disappointment in his liberal base (hasn't moved enough to the left) and to outrage on the right (because he's moved too far to the left). In fact this is just the reality of settling in to governing and the pace of policy change is always going to be controversial for critics on the right and left, albeit for different reasons.
• Remainders: To claim the stimulus has done nothing or made things worse is patently absurd; at least on cap-and-trade it would be good to follow California's example; the people of New Jersey get a taste of the fabled compassionate conservatism; Alan Grayson reminds us that only the Senate can reform itself; Nancy Pelosi has the right idea on economic stimulus and jobs creation; and Charlie Crist asks a reasonable question of the conservative base, forgets said base is not reasonable.

--Mori Dinauer

In the wake of the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog over the course of the next two weeks. In this installment, Pavlina Tcherneva describes how a much poorer country than ours — Argentina — used direct job creation to pull the country out of recession.

What has now become the standard government response to a recession – pump priming – is a gamble and it is time to abandon it as a tool for economic recovery and job growth. It takes too long to produce results and one never knows how much demand the government must pour down a leaky economy to turn it around. It is a risky strategy, which is why President Obama reminded us again on a few days ago that unemployment is a lagging indicator. Yet, there are no good reasons for putting up with high unemployment when we have an effective solution at hand. This is why I add my support to the growing list of those calling for direct job-creation programs.

While policy-makers cling to the astounding belief that the government can neither create jobs, nor find enough useful things for the unemployed to do, a much poorer country with presumably fewer resources and less effective government was able to do it just a few years ago. The country is Argentina, which did not settle for a jobless recovery when its economy plunged in its worst post-War recession; instead, it immediately launched a public employment program, known as the Jefes Plan, to deal with the crisis.

Just like the New Deal in the 30s, the Jefes plan was up and running in only a few months. In January 2002, the jobs program was signed into law as an emergency measure and five months later it began putting 500,000 people to work. Twelve months after that, it had employed 2 million people, or 13% of the labor force. The program offered a part-time, minimum wage public sector job to any unemployed head of household willing to work in a community project. The price tag of the Jefes plan was less than 1 percent of GDP.

More after the jump.

--Pavlina Tcherneva

Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an assistant professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability.

Unemployment did not wait for the economy to recover to start falling. Instead, even before GDP posted its first positive growth numbers, the unemployment rate had already fallen by 25 percent -- from its peak of 24 percent in mid-2002 to 18 percent a year later. It continued falling precipitously as the economy recovered to move into single-digit territory three years after that. This is a dramatic and expedient reduction in the jobless numbers, given their extraordinary levels – a decline only possible with direct job creation. And the Jefes Plan, by most measures, created much needed and useful work.

In a matter of months, Argentina had organized projects at the federal, state, and local levels. These included large-scale infrastructure investments and massive recycling initiatives, water irrigation and soil renewal projects, healthcare and daycare centers, food kitchens and homeless shelters, public libraries and recreational programs, subsistence farming and elderly care programs, family violence attention centers and many others. Public sector jobs provided employment, income, on-the-job training, and education to participants. Projects transformed communities and had a positive impact on women and children. Parents who took the Jefes jobs enrolled their kids in school and took them for routine health checkups and vaccinations, as per program requirements. Women turned up for work in large numbers as heads of households and produced useful output, participated in community rebuilding, and took leadership roles in the organization of these projects. Jefes spurred private-sector job creation as well (estimates place the multiplier effect of the program at 2.57), and many workers transitioned from their public Jefes jobs to better-paid private sector employment.

While in the U.S. Congress keeps extending unemployment benefits (the Argentine government chose to put the unemployed to work. When our politicians forecast a jobless recovery ahead, policy makers south of the equator speak of reaching full employment by creating and safeguarding jobs by private and public means.
It is no coincidence that macroeconomic stabilization programs that contain an explicit direct job creation package produce robust job creation and economic growth more quickly and vigorously than the unreliable and inefficient pump-priming approach.

If the U.S. government creates a permanent, voluntary public employment program that offers a living-wage job to anyone ready, willing, and able to work in a public service project, unemployment will be addressed directly as it develops during recessions. And this very same program will serve to turn the economy around. Such a program will fluctuate counter-cyclically with the business cycle, and unemployment will no longer be a lagging indicator. As the economy recovers, public service workers can move back into private-sector jobs.
If Argentina was able to find productive work for its unemployed, surely the U.S. could do it too. It is time to abandon the wasteful pump-priming model along with defeatist attitudes about government job creation. It’s time for a Rooseveltian resolve.

Can you spot the glaring problem in this AP story about last night's state dinner?

First lady Michelle Obama chose to wear a gleaming silver-sequined, flesh-colored gown Tuesday night to the first state dinner held by her husband's administration. She was tending to her hostess duties in a strapless silhouette with the beads forming an abstract floral pattern that was custom-made by Naeem Khan.

Hey, AP? Crayola got the memo back in 1962--using flesh as a synonym for white or light-colored is, well, racist.

Sociological Images pulled together a collection of ads that trade on this same assumption--the default skin tone color is white. As Lisa wrote, "Part of the privilege of being white is having a society that considers you the norm and is, therefore, organized around you."

--Phoebe Connelly

(AP Photo)

Dana Perino has some thoughts on terrorism, in particular the Ft. Hood shootings:

PERINO: And we had a terrorist attack on our country. And we should call it what it is. Because we need to face up to it so that we can prevent it from happening again.

HANNITY: I agree with you. And why won’t they say what you just so simply said?

PERINO: They want to do all of their investigations. I don’t know. All of the thinking that goes into it. But we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think we ought it to the American people to call it what it is.

This isn't actually true of course, and other people have dealt with fact-checking this statement.

The Ft. Hood shooting initially inspired some rather interesting conversation on the right and left about the nature of terrorism and how it's defined. But Perino isn't actually making an argument about the nature of the attack, or attempting to determine what is terrorism or what isn't. She's just keeping score.

I'm sure Perino will bring the same morbid insight to her new position with the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

-- A. Serwer

Atrios has the correct response to Kevin Drum's rather odd claim that Social Security could somehow be "taken off the table" by instituting some benefit cuts and tax hikes: thinking that Social Security could ever be "reformed" to Fred Hiatt's long-term satisfaction will work out about as well as it did under the Reagan administration.  (You'll remember that regressive tax increases designed to "stabilize" Social Security funding ended up being used to justify future regressive tax cuts, and the same people who supported this scam then claimed we needed more "reform" anyway.) 

A couple more points:

• I'm also not sure why it would be desirable to have Social Security "taken off the table" even if it were somehow possible, since having it as a live issue obviously helps Democrats, as Bush's failed attempt at privatization proved. The Pain Caucus and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page represent public opinion on this issue even less that they usually do.
• I forgot to mention this earlier in the week, but I was amused by Ross Douthat's example of an "innovative" policy proposal from a Republican intellectual: "a payroll tax cut." Leaving aside the comic value of thinking there's anything innovative about Republicans advocating tax cuts as a solution to everything, in isolation the proposal isn't entirely unattractive: a payroll tax cut would, on its face, be both stimulative and progressive.   The problem, of course, is that regressive payroll taxes are acceptable because they fund progressive Social Security benefits, while cutting payroll taxes would be a long term-political disaster. If you think there's a lot of complaining about Social Security when payroll taxes are substantially overfunding payouts, wait until the program's fake "bankruptcy" is imminent rather than hypothetical decades away.  The idea is to force Congress to make bad and politically destructive "reforms" by denying Social Security its dedicated funding. I think I'll pass ...

I'm not Johnny-on-the-spot with climate change issues, normally leaving that work to the estimable Brad Plumer, but I have rather enjoyed the excitement on the right as hacked e-mails from a British university's climate change research center have prompted wild misreadings and driven thoughts of a global conspiracy theory to hoodwink everybody into thinking global warming is real when it isn't. (Fact Check Alert: global warming is real!) Judging by most of the commentary I've read on the topic, the whole thing is overblown.

This morning, Jim Manzi does me one better by not even doing the basic background research. Instead, he offers this lovely bit of commentary on the subject:

I have not read the full set of e-mails, nor have I seen authoritative evidence of their provenance, but for the sake of argument let’s assume the allegations are correct.

Responsible! Manzi goes on to deduce from this fantasy evidence that "the scandal is obviously a PR disaster for those who believe that climate reconstruction is 'science' in the sense we normally use the term." Hrm. I would say instead that the wide scientific consensus around the fact of global warming is a PR disaster for those who believe we should do nothing about the problem.

More broadly, the idea that there is a world-wide conspiracy of people who want to manufacture the idea of global warming and then create laws to solve this fake problem requires a tremendous leap of faith. Here in the United States, for instance, Cap and Trade is a huge pain in the butt for liberals who would much rather be doing other things with their legislative time. No doubt someone will argue that this is just another way to raise revenue off of business, but almost all of the revenue in Cap and Trade goes to ease the transition costs. Believe me, we'd much rather be passing health care, reforming financial regulations, fixing labor law and improving the labor market than dealing with global warming, but those pesky facts have gotten in the way and somebody has attempt responsible governance.

-- Tim Fernholz

Daphne Eviatar looks at the arguments against giving Khalid Sheik Mohammed the death penalty:

“I think the fact that the defendants want to be executed shouldn’t count either way,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Cornell University, who advocated against the death penalty for these suspects when they faced military commission trials last year. “However, I do think it is legitimate for the government to worry about the possible counter-productivity of the death penalty here. That is, if the government had concluded that executing [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed], et al were likely to substantially aid Al Qaeda in recruiting, a decision not to seek the death penalty could be based in part on that worry.” According to Dorf, executing the men not only wouldn’t deter other terrorists from committing similar crimes, but could even encourage them.

I've already made my feelings on this issue known--although I will say I find it interesting that conservatives are constantly arguing that liberals somehow ignore specific cultural features of Islamic extremism out of "political correctness"--but then they turn around and ignore those some idiosyncracies when considering how something like execution for KSM might actually be in Al Qaeda's interest because doing so would be somehow "soft".

-- A. Serwer

Adam Serwer examines the backlash against trying the accused 9-11mastermind in civilian courts:

Republicans' view of whether trying a terrorist in federal court is a victory for the rule of law or "irresponsible" tracks closely with whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. The U.S. has far more to gain from trying the alleged 9-11 conspirators in civilian court than it has to lose. Despite conservatives' fears, there will be no TV cameras in the courtroom, no Khalid Sheik Mohammed monologues on the evening news except for those delivered by transcript. What the trial will put on display is the United States' commitment to due process, and it may potentially prove America is unafraid to confront its own wrongdoing when it comes to the abuse of the accused while in government custody.

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Former CIA official Reuel Gerecht argues that the FBI can't handle counterterrorism:

It shouldn't require the U.S. to have a French-style, internal-security service to neutralize the likes of Maj. Hasan. He combines all of the factors—especially his public ruminations about American villainy in the Middle East and his overriding sense of Muslim fraternity—that should have had him under surveillance by counterintelligence units. Add the outrageous fact that he was in email correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaqi, a pro-al Qaeda imam well-known to American intelligence, and it is hard not to conclude that the FBI is still incapable of counterterrorism against an Islamic target.

No one's arguing that the FBI should be exclusively involved in counterterrorism without the help of agencies focusing on foreign intelligence, but I'd really like to hear Gerecht's plans for determining whether someone has an "overriding sense of Muslim fraternity." The fact that Major Hasan was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi was suspicious behavior on its own. What's disturbing about the Hasan case isn't the "political correctness"--an assertion that has yet to be substantiated in any real sense--it's the possibility that genuine suspicious behavior was ignored.

The past few months have seen the dismantling of a number of homegrown terror plots by domestic law enforcement, so the idea that the FBI can't fight Islamist terrorism is absurd on its face. The agents who posed as al Qaeda sleeper agents and foiled bomb plots in Texas and Illinois would probably also disagree. But I think that, between Gerecht's broad chauvinist declarations ("The West has stimulated every single great modern Muslim conversation") and his wailing about political correctness (meaning I suppose, that "a sense of Muslim fraternity" doesn't count as probable cause) I think we get at what he's really saying:

A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity—that must come into play before any crime is committed—is at odds with a G-man's raison d'être. And much more so than local police departments—which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life—it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.

The Bush administration basically stopped thinking about annoying things like "criminal prosecution" and "admissible evidence" when dealing with terrorism, which is how we ended up with Guantanamo Bay. But of course, if we weren't all so politically correct, we'd just lock all these people up forever and wouldn't worry about it. 

Counterterrorism shouldn't solely be the job of the FBI. But the idea that the FBI is "incapable of counterterrorism against an Islamic target" is simply incorrect.

-- A. Serwer

The detestable Dana Milbank has an article today on the efforts of financial industry lobbyists to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect borrowers from pernicious lending practices. Some of his reporting is unsurprising, and some is just weird. For one, I'd say he's wrong about saying the CFPA is in danger in the House of Representatives -- it's already been watered down, but it is moving forward. But in the Senate, it's a different story. Compare this paragraph from Milbank's piece today:

[The lobbyist] detailed how various other lawmakers -- Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), and, in the House, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and the Congressional Black Caucus -- were causing various problems for the bill. "It looks more and more like Senate banking won't take it up until January or February, and with next year being an election year, that does raise the concern level," Hempler reported with satisfaction. "This could delay the overall effort." Or, with a bit of luck, kill it outright.

... to this paragraph from a piece I wrote last spring about the Chamber of Commerce:

Nonetheless, the Chamber is lobbying senators whom [the lobbyist] termed on the call "the usual suspects over there on Senate Banking." This includes Johnson -- "for sure," in Matthews' words -- Mark Warner of Virginia, Michael Bennett of Colorado, and Jon Tester of Montana. They are all Democrats the Chamber expects will choose a more business-friendly approach over consumer interests.

Happy to see Warner and Tester didn't make today's lobbyist roll-call, not surprised at all about Johnson. I was astonished to see the CBC on that list, but it may have to do with the decision by CBC members to hold up a recent vote on regulatory reform to protest the lack of economic policy attention given to African Americans. If they are actually fighting the CFPA more generally, they should be ashamed -- African Americans suffered from the depredations of predatory lending wildly out of proportion to any other community, and for their supposed leaders in Congress to block this agency would be a monumental betrayal.

The real problem, though, is the Senate, where no one has stepped forward to champion the CFPA -- Dodd is supporting it, but there is no one else on the Banking committee giving it full-throated backing. That's a real shame. The CFPA is critical to good regulatory reform -- there is no sense in fixing the banks if they can still screw over their customers -- and critical to good regulatory reform politics because it provides tangible benefits to everybody.

-- Tim Fernholz

• President Obama's "Educate to Innovate" campaign focusing on promoting the "cool" factor of science is quite welcome in an era of the Discovery Institute and the ongoing campaign to deny global warming even exists. The question is whether this is going to be the administration's strategy for strengthening education, which is supposed to be one of the big three domestic policy areas candidate and President Obama has repeatedly emphasized.
• The main takeaway from this Chris Hayes piece on the meaning behind Obama's trip to China is that most of the political and economic analysis which followed it is clueless about the true nature of our relationship with the Chinese government. Indeed, our "biggest creditor" only holds 22 percent of foreign-held U.S. securities and the biggest investors overall are domestic, and they're still quite happy to debt-finance the United States government.
• Charles Franklin's analysis at Pollster.com convincingly demonstrates that support for Obama among political independents, as with Democrats and Republicans, has been stable for some time now. But where has Obama lost support? Gallup notes that support among whites has plummeted for the president and PPP finds that crossover Republican support has gone, in their words, "from a small amount of crossover support to a very small amount of crossover supports."
  
• Remainders: There's more going on with India than fancy state dinners; Ed Kilgore explains the Brooks Maneuver; moderate Republicans are bailing on the bailout; Ezra Klein makes the case for emulating Bill Frist; and prop 187, the Republican minority, and California's fiscal crisis.

--Mori Dinauer

Over at Talking Points Memo, a friendly argument has broken out between a former Senate staffer and a political scientist over what might be called the problem of the Senate. That's the kind of fight I have to jump into!

In summary, the two viewpoints on filibusters are: (1) Something changed in the culture of the Senate, and filibusters used to be rare, mostly threatened by individual senators or factions who wanted some change to a bill rather than to block it completely. (2) It's a much more structural change, and in the past there were often large bipartisan majorities that wanted to pass major legislation, so the filibuster wasn't even an issue. (With the notable exception of civil rights.)

Both are probably right: In terms of culture and custom, the turning point was almost certainly the previous health-reform debate, in 1993 and 1994. That's when Bob Dole, then the majority leader, made the phrase "You need 60 votes to do anything around here" his mantra, and when -- thanks to Bill Kristol's famous memo -- the idea of blocking major legislation for political reasons, rather than trying to get it revised to reflect your own policy preferences, took hold. Maybe I put too much weight on that period because that happens to be when I worked in the Senate, but there's no doubt that at that time, a whole bunch of obstructionist techniques came out of the dusty toolbox, such as "filling the amendment tree" and, in the House, the motion to recommit a bill to conference. (I once witnessed Ted Kennedy asking staffers for advice about how to break one of these tactics, which he had never seen in 34 years in the Senate.)

Underlying that, of course, was the structural change that came with the realignment from a four-party system, in which each party had a liberal and conservative wing, to two ideological parties. (A center-left party and a far right party.) As frustrating as today's conservative Democrats like Mary Landrieu are, none of them are more conservative than any Republican, and no Republican is more liberal than even the most conservative Democrat. As a result, a filibuster can be organized and enforced by a party leader, whereas in the past, there was considerable ideological overlap, so both sides of a fight would be cross-partisan, and thus loose and shifting.

In the old Senate (up to the early 1990s), there were dozens of possible configurations that could produce legislation that won broad majority support. You could see it quite visibly in the Senate Finance Committee when Lloyd Bentsen of Texas was the chair -- from the center of that horseshoe dais, he might put together a coalition on the center-left one day, and one on the center-right the next, and if he played the politics right, the vote in committee would typically be something like 17-4, with a similar majority on the floor. My boss, as one of the more liberal members, was sometimes in the majority coalition and sometimes a dissenter -- it changed all the time. As debate began, it was hard to predict the final vote. But to watch Max Baucus maneuver in the same committee last month, you had to sympathize with how little he had to work with: Forty percent of his members were completely opting out -- any amendments they offered were purely symbolic or intended to support a talking point in opposition. The only coalitions available were a totally Democratic one and one that included Olympia Snowe. On the Senate floor, it's the same thing -- with a hundred senators, there are in theory, some mathematically unimaginable number of coalitions. But in reality, there are only two: Keep every single Democrat, including red-staters up for re-election and the now unabashedly malevolent Joe Lieberman, or lose one and get Olympia Snowe. There are no other options, and no legislative wheeling-and-dealing will open up any other possibilities.

As a result the Senate feels suffocating. It's easy to fantasize that maybe a tougher or more creative Harry Reid could do something, but even LBJ would be stuck if he drew this hand. The combination of the change in custom -- which involves not just using the filibuster to excess, but pushing to defeat legislation regardless of its content, for political purposes -- and the particular alignment of parties leaves shockingly little room for legislative maneuvering.

-- Mark Schmitt

Kriston Capps on Jeanne-Claude's role in the art world:

In April 1994, married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude fielded a question during an art-college lecture that forever altered their artistic practice. According to Wolfgang Volz, the couple's friend and photographer, a man in the audience inquired after "the young poet Cyril, Christo's son." Jeanne-Claude, Cyril's mother, wasn't mentioned. A discussion the artists, born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon and Christo Javacheff, had been having for some time about fully attributing their collaborative works to the both of them, and what that might mean economically and aesthetically, was foregrounded by an innocuous question about the couple's most intimate collaboration. From that point forward -- and in revision, as far back as 1961 -- the works of Christo became the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

With the death of Jeanne-Claude on Nov. 18, at age 74, comes an opportunity to reconsider her contribution to the greatest collaboration in contemporary art. Out of their partnership came many of the environmental art installations that gave the genre form, including 2005's The Gates -- the celebrated, temporary installation of some 7,000 saffron-colored fabric panels in Central Park. Giving Christo the bulk of the credit -- or failing to give Jeanne-Claude her due -- misunderstands the enduring significance of their work. While Christo worked primarily on the drawings and models that made their enterprise possible, Jeanne-Claude focused on the fairly enormous behind-the scenes tasks that lend their work its post-Marxist heft.

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If I was making millions off of a mammy-like drag queen-type character I'd probably want to donate some cash to the NAACP too, just to be safe.

-- A. Serwer

As we prepare to break for Thanksgiving, TTR has a survey of technology availability in Native communities, another idea for solving the deficit problem, the latest public opinion on immigration reform, and another take on the challenges faced by local and state governments during the recession.

• More Tech Needed in Indian Country. A new report authored by Native Public Media and the New America Foundation highlights the limited digital media access Native communities enjoy. For most tribal communities, only one-third of the families have analog phone service, broadband access is limited to a 10 percent penetration rate, and traditional radio remains the chief source of information for rural and remote native communities.The study does note that of the population engaging in digital multi-media, the utilization of new technologies are at rates higher than national norms. Given the economic and social advantages of mass access to digital information, the report recommends actions that seek to expand access, including new technology infrastructure projects and investment in human capital to increase jobs and expand Internet know-how throughout native communities. -- MZ
• A New Social Contract for the 21st Century? [PDF] The Brookings Institute released a paper suggesting that the federal deficit could be mitigated in coming years by increasing the correlation between income and the amount of benefits received. For example, individuals with higher incomes would receive less Social Security and Medicare benefits than someone with a lower income. While this solution is not ideal, the paper suggests that a more targeted safety net is more likely to survive spending cuts. Moreover, reducing benefits for the wealthy is more politically viable than raising their taxes. -- PL
• Feeling conflicted about immigrants. Though immigration reform isn't on everyone's mind right now, President Obama's planned overhaul of immigration law next year will be sure to fire up Democrats
  and Republicans alike. According to a new Pew Research Center report, while more people support immigration reform than in 2007, it is a more partisan issue, with support increasing among Democrats and dropping among Republicans. Further, while most Americans respect immigrants for their work ethic and cultural contributions, most believe that they weaken the economy and contribute to crime. Understanding these views will affect how Democrats gather support for reform. --LL
• Dire States. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute analyzes the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on state and local governments. While the Institute estimates the act has saved more than 1 million jobs and $219 billion worth of economic activity since February, it also warns of a prolonged economic downturn if relief isn’t extended. Over the next two years, the report predicts shortfalls of $369 billion and $100 billion for state and local governments, respectively. To counteract this, the report recommends $150 billion of additional relief for state and local governments through 2011. -- MH

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/17/09
11/10/09

Anyway, Lieberman's foolishness on the public option has been well documented here. The latest entry is from Gerry Seib, the Wall Street Journal's bureau chief:

His objection is based on fiscal risk: "Once the government creates an insurance company or plan, the government or the taxpayers are liable for any deficit that government plan runs, really without limit," he says. "With our debt heading over $21 trillion within the next 10 years...we've got to start saying no to some things like this."

Mr. Lieberman also notes that the public option wasn't a big feature of past health-overhaul plans or the campaign debate of 2008. So he says he finds it odd that it now has become a central demand -- which it has, he suspects, because some Democrats wanted a full-bore, single-payer, government-run health plan, and were offered a public option as a consolation.

Beinart had observed that, in the past, Lieberman was awarded full support of an organization dedicated to single-payer. It's also nice to see Lieberman backing off his lie that the public option wasn't mentioned in 2008, but now he's just saying it's not a "big feature." But if it's not a big feature, how can it create an unlimited deficit liability? Given that this insurance company will be funded entirely by premiums, its pretty hard to understand where this unlimited deficit comes from, especially because those killjoys over at the CBO predict that the public option will save money, not contribute to the deficit. I know, repeating all this ad nausem won't change Lieberman's stance, but the Connecticut senator's repetition of false arguments basically makes interpreting his stance as either being in hock to insurance companies or voting his rage. Neither option looks particularly flattering.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists, and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, Barbara Arnwine looks at the "ethnic recession" and how to address training and re-employment challenges for our most vulnerable communities.

As the economy continues its long road to recovery, we must be wary of the policies implemented along the trek. Race looms at the fork in the road, and we must determine which way to turn to most effectively address these issues in a manner to protect people of all colors.

That said, the significant impact on the African American and Latino communities must not be ignored. Among blacks, the jobless rate stands at 15 percent, while unemployment among Hispanics exceeds 12 percent. Comparatively, joblessness among white workers is below 9 percent. The gap between black and white unemployment rates “is an index of discrimination in our society” says William A Darity, professor of African and African American Studies and economics at Duke University, as reported in Congressional Quarterly. To focus attention on those communities hardest hit doesn’t divert attention from the omnipresent problem but reminds us that we must be strategic in our thinking to avoid the flagrant mistakes of the past.

As CQ reminds us, it is a fact that the jobless rate for black Americans has remained much higher than that of whites through good times and bad since at least the 1960s. As I stated in that article, we need specific programs directed toward communities of color, and unfortunately we’re not seeing that. President Obama is right to note that he must “get the economy as a whole moving to be able to help anybody,” but that effort should not be mutually exclusive from assisting those communities disproportionately impacted.

More after the jump.

--Barbara Arnwine

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Barbara Arnwine has been the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law since 1989.

Minorities make up a larger portion of the low-wage work force and tend to have less seniority than white workers, so they are often more likely to lose their jobs when the economy sours. Even college-educated African Americans are consistently more likely to be unemployed than whites who have only a high school diploma. At the very least the federal government needs to track how communities of color are being impacted and identify ways to implement intervention policies differently. Otherwise, when the economy recovers, African Americans and Latinos will still find themselves at the same unequal playing field from where they started, or worse, permanently displaced in our economy.

The typical black family owns 10 cents to the white family’s dollar, and the typical Latino family owns 12 cents, according to a 2007 survey in Insight Center for Economic Development’s report. Fixing the economy doesn’t substantively address this issue. The pre-recession era was one still marked by an unequal playing field and to return to that status does us a disservice.

We also must reinvest in African American and Latino communities in a way that helps them sustain their wealth in the future. As noted by InsightCCED.org, 42 percent of whites own an IRA or Keogh compared to only 7 percent of African Americans and 8 percent of Latinos. African Americans are 23.3 and Hispanics 28.3 percentage points less likely than all families to have direct or indirect holdings of publicly traded stock. It is essential that these communities not only have the power to spend and earn an equal income for equal work, but be able to sustain wealth and build assets. If not, this cycle of ethnic recession will continue.

To specifically address the particularized training and re-employment challenges for the most vulnerable communities, including African Americans, Latinos, the elderly, and people with disabilities, we recommend, as a start, these direct solutions:

1. Establishing an Interagency Task Force in the federal administration.

2. Strengthening enforcement and monitoring of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prevents employment discrimination against individuals on the basis of race and ethnicity.

3. Integrate universal, age-appropriate, and culturally relevant financial education opportunities into the K-12 curriculum and into post-secondary and community-based education settings.

4. Passing the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act which increases Pell Grant scholarships; invests in HBCUs; and lowers interest rates on student loans.

5. Eliminating credit-checks as a condition for employment due to their disproportionate impact on candidates of color. Even for entry-level jobs, or for jobs where there is no requirement or opportunity to handle money, the criteria of a clean credit record is often applied despite evidence that an imperfect credit record is not an accurate predictor of job competence or workplace theft.

We believe in the Obama administration’s effort to revitalize the economy as a whole, but also recognize that implicit racial bias in the employment sector has a significant impact on the disproportionate disparities in unemployment we see today. The recession and the problems encompassed therein are nothing new for African Americans and Latinos and merely a continuation of the plight of the last several decades. Fixing the economy must not just be about a return to pre-recession conditions, but forging a new path to economic sustainability for all.

Kenneth Chandler, public policy associate, contributed to this article.

Paul Waldman on the politicization of mammograms:

The last thing Democrats needed, with reform still not passed, was any kind of health-care controversy. Yet that's just what they got when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force came out with a new set of guidelines on breast cancer screening, pushing back the suggested age for regular mammograms from 40 to 50. The uproar over the recommendation demonstrates a lot of the problems with how we deal with health care. It shows how opportunistic politicians can be -- the GOP, champions of women's health! -- and how as a country we have an inherent bias toward more health care, whether or not it's better health care. But the controversy also demonstrates how difficult it is to have a reasoned discussion and make good policy when scientific claims based on aggregates of cases are put up against vivid anecdotes from individual people.

Unsurprisingly, news reports about this issue have been filled with women testifying about the success of their own pre-50 mammograms. Since reporters always look for ordinary folks who can embody a controversy, they'll gravitate toward those who can say, "If I hadn't had a mammogram when I was 41, I'd be dead." The other side will be represented by a scientist wielding a stack of studies and figures.

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The reason I hate the complaints about "political correctness" is they generally only apply to the way social dialogue is policed for overt bigotry--as opposed to social pressure against saying impolitic things that are actually true. The implicit premise behind this complaint is that the world is now built to privilege undeserving minorities and women, who could not advance but for massive preferential treatment encouraged by the government--because social traditions that privilege white men don't actually count. This has only gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected, and the GOP decided to make the overt political pitch that the U.S. is being ruled by an iron-fisted racist who hates white people.

Then every once in a while, you read an article like this one, that puts it all in perspective. The unemployment rate for black men aged 16-24 in this country reached 34.5 percent in October:

Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions -- 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.

Of course, someone prone to blaming the ills of the world on "political correctness" could simply deploy a stereotype or two and rationalize the whole thing away. You could go intellectual, citing incarceration rates, or you could go old school, citing "work ethic."

Except the problem is this:

"Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men," said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. "Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison."

Obama or no, if you're black in this economy you better have a tight grip on those bootstraps.

Look, I don't doubt that this has little to do with malice. I think that's part of the reason people don't want to acknowledge the role that racial bias continues to play in American life--it's not easy to tell where it begins or ends. But it's easy to see the results.

-- A. Serwer

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But if science fiction has taught us anything, it’s that any sufficiently advanced technology will inevitably rise up to enslave us. So if you want to get ready for the day when your Roomba declares that maybe it’s time for you to start crawling around on the floor sucking up dust, it might be a good idea to evaluate the Republican and Democratic approaches to this problem.

Republicans might argue that with their ample stockpiles of weaponry and shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude, they’re the folks you want to have around during the robot apocalypse. I can think of one politician who might take particular pleasure in popping off her titanium pursuers (though she won’t be able to do it from a helicopter, since those computer-filled machines will be taking orders from their electronic brethren).

Democrats, however, have a trump card in this debate. Unlike their opponents, they’re at least aware that there’s a problem. Just as the GOP doesn’t really think there’s a health-care crisis, they don’t seem to be concerned about a robot uprising. Our commander in chief, however, is on the case.

At an event at the White House today, President Obama announced the “Educate to Innovate” initiative, meant to get kids interested in careers in science. The event featured a science project by some high school kids, a robot meant to “scoop up and toss moon rocks." As part of his remarks, Obama said the following:

As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.

Granted, there is a great deal of planning to be done. But if we wait until the Predator drones are buzzing down Pennsylvania Avenue acquiring targets with their autonomous threat assessment protocols, it'll be too late. If nothing else, at least the president has identified the potential for disaster.

And don’t forget, the man also knows how to wield a light saber.

-- Paul Waldman

Ann Friedman explains why the fight for the common good must include individual interests:

Several years ago, The American Prospect held a "What is Liberalism?" contest. The winner, Todd Washburn, submitted this definition: "Liberals believe our common humanity endows each of us, individually, with the right to freedom, self-government, and opportunity; and binds all of us, together, in responsibility for securing those rights."

The first part of that statement is easy to embrace. We call ourselves liberals because we share a certain set of beliefs. The second part -- about our responsibility to act together on those beliefs -- is where things get tricky. Progressives do not live in a bubble. Despite our commitment to equality and opportunity, the movement reflects the biases and hierarchies of the rest of the country. We might all agree that gay couples deserve marriage rights and women must have access to reproductive health care, but when it comes to devising a political strategy and policy agenda, these are inevitably issues that always seem to slide quietly to the back burner.

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Sure, the President will take his fair share of lumps from Dobbs and he'll lose some Rust-belt voters too. But Dobbs's appeal, should he run, will be heavily concentrated amongst white, non-college educated men. And since that's a much more important constituency for the Republican party than it is for the Democrats then it makes sense for the White House to welcome Dobbs to the festivities and the race.

But Massie forgets another key point: A Dobbs run would immediately activate Hispanic voters who are predominately Democratic Party supporters. In 2008, Hispanics went for Obama 67 to 31 percent. Next time around, they'll be a much larger chunk of the electorate -- Hispanics are one of the fastest-growing populations in the country -- and, if Dobbs runs, not only will they be weighing all of the issues that are important to all voters, they'll also be facing a candidate whose careless smears of illegal immigrants and embrace of Minutemen groups have made him a symbol of xenophobia. If that doesn't boost turnout among that community on Election Day, I don't know what will.

At the end of the day, of course, Dobbs probably won't run. And if he does, he'll likely flame out -- simply because most media and entertainment personalities don't have the humility to handle a serious political campaign. Although politicians are known for their arrogance, to succeed in that game you need to be willing to bow and scrape for votes, meet and charm hundreds of local officials, get blasted in the media, have your shortcomings highlighted relentlessly by your own campaign staff (not to mention your opponents), and basically be uncomfortable for about a year. Some compare Dobbs to Al Franken, but if anything can prepare you for the hustings, it is trying to make it as a stand-up comic. I doubt Dobbs can handle that kind of pressure.

-- Tim Fernholz

What does Khalid Sheik Mohammed have in common with O.J. Simpson? Conservatives seem to think a great deal.

First, there was Sen. Chuck Grassley, who said this during Attorney General Eric Holder's Senate testimony last week:

I think a lot of Americans thought O.J. Simpson ought to be convicted of murder rather than being in jail for what he's in jail for now. It seemed to me ludicrous. You know, I'm a farmer, not a lawyer, but I just want to make that observation.

Indeed, a lawyer for one of the detainees has said that all five intend to plead not guilty “so they can have a trial and try to get their message out.” Were it not for Holder, they’d be on death row instead of preparing for a trial that will take years and make the O.J. Simpson case look like a traffic court hearing. And Holder chastises President Bush for delaying justice for 9/11 families?

Charles Krauthammer:

Holder himself told the Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be “the trial of the century.” The last such was the trial of O. J. Simpson.

Bill Kristol:

“What was the last crime of the century?” Kristol cried. “OJ Simpson . . . it’s disgusting to me that Holder used that term . . . crime of the century means a circus . . . it’s always been used for these tabloid show trials . . . now we’re gonna have another OJ Simpson trial in New York.”

This card is starting to get a little dog-eared, fellas. And just so we're clear, according to Human Rights Watch the score on terrorism convictions over the past eight years is criminal courts 145, military commissions 3.

-- A. Serwer

When Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006 with U.S. support, displacing the Islamist government, the Islamic Courts Union, the usual conservative cheering section erupted in applause over the Bush administration's "toughness" in the war on terror. In fact, the decision was a humanitarian and national security disaster as the documents related to the Minnesota indictments of several Somali Americans yesterday make clear.

The removal of the ICU empowered its radical wing, Al Shabaab, led by the al-Qaeda-trained Aden Hashi Ayrow, which has now taken over terrorizing the country with suicide bombings, assassinations, and the killing of civilians. The ICU weren't what you might call "good guys" by any means, but they also weren't as bad as Al Shabaab. In fact, Osama bin Laden was so impressed by Al Shabaab that he offered them al-Qaeda's endorsement, denouncing the former head of the ICU, after he was elected president of the Transitional Federal Government, which has now adopted sharia anyway. The Bush administration's policy led directly to the rise of a more radical Islamic terrorist movement in the region, one that has culminated in the largest group of American citizens ever accused of joining a radical terrorist group, not to mention the first American suicide bomber.

The FBI criminal complaint yesterday makes clear that the political situation in Somalia figured directly in the recruitment of the individuals who have been indicted so far. One of the recruiters named, Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, according to the complaint, told eventual recruits that "he experienced true brotherhood while fighting in Somalia and that travel for jihad was the best thing that they could do." Another individual named in the complaint, Abdiweli Yassin Isse, who wanted to go to Somalia to "fight Ethiopians," helped raise money for friends to join him by telling everyone in the community they were going to study the Koran in Saudi Arabia. He himself never made it--but he did manage to fund the trips of others.

According to the complaint, Al Shabaab wasn't designated a terrorist organization by the State Department until June of 2008, nearly two years after the invasion. The problem isn't just, as Matthew Yglesias wrote last year, that the invasion bred "a new generation of anti-American jihadists." It's that it's breeding them here.

It's hard to imagine a worse outcome.

-- A. Serwer

Via Paul Krugman, this graph may help put some of the recent dollar panic in perspective:

Krugman observes that the dollar is more valuable now than it was in early 2008, but at that time the financial press was not freaking out about it the way we've seen recently. You could argue that our current economic situation makes a cheaper dollar more problematic, but Krugman notes that the opposite is in fact true. Here's what would happen in the supposed worst-case scenario, brought on by the deficits needed to fight the recession: If China starts to divest itself of dollar holdings, the effect would be to do what the Federal Reserve isn't willing to do but ought to, which is to use a more aggressive expansionary policy to fight unemployment. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? (Why Ben Bernanke isn't doing that anyways is another story entirely.)

-- Tim Fernholz

• One thing you'll notice about the RNC's new "purity test" is that the 10 alleged "policy positions" are mostly vague statements of principle. The very first item declares support for "smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes" but doesn't explain how they intend on actually achieving this limited government paradise. Of course, vague statements of principle -- and sometimes not even that -- are the sine qua non of base conservative politics these days, and anyone waiting for Republicans of substance to assume leadership of the party shouldn't hold their breath.
• One of the strongest arguments predicting successful passage of a health-care reform bill is that Democrats know failure is tantamount to political suicide. Even if not all rank-and-file Democrats get this, the leadership certainly does, and are probably circulating this poll to members of the caucus, which demonstrates the cost of failure. And being perceived as legislatively successful is an asset in Washington.
• I'm unable to comprehend this tendency of celebrities/CEOs/media personalities with little or no political experience to suddenly imagine themselves as credible presidential candidates. Actual time spent in elected office isn't the issue here, rather it's that one needs a political base to draw upon if one is going to endure the now-common two-year marathon that is the modern presidential race. Who, exactly, is Lou Dobb's constituency? Who's going to donate money to him? And why does anyone care that a washed-up cable news anchor thinks he's presidential material?
• Richard Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style" essay has been repeatedly referenced this year but the more relevant work has to be Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which is the best book-length explanation for how obtuse news anchors like Chris Matthews can attest to Barack Obama's apparent handicap of having an analytical mind. And it's not just Matthews but more of a Beltway-wide phenomenon that consistently sighs under the burden of having to understand and explain policy details.
• Weekend Remainders: Senator Joseph I. Lieberman is a shameless liar; independents aren't exactly fleeing Barack Obama; I'm so glad we pared down the ARRA to an arbitrary dollar amount out of political necessity; conservative "arguments" against college students protesting have evolved little in the past 40 years; and is the tea party over?

--Mori Dinauer

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, James K. Galbraith warns that without a bold change in course, the jobs problem won’t go away.

I’m tempted to say, the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. The barriers are philosophical, procedural, and constitutional. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, so long as any action requires 60 Senate votes, and so long as political capital erodes from the start of a fixed four-year presidential term, we’re stuck.

Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate. There could have been prompt corrective action to resolve, instead of coddle, the worst of the banks.

I mostly don’t blame President Obama; he and his team went as far as they felt they could. I blame the head-in-the-sand politicians in Congress, the over-optimistic forecasters, the half-educated press, and the power of the financial lobby. I blame the avatars of fiscal virtue, the public debt scaremongers, the astrologers for whom 13 significant digits (a trillion) for the stimulus package was just too much. I blame the Senate, which hands the balance of power to small states at the expense of disaster areas like California, Florida and New York. I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that “credit would flow again” if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn’t.

The Bretton Woods point deserves another word. According to the system established in 1944, the U.S. current account deficit – and by extension our public budget deficit – was limited by an obligation to exchange foreign-held dollars for gold. Richard Nixon abolished that arrangement. Since the early 1980s, the world has held the Treasury bonds that the U.S. chose to issue. The system is fragile. But so long as it lasts, it doesn’t discipline our budget (and if it broke, we could replace it). Low interest rates prove this: Despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: The same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won’t be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other “good signs.” So we’ll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don’t buy what we can’t afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger – perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone’s guess.

Sorry to be defeatist – it’s the way I feel. Prove me wrong.

-- James K. Galbraith

James K. Galbraith is the author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Currently, no Republicans are leaving their seats except to run for higher office; in total, 12 Republicans and seven Democrats are leaving their seats open for various reasons. Right now, those numbers don't predict much about next year's elections, but it's still early yet; typically, members of Congress announce their decisions to retire or run in winter or spring of the election year, giving their respective parties time for a proper primary campaign. Watching the relative number of Democrats versus Republicans who leave behind open seats is one way to gauge what will happen eight months later and the general mood among the two parties going into the midterms.

-- Tim Fernholz

Right now, unemployment is a much larger problem than inflation, and creating a specific inflation target would, as Paul Krugman puts it in his discussion of the Japanese case in the 1990s, allow "the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible - to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs." Negative real interest rates would be the step beyond the zero-interest rate policy that the Fed is following right now, which is not enough to provide a significant monetary expansion to allow for employment growth.

Bernanke could, conceivably, do something along these lines. But he hasn't yet. On the other hand, if you wanted someone who could credibly promise to be "irresponsible," at least from the view of monetary policy hawks, why not pick someone who Bond Vigilante-types already think is irresponsible (read, cares about unemployment), like San Francisco Federal Reserve President Janet Yellen? Some might claim that this would damage the Fed's "political independence," but actually making use of the main check that the government has over the Fed -- appointing the chairman -- should be seen as within the normal bounds of Fed-government relations.

There are definitely downsides, of course. Financial markets, and bonds in particular, would probably react unwisely (remember that Bernanke was initially reappointed specifically to calm those markets on the day the updated budget was released). But it would be very smart politics for President Obama -- in one fell swoop, he demonstrates his seriousness about fixing unemployment, sticks it to the bankers that many Americans think he has been coddling, and captures a news cycle. The danger is that explaining the intricacies of monetary policy is challenging and that deficit hawks on CNBC and Fox would lose their minds; that said, the current explanations aren't particularly compelling and deficit hawks on CNBC and Fox are already losing their minds, so might as well make something of it.

-- Tim Fernholz

Jeff Faux notes that if the dollar crashes, it will take our economic cushion down with it:

The word from Washington and Wall Street is that the worst is over.

Sure, it will take a while for jobs to recover, for housing to come back, and for wages to rise. But we are definitely on the road to recovery from the biggest debt-bubble collapse since 1929.

Maybe. There were actually two debt bubbles. One was driven by Americans borrowing against unsustainable inflation in housing prices. The other was driven by America borrowing against unsustainable inflation in the price of the U.S. dollar. One more bubble is left to pop. When it does, our unique economic cushion -- privileged access to the world's savings -- will deflate. Like overvalued housing prices in the run-up to the 2008 crash, the dollar is headed for a substantial fall. The question is whether our political class can minimize the hit to working Americans' already-battered living standards. On the available evidence, the answer is, "No."

The central threat here is not the currently rising federal deficit, which despite the theatrical hysteria from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats is a necessary remedy for the collapse of private spending. True, foreigners are financing the fiscal deficit, but because it is stimulating growth, it is ultimately self-liquidating. Rather, the core problem is the accumulating debt that the U.S. economy as a whole owes to the rest of the world, a result of a more chronic condition: 25 years of buying more in the global marketplace than we have been selling -- and borrowing to make up the difference.

KEEP READING ...

One of the most frequent canards trotted out by those against trying terror suspects in civilian courts is the idea that classified information will be revealed through discovery. Glenn Greenwald notes today that the doctrine covering the disclosure of classified information in court, the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), is being used to block the maltreatment of one of the alleged al-Qaeda members involved in the al-Qaeda embassy bombing, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Judge Lewis Kaplan has imposed a protective order that allows the defense lawyers to review classified info only in a secure room, and that information can't be disclosed to Ghailani without government permission.

Greenwald writes:

Even during the Bush years, numerous defendants accused of terrorist acts were tried and convicted in federal courts -- John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ali al-Marri, Jose Padilla. Those spewing the latest right-wing scare tactic (Osama bin Laden will learn everything if we have trials!) cannot point to a single piece of classified information that was disclosed as a result of any of these trials. If that were a legitimate fear, wouldn't they be able to?

Greenwald's argument is that the CIPA is too strict, describing the guidelines as "draconian measures so extreme that it's hard to believe they can exist in a judicial system that it supposed to be open and transparent."

I just want to add that one of the examples most often cited by conservatives in opposition to the trial is the identity of unindicted co-conspirators disclosed during the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in 1995. Here's Michael Mukasey giving a typical version of the spiel:

Moreover, the rules for conducting criminal trials in federal courts have been fashioned to prosecute conventional crimes by conventional criminals. Defendants are granted access to information relating to their case that might be useful in meeting the charges and shaping a defense, without regard to the wider impact such information might have. That can provide a cornucopia of valuable information to terrorists, both those in custody and those at large.

Thus, in the multidefendant terrorism prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and others that I presided over in 1995 in federal district court in Manhattan, the government was required to disclose, as it is routinely in conspiracy cases, the identity of all known co-conspirators, regardless of whether they are charged as defendants. One of those co-conspirators, relatively obscure in 1995, was Osama bin Laden. It was later learned that soon after the government's disclosure the list of unindicted co-conspirators had made its way to bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, where he then resided. He was able to learn not only that the government was aware of him, but also who else the government was aware of.

Notice that Mukasey says "valuable" information, not "classified" information. Nevertheless, people arguing against civilian trials do as best they can to conflate the two by implication if not outright deception -- the idea being that something terribly valuable had been disclosed as a result of trying a terrorist in a civilian court.

In fact, bin Laden had been calling for "jihad" against the U.S. since 1992, so the idea that he discovered that we were "aware" of him in 1995 is absurd. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that he had been calling for holy war against the U.S. for at least three years by that point. If OBL was "relatively obscure," it wasn't because he was trying to keep a low profile.

At any rate, for the 9/11 trial to have the intended public relations effect internationally, the government is going to have to fess up to some of the things that were done in the name of "security" -- and I have little doubt that can be done without compromising valuable intelligence information.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Starr says voters need to see immediate progress on jobs and health reform:

The continuing rise in the unemployment rate, up to 10.2 percent in November, has to give a sense of urgency to Democrats in Congress and the administration about the work they have at hand before next fall's elections. In 2010 Republicans are looking to repeat the success they had in 1994 after Bill Clinton's first two years, and if Democrats do not produce results soon, Barack Obama may suffer the same kind of midterm reversal as Clinton did.

The one good thing for the Democrats about the risk of losing control of Congress next fall is that, as Samuel Johnson said about the prospect of a hanging, it concentrates the mind. And it ought to concentrate congressional minds in two areas where the pressure is greatest to match promise with performance -- the economy and health care.

KEEP READING ...

“For the last year, as we’ve struggled to pass healthcare reform, we’ve been told that we have to pay for the bill – and the cost over the next decade will be about a trillion dollars. Now the President is being asked to consider an enlarged counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, which proponents tell us will take at least a decade and would also cost about a trillion dollars. But unlike the healthcare bill, that would not be paid for. We believe that’s wrong,” said Obey, Murtha and Larson. “Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.”

“The only people who’ve paid any price for our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are our military families,” they added. “We believe that if this war is to be fought, it’s only fair that everyone share the burden. That’s why we are offering legislation to impose a graduated surtax so that the cost of the war is not borrowed.”

I spoke with Ellis Brachman, Obey's spokesperson, to get more details on the plan: Essentially, below the $150,000 level, the 15 percent bracket for a family, there would be an increase of 1 percent of your current level, so for most people that would be 15.15 percent. Separate changes would happen between the $150,000 to $250,000 income level and above $250,000, which would be set by the president depending on his eventual decision on what to do in Afghanistan; currently, the war costs about $68 billion a year, but that could increase if the White House decides to send more troops or spend more money on development projects.

While this does present a serious challenge for those who would champion putting more resources into the conflict, but it will be hard for them to argue against this bill in good faith. These members of Congress are right to point out that many Americans are insulated from the effects of this conflict, and the least they can do is feel it in their pocketbooks. Should this bill come to a vote, it will be especially hard for Republicans who support the war effort but don't, in general, support higher taxes for any reason. (That's fiscal responsibility!) For now, it's just one more wrinkle in President Barack Obama's effort to make the right choice in Afghanistan, but if it forces him to make a real case to the American people about what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan and why it is worth the price, then it can only be a good thing. And if this legislation highlights his inability to do that, even better.

-- Tim Fernholz

Gabriel Arana explains why more than marriage is at stake in the federal legal challenge to Prop. 8:

On Nov. 4, 2008, when the polls closed on the West Coast and media outlets reported that California voters had passed Proposition 8, gay-rights supporters across the country were stunned. How could the purported gay haven of California -- home to Hollywood, Harvey Milk, and the Castro -- have rejected same-sex marriage?

It was an odd cultural moment, infused with the countervailing energy and promise of Barack Obama's victory. While progressives across the country danced in the streets chanting, "Yes We Can," angry gay-rights supporters gathered on the steps of the state Capitol in Sacramento carrying signs that expressed their indignation: "No More Mr. Nice Gay." As Obama declared in his victory speech, the ground had shifted, but in the Golden State, it had moved in opposite directions.

KEEP READING ...

“Today’s employment report contained both signs of hope for recovery and painful evidence of continued labor market weakness. ... The unemployment rate, however, rose four-tenths of a percentage point, to 10.2 percent. That this occurred despite the rise in real GDP last quarter reflects both the typical lag between GDP growth and unemployment decline, and the recent exceptional increases in productivity. Having the unemployment rate reach double-digits is a stark reminder of how much work remains to be done before American families see the job gains and reduced unemployment that they need and deserve.”

Yup, that's just about the same effect as flying out to an aircraft carrier and raising a huge banner that says "Mission Accomplished."

However effective the administration's policies have been thus far -- and I think they're more effective than people generally give them credit for, and in many cases their failings are caused by Congress, not the executive branch -- no one is saying that this job is over. The president is having a "Jobs Summit" next week to talk about new job creation policies, and Congress is pushing to have something prepared on the same issue after health-care reform is done. It's one thing to complain about the approach, but to complain about the president and Congress declaring victory and going home just doesn't reflect the facts.

-- Tim Fernholz

The headline "9/11 defendants want platform for views" is screaming across the Internet this morning, as conservative tough guys shiver in their seats over all the mean things the 9/11 conspirators might say about America.

The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said.

Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said Sunday the men would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but "would explain what happened and why they did it.

Oh no! Can you imagine? Terrorists are going to be talking at us! And all because the Obama administration wouldn't have them summarily executed without trial!

What the articles on the subject all seem to omit is that there will be no TV cameras in the courtroom for this trial. Khalid Sheik Mohammed's rants will be available only by transcript. Americans, to the extent they aren't bored to tears, will get to experience KSM's pontificating on the evening news through the age-old craft of voice-overs placed over tastefully edited court drawings made mildly more exciting by creative use of keyframes. There's a reason why you can't get Zacarias Moussaoui's greatest hits on Blu-ray.

-- A. Serwer

Dexter Filkins reports that the U.S. and Afghan governments have been somewhat successful in supporting the rise of local pockets of resistance to the Taliban:

The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.

The endeavor represents one of the most ambitious — and one of the riskiest — plans for regaining the initiative against the Taliban, who are fighting more vigorously than at any time since 2001.

This is mostly good news. At a recent Center for American Progress event, the Carr Center's Michael Semple said that the more effective the Taliban are at portraying themselves as fighting an insurgency against foreign soldiers rather than a civil war against other Afghans, the more inroads they are able to make. Anything that undercuts that narrative is a positive development.

The problem is, though, that at some level part of the goal is to leave Afghanistan with a stable civil society, something that militias aren't exactly conducive to. This is, at best, a stopgap measure, and one that Filkins writes is already having problems because while the U.S. is being careful to keep the groups they're supporting small, the Afghan government has been supporting larger groups that in at least one instance took over and started levying taxes on the locals once they had driven off the Taliban.

The risk of this not working that well is pretty high, which is why Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak seemed so lukewarm on the whole "militia" idea when discussing this kind of approach months ago. It's not like this hasn't been tried before. 

-- A. Serwer

On the same program, Senator Arlen Spector, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, shrugged off criticism by his former party that the Senate bill would end up vastly increasing the federal budget and widening the deficit. He pointed out that the Congressional Budget Office, the respected arbiter on what legislation costs, said that the bill would save $130 billion in the first 10 years and $650 billion in the second 10 years.

But Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, was skeptical, saying “I don’t think one out of 10 Americans believes that.” The bill, he said, would lead to higher premiums, higher taxes, cuts in Medicare and it would put “15 million more low-income Americans into a medical ghetto called Medicaid."

Soooo, the CBO, a vaunted, non-partisan group of economists, says the bill will save hundreds of billions of dollars. (Incidentally, many other economists agree.) But Alexander cites a poll that he took in his head -- I haven't seen any polls of whether Americans agree with numerous economists that the public option will save money, but six in ten think it should be in the bill -- and then makes up a bunch of stuff before calling a program that provides low-income Americans health care a "ghetto." And, in traditional newspaper style, all that is quoted as if it was as substantive as what Specter said.

Maybe I'm just being foolish, and it's obvious that everyone who reads those two paragraphs will realize that Alexander's comments are nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing. But I have the sneaking suspicion that people will read that and say, well, a U.S. senator believes this is the case and he must have the facts. There's got to be a role for editorial discretion where a reporter or an editor can look at a comment, realize that it is not sound, and pull out the old red pen.

Meanwhile, as Matt Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman note, moderates like Blanche Lincoln are still not expected to explain their positions. When Brian Beutler catches Joe Lieberman making stuff up about what is in the public record -- namely, whether or not presidential candidate Barack Obama included a public option in his campaign health-care plan (he did) -- Lieberman blows him off. Give Beutler points for trying to get an explanation -- it's more than Carl Hulse is doing.

-- Tim Fernholz

A few months back, I wrote a column titled "The Ten Dumbest Arguments Against Health Care Reform." But now I feel bad, because I missed the single dumbest argument, which those opposed to reform seem to have put at the center of their case against it. And here it is: The bill is really long!

We’ve had to endure one Republican after another decrying the length of the bill, holding up big printed copies of the bill, demanding that people read the whole bill out loud … enough already. You made your point. It’s really long.

What none of them has explained is why this is, irrespective of what is actually in the bill, a bad thing. When they were running Congress, Republicans wrote long bills too (the White House pointed out that the Medicare prescription drug plan passed by Republicans and signed by George W. Bush was a none-too-svelte 1,044 pages). Those bills weren’t bad because they were long, they were bad because of what they did.

Whether a bill is good or bad depends on what it actually does, not how long it is. Republicans would probably argue that the big-government-ness of the bill is expressed in its length, but that’s just silly. You can have a far-reaching bill that dramatically expands the scope of government power but does so in a few words, just as you can have a bill that goes into great detail about many narrow provisions that don’t affect very many people.

Bills can be long for many reasons – there’s a lot of legalese, a lot of "whereas" passages explaining why the bill exists in the first place, not to mention that because of the way bills are printed – double-spaced and with big margins – there aren’t very many words on each page. And a complex bill might also spend substantial amounts of time explaining what it doesn’t do, of the "Nothing in this legislation may be interpreted to mandate tonsillectomies for any member of Washoe County Boys Scout Troop #23…" variety.

You might think that opponents, who can’t stand much of anything about health care reform, would want the bill to be as detailed and specific as possible about what it does and doesn’t do. But I guess not. Now we’ll be treated to a lengthy "debate" in the Senate about the merits of health care reform. I'm guessing that nearly every Republican who gets up to talk will scornfully mention the length of the bill. And you wonder why Americans think Congress is a bunch of buffoons.

-- Paul Waldman

• How is one to account for Barack Obama's precipitous drop to 49 percent approval in the latest Gallup daily tracking poll? Is is the grave pronouncements printed in British blog posts? Democratic legislators throwing temper tantrums because Obama isn't doing their job for them? No, as always, for every president, it's the economy. And has frequently been the case, it's instructive to compare Obama's approval to Reagan's, who came into office under similar economic conditions, and who also fell below 50 percent approval by November of his first year.
• Should we be even remotely surprised that John McCain, whether due to electoral pressure or some other factor, is abandoning his climate change centrism? The "Maverick" shtick was always just a media concoction, and let's not forget that the maverick legislator in the first couple years of this decade was acting out of spite towards George Bush and the Republicans, who were back on touchy-feely terms by the time the 2004 election rolled around.
• I'm shocked, just shocked, that the tea party movement, as it were, is riven with factions that don't really know how to organize themselves into an effective protest movement. The only thing that made the very real but ultimately incoherent passions of the don't tread on me crowd into something worthy of our attention were with organizational efforts of old pros who hoped to harness that energy to take back real power in Washington.
• The problem with the belief that war with the government is inevitable is that it takes very little for this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If some band of "patriots" were to stand off against the federal government, the federal government would likely crush them, solidifying in the secessionist mind that the government is out to get them. Waco anyone?
• Remainders: Things get interesting in the 2010 Florida Senate race; why are we in Afghanistan if al Qaeda is a second-tier threat?; right wing prays for Obama to go away, one way or another; things could have been worse for Democrats in next year's Senate races; and sometimes the majority of Americans are really stupid.
  

--Mori Dinauer

So you don't normally expect a lot of snark about financial regulatory reform, but today is different, because House Financial Services Committee Spokesman Steve Adamske just sent out his fisking of a recent National Journal article on regulatory reform, which I've posted in full after the jump. Here's a sampling:

National Journal: What's going on with financial regulatory reform? I know that Dodd has a new plan and that Frank is expected to move his plan out of committee soon, but I still can't tell what the administration's plan is. Why so many plans? Well, for starters, this re-regulation of finance is huge, so it is natural that everyone would want to drive the train. Primarily, though, the many approaches reflect a strategic decision by the Obama administration. Rather than come out with a fully formed plan and guide the negotiations, the president's advisers decided to let Congress work out the details.

HFSC: This is 100% false. President Obama’s team did indeed produce a plan. They delivered to the House Financial Services Committee and to the Senate Banking Committee a 13 title bill totaling several hundred pages, complete with legislative language, and that language is serving as the base text for our deliberations.

...National Journal: It sounds like I should bet on this taking a lot more time. With big reforms, that's usually a good bet.

HFSC: We certainly wish the National Journal would take its time to do some quality reporting.

I can't link to the original article because it is subscription only, but you get a pretty good flavor from the excerpts in the release. This kind of response to a piece from a communications shop isn't the norm outside of campaigns, but National Journal represents a kind of distillation of bland conventional wisdom and is thus quite influential among members of Congress and staff, which no doubt motivated Adamske's to go after the article head on. National Journal does occasionally do in-depth reported pieces on esoteric issues like financial regulatory reform, but this isn't one of those pieces. The article entirely predicated on procedural nonsense -- Adamske's fact-checks are, on the whole, correct -- while ignoring the many substantial critiques of the bill. It's ultimate conclusion that Congress should take more time on the bill is just a silly regurgitation of Republican talking points. The problems faced by the committee can't be solved with more time, they'll be solved with negotiations and votes.

-- Tim Fernholz

Washington, DC — Today, House Financial Services Committee Communications Director Steve Adamske released the following statement after reading the Nov. 21 National Journal article, “End of the Beginning,” written by John Maggs:

“You have got to be kidding.”

On page 54 of the November 21 edition, reporter John Maggs invents a “question and answer” article that discusses the status of financial regulatory reform. The article has several errors and misrepresentations that have been corrected below:

National Journal: What's going on with financial regulatory reform? I know that Dodd has a new plan and that Frank is expected to move his plan out of committee soon, but I still can't tell what the administration's plan is. Why so many plans? Well, for starters, this re-regulation of finance is huge, so it is natural that everyone would want to drive the train. Primarily, though, the many approaches reflect a strategic decision by the Obama administration. Rather than come out with a fully formed plan and guide the negotiations, the president's advisers decided to let Congress work out the details.

HFSC: This is 100% false. President Obama’s team did indeed produce a plan. They delivered to the House Financial Services Committee and to the Senate Banking Committee a 13 title bill totaling several hundred pages, complete with legislative language, and that language is serving as the base text for our deliberations.

National Journal: But didn't Obama offer a comprehensive bill over the summer? It wasn't a bill; it was called a "blueprint." It was sketchy in its details, and many of its ideas have been changed or abandoned. House and Senate Democratic leaders, for example, now say that regulation by the administration's Consumer Financial Protection Agency should be limited to the largest 10 percent of banks. Other fundamental matters were left unmentioned, such as the way to discourage big banks from taking on too much risk -- how, exactly, to avoid fostering banks that are "too big to fail" and thus take reckless risks because they believe that the government will bail them out. No plan has settled on how to avoid this problem.

HFSC: 100% false again. As discussed above, while President Obama did release a blueprint in early June, he ordered his staff and the Treasury Department to produce a bill. They did. In addition, the National Journal is dead wrong to suggest that we abandoned the administration’s plan. To the contrary, we are implementing the administration’s plans.

The National Journal is also wrong to say that the House Financial Services Committee’s bill, H.R. 3126, limits the reach of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to 10 percent of the banks. This is 100% false. All banks will be subject to the rules and regulations of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The committee only exempted independent examinations of community banks by the CFPA. In addition:

The CFPA will write the rules for all institutions on credit cards, overdraft fees, and all other aspects of financial consumer protection– none of the covered banks will be exempt in any way from these stringent new rules.

The CFPA will receive and monitor all reports on consumer exams done by the prudential regulators at a covered institution, looking for signs of non-compliance by the institution or problems in the regulator’s conduct of exams.

The CFPA may at its discretion send an examiner on any exam of a covered bank, thrift or credit union.
This examiner will participate in all aspects of the exam, from design to final report writing
In an unprecedented move, the CFPA will be able to remove the prudential regulator and take over the exams itself if it finds that the regulator is not adequately pursuing or enforcing violations, or that there are other consumer problems at the bank.

Finally, the CFPA retains complete control of the consumer complaint process, and has authority to investigate and enforce against violations at any institution based on those complaints.

National Journal: Isn't it typical to start with a blueprint? Isn't that how President Reagan did tax reform in the 1980s? Yes, but it's not typical to be as disengaged as the Obama administration seems to be this late in the game. The White House said all along that it wants to complete the reform process this year, and even though it has pushed Congress to vote on the legislation, it opposes some aspects of both chambers' bills. That rush apparently was at least partly responsible for a rift between Dodd and the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. The staff of the House Financial Services Committee has been in regular contact with White House staff and the Treasury Department. It is a complete lie to say the Obama administration has been disengaged.

National Journal: Why did the White House proceed this way, without firm positions? For reasons of style and necessity. On the style point, it should be clear from health care that in implementing his agenda, Obama seems to prefer leaving the details to Congress. His style simply differs from that of past presidents, who have led negotiations rather than let congressional leaders take charge. To cite Obama's predecessors, the Bush team was deeply involved in lining up votes and twisting arms to pass his 2001 tax cut; President Clinton did the same in ending Cold War trade restrictions on China. That doesn't seem to be how this White House likes to do things.

HFSC: Again 100% wrong. They have firm positions and they have worked with us every step of the way — the National Journal just never bothered to find out.

National Journal: What about necessity -- why did the administration have to start out that way? Because even as late as June, Obama's advisers hadn't decided what to do, and in many ways, they still haven't.

HFSC: Again 100% wrong. The administration brought to us a bill composed of 13 titles and hundreds of pages which has served as the base text. Of course we have changed things, but this is normal in the course of legislating. We have worked with them every step of the way.

National Journal: You've got to be kidding. As with every phase of the financial crisis, the government was improvising, trying to stay ahead of events. Arguably, Obama had good reasons for moving forward with something on financial regulation, even if the proposal was incomplete. He had to send the message to the global financial system that there was a plan, some process, to avert a recurrence of the kind of crisis that took hold in 2008 and shut down bank lending. Five months after the inauguration, after an $787 billion stimulus plan, and after deciding that health care would be his focus in 2009, it just wasn't possible to re-design financial regulation in a few weeks. On the other hand, deliberating for months internally, with rumors and details leaking out, could have destabilized the markets.

HFSC: No, you have got to be kidding. As has been discussed in several parts of this rebuttal, the Obama administration within five months of taking office produced a blueprint for reform, and two months after that, produced an extensive, 13 title bill that has served as the base text for our deliberations.

National Journal: Wasn't politics a big reason for the haste? Without some plan, Republicans would have spent the past five months complaining that "Obama is wasting time on socialist health care and neglecting financial reform." Of course politics was a big factor. History will have to judge whether Obama's push on health care led him to neglect more-important matters. With or without health legislation, however, it would have been impossible for Obama to decide fundamental questions of financial regulatory reform so quickly. For one thing, the financial industry was unprepared and hadn't sorted out what it would and would not accept. The White House couldn't take a final stand on matters without getting the banks and other financial institutions on board. The months since June have really been a feeling-out process for both sides.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. The Obama administration has been engaged on all issues of financial regulation reform, producing direction and producing a bill. The Obama administration has not neglected this effort.

National Journal: So banks are holding up this process? That's too simplistic. In our system, where banks and other moneyed interests finance every congressional campaign, banks have a seat at the table. There are other considerations, but it would be silly to pretend that such a large industry has no role. As with health care, the Obama team needed time to determine which parts of the financial industry could kill the process and which parts could be co-opted. For example, after the House's hearings it became clear that smaller banks, with a presence in every congressional district, weren't willing to go along with the consumer protection agency proposal. Administration officials could see that the largest 10 percent of banks accounted for 80 percent of lending, so they let the bottom 90 percent off the hook. It took time to make this judgment, and there are many more to make.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. Banks are not “off the hook” when it comes to consumer protection. As discussed above, all banks are subject to the rules and regulations of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. We only exempted independent examinations of community banks and credit unions from the CFPA. All other rules apply to all banks.

National Journal: Well, where is the process now? Isn't the House going to be voting on the Frank bill in a few weeks? Obviously, the bill won't be finished this year, considering that the Senate plan was unveiled a week and a half ago and is fundamentally different from the House version. The question is whether the process is near the end or much closer to the beginning, and there are signs that it is much closer to the beginning.

HFSC: The House will vote on the reform in mid-December and the Senate is currently marking up their version.

National Journal: What signs? Among the differences between the chambers' proposals, the Senate plan is predicated on a really big change--taking all bank regulation away from the Federal Reserve Board and creating a powerful agency to assume the Fed's role in managing the stability of the financial system, both domestically and internationally. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is against this, and so are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economics adviser Lawrence Summers. This conflict is too fundamental to sort out in routine conference negotiations. Other issues aren't as complicated -- whether to merge two small agencies or four, for example. But some other basic matters remain undecided.

HFSC: Issues are too fundamental to sort our in routine conference negotiations? Says who? You? How else will the differences between the House and Senate be decided?

National Journal: Such as? Such as the whole point of financial regulation. Before the crisis, the government implicity guaranteed that it would do whatever was necessary to prevent the collapse of the financial system. Today, that guarantee is explicit, and it will be codified in this financial regulatory overhaul. The problem is, no one has decided how to guarantee the solvency of giant banks without encouraging the kinds of risky behavior that caused the crisis. How do you prevent the emergence of banks that are too big? There are ideas -- Dodd would use an exotic kind of bond to keep banks in line -- but no decisions. Likewise on derivatives, the privately traded securities that allowed insurance giant American International Group to almost wreck the global financial system. To sum up the House and Senate action on derivatives, the government is still in the early stages of determining how derivatives will be regulated.

HFSC: On the too big to fail issue, I would encourage you to read the excellent coverage by Bill Swindell in today’s (Nov. 20) CongressDaily of our committee’s deliberations on the Kanjorski amendment, and continue reading CongressDaily on page 8 on the Gutierrez amendment. Our whole effort, from regulating subprime mortgages to reining in derivatives and ending bailouts, is to ensure that the taxpayers never again have to foot the bill for other people’s lousy business decisions.

National Journal: When is this going to get done? A bill could be enacted by June, but it is also easy to see action slipping past the fall 2010 election. Obama wants to get reform done to claim credit for Democrats, but Republican opposition is arguably as strong as it is on health care, and the GOP is confident that it will have larger numbers in 2011. The president was able to shorten the customary reform timetable when it came to health care, and perhaps he can do so on financial regulation as well. Big reforms usually take time, however -- Reagan embraced tax reform in 1984, but it was 1986 before it came to a vote. Ironically, as the financial system recovers, the pressure for reform lessens. Dodd, in a tough re-election fight, could be crucial if he seeks to finish action in time to impress voters. He might force a partisan vote this fall to get the issue off his plate, but that might hinder compromises in the final stages.

HFSC: Wrong. Chairman Frank and Chairman Dodd are committed to making financial reform a reality as soon as possible. The American people have waited long enough for meaningful reforms, and they do not deserve to wait any longer.

National Journal: It sounds like I should bet on this taking a lot more time. With big reforms, that's usually a good bet.

HFSC: We certainly wish the National Journal would take its time to do some quality reporting.

###

Terence Samuel explains why Democrats need to focus on jobs:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will win his motion to proceed on a health-care reform package that should shave $127 billion off the federal budget deficit over the next decade -- the legislation will come to the floor of the Senate before Thanksgiving. In practical terms, that means the Obama administration will likely get to mark its first year in office with a remarkable set of legislative triumphs that, in addition to health care, could include some kind of financial reform legislation and maybe even a climate change bill.

These are big wins that will change our way of life significantly and constitute an admirable record of campaign promises kept. So it is no small irony that all this success may be of limited political value to Democrats as they go into the next election season: 2010 could be the year of the American job.

KEEP READING ...

But outside of the political sideshow, the much-hyped Chinese ownership of U.S. debt and the controversy over exchange rates (which has led some Americans to accuse the Chinese of currency manipulation) isn't likely to change in the near future.

"The truth is … China really has no choice," Michael Pettis, a professor at the Guanghua School of Management in Beijing, says in an e-mail. "China does not want to hurt its export sector (on the contrary, it is trying to prop it up), and since no one else besides the United States can run such large trade deficits, China has no choice but to keep buying dollars."

What's more interesting about the fuss isn't what China could do to the U.S. economy, but what they're doing about their own -- the current Chinese economic policy greatly advantages coastal elites over rural interests, and economic inequality is a big issue. Pettis, whose blog, "China Financial Markets," is really a must-read on these issues, thinks the larger concern is that the Chinese won't heed international advice to about balancing global trade (now, China is saving/investing too much, and the U.S. is overconsuming) because that would require greater household income growth in China, which obviously involves redistribution of income and probably increasingly broad political awareness.

But the insistence of the Chinese government that exports and investment are the way out of the global recession means that China's recovery is weaker than many realize, and could lead to more trade disputes as the Chinese continue to pursue their pro-export policy at the expense of the rest of the world. Ironically, the rebalancing policy that the Obama administration supports -- which would lead to less reliance on U.S. consumption -- is more broadly in the interest of the Chinese people than what Chinese leaders want, which is maintaining the current status quo between the two economies.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, James Carr argues for targeting hardest-hit communities with job training and access.

As this month’s unemployment numbers confirm, the nation’s economy continues to suffer despite recent positive and relatively impressive productivity numbers. Unemployment now exceeds 10 percent for the general population. Unemployment for African Americans and Latinos exceeds 15.5 percent and 13 percent respectively. For Native Americans living on reservations, it is just below the fabled and feared 25 percent of the Great Depression. For all families out of work, the economy is in a depression. Unable to find a suitable job, more than a third of those out of work are classified as long-term unemployed. The longer they remain out of the labor market, the more difficult it will be for them to reenter the workforce. It also makes them less likely to regain a job paying the same or higher wages than the job they have lost, and more likely to run out of unemployment insurance and potentially end up on the streets with few, if any, options. In fact, prior to the recent extension of unemployment benefits, roughly 7,000 people per day were losing their benefits.

Many economists dismiss the bad news on the employment front arguing that unemployment is merely a lagging indicator. But a recovery without jobs is meaningless for families worried about paying their mortgages, purchasing food, affording health care, sending their kids to college, and saving for a decent retirement. And, a recovery without jobs presents the prospect for further damage to the financial system as growing numbers of households are unable to pay their debts. Most concerning, continued significant job losses open the door for a possible “double-dip recession” given the key role played by consumer spending.

More after the jump.

--James Carr

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster James H. Carr is Chief Operating Officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

While there is legitimate concern over the size of the federal deficit, the threat to the economy of continued high levels of unemployment is more urgent. The foreclosure crisis -- which sparked the collapse of the credit markets and economy -- continues to grow. But unemployment is now the leading reason families are losing their homes. Moreover, more than $13 trillion of household wealth has been lost since the crisis began. While it’s hard to estimate how much of that wealth was an illusion, much of it was real savings. So, more must be done to help the nation recover from its sudden and dramatic loss. Creation, retention, and access to jobs must be a focal point for additional recovery spending, as well as management of current available recovery dollars. Employment strategies should focus on three major efforts:

• Job training that translates directly into real jobs or careers: For those out of the labor market or marginally employed, we should create job-training programs in the form of apprenticeships that are directly linked with job placement and retention strategies or first-source hiring agreements with industry. Job training programs should also focus on long-term career opportunities (i.e. teach transferable skills, create opportunities for future training and education, technical assistance for those who want to start their own businesses), wrap-around services and ongoing case management.
• Increased access to existing jobs for the hardest hit communities: Every agency within the federal government has annual contracting goals to increase the participation of small, disadvantaged, and women-owned businesses. Adherence to these goals varies greatly by agency with some key programs poorly enforced. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that for one of its largest programs (Section 3 requirements), only 25 percent of HUD funded recipients report their compliance and 80 percent of those reporting fail to meet the minimum requirements. Compliance with these types of guidelines consistently across agencies could channel tens of thousands of jobs to the hardest hit families and communities in America.
• Rebuild the middle class - We should implement policies that encourage the creation of reliable and sustainable jobs that allow families to earn a living wage, receive reasonable benefits, build assets, and retire in dignity. Investing in clean energy and energy efficiency programs can replace many manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past few decades and position the nation to be a leader in many industrial jobs of the future. Federal policies should also protect American workers from direct competition with countries that fail to respect worker rights and not reward firms that ship economic opportunities abroad.

Matthew Duss on Iran's legitimacy problem:

The "war on terror" was pretty great for Iran's hardliners. The Bush administration's 2002 inclusion of Iran in the "Axis of Evil" was a major blow to Iranian moderates, discrediting their calls for U.S.-Iran rapprochement and supporting the claims of Iran's hard-liners that engagement with America was pointless. The invasion of Iraq removed Iran's greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, against whom Iran had fought a staggeringly destructive eight-year war. Iraq's postwar government included a significant number of Iran's former clients -- including eventual Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq -- in top leadership positions.

The perceived success of Iran's Lebanese ally Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 -- in a devastating month-long combination of bombing and ground combat hailed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" -- also proved a huge boost to Iranian hawks. A 2007 poll of Egyptians placed Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as the two most admired leaders in the region. The fact that two Shiite leaders topped an Egyptian poll, even as Iraq's sectarian civil war raged and Arab leaders like Jordan's King Abdullah warned of Shiite inroads into Sunni Arab lands, is a testament to Iran and Hezbollah's success in defying the West.

KEEP READING ...

A recent survey shows that more than 14 percent of borrowers are having trouble paying their mortgages, especially as unemployment starts to play a larger role than the subprime fiasco that helped kick off the recession. Meanwhile, 9.6 percent of borrowers are delinquent on payments, and 4.5 percent are involved in a foreclosure -- taken together, 7.4 million households, the highest level since 1972.

Especially given the problems with the administration's mortgage modification plan, this isn't welcome news. If anything, it should be another argument for using TARP funds to deal with unemployment rather than deficit reduction, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats, frustrated by the pace of real economic improvement, are urging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

-- Tim Fernholz

Both the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First were at Guantanamo this week to observe the commencement of the new, revised military commissions. Both were present for the pre-trial hearing of Mohammed Kamin, and both organizations had similar takes on the proceedings.

ACLU:

Continuing the military commission proceedings against Kamin meant more of the same of what we've seen in other proceedings here: uncertainty about the rules, which the government is making up as we go along (even now, the Department of Defense is preparing new rules for the military commissions), and a judge frustrated by delays in the prosecution's failure to hand over fundamental evidence to the defense.

The usual chaos was compounded by uncertainty over where Kamin's case will ultimately be tried. Kamin is accused of a single crime, providing material support for terrorism—an offense that should have been prosecuted in established federal courts. While a military commission conviction for material support for terrorism could possibly be overturned on appeal because such a crime is not a traditional war crime, the offense is covered by the federal criminal law. And federal courts have a proven track record of obtaining convictions for material support for terrorism in numerous cases since 2001.

There is a making-it-up-as-we-go feel to these proceedings which is inevitable for a system of trials for which the Congress, courts and executive keep changing the rules. For example, there was discussion today of a new pre-trial hearing date in December in the Kamin case.

But officials said that the new rules for the military commission proceedings - which the Department of Defense needs to alter to conform with reforms passed by Congress on October 29 - have yet to be released by the Department of Defense. Officials with the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo acknowledged today that they have not even seen a draft set of the new rules.

I think most Americans aren't actually privy to how haphazard the military commissions are--they're essentially a new legal system invented from scratch to try detainees against whom we have dubious evidence or only intelligence information. The adjective "military" may give them a certain sense of authority for those who are unaware just how poorly the process has worked so far compared to federal courts, but this is misleading since the DoJ's civilian lawyers are actually more experienced in trying terrorism cases.

Not to belabor the point, but from a practical point of view, why would you want to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed through this kind of shaky process rather than a civilian trial in the Southern District of New York, which has already handled plenty of these types of cases? A civilian trial is still far less of a roll of the dice than the military commissions, even after the revisions.

-- A. Serwer

Joanne Kenen lays out some progressive solutions to the malpractice problem:

Year after year, Republicans try to pass legislation that would limit medical malpractice awards. Fix the tort system, they argue, and we fix rising health-care costs. And year after year, Democrats resist placing arbitrary caps on awards to people who may have suffered from an egregious medical error. The fight plays out like a predictable old Western -- good guys versus bad guys. Depending on your politics, the villain is either the greedy doctor or the greedy trial lawyer.

Health reform invites a fresh look at malpractice. The Republican tort-reform agenda hasn't magically fixed what ails American health care in states that have tried it. But progressives can test new models of medical malpractice reform because -- done right -- they may lead to a more consistent, more timely, and more equitable approach to compensating people who have been harmed.

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The other day, Jesse Jackson said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama wasn't black because he voted against health-care reform:

At a CBC dinner on Wednesday night, the famed civil rights leader denounced Davis's vote, saying, "We even have blacks voting against the health care bill from Alabama. You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man."

Days after insisting it was impossible to be both black (which Davis is) and vote against health care reform (which Davis did), Jackson said he called the Alabama gubernatorial candidate to "assure him of my abiding admiration."

It's a good sign that even someone who has been associated with civil rights as long as Jesse Jackson can't get away with publicly questioning someone's ethnic loyalties based on their politics without embarrassing himself and having to apologize. If only we could somehow get this dynamic going within the American Jewish community.

-- A. Serwer

Following somewhat in the footsteps of the Constitution Project and former State Department official John Bellinger, former Bush Department of Justice officials Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey have backed Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court. Goldsmith famously withdrew the administration's torture memos, and Comey backed then Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision not to certify the NSA wiretapping program.

Goldsmith and Comey don't go as far as the Constitution Project in pushing against preventive detention, and they're fine with the two-tiered system of justice for suspected terrorists. In fact, they're painfully honest about it:

It is more likely that Holder decided to use a commission system still learning to walk because the Cole case is relatively weak and will benefit from the marginal advantages the commission system offers the government. It is also likely that the Justice Department will decide that many other terrorists at Guantanamo Bay will not be tried in civilian or military court but, rather, will be held under a military detention rationale more suitable to the circumstances of their cases.

Krauthammer also fears, like other conservatives, the unhinged rants of KSM. There's really nothing more self-implicating than the chattering teeth of Republicans in the face of a terrorists' rants -- in a military commissions trial, KSM's indictment of the United States might have some resonance, particularly in the Middle East. Placing him in a civilian courtroom is a propaganda coup for the U.S., not the other way around. When people get hysterical over what KSM might say, it makes me wonder how much of what they think he might say is actually true. Spencer Ackerman has another theory: Seeing Al Qaeda terrorists being brought low before a court of law demystifies them for a fearful public, diminishing the political currency of terrorism-based fearmongering.

I can see why the GOP would be afraid of that.

-- A. Serwer

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, costs Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.

So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn't be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and ... you know the rest.

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and "centrists" in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."

And yet Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson mumble darkly that they may not even vote to allow debate on the floor of the Senate about the bill if it contains this paltry public option. And Republicans predict a "holy war."

But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word "public?" Make it available to only twelve people?

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no preexisting conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

But instead of revisiting old disputes, Karzai brought in several cabinet ministers to talk about development and security. He explained details of a new effort to address graft. And halfway through a meal of lamb stew, chicken and rice, he looked across the table and said he had decided that the United States would be a "critical partner" in his second term, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the meeting.

I'm glad he's decided that the U.S. is a "critical partner," but that's not exactly his decision, is it, given the whole U.S.-military-keeps-him-in-power thing? While Rajiv Chandrasekaran's piece suggests that Karzai's efforts are a result of "top diplomats and generals ... abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship," I just don't think the chronology adds up. It was only a week ago that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry was arguing that the U.S. shouldn't send more troops specifically to have more leverage over Karzai, leading the president to reject all of his staff's proposals. I doubt that things have since turned around dramatically since then.

Reading on, the change in dynamic seems to be this: The new approach "will entail more engagement with members of Karzai's cabinet and provincial governors, officials said, because they have concluded that the Afghan president lacks the political clout in his highly decentralized nation to purge corrupt local warlords and power brokers." Essentially, U.S. officials have realized Karzai is inept and are bypassing him, which is much better explanation of why he's suddenly decided the U.S. ought to be his critical partner.

That's not to say there is no merit in Chrasekaran's analysis, which does show that the U.S. has pushed Karzai pretty hard throughout the election cycle, and made some diplomatic missteps that led Karzai to seek unsavory allies. But the article concludes with a quote from a senior official saying that Karzai isn't obstructionist, just inept, and with mention that at Clinton's feel-good meeting, she also delivered the news that further U.S. aid would be contingent on the Afghan government hitting certain benchmarks, not exactly a message Karzai wants to hear. Maybe the U.S. is taking a warmer tone with Karzai, but that's because they've realized how ineffectual he is, which in turn has led him to emphasize his value to the American project. The combination of the U.S. dealing with the facts on the ground and Karzai being cooperative might be a very good outcome indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Some conservatives are open about their reverence for the Bush administration's policies. But others, perhaps not wanting to associate themselves with the worst presidency of modern times try to pretend the last eight years didn't happen by comparing Barack Obama to History's Greatest Monster, Jimmy Carter, or pretending that foreign policy initiated by the Bush administration, left to fester for years, is now proof that Obama has "lost" the war in Afghanistan.
• I agree with Robert Farley that basing your foreign policy exclusively on worst-case scenarios is arguably the worst thing you can do, which I think is related to the another common refrain in foreign affairs: portraying your would-be adversary in the personalized terms of a madman who cannot be negotiated with, and who is unwavering in his commitment to destroy you. Fortunately, the Obama administration has opted to return to a fairly conventional carrots-and-sticks approach which gives the United States more leverage than mindless saber-rattling and demonization ever could.
• Needless to say, Republicans did not provide the leadership which led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, but what's most telling about these remarks is that most Republicans probably believe this. As we all know, the only racists left in this country are liberals, whose insistence on big government creates dependency for minorities who would otherwise pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become successful small business owners under the proven deregulatory policies of Republicans.
• Remainders: Voters sour on the stimulus, don't understand recession economics; Michael Tomasky tries to unravel the Blue Dog enigma; the fundraising war continues apace; and the Senate deludes itself into thinking that it can legislate away teenagers' hormones.

--Mori Dinauer

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins argues for clean energy investments that will create 1.7 million jobs for the people who need them the most.

It’s difficult for most Americans to accept data indicating an end to the recession for a simple reason – they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Despite a quarter of growth, the unemployment rate has topped 10 percent, the highest it has been since 1983. Among people of color, the rates are even higher, with Latino unemployment exceeding 13 percent, and unemployment in the African-American community just shy of 16 percent. Economic growth does not mean that Americans experience economic relief; without stable jobs for everyday Americans, this cannot be considered a recovery. Recovery necessitates that jobs be created – jobs that provide stable employment for years, not months.

Green shoots of an employment recovery are showing through the investments made under President Obama's Recovery Act, which is already producing impressive innovation and the beginnings of job and wealth creation in green industries. Clean-energy sectors, which hold the promise of being major engines of job growth, are creating opportunities for those communities hit hardest by the recession: low-income communities and communities of color.

Portland, Oregon, for example, is using Recovery Act investments to launch a revolving loan fund that will help residents pay for energy-efficiency improvements to their homes. This program will save energy, save money and create 10,000 local jobs. A groundbreaking Community Workforce Agreement will further ensure that those jobs are available to workers from low-income and other disadvantaged communities.

In New York City, Recovery Act investments are helping the Community Environmental Center (CEC) hire more workers and weatherize more buildings. The largest Weatherization Assistance Program provider in the state, CEC is a union shop providing good wages and benefits. And thanks to a partnership between the union (the Laborers Local 10) and Non-Traditional Employment for Women, women and historically disadvantaged workers have the opportunity to win those jobs.

These local examples reinforce what larger, national investigations have shown. In our report Green Prosperity, Green For All, the Political Economy Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council showed that clean-energy investment creates roughly three to four times as many jobs as comparable investment in fossil fuel industries. The report estimates that investing $150 billion (public and private) in clean energy will create a net gain of 1.7 million jobs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency replace the damage done to our environment by fossil fuels with good, sustainable jobs for American workers. Building a green economy involves more than a shift to clean energy – it will provide a shift to a more skilled and labor-intensive economy.

More after the jump.

-- Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

The Recovery Act is promising – but it is only a beginning. Congress and the President must take the next step: enacting strong climate and energy legislation. The Clean Energy Jobs Act, just reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, will invest public money in clean energy. But moreover, it will also encourage private investment and innovation by sending a clear message: clean energy is the future of our economy. Those who invest early and robustly will be reap the benefits.

There are ways, though, that the Clean Energy Jobs Act can be made even stronger. We must to increase clean-energy investments while fully protecting low-income consumers from price hikes. We must protect two key provisions: the Green Construction Careers Demonstration Project and funding for the Green Jobs Act. These provisions ensure that the bill not only creates jobs, but that all of America's workers have access to and are ready for these jobs — particularly the workers impacted most severely by the economy’s downturn.

An economic recovery, after all, is not a percentage point noted in a press release. A real recovery is one in which Americans can be confident that, regardless of where they live or what they look like, they have an opportunity to succeed in the economy. We must measure our true progress by a different metric: the number of career-track, green jobs that we create for those Americans who need them most.

All very interesting stuff from the newest Democratic senator. But, when asked what would happen if the president proposed a troop increase -- "I don't think Congress would leap forward with plaudits" -- Specter gave the game away: "When you have Congressman [Joe] Sestak calling for an increase, a major increase, I think his view would be in the minority." Sestak, a retired Admiral, is the Pennsylvania Representative challenging Specter for his senate seat. Asked how much of his forward leaning statements were political positioning, Specter replied,"None, None," pointing to a statement he delivered in September raising similar questions about the war -- which also came after Sestak's decision to run.

Funny to see Specter, the former Republican, is finding ground to the left of Sestak in the Pennsylvania primary on an issue of major importance to progressives. Sestak probably has the advantage on almost every other issue among the Democratic base, but his support of increasing troops in Afghanistan could present a window of opportunity to Specter. It all depends on what the Obama administration chooses, and whether real congressional opposition emerges following that decision.

-- Tim Fernholz

Sady Doyle on the unwarranted backlash against fans of the world's most popular vampire-romance series:

When New Moon, the second film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's four-part Twilight series, opens in theaters this month, those who see it will not be getting great art. The faults of Meyer's immensely popular teen vampire-romance novels have been endlessly, and publicly, rehashed: the retrograde gender roles, the plodding plotlines, the super-heated goofiness of Meyer's prose. I can confirm for you that these faults are real!



Yet I could not stop reading the series. The books -- all about sexy teen vampire Edward Cullen, his sexy teen werewolf rival Jacob Black, and their joint quest to stalk, control, and condescend their way into the ever-turgid affections of sexy teen (human) narrator Bella Swan -- are slow, repetitive, and often unintentionally hilarious. ("If I hadn't seen him undressed, I would have sworn there was nothing more beautiful than Edward in his khakis." Wait. Hold up. The vampire is wearing khakis?) 



KEEP READING ...

Peter Bergen, who testified today before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, made an important point about homegrown radicalization.

An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17%. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the US Army after three weeks and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.

A few years ago Spencer Ackerman wrote what I think was a very accurate piece about how American pluralism and economic opportunity had stemmed the growth of homegrown Islamic radicalism. But that was years ago, and things change -- de facto segregation may be creating the conditions for the kinds of radicalization that we've seen in Europe.

Weeks ago I had a conversation with Bergen's colleague at the New America Foundation Andrew Lebovich, who warned that Americans may have gotten complacent about thinking of how to properly counter radical ideologies from spreading because of a certain strain of American exceptionalism -- the idea that American culture is itself a deradicalizing force. I happen to think that's true. Nevertheless, Lebovich points out that what we've seen recently -- most dramatically in Minnesota -- is the rise of isolated, economically depressed "country-or region-specific" communities where radicalization can take root anyway, often as a result of events in the country of their families' origin. It's a problem we're going to have to figure out how to face soon, without alienating or demonizing the communities in question.

As former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army John Keane said in the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing on the Ft. Hood shootings said earlier today, “you cannot kill this movement, you need moderate Muslims to reject it."

-- A. Serwer

A new poll shows that 52 percent of Republicans think ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama.

I've written about voter fraud pretty extensively -- most Republicans don't know the difference between registration fraud, which is as easy as filling out a ballot application incorrectly, and voter fraud, which means actually casting a ballot. The conservative Ahabs at the Bush Justice Department spent years chasing that white whale and came up with bubkus. The latter is incredibly rare, and there isn't a single documented instance of ACORN anywhere, ever, stealing an election.

Nevertheless, like the idea that the Obama was born abroad, the myth of voter fraud persists -- only a minority of Republicans believe the president was born in the United States.

These issues are ultimately connected -- the segment of the Republican base that imagines itself as "real" Americans finds it incomprehensible that they, and their agenda, could be rejected by a majority of voters. We saw a little bit of this denial from conservative pundits insisting America is a "center-right" country immediately after the election. But for a certain group of Republicans the 2008 election caused a sense of rejection that has fermented into derangement, which is why the weepy, manic Glenn Beck has now become the right's primary ideological voice. It's why so much of that emotion is focused on a time -- right after 9/11--that people were so fearful of terrorism that the right had overwhelming political support.

The 2008 electorate was the most diverse ever--for some people, that is disenfranchisement by definition, since that means America is being increasingly populated by people who aren't "real Americans." Even if ACORN didn't steal the election, those people did, and so whether ACORN literally stole the election matters about as much as literal "death panels". It's "true enough." Hoffman workers in NY-23 mistook one of their own African-American volunteers for a member of ACORN, which wasn't even active in the district.

None of this new far right mythology actually has to make sense. As long as the frayed pieces of the puzzle can be assembled in a manner that allows this part of the right to preserve in their minds the idea that they are the authentic representation of what it means to be American, any explanation will do.

-- A. Serwer

Today, Obama leaves Asia having made no headway on the issue of North Korean denuclearization. In Japan, China, and South Korea, the president reaffirmed each country's commitment to bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks. But it's not clear how much good that would do: Pyongyang remains as unpredictable as ever. For the past decade, North Korea has participated in eight rounds of these negotiations -- a process aimed toward ending DPRK's nuclear program that also involves the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea -- and it's been rewarded with gradual loosening of economic sanctions. The outcome? A trail of broken pledges and two nuclear tests, the most recent one in May.

It may be time to shift toward using trade and academic exchanges to open up North Korea -- an approach that worked with Eastern Europe and China -- and leave more of the heavy lifting on denuclearization to its neighbors. As a recent Asia Society report suggests, integrating North Korea into the world economy could potentially empower its citizens and impose heretofore nonexistent domestic pressure on its leaders to abide by international norms. Having already removed North Korea from the U.S. Trading with Enemy Act last year (only Cuba remains!), we should follow the lead of many European countries to develop trade ties and encourage NGO aid networks to work within the country. The United States could also initiate technological and educational exchanges to expose North Koreans to new ideas and business practices that can be implemented back home.

These societal improvements will be critical to transitioning North Korea out of its currently unthinkable degree of isolation and poverty. In a recent New Yorker article, Barbara Demick describes a famine in North Korea that killed 2.5 million and profiles a woman who led a modern-day hunter-gatherer life in order to combat state-induced food shortage, all the while believing that she was living in the “greatest nation on earth”:

Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day"… Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could find dandelions or other weeds that people ate even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song also collected rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer.

This oppression is destabilizing for North Korea's economic system and the country as a whole -- clearly not a good thing when you're talking about a country with nukes.

Meanwhile, we can leave the task of putting pressure on DPRK to its neighbors -- they're within range of Pyongyang's missiles, and they're most vulnerable if it experiences internal instability. Japan, South Korea, and even China are pursuing a denuclearization policy with North Korea that is already roughly in line with U.S. interests. Two days ago, Pyongyang even declared eagerness for inter-Korean dialogue toward unification.

Going forward, the Six-Party Talks will remain an important platform for coordination among the nations invested in North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. However, for the United States, economic engagement with DPRK would be a more practical and sustainable policy focus. By drawing North Korea into the international community, as President Obama wishes, it would indirectly coerce Pyongyang to denuclearize and, more importantly, induce systemic change that bring benefits directly to the North Korean people.

-- Linda Li

The Catholic bishops have gotten a lot of attention for the role they played in pushing the Stupak amendment -- and the House health-care bill -- over the finish line. While there's no doubt the bishops applied the midnight pressure, their role is just one piece of how Democrats yearn for the godly imprimatur.

To be sure, the final outcome on the House side is the result of whip counts simply not adding up to the number needed to pass the bill. But Democrats ending up in the position of having to obtain a particular religious stamp of approval was also the result of seeking out the "faith vote" in the last several election cycles, and confining the definition of "people of faith" to people who oppose abortion.

The Democrats "got religion," but at what cost?

The Democrats failed to tap into pro-choice religious groups as a voice to argue for inclusion of abortion coverage in a health-care bill. Instead, these groups, along with leading pro-choice groups, acquiesced to the Capps amendment, which would have segregated private and public funds and used only private funds to pay for abortions, as a reasonable compromise. But not being met in the middle by the anti-choice side has infuriated the pro-choice side.

The day before the House vote on November 7, pro-choice groups, including religious pro-choice groups like Catholics for Choice, were essentially saying they would hold their noses and not object to an abortion amendment compromise being crafted by Rep. Brad Ellsworth. That proposed amendment would have required a private contractor to oversee disbursement of funds for abortion coverage to ensure that public funds wouldn't be used. The pro-choice side did this reluctantly, though, because they felt they had already compromised by acquiescing to the Capps amendment when they in fact favor full coverage of abortion services.

On November 6, I wrote in a story published at Religion Dispatches:

Indeed, the pro-choice camp has compromised in order to make the bill more palatable to the anti-choice camp, which is not meeting them in the middle. “This is a hard time for us in the pro-choice community,” said [Catholics for Choice president Jon] O'Brien. “We’ve been straightforward and reasonable.” The House bill “is not a win for women. But it’s not a loss for the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. We see it as a compromise.”

When the Stupak amendment prevailed, these pro-choicers were furious. The midnight pressure applied by the Catholic bishops amounted to the enshrining of one particular religion -- and indeed one version of that particular religion -- into law. Polling data showed that most Catholics not only disagreed with the bishops' position on the Stupak amendment, but also believed they shouldn't be politicizing the health-care debate. While the bishops do have an infrastructure that gives them access to thousands of parishes across the country -- unrivaled in any other denomination -- many pro-choice advocates believe that Congress "drank the Kool-Aid" that the bishops have actual power to sway votes.

The anti-choice Democrats who allowed Bart Stupak to be their ringleader now risk being seen as more aligned with the religious right than with their own party. As I reported at RD, while the Catholic bishops were in Nancy Pelosi's office late that Friday night, the religious right -- and Democrats for Life of America -- were rallying the religious right's base to push members of Congress to settle for nothing less than the Stupak amendment. Their goal, as we know, is blocking access to legal abortion, and a new study from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services maintains the Stupak amendment would, over time, end all insurance coverage for abortion services. But the Ellsworth compromise, the religious right maintained, was nothing more than a "money-laundering scheme." (Apparently the Catholic bishops believe Catholic organizations are capable of segregating public and private funds, but the government is not.)

But where were the president's vaunted faith allies? The ones who were supposed to bring home the big tent? The broader agenda voters who didn't care about abortion anymore? It seems like there are cracks in their common ground strategy on health care. Religious pro-choice groups are not going to be sidelined in order for "people of faith" to close ranks around a health-care bill, just to support a health-care bill. As I reported earlier this week, religious pro-choice groups might have been foiled on Stupak, but they vowing not going to be silent in their advocacy for abortion coverage in the final bill.

--Sarah Posner

But this corporatism -- made palatable to the Left only by heavy-duty pro-consumer regulations and the public option -- is naturally offensive to progressives and populists of all stripes. More than one conservative has complained to me about these deals as offensive to the free market (as if insurance companies have ever operated in a 'free market'). But instead of taking advantage of this situation and calling out the Democrats on creating a permanent insurance industry, conservative health care proposals are an even bigger gift to the health insurance industry -- their proposals to throw off almost all regulations, allow for many kinds of medical discrimination against customers, and basically let these firms run wild -- would be even worse for consumers. But they're free market, dammit, and it saves them the time of solving the ridiculously hard problem of actual health care reform. Even their moderates, some of whom have good ideas, can't propose them because the caucus can't even agree whether or not denying coverage based on preexisting conditions is OK.

As Matt says, "moving to a less-incoherent posture would have some real benefits, but also disrupt the current sweet deal." Unfortunately, the benefits, in the form of responsible governance, would be more for the country at large than to the Republicans themselves, so I imagine we can expect the current status quo to continue.

-- Tim Fernholz

Gershom Gorenberg on selective disobedience in Israel:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel's universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn't intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews -- a point he presumed was obvious from the "uprooting" of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF "doesn't want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world." He didn't want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs' lives. As a student at a yeshivah -- a religious seminary -- he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age.

KEEP READING ...

Tom Ricks summarizes a speech by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, wherein he says that the U.S. basically needs to go all or nothing -- either put in at least 40,000 troops to control corruption, or start pulling out. Related true story: A to-remain-nameless national security expert told me of a conversation he had the other day, when a congressional aide asked if the U.S. should be all in or all out in Afghanistan, and this security wonk replied, "That’s the stupidest fucking question I’ve ever heard on national security.” Kilcullen's polarity fixation aside, check the post for his comparison of Karzai to the Kuomintang in 1949 and his description of the corruption cycle. Like Ricks, I was most surprised by Kilcullen's take on Al Qaeda.

One surprise to me was that he isn't particularly worried about the possibility of al Qaeda moving back into Afghanistan. "I hope so," he said, explaining that it would be a strategic gain for us to see the terrorist group leave Pakistan and move into parts of Afghanistan that essentially are "the moon with gravity."

If Kilcullen thinks this al Qaeda problem is sorted, and that the situation would in fact be better if they did move back into Afghanistan, why is escalation even on the table? If the justification for being in Afghanistan isn't al Qaeda, then a lot of folks -- particularly President Barack Obama -- are going to be surprised.

-- Tim Fernholz

I think Daphne Eviatar is exactly right to point out that Eric Holder's comment that "failure is not an option" in the 9/11 trials sounds eerily similar to one made by Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes on the military commissions prosecutions years ago. Haynes' statement that “We can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions," was used by civil liberties groups at the time to argue that the military commissions were reverse engineered to ensure convictions.

Of course, it's not just Holder making such statements. President Obama said yesterday in response to those criticizing him for not trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in military commissions that such people won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." He's since backed off that statement.

By trying KSM in a civilian court, the Obama administration is circumventing the accusation that the venue is meant to ensure conviction. But what we have here, essentially, is a situation in which there is immense social and political pressure for any judge and jury to convict the accused -- pressure that is coming from the highest reaches of the administration. Now, I personally think KSM is guilty -- but that doesn't change the fact that when the president and attorney general speak so frankly in favor of a particular outcome of a criminal trial, it certainly calls into question whether or not the accused is getting a fair proceeding.

This trial isn't just for the U.S.: It's for the world. Al Qaeda's murderous ideology will be put on trial here, but anything less than real due process will indict the United States instead. Most Americans may be convinced of KSM's guilt, but the rest of the world -- particularly the hearts and minds the U.S. is trying to win, may not be. Which is why getting this right is so important.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, during Attorney General Eric Holder's appearance before the Senate, the right-wing blogosphere crowded around National Review "legal expert" Andy McCarthy as he exposed the "whoppers" in Holder's testimony. Let's take a look at these -- I'll excerpt as much as possible since McCarthy's post is long.

The "tragic shooting" at Ft. Hood. What happened at Ft. Hood was a jihadist massacre — a terrorist act, not a tragedy.

The civilian justice system has been handling terrorism cases successfully for years. No mention of Mamdouh Salim, the al-Qaeda founder who was never brought to trial for 1998 U.S. embassy bombings because he maimed a Bureau of Prisons guard in an escape attempt during which he attempted to kidnap is taxpayer-funded defense lawyers.

A civilian trial is no more a platform for KSM than a military commission would have been. That's ridiculous. KSM was ready to plead guilty and be executed eleven months ago. Whatever soapbox he was going to have, he'd largely already had, and while we'd have had to let him speak before sentence was imposed, that would have been the end of it. Now, he's going to get a full-blown trial — after combing through the discovery for a couple of years and after putting the Bush administration under the spotlight.

So this is an unforced self-owning. McCarthy wants a military commission for KSM because he's afraid of "putting the Bush administration under the spotlight." In other words, a civilian trial of KSM would expose the Bush administration's illegal behavior, behavior McCarthy supports but doesn't want exposed for what it is. There's nothing more telling about the shaky moral case for torture than torture apologists' fear of their methods being scrutinized before a court of law.

In a civilian trial, America will see KSM for the coward that he is — Holder: "I am not scared of KSM." Submitting a war criminal to a military commission is not an exercise in fear; it is an exercise in justice. We already know all about what kind of animal KSM is, thanks to the exrtraordinary information that has come out in the military proceedings and the CIA interrogations. You could fill a book a book with it, which the 9/11 Commission did. We don't need to bear the risks of a civilian trial either to learn more about KSM or so Mr. Holder can show how brave he is.

Of course, KSM isn't a "war criminal" if he's guilty, he's just a criminal -- a mass murdering criminal, but there's no need to elevate him to the status of warrior. He was captured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, not on a battlefield. He has no right of belligerence. He's not a uniformed soldier or state actor. He is a terrorist. Terrorists are criminals.

For eight years justice has been delayed — no longer, "It is past time to finally act." Holder, of course, does not mention the role of his firm and others in delaying and derailing the military commissions during their representation of America's enemies. Senator Kyl just confronted him with my contentions on that score (from this column). The attorney-general responded that I am a polemecist who says inflammatory things for talk shows, whereas he is concerned with facts. (I guess he means pertinent facts, like how he is not "scared of KSM.") I'm delighted to let people judge that one for themselves.

McCarthy wrote a long screed attacking the "the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers" who gave "free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees," for delaying the military commissions by challenging their constitutionality. The lawyers in question were doing nothing more than following Thomas Paine's counsel, that "he that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Never mind that these "left-wing lawyers" -- many of whom were people in uniform serving their country -- have managed to win 30 out of 38 habeas cases for detainees at Guantanamo. McCarthy's argument is a textbook example of what Armando describes as "the Ed Meese School of Law" wherein being a suspect makes you guilty even if you've been convicted of nothing. Never mind that it was the 2006 Roberts-Alito Supreme Court -- that left-wing cabal that was to the right of the partisans who handed the presidency to George W. Bush -- that decided the Hamdan case ruling the Bush military commissions unconstitutional. Never mind that due process is the legal principle on which a democratic society rests -- McCarthy would throw it all away to have a bad guy waterboarded or thrown in a cell forever.

This man, who in a second would give al-Qaeda the kind of strategic victories it only dreams of without hesitation by needlessly shredding the traditional institutions of American democracy, imagines himself a patriot, and those who defend the Constitution as traitors.

-- A. Serwer

• Of course there are political advantages to calling a "stimulus bill" a "jobs bill." But rhetoric only takes you so far if your jobs bill fails to actually produce jobs. The ARRA, while imperfect, saved a not-insignificant number of jobs, and created some demand where there otherwise would not have been any, but it wasn't designed to create concentrated and targeted job growth. Since the administration reportedly knew the stimulus fell short of the amount of money its economists were recommending for political reasons, perhaps they held off on an actual jobs bill designed to make up for the ARRA's shortcomings.
• Kevin Drum catches a New York Times piece on Obama's trip to China making the assumption that China has become "more willing to say no to the United States," as if in the rosy past China was more deferential to the United States. As much as this narrative stems from a simpleminded understanding of our fiscal relationship to the Chinese, it also draws upon the "rising power" story that places China on an inevitable path to preeminence, regardless of the fact that China is still very, very poor.
• I don't doubt that many Republicans believe their own terrorist-as-supervillian fantasies, but the main reason they would welcome a return to the inspiring politics of 2002-2004 is that they, you know, won those elections. And they won them because they convinced enough people that only they could protect you from the terrorists marching on Main St., USA, and that Democrats were nothing less than traitors.
• It's possible that Chuck Grassley actually believes that in their heart of hearts, Democrats just want to destroy capitalism, but to suggest that they "don't care" if they're hurting the economy doesn't make any sense. Name me a political party that won elections by being indifferent to an ailing economy. If Democrats were really just self-interested power seekers, why would they deliberately ruin their chances for re-election?
• Remainders: The vision of the Senate Robert Byrd recalls doesn't actually exist; Marco Rubio tests whether anti-immigration sentiment or worship of St. Ronnie is more powerful; and this year's War on Christmas is the most clueless yet.
  

--Mori Dinauer

In a story that's provoked justified outrage, the Army has threatened single military mom Spc. Alexis Hutchinson with a military court marshal for refusing leave her 10-month-old and ship off to Afghanistan when none of her family members could care for the child. In a compassionate display of flexibility, her superiors offered her the alternative of putting the child in foster care. The whole episode seems to be a the result of military keeping an inadequate and inconsistent family policy.

The Army requires single parents to have a "family plan" in case they are deployed, but if yours falls through, you're out of luck. Why isn't there a backup plan? Hutchinson -- a chef -- could serve on the base for a certain period until she finds an adequate solution. Worse comes to worse, she could receive an "administrative discharge." Whatever the details of the arrangement are, the default choice should not be to put your child in foster care or face criminal charges.

Hutchison also wouldn't have been in this predicament had she been serving, in say, the Navy. Military women generally get six weeks of maternity leave. But the time period before they can be deployed varies by branch. The Navy and Marine Corps don't require women to deploy for up to a year. The Army, however, is ready to ship you off after four months. Four months of leave isn't enough of a grace period for deployments -- many women are still breastfeeding then. Returning to work after four months might not seem so bad, but it's a huge burden when work is thousands of miles away.

The military's family policies belong in the 1950s, both in their understanding of gender balance and in terms of labor law. The government's requirement for private employers – under the Family and Medical Leave Act – makes companies with 50 employees or more give new mothers 14 weeks, a meager baseline that it fails to follow itself. And after years of prodding, the military finally acknowledged that men take care of kids, too: They get all of 10 days.

--Gabriel Arana

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, David Woolner urges President Obama and Congress to adopt the fearlessness of FDR in directly creating jobs.

The recent news that the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009 while at the same time the national unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October, has many economists talking about a “jobless recovery.” What this means, say the experts, is continued economic growth -- and hence a technical end to the recession -- but no improvement in the employment figures for the immediate future. In fact, most economists predict that under current conditions, the unemployment rate will rise even further -- perhaps reaching as high as 11 percent by the summer of 2010.

It appears that the Obama administration is prepared to accept this scenario and will not push for bolder solutions so as to ensure that the so-called recovery includes not just an expansion of the GDP but also a reduction in the alarmingly high unemployment rate. As a consequence, millions of American workers will continue to languish among the ranks of the unemployed, burdened by an anxious present and an uncertain future.

More after the jump.

--David Woolner

Braintruster David Woolner is senior vice president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, about 18 million Americans were in immediate need of food, clothing, medical care, and most of all, jobs. For his administration, the notion of a “jobless recovery” would have been an anathema. Indeed, for FDR, the health of the nation was tied directly to the dignity of work. People needed jobs not merely to put food on the table but also to maintain their physical, psychological, and economic well-being. Moreover, FDR firmly believed that it was government’s responsibility to provide for the “general welfare.” So in the midst of an economic crisis that had produced the highest unemployment figures in our nation’s history, he did not hesitate to use the power of the state to provide the jobs the private sector had failed to generate. The Civilian Conservation Corps, which put hundreds of thousands of young men to work regenerating our nation’s depleted forests, preventing soil erosion, and enhancing our national parks; the Civil Works Administration, which provided work for more than 4 million Americans building schools, roads, and bridges, or as teachers in rural districts; the Works Progress Administration, which between 1935 and 1938 employed 5 million people to help build the economic infrastructure we still enjoy today.

These programs were not government hand-outs. Far from it. They provided real jobs to real people doing real work. They improved our natural resources and quality of life and brought America’s economic infrastructure into the modern world. No one -- least of all FDR -- expected these programs to continue indefinitely.

But they dramatically reduced unemployment in a moment of crisis and prevented what FDR called the “atrophy” of the work force. They also brought hope and dignity to millions through the one thing most able-bodied Americans want more than anything else-a job. Isn’t it time we adopted the same approach to our own recovery from the Great Recession?

Bank of America has been one of the least cooperative banks participating in Treasury's slow-going program to modify mortgages and prevent foreclosure, but last week I received a lending report from BofA with a fishy paragraph:

Over the past 21 months, we’ve helped modify mortgage loans for 445,000 homeowners or, on average, more than 21,000 each month. In addition to these results through our own programs, we helped move almost 100,000 customers into trial modifications through the Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) in the third quarter.

Wait a minute. BofA has been performing Treasury modifications through the Home Affordable Mortgage Program more slowly than almost every other peer institution, and had been complaining about how they didn't have the resources or infrastructure to move any faster. But now we find out that even as they complained about the lack of resources, they've been doing hundreds of thousands of non-Treasury modifications, which, as I reported in the spring, are usually worse than getting no modification at all. How are they doing this? Andrew Jakabovics and Pat Garafalo at the Center for American Progress have found out: BofA is directing potential HAMP participants into its proprietary modification program, something the HAMP program is supposed to discourage:

In case there remains any ambiguity as to whether a servicer can pull borrowers out of the pool to offer them a non-HAMP-compliant modification before determining their status under HAMP, Treasury official Herbert Allison recently testified, “under HAMP’s loan modification guidelines, mortgage servicers are prevented from ‘cherry-picking’ which loans to modify in a manner that might deny assistance to borrowers at greatest risk of foreclosure.”

So BofA can’t simply suggest an alternative program to this homeowner without determining eligibility for HAMP, and by doing so, it is potentially lowering the number of successful HAMP modifications it completes. Given the size of BofA’s portfolio, its compliance with program rules — particularly as it pertains to getting eligible borrowers into the program — directly impacts the public’s perception of the success of HAMP. If BofA were performing as well as CitiMortgage, Treasury would have reported an additional quarter million mortgages in its HAMP totals.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The whole point of HAMP was to make modifications that helped troubled borrowers and the broader economy, not use the facade of a government program to trick homeowners into changes that could end with them owing even more money and still potentially losing their homes.

-- Tim Fernholz

At the U.N.'s big World Food Summit in Rome this week, Pope Benedict gave voice to a way of thinking about food that is both seemingly obvious and undervalued in development circles. You hear about the mismatch between the world's sustenance needs and the amount of readily available food attacked from the market angle -- treating food as products that would flow where they need to be if not for subsidies and other protectionist schemes. And you hear food security talked about from the structural-inefficiencies angle -- countries where there is food insecurity suffer from either underdeveloped agricultural industries or malevolent governments. Applying new biotech innovations or focusing on eliminating political bottlenecks thus becomes the goal.

Benedict sees food security differently. Without ignoring the damage done by protectionism and corruption, or the promise of a new green revolution, Benedict is trying to reframe the debate from the bottom up. And at the base is the premise that we should assume that people have secure food, and then muster up outrage when it becomes glaringly clear that they don't. Food insecurity where it exists is not an inefficiency. It's a disgrace. Thus, says Benedict:

[T]he need to oppose those forms of aid that do grave damage to the agricultural sector, those approaches to food production that are geared solely towards consumption and lack a wider perspective, and especially greed, which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.

Again, it isn't exactly non-obvious that a billion or so humans being food insecure should be considered a moral question. But Benedict's appeal failed to resonate with the attendees at the U.N. summit, as the countries in attendance -- which included only Italy's Silvio Berlusconi among the G-8 leaders -- issued a squishy statement that failed to set concrete targets for addressing food security, either in terms of economic commitment or goals for a timeline for drawing the global food insecurity crisis to a close.

--Nancy Scola

Tim Fernholz on the need to consider strategy and resources in Afghanistan:

Last week, President Barack Obama rejected four different plans for what to do in Afghanistan, each one including an increase in the number of U.S. troops in the region. Resources -- how much money and how many troops -- are at the forefront of the media's coverage of Obama's decision, and the most tangible measure of the conflict to most Americans.

But as the debate over Afghanistan has progressed, voices within the administration, military commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former officials like Gen. Colin Powell, and pundits like Fred Kaplan have argued that the focus shouldn't be on how many troops are sent to Afghanistan but what they will do when they get there. This is a misleading formulation that eliminates vital strategic options. In reality, the resources the U.S. commits in Afghanistan, in both troops and treasure, should be at the crux of this debate.

KEEP READING ...

I just got off a conference call held by the Council on Foreign Relations, featuring former adviser to Condoleeza Rice, John B. Bellinger, and National Security expert Steve Simon. Simon has an op-ed in the New York Times today supporting the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court.

Bellinger said that he thought the administration's "hybrid model" of military commissions and civilian trials makes sense given that some of the people the U.S. is holding were captured on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he also pointed out that federal courts have far more experience dealing with terrorism cases than military commissions.

Bellinger condemned the "demonization" of the military commissions by human rights groups, and argued that the commissions were "in fact a well functioning system with good judges and good lawyers who I think would have been fair," but that "none of the military lawyers were used to dealing with massive terrorism cases like this.” Bellinger said that the Bush administration had in fact planned on "moving to shore up the military prosecutors with people from the Justice Department."

“Federal prosecutors are really more used to doing this kind of thing anyway," Bellinger said.

Another point that Bellinger made was that military commissions cases can be appealed into the federal court system -- meaning that any lawyer who decides to appeal would have his client's case looked at by a civilian judge anyway. He said that even if KSM had been tried by military commission, his case would have ended up in federal court.

As for Simon, he pointed out that trying KSM and the alleged 9/11 conspirators by military commission would read poorly in the Middle East.

“In the Arab Middle East, these sorts of trials are carried out by the military, they are seen as the worst form of pseudo-judicial regime justice, and not the real thing," Simon said. "So when they would look at a trial conducted by the U.S. military, even though it would adhere to more than just a semblance of due process, they’re looking at men in uniform trying other men, and they’re going to draw certain conclusions based on mirror imaging.”

"They’re just going to say that’s what happens here.”

-- A. Serwer

How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.

In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.

In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they're doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.

Caterpillar earned $404 million in the third quarter, or 64 cents a share. Analysts had expected only 5 cents. Caterpillar’s stock is up 165 percent since March. How did Caterpillar do it? Not by selling more bulldozers. It did it by cutting over 37,000 jobs.

The result, overall, is an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street recovery. Yes, the economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies are generating almost as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

The Fed, meanwhile, has become an enabler to all this, making it as cheap as possible for companies to ax their employees. Money costs so little these days, it’s easy to substitute capital for labor. It’s also easy to buy up foreign assets with cheap American money. And it’s now blissfully easy for Wall Street to borrow money almost free and buy all sorts of interests in foreign assets, especially commodities. That's why we're seeing the prices of foreign commodities and other assets go through the roof.

At the same time, the Treasury continues to be fixated on keeping banks afloat. The administration's mortgage mitigation efforts are lagging. Small businesses are starved of credit. The White House has announced a "jobs summit," which is better than nothing but not nearly as good as pushing immediately for a larger stimulus, a new jobs tax credit, and a WPA-style jobs program.

The Fed and the Treasury have, in effect, placed a huge bet on a recovery driven by asset prices. That’s a bad bet. The great disconnect between the stock market and jobs is pushing stock prices way out of line with the real economy. This isn't sustainable.

No economy can recover without consumers. Yet American consumers, who constitute 70 percent of the U.S. economy, are facing mounting job losses as well as pay cuts. They’re in no mood to buy and won’t be for some time.

Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy -- both at the Fed and in the White House -- the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats next year.

Julie Strawn explains how we can fix our community colleges:

Community colleges, far more than four-year colleges, serve groups that will dominate our undergraduate student populations and our work force for decades to come: students on their own financially, older students, people of color, parents, first-generation college students, and immigrants. Although widely viewed as gateways to the American dream, community colleges face relatively low completion rates. This quandary challenges our national commitment to economic mobility.

Washington state, more than any other, has sought to address this challenge systematically. Researchers mined state data on work-force needs, demographic changes, and student outcomes in community and technical colleges. They found that students needed to reach a "tipping point" in their educational journeys for postsecondary education to translate into significant economic benefits. This tipping point is about a year's worth of post-secondary education, paired with an occupational credential.

KEEP READING ...

Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and his prepared remarks focus heavily on justifying the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in federal court. Holder points out that civilian courts have been used very successfully over the years to prosecute terrorists, that the Classified Intelligence Procedures Act will prevent sensitive information from leaking out of a trial, and that KSM's hollow indictments of the United States will be no less present in a military commission than they would be in a civilian court.

The most politically salient part of Holder's speech however, is the part meant to head off conservative criticism that the administration is underestimating the threat posed by terrorism. Holder states unequivocally that "I know we are at war," adding that "We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready."

Here's the relevant excerpt:

I know that we are at war.

I know that we are at war with a vicious enemy who targets our soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and our civilians on the streets here at home. I have personally witnessed that somber fact in the faces of the families who have lost loved ones abroad, and I have seen it in the daily intelligence stream I review each day. Those who suggest otherwise are simply wrong.

Prosecuting the 9/11 defendants in federal court does not represent some larger judgment about whether or not we are at war. We are at war, and we will use every instrument of national power – civilian, military, law enforcement, intelligence, diplomatic, and others – to win. We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready.

We will also use every instrument of our national power to bring to justice those responsible for terrorist attacks against our people. For eight years, justice has been delayed for the victims of the 9/11 attacks. It has been delayed even further for the victims of the attack on the USS Cole. No longer. No more delays. It is time, it is past time, to act. By bringing prosecutions in both our courts and military commissions, by seeking the death penalty, by holding these terrorists responsible for their actions, we are finally taking ultimate steps toward justice. That is why I made this decision.

In making this and every other decision I have made as Attorney General, my paramount concern is the safety of the American people and the preservation of American values. I am confident this decision meets those goals, and that it will withstand the judgment of history.

That said, Holder's right that "we need not cower in the face of the enemy". Al Qaeda cannot destroy the United States. It can only make us so fearful that we destroy ourselves.

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder points to this Washington Post article that appears to describe exactly how many detainees at Guantanamo Bay fall into the so-called fifth category, those detainees who are "too dangerous to let go" but against whom we have scant evidence to prosecute:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

Shortly after the Mohammed Jawad verdict, his defense attorney, David Frakt, suggested to me that the administration might change its mind about the fact that this category existed at all. David Kris, head of the Department of Justice's National Security Division told Congress in July that half the Gitmo cases had been reviewed and none had been put in the fifth category. White House counterterrorism official John Brennan suggested that these detainees might simply be transferred to other countries. It wasn't clear until now that the fifth category still existed at all -- but it appears it does.

I gave some background on how this group of detainees came to exist in my feature on Jawad: Basically, the Bush administration dispensed entirely with gathering useable evidence on terrorist suspects, instead relying on intelligence information that is often nebulous and inconclusive by legal standards. At the time, the Bush administration felt it was better safe than sorry, and the Obama administration got stuck with the sorry.

Spencer Ackerman speculates that these detainees might be sent to Bagram. That was the Bush administration's solution for avoiding judicial scrutiny of detention, but that approach is distinct from what Ken Gude and the Center for American Progress are proposing. The CAP proposal is to send those detainees who were captured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, and who have lost the first round of their habeas appeals, back to Bagram. Sending "fifth category" detainees captured in third countries would jeopardize the government's position in appealing the judicial ruling that granted detainees captured in third countries and held at Bagram habeas rights.

I spoke to Matthew Waxman, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs under the Bush administration for the story I wrote on CAP's report last week, and he explained to me (in a quote that didn't make it into the final piece) why that wouldn't be a good idea.

"To defend against claims that habeas rights should also apply at Bagram, the administration needs to highlight the differences between the two sites, such as security issues, practical challenges of detention operations, the degree of U.S. control," Waxman said. "If the government starts simply swapping detainees among the facilities, it hurts its case that for all these reasons Bagram should be treated differently as a legal matter."

So Bagram is not a solution. Neither, in my mind, is preventive detention outside of an ongoing theater of military combat.

-- A. Serwer

Christopher Jencks looks at higher education's problems:

American higher education, once the envy of the world, is losing its competitive edge. Most of the world's top universities are still located in the United States, but our other great accomplishment, making higher education available to an ever-larger fraction of young people, has succumbed to our hatred of taxes. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, young people in Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and Scandinavia, where students and families do not bear such a large share of college costs, are now all more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than are young people in the United States. That is not because American employers no longer want more college graduates. The pay premium for workers with a bachelor's has doubled since the mid-1970s and is now greater than the gap in almost any other rich nation. This trend has been one factor (among many) in the rise of economic inequality. Richard Rothstein discusses the many other steps that would be needed to reverse that rise.

What has gone wrong? The problem has three parts. First, the college graduation rate has traditionally grown in tandem with the high school graduation rate -- which hasn't risen since the early 1970s. In addition, while the proportion of high school graduates entering college has risen, the proportion of college entrants earning a four-year degree has fallen. Meanwhile, college costs have soared, and financial aid has not kept up.

KEEP READING ...

Spencer Ackerman reminds us that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Can the U.S. deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan without violating soldiers' rotation policies or becoming dangerously underprepared for a crisis?

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

That's the real talk. There are other variables in the mix -- how much of the force is made up of Marines, how smoothly drawdown goes in Iraq -- but getting troop levels up to where Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants them won't be easy. When McChrystal made his original requests at the end of the summer, his strategic review described a 12-month window for changing the dynamic of the war, a window that is rapidly shrinking -- even if the first deployments began in January, it's not clear that overall levels could rise until the spring, nearly eight months after his deadline, and I'm curious what effect that would have on the conflict.

Meanwhile, in amateur news, my column this week is about how you can't elide the troop factor when talking about strategic issues, either, because doing so cuts several critical options off the table, not the least of which is getting Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

-- Tim Fernholz

• One can draw many conclusions from the list of senators who voted for the debt-financed Medicare Part D legislation in 2003 and now complain about the debt supposedly produced by the deficit-neutral health-care reform legislation hitting the Senate floor this week. Are they economically illiterate? Clearly. Hypocritical? Absolutely. And is anybody in the press talking about it? Of course not -- they've got to compete with Entertainment Tonight this week, it seems.
  
• It is inevitable that politicians contradict themselves, but in the case of Tim Pawlenty, who is clearly laying the groundwork for achieving higher office, his flip on climate change is especially egregious. His new-found climate change skepticism is designed to appease the conservative base, but like Mitt Romney, Pawlenty's wider appeal was supposed to be his reputation as a reformer. Now Romney is a joke, and the man behind "Sam's Club" Republicanism is probably headed down the same path.
• The 2010 elections are a year away but I still see this situation where anti-incumbent sentiment runs high yet the opposition party remains deeply unpopular to be unique in midterm elections. Throw the lack of open congressional seats into the mix and it isn't clear how the GOP picks up more than a handful of seats.
• Remainders: The Senate blocks James Inhofe's Terrorism Cowardice amendment; Glenn Beck uses the power of analogy to argue against health-care reform; at some point in the past 20 years, conservative talking points eliminated hunger in America; Hoffmania is back in NY-23; and doesn't American journalism have enough problems without having to defend their decision to run columns from former Bush aides?

--Mori Dinauer

At 10.2 percent, unemployment is now at its highest level since 1983. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though we are constantly being told that the worst recession since the Great Depression has officially ended. Yet instead of trying to revive the productive economy, most of the Obama administration’s recovery efforts still remain focused on cardio-shock treatment for Wall Street. The president still seems curiously hamstrung by his Herbert Hoover-like devotion to fiscal rectitude: he wants to spend but not add “one dime to the deficit,” as he announced at his congressional address on health care in September. He does this even though deficits are a natural consequence of slowing economic growth, falling tax revenues, and higher social welfare payments.

To all of the “Chicken Littles” (including the president), who fret about “excessive” government spending, we would simply point out that it is far better to deploy government spending in a way that reduces unemployment instead of settling for having it rise as a consequence of this spending.

We therefore suggest a new approach: Government as Employer of Last Resort (ELR). The U.S. government can proceed directly to zero unemployment by hiring all of the labor that cannot find private sector employment. Furthermore, by fixing the wage paid under this ELR program at a level that does not disrupt existing labor markets, i.e., a wage level close to the existing minimum wage, substantive price stability can be expected. A sizable benefits package should be provided, including vacation and sick leave, contributions to Social Security and, most important, health care benefits, providing scope for a bottom-up reform of the current patchwork health-care system.

More about the ELR program after the jump.

--Marshall Auerback

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

Government as ELR would not be introducing another element of intrusive bureaucracy into our economy, but simply better utilizing the existing stock of unemployed, who are now dependent on the public purse -- especially the chronically long-term unemployed. The current system we have relies on unemployed labor and excess capacity to try to dampen wage and price increases; however, it pays unemployed labor for not working and allows that labor to depreciate and develop behaviors that act as barriers to future private-sector employment. Social spending on the unemployed prevents aggregate demand from collapsing into a depression-like state, but little is done to enhance future growth and demand, which can be done via the ELR by providing the currently unemployed with jobs, greater education, and higher skill levels.

The ELR program would allow for the elimination of many existing government welfare payments for anyone not specifically targeted for exemption. It would also command greater political legitimacy, as society places a high value on work as the means through which individuals earn a livelihood. Labor would welcome the safety net of a guaranteed job, and business would recognize the benefit of a pool of available labor it could draw from at some spread to the government wage paid to ELR employees. Additionally, the guaranteed public service job would be a countercyclical influence, automatically increasing government employment and spending as jobs were lost in the private sector, and decreasing government jobs and spending as the private sector expanded. It would therefore remain a permanent feature of our economy. In effect, it would act as a buffer stock to put a floor under unemployment. The program helps maintain price stability whereby government offers a fixed wage that does not “outbid” the private sector, but simply creates a stabilizing floor and thereby prevents deflation.

A more or less “free market” system does not (and, perhaps, cannot) continuously generate true full employment. And no civilized nation should allow a large portion of its population to go without adequate food, clothing and shelter. One of the best features of the ELR program is that it creates a stock of employed people, rather than a buffered stock of unemployed, where social capital depletes rapidly, and several long-term social pathologies develop.

The way we’re approaching our labor force now isn’t working. It’s time to try something that can put as many Americans as possible into productive employment.

This week's TTR brings some surprising data about faith-based programs, some unpleasant facts about economic mobility and how to improve it, a simple solution to the problems of youth unemployment and poverty, and the challenges of getting an international clean energy agreement off the ground.

• Faith-Based Favor. New Pew Research Center data shows continued support for faith-based programs, with nearly 70 percent of Americans in favor of allowing churches and other religious organizations to apply for government dollars when providing social services. That's slightly down from 2001 -- when President Bush introduced his faith-based initiative -- but surprisingly, Democrats are now more supportive than Republicans: 77 percent to 66 percent. The survey notes that concerns remain about church-state relations, with three-quarters opposing government-funded organizations hiring only people with those specific beliefs. Additionally, not all religions received consistent support: more than half of respondents are against allowing Muslim mosques to apply for funds. -- MH
• Halting the Economic Backsliding. The Pew Economic Mobility Project has unveiled an ambitious road map to restore American prosperity, ranging from comprehensive investment and savings tutorials for underprivileged parents and students to early-life investment accounts automatically assigned to children. Today, 42 percent of Americans born into the bottom of the economic ladder remain there, a figure that exceeds many industrial nations by a factor of two. Women continue to lag behind men in upward mobility, while African Americans are more likely to fall from the middle class than whites. When almost 50 percent of black children born to middle class parents end up in lower income brackets compared to only 16 percent of white children, new approaches are necessary. -- MZ
• National Service to Combat the Recession. The Center for American Progress proposes a simple policy solution for two casualties of the Great Recession: unemployed youth and the growing number of Americans in poverty. The answer is to increase funding for national service programs such as AmeriCorps and VISTA so that young people can get job experience while helping those in need. For $1.5 billion, the government could create 100,000 jobs for young people in the next year. Additionally, such an investment in youth unemployment has long-term benefits, preparing both youth and the poor for jobs in a better economy while hastening recovery by increasing aid and employment. -- PL
• Leading the Race to the Bottom. The path to achieving a legally binding energy and emissions agreement in Copenhagen is littered with institutional and domestic roadblocks, reports the World Resources Institute. Several countries, including the United States, are expected to reject international compliance standards. Instead, the U.S. proposal is even less ambitious than the House ACES Bill, explicitly putting domestic law above multilateral enforcement, making international accounting standards and comparisons a waste of time. -- LL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/10/09
11/3/09

Over at DCist, Sommer Mathis gives us the latest from the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, which was asked to consider whether a referendum on gay marriage would violate D.C.'s human-rights law by putting the civil rights of the LGBT community up to a vote. Like the question of whether recognition of gay marriage from other states should be subject to a referendum that the Board considered earlier this year, the answer was a no-brainer:

In an opinion released today, the Board made much the same argument that it did in a previous decision that barred a ballot initiative on the matter of recognizing same-sex marriages that are performed legally in other jurisdictions. In both decisions, the Board held that such initiatives do 'not present a proper subject of initiative because it would authorize discrimination prohibited under the Human Rights Act (“HRA”).'

The HRA of course, is part of the long game that D.C. LGBT rights activists have been playing. The 1970s-era human-rights law contains a provision, inserted by marriage-equality opponent Marion Barry, that the referendum process could never be used to "interfere with basic human and civil rights." Marriage is obviously one of those. At the time, the GLAA, a local LGBT rights group, lobbied hard to ensure that LGBTs would be among the protected groups named in the law -- meaning that when the National Organization for Marriage came to town with Bishop Harry Jackson as their front man, the battle had already mostly been won. That old line about one side playing chess and the other playing checkers? That's what this looks like.

With no referendum, and with a mostly Democratic Congress unlikely to interfere, and the D.C. City Council set to vote on a marriage equality bill in early December, marriage equality in D.C. is looking like more of a sure thing than health-care reform. After all the criticism of the black community we've seen in the past year over marriage equality, a majority black city is about to become among the first to recognize unions between same-sex couples.

-- A. Serwer

I've already written too much about Jim Wallis' apologia for the odious Stupak-Pitts amendment. Suffice it to say that if we were to take Wallis' argument seriously, we wouldn't need health-care reform at all: After all, the current system doesn't literally ban private insurance for people who can't afford it, so access must not be a problem, right? Still, this strawman demands a response:

But some of the most hysterical comments from the Left this week have suggested the problem is that progressive religious groups have been listened to by the Democratic Party; some members of the Left long for the good old days when their party was avowedly secular and properly hostile to religion and all this talk about those annoying moral values voters.

Truly a definitive example of this kind of argument. First of all, the "good old days" when the Democratic Party was "hostile to religion" don't exist. (When was this exactly -- when it was led by the Southern Baptist Bill Clinton? The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter? For the decades in which its most influential member of Congress was the devout Roman Catholic Ted Kennedy? Help me out here.) Secondly, when you invoke "hysterical comments" indicating that people of faith need to be driven from the Democratic Party, you really need to name names and cite examples, or people can safely assume that your examples are either trivial or don't exist at all.

But most important, the debate over Stupak-Pitts isn't about the influence of religion -- it's about people who want to restrict access to abortion, whether motivated by religious or secular reasons. Democratic leaders who tried for a less restrictive amendment were seeking to protect the party's core values of equality for women and reproductive freedom, not trying to drive people of faith out of the party. This conflation of religious belief with reactionary social policies is both false and plays directly into Republican talking points. Just as it was people opposed to a women's right to choose -- not pro-choicers -- who introduced a cultural wedge issue that threatened to derail health-care reform, it's Wallis who wants to make this a debate about the Democratic Party being "avowedly secular."  And while I can understand Wallis' reluctance to defend his position on the merits, that's simply not the issue here.

--Scott Lemieux

President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese ... just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending.

This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many).

Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50 percent higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at or near its current rate and the benefits of that growth trickle down to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, the country would become the largest shopping bazaar in the history of the world. They'll be driving over a billion cars and will be the world's biggest purchasers of household electronics, clothing, appliances, and almost everything else produced on the planet.

So this will mean millions of American export jobs, right? No.

Why that's not the case, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

In fact China is heading in the opposite direction of "rebalancing." Its productive capacity keeps soaring, but Chinese consumers are taking home a shrinking proportion of the total economy. Last year, personal consumption in China amounted to only 35 percent of the Chinese economy; 10 years ago consumption was almost 50 percent. Capital investment, by contrast, rose to 44 percent from 35 percent over the decade.

China's capital spending is on the way to exceeding that of the U.S., but its consumer spending is barely a sixth as large. Chinese companies are plowing their rising profits back into more productive capacity -- additional factories, more equipment, new technologies. China's massive $600 billion stimulus package has been directed at further enlarging China's productive capacity rather than consumption. So where will this productive capacity go if not to Chinese consumers? Net exports to other nations, especially the U.S. and Europe.

Many explanations have been offered for the parsimony of Chinese consumers. Social safety nets are still inadequate, so Chinese families have to cover the costs of health care, education and retirement. Young Chinese men outnumber young Chinese women by a wide margin, so households with sons have to accumulate and save enough assets to compete in the marriage market. Chinese society is aging quickly because the government has kept a tight lid on population growth for three decades, with the result that households are supporting lots of elderly dependents.

But the larger explanation for Chinese frugality is that the nation is oriented to production, not consumption. China wants to become the world's preeminent producer nation. It also wants to take the lead in the production of advanced technologies. The U.S. would like to retain the lead, but our economy is oriented to consumption rather than production.

Deep down inside the cerebral cortex of our national consciousness we assume that the basic purpose of an economy is to provide more opportunities to consume. We grudgingly support government efforts to rebuild our infrastructure. We want our companies to invest in new equipment and technologies but also want them to pay generous dividends. We approve of government investments in basic research and development, but mainly for the purpose of making the nation more secure through advanced military technologies. (We regard spillovers to the private sector as incidental.)

China's industrial and technological policy is unapologetically direct. It especially wants America's know-how, and the best way to capture know-how is to get it firsthand. So China continues to condition many sales by U.S. and foreign companies on production in China—often in joint ventures with Chinese companies.

American firms are now helping China build a "smart" infrastructure, tackle pollution with clean technologies, develop a new generation of photovoltaics and wind turbines, find new applications for nanotechnologies, and build commercial jets and jet engines. GM recently announced it was planning to make a new subcompact in China designed and developed primarily by the Pan-Asia Technical Automotive Center, a joint venture between GM and SAIC Motor in Shanghai. General Electric is producing wind turbine components in China. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar announced it will be moving its solar panel production to China.

The Chinese government also wants to create more jobs in China, and it will continue to rely on exports. Each year, tens of millions of poor Chinese pour into large cities from the countryside in pursuit of better-paying work. If they don't find it, China risks riots and other upheaval. Massive disorder is one of the greatest risks facing China's governing elite. That elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.

To this extent, China's export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order. Despite the Obama administration's entreaties, China will continue to peg the yuan to the dollar—when the dollar drops, selling yuan in the foreign-exchange market and adding to its pile of foreign assets in order to maintain the yuan's fixed relation to the dollar. This is costly to China, of course, but for the purposes of industrial and social policy, China figures the cost is worth it.

The dirty little secret on both sides of the Pacific is that both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment.

Both societies are threatened by the disconnect between production and consumption. In China, the threat is civil unrest. In the U.S., it's a prolonged jobs and earnings recession that, when combined with widening inequality, could create political backlash.

Matthew Yglesias on what lowered expectations mean for climate change:

Barack Obama's concession on Sunday that the upcoming Copenhagen meeting on climate change will not result in a comprehensive climate deal is little more than an official acknowledgment of what everyone already suspected. Simply put, there's no time. The combination of the economic crisis, which sucked up an enormous amount of time at previous multilateral meetings and the exceedingly slow pace with which the U.S. Congress has moved to address health care made it, in practice, impossible to imagine an agreement emerging. Indeed, though the downgrading of Copenhagen makes for a bad headline, it counts as good news.

This is born out by the fact that neither environmental groups nor the Danish government is upset. Indeed, they'd been trying to accomplish precisely this lowering of expectations for a couple of months. The Danes would like, in essence, to host a conference that counts as a success. And greens recognize that high expectations would be counterproductive. The risk was that a "failed conference" would set off a downward spiral that derailed efforts to halt climate catastrophe. In the United States, the collapse of talks aimed at an international agreement would be yet another excuse for risk-averse senators to avoid voting for a tough climate bill. In the developing world, U.S. inaction would become another reason to avoid emissions reductions. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the next thing you know, the planet is boiling.

KEEP READING ...

Eric Kleefield looks at the results of a new Marist poll showing a narrow majority of New Yorkers like the idea of trying the alleged 9/11 plotters in the city:

"Do you think it is a good idea or a bad idea to have this trial located in New York City?" the poll asked. The answer is 45% good idea, 41% bad idea, with a ±4% margin of error.

Also, New Yorkers don't seem to be quite as frightened as the GOP about potential security problems:

One question does receive wider agreement, though: Whether New York City will be able to handle the potential security risks. Here 67% say they are confident, to 22% who are not confident.

Last night, Rep. John Shadegg asked Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supports trying the 9/11 suspects in New York, "How are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist?" You might have thought that Republicans asking the old Mike Dukakis question had gone out of style, but it clearly hasn't.

It's not like that can't be flipped around though. I wonder how opponents of trying terrorists in civilian court would react to being asked how they'd feel if their children were imprisoned without trial for years and tortured on suspicion of being a bad guy. Of course, some people are fine with unconstitutional government behavior as long as they're not on the receiving end. True tyranny is raising the top marginal tax rate to 39.2 percent.

-- A. Serwer

Alexandra Gutierrez reviews Michael Bérubé's new book The Left at War:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The Centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not yet over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

KEEP READING ...

I've always had a bit of soft spot for Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah, and he seems to be maintaining his, hm, folksy charm? Look for more China blogging here later today ...

-- Tim Fernholz

The Washington Times Wes Pruden on President Barack Obama (via Thinkprogress):

It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Kathleen Parker said pretty much the same thing during the election last year. I've already expressed my feelings on people who believe being "American" is a genetic exclusivity that belongs solely to whites, and I won't repeat those arguments here. I'll just note that it's still OK in 2009 to make the argument that white people are the only "true Americans" in major newspapers, even with a black man in the White House. No, especially because there's a black man in the White House. For some reason, suggesting that black people as a whole aren't really "American" is justified because it's seen as a personal attack on the president, rather than what it really is: soft white nationalism.

But hey, these days, you can drop n-bombs like loose change or refuse to marry interracial couples "for the children" and not be a racist. There are no racists in America, except for people who think that Americans of color should be entitled to the same rights as those with the white skin "blood impulse" of "real Americans."

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday on MSNBC, Sen. John Cornyn suggested that it would be safer to try 9/11 suspects in military commissions because -- I'm paraphrasing here -- you wouldn't have to worry about them "being released." He then added, without irony, that military commissions could "protect the rights of terrorists." Orwell lives: Under what circumstance is a procedurally assured conviction protecting the rights of the accused?

Look, Khalid Sheik Mohammed has confessed -- I have little doubt that he'll be convicted. The Obama administration wouldn't be bringing him to trial in civilian court if they thought there was a chance of his being let go. The same legal rationale that could have been used to hold him indefinitely will be used to hold him in case of an acquittal. As I reported a few months ago, because the U.S.has declared war against al-Qaeda -- and KSM is quite obviously a member of al-Qaeda -- they can claim legal authority to detain him even post-acquittal, until the end of hostilities, under the authority granted by the Authorization to Use Military Force. The Bush administration considered doing this briefly with Osama bin Laden's limo driver, Salim Hamdan; but because it makes a mockery of the American system of justice, they decided against it. But the options don't actually end there.

"They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain [KSM], one of which is the AUMF, because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language -- the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants and are detainable under the AUMF," explains Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Center for American Progress. "Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them."

The attorney general could detain him as an "international terrorist" indefinitely, in renewable six-month periods, based on a provision in the PATRIOT Act. And if things really get desperate, they could detain him as someone who is in the United States illegally, pending deportation. Since no country is going to take a mass murdering terrorist, that detention will essentially be indefinite.

On the prospect of KSM being released, Gude shrugs, "It isn't even in the realm of possibility."

An acquittal would be a political disaster for the administration -- but there's really no way that KSM is getting away, because the government has at least three different ways to detain him indefinitely post-acquittal. It doesn't matter under what venue he's tried. That may make some of us feel safer, but it's also part of the reason why the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz argues that U.S. detention policy is "essentially lawless."

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman explains that Obama's rhetorical skills do not make him omnipotent:

"We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose," said Mario Cuomo, then-governor of New York, in a 1985 speech. "And when we govern -- as distinguished from when we campaign -- we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality."

The man then hailed as the Democratic Party's greatest orator knew what he was talking about. And there is no doubt that the party's current lead orator, Barack Obama, has understood this truth all along. But those swept up in the oratory still seem to need occasional reminding of this reality. As health-care reform teeters between success and failure, the economy limps along, and more and more Americans wonder what we're doing in Afghanistan, the prose of governing is more than a little unsettling for some.

KEEP READING ...

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that [Majority Leader] Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

"There's a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion" on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. "I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They're speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass."

Given how easy it is to recognize McConnell's ploy, you'd think more moderates would see through it. Especially, in Lincoln's case, because public opinion remains split in Arkansas:

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln's home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas's Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

"It's hard to draw firm conclusions," said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. "People are dissatisfied, but they haven't signed on with an alternative." Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be "right with her constituents -- convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it's this."

I would interpret those poll numbers a bit differently than Parry: The state is split because no one is offering any real leadership on the issue -- all of the Arkansas Democrats, who are mentioned in this profile, have been publicly waffling about health-care reform for months, and dropping lines like Lincoln's factually incorrect comments on the public option. Of course the public is unconvinced that this is a good alternative -- no one is explaining to them what health-care reform means. If Lincoln were to actually take a stand, she could move public opinion. But instead she'll waver and stumble, and her approval will drop, because voters don't generally want senators who waver and stumble. And instead of listening to her putative friends in the Democratic Party, she's going to trust McConnell's analysis right up until the GOP candidate beats her next year.

-- Tim Fernholz

• In light of the latest conservative freakout over diplomatic protocol and following the rule of law, here's a handy fill-in-the-blanks statement you can use for the next one: "I am shocked and appalled that this president would take the unprecedented step of _____ before ______ on his overseas trip to _____. This fits into a familiar pattern of the Obama administration, most recently seen at home in his decision to ______, which emboldens our enemies and further pushes America into a _____ state that would have been unrecognizable just ______ months ago."
• I've said it before and I'll say it again: no one ever won elected office running on "first principles," but this is the concept behind the latest Newt Gingrich-Michael Steele joint venture to take back Congress. I'm sure voters will be hotly discussing Burke and Disraeli and the media will be be debating the importance of virtue and prudence while high-profile conservative-moderate civil wars engulf the GOP in Florida and California, and tea party protesters ponder the value of burning members of Congress in effigy. Welcome to 2010.
• Matt Yglesias makes a good point on the importance of high per-capita income toward being a great power in the world, but it's more than PPP. After all, Luxembourg is in the top three of the lists he links to, but certainly we don't consider it to be a great power and that's because of population. It's the fact that the United States has a relatively wealthy population AND 300 million people AND the ability to effectively mobilize its people and resources that makes it the preeminent power in the world. China only has two of those three characteristics, and could end up losing the third if the CCP loses its grip on power.
• Weekend Remainders: It appears that Bart Stupak is that rare combination of incompetent legislator and moral monster that is the pride of the Democratic caucus; Republicans are shocked that there's a backlash against their vote against legislation that would protect rape victims; the former mayor of New York lost his mind on 9/11, and it never came back; the White House calls out the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; in addition to providing abortions until recently, the RNC health plan also provides end-of-life (A.K.A. "death panels") counseling; and what is it with aging Washington columnists pining for George W. Bush's "leadership" style?

--Mori Dinauer

Window Media, the nation's largest owner of gay newspapers, shut its doors today bringing D.C.'s local gay newspaper The Washington Blade as well as four others down with it.

The Washington Blade, you could say, was the New York Times of LGBT news. It was the second-largest gay newspaper by circulation (beside Gay City News) and covered national issues as well as local D.C. politics. It was widely recognized for its reporting on the AIDS crisis and the marriage fight and has served as a bulletin board for local events, including political rallies. Most obviously, gay D.C. residents will be less informed about issues that affect them without the Blade -- and less likely to be drawn to activism, which is no small blow for groups that are already underrepresented in politics anyway.

I regularly wrote for the New York Blade, its sister publication, until it shuttered its operations in July. Whenever I had an idea I thought would be too "gay" for mainstream media, or when I wanted to write about a certain politician's gay-rights record, I went to the NY Blade.

Much has been made of local city papers like the Rocky Mountain News closing their doors, but if anything, the disappearance of publications that cater to minorities -- the "ethnic" or "minority" media -- is even more troubling. Papers like the Blade not only provide a voice to dispossessed groups, they're how a community talks to itself – and sounds the alarm when there's a threat. Next time a D.C. police officer roughs up and arrests someone gay while calling him a "faggot," I question whether the Washington Post will immediately run to the scene. Who will?

--Gabriel Arana

Via Mike Crowley, I see that gossip columnist Lloyd Grove has a piece detailing all of the people that Barack Obama has supposedly "thrown under the bus" over the last year or so, with Grove implying that most of these people deserved better (Greg Craig, for one, did) and that this dastardly president of ours will do anything to further his ambitions. Except that the phrase he uses actually implies taking advantage of someone who is blameless. But why is Obama is responsible for Steve Rattner's pay-to-play scandal, the tax problems of his various withdrawn nominees, James Johnson's sweetheart mortgage deal, the federal investigation of Bill Richardson's campaign finances, Creigh Deeds' crappy gubernatorial campaign, Rick Wagoner running GM into the ground, Van Jones' decision to sign a Truther petition or David Paterson's inept job as governor?

Since Grove can't seem to think clearly, let me help: There is a difference between throwing someone under the bus -- letting them take the hit for a mistake you were complicit in, or using their loss to advance your own ambitions -- and declining to expend political capital defending someone who has made their own mistakes. In almost all of these cases, Obama and his staff declined to waste time fighting on behalf of people who made mistakes before they even worked with or for him. Loyalty is important, of course, but it can be pernicious, as we saw in the Bush administration. Obama, like all politicians, has been known to be politically expedient, and he ought to be reprimanded when he does so in violation of his stated principles. But Grove's decision to attribute so many people's mistakes to Obama is inexplicable.Then again, Grove's job is to gin up scandals.

-- Tim Fernholz

It's not that surprising, though. Castle was/is considered a very strong contender for the vice president's old Senate seat, but he's only popular in Delaware so long as he is a moderate Republican. Now that he's joined the rest of the House Republicans in opposing President Obama's agenda, his moderation has to be called into question. At some point, the Republican leadership is going to have to ask themselves what forcing their entire caucus to vote against each major Obama agenda item is getting them. Voters are already pretty clear that Republicans oppose the Democrats' vision, but when GOP leaders turn every vote into a litmus test for the moderate members of their caucus, it's going to have electoral results that end with fewer Republicans in office. Those votes don't really help Castle on the right, either -- the usual crowd is already lambasting Castle for his moderate reputation, and, of course, there is a conservative primary challenger.

It should go without saying, but the usual poll caveats apply for an election set to take place a year from now.

-- Tim Fernholz