The Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, now in a military detention center charged with having leaked classified documents related to the Iraq War, once explained why he was contemplating his deed. (He is additionally suspected of having leaked the 390,000 documents made public by the whistleblowing solicitor WikiLeaks, but he has not been charged with this.) Manning was not yet in prison or in the media spotlight. He was artlessly and recklessly chatting online to a blogger, Adrian Lamo, who eventually turned him in. Lamo wanted to know why Manning didn't cash in by giving the documents to a foreign power, such as China or Russia. Because "it belongs in the public domain," Manning replied. "Information should be free...because another state would just take advantage of the information...try and get some edge.... It should be a public good."
Manning's breaking point had come when he witnessed the arrest by the Iraqi police of fifteen people for printing "anti-Iraqi literature." He looked the documents over and found them to consist merely of "a scholarly critique" of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He reported the finding to his American superior, who dismissed it and told him to busy himself looking for more people to detain.
As an intelligence officer with access to secret reports, Manning knew well what happened to detainees in Iraqi custody. They were commonly tortured. A typical example of a report by an American soldier reads:
{AT 191400C OCT___IN___(ZONE___) IVO___NPTT___THAT-___BDE SPTT-___BDE SPTT CONDUCTED A ROUTINE INSPECTION OF THE -___ [WOLF] BDE DETENTION FACILITY AND IDENTIFIED ONE PROBABLE CASE OF DETAINEE ABUSE. THE ALLEGED BEATING TOOK PLACE UNDER INTERROGATION AT THE--___HQ ON THE EVENING OF ___OCT___. THE DETAINEE WAS BLINDFOLDED AND IS UNABLE TO IDENTIFY THE OFFENDERS. THE DETAINEE CLAIMED HE WAS BEATEN ABOUT THE FEET AND LEGS WITH A BLUNT OBJECT, AND PUNCHED IN THE FACE AND___. HE CLAIMED THAT ELECTRICITY WAS USED ON HIS FEET AND GENITALS, AND HE WAS ALSO [SODOMIZED] WITH A WATER BOTTLE. --___PERSONNEL CLAIMED IT WAS CAUSED BY THE DETAINEE FALLING FROM HIS MOTORCYCLE WHILE HE WAS BEING CHASED BY THE___. THE DETAINEE DISPLAYED GREAT DIFFICULTY WALKING WITH BRUISING AND SWELLING ON THE SOLES OF BOTH FEET. THE DETAINEE HAD LOCALIZED CUTS AND BRUISING ON BOTH LEGS (PRIMARILY THE LEFT), THE LEFT ARM, AND THE LEFT CHIN. THERE WERE NO INJURIES VISIBLE ON THE DETAINEE E___HANDS, UPPER ARMS, TORSO, UPPER LEGS, OR BUTTOCKS. HIS CLOTHING WAS NOT RIPPED OR DAMAGED, BUT DID DISPLAY BLOOD STAINS.
No intervention was attempted by the United States in such cases. The military's Fragmentary Order 242, known as FRAGO 242, dictated that if coalition forces were not involved, no further action was to be taken: "only an initial report will be made.... No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ." FRAGO 242 is repeatedly cited by military reporters as the reason for doing nothing.
Sometimes, indeed, American or other coalition soldiers threatened Iraqi prisoners with the torture or execution that would befall them if they were turned over to their Iraqi compatriots. One unit created in these years was the Iraqi Wolf Brigade, an elite outfit set up to terrorize insurgents, perhaps in imitation of the death squads that had operated with US connivance in El Salvador in the 1980s. One report describes a threat by an American to turn an Iraqi prisoner over to the battalion:
DURING THE INTERROGATION PROCESS THE ___ THREATENED THE SUBJECT DETAINEE THAT HE WOULD NEVER SEE HIS FAMILY AGAIN AND WOULD BE SENT TO THE WOLF BATTALION WHERE HE WOULD BE SUBJECT TO ALL THE PAIN AND AGONY THAT THE WOLF BATTALION IS KNOWN TO EXACT UPON ITS DETAINEES [December 14, 2005].
At this time in Iraq, executed victims were being found in the streets with electric-drill holes in their bodies.
American forces were thus routinely handing over Iraqi suspects to Iraqi forces who routinely tortured them, and then nothing further was done. This proceeding did not constitute abuse of some other, better system that provided the rule; it was the system—a torture system. Elsewhere in the "war on terror," "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries to be tortured—required long flights on CIA Gulfstream jets. In Iraq it was a matter of walking across the street. In the days leading up to the war, of course, the United States frequently cited the Saddam Hussein regime's practice of torture as a reason for invading. Now America's own client regime was engaging in widespread torture.
Faced with this particular and general knowledge, Manning felt "helpless," he told Lamo. "That was a point where I was...actively involved in something that I was completely against." In sum, Manning found himself in the classic, excruciating dilemma of the decent person enmeshed in an abhorrent system, not as a victim but as a perpetrator. By following the rules, he would be an accomplice of torture. Only by breaking them could he extricate himself.
Julian Assange, the nomadic cyber rebel who leads WikiLeaks, was not himself a cog in the machine, but he was of like mind with Manning in regard to individual responsibility. Before he got into the business of disclosing the dirty secrets of governments and corporations, he reflected in an essay, "Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice," adding, "Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility." In his own way, he, too, acted. In July WikiLeaks released more than 70,000 secret documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan, and then came the documentary tsunami from Iraq, which may have, in Assange's words, "constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record."
Assange is not in prison—on the contrary, this tall, white-haired, disciplined, well-spoken and somehow unearthly information guerrilla shows up regularly on television, where he performs with a kind of high-minded, cool scrappiness. But his organization has been cloudily but menacingly designated a "threat to the U.S. Army" in a classified Army document (also published by WikiLeaks), and he is a man on the run, moving from nation to nation in search of safety from possible legal jeopardy. (Assange is under investigation for sexual misconduct in Sweden but has denied all accusations.)
Among the flood of Afghan war documents there happens to be a report on one more instance of a man who, finding himself threatened with participation in the evil-doing of a malignant system, opted to withdraw. In Balkh province, a little more than a year ago, the report disclosed, Afghan police officers were beating and otherwise abusing civilians for their lack of cooperation. The police commander then sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. When a civilian protested, the report stated, "The district commander ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan civilian]. The bodyguard refused, at which time the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of the AC." At the time these documents came out, the official reaction to them, echoed widely in the media, was that they disclosed "nothing new." But let us pause to absorb this story. A police officer, unwilling, at the risk of his own life, to be a murderer, is himself murdered by his superior. He gives his life to spare the other person, possibly a stranger. It is the highest sacrifice that can be made.
The man's identity is unrecorded. His story is met with a yawn. But perhaps one day, when there is peace in Afghanistan, a monument will be erected in his honor there and schoolchildren will be taught his name. Perhaps here in the United States, when the country has found its moral bearings again, there will be recognition of the integrity and bravery of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. For now, the war- and torture-system rolls on, and it's all found to be "nothing new."
RT On Air
Saturday, 13 November 2010
The Money & Media Election Complex
Like the wizard telling the people of Oz to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama's complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races across the country with a flood of money—hundreds of millions of dollars—from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives into Senate and House races. "Obama looks weirdly disconnected—and slightly obsessive—when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me," Rove mused. "The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign's final four weeks on this sideshow."
The "sideshow" from which Rove sought to distract attention was, in fact, the most important story of the most expensive midterm election in American history: the radical transformation of our politics by a money-and-media election complex that is now more definitional than any candidate or party—and that poses every bit as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us a half-century ago. This is not the next chapter in the old money-and-politics debate. This is the redefinition of politics by a pair of new and equally important factors—the freeing of corporations to spend any amount on electioneering and the collapse of substantive print and broadcast reporting on campaigns. In combination they have created a "new normal," in which consultants dealing in dollar amounts unprecedented in American history use "independent" expenditures to tip the balance of elections in favor of their clients. Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process and abetted by commercial broadcasters that this year pocketed $3 billion in political ad revenues, the money-and-media election complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010.
Of fifty-three competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with "independent" expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats—often by more than $1 million per district, according to Public Citizen—the Republicans won fifty-one. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove's American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns until the outside money flowed in, the advantage. The money is powerful, of course, but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and in many cases disappearance, of independent and skeptical journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided. Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who, imperfectly but seriously, pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by commercials—millions of them, most negative. The narrative for the most part still comes from broadcast and cable TV stations, as it has for some time, but it is now produced and paid for by economic elites that seek to define not just the results of an election but the scope and character of government itself. To neglect the money-and-media election complex or, worse yet, to imagine that progressive forces can compete within it will make the 2012 election season look like 2010 on steroids. Determined and dramatic responses are the only options if we hope to maintain anything more than the remnants of a functioning democracy.
The immediate cause of the crisis was the Supreme Court's January 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which wiped away a century of campaign finance regulations designed to prevent corporations and business alliances from using their immense resources to buy the results that best serve their interests. There was bipartisan shock at the ruling, with protest across the spectrum. National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz declared that the freeing of corporations to tap general treasury funds would allow them to spend so freely that they could "effectively own our democracy."
The critique was right, but even serious analysts tended to underestimate the speed with which corporate interests and wealthy conservatives would take advantage of the severe damage done to campaign finance laws. The corporate intervention was unapologetic. "The big three stepping into the batter's box are the financial services industry, the energy industry and the health insurance industry," chirped veteran GOP operative Scott Reed, whose Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity spent millions, perhaps tens of millions, this fall on thousands of commercials attacking Democratic lawmakers in battleground states all over the country. Reed's operation was identified by the Media Matters Action Network as a "small fry" player among the more than sixty nonparty groups that by late October had paid for nearly 150,000 commercials and an untold number of direct-mail attacks in a frenzy of spending that would make the 2010 cycle (price tag: $4 billion and counting) more expensive than either the 2006 midterms or the 2004 presidential race.
To be sure, Democrats tried to play the game and raise corporate money too, but the balance was off from the start; by one measure, that of the Center for Media and Democracy, "spending by outside interest groups [was] up at least 500 percent since the last midterm election, with pro-Republican groups outspending those favoring Democrats by seven-to-one."
* * *
To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought "those who own the country ought to govern it." The battle to establish a credible system of "one person, one vote" instead of "one dollar, one vote" has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both," observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an "enthusiasm gap." No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that "we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing," the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest.
The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government—Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware's GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O'Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. "It's a bigger prize in 2012, and that's changing the White House," says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. "We've planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012."
* * *
But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.
Yet commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses for their scarce channels at no charge from the government under the condition that they serve the public interest. By any account, the most important role of our media is to make the electoral system serve the voters, who, as surveys continue to demonstrate, rely on local TV as their main source for news. However, local TV covers far less than it did two or three decades ago; according to the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, a thirty-minute newscast at election time has more political advertising than campaign news. Even when politics does get covered, the focus, increasingly, is on "analyzing" ads. And the cumulative effect of endless advertising overwhelms what little remains of independent on-air coverage. What incentive do commercial stations have to cover politics when they can force candidates and players to pay for it? Nice work if you can get it.
This contradiction is magnified by the aforementioned decline of political journalism across all media. If the United States had a vibrant and credible news media, the problem of the money-and-media election complex would be less pressing, as citizens could use news coverage and dismiss much of the brazen deception of ads. Instead, our news media, in decline for decades, is in free fall [see Nichols and McChesney, "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April 6, 2009]. The shuttering of dozens of papers and the wholesale layoff of tens of thousands of journalists and support staffers, the shuttering of Washington and statehouse bureaus and the shift of radio and cable TV from traditional campaign coverage to one-sided talk formats that often reinforce rather than sort through the spin have allowed money to speak more loudly than ever before. New-media initiatives are encouraging, but they have not begun to fill the void, in large part because few have developed business models that can pay for serious independent journalism.
The changes taking place in how campaigns are paid for and covered provides the most meaningful explanation for otherwise incomprehensible shifts in our politics. We know and respect the multitude of theories being advanced for why 2010 went so horribly awry for Democrats and particularly for progressives, but we would argue that the key factor is the emergence of the money-and-media election complex. Recognizing how this system works is necessary if we are to recognize the absurdity of the suggestion—advanced by former Clinton administration aide and veteran Democratic fundraiser Harold Ickes, among others in the consultocracy—that Democrats can somehow buy their way back into the game by getting progressive donors to give as generously as Rove's billionaires and the wealthiest multinationals. Only an insider with no sense of history could willingly embrace this system. And if Democrats somehow "succeed" in the money-and-media election complex, it will be at the price of the party's soul and of any prospect that progressive ideas will get a hearing.
Democrats in anything more than name only cannot win the money race. As Michael Vachon, an adviser to George Soros, correctly notes with regard to the consultants who organize "independent" expenditures on behalf of Republicans (and perhaps of corporate-friendly Democrats), "Their resources will always be too great because the funds come from those who are acting in their economic self-interest." Fundamental reform is going to be necessary. And it will not be easy, as we are talking about changing our entire political process in a way that frightens economic elites. Opposition from entrenched, procorporate Republicans will be intense, as evidence suggests that their corrupt and unpopular policies can prevail at the polls only with the sort of depressed and selective turnout and lack of critical scrutiny that the money-and-media system encourages. How ironic that, just as demographic trends are moving in a decidedly progressive direction—as minorities begin to form majorities in our states, and as young people move increasingly to the left on social and economic issues—the electoral system is becoming a bastion of reaction.
Rove, Reed and their allies—including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner—would have us believe that more spending is good and that ads can be educational. This is an extension of the "money is speech" argument that has underpinned a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and culminating in Citizens United, that initially undermined but have by now made a mockery of campaign finance reform. It's an absurd construct. But it is being reinforced by consultants—veteran Democrats as well as Republicans—and TV executives who are cogs in a permanent campaign apparatus.
The counsel of the self-interested "players" is always the same: raise money, more money and more money still—and don't do or say anything that makes it harder to raise money. This thinking has bled into what is left of our journalism, such that political reporters today spend more time covering the money that candidates, parties and interest groups raise and spend than examining their records and intentions. Whereas journalists once wrote stories about issues, and candidates cut commercials in response to them, now some journalists go through entire campaigns doing little more than fact-checking commercials. On many days, reviews of ads are all that appear in print and broadcast reports. And what do new-media outlets bring to the table? An opportunity to watch ads on YouTube!
As ads become the primary source of political information, we create a politics based on lies or, at best, decontextualized quarter-truths. Campaign ads are unregulated for truthfulness, unlike commercial advertising. Three decades ago Ogilvy and Mather executive Robert Spero determined that if political ads had to meet the same Federal Trade Commission criteria as commercial ads, all of them would be rejected as fraudulent. The regulation of commercial ads may be more lax today, but we doubt that any study of political ads in 2010 would regard them more favorably than Spero did.
The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused. Instead, Johnson let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did debate in a handful of forums available for broadcast by the state's TV stations, many stations avoided airing them in prime time. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a website. "As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations," griped Garvey. "I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest."
That should be the starting point of any response to the money-and-media election complex. We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it's important to fight for reforms). It's a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission have a duty to figure out exactly how much was spent, by whom and to what end. That examination should start with dollar amounts, but it shouldn't stop there. It should explore the issue of whether TV stations that made a fortune running campaign ads met even the most basic public-interest requirements of companies that obtain broadcast licenses. How much campaign journalism have these stations been doing, compared with a generation ago? How many debates are they airing in prime time? FCC member Michael Copps understands the crisis and intends to press ahead this fall with demands for stronger public-interest requirements for broadcasters. Copps is no fool; he knows this is the hardest of all fights. That's why he will need support from Congress as well as citizens.
House and Senate committees should hold hearings about the money-and-media election complex. How about calling Representative Pete DeFazio to testify? The Oregon maverick was one of many Democratic incumbents facing marginal challengers who suddenly found himself battered by attack ads paid for by a shadowy group no one had heard of. DeFazio pushed back, taking a camera crew to the Capitol Hill condo from which the group operated and exposing the source as a single New York–based hedge fund gazillionaire who was apparently angered by the Congressman's ardent advocacy for holding Wall Street speculators to account. That's the stuff of a good hearing. But don't stop with DeFazio; call the hedge fund manager who went after him. Then call Karl Rove. The 111th Congress has been lame when it comes to oversight; it should finish with a bang. And state legislative committees around the country should do the same.
Gathering the data and grilling the guilty players will make the case for fundamental reform, which must come at multiple levels. The FCC could require stations to grant equal advertising time to any candidate who is attacked in an ad paid for by corporations, with the free response ad to immediately follow the hit job. The FCC should consider requiring free TV ads for every candidate on the ballot if any candidate buys his or her own spots. This would allow wealthy candidates access but would prevent them from shouting everyone else down. Let the stations jack up rates to cover all the time, if they want. We suspect the appeal of TV ads will decline if the result is simply to open an equal debate rather than allow one side to dominate. And of course there is the long-overdue matter of providing free airtime to candidates and requiring debates to be broadcast.
Radical ideas? Hardly. Much of what we're talking about was outlined in the original version of the McCain-Feingold bill of the 1990s and in other proposals advanced over the years. It's time to renew them. At the same time, we need a public policy commitment to the rejuvenation of news media. A supercharged public and community broadcast system would be a good start. It's no accident that the corporate right is taking dead aim at public broadcasting, as it remains the one institutional force not under its direct control.
* * *
Ultimately, however, Americans have to get serious about addressing the Citizens United ruling. We have no problem with legislative remedies, especially if they embody proposals like those advanced by the Sunlight Foundation to establish online transparency at every level of influence, from independent expenditures to lobbying to bundled campaign contributions. We agree with Lisa Gilbert of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who says Representative Grayson has proposed "pieces of good policy" with his Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, which would impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns; his Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, which would require public companies to report what they spend to influence opinion on any matter other than the promotion of their goods and services; and his End Political Kickbacks Act, which would restrict contributions by government contractors. And we have no doubt that Grayson's advocacy for these reforms helps explain why "independent" groups spent more than $1.2 million on attack ads targeting him.
However, we don't see any way to avoid the requirement of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Representative Donna Edwards has proposed a sound one, backed by the Free Speech for People campaign. Another approach, proposed by Move to Amend, would begin the process at the state level, where grassroots activists may have more of an opening to demand that legislatures call for an amendment. It's not necessary to choose a specific strategy at this point, but we do have to recognize that the money-and-media election complex defined the 2010 election, and that its reach is extending to 2012. Taking it on will require boldness, creativity and determination. We will be told it is impossible to beat, but we're with Lisa Graves, the former Justice Department lawyer who as executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy has become a leader in the fight for a constitutional amendment. She says, "If we don't seize it as an opportunity because it's so discouraging, they win."
Even if only out of self-interest, this is what Obama and his Democratic allies should have been talking about during the 2010 campaign and what they should be shouting about now—not with vague rumblings about contributions from foreign corporations but with shout-it-from-the-rooftops populist rage at a threat to democracy every bit as serious as the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower identified. His charge to Americans with regard to the machinery of military dominance—"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes"—translates with chilling precision to the new media and money machinery of political dominance.
Scholars of American history have acknowledged for a long time that the United States is far from a true democracy, or even an especially effective representative democracy. Most political decisions are made with precious little input by average citizens. What the government does with wealthy individuals and powerful corporate interests is largely removed from popular control. This is part of the reason voter turnout has for so long been among the lowest in the world. But two things give us confidence in our system. First, we have core civil liberties, especially the right to freedom of speech. And second, we have elections, as flawed as they may be, and that gives the citizenry the periodic capacity to replace whoever is in power with someone else. It is our ultimate and last remaining check.
The money-and-media election complex has transformed longstanding problems into an existential crisis: we are about to lose the democratic promise of elections. It is hard to see how our cherished freedoms can then survive, except to the extent that they are trivial and unthreatening to those in power. What hangs in the balance is democracy itself, along with the promise of the American experiment.
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The "sideshow" from which Rove sought to distract attention was, in fact, the most important story of the most expensive midterm election in American history: the radical transformation of our politics by a money-and-media election complex that is now more definitional than any candidate or party—and that poses every bit as much of a threat to democracy as the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us a half-century ago. This is not the next chapter in the old money-and-politics debate. This is the redefinition of politics by a pair of new and equally important factors—the freeing of corporations to spend any amount on electioneering and the collapse of substantive print and broadcast reporting on campaigns. In combination they have created a "new normal," in which consultants dealing in dollar amounts unprecedented in American history use "independent" expenditures to tip the balance of elections in favor of their clients. Unchecked by even rudimentary campaign finance regulation, unchallenged by a journalism sufficient to identify and expose abuses of the electoral process and abetted by commercial broadcasters that this year pocketed $3 billion in political ad revenues, the money-and-media election complex was a nearly unbeatable force in 2010.
Of fifty-three competitive House districts where Rove and his compatriots backed Republicans with "independent" expenditures that exceeded those made on behalf of Democrats—often by more than $1 million per district, according to Public Citizen—the Republicans won fifty-one. Roughly three-quarters of all GOP House gains came in districts where independent expenditures by groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove's American Crossroads gave Republican candidates, some of them virtual unknowns until the outside money flowed in, the advantage. The money is powerful, of course, but that power is supercharged because of the decay, and in many cases disappearance, of independent and skeptical journalism at the state and regional levels, where elections are decided. Campaign narratives used to be created by reporters who, imperfectly but seriously, pulled together the multiple threads of an election season to give voters perspective. Now that narrative is driven by commercials—millions of them, most negative. The narrative for the most part still comes from broadcast and cable TV stations, as it has for some time, but it is now produced and paid for by economic elites that seek to define not just the results of an election but the scope and character of government itself. To neglect the money-and-media election complex or, worse yet, to imagine that progressive forces can compete within it will make the 2012 election season look like 2010 on steroids. Determined and dramatic responses are the only options if we hope to maintain anything more than the remnants of a functioning democracy.
The immediate cause of the crisis was the Supreme Court's January 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which wiped away a century of campaign finance regulations designed to prevent corporations and business alliances from using their immense resources to buy the results that best serve their interests. There was bipartisan shock at the ruling, with protest across the spectrum. National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz declared that the freeing of corporations to tap general treasury funds would allow them to spend so freely that they could "effectively own our democracy."
The critique was right, but even serious analysts tended to underestimate the speed with which corporate interests and wealthy conservatives would take advantage of the severe damage done to campaign finance laws. The corporate intervention was unapologetic. "The big three stepping into the batter's box are the financial services industry, the energy industry and the health insurance industry," chirped veteran GOP operative Scott Reed, whose Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity spent millions, perhaps tens of millions, this fall on thousands of commercials attacking Democratic lawmakers in battleground states all over the country. Reed's operation was identified by the Media Matters Action Network as a "small fry" player among the more than sixty nonparty groups that by late October had paid for nearly 150,000 commercials and an untold number of direct-mail attacks in a frenzy of spending that would make the 2010 cycle (price tag: $4 billion and counting) more expensive than either the 2006 midterms or the 2004 presidential race.
To be sure, Democrats tried to play the game and raise corporate money too, but the balance was off from the start; by one measure, that of the Center for Media and Democracy, "spending by outside interest groups [was] up at least 500 percent since the last midterm election, with pro-Republican groups outspending those favoring Democrats by seven-to-one."
* * *
To some extent, this is a story as old as the nation itself. Founding father John Jay thought "those who own the country ought to govern it." The battle to establish a credible system of "one person, one vote" instead of "one dollar, one vote" has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt our governance. But the current moment sees the country accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both," observed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. America is being put to the Brandeis test: democracy or plutocracy. The money-and-media election complex is creating a radically different electoral landscape than anything Americans have known since the Gilded Age. That landscape is characterized, pundits tell us, by an "enthusiasm gap." No kidding. Americans are not stupid. They knew their relatively paltry contributions, and even their votes, were unlikely to stop a $4 billion onslaught. To those bankrolling the system, voter cynicism and apathy are welcome. The more that the 2008 surge of youth participation in electoral politics dissipates, the better for them. Their interests are best served by narrowing the range of debate and participation, since that makes it easier to buy the government. As much as commentators like Jon Meacham might want to believe that "we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing," the hard truth is that we have a corporate class that funds electoral conflict for the purpose of forging a political class that will govern in its interest.
The emerging money-and-media election complex is perfectly designed to make participants conform or suffer the consequences. It should come as no surprise that some of the most troubling results of 2010 involved the defeats of independent players of both parties who had battled hardest for clean politics and ethical government—Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive Democratic reformer, was defeated, as was Representative Mike Castle, a moderate Republican beaten in Delaware's GOP Senate primary by Tea Party heroine Christine O'Donnell. Nor should it get better in 2012. "It's a bigger prize in 2012, and that's changing the White House," says Robert Duncan, chair of American Crossroads. "We've planted the flag for permanence, and we believe we will play a major role for 2012."
* * *
But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.
Yet commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses for their scarce channels at no charge from the government under the condition that they serve the public interest. By any account, the most important role of our media is to make the electoral system serve the voters, who, as surveys continue to demonstrate, rely on local TV as their main source for news. However, local TV covers far less than it did two or three decades ago; according to the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, a thirty-minute newscast at election time has more political advertising than campaign news. Even when politics does get covered, the focus, increasingly, is on "analyzing" ads. And the cumulative effect of endless advertising overwhelms what little remains of independent on-air coverage. What incentive do commercial stations have to cover politics when they can force candidates and players to pay for it? Nice work if you can get it.
This contradiction is magnified by the aforementioned decline of political journalism across all media. If the United States had a vibrant and credible news media, the problem of the money-and-media election complex would be less pressing, as citizens could use news coverage and dismiss much of the brazen deception of ads. Instead, our news media, in decline for decades, is in free fall [see Nichols and McChesney, "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April 6, 2009]. The shuttering of dozens of papers and the wholesale layoff of tens of thousands of journalists and support staffers, the shuttering of Washington and statehouse bureaus and the shift of radio and cable TV from traditional campaign coverage to one-sided talk formats that often reinforce rather than sort through the spin have allowed money to speak more loudly than ever before. New-media initiatives are encouraging, but they have not begun to fill the void, in large part because few have developed business models that can pay for serious independent journalism.
The changes taking place in how campaigns are paid for and covered provides the most meaningful explanation for otherwise incomprehensible shifts in our politics. We know and respect the multitude of theories being advanced for why 2010 went so horribly awry for Democrats and particularly for progressives, but we would argue that the key factor is the emergence of the money-and-media election complex. Recognizing how this system works is necessary if we are to recognize the absurdity of the suggestion—advanced by former Clinton administration aide and veteran Democratic fundraiser Harold Ickes, among others in the consultocracy—that Democrats can somehow buy their way back into the game by getting progressive donors to give as generously as Rove's billionaires and the wealthiest multinationals. Only an insider with no sense of history could willingly embrace this system. And if Democrats somehow "succeed" in the money-and-media election complex, it will be at the price of the party's soul and of any prospect that progressive ideas will get a hearing.
Democrats in anything more than name only cannot win the money race. As Michael Vachon, an adviser to George Soros, correctly notes with regard to the consultants who organize "independent" expenditures on behalf of Republicans (and perhaps of corporate-friendly Democrats), "Their resources will always be too great because the funds come from those who are acting in their economic self-interest." Fundamental reform is going to be necessary. And it will not be easy, as we are talking about changing our entire political process in a way that frightens economic elites. Opposition from entrenched, procorporate Republicans will be intense, as evidence suggests that their corrupt and unpopular policies can prevail at the polls only with the sort of depressed and selective turnout and lack of critical scrutiny that the money-and-media system encourages. How ironic that, just as demographic trends are moving in a decidedly progressive direction—as minorities begin to form majorities in our states, and as young people move increasingly to the left on social and economic issues—the electoral system is becoming a bastion of reaction.
Rove, Reed and their allies—including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner—would have us believe that more spending is good and that ads can be educational. This is an extension of the "money is speech" argument that has underpinned a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and culminating in Citizens United, that initially undermined but have by now made a mockery of campaign finance reform. It's an absurd construct. But it is being reinforced by consultants—veteran Democrats as well as Republicans—and TV executives who are cogs in a permanent campaign apparatus.
The counsel of the self-interested "players" is always the same: raise money, more money and more money still—and don't do or say anything that makes it harder to raise money. This thinking has bled into what is left of our journalism, such that political reporters today spend more time covering the money that candidates, parties and interest groups raise and spend than examining their records and intentions. Whereas journalists once wrote stories about issues, and candidates cut commercials in response to them, now some journalists go through entire campaigns doing little more than fact-checking commercials. On many days, reviews of ads are all that appear in print and broadcast reports. And what do new-media outlets bring to the table? An opportunity to watch ads on YouTube!
As ads become the primary source of political information, we create a politics based on lies or, at best, decontextualized quarter-truths. Campaign ads are unregulated for truthfulness, unlike commercial advertising. Three decades ago Ogilvy and Mather executive Robert Spero determined that if political ads had to meet the same Federal Trade Commission criteria as commercial ads, all of them would be rejected as fraudulent. The regulation of commercial ads may be more lax today, but we doubt that any study of political ads in 2010 would regard them more favorably than Spero did.
The journalists who want to cut through the lies are having a harder time doing so. One of the truly unsettling developments of this election season was the decision by prominent candidates either to avoid the press, as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle did, or to refuse opportunities to debate. Once upon a time challengers hungered to debate incumbents; in 2010 incumbents like Florida Representative Alan Grayson found themselves chasing after well-funded challengers. Feingold offered to debate his millionaire opponent in forums across the state, but Republican Ron Johnson, who had no record in public life and who even avoided interviews with newspaper editorial boards, refused. Instead, Johnson let his advertisements and those paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network and sundry organizations that flooded the state with anti-Feingold ads do his talking. Even when Johnson did debate in a handful of forums available for broadcast by the state's TV stations, many stations avoided airing them in prime time. Wisconsin lawyer Ed Garvey, a former Democratic nominee for governor, tried to tune in to a much-anticipated Feingold-Johnson debate, only to find it was not being aired. He called the station and was told he could track it down on a website. "As a citizen, I was left with no option but the ads. I got nothing of substance from television stations," griped Garvey. "I thought they were supposed to operate in the public interest."
That should be the starting point of any response to the money-and-media election complex. We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it's important to fight for reforms). It's a media ownership and responsibility issue as well. It goes to the heart of why freedom of the press is enshrined in our Constitution. And regulatory agencies that are empowered to protect the public interest should be the first to intervene. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission have a duty to figure out exactly how much was spent, by whom and to what end. That examination should start with dollar amounts, but it shouldn't stop there. It should explore the issue of whether TV stations that made a fortune running campaign ads met even the most basic public-interest requirements of companies that obtain broadcast licenses. How much campaign journalism have these stations been doing, compared with a generation ago? How many debates are they airing in prime time? FCC member Michael Copps understands the crisis and intends to press ahead this fall with demands for stronger public-interest requirements for broadcasters. Copps is no fool; he knows this is the hardest of all fights. That's why he will need support from Congress as well as citizens.
House and Senate committees should hold hearings about the money-and-media election complex. How about calling Representative Pete DeFazio to testify? The Oregon maverick was one of many Democratic incumbents facing marginal challengers who suddenly found himself battered by attack ads paid for by a shadowy group no one had heard of. DeFazio pushed back, taking a camera crew to the Capitol Hill condo from which the group operated and exposing the source as a single New York–based hedge fund gazillionaire who was apparently angered by the Congressman's ardent advocacy for holding Wall Street speculators to account. That's the stuff of a good hearing. But don't stop with DeFazio; call the hedge fund manager who went after him. Then call Karl Rove. The 111th Congress has been lame when it comes to oversight; it should finish with a bang. And state legislative committees around the country should do the same.
Gathering the data and grilling the guilty players will make the case for fundamental reform, which must come at multiple levels. The FCC could require stations to grant equal advertising time to any candidate who is attacked in an ad paid for by corporations, with the free response ad to immediately follow the hit job. The FCC should consider requiring free TV ads for every candidate on the ballot if any candidate buys his or her own spots. This would allow wealthy candidates access but would prevent them from shouting everyone else down. Let the stations jack up rates to cover all the time, if they want. We suspect the appeal of TV ads will decline if the result is simply to open an equal debate rather than allow one side to dominate. And of course there is the long-overdue matter of providing free airtime to candidates and requiring debates to be broadcast.
Radical ideas? Hardly. Much of what we're talking about was outlined in the original version of the McCain-Feingold bill of the 1990s and in other proposals advanced over the years. It's time to renew them. At the same time, we need a public policy commitment to the rejuvenation of news media. A supercharged public and community broadcast system would be a good start. It's no accident that the corporate right is taking dead aim at public broadcasting, as it remains the one institutional force not under its direct control.
* * *
Ultimately, however, Americans have to get serious about addressing the Citizens United ruling. We have no problem with legislative remedies, especially if they embody proposals like those advanced by the Sunlight Foundation to establish online transparency at every level of influence, from independent expenditures to lobbying to bundled campaign contributions. We agree with Lisa Gilbert of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who says Representative Grayson has proposed "pieces of good policy" with his Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, which would impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns; his Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, which would require public companies to report what they spend to influence opinion on any matter other than the promotion of their goods and services; and his End Political Kickbacks Act, which would restrict contributions by government contractors. And we have no doubt that Grayson's advocacy for these reforms helps explain why "independent" groups spent more than $1.2 million on attack ads targeting him.
However, we don't see any way to avoid the requirement of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Representative Donna Edwards has proposed a sound one, backed by the Free Speech for People campaign. Another approach, proposed by Move to Amend, would begin the process at the state level, where grassroots activists may have more of an opening to demand that legislatures call for an amendment. It's not necessary to choose a specific strategy at this point, but we do have to recognize that the money-and-media election complex defined the 2010 election, and that its reach is extending to 2012. Taking it on will require boldness, creativity and determination. We will be told it is impossible to beat, but we're with Lisa Graves, the former Justice Department lawyer who as executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy has become a leader in the fight for a constitutional amendment. She says, "If we don't seize it as an opportunity because it's so discouraging, they win."
Even if only out of self-interest, this is what Obama and his Democratic allies should have been talking about during the 2010 campaign and what they should be shouting about now—not with vague rumblings about contributions from foreign corporations but with shout-it-from-the-rooftops populist rage at a threat to democracy every bit as serious as the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower identified. His charge to Americans with regard to the machinery of military dominance—"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes"—translates with chilling precision to the new media and money machinery of political dominance.
Scholars of American history have acknowledged for a long time that the United States is far from a true democracy, or even an especially effective representative democracy. Most political decisions are made with precious little input by average citizens. What the government does with wealthy individuals and powerful corporate interests is largely removed from popular control. This is part of the reason voter turnout has for so long been among the lowest in the world. But two things give us confidence in our system. First, we have core civil liberties, especially the right to freedom of speech. And second, we have elections, as flawed as they may be, and that gives the citizenry the periodic capacity to replace whoever is in power with someone else. It is our ultimate and last remaining check.
The money-and-media election complex has transformed longstanding problems into an existential crisis: we are about to lose the democratic promise of elections. It is hard to see how our cherished freedoms can then survive, except to the extent that they are trivial and unthreatening to those in power. What hangs in the balance is democracy itself, along with the promise of the American experiment.
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Friday, 12 November 2010
PM transitions toward ongoing programmatic specificity
A horrifying possibility emerges.
All these months, we've been assuming that there was no lasting handover deal between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
We've assumed it based on a number of observable clues.
Like the nauseous incapability each exhibited, for a while, to enunciate the other's name in public.
Or the fact that Ms Gillard's team treated Mr Rudd, during the campaign, with all the transfixed caution accorded to an unattended, mysteriously ticking shopping trolley in a Jerusalem marketplace.
Or - I don't know - the fact that their face-to-face meeting, when it did come, was a staged map-reading with all the relaxed bonhomie of an encounter in the Fritzl basement.
These factors screamed: Unresolved Tensions.
But I am having increasing doubts, and it's not just based on Mr Rudd's seamless acquisition of the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
It appears that some kind of amnesty arrangement has been extended, by the Prime Minister, to Mr Rudd's vocabulary.
Ms Gillard began her stint as Prime Minister with a press conference that was blissfully free of detailed programmatic specificities.
But something has happened in the interim.
Some mischievous worm has infested the prime ministerial cortex, adding rogue syllables, creating intransitive verbs willy-nilly, and otherwise taking simple concepts and obliterating them under a toxic sludge of jargon.
Interviewed by Laurie Oakes on Sunday, the Prime Minister promised that her Government's "crackdown" on mortgage exit fees would be "operationalised" this week.
But it was in her discussion of Australia's military commitment in Afghanistan that suspicions of a secret contra deal on Ruddisms were properly excited.
In Afghanistan, euphemisms grow as profusely as the opium poppy.
And the latest one is "transition".
"Transition" is what "Retreat" used to be until it was moved forward.
The United States and its allies in Afghanistan no longer discuss an exit strategy.
They discuss the "transition" to Afghan independence instead, because it sounds more constructive. It also buys them a few extra years, because "transition" is a process, while "exit" used to be a deadline.
And a certain person who was this week depicted in Seoul as a milkmaid seems to have grabbed the new word with both hands.
In her Sunday morning interview, there were several feats of conjugation.
"The talk in Afghanistan is all about transition, the way in which transition will occur, the conditions that will lead to transition," Ms Gillard began.
The Prime Minister quickly dispelled any irrational fears in the minds of Sunday-morning viewers that transition might be hasty, or ill thought-out.
"I dealt with this matter in the parliamentary debate and I've made it very clear that transition needs to be conditions-based," she told Oakes, whose famously impassive features did not betray even a hint of the relief that must have been coursing through his frame at the news.
But there is much more to transition than might have met the eye of a casual observer.
For instance, it can be a verb, as the PM effortlessly demonstrated.
"We should transition at a point that we are satisfied that Afghan security services can take the lead and that lead can be sustained," she said.
"I've been very clear. I think it would be a bad error to transition out only to have to transition back in."
The PM, a woman of significant personal self-effacement, is probably a little hard on herself here.
Having successfully reverse-transitioned on offshore refugee processing and reverse-reverse-transitioned on carbon pricing, it's entirely possible that she could manage something similar in Tarin Kowt.
But she seems immutable on the matter: "I've got a very firm view that we need to be very clear that when we are transitioning our forces and transitioning leadership to local Afghan forces, that that needs to be irreversible. So there's some intellectual labour that needs to be brought to bear when we say we're going to engage in a conditions-based transition."
Indeed, substantial intellectual labour does need to be brought to bear when we hear our Prime Minister talk about engaging in a conditions-based transition of any kind.
Substantial intellectual labour could, in particular, be brought to bear on the following question: "Who are you, Madam? And why have you borrowed Kevin Rudd's brain?"
The Prime Minister concluded with some chit chat about the United States' Force Posture Review, which turns out, disappointingly, to have very little to do with the Growler planes we're buying from them and everything to do with expanding American access to our bases.
Oakes paused for a moment before delivering what must be the punchline of the week.
"Are you developing a passion for this stuff yet?"
The old Julia Gillard might have got the joke.
But the new one responded with the customary treatise about her preference for ennobling children through education.
The best thing about Old Julia was that you could usually understand what she was on about.
Maybe, one day, we can transition back to that.
Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.
All these months, we've been assuming that there was no lasting handover deal between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
We've assumed it based on a number of observable clues.
Like the nauseous incapability each exhibited, for a while, to enunciate the other's name in public.
Or the fact that Ms Gillard's team treated Mr Rudd, during the campaign, with all the transfixed caution accorded to an unattended, mysteriously ticking shopping trolley in a Jerusalem marketplace.
Or - I don't know - the fact that their face-to-face meeting, when it did come, was a staged map-reading with all the relaxed bonhomie of an encounter in the Fritzl basement.
These factors screamed: Unresolved Tensions.
But I am having increasing doubts, and it's not just based on Mr Rudd's seamless acquisition of the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
It appears that some kind of amnesty arrangement has been extended, by the Prime Minister, to Mr Rudd's vocabulary.
Ms Gillard began her stint as Prime Minister with a press conference that was blissfully free of detailed programmatic specificities.
But something has happened in the interim.
Some mischievous worm has infested the prime ministerial cortex, adding rogue syllables, creating intransitive verbs willy-nilly, and otherwise taking simple concepts and obliterating them under a toxic sludge of jargon.
Interviewed by Laurie Oakes on Sunday, the Prime Minister promised that her Government's "crackdown" on mortgage exit fees would be "operationalised" this week.
But it was in her discussion of Australia's military commitment in Afghanistan that suspicions of a secret contra deal on Ruddisms were properly excited.
In Afghanistan, euphemisms grow as profusely as the opium poppy.
And the latest one is "transition".
"Transition" is what "Retreat" used to be until it was moved forward.
The United States and its allies in Afghanistan no longer discuss an exit strategy.
They discuss the "transition" to Afghan independence instead, because it sounds more constructive. It also buys them a few extra years, because "transition" is a process, while "exit" used to be a deadline.
And a certain person who was this week depicted in Seoul as a milkmaid seems to have grabbed the new word with both hands.
In her Sunday morning interview, there were several feats of conjugation.
"The talk in Afghanistan is all about transition, the way in which transition will occur, the conditions that will lead to transition," Ms Gillard began.
The Prime Minister quickly dispelled any irrational fears in the minds of Sunday-morning viewers that transition might be hasty, or ill thought-out.
"I dealt with this matter in the parliamentary debate and I've made it very clear that transition needs to be conditions-based," she told Oakes, whose famously impassive features did not betray even a hint of the relief that must have been coursing through his frame at the news.
But there is much more to transition than might have met the eye of a casual observer.
For instance, it can be a verb, as the PM effortlessly demonstrated.
"We should transition at a point that we are satisfied that Afghan security services can take the lead and that lead can be sustained," she said.
"I've been very clear. I think it would be a bad error to transition out only to have to transition back in."
The PM, a woman of significant personal self-effacement, is probably a little hard on herself here.
Having successfully reverse-transitioned on offshore refugee processing and reverse-reverse-transitioned on carbon pricing, it's entirely possible that she could manage something similar in Tarin Kowt.
But she seems immutable on the matter: "I've got a very firm view that we need to be very clear that when we are transitioning our forces and transitioning leadership to local Afghan forces, that that needs to be irreversible. So there's some intellectual labour that needs to be brought to bear when we say we're going to engage in a conditions-based transition."
Indeed, substantial intellectual labour does need to be brought to bear when we hear our Prime Minister talk about engaging in a conditions-based transition of any kind.
Substantial intellectual labour could, in particular, be brought to bear on the following question: "Who are you, Madam? And why have you borrowed Kevin Rudd's brain?"
The Prime Minister concluded with some chit chat about the United States' Force Posture Review, which turns out, disappointingly, to have very little to do with the Growler planes we're buying from them and everything to do with expanding American access to our bases.
Oakes paused for a moment before delivering what must be the punchline of the week.
"Are you developing a passion for this stuff yet?"
The old Julia Gillard might have got the joke.
But the new one responded with the customary treatise about her preference for ennobling children through education.
The best thing about Old Julia was that you could usually understand what she was on about.
Maybe, one day, we can transition back to that.
Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.
Aung San Suu Kyi to be freed within hours
People are gathering at the National League for Democracy headquarters in Rangoon amid rumours that detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will soon be released.
There is speculation the democracy icon will walk free tonight.
National League for Democracy sources say junta leader Than Shwe has signed the order for her release and that she has received the paperwork in her home.
Her Rangoon lawyer, however, says he has not been formally notified.
Party supporters have been cleaning up the office and placing banners of the Nobel laureate, who has spent much of the past 20 years under house arrest.
She was released briefly in 2002 but was detained again in 2003.
Nervous excitement is building in Burma about her release only a week after the first election since she and her party won in a landslide 20 years ago but were not allowed to take office.
Aung San Suu Kyi: a timeline
Foreign Correspondent: Orphans of the storm
Burma: A brief political history
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There is speculation the democracy icon will walk free tonight.
National League for Democracy sources say junta leader Than Shwe has signed the order for her release and that she has received the paperwork in her home.
Her Rangoon lawyer, however, says he has not been formally notified.
Party supporters have been cleaning up the office and placing banners of the Nobel laureate, who has spent much of the past 20 years under house arrest.
She was released briefly in 2002 but was detained again in 2003.
Nervous excitement is building in Burma about her release only a week after the first election since she and her party won in a landslide 20 years ago but were not allowed to take office.
Aung San Suu Kyi: a timeline
Foreign Correspondent: Orphans of the storm
Burma: A brief political history
Subscribe in a reader
"Wartorn 1861-2010" New Doco Chronicles Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Civil War to Iraq & Afghanistan
A new documentary, Wartorn 1861-2010, airing on HBO on Veterans Day, chronicles the lingering effects of war on military veterans throughout American history, from the Civil War through today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We speak with the filmmakers, Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, and with the parents of two soldiers who committed suicide after coming home from Iraq.
Guests:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Tomorrow, November 11th, is Veterans Day, the day that honors soldiers who have served in war. While the methods and technologies of war have changed over the years, over the decades, the effects of war on military veterans has stayed the same. What’s known as "post-traumatic stress disorder" has been called many other names throughout the years. During the Civil War in the 1860s, it was called "insanity" or "melancholia." During World War I, it was "shell-shock." And in World War II, it was "combat fatigue."
Whatever its name, the effects of war on military veterans can be devastating. An Army report found that in 2009, 160 soldiers committed suicide; another 146 died by other violent means, such as murder, drug abuse or reckless driving while drunk; another 1,700 attempted suicide.
Well, a new documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder is airing tomorrow on HBO. It’s called Wartorn 1861-2010, and it chronicles the lingering effects of war on military veterans throughout American history, from the Civil War through today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
SGT. MAX HARRIS: Feeling a disturbing feeling, feeling someone’s heart beating from inside their body. I still wake up with horrible nightmares from that sometimes, crying and scrubbing my hands, trying to get blood that’s not there off.
SPC. ELIZABETH HALL: I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to sleep. I don’t—I don’t want to move. I just want to sit in a corner and just be a vegetable.
SPC. JAMESON WEATHERFORD: When I came back, it was paranoia. A lot of paranoia, emotional detachment. You know, my spouse and I had basically grown apart.
STAFF SGT. KATISHA SMITTICK: Some things you just don’t want to remember. You block them out. And I’ve been blocking it for so long.
SGT. JEFFREY BROWN: I couldn’t pinpoint a direct day where it would be like, "Oh, yeah, that happened, and that’s what caused it." I couldn’t do it. I just know that it’s just—it’s not the same anymore.
SGT. MARK JOLLY: Never in a million years did I ever think that I would lose my mind.
AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from the new film Wartorn, airing on Thursday, Veterans Day, on HBO. Jon Alpert is co-director of the film, 15-time Emmy winner and co-founder of our former home, the Downtown Community Television Center. He joins us here in our new studios, along with Matt O’Neill, who produced the film with Jon. And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream, two parents who are featured in the film. Cheryl Softich joins us from Minnesota. Her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself July 2007 after serving in Iraq. And joining us from North Carolina is Chris Scheuerman. His son Jason shot himself in 2005 after serving also in Iraq.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Jon, let’s begin with you. Your choice for this film to focus on post-traumatic stress, why?
JON ALPERT: This is part of a series that HBO, led by Sheila Nevins, has been making, telling about the consequences of war. We showed what happened in Baghdad ER, when people get chopped up. But there are also injuries that you can’t see, and that’s post-traumatic stress. The soldiers are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan by the thousands, disturbed by things that they’ve seen, things that they’ve had to do. It gets inside their heads and doesn’t leave. And it’s a terrible situation that for many years the military swept under the carpet, and now they’re just beginning to deal with it.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what’s really fascinating in the film is that you go back to the Civil War and somehow find cases of post-traumatic stress disorder back from 1861 through World War I, World War II. Talk about—how did you get, first of all, these stories from so long ago?
MATT O’NEILL Yeah, most of the film is comprised of these strong personal narratives that tell the stories of service members in all these different wars. And the thing that’s remarkable is you hear the words and the feelings of a soldier in the Civil War reflected in the words and the feelings of a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan. And I think the takeaway, as we researched all these different stories, was that these behavioral and mental health issues are an inevitable part of combat and an inevitable part of war, not something that we can ignore.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And you speak with two—well, James Gandolfini does some of the interviews in the book, the star of The Sopranos—in the documentary. And he, in one scene, is speaking to two Army psychiatrists, and one of them seems to say that post-traumatic stress disorder affects every soldier in war.
JON ALPERT: Yes. There was a Medal of Honor winner—the premier of this film was at the Pentagon. And there was a panel afterwards, and if people want to see this, if they go to hbo.com, it’s a very interesting panel discussion, and it featured a Medal of Honor winner. And he looked at all the generals, and he says, "OK, some people say it’s ten percent post-traumatic stress. One of the generals says it’s 30 percent. You know, you know, and I know it’s 100 percent." Anybody who engages in warfare is scarred forever.
AMY GOODMAN: Ray Odierno, General Odierno, you interviewed in Iraq, or James did, talked to him?
JON ALPERT: Right, uh-huh, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: His son was severely wounded in Iraq, and he, himself, said he may suffer from it, the General himself.
JON ALPERT: I think it’s important that America has this conversation. The military is finally ready to have this conversation, that when you go to war, you have these consequences. We ignored these consequences for generations. Everybody has somebody in their family, came back from World War II, an uncle who behaves strangely, who suffered with post-traumatic stress, but nobody ever talked about it. We’re starting to talk about it now, and we have to talk about it.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, two of the parents featured in the film are joining us here today. Cheryl Softich is joining us form Minnesota. Her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself in July of 2007.
Cheryl, thank you very much for joining us today. Talk about what happened when your son returned from Iraq.
CHERYL SOFTICH: My son returned physically, but mentally, he never returned. He served two tours of duty in Iraq, turning 19 and 21 over there. And he just—my son died from the inside out, which is what post-traumatic stress will do to you. Left untreated, it festers and grows. And he came home, and about a year and a half after being home, he put a gun to his head, and he pulled the trigger, and he is dead. He couldn’t handle the nightmares, and—he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to live that way for the rest of his life. And he just got ridiculed for having post-traumatic stress disorder, because there’s such a stigma on it. The American people don’t want to really seem to acknowledge that it’s no different than losing a limb, a leg or an arm. It just needs to be treated differently.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl, describe how he dealt at the end and what you saw the signs were. In the film, you talk about your son feeling like he had gone bad because he had killed people in Iraq.
CHERYL SOFTICH: That’s the way he felt. He felt that he killed, and so now it was time for him to be dead, because he wasn’t brought up to kill people. And I could never get him to understand that what he did was he was—he had a job. It was for the Army, and it was his job. And he didn’t kill like he thought he did. Everybody shot. It doesn’t mean Noah necessarily killed anybody. But he did kill a few people, as happens in war, and it ate him up from the inside out. He couldn’t deal with it.
AMY GOODMAN: It was very graphic, his feeling about himself and the way he killed himself, Cheryl, if you could bring yourself to talk about that.
CHERYL SOFTICH: He went to a childhood spot that he had always went to hang out when he skipped school or when he was rabbit hunting or whatever. And he stabbed each and every one of his IDs through the face with a pocket knife. He put his fist through the side window on his truck so he wouldn’t have to look at his face. He put his dog tag to his temple. He wedged the gun to that dog tag, and he pulled the trigger. It was his way of saying that "I am dead because of my tours in Iraq. The Army killed me." It was his way of letting me know why he did it. It had nothing to do with us.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve kept the gun. You’ve kept the truck he killed himself in. You even asked the police for the dog tag that he shot through his temple into his head.
CHERYL SOFTICH: Originally—well, I didn’t know about the dog tags until months after the fact. The cops never told me that part of it. When I found out about the dog tag, yes, I wanted it back to go with its mate. As far as the gun, I wanted that gun destroyed. And a year later, that gun was still not destroyed, so I got angry. And I told them, if it’s not destroyed, then I want it back. And yes, I do have the gun. I don’t know why I have the gun, but I do have the gun. I have the truck. I have the dog tag. It hangs—seriously, it hangs by my bed.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And he wrote you a note, as well. Is that right?
CHERYL SOFTICH: Yes, he did. First thing in the note, he says he’s been in hell since the invasion in 2002. And the last few months of his life, he went out of his way to make sure that he kept myself and my daughter and my husband away from him. He didn’t want us to see how bad he was suffering. Even though he tried to keep Mom way, it didn’t work. Mom showed up every day. I usually left him in tears, because he was mean to me, verbally mean, not physically. Verbally mean, just to keep at a distance. It didn’t work; I always went back for more. I knew that he was suffering, and he needed to know I was on his side. So I went back time and time again.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Chris Scheuerman. His son, Jason, shot himself in 2005 after serving in Iraq. Both are featured in Jon and Matt’s film that will air on HBO, called Wartorn.
Chris, one of your sons served in Afghanistan. Jason served in Iraq in 2005. Describe what happened to him. Describe your last experiences with Jason.
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: It’s my opinion that Jason suffered from a traumatic brain injury, secondary to an improvised explosive device. After suffering that injury, he fell into bouts of depression, and he also became suicidal. He wrote a suicide note to his mother in early July. We notified the Army and told the Army all this was going on. They basically disregarded that warning, the onset of severe depression or PTSD, and took it for him disobeying. They took minor incidents like being out of uniform, and they would punish him severely for that. And that took a great toll on my son.
AMY GOODMAN: He sought help in Iraq?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Jason—while Jason was in Iraq, he was sent on a command-directed psychological examination. The Department of Defense requires that those examinations be conducted by a doctoral-level provider. Jason was seen by an individual who held no credentials, no training and no license, gave him a standardized test and a ten-minute conversation, and sent him back to his unit with a diagnosis of malingering.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And describe the last conversation you had with Jason on the phone.
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: The last time I talked to my son was when he had just seen the individual who was supposed to help him. He described to me what had happened. I told him that there was no way anyone could come up with any sort of diagnosis based on a standardized test and a ten-minute conversation. I implored my son to go back and get a second opinion. At this point, Jason had been failed by his leadership. He had been failed by the chaplaincy. And now he had been failed by the medical community. All three pillars of foundation that a soldier has available to him had failed him. I believe my son felt absolutely alone. And he told me he could not go back for a second opinion, that they said he was faking it and he just needed to man up.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And you have not received a condolence letter from President Obama. Is that correct?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: It has been a policy dating back from the Clinton administration that if a soldier dies in theater, secondary to a mental disorder, and take their own life, the family does not receive a letter of condolence. So, no.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Do you want one?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Yes, I want one. I want my son’s sacrifice recognized. My son was a patriot. He was sick. He was subjected to egregious malpractice. He was abused by his leadership and eventually forced into the closet of his barracks room, where he shot himself.
AMY GOODMAN: After he came back from seeing this—seeking help and they told him no, he was told to go to his room, and no one else was to be near him? Is that right, Chris Scheuerman?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: A couple weeks after he was sent back to his unit, they had been subjecting him to sleep deprivation. They would wake him up in the middle of the night, tell him to put on his battle gear and run up and down the stairs. They cut off all of his communication with his family, basically cut him off from all his—from his support structure. They charged him again with being out of uniform. And during those proceedings, his first sergeant told him that if he didn’t get his stuff together, that if he was trying to get out of the Army based on a mental issue, that he would be sent to prison and abused in prison. After that encounter, they brought him back to his barracks, sent him to his room with his weapon and his ammunition, and told everyone to stay away from him.
AMY GOODMAN: And that’s when he killed himself?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl—
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: He was all alone.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl, as we wrap up, do you feel your son would be alive today if he had gotten counseling?
CHERYL SOFTICH: I know he would be alive today if he had gotten counseling. He tried to get counseling, but he slipped through every crack there was to slip through. And he finally gave up, but he did try. Had they counseled him before he went to his second tour, he would probably still be alive.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Jon and Matt, very briefly—we have to wrap—but you document PTSD from the Civil War through today. Is the treatment getting any better?
JON ALPERT: They’ve just come up with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in the last 30 years, even though we know, and the documentary shows, that it’s been the handmaiden of warfare ever since the beginning of time. If you have war, you have post-traumatic stress. And we have to think about that before we send our men and women into warfare.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to end it there. We want to thank you all for being us. The HBO documentary airs on Veterans Day.
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Guests:
Jon Alpert, 15-time Emmy winner and co-director of Wartorn 1861-2010. He is also the co-founder of Downtown Community Television.
Matt O'Neill, producer of Wartorn 1861-2010.
Cheryl Softich, her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself in July of 2007 after serving in Iraq.
Chris Scheuerman, his son, Jason Scheuerman, shot himself in 2005 after serving in Iraq.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Tomorrow, November 11th, is Veterans Day, the day that honors soldiers who have served in war. While the methods and technologies of war have changed over the years, over the decades, the effects of war on military veterans has stayed the same. What’s known as "post-traumatic stress disorder" has been called many other names throughout the years. During the Civil War in the 1860s, it was called "insanity" or "melancholia." During World War I, it was "shell-shock." And in World War II, it was "combat fatigue."
Whatever its name, the effects of war on military veterans can be devastating. An Army report found that in 2009, 160 soldiers committed suicide; another 146 died by other violent means, such as murder, drug abuse or reckless driving while drunk; another 1,700 attempted suicide.
Well, a new documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder is airing tomorrow on HBO. It’s called Wartorn 1861-2010, and it chronicles the lingering effects of war on military veterans throughout American history, from the Civil War through today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
SGT. MAX HARRIS: Feeling a disturbing feeling, feeling someone’s heart beating from inside their body. I still wake up with horrible nightmares from that sometimes, crying and scrubbing my hands, trying to get blood that’s not there off.
SPC. ELIZABETH HALL: I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to sleep. I don’t—I don’t want to move. I just want to sit in a corner and just be a vegetable.
SPC. JAMESON WEATHERFORD: When I came back, it was paranoia. A lot of paranoia, emotional detachment. You know, my spouse and I had basically grown apart.
STAFF SGT. KATISHA SMITTICK: Some things you just don’t want to remember. You block them out. And I’ve been blocking it for so long.
SGT. JEFFREY BROWN: I couldn’t pinpoint a direct day where it would be like, "Oh, yeah, that happened, and that’s what caused it." I couldn’t do it. I just know that it’s just—it’s not the same anymore.
SGT. MARK JOLLY: Never in a million years did I ever think that I would lose my mind.
AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from the new film Wartorn, airing on Thursday, Veterans Day, on HBO. Jon Alpert is co-director of the film, 15-time Emmy winner and co-founder of our former home, the Downtown Community Television Center. He joins us here in our new studios, along with Matt O’Neill, who produced the film with Jon. And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream, two parents who are featured in the film. Cheryl Softich joins us from Minnesota. Her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself July 2007 after serving in Iraq. And joining us from North Carolina is Chris Scheuerman. His son Jason shot himself in 2005 after serving also in Iraq.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Jon, let’s begin with you. Your choice for this film to focus on post-traumatic stress, why?
JON ALPERT: This is part of a series that HBO, led by Sheila Nevins, has been making, telling about the consequences of war. We showed what happened in Baghdad ER, when people get chopped up. But there are also injuries that you can’t see, and that’s post-traumatic stress. The soldiers are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan by the thousands, disturbed by things that they’ve seen, things that they’ve had to do. It gets inside their heads and doesn’t leave. And it’s a terrible situation that for many years the military swept under the carpet, and now they’re just beginning to deal with it.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what’s really fascinating in the film is that you go back to the Civil War and somehow find cases of post-traumatic stress disorder back from 1861 through World War I, World War II. Talk about—how did you get, first of all, these stories from so long ago?
MATT O’NEILL Yeah, most of the film is comprised of these strong personal narratives that tell the stories of service members in all these different wars. And the thing that’s remarkable is you hear the words and the feelings of a soldier in the Civil War reflected in the words and the feelings of a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan. And I think the takeaway, as we researched all these different stories, was that these behavioral and mental health issues are an inevitable part of combat and an inevitable part of war, not something that we can ignore.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And you speak with two—well, James Gandolfini does some of the interviews in the book, the star of The Sopranos—in the documentary. And he, in one scene, is speaking to two Army psychiatrists, and one of them seems to say that post-traumatic stress disorder affects every soldier in war.
JON ALPERT: Yes. There was a Medal of Honor winner—the premier of this film was at the Pentagon. And there was a panel afterwards, and if people want to see this, if they go to hbo.com, it’s a very interesting panel discussion, and it featured a Medal of Honor winner. And he looked at all the generals, and he says, "OK, some people say it’s ten percent post-traumatic stress. One of the generals says it’s 30 percent. You know, you know, and I know it’s 100 percent." Anybody who engages in warfare is scarred forever.
AMY GOODMAN: Ray Odierno, General Odierno, you interviewed in Iraq, or James did, talked to him?
JON ALPERT: Right, uh-huh, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: His son was severely wounded in Iraq, and he, himself, said he may suffer from it, the General himself.
JON ALPERT: I think it’s important that America has this conversation. The military is finally ready to have this conversation, that when you go to war, you have these consequences. We ignored these consequences for generations. Everybody has somebody in their family, came back from World War II, an uncle who behaves strangely, who suffered with post-traumatic stress, but nobody ever talked about it. We’re starting to talk about it now, and we have to talk about it.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, two of the parents featured in the film are joining us here today. Cheryl Softich is joining us form Minnesota. Her son, Noah Pierce, killed himself in July of 2007.
Cheryl, thank you very much for joining us today. Talk about what happened when your son returned from Iraq.
CHERYL SOFTICH: My son returned physically, but mentally, he never returned. He served two tours of duty in Iraq, turning 19 and 21 over there. And he just—my son died from the inside out, which is what post-traumatic stress will do to you. Left untreated, it festers and grows. And he came home, and about a year and a half after being home, he put a gun to his head, and he pulled the trigger, and he is dead. He couldn’t handle the nightmares, and—he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to live that way for the rest of his life. And he just got ridiculed for having post-traumatic stress disorder, because there’s such a stigma on it. The American people don’t want to really seem to acknowledge that it’s no different than losing a limb, a leg or an arm. It just needs to be treated differently.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl, describe how he dealt at the end and what you saw the signs were. In the film, you talk about your son feeling like he had gone bad because he had killed people in Iraq.
CHERYL SOFTICH: That’s the way he felt. He felt that he killed, and so now it was time for him to be dead, because he wasn’t brought up to kill people. And I could never get him to understand that what he did was he was—he had a job. It was for the Army, and it was his job. And he didn’t kill like he thought he did. Everybody shot. It doesn’t mean Noah necessarily killed anybody. But he did kill a few people, as happens in war, and it ate him up from the inside out. He couldn’t deal with it.
AMY GOODMAN: It was very graphic, his feeling about himself and the way he killed himself, Cheryl, if you could bring yourself to talk about that.
CHERYL SOFTICH: He went to a childhood spot that he had always went to hang out when he skipped school or when he was rabbit hunting or whatever. And he stabbed each and every one of his IDs through the face with a pocket knife. He put his fist through the side window on his truck so he wouldn’t have to look at his face. He put his dog tag to his temple. He wedged the gun to that dog tag, and he pulled the trigger. It was his way of saying that "I am dead because of my tours in Iraq. The Army killed me." It was his way of letting me know why he did it. It had nothing to do with us.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve kept the gun. You’ve kept the truck he killed himself in. You even asked the police for the dog tag that he shot through his temple into his head.
CHERYL SOFTICH: Originally—well, I didn’t know about the dog tags until months after the fact. The cops never told me that part of it. When I found out about the dog tag, yes, I wanted it back to go with its mate. As far as the gun, I wanted that gun destroyed. And a year later, that gun was still not destroyed, so I got angry. And I told them, if it’s not destroyed, then I want it back. And yes, I do have the gun. I don’t know why I have the gun, but I do have the gun. I have the truck. I have the dog tag. It hangs—seriously, it hangs by my bed.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And he wrote you a note, as well. Is that right?
CHERYL SOFTICH: Yes, he did. First thing in the note, he says he’s been in hell since the invasion in 2002. And the last few months of his life, he went out of his way to make sure that he kept myself and my daughter and my husband away from him. He didn’t want us to see how bad he was suffering. Even though he tried to keep Mom way, it didn’t work. Mom showed up every day. I usually left him in tears, because he was mean to me, verbally mean, not physically. Verbally mean, just to keep at a distance. It didn’t work; I always went back for more. I knew that he was suffering, and he needed to know I was on his side. So I went back time and time again.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Chris Scheuerman. His son, Jason, shot himself in 2005 after serving in Iraq. Both are featured in Jon and Matt’s film that will air on HBO, called Wartorn.
Chris, one of your sons served in Afghanistan. Jason served in Iraq in 2005. Describe what happened to him. Describe your last experiences with Jason.
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: It’s my opinion that Jason suffered from a traumatic brain injury, secondary to an improvised explosive device. After suffering that injury, he fell into bouts of depression, and he also became suicidal. He wrote a suicide note to his mother in early July. We notified the Army and told the Army all this was going on. They basically disregarded that warning, the onset of severe depression or PTSD, and took it for him disobeying. They took minor incidents like being out of uniform, and they would punish him severely for that. And that took a great toll on my son.
AMY GOODMAN: He sought help in Iraq?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Jason—while Jason was in Iraq, he was sent on a command-directed psychological examination. The Department of Defense requires that those examinations be conducted by a doctoral-level provider. Jason was seen by an individual who held no credentials, no training and no license, gave him a standardized test and a ten-minute conversation, and sent him back to his unit with a diagnosis of malingering.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And describe the last conversation you had with Jason on the phone.
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: The last time I talked to my son was when he had just seen the individual who was supposed to help him. He described to me what had happened. I told him that there was no way anyone could come up with any sort of diagnosis based on a standardized test and a ten-minute conversation. I implored my son to go back and get a second opinion. At this point, Jason had been failed by his leadership. He had been failed by the chaplaincy. And now he had been failed by the medical community. All three pillars of foundation that a soldier has available to him had failed him. I believe my son felt absolutely alone. And he told me he could not go back for a second opinion, that they said he was faking it and he just needed to man up.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And you have not received a condolence letter from President Obama. Is that correct?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: It has been a policy dating back from the Clinton administration that if a soldier dies in theater, secondary to a mental disorder, and take their own life, the family does not receive a letter of condolence. So, no.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Do you want one?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Yes, I want one. I want my son’s sacrifice recognized. My son was a patriot. He was sick. He was subjected to egregious malpractice. He was abused by his leadership and eventually forced into the closet of his barracks room, where he shot himself.
AMY GOODMAN: After he came back from seeing this—seeking help and they told him no, he was told to go to his room, and no one else was to be near him? Is that right, Chris Scheuerman?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: A couple weeks after he was sent back to his unit, they had been subjecting him to sleep deprivation. They would wake him up in the middle of the night, tell him to put on his battle gear and run up and down the stairs. They cut off all of his communication with his family, basically cut him off from all his—from his support structure. They charged him again with being out of uniform. And during those proceedings, his first sergeant told him that if he didn’t get his stuff together, that if he was trying to get out of the Army based on a mental issue, that he would be sent to prison and abused in prison. After that encounter, they brought him back to his barracks, sent him to his room with his weapon and his ammunition, and told everyone to stay away from him.
AMY GOODMAN: And that’s when he killed himself?
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl—
CHRIS SCHEUERMAN: He was all alone.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheryl, as we wrap up, do you feel your son would be alive today if he had gotten counseling?
CHERYL SOFTICH: I know he would be alive today if he had gotten counseling. He tried to get counseling, but he slipped through every crack there was to slip through. And he finally gave up, but he did try. Had they counseled him before he went to his second tour, he would probably still be alive.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Jon and Matt, very briefly—we have to wrap—but you document PTSD from the Civil War through today. Is the treatment getting any better?
JON ALPERT: They’ve just come up with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in the last 30 years, even though we know, and the documentary shows, that it’s been the handmaiden of warfare ever since the beginning of time. If you have war, you have post-traumatic stress. And we have to think about that before we send our men and women into warfare.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to end it there. We want to thank you all for being us. The HBO documentary airs on Veterans Day.
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The Death Of The Dollar? 11 Signs That We Could Be On The Verge Of A Global Currency Crisis
Over the past several decades, the U.S. dollar and other major currencies around the globe have been continually devalued, but they have still remained stable enough for trade to flourish and for the world to enjoy an unprecedented era of prosperity. However, that all may now be changing. Many analysts now fear that the new $600 billion program of quantitative easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve may set off a round of "competitive devaluations" across the globe that could precipitate a global currency crisis. If that happens, it might not just be the death of the dollar that we are talking about. Instead, we could potentially see the death of fiat currencies worldwide in the coming years. Under the current system, nations have a built-in incentive to devalue their national currencies because it gives them a competitive advantage in world trade. In fact, quite a few countries have been doing this for years, but in 2010 currency devaluations have become a "hot button" issue and the extreme actions taken recently by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other global central banks have pushed us to the brink of a global currency war.
The U.S. dollar was the first fiat currency to ever be used as a true reserve currency literally all over the globe. For decades, nearly the entire world has had a tremendous amount of faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt. If the world was to lose faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt, the entire global financial system would crumble. Unfortunately, thanks to the foolish actions of the Federal Reserve, it looks like that is exactly what is starting to happen.
The following are 11 signs that we could be on the verge of the death of the U.S. dollar and of a global currency crisis....
#1 China's leading credit rating agency has downgraded U.S. debt to "A" in the aftermath of last week’s announcement of a second round of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve.
#2 Top finance officials from China, Russia, Germany, Brazil and many other countries all over the globe are expressing anger over the decision by the Federal Reserve to initiate another round of quantitative easing. A number of key exporting nations are now evaluating whether or not they should devalue their own currencies in retaliation.
#3 Alarmingly high sovereign debt levels in Ireland, Portugal and Spain are raising fears that the euro is set for another significant tumble.
#4 Investors are flocking to precious metals as they become disillusioned with paper currencies. On Tuesday, gold closed at $1,409.80 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and silver soared to a 30-year high of $28.46 an ounce before moving back down a bit.
#5 It isn't just precious metals that are exploding in price. Virtually every major commodity has been skyrocketing in price in 2010, and things only accelerated once the Federal Reserve announced this new round of quantitative easing. Some analysts fear that this commodity bubble could put significant inflationary pressure on economies across the globe.
#6 The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is admitting that for at least the next eight months, the Federal Reserve is going to be monetizing U.S. government debt.
#7 One top Citibank official has publicly declared that he believes that central banks around the globe are going to start dumping U.S. dollars in the coming weeks.
#8 Earlier this year, Japan publicly intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time since 2004. Japan's stunning 12 billion dollar move to push down the value of the yen made headlines all over the world.
#9 Even economies that are on a relatively solid footing are openly attempting to manipulate currency rates in 2010. For example, the Swiss National Bank experienced losses equivalent to about 15 billion dollars trying to stop the rapid rise of the Swiss franc earlier this year.
#10 Things have gotten so desperate that World Bank President Robert Zoellick is actually proposing that the world's biggest economies should consider using gold as an indicator to help set foreign exchange rates.
#11 Unfortunately, the financial problems of the U.S. government look like they are only going to get worse. According to the Wall Street Journal, in order to repay maturing bonds and finance the budget deficit, the U.S. government will have to borrow 4.2 trillion dollars over the next year. If other nations decide that they are tired of the games and that they are going to stop lending so much money to the U.S. government, where will all that money come from? Would the Federal Reserve step in and monetize most of it?
The truth is that the United States financial system is starting to come apart at the seams. America simply cannot run a half trillion dollar trade deficit and a trillion dollar federal government budget deficit each year indefinitely. There is no way in the world that those twin deficits are sustainable.
If the Federal Reserve thinks that it can solve these problems by printing up a bunch of money and throwing it on to the table they are sadly mistaken. The main thing that is going to do is cause a dramatic drop in the faith that other nations have in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt.
But without faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt, the world financial system is headed for a world of hurt. If the rest of the world starts rejecting U.S. dollars and U.S. Treasuries, the fallout will be horrifying.
Not only that, but if we do start to see a full-out currency war with nation after nation "competitively devaluing" their currencies, we might see faith being lost in all paper currencies. If that happens it will create a financial horror of unprecedented proportions.
So let us hope that cooler heads prevail and that we don't see a full-fledged currency war break out. Let us hope that faith in the U.S. dollar and other major currencies remains high for as long as possible.
Because once the "tipping point" comes, there will simply be no putting the toothpaste back into the tube.
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The U.S. dollar was the first fiat currency to ever be used as a true reserve currency literally all over the globe. For decades, nearly the entire world has had a tremendous amount of faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt. If the world was to lose faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt, the entire global financial system would crumble. Unfortunately, thanks to the foolish actions of the Federal Reserve, it looks like that is exactly what is starting to happen.
The following are 11 signs that we could be on the verge of the death of the U.S. dollar and of a global currency crisis....
#1 China's leading credit rating agency has downgraded U.S. debt to "A" in the aftermath of last week’s announcement of a second round of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve.
#2 Top finance officials from China, Russia, Germany, Brazil and many other countries all over the globe are expressing anger over the decision by the Federal Reserve to initiate another round of quantitative easing. A number of key exporting nations are now evaluating whether or not they should devalue their own currencies in retaliation.
#3 Alarmingly high sovereign debt levels in Ireland, Portugal and Spain are raising fears that the euro is set for another significant tumble.
#4 Investors are flocking to precious metals as they become disillusioned with paper currencies. On Tuesday, gold closed at $1,409.80 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and silver soared to a 30-year high of $28.46 an ounce before moving back down a bit.
#5 It isn't just precious metals that are exploding in price. Virtually every major commodity has been skyrocketing in price in 2010, and things only accelerated once the Federal Reserve announced this new round of quantitative easing. Some analysts fear that this commodity bubble could put significant inflationary pressure on economies across the globe.
#6 The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is admitting that for at least the next eight months, the Federal Reserve is going to be monetizing U.S. government debt.
#7 One top Citibank official has publicly declared that he believes that central banks around the globe are going to start dumping U.S. dollars in the coming weeks.
#8 Earlier this year, Japan publicly intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time since 2004. Japan's stunning 12 billion dollar move to push down the value of the yen made headlines all over the world.
#9 Even economies that are on a relatively solid footing are openly attempting to manipulate currency rates in 2010. For example, the Swiss National Bank experienced losses equivalent to about 15 billion dollars trying to stop the rapid rise of the Swiss franc earlier this year.
#10 Things have gotten so desperate that World Bank President Robert Zoellick is actually proposing that the world's biggest economies should consider using gold as an indicator to help set foreign exchange rates.
#11 Unfortunately, the financial problems of the U.S. government look like they are only going to get worse. According to the Wall Street Journal, in order to repay maturing bonds and finance the budget deficit, the U.S. government will have to borrow 4.2 trillion dollars over the next year. If other nations decide that they are tired of the games and that they are going to stop lending so much money to the U.S. government, where will all that money come from? Would the Federal Reserve step in and monetize most of it?
The truth is that the United States financial system is starting to come apart at the seams. America simply cannot run a half trillion dollar trade deficit and a trillion dollar federal government budget deficit each year indefinitely. There is no way in the world that those twin deficits are sustainable.
If the Federal Reserve thinks that it can solve these problems by printing up a bunch of money and throwing it on to the table they are sadly mistaken. The main thing that is going to do is cause a dramatic drop in the faith that other nations have in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt.
But without faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt, the world financial system is headed for a world of hurt. If the rest of the world starts rejecting U.S. dollars and U.S. Treasuries, the fallout will be horrifying.
Not only that, but if we do start to see a full-out currency war with nation after nation "competitively devaluing" their currencies, we might see faith being lost in all paper currencies. If that happens it will create a financial horror of unprecedented proportions.
So let us hope that cooler heads prevail and that we don't see a full-fledged currency war break out. Let us hope that faith in the U.S. dollar and other major currencies remains high for as long as possible.
Because once the "tipping point" comes, there will simply be no putting the toothpaste back into the tube.
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Fiscal Commission Report Ignites New Debate Over Tackling Debt
So now maybe we'll find out who's serious about attacking the federal debt.
With the proposal released Wednesday by the heads of the bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to look at ways to tackle the nation's looming fiscal crisis, it's going to be harder for lawmakers to take a pass when asked what they would do.
By proposing $ 3.8 trillion dollars in spending reductions by 2020 - either through program cuts or tax increases - former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles have in effect rolled a live grenade into the debate over the deficit.
Three-fourths of the reductions would come in the form of cuts to politically sacrosanct programs like defense, Social Security, Medicare and farm subsidies. The final quarter would materialize by raising the gas tax, and doing away with popular deductions like those for home mortgages. Meanwhile, most income tax rates would be lowered, through an overhaul of the tax code.
The initial reaction has been mostly negative, with both liberals and conservatives screaming objections. In the words of the AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka: the plans authors "just told working Americans to 'Drop Dead'... Especially in these tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare."
The conservative group, Americans for Tax Reform: "It confirms what everyone has known - this commission is merely an excuse to raise net taxes on the American people." It warned that signing on to the plan would violate the anti-tax pledge many incoming Republican members of Congress, and some Democrats, have made.
The association representing the pharmaceutical industry said the recommendations on Medicare would undermine economic growth and job creation.
Among elected officials, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly labeled the plan "unacceptable" and Democrat and Senate Budget Committee member Richard Durbin of Illinois said he wouldn't vote for it.
But there were a few receptive signs. Senate Budget Committee Chairman, Democrat Kent Conrad, said on ABC this morning, "there's no way of doing it that's not controversial or difficult." But in a fatalistic bow to political realism, Conrad added: "If some of us have to sacrifice a political career to get this country back on track, then so be it." He challenged the critics on his side of the aisle to come up with alternatives, rather than just shooting the plan down.
And outgoing Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, a budget expert in his party, called the proposal "a genuine product that deserves very serious attention."
Perhaps most significant, and setting up a clear contrast with Pelosi, President Obama told reporters covering his meeting with global leaders in South Korea, "Before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts. I think we have to be straight with the American people."
Most members of Congress have yet to weigh in. And the historical odds against taking action, especially bold action like what Bowles and Simpson recommend, are long. But the grenade has been rolled into the middle of the room, underlining the message from many voters in last week's midterm elections - that it's time for Washington to get serious, and candid, about getting the nation's fiscal house in order.
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With the proposal released Wednesday by the heads of the bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to look at ways to tackle the nation's looming fiscal crisis, it's going to be harder for lawmakers to take a pass when asked what they would do.
By proposing $ 3.8 trillion dollars in spending reductions by 2020 - either through program cuts or tax increases - former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles have in effect rolled a live grenade into the debate over the deficit.
Three-fourths of the reductions would come in the form of cuts to politically sacrosanct programs like defense, Social Security, Medicare and farm subsidies. The final quarter would materialize by raising the gas tax, and doing away with popular deductions like those for home mortgages. Meanwhile, most income tax rates would be lowered, through an overhaul of the tax code.
The initial reaction has been mostly negative, with both liberals and conservatives screaming objections. In the words of the AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka: the plans authors "just told working Americans to 'Drop Dead'... Especially in these tough economic times, it is unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare."
The conservative group, Americans for Tax Reform: "It confirms what everyone has known - this commission is merely an excuse to raise net taxes on the American people." It warned that signing on to the plan would violate the anti-tax pledge many incoming Republican members of Congress, and some Democrats, have made.
The association representing the pharmaceutical industry said the recommendations on Medicare would undermine economic growth and job creation.
Among elected officials, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly labeled the plan "unacceptable" and Democrat and Senate Budget Committee member Richard Durbin of Illinois said he wouldn't vote for it.
But there were a few receptive signs. Senate Budget Committee Chairman, Democrat Kent Conrad, said on ABC this morning, "there's no way of doing it that's not controversial or difficult." But in a fatalistic bow to political realism, Conrad added: "If some of us have to sacrifice a political career to get this country back on track, then so be it." He challenged the critics on his side of the aisle to come up with alternatives, rather than just shooting the plan down.
And outgoing Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, a budget expert in his party, called the proposal "a genuine product that deserves very serious attention."
Perhaps most significant, and setting up a clear contrast with Pelosi, President Obama told reporters covering his meeting with global leaders in South Korea, "Before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts. I think we have to be straight with the American people."
Most members of Congress have yet to weigh in. And the historical odds against taking action, especially bold action like what Bowles and Simpson recommend, are long. But the grenade has been rolled into the middle of the room, underlining the message from many voters in last week's midterm elections - that it's time for Washington to get serious, and candid, about getting the nation's fiscal house in order.
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Fiscal Commission Proposes Big Cuts, Tax Reform to Reduce U.S. Debt
The Fiscal Commission charged with charting a path toward a balanced federal budget released a draft report Wednesday, calling for cuts to Social Security, broad changes to the tax code and cuts in spending across the ledger.
This draft is the work of chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Eskine Bowles, a chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. The panel is supposed to submit a final recommendation to Congress by Dec. 1, but only once 14 of 18 members agree on the plan.
We're gathering reactions to the draft report here. The proposal is embedded below:
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This draft is the work of chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Eskine Bowles, a chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. The panel is supposed to submit a final recommendation to Congress by Dec. 1, but only once 14 of 18 members agree on the plan.
We're gathering reactions to the draft report here. The proposal is embedded below:
Reactions to the Fiscal Commissions Draft Report
- Yes, the Entitlement Commission Was an Unforced Error by the Obama Administration
- Grasping Reality with Both Hands | | Nov 10, 2010
- At the time I asked why you would take a budget arsonist like Alan Simpson and give him a Fire Chief hat. I never got a good answer.
- "No one thinks this is the final deal."
- Marginal Revolution | | Nov 10, 2010
- No one thinks this is the final deal. I would say evaluate this as you would a movie trailer: will it get people to take the next step of thinking about a ticket purchase? The top 23 percent tax rate is like the quickly cut scene with the rolling boulder, the skimpily clad girl, the grinning enemy, and the face of the star.
- Drop Everything: The Simpson-Bowles Breakthrough
- The Atlantic: The Daily Dish | | Nov 10, 2010
- It really does hit what the Dish regards as key themes for a new fiscal order: 1986-style tax reform (largely removing deductions and lowering rates); serious defense retrenchment; focusing social security on the truly needy and raising the retirement age; hard cost-controls in Medicare; a real populist attack on government waste.
- Panel Chairmen Recommend Cutting Federal Spending by $200 Billion
- Wall Street Journal | | Nov 10, 2010
- "I told them that there are things in there that inspire me, and there are things in there that I hate like the devil hates holy water. I'm not going to vote for this thing," Durbin said.
- A truly radical debt reduction scheme
- Salon: How the World Works | | Nov 10, 2010
- How do you evaluate a proposal that has zero chance of ever becoming reality? The release today of a draft report from President Obama's Fiscal Deficit Commission poses just such a question. It is pure fantasy -- a blueprint for reducing health care costs, rejiggering Social Security, completely revamping the tax code, shrinking government, cutting defense spending and guaranteeing that each and every American gets a pony.
- Not Far Enough
- National Review: The Corner | | Nov 10, 2010
- While it doesn’t seem to pull punches on how desperate our fiscal condition has become, I can already see it’s not going far enough. Their goal is to eliminate annual federal deficits in 30 years!
- There is no report from the fiscal commission
- Washington Post: Ezra Klein | | Nov 10, 2010
- The co-chairmen have some interesting policy ideas for how to balance the budget, but as of yet, they've not made any discernible progress on the political deadlock preventing us from balancing the budget. And it's the deadlock, not the policy questions, that they were asked to solve.
- Debt Commission Chairmen Seek To Head Off Leaks, Put Positive Spin On Report
- Talking Points Memo | | Nov 10, 2010
- The White House's debt commission co-chairs were not planning on publicly releasing their preliminary recommendations, at least not in such a hurried fashion. But the commissioners' reactions to their eye-popping proposals weren't exactly positive. And so, concerned about potential leaks and negative press, the co-chairs decided to unveil it and get ahead of the spin, according to a source with knowledge of the proceedings.
- Unserious People
- New York Times: The Conscience of a Liberal | | Nov 10, 2010
- OK, let’s say goodbye to the deficit commission. If you’re sincerely worried about the US fiscal future — and there’s good reason to be — you don’t propose a plan that involves large cuts in income taxes. Even if those cuts are offset by supposed elimination of tax breaks elsewhere, balancing the budget is hard enough without giving out a lot of goodies — goodies that fairly obviously, even without having the details, would go largely to the very affluent.
- Judd Gregg on the Fiscal Commission's report
- gregg.senate.gov | | Nov 10, 2010
- The proposal that the Co-Chairmen of the Commission have put forward is an aggressive and comprehensive plan for getting federal spending, deficits and the debt under control. ... It is critical to our nation’s future that we take action that puts the country and our children’s future back on sound financial ground. This will not be the final proposal, but it is a significant step down the path of establishing fiscal responsibility
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Obama Deficit Commission Criticized for Proposals to Slash Social Security, Medicare
The co-chairmen of the bipartisan presidential deficit commission released a list of recommendations Wednesday on ways to reduce the nation’s deficit by $4 trillion by 2020. Co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have proposed raising the retirement age for Social Security to 69 by the year 2075, decreasing the cost of living benefits for Social Security recipients, imposing new limits on the Medicare health insurance program, and ending several middle-class tax breaks. We speak with economist Robert Kuttner.
Guest:
Many of the proposals read like a wish list for the Republican Party, including the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the capping of jury awards in malpractice cases, and a major reduction in corporate income taxes.
But the commission is also making significant cuts to the Pentagon budget. The draft proposals call for the closing of one-third of the nation’s overseas military bases, a temporary freeze on Defense Department salaries, and a reduction on the Pentagon’s reliance on private contractors.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka slammed the commission’s proposals. He said, quote, "The chairmen of the Deficit Commission just told working Americans to 'drop dead.' Especially in these tough economic times," Trumka said, it is, quote, "unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare."
The commission’s co-chair, Erskine Bowles, said Wednesday that the nation is facing an economic crisis if the budget deficit is not addressed.
ERSKINE BOWLES: We are on the most predictable path towards an economic crisis that I can imagine. The path we’re on today is not sustainable. And I don’t know a soul on this commission or anywhere else in the Congress that believes it is. The arithmetic is compelling. This debt is like a cancer that will truly destroy this country from within if we don’t fix it, and we can’t grow ourself out of this problem. We could have double-digit growth for decades and not solve this problem. We can’t tax our way out of this problem, and we can’t cut our way out of this problem. It’s going to take some combination thereof.
JUAN GONZALEZ: To talk more about the deficit commission’s proposals, we’re joined by the journalist and economist Robert Kuttner. He’s the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine. His latest book is called A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Kuttner.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for having me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Your reaction to the preliminary proposals, because obviously the commission has not yet even voted on these proposals. This is sort of the outline of what they’re considering. Your reaction?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, the only thing worse than the economics is the politics. The economics are totally perverse. Bowles talks about being on a path to an economic crisis. Of course, we’re in an economic crisis. We’re in a prolonged recession that bears more resemblance really to a depression. And you cannot get out of a depression by austerity. The idea that you should have an arbitrary set of cuts in the deficit at a time when you need more public spending is totally perverse. It’s the economics of Herbert Hoover. It’s the politics of the Republican right. And it’s one more indication of the capture of the Obama administration by Wall Street.
I mean, Erskine Bowles gets over $300,000 a year for attending a few meetings of Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, on whose board he sits, so he gets more money in board fees than 99 percent of Americans earn. And you’ve got three privately funded commissions by the Peterson Foundation, Pete Peterson, proposing the same stuff. It’s intended to create a drumbeat to carry out a wish list that has long been the goal of fiscal conservatives, that has nothing to do with this crisis. Social Security is in surplus for the next 27 years. So, the idea that you can somehow get the budget closer to balance by cutting Social Security is perverse. It’s politically insane.
And if the President had the kind of spine that we hoped he had when we elected him, he would be saying, "No way are we going to balance the budget on the backs of working people." Instead, I think the risk is that the President is going to embrace some version of this. And the hope is that the four progressives on the commission, three of whom have already said "no way," plus Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee who’s on the commission, will view this as a threat to his prerogatives as a Senate committee chairman. The best thing about this commission is that maybe it will deadlock.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you say the four progressives, who are the other progressives that you are expecting to stand up on these issues?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, Jan Schakowsky, who’s a member of the Democratic House leadership, she’s a very progressive member of Congress from Chicago; Xavier Becerra, also a progressive; and Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois. They have said "no way." Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union, is on the commission. Andy is a bit of a free spirit. Andy loves to see if there can be some kind of a deal. But I think this particular deal will even stick in Stern’s craw. So, I think the hope is that the Republicans, some of them, will say, "Well, nothing that reduces defense spending or reduces tax loopholes are we going to support," and the liberals on the commission will hang tough and say, "No way are we going to cut Social Security and Medicare."
I think the problem is that the editorialists of this country—if you read this morning’s New York Times editorial—are saying, "Well, gee, anything that the left and the right don’t like must be pretty good." And that’s exactly wrong. I mean, this is a case where the so-called center just completely has it wrong. You cannot get out of a depression by having deeper cuts in spending. And I think if you look at the criticism of the Federal Reserve policy of buying treasuries because it doesn’t know what else to do, in the hope that that will lower interest rates and somehow stimulate recovery, the Fed is doing that as a last resort because Congress is opposed to increasing social investment. The only way you can really get out of a prolonged slump like this is to increase social investment in job creation, in the infrastructure, in the clean energy that the country needs. And yet that path seems to be blocked. And instead of fighting for some degree of public investment, Obama, who, after all, appointed this commission, is at risk of embracing at least some of its proposals.
So I think the only thing that’s going to block this—and we heard some of this from Rich Trumka—the progressive movement needs to put forward its own version of a budget that would cut defense spending, cut tax loopholes, insist on suspending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and dramatically increase social investment, and explain to the American people why that’s a better route out of the real crisis that we’re in. There’s one resource I want to commend to all of your viewers and listeners. It’s a new website, ourfiscalfuture.org, which proposes a counter-strategy for getting the economy out of this mess. That’s a coalition of progressive think tanks—Demos, where I’m a fellow, Economic Policy Institute, Century Foundation. And we have a huge fight on our hands, because the other side is investing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in a propaganda effort on behalf of austerity. It’s backed by Wall Street. And all we can do is try and argue that this whole set of proposals is bad economics and bad politics for the Obama administration and the Democrats.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Robert Kuttner, one of the arguments of those who would support many of these cuts are saying that this will allow the government to further cut the nominal tax rates for—not only for high income, but for middle-class Americans, as well. But isn’t the reality—I mean, there was a time in this country when the highest tax brackets, in the 1950s, were being taxed at a 90 percent rate. Now they’re down into the mid-thirties, and they think that that is too high a rate, and they want it lowered further. What about this tax policy that now, for years, has continued to reduce the tax rates for the highest-earning Americans in the country?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Sure. Well, the Alice in Wonderland character of this whole exercise is demonstrated by the fact that, on the one hand, they’re talking about some kind of a tax deal where you cut loopholes and you raise rates—or lower rates. And by the way, one of the so-called loopholes that they want to close is the child tax credit. Hundreds of millions of dollars of relief for working poor people, where you get a refundable tax credit to help you raise your kids, that’s one of the supposed loopholes that the commission wants to get rid of. That’s crazy. Also, the idea that you cut loopholes and then cut rates, that produces no net increase in revenue. It simply reshuffles the deck.
And the other thing that’s deceptive is that at the same moment that the Republicans on the panel are proposing this deal, they’re also demanding that the Bush tax cuts from 2001, which expire at the end of this year, be extended not just for the 98 percent of Americans who make less than $250,000 a year, as President Obama proposes, but for very, very rich people. Now, continuing those tax cuts for very rich people would add almost a trillion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years, and yet the commission is treating that as absolutely untouchable, because there’s no way the Republicans would buy into that. So, you’re absolutely right. I mean, if we want to do something about the deficit in the long run—and we should not be doing anything about it in the short run. In the short run, with the economy in the condition that it’s in, we need more deficit spending, not less. But if we want to deal with the deficit in the long run, restore higher tax rates on the people who got us into this mess, who are still making an absolute killing and, unlike working people, who can afford to pay higher taxes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Also, I’d like to ask you—you were mentioning the people who got us into this mess. Clearly, the enormous amounts of speculation that has been occurring—and the financial speculation has been growing exponentially, not only in the United States, but across the world, on markets. There’s never any kind of a discussion of being able to tax stock transactions on all of these various markets, which obviously, if these companies want to continue to engage or investors want to continue to engage in speculative activity, why not have the government tax it as a means of being able to close our deficit? But that’s never somehow discussed.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, no, and it’s not even in the proposal. And again, here’s Erskine Bowles. He’s on the board of directors on one of the top five banks that would actually be taxed if you taxed financial speculation. And he’s the chair of this, appointed by President Obama. And that proposal is nowhere to the seen. I would call that a conflict of interest. I mean, if Obama had put, you know, Rich Trumka as one of the two co-chairs, the right would be screaming bloody murder, and so would Wall Street. And yet, Wall Street got one of its people, not as the Republican co-chair, but as the Democrat co-chair.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Robert Kuttner, journalist and economist. He’s also the co-editor of The American Prospect magazine and the author of A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future. And we’ll continue to be covering this issue of what happens with the deficit commission proposals.
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Guest:
Robert Kuttner, Journalist and economist. He is the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future.
JUAN GONZALEZ: On Wednesday, the co-chairmen of the bipartisan presidential deficit commission released a list of recommendations on ways to reduce the nation’s deficit by $4 trillion by 2020. Co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have proposed raising the retirement age for Social Security to 69 by the year 2075, [decreasing] the cost of living benefits for Social Security recipients, imposing new limits on Medicare health insurance programs, and ending several middle-class tax breaks.Many of the proposals read like a wish list for the Republican Party, including the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the capping of jury awards in malpractice cases, and a major reduction in corporate income taxes.
But the commission is also making significant cuts to the Pentagon budget. The draft proposals call for the closing of one-third of the nation’s overseas military bases, a temporary freeze on Defense Department salaries, and a reduction on the Pentagon’s reliance on private contractors.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka slammed the commission’s proposals. He said, quote, "The chairmen of the Deficit Commission just told working Americans to 'drop dead.' Especially in these tough economic times," Trumka said, it is, quote, "unconscionable to be proposing cuts to the critical economic lifelines for working people, Social Security and Medicare."
The commission’s co-chair, Erskine Bowles, said Wednesday that the nation is facing an economic crisis if the budget deficit is not addressed.
ERSKINE BOWLES: We are on the most predictable path towards an economic crisis that I can imagine. The path we’re on today is not sustainable. And I don’t know a soul on this commission or anywhere else in the Congress that believes it is. The arithmetic is compelling. This debt is like a cancer that will truly destroy this country from within if we don’t fix it, and we can’t grow ourself out of this problem. We could have double-digit growth for decades and not solve this problem. We can’t tax our way out of this problem, and we can’t cut our way out of this problem. It’s going to take some combination thereof.
JUAN GONZALEZ: To talk more about the deficit commission’s proposals, we’re joined by the journalist and economist Robert Kuttner. He’s the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine. His latest book is called A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Kuttner.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for having me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Your reaction to the preliminary proposals, because obviously the commission has not yet even voted on these proposals. This is sort of the outline of what they’re considering. Your reaction?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, the only thing worse than the economics is the politics. The economics are totally perverse. Bowles talks about being on a path to an economic crisis. Of course, we’re in an economic crisis. We’re in a prolonged recession that bears more resemblance really to a depression. And you cannot get out of a depression by austerity. The idea that you should have an arbitrary set of cuts in the deficit at a time when you need more public spending is totally perverse. It’s the economics of Herbert Hoover. It’s the politics of the Republican right. And it’s one more indication of the capture of the Obama administration by Wall Street.
I mean, Erskine Bowles gets over $300,000 a year for attending a few meetings of Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, on whose board he sits, so he gets more money in board fees than 99 percent of Americans earn. And you’ve got three privately funded commissions by the Peterson Foundation, Pete Peterson, proposing the same stuff. It’s intended to create a drumbeat to carry out a wish list that has long been the goal of fiscal conservatives, that has nothing to do with this crisis. Social Security is in surplus for the next 27 years. So, the idea that you can somehow get the budget closer to balance by cutting Social Security is perverse. It’s politically insane.
And if the President had the kind of spine that we hoped he had when we elected him, he would be saying, "No way are we going to balance the budget on the backs of working people." Instead, I think the risk is that the President is going to embrace some version of this. And the hope is that the four progressives on the commission, three of whom have already said "no way," plus Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee who’s on the commission, will view this as a threat to his prerogatives as a Senate committee chairman. The best thing about this commission is that maybe it will deadlock.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you say the four progressives, who are the other progressives that you are expecting to stand up on these issues?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, Jan Schakowsky, who’s a member of the Democratic House leadership, she’s a very progressive member of Congress from Chicago; Xavier Becerra, also a progressive; and Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois. They have said "no way." Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union, is on the commission. Andy is a bit of a free spirit. Andy loves to see if there can be some kind of a deal. But I think this particular deal will even stick in Stern’s craw. So, I think the hope is that the Republicans, some of them, will say, "Well, nothing that reduces defense spending or reduces tax loopholes are we going to support," and the liberals on the commission will hang tough and say, "No way are we going to cut Social Security and Medicare."
I think the problem is that the editorialists of this country—if you read this morning’s New York Times editorial—are saying, "Well, gee, anything that the left and the right don’t like must be pretty good." And that’s exactly wrong. I mean, this is a case where the so-called center just completely has it wrong. You cannot get out of a depression by having deeper cuts in spending. And I think if you look at the criticism of the Federal Reserve policy of buying treasuries because it doesn’t know what else to do, in the hope that that will lower interest rates and somehow stimulate recovery, the Fed is doing that as a last resort because Congress is opposed to increasing social investment. The only way you can really get out of a prolonged slump like this is to increase social investment in job creation, in the infrastructure, in the clean energy that the country needs. And yet that path seems to be blocked. And instead of fighting for some degree of public investment, Obama, who, after all, appointed this commission, is at risk of embracing at least some of its proposals.
So I think the only thing that’s going to block this—and we heard some of this from Rich Trumka—the progressive movement needs to put forward its own version of a budget that would cut defense spending, cut tax loopholes, insist on suspending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and dramatically increase social investment, and explain to the American people why that’s a better route out of the real crisis that we’re in. There’s one resource I want to commend to all of your viewers and listeners. It’s a new website, ourfiscalfuture.org, which proposes a counter-strategy for getting the economy out of this mess. That’s a coalition of progressive think tanks—Demos, where I’m a fellow, Economic Policy Institute, Century Foundation. And we have a huge fight on our hands, because the other side is investing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in a propaganda effort on behalf of austerity. It’s backed by Wall Street. And all we can do is try and argue that this whole set of proposals is bad economics and bad politics for the Obama administration and the Democrats.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Robert Kuttner, one of the arguments of those who would support many of these cuts are saying that this will allow the government to further cut the nominal tax rates for—not only for high income, but for middle-class Americans, as well. But isn’t the reality—I mean, there was a time in this country when the highest tax brackets, in the 1950s, were being taxed at a 90 percent rate. Now they’re down into the mid-thirties, and they think that that is too high a rate, and they want it lowered further. What about this tax policy that now, for years, has continued to reduce the tax rates for the highest-earning Americans in the country?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Sure. Well, the Alice in Wonderland character of this whole exercise is demonstrated by the fact that, on the one hand, they’re talking about some kind of a tax deal where you cut loopholes and you raise rates—or lower rates. And by the way, one of the so-called loopholes that they want to close is the child tax credit. Hundreds of millions of dollars of relief for working poor people, where you get a refundable tax credit to help you raise your kids, that’s one of the supposed loopholes that the commission wants to get rid of. That’s crazy. Also, the idea that you cut loopholes and then cut rates, that produces no net increase in revenue. It simply reshuffles the deck.
And the other thing that’s deceptive is that at the same moment that the Republicans on the panel are proposing this deal, they’re also demanding that the Bush tax cuts from 2001, which expire at the end of this year, be extended not just for the 98 percent of Americans who make less than $250,000 a year, as President Obama proposes, but for very, very rich people. Now, continuing those tax cuts for very rich people would add almost a trillion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years, and yet the commission is treating that as absolutely untouchable, because there’s no way the Republicans would buy into that. So, you’re absolutely right. I mean, if we want to do something about the deficit in the long run—and we should not be doing anything about it in the short run. In the short run, with the economy in the condition that it’s in, we need more deficit spending, not less. But if we want to deal with the deficit in the long run, restore higher tax rates on the people who got us into this mess, who are still making an absolute killing and, unlike working people, who can afford to pay higher taxes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Also, I’d like to ask you—you were mentioning the people who got us into this mess. Clearly, the enormous amounts of speculation that has been occurring—and the financial speculation has been growing exponentially, not only in the United States, but across the world, on markets. There’s never any kind of a discussion of being able to tax stock transactions on all of these various markets, which obviously, if these companies want to continue to engage or investors want to continue to engage in speculative activity, why not have the government tax it as a means of being able to close our deficit? But that’s never somehow discussed.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, no, and it’s not even in the proposal. And again, here’s Erskine Bowles. He’s on the board of directors on one of the top five banks that would actually be taxed if you taxed financial speculation. And he’s the chair of this, appointed by President Obama. And that proposal is nowhere to the seen. I would call that a conflict of interest. I mean, if Obama had put, you know, Rich Trumka as one of the two co-chairs, the right would be screaming bloody murder, and so would Wall Street. And yet, Wall Street got one of its people, not as the Republican co-chair, but as the Democrat co-chair.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Robert Kuttner, journalist and economist. He’s also the co-editor of The American Prospect magazine and the author of A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future. And we’ll continue to be covering this issue of what happens with the deficit commission proposals.
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Paul Wilson judges wicket from a different angle
When Southern Lakes junior Paul Wilson says his goal is to umpire Test cricket you tend to believe its possible.
Wilson left his Kilaben Bay home as an unheralded young quick and lobbed at the Adelaide doorstep of Test great Rod Marsh to pester old "iron gloves" for a spot in the Australian Cricket Academy.
Wilson's art of persuasion eventually forced Marsh to take a punt on the then 19-year-old.
The man known as "Blocker" went on to play 51 Sheffield Shield games for South Australia and Western Australia and one Test for Australia in 1998 against India and 11 one-day internationals.
Wilson will be the special guest today at the DeCourcy lunch at the Newcastle Club. The lunch is named for the late Lambton-New Lambton, NSW and Australian player Jim DeCourcy.
Wilson built a reputation based on persistence and determination and since 2006 he has been using those traits to carve out a career as an umpire.
Wilson has umpired three Sheffield Shield matches since making his debut last November in a game between NSW and Western Australia at the WACA Ground, in Perth.
He will officiate his fourth next Wednesday when NSW host a Tasmanian side featuring Test skipper Ricky Ponting at the SCG.
Although an international career may be years away, the Toronto boy has set his sights on the big time.
When asked how the baggy green cap would compare to umpiring a Test match, Wilson said: "It's a different type of pride but still one of those things I'm aiming for.
"I think if I get to that point I'll know how damn hard it's been.
"I know how hard it was to play a Test match and I know certainly how hard it's going to be to umpire one as well, so I'm just looking forward to the journey."
Wilson did not score a run or take a wicket in his solitary Test match, which was played in the middle of a golden era in Australia cricket where he competed for spots against Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Michael Kasprowicz and Paul Reiffel.
Australia's world ranking has slipped in recent years but Wilson says the country's fast bowling stocks are still of high quality.
"I certainly believe the state of cricket in Australia is very healthy," he said.
"From what I see as an umpire in first-class cricket I think Australian cricket is in very safe hands."
Wilson is the last Novocastrian to don the baggy green cap but several Newcastle-bred pacemen are roaming around looking to follow in his footsteps.
"Young Michael Hogan in Perth is another and is going quite well and obviously Mark Cameron is another Newcastle guy who's doing well," he said.
"The depth is there with [Peter] Siddle, [Mitchell] Johnson, [Doug] Bollinger and [Ben] Hilfenhaus.
"There's enough there around the country."
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Wilson left his Kilaben Bay home as an unheralded young quick and lobbed at the Adelaide doorstep of Test great Rod Marsh to pester old "iron gloves" for a spot in the Australian Cricket Academy.
Wilson's art of persuasion eventually forced Marsh to take a punt on the then 19-year-old.
The man known as "Blocker" went on to play 51 Sheffield Shield games for South Australia and Western Australia and one Test for Australia in 1998 against India and 11 one-day internationals.
Wilson will be the special guest today at the DeCourcy lunch at the Newcastle Club. The lunch is named for the late Lambton-New Lambton, NSW and Australian player Jim DeCourcy.
Wilson built a reputation based on persistence and determination and since 2006 he has been using those traits to carve out a career as an umpire.
Wilson has umpired three Sheffield Shield matches since making his debut last November in a game between NSW and Western Australia at the WACA Ground, in Perth.
He will officiate his fourth next Wednesday when NSW host a Tasmanian side featuring Test skipper Ricky Ponting at the SCG.
Although an international career may be years away, the Toronto boy has set his sights on the big time.
When asked how the baggy green cap would compare to umpiring a Test match, Wilson said: "It's a different type of pride but still one of those things I'm aiming for.
"I think if I get to that point I'll know how damn hard it's been.
"I know how hard it was to play a Test match and I know certainly how hard it's going to be to umpire one as well, so I'm just looking forward to the journey."
Wilson did not score a run or take a wicket in his solitary Test match, which was played in the middle of a golden era in Australia cricket where he competed for spots against Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Michael Kasprowicz and Paul Reiffel.
Australia's world ranking has slipped in recent years but Wilson says the country's fast bowling stocks are still of high quality.
"I certainly believe the state of cricket in Australia is very healthy," he said.
"From what I see as an umpire in first-class cricket I think Australian cricket is in very safe hands."
Wilson is the last Novocastrian to don the baggy green cap but several Newcastle-bred pacemen are roaming around looking to follow in his footsteps.
"Young Michael Hogan in Perth is another and is going quite well and obviously Mark Cameron is another Newcastle guy who's doing well," he said.
"The depth is there with [Peter] Siddle, [Mitchell] Johnson, [Doug] Bollinger and [Ben] Hilfenhaus.
"There's enough there around the country."
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