Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist. His new media company, Brave New Films, is currently focused on making short videos like the FOX Attacks (FoxAttacks.com) and The REAL McCain (TheRealMcCain.com), which educate and empower viewers to take action and have been seen by millions.
In 2007, 82 Democratic members of Congress signed a pledge. They would never again vote to fund the war in Iraq without plans for troop withdrawal.
Republican critics accused them of demagoguing the war. Of using our soldiers as a political pawns, of not meaning what they said.
Those who signed that pledge need to cast their vote against the Supplemental Appropriations Act on Tuesday and prove them wrong.
We may agree or disagree about what needs to be done in Iraq, but a promise is a promise. Anti-war activists have supported these members of Congress because of that 2007 pledge. They knocked on doors and distributed leaflets and donated to their campaigns. They and marched side by side with them as they sought to bring an end to the war that still lingers in Iraq and escalates in Afghanistan, as the new film Rethink Afghanistan documents.
As Digby notes, there were already serious objections to the use of torture in 2002 -- the FBI chief Muller had already refused to let his agents participate in the CIA's "coercive interrogations" in June of 2002 (per Marcy's timeline, the Bybee memo didn't make them legal until August 1).
But it's not like the FBI was the only one who had a problem. On October 1, Major General Michael Dunlavey sent a memo to General James Hill, Commander of US Southern Command, requesting the authority to use "aggressive interrogations techniques" like those use in SERE training. The memo reached Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Joint Staff solicited views of the military services. Here's what came back in November 2002 (PDF):
Air Force: "serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques...Some of these techniques could be construed as 'torture' as that crime is defined by 18 U.S.C 2340." Further, they were concerned that "implementation of these techniques could preclude the ability to prosecute the individuals interrogated," because "Level III techniques will almost certainly result in any statements obtained being declared as coerced and involuntary, and therefore inadmissible....Additionally, the techniques described may be subject to challenge as failing to meet the requirements outlined in military order to treat detainees humanely and to provide them with adequate food, water, shelter and medical treatment." They called for an in-depth legal review.
Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITM): Chief Legal Advisor to the CITF at Gitmo, Maj Sam W. McCahon, writes "Both the utility and the legality of applying certain techniques identified in the memorandum listed above are, in my opinion, questionable. Any policy decision to use the Tier III techniques, or any techniques inconsistent with the analysis herein, will be contrary to my recommendation. The aggressive techniques should not occur at GTMO where both CITF and the intelligence community are conducting interviews and interrogations." He calls for further review and concludes by saying "I cannot advocate any action, interrogation or otherwise, that is predicated upon the principal that all is well if the ends justify the means and others are not aware of how we conduct our business."
One of the factors that frequently limits the value of demonstrations in the modern era is that no matter how many people you pull together, if the media decides it's not going to cover something, the impact is minimal. The teabagger demonstrations were rather small relative to the hype and free media time lavished on them -- Nate Silver estimates that across the country there were 250,000 people attending, with the largest being 7,000. By way of comparison, many demonstrations for immigration reform in the spring of 2006 had more than 300,000 people at a single event.
That probably wouldn't have been a problem for the teabaggers -- right-wing robber barons with professional PR outfits had a long reach into the media, and on an otherwise quiet day, there would have been significant coverage. But as Cillizza notes, nobody factored in the Susan Boyle effect -- a genuine populist phenomenon. I watch a lot of cable news, and it was in heavy rotation all day long. It was all anyone could talk about, and rightfully so. I must've watched it 5 or 6 times myself. How can you not? Despite the petty, mean putdowns by the narcissistic asshole judges (or perhaps because of them), it's impossible not to tear up as you watch her walk on to the stage and take her best shot at the unlikely dream she never gave up on. It's up to 12 million views now [click to watch Susan Boyle].
So bottom line -- nobody cares, Karl. Susan Boyle kicked your ass, too.
Michelle Malkin has a teabagger timeline. She seems to have left a few things out:
December 16, 2007 -- Ron Paul supporters have the first anti-tax Tea Party, reenact dumping of tea into Boston Harbor by tossing banners into a box.
August 2008 -- ChicagoTeaParty.com registered by Zack Christenson, "a producer for a conservative radio talk show host" (Milt Rosengerg) according to the New York Times. On August 28th, he also emails Michelle Malkin after the NRO's Stanley Kurtz goes on his program to talk about his investigation into the Obama/Bill Ayers relationship.
January 25 2009 -- Seattle school teacher, former actress and Young Republican Keli Carender starts her blog, Redistributing Knowledge. Calling herself Liberty Belle, her first post says conservatives need something "BOLD and DIFFERENT and REAL."
January 26 -- In her second post, Liberty Belle says "There are tens of millions of us, if not more. I think if we chose a day to show the world, scary coworkers be damned, that we exist and we are just as passionate about the direction of our country, that we could maybe finally find each other."
February 1 -- FedUpUSA calls for people to send tea bags to members of Congress -- "a Commemorative Tea Party."
February 10 -- At 10:06 am, Liberty Belle says "Anyone in the Seattle area? I would like to stage a Porkulus Protest here." It gets one comment in response. At 12:52 pm, she puts up another post to announce that the protest is on. The first comment comes the next morning.
February 12 -- At 1:28 pm, Steve Beren, the GOP candidate who ran against Jim McDermott in 08 who works for an internet marketing firm, starts promoting the event. Says that Carender has appeared on the Kirby Wilbur and David Boze (KIRO radio) shows. Does not mention that he'll be speaking at the event.
February 12 -- At 2:27 pm, Liberty Belle says she will appear the next day on KIRO radio and announces that Steve Beren will be speaking at the event.
February 15 -- Michelle Malkin picks up Liberty Belle's announcement. Suggests Coloradans need to do the same.
**First rally organized on a three week-old blog with help from folks from Fox News Radio, the Young Republicans, The Young Americans Foundation (CPAC), and a GOP House candidate who works for an internet marketing firm.**
Teabaggers are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that true "grassroots" demonstrations aren't orchestrated by corporate lobbyists. Understandable -- if you didn't have any experience organizing a demonstration that didn't have millions in free PR from Fox News and well-funded GOP fat cats providing a national infrastructure, you wouldn't know the difference.
With your help, we have been able to organize hundreds of Taxpayer Tea Parties across the country, from Santa Barbara, California to Amarillo, Texas, and all the way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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If you are not able to organize or attend a Taxpayer Tea Party, you can still help the cause by donating or buying a t-shirt. You can also spread the word via email, facebook and word of mouth. If you would like to post updates on tea parties in your state, or if you’d like to get in touch with other people planning tea parties, visit our Tea Party HQ. We have created an interactive Google map that you can use to locate a tea party near you!
The "donation" for the Tea Parties page goes to -- you guessed it -- the FreedomWorks Foundation. The "thank you" lettter is signed by Matt Kibbe, President & CEO, who cut his teeth working for Lee Atwater. He was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.
Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute writes about their new poll, which indicates that there is no appetite for the Republican message these days:
Consider this: Four out of five voters think politicians in Washington, D.C., should limit the pay of executives at companies that get federal bailout money. Three in 10 voters embrace the historically un-American notion that government should control the pay for executives of firms that don’t get any cash from Uncle Sam — the kind of trust in government over the private sector that only a few years ago would have seemed laughable. The sentiment may be unprecedented, but so too is the federal assistance to private industries to keep them in business.
Republicans twisted themselves into pretzels yesterday opposing compensation limits to bank executives, despite the fact that 81% of Americans support it. You could see their relief when Melissa Bean and the New Democrat Coalition offered up an amendment to gut the bill -- 165 of them flocked to the floor to join with 63 corporatist Democrats to pass it.
Timothy Geithner's new TALF plan, like all his other plans, seems designed to shovel billions into the coffers of the very same bankers who got rich on the mortgage bubble. When the public gets a glimpse of the tip of this giant iceberg, as they did with the AIG bonuses, they're dismissed as angry rubes who Just Don't Understand How Things Work. But his latest scheme is proof that they are absolutely right.
Despite Geithner's contention that banks are simply "burdened with bad lending decisions," most Americans understand at this point that there was serious fraud involved in the inflation of the mortgage bubble. The Justice Department and the FBI are currently investigating Countrywide for accounting fraud, insider trading and consciously lending money to people they knew couldn't afford to repay it. Meanwhile, AIG is suing Countrywide because they have to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims because Countrywide just flat out lied about the mortgages they were issuing:
United Guaranty said in the complaint that it had reviewed loan files that showed that most mortgages covered by 11 policies for asset-backed securities were either underwritten in violation of Countrywide’s own guidelines or contained defects, such as missing documents, misrepresented credit scores or false social security numbers.
And who has the privilege of paying off AIG's insurance policies? That would be American taxpayers.
Stanford Kurland was the President of Countrywide during its salad days, when the predatory lending practice of low introductory "teasers" inflated Countrywide's mortgage portfolio from $62 billion to $463 billion. Bank of America, which bought Countrywide last year, has already paid out $8.7 billion to settle suits brought by states because of Countrywide's fraudulent practices, including hidden fees and false claims like "no closing costs." The Illinois suit examined one mortgage broker's sales of Countrywide loans and found the "vast majority of the loans had inflated income,almost all without the borrower’s knowledge.”
The White House spin doctors are getting a lot of help this morning from their scribes, trying to sell the point that the $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives is but a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger problem of fixing the economy. Rahm Emanuel says they are a "big distraction." There is tremendous pundit anxiety that the ignorant masses in their blood lust will pervert serious efforts to deal with our economic challenges and make unseemly demands for vengeance.
I live in DC now, and it's a very nice place, insulated from the pressures being felt by the rest of the country. Those economic hardships remain largely invisible here: money still flows to federal employees and government contractors, nearby counties are among the richest in America, and Tina Brown declared that the cultural center has shifted here from New York. It's a world that reveres people in the Obama administration as the new celebrities. The confidence that the American people have expressed in their ability to fix the country's problems is exceeded only by their own.
It's not that people here are unaware of those problems, far from it. But as Krugman says this morning, the "best and the brightest" in the administration are products of the financial system and they have a fundamental belief in its integrity. They think that pumping money into it with no strings attached will solve its maladies, and share the underlying assumption that bankers should continue to profit handsomely.
I chatted with Elijah Cummings briefly yesterday in the hallway at the AIG hearings. He had been the first member in the hearing room, and as others drifted in and out, he was there almost the entire time. I followed him out shortly after Kanjorski dropped the bomb about having known about the AIG bonuses over a month ago, and Liddy confirmed that Ben Bernanke both knew about the bonuses and had approved them. I asked him if Mr. Kanjorski had made him or members of the subcommittee aware of the bonuses at the time.
"I'm not on the subcommittee, I'm a guest today" he said.
I went back and sure enough, he's not on the subcommittee -- he's not even on the Financial Services committee. Cummings is House Oversight, and I assumed he must have a burning question to ask. As it turns out, he did:
The media has been focused on the $165 million installment of the $450 million retention program for AIG Financial Products Division. However, for months, you and I have been going back and forth overall about the one billion dollars retention program that covers thousands of employees throughout AIG.
Then, as Marcy notes this morning, he blows holes in Liddy's story that he was only given the "distasteful" task of paying out contracts he would never have approved. From Liddy's Dec. 5 letter to Cummings:
On September 18, 2008 AIG's compensation committee of the Board of Directors approved retention payments for 168 employees.
Cummings says that he met with Liddy on January 15, and at that time Liddy admitted that under his tenure, he had expanded the retention bonus program to cover 2100 employees. Cummings asked how many retention bonuses Liddy had approved, and he estimated 4500 to 4700. However, that number didn't include bonuses agreed to by managers of other divisions. He asked how much money the company had paid in bonuses in 2008 and how much was scheduled to be paid out in 2009, and Liddy said he didn't know.
Let's underscore that -- Edward Liddy comes to a subcommittee hearing and answers questions by every single member of the subcommittee for hours, called expressly to answer questions about the AIG bonus program, and he's not prepared to answer a question about how much money they've paid out, or how much they will pay out. It is at the very end of the day when Cummings finally gets to ask his questions, and I admit I had to take off and interview Senator Merkley so I wasn't even there at the time, but as far as I could tell it was the first time that day that anybody had asked that question.
We'll be delivering our petition to Congress when Barney Frank's House Financial Services Committee holds a hearing on AIG at 10am tomorrow. You can sign it here and leave your comments.
Andrew Sorkin writes a completely incoherent defense of paying out bonuses to AIG in the New York Times. It would hardly be worth consideration were it not for the fact that it may very well be what Timothy Geithner was thinking when he negotiated the deal to pay the bonuses out in the first place:
A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.
A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave — the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to — they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.’s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it.
So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats, if only to prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.
It certainly explains the white paper obtained by FDL on Sunday which AIG wrote to explain its legal rational for paying the bonuses. Marcy Wheeler interprets it (rightly I believe) as a ransom note: Pay us or we blow the whole thing up.
As Rep. Alan Grayson said yesterday in his chat, "AIG blew up because it was a casino that dabbled in insurance on the side." To date, they've received $173 billion -- billion -- and we've got no idea what they did with it. Now we're being told that Citi needs a "bad bank" too to buy up their toxic assets, after they already received $250 billion -- billion -- in guarantees for their worthless shit in exchange for the low, low price of $7 billion in preferred stock for taxpayers.
And what are Americans--who are losing their jobs and their homes because AIG acted like a casino and taxpayers paid off all their gambling debts--getting?
21% of Americans scramble to pay medical, drug bills
Denise Prosser, 39, has battled cancer since she was a toddler.
Yet Prosser can't afford her next cancer treatment — a radioactive therapy that she's supposed to receive once a year — because she and her husband lost their jobs in December. Without insurance, she has postponed the radiation indefinitely and is taking only half of her asthma medications — sacrifices that often leave her gasping for air and could allow her cancer to come surging back.
She's dying because she lost her job and she can't pay her medical bills. She didn't steal anything so she could get taxpayer money so she can pay lobbyists to get her more taxpayer money--that's AIG.
Remember: Tell members of Congress that you want them to take action here. And join us today at 4:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (1:30 pm Pacific) for a chat with economist James Galbraith, and at later, at 7:00 pm Eastern (4pm Pacific), when Rep. Alan Grayson joins us to talk about the need for bank bailout transparency.
Last night, Timothy Geithner appeared before the House Democratic Caucus and was singularly unimpressive. He was apparently dispatched to absorb Congressional ire about the AIG situation, but didn't say much of substance, according to those who attended the meeting -- he mostly just shook his head and cussed about AIG.
Members of Congress are scoring political points tongue-lashing Wall Street for its role in the economic meltdown, but they are proving less willing to put their campaign money where their mouths are.
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The list of 400 companies that have taken advantage of the $700 billion bailout package includes some of the biggest donors in politics: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, among others. Altogether, TARP recipients doled out $5.2 million to members of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees in the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Bank lobbyists were working through Ellen Tauscher and the New Democrat Coalition, in conjunction with the Blue Dogs, tried to kill the bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to write down mortgages, cutting foreclosures by 20% at no cost to taxpayers. Thanks to a big public outcry, the New Dems backed down and the bill passed the House. A bankruptcy judge in Kansas speaks today about how important it is going to be that it pass the Senate and that judges be given the powers that they need to help deal with an unmanageable crisis.
CQ Politics says that "Democratic Reps. Jim Matheson of Utah and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona have joined a quiet revolt in the House that could slow some of President Obama's fast-moving priorities." This, we are told, is because "The two are among 49 Democrats from congressional districts that backed Republican Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential race and whose support for the Democratic majority's progressive agenda is increasingly not assured."
But is that true? Is this an honest attempt to represent their districts? Or does it have anything to do with the fact that Matheson is a Blue Dog, Giffords is a member of the New Democrat Coalition, and lobbyist money is flowing into their coffers now that they control what legislation gets passsed? Giffords' district is among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. Are they truly representing "conservative" interests, or just open for business?
There's a PR campaign afoot to cast "New Dems" as "centrists," in contrast to more conservative "Blue Dogs." Kagro offers some further clarification to the assertion that there is a big difference between the two on cramdown legislation:
There's a whole host of evidence that Bobby Jindal's story about Katrina from his truly disastrous SOTU rebuttal was, shall we say, fabricated. Ben Smith reports Jindal is walking it back:
A spokeswoman for Bobby Jindal now says the Louisiana governor didn't intend to imply that an anecdote about battling bureaucrats "during Katrina" actually took place during the heat of the rescue effort or directly involved the governor, then a member of Congress.
The spokeswoman, Melissa Sellers, said the story Jindal told in his response to Obama actually took place some days later in Lee's office, as Lee was recounting his frustrations with the bureaucracy to someone else on the telephone.
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"It was days later," Sellers said. "Sheriff Lee was on the phone and the governor came down to visit him. It wasn't that they were standing right down there with the boats."
She said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, "was doing an interview" about the incident with the boats when the governor described him yelling into the phone.
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