The San Diego Experiment

San Diego, California, is a place to keep an eye on as it serves as a laboratory for Movement Conservative experiments in economic malfeasance and runaway plutocracy, helped along by a marvelously kleptocratic and corrupt Democratic contingent. This is the mess Pete Wilson built. The biggest experiment underway right now is how to use Republican controlled major municipalities to eliminate any kind of retirement for workers except 401(k)s. They just might get away with it.

The City of San Diego stopped participating in Social Security system in 1982, when Pete Wilson was mayor, in exchange for a city-funded retirement pension and health care package. City employees do not pay into Social Security or Medicare. The current retirement system is a slightly better than Social Security deal for ordinary long-term employees. Short term employees (less than 10 years of employment) are not vested, so it is a worse deal. For a small number of very long term employees who are at the top of the civil service ladder, especially those in Police, Fire or Life Guard positions, it is a much better deal than Social Security. The people at the top have more opportunities to game the system and maximize their eventual payout. In short, business as usual for the oligarchic kleptocracy.

Hostage Situation

I found myself in close to full agreement with The Shrill One's latest column today, The World as He Finds It.  I thought Krugman's observation that Obama negotiated everything "with himself" before trying to engage others was of a piece with Sean Wilentz's New Republic article about the failure of the Obama movement to achieve anything of worth.  As the Krug notes, echoing Wilentz (my emphasis):

The Failure of Team Obama

I've added two new blogs to my blog roll in the last week - Peter Daou, of "The Daou Report" and HRC campaigns's Internet director, and New Deal 2.0, "A project of the Roosevelt Institute, ND2.0 brings you commentary from the country’s leading thinkers: economists, historians, political scientists, policy experts and elected officials." Right on cue, Jamie Galbraith posts one of his smart, succinct, devastating critiques to ND 2.0:

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure — to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy. ...

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures

Capital Expenditure

One of the most telling things George W. Bush is alleged to have said (I'm too lazy to look up the quote) was that if he had political capital, he was going to spend it. He said this as a comparison to his father's administration, which he believed lost political capital because it wouldn't spend it. ("Wouldn't be prudent!")

And, boy howdy, did he ever. He spent every last cent of political capital he gained from 9/11 to pursue his wars and cement his class's stranglehold on the nation's wealth - and pursuit of both happily coincided. Revolting as his actions were, he did what any strong, smart politician does, namely waste no opportunity in which to advance his interests, because at some point, you'll be out of power and you will no longer have those opportunities. That's what it means to spend capital. It is an investment in anticipated future returns, something that may begin as a debt but (through the miracle of compound interest and good borrowing terms) may turn into a very large asset indeed. If nothing else, your capital may get others to toss some of theirs into the kitty and then you can hold a "liquidity event" and cash out. The key here is using capital to raise more capital. It is an entrepreneurial mode and can fail catastrophically (see, LBJ, Vietnam) when a venture goes bad.

On Guantanamo

National Journal asked for contributors to respond to the question "What Do To About Guantanamo?" There are currently 8 responses, all interesting in their own way, some more for what it says about the commenter than what it says about the conundrum of Guantanamo. Col. W. Patrick Lang (Ret.) of Sic Semper Tyrannis posted the following response:

Guantanamo has become a kind of national Rohrschach test for the American people.

It is a place seen within the mind's eye as a projection of what is inside us. I have been impressed since just after 9/11 with the depth of the illusion of personal security within which most Americans lived before the attacks. A friend called then from across the country to say that "now we all live in your world," referring I suppose to the life I had lead in the security services. The caller was a well traveled international businessman. The "blue funk" level was incredible for months. People acted as though each and every one of them stood on the ramparts on watch against the Saracen hordes. I remember repeatedly being stared at with hostility on the DC Metrorail system by men who could not take their eyes off the modest beard I then had. Supposedly grown up people would say things like "Say Muzlim, not Muslim!" Why? They imagined that to pronounce words correctly made one a kind of collaborator.

Now, we have the media encouraged phenomenon of the masses' inability to deal with the idea of prisoners charged, tried and imprisoned on our soil. This is fear of the boogy-man come back once again. This is behavior for children who need a night light. I heard a member of Congress from Kansas say on the floor of the US Senate that prisoners could not be sent to Leavenworth because the "purity" of the post and Army school at Ft. Leavenworth would be ruined by their presence. No matter that the federal prison that adjoins Fort Leavenworth is full of some of the worst people who ever lived.

And then there is the issue of the actual guilt or innocence of some of those now held without charge by the United States. When people here are asked if they think that all those held in our prison in Cuba are guilty, they generally fall silent, unable to respond. Of those who do, many of them clearly do not care if the imprisoned are guilty of anything. They might be... They are Muzlims... Keep them there and then my children will be safe...

Boumedienne, the Algerian former prisoner now living in France is a good person to remember. He, clearly, had done nothing wrong, but was imprisoned by us without charge for SEVEN YEARS. Neverheless, most Americans do not care...

It is going to take a long time for us to live this down. We should get on with it.

We should get on with it. This is what ties Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to black sites and extraordinary rendition - the inability of the people in power and the faux-innocents in the public to come to terms with the fact that atrocities were performed by Americans under our flag as an explicit policy of our government.

We cannot pretend it didn't happen. We cannot continue to squall that we're just protecting ourselves from the current Big Bad of the zeitgeist. We cannot pretend that we're doing good by covering up the evidence of evil. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened enough to elect a Black president while we obsess about the "Muzlim" other.

Guantanamo, and all the other festering pockets of national shame connected to it, will not go away on its own. It cannot be quietly swept away, which is what the current administration would probably prefer to happen precisely because it is a reflection of something that this nation is, not even some dark side or ignorant underbelly, something not-US. It is inherent in our language, which is to say in our way of life.

Wittgenstein's observation, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably," gets to the heart of the language game that is "Guantanamo." Using that (or Abu Ghraib, or extraordinary rendition, or war crimes) as a starting point, and you will be drawn into the hall of mirrors populated by those who both react to the images and create the new reflective surfaces that contribute to the sense of inexorability. There is the argument about security, there is the advice about not being hasty, there is the concern over precedent, there is the outrage over violations, each participant playing his or her role in the language game.

I do not mean that this is "just words" or that people are merely "playing" at being scared or cautious or concerned or outraged. Part of the language game, what makes it tenacious and gives it strength, it that it is real, the warp of the social fabric. Am I not now this very instant engaging in this game? If it was not real for me, I would not do this.

The picture, and especially the pictures, has its rules of enagagement, a known and familiar mode of objection, rejoinder, riposte, counter argument, and so forth, a mode of life fervently defended by the various participants in the language game that is "Guantanamo." This is what confounds Pat Lang's common sense advice to "get on with it" - the nation is invested in this mode of life, the opponents of this picture as much as the advocates and defenders.

The only way to cease being captive to this picture is to invent, if you will, a new language game in which this artifact can both be made into us (something ineluctably American) yet shifted in such a way that we no longer look into the reflection of ourselves that brought us to this pass in the first place. Lang's observation, "They imagined that to pronounce words correctly made one a kind of collaborator," points at the socio-psychological construction of the game, how we understand that words make us complicit in this mode of life rather than that one.

Perhaps we will simply tire of the game and abandon it, like something with a few missing pieces offered for "$1 or best offer" at a garage sale. It would be the normal way a society disposes of an unpalatable picture. Again, it's not merely that "they" want to cover it up and "we" want to live in the truth and the light. It is that to "get on with it" may be a language game this nation is not capable of playing, from any position on the political spectrum.

The disappointment over Obama's performance on this picture (among others) stems in part from the expectation that he would be a game changer, crafting a new language game yet enabling us to recognize ourselves even as we are made different than we were. I posit that the deep well of left wing resentment against Bill Clinton stems from his failure to perform a similar transformation in how we imagine ourselves, while the resentment from the right shows how close he came to making the rules of the game change.

We remain captives of Guantanamo.

Anglachel

Crossroads

It looks like the Spousal Unit's company is going to go with Kaiser Permanente and drop Blue Shield. Susie Madrak posted about being between a rock and a hard place (or, rather, a lack of insurance and a lack of payment options) on needed dental work. And Paul Krugman writes up the cynical "fuck you" from Blue Cross/Blue Shield in his latest column Blue Double Cross.

SU and Susie are examples of the reason why the current avaricious state of private health insurance and and beyond-dysfunctional state of health care delivery need to be uprooted and replaced with something that actually works. Krugman gets into what it takes to do so. First he points out the non-clothes of the insurance emperors by talking about a Blue Cross ad in the works (my emphasis throughout):

"We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system," says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that’s true, why don’t you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it’s really that bad?

For none of the reform proposals currently on the table would force people into a government-run insurance plan. At most they would offer Americans the choice of buying into such a plan.

And the goal of the insurers is to deny Americans that choice. They fear that many people would prefer a government plan to dealing with private insurance companies that, in the real world as opposed to the world of their ads, are more bureaucratic than any government agency, routinely deny clients their choice of doctor, and often refuse to pay for care.

The point of the scare tactics is to take choice off the table. Period. These companies do not want people to even have an option of not being screwed over. Then Krugman, rightly, puts the screws to Obama, pointing out what it will take to end the insurance industry's campaign of terror (my emphasis throughout):

Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.

But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ”

The question now is whether he really meant it.

The medical-industrial complex has called the president’s bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity.

It's up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.

The problem here is not so much that we're dealing with the insurance industry, but that we have a political leader who does not believe in forcing choices onto people, and most especially not forcing them onto white collar corporate interests. I wrote about this in the context of health care and retirement savings almost exactly a year ago today, in my post Libertarian Paternalism, where I looked into the intellectual environment Obama lives in and where his philosophical inclinations lie. My key point has to do with having a certain conept of what politics and government is for:

The aspect of Obama's economic approach that had always bothered me was a curious absence of any philosophy of the state as a constructive force, coupled with a stance that focused on "choice" for the isolated and abstract individual of classic economic theory. In short, there is no theory of power.

Why does this matter? If your focus is on the abstract individual and structuring choices for the individual, then you are not addressing the larger environment in which the structuring takes place...

There is, if only in the negative, a theory of government in this approach, which is that there really isn't a role for it in people's lives if it results in a requirement rather than an option for individuals. From a liberal democratic viewpoint, the purpose of government is to regulate relations of power such that those who are disadvantaged in society are not simply exploited by those who are. Our civil rights are the foundation of this regulation, but it reaches into things like workplace safety, disease control and environmental protection. Individual choice is meaningful only if the individual has some say in how those choices are structured, enabled and defended...

Choice requires context, and it is the context that is wrong in Obama's economic proposals. As in health care, he appears more concerned with maintaining the illusion of choice than addressing the environment in which acceptable choices about insurance can occur. Cassidy asks a question I have asked myself in several ways: "But for what policy purposes are the masses to be mobilized?" Just what is the vision for the society and the nation that Obama intends to put into practice? There isn't one; it is fractured into small buckets of choices here and there, with neither a philosophy of governance nor a coherent plan for transforming the steaming pile left behind by the Republicans into a strong, liberal government.

The Democratic candidates' foundation of political economy is in Keynsianism for the simple reason that it works far better than any other approach when the overall well being of the society is the central concern of government. That the libertarian paternalists equate the Clean Air Act with totalitarian government is telling. They cannot accept that government is needed to counteract concentration of power to the detriment of the citizenry, and their conceit that they will be among the winners in an unregulated society is not a hypothesis the rest of us really want to test.

This is why, for all the specific proposals, Obama's economic policies simply do not convince anyone who actually wants things to change.

What Krugman is asking, what I have asked for over a year, what anyone who actually listened to what Obama said should have been asking, is whether Obama is capable of mobilizing the power of the state for the benefit of the citizens in a way that actually forces an unwelcome outcome onto an unwilling power player.

There is no vision of what the long-term role of the state should be in improving the lives of its citizens who are not lucky enough to be counted among the upper middle class winners of the four decade class war conducted by the Movement Conservaties against the nation. We have already had five months of pandering to the interests of the financial industry in lieu of real reform, complete with the media trashing of Elizabeth Warren for not agreeing that everything is for the best in the best of all possible economic worlds.

Obama is at the crossroads. The domestic political and economic circumstances are such that he can choose to be the President and use his political capital for something that will materially improve the lives of millions of people for generations, or he can be the Preznit and posture about his wonderful inclusive hopey-changey powers while millions more citizens are immiserated. I have said for more than a year that he will deliberately go with the easy path, the one so heavily traveled the last few decades, and side with the socio-economic winners.

Prove me wrong, Precious.

Anglachel

14%

That's the amount of increase in the Spousal Unit's Blue Shield of California health insurance premiums this time around. His doctor's medical group is no longer in the Blue Shield network. The monthly premium goes up but the amount of coverage goes down. The hospital deduction went from $200 per day to a few dollars short of $800. One week in the hospital jumped from $1400 to $5600 overnight.

Of course, that assumes you get admitted in the first place.

At a time when there is no inflation, when California is suffering massive unemployment, and when businesses of all sizes are struggling to stay open (we'll worry about solvency later), private health insurance is jacking up the prices by 14%. And that's after negotiations.

The Spousal Unit is a healthy guy, aside from his failing eyesight. His only health problem, a bad back, was cleared up years ago by some physical therapy and an ergonomic office chair.

We bought the chair ourselves because the company couldn't afford it. They do pay 100% of health insurance premiums. On the other hand, his last paycheck, which should have been deposited on the 15th, is sitting in his wallet waiting for when there is money in the bank. This is often the case for small businesses, even in the glamorous world of high-tech; the trade off for the smaller environment is a willingness to be flexible about when the paycheck goes in.

Of course, the paycheck would go in a lot sooner if it weren't for the price gouging of the health insurance industry.

As if knowing our personal news of the day, Mark Thoma of The Economist's View links to Robert Reich's latest article, The Health Care Cave-In:

The Health Care Cave-In, by Robert Reich: "Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better" is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: "Don't give away the store."

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called "single-payer" plan is the ideal... Not surprisingly, insurance and drug companies have been dead-set against a single payer for years. And they've so frightened the public into thinking that "single payer" means loss of choice of doctor (that's wrong -- many single payer plans in other nations allow choices of medical deliverers) that politicians no longer even mention it.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama pushed a compromise -- a universal health plan that would include a "public insurance option" resembling Medicare, which individual members of the public and their families could choose if they wished. This Medicare-like option would at least be able to negotiate low rates and impose some discipline on private insurers.

But now the Medicare-like option is being taken off the table. Insurance and drug companies have thrown their weight around the Senate. And, sadly, the White House -- eager to get a bill enacted in 2009 rather than risk it during the mid-term election year of 2010 -- is signaling it's open to other approaches. ...

It's still possible that the House could come up with a real Medicare-like public option and that Senate Dems could pass it under a reconciliation bill needing just 51 votes. But it won't happen without a great deal of pressure from the White House and the public. Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and the rest of Big Med are pushing hard in the opposite direction. And Democrats are now giving away the store. As things are now going, we'll end up with a universal health-care bill this year that politicians, including our President, will claim as a big step forward when it's really a step sideways.

Sideways? I could deal with sideways. How about backwards? I don't yet know what is going to happen to my health insurance premiums this round. I pay part of them and I will pay a larger part this year because of a 6% cut in payroll and benefits imposed on my company.

I wonder if more than 14% of the population is completely secure in their health insurance? Between falling wages, lagging employment and the-sky's-the-limit insurance costs, what portion of the population is not a pink slip - or a slip on the sidewalk - away from health care ruin?

Since he won't be able to keep his doctor anyway, the Spousal Unit is probably going to switch to Kaiser. He's lucky he has that option. I'm lucky I work for a company so short-staffed that they can't afford to let me go if I get sick. I'm also lucky my bout of flu last month didn't turn into pneumonia, something I'm at risk for due to a congenital lung deformity. We're lucky that we could probably cough up the extra cash if one of us became seriously ill.

Basic health care should not be a matter of luck.

Anglachel

PS - If you care about health care, throw some dollars at the indefatigable DC Blogger whose blog on Corrente is a must-read to know the sorry political state of affairs of health care.

Undercapitalized

I think that the banks have been investing wisely. Wall Street paid enormous amounts to put The Precious into the White House. They are getting their dividends now. Yves Smith of naked capitalism has been going hammer and tongs at the proposals coming out of the White House. Read the whole article, but here are some key points from his her recent post, The Bad Bank Assets Proposal: Even Worse Than You Imagined (my emphasis throughout):

Dear God, let's just kiss the US economy goodbye. It may take a few years before the loyalists and permabulls throw in the towel, but the handwriting is on the wall.

The Obama Administration, if the Washington Post's latest report is accurate, is about to embark on a hugely expensive "save the banking industry at all costs" experiment that:

1. Has nothing substantive in common with any of the "deemed as successful" financial crisis programs

2. Has key elements that studies of financial crises have recommended against

3. Consumes considerable resources, thus competing with other, in many cases better, uses of fiscal firepower.

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was. We have no new thinking, no willingness to take measures that are completely defensible (in fact not doing them takes some creative positioning) like wiping out shareholders at obviously dud banks (Citi is top of the list), forcing bondholder haircuts and/or equity swaps, replacing management, writing off and/or restructuring bad loans, and deciding whether and how to reorganize and restructure the company. Instead, the banks are now getting the AIG treatment: every demand is being met, no tough questions asked, no probing of the accounts (or more important, the accounting).

***

What we have from Team Obama is a bigger abortion of a :"throw money at bad bank assets" plan that I feared in my worst nightmare. And (when we get to the Post preview), they have the temerity to invoke triage to make what they are doing sound surgical and limited.

Those who remember the origin know that triage means focusing on the middle third of the wounded on the battlefield : leaving the goners to die, leaving those wounded but stable to fend for themselves for the moment (they were in good enough shape to wait to be transported or hold on to be treated later). The middle third, those in immediate danger but who might nevertheless be salvaged, got top priority.

The concept of "triage" recognizes that resources are limited, tough decision need to be made, and some are beyond any hope. But in Team Obama Newspeak, triage means everyone can be saved because resources are presumed to be unlimited:

***
So we the taxpayers are going to eat a ton of bank losses that should instead be borne first by stockholders and bondholders This program should be labeled the Pimco bailout plan, since the giant bond fund holds a lot of bank debt. That show what a fiction Obama's populism is. It's mere posturing and empty phrases. Look at where the dough goes, and it is going first and foremost to the big money end of town.

Now I do no labor under the delusion that there are cheap or easy ways out of our financial sinkhole. People are suffering, and we are only partway through the process of contraction and writeoffs. I heard of a suicide today, a jewelry dealer who was $400,000 in debt (also owed a lot of money but unable to collect) who threw himself off 10 West 47th Street (from someone else in the building, this is no urban legend). A tragedy, and a visible one, and there is plenty of less acute but no less real trauma afoot.

But Team Obama is taking the cowardly approach of distributing the costs among the most disenfranchised group in the process, namely the taxpayer, when there far more obvious and logical groups to take the hits. Shareholders and bondholders bought securities KNOWING there was the possibility of loss. A lot of big financial institutions have been on the ropes for over a year. A security holding is not a marriage. When conditions change, prudent investors reassess and adjust course accordingly. If anyone is long a lot of dodgy bank paper now, they have only themselves to blame. Any why are rank and file bankers still exempt from pay cuts when the workers in another failing US industry, autos, expected to take big hits?

***

The most amazing bit is the government acts as if it has no leverage. Look how Paulson sent teams in to inspect the accounts of Fannie and Freddie and put them into conservatorship. The reason it is obvious that this program is a crock is that it has ben cooked up in the complete and utter absence of any serious due diligence on the toxic holdings of the big banks.

As we discuss in a separate post, the one punitive element, executive comp restrictions, are mere window-dressing. Welcome to change you can believe in.

Ah, yes, the triumph of Whole Foods Nation, where we will all be progressive, exercise regularly and floss after every meal, where the Blogger Boyz will call the shots and rule the world with their mad posting skillz. Eh, not so much.

An inability to escape conventional wisdom, along with weak-kneed capitulation to the myth of "bipartisanship" combined with a lack of political vision is what Krugman warned us about as regards The Precious about this time last year and damn if the Shrill One wasn't right. Paul needs to change his name to Cassandra.

We are already 10% of the way through the first 100 days of the Obama administration (and I'm only counting business days, mind you) and we are watching him squander the political capital of the election.

Anglachel

PS - And the Shrill One welcome Yves Smith into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Shock and oy

Martin Wolf has it right:

First, focus all attention on reversing the collapse in demand now, rather than on the global architecture.

Second, employ overwhelming force. The time for “shock and awe” in economic policymaking is now.

…

Unfortunately, what is coming out of the US is desperately discouraging. Instead of an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, what is emerging is too small, too wasteful and too ill-focused. Instead of decisive action to recapitalise banks, which must mean temporary public control of insolvent banks, the US may be returning to the immoral and ineffective policy of bailing out those who now hold the “toxic assets”.

You know, it was widely expected that Obama would have a stimulus plan ready to pass Congress even before his inauguration. That didn’t happen. We were told that this was because the economic team was working flat out on the financial rescue.

In fact, when it comes to bank rescue it’s hard to see much evidence that anything was accomplished during all that time; the team is still — still! — running ideas up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. And the ideas look remarkably bad. (Welcome to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, Yves.)

Meanwhile, when it came to stimulus legislation, when Obama finally introduced his economic plan he immediately began negotiating with himself, preemptively offering concessions to the GOP, which voted against the plan anyway. (And Obama appears, in the name of bipartisanship, to have thrown away a Senate vote he may well need.)

As a wise man recently said, failure to act effectively risks turning this slump into a catastrophe. Yet there’s a sense, watching the process so far, of low energy. What’s going on?

Dignity of the Office

There are good discussions of the Favreau photo showing Obama's chief speechwriter and another Obama staffer performing lewd acts on a cutout photo of Hillary Clinton, with Favreau grabbing Sen. Clinton's breast while the other staffer grabs her hair and forces her to chug beer. See posts one, two and three on Alegre's Corner, and posts at one and two at Corrente, Feminist Law Professors, Historiann, Shakesville and TalkLeft. My opinion of Favreau himself is that he finds denegration through sexual molestation a neat-o thing, and I pity those who have to deal with him on a daily basis. I am a little unclear on when the photo was taken (Before June? Near the convention? Before the election? Within the last few weeks?) and I am also uncertain about his employment status (Is he currently chief speech writer? Applying for a job at State?), but these are subsidiary concerns, things that slightly increase or decrease the offensiveness of the image but do not change the political circumstances of the revelation of the image.

The question of Favreau himself (well discussed at the above linked blogs) may be getting most of the attention but that is not where the political issues lie. The political question remains: what will Obama do with this challenge to his authority? Does he have the political acumen and self-assurance to make a well-timed example of someone who has been important to the campaign?

The stance Obama takes towards Favreau will have repercussions. To say "Sorry, this behavior does not measure up to this administration's standards, can't have this around," would clearly communicate some serious expectations for executive staff performance and workplace environment. To fail to do so will damage the administration.

The reluctance to act upon the irreducible fact of this photo is paradigmatic of Obama's political behavior. He is loath to spend political capital to do the right thing if that thing involves an implicit (let alone explicit) criticism of himself. This is one of the reasons the Rev. Wright situation dragged on as long as it did. The desire to not be wrong overshadows the desire to do what is right, particularly if there is political advantage (real or imagined) to be wrung from the wrong. I compare this political tendency - wait out bad news and see if it will resolve itself - to the behavior of banks that have reaped a windfall from the Hanky Panky. They have capital but will not put it at any risk even when the long term danger for failing to do so dwarfs any immediate penalty. The Village snickers at Hillary's degradation, shills like Campbell Brown want HRC to act out their own private revenge fantasies instead of behave like a public figure of stature, and the public is distracted by the collapsing economy. It must be tempting to see if this situation can be toughed out.

What should be an opportunity to set a number of political expectations is being allowed to slide down the memory hole to defend the imagined hoard of capital.

But this isn't a campaign and we are talking serious, high-stakes politics. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not an electoral adversary, nor is she just another senator. By virtue of her appointment as Secretary of State, she is the representative of the United States to the world. She embodies American policy and reliability to other sovereign nations. To allow this image of her being treated with disrespect by a close associate of the president, someone who appears to be on track as a member of the administration, says two things to the nations and diplomats she will engage:

1. Go ahead, piss on her. We do.
2. We don't respect you enough to send someone we respect to treat with you.

Had this photo come out during the campaign, it could have been kept an individual matter, dimissed (however disingenuously) as the unfortunate side effect of a highly competitive contest. But now Hillary has been named Secretary of State and the revelation of the contempt under these circumstances carries a different meaning. This image is no longer about her. This is not a situation of her making. It is an act of denegration towards her. She cannot respond to it politically because, while it is a personal insult, it is not her political predicament.

It is about defending the dignity and authority of a cabinet officer, which is identical with defending the dignity and authority of the administration as such. It is about Obama's ability to maintain order and enforce discipline. In this case, the president is responsible for defending the nation, as represented by a member of his cabinet, from violation and degredation. That the acts were perfomed on a cardboard cutout should increase awareness of the symbolic import of an assault upon a representation of the country. People have mentioned (and even Photoshopped in) faces of other women, which misses the point. The correct reshuffling of that image would be to have foreign nationals in the place of the staffers. What is done to the Secretary of State is done to the nation.

As I mentioned above, it is not clear when the picture was taken but that is irrelevant. The repercussions of this demonstration of disrespect are happening now.

The dignity, efficacy and authority of the office is at stake.

Anglachel

The Undeserving

The LA Times has a business columnist, David Lazarus, who isn't much of a writer and he's far too committed to conventional economic wisdom for his own good, but in today's Sunday Times he hit one out of the park:

Why were Wall Street workers not asked for concessions?

Say what you will about the role of the [UAW] in exacerbating Detroit's financial troubles, one thing stands out: Blue-collar workers are taking it in the shorts as part of their employers' efforts to secure some bailout bucks from Uncle Sam.

I don't recall white-collar workers on Wall Street stepping up with similar concessions in return for their companies' receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer cash. ...

That said, a bailout's a bailout, at least as far as taxpayers are concerned. So why are we holding blue-collar workers to a different standard than their white-collar kin?

Put another way, how many people can even list the terms of the recently announced multibillion-dollar bailout for financial colossus Citigroup Inc. and what the company agreed to do in return for our generosity? ...

The UAW, long criticized (unfairly, I believe) for being too powerful and too greedy, has done the stand-up thing in offering concessions to protect jobs at a perilous time for the auto industry.

White-collar workers on Wall Street, many of whom pull down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and bonuses, have shown no such spine or self-sacrifice as their employers pass the hat among taxpayers.

[Economist Robert] Reich is right: A bailout should require concessions from all stakeholders, not just the top brass and certainly not just the public.

By that standard, the auto industry has earned its piece of the pie, while Wall Street firms, silver spoons in hand, are enjoying their dessert on the house.

The poll that accompanies the article is over 77% in agreement that blue collar workers are being treated differently and unfairly compared to white collar workers. It's just an online poll so should be taken with a grain of salt, but it probably does register some fairly common popular sentiments that are not often represented in the media.

The people being forced to offer concessions here for a manufacturing base bailout are not members of Whole Foods Nation, the people who comprise the symbolic analyst elite that is having its collective butt covered by the economic Hanky Panky (thus far).

From my perspective, this is another sign of the fault line in the Democratic Party and is indicative of where and how the power elite is going to spend their political capital.

Anglachel

Holy Joe Has to Go

A time of reckoning is upon us. Or, rather, upon the Senate.

Since 2001, Joe Lieberman has been a thorn in the side of Democrats, beginning with his criticism of Al Gore and running right through his endorsement of John McCain. When told by the party that his services were no longer required, he ran the ultimate "Democrat for a Day" campaign and used Republican votes to retain his Senate seat. He exploited the need for 51 votes in the Senate to hold on to his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Like Zell Miller, he has trashed his own legacy as a Democrat in his zeal to kick the party while it was down and kiss up to power.

The NYT has an article: Among Democrats’ Leadership Questions: What to Do With Lieberman? It lays the problem out fairly well:

With the Democrats now guaranteed to hold at least 56 seats without Mr. Lieberman, he could be stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, a move that could prompt him to join the Republicans.

The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, met with Mr. Lieberman for a half-hour Thursday and issued a terse statement saying no decisions had been made. Aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Reid had suggested that Mr. Lieberman relinquish his chairmanship in exchange for a less prominent position.

At a brief news conference after the meeting, Mr. Lieberman promised to support President-elect Barack Obama, but he did not disclose his plans and did not take questions.

Many Democrats say Mr. Lieberman had crossed a line not only by endorsing Mr. McCain, his longtime friend, but also serving as one of his closest advisers and by sharply questioning Mr. Obama’s qualifications to be president. Some Senate Democrats and aides say it is unthinkable to let Mr. Lieberman head a committee that will conduct oversight of the Obama administration.

Mr. Reid restated the dismay felt by many Democrats. “While I understand that Senator Lieberman has voted with Democrats a majority of the time, his comments and actions have raised serious concerns among many in our caucus,” he said.

The problem is not, as you might think, with Lieberman. He has made his positions perfectly clear over the years. We know where he stands and what he will do. It is not even, as the article alludes, that he would be some kind of internal enemy to the Obama administration. (Side note - this story makes me chuckle as Obama was perpetually villified in the Left Blogosphere as being an ally and enabler of Lieberman, with people pointing to his reluctance to campaign for Ned Lamont as proof of his real allegiance.)

The problem is whether or not the Democrats will act like a party and will use power to punish those who have harmed them now that they have the political upper hand. The question is party discipline and sending out an unequivocal message that those who are not on board are out.

Unless Harry Reid was telling Lieberman to direct his staff to hand over materials relating to all of his committee positions, there was nothing to discuss. Lieberman does not get to choose whether he will relinquish his post and he should not get any lesser position. His leverage is gone. He should be unceremoniously dumped from all committees and made into a political pariah.

That's how politics is played.

If Joe wants to caucus with the Democrats, that's nice. Let him sit in the back and fume. If he wants to stomp off and caucus with the Republicans, that's nice too. He can go change his party affiliation while he's at it and stop the charade. The Democrats have a solid majority without him and need to look ahead to 2010 for the next set of senators to put them comfortably beyond the filibuster threat.

But make no mistake that the test here is of Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership. If they will not stand up to Lieberman, I think we can see where the legislative agenda is going.

Anglachel

Cabinet Guesses

Provide your best guesses for what Republicans The Precious will have as part of his cabinet in the comments.

Inspired by this post from Susie at Suburban Guerilla - Not Cheering Me Up.

Anglachel