THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT’S DINNER!!
While few might live up to the notoriety of Colbert’s terrifying Satire (youtube it!) Obama was not found wanting on the jokes, with Limbaugh a recurrent theme throughout the night.
Big political stories are like buses: you wait ages for one to turn up… well, you know the rest . In America’s case, last week saw two huge pieces of news descend on Washington. On Tuesday, Republican Senator Arlen Specter announced that he was switching to the Democrats, giving them (in theory at least) a 60 seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (see my last post for more on this).
No sooner had the potential political ramifications of this news sunk in than another mammoth headline hit the press: Thursday’s announcement that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will be retiring from the Court come June. This means that Obama now has to find some time over the next couple of months to slot in, between his massive domestic agenda and economic efforts, that most controversial and explosive of a President’s tasks: nominating someone for the Supreme Court and getting Congress to approve them.
Though it might not be obvious at first, these two game-changing events – Specter’s defection and Souter’s retirement – are closely linked, at least in political terms. Specifically, both have the potential to seriously affect Obama’s “summer of reform”. Over the next few months the President will be working with Democrats in Congress to pass landmark legislation on, among other things, healthcare reform and climate change. The success of these bills will depend heavily on navigating what looks set to be a political minefield, thanks to a combination of an obstructionist Republican minority and the grandstanding of certain centrist Democrats.
In the case of Specter’s defection, it’s easy to see how this affects Obama’s legislative agenda- as long as Specter votes with his new party, then no Senate Republicans will be needed to pass the big bills. But the nomination process for Souter’s replacement, which will in all likelihood take place in June before any votes on healthcare reform or climate change legislation, could end up being just as significant for the President’s agenda.
The big political news from America is that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter (not pictured) has announced he’s leaving the Republican party and joining the Democrats. This came as a bit of a bombshell to Republicans, since it means there will be 60 Democrats in the Senate. What’s so exciting about 60? Only that it’s the number needed for a filibuster-proof majority. In other words, Senate Democrats now have the votes to cut off debate on any legislation and head straight to a simple majority vote. This means – in theory at least – that Democrats can now pass any bill they want through the Senate and Republicans can’t do anything but sit on the sidelines and moan about it. Of course, in practice it’s not that simple – but then you didn’t think it would be, did you?
The rationale for Specter’s defection was fairly low on the list of honourable reasons to switch parties. Arlen Specter was one of the most moderate Republican Senators. He has a long history of defying the Republican party and voting with the Democrats, the latest example being his February vote in favour of Obama’s stimulus package, which infuriated his party’s base. He is also up for re-election in the 2010 mid-terms and, unsurprisingly, was facing a significant challenge in his state’s Republican primary from the seriously right-wing Pat Toomey, who’s being generously funded by a conservative political action committee called The Club For Growth. Now, The Club For Growth have a hilarious record of funding right-wing challenges to sitting Republicans, only to see their candidates failing to beat the incumbent yet still weakening them enough so that that they then go on to lose to a Democrat in the general election.
However, given that most Republicans now despise Arlen Specter as a Democrat in everything but name, the polls showed Toomey beating him heavily in the primary, despite the involvement of the chronically incompetent Club for Growth. Specter’s defection to the Democrats is therefore a matter of simple political survival – he could no longer be re-elected as a Republican. He could’ve gone Independent, but this way he (probably) avoids being challenged by another Democrat.
So the move was great for Specter. But was it good for Democrats?
This week, two memos were released by the Obama Adminsitration, detailing torture techniques used under Bush. This is Sullivan’s response
I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years.
As Sullivan argues, it’s the bureacratic element that is the most chilling, a faceless largely unaccountable bureaucracy clinically eliminating civil liberties and perpetrating brutalities. It makes it so much harder to rally against this than against a visible leader such as Bush or Cheney. Although less grave, in the UK the recent story of a council spying on a family for three weeks, because they didn’t believe the family was in the right school zone is actually terrifying, in its sheer pointlessness and in the capacity for something we consider so benign to be spying.
About two years ago, I remember debating with Ed, whether the UK should have a constitution and subsequently a supreme court, at the time I felt we’d done fine without one, but now a full means of redress beyond a mini-media storm seems more than reasonable. Perhaps more critically it’s time we started, shining the light on bureacracies and demanding transparency from them.
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A round-up of the crazy-end of the Right wing media by the Daily Show.
And I’m going to include this nugget from Sarah Palin
I know the truth about my family. I know details about whether Levi Johnston was allowed to live with my teenage daughter or not. By the way, it would be over my dead body that a kid would live with my teenage daughter.
What are the chances this comes back to bite her?
Some transatlantic comparison from Charlie Brooker:
This remarkable article from Talking Points Memo and its follow up from underlines the embarassing position the GOP still finds itself in.
Brian Merchant summarises at Treehugger:
Case in point: the GOP is publicly claiming that climate change legislation would cost each American family more than $3,100 a year, citing research done by MIT. Thing is, the very researcher who conducted the study personally contacted the GOP, alerting them to the fact that his findings clearly state that the cost to families would only be $340 a year. So what did the GOP do?
Ignored him.
After 8 years of Bush’s meddling with science by falsifying or watering down documents to suit his ideology and denying Climate Change because of the implications for big-oil sponsors. Some of us thought the GOP might be chastened into acknowledging such over-arching global phenomena like Climate change and work to finding free-market solutions but apparently not.
What concerns me most is that the GOP will be able to get away with this, there is still a real issue particularly in the US that still doesn’t believe Climate Change is linked to man-kind, and the GOP remarkable stance, seen recently by Michael Steele is not only embarassing but breathtakingly irresponsible.
How long before they face up to reality? Because they can slow the debate down with their misinformation but they will ultimately lose it and then miss out on the opportunity to shape the legislation itself, but then again winning doesn’t seem to be high on the the Republican radar.*
* In no way am I trying to jinx NY-20, where they may actually win, but fingers crossed they don’t.
UPDATE
Think Progress covers some dissent over the issue within Republican ranks, from Republicans for Environmental Protection.
18:45 BST: Well, the time has come for me to quit this epic live-blog, given that I’ll soon be entering my twelfth hour of continuous live-blogging. I know; I know – Obama’s about to give his press conference. But I’m about to collapse; so that’s that. I hope you enjoyed the random, disparate, often unhelpful observations from yours truly. I know I did – live-blogging’s great! There’ll be some more analysis tomorrow from Entangled Alliances, looking in more detail at the exact provisions of the groundbreaking G20 agreement: what they are, whether they’re good and whether they’ll actually change anything, as well as a look at how the G20 will benefit its main players. But for now, I’ll leave you with a fitting quote from BBC business correspondent Robert Peston:
There are no surprises in the deal announced today to reform the banking system, to prevent banks making the kind of risky loans and investments that precipitated the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.
But it’s nonetheless a historic event that the world’s 20 most powerful economies have signed up for these reforms – because they represent the death knell for the Anglo-American doctrine that economies flourish when financial firms are left alone to do as they please.
Indeed.
18:32 BST: Buried under all the G20 news has been the potentially groundbreaking meeting between Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which resulted in an agreement to reduce the nuclear arms of both sides much further than the current agreement demands. This could be very important…
18:30 BST: A wise comment from the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow (whose live-blog was probably better than mine but nowhere near as epic!):
I’ve been busy updating our main story, having sat through the opening of Brown’s statement. First reaction: I found myself sitting there thinking ‘David Cameron could not pull off an event like this’. That’s not because I think Cameron’s a lightweight. I don’t. It’s because the most important summit conclusions involve international finance, global trade and the inner workings of organisations like the IMF and there are probably very few prime ministers or presidents in the world who understand this stuff as well as Brown.
18:20 BST: Lest I be judged by my comments below to have been a bit too harsh on the protests, I want to stress that I have great respect for most of them. I say most of them, because the anarchists were just so annoying. Proper anarchism is really cool. It’s an extremely sophisticated ideology . These guys, however, were just pathetic. Bad anarchists! The majority of protests, however, made some good points.The fact remains, though, that they surely made no difference on the summit at all. If you want to get something changed, you focus on it like a laser and you don’t go off message. But the protests were never on message to begin with – from homelessness to climate change to ending the war to the death of capitalism; only a minority were actually focused on the topics of the summit! The question becomes then – did they really want to influence the summit? Or did they just want to get their message out there in a sort of vague picture of defiance? In their defence, however, you could respond that they never stood a chance anyway: governments don’t respond to the people anymore. No-one listened to Iraq protests, for example and they were very focused. So it’s an interesting debate. But I do think that they could have maybe stood a chance at getting some traction if they focused on one message and, you know, stuck to it.
18:13 BST: Here’s the full text of the communique, courtesy of the Guardian. There’s tonnes of details here…
18:10 BST: Oh and I forgot to add that hedge funds and other non-banking institutions will come under the aegis of this new Financial Stability board. Since the mysterious financing of hedge funds helped to exacerbate the mess, this is also good news; but again it all depends on how strong the regulation is…
18:05 BST: The headlines are focusing on the issues of tax havens and that $1 trillion figure, but there’s tonnes of other stuff that’s just as interesting. For example, there’s going to be a new Financial Stability Board that will work with the IMF to monitor the risk of banking transactions and impose limits on things like capital reserves and leverage requirements (not to mention executive bonuses.) This is absolutely crucial in getting the banks back on track and preventing such a crisis happening again, since it was an inherent failure in the banks’s ability to evaluate “systemic risk” that made the crisis so bad. This is pretty complicated and I’ll come back to this another time, but suffice to say it’s a good move – that is, as long as this new regulatory body actually has proper regulatory oversight.
17:54 BST: A timely article over at Foreign Policy discussing whether protests ever work. I agree with its basic conclusion: protests have to be unified and targeted; and focused on changing the system not overthrowing it. The G20 protests were none of these things and so I’m afraid that they’ve had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
17:46 BST: Did Sarkozy and Merkel get their victory? Or was there never any “victory” to begin with? Everyone was in agreement over the basic regulatory provisions. and had been for weeks. The real controversy- over the possibility of national stimulus packages – was won by Merkel and Sarkozy weeks ago, and so it was no surprise to see no such provisions today. However, Sarkozy must be feeling pleased that the language on tax havens was quite fierce. In the big picture, it’s not really much of an issue, but he’ll make a big deal of it, which is fair enough…
If you Read Ed’s article on the need for stimulus packages in Europe you may have come across a debate Ed and I had over the nature and merits of a stimulus. Regardless of which side you fell on, there were further issues at stake than just economics. Economists like to see their subject as a science: numerical and evidence based, rational and objective. No doubt, many of their research tools are scientific but economics is also the backbone of the modern world and often not an end in itself, more a vehicle for achieving other ends.
As James Surowiecki argues in the Financial Page of the New Yorker, economics is by no means a science and as the recession draws on, we’re able to examine the cultural memories that can and do direct economic courses of action. From recessions and inflations, each country will have its own preferences and fears that alter the importance attached to different parts of the economy.
In the US, the focus has fallen on the stimulus package and Paul Krugman has made the case that europe should follow suite. He makes a convincing case for a European stimulus package, but is it correct to lampoon European economic policy and decision making as woefully inadequate or to equate US economic policy so readily with Europe? Well in some sense yes, it’ s perfectly fair, the rationale for the stimulus is not so difficult, it could even lead to greater gains if correctly invested in infrastructure which could grow economies in the future, from transport to broadband aswell as tiding Europe over during a recession. In fact, many economists, (despite what many think) advocate deficit spending. They argue that if done correctly it will more than pay itself back through the higher tax-receipts of the economic growth it will yield.
Will Steele win his battle with the cool “liberal media” or will it disastrously backfire?
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Last month Britain was swept up in a maelstrom of rage after it was revealed that Fred Goodwin, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was due to receive a generous pension to the tune of a staggering £703,000 a year. The problem? The Royal Bank of Scotland is now 70% owned by the British taxpayer. Cue outrage from all sides: while the tabloids and broadsheets alike foamed at the mouth, government ministers went a bit mental and promised to suspend the rule of law. The controversy over Goodwin’s pension wasn’t just a matter of one man’s greed, however; it was a focal point for the public feeling of helplessness, disbelief and disgust brought on by the realisation that the mighty, all-knowing financial powers we entrusted with our money are actually just a load of out-of-their-depth greedy idiots who’ve gone and squandered the lot.
Well, now the United States is having their “Goodwin” moment – and who knows where the chips will fall?
