Month: May 2011

Levitin on the Anti-Consumer Agenda

Professor Adam Levitin has a great post on the anti-consumer agenda he sees US corporations pushing up at Credit Slips. Levitin writes:

Instead of a laboratory of experiements to help level the b2c playing field, we see a different trend emerging:  a distinct anti-consumer agenda that aims to reduce consumer bargaining power and information.  Consider the common theme that runs through the following issues:

  • AT&T v. Concepcion (waiver of class actions in arbitrations)
  • Attempts to bust up public employee unions (and attacks on unions in general, such as the failure of Card Check legislation)
  • Citizens United (corporate speech rights)
  • Attempts to retain the current corrupt swipe fee system (failure of antitrust)
  • Attacks on public health insurance (prohibition on Medicare bargaining over prescription drug prices and the death of the public option)
  • Attempts to first kill off and now to maim the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

…

There might be other items to add to this list (and please feel free to note so in the comments), but to me, it paints a disturbing picture of a concerted anti-consumer agenda.

There are distinct constituencies for each of these issues, but I think it’s important to recognize that there’s a larger strategic move going on here.

Levitin is asking how this happens and what leads to it being a concerted effort. I’d point him in the direction of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is a leading lobbying body for business against consumers for almost all of the issues Levitin lists.

Torture doesn’t work & other lessons

There has been a really strong push on the left since Sunday to make clear that Osama bin Laden was found and killed because of traditional interrogation and intelligence methods, essentially the police work version of counter-terrorism. Marcy Wheeler has done great work clarifying this here, here, and here; in these posts, Wheeler looks at the timeline of known torture of key Al Qaeda terrorists and what information was produced. The administration, too, is making clear that torture was not instrumental in getting to Bin Laden. A National Security Council spokesman made this clear to the NY Times:

“The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there.”

This is right and it’s good on some level that the death of Bin Laden is proving as a nail in the coffin to the idea that torture works. Glenn Greenwald makes the point even more clearly:

But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.

Greenwald’s piece is worthwhile in that it brings us away from the question of how information was and was not obtained and towards the question of what actions or behaviors or policies we as a country should approve in the face of the threat of terrorism.

So while there is a robust debate taking place about torture, where is the debate on whether we were right as a country to suspend habeas corpus? Where is the debate about whether we should close Guantanamo Bay? Where is the debate about whether terrorism suspects should be brought to the United States to face trial before federal civilian judges? For all the ways in which this moment is being used to dismiss arguments for torture, we should remember that the Bush administration’s torture policies were largely wound down during the Bush administration. In essence, this is a debate that while important due to the response from Republican leaders who sought to use torture of suspects in interrogations, is somewhat less important than the debate about other policies which are actively being continued today. In the absence of strong and forceful rebuttals now from the left, I am deeply worried that the lesson political leaders, military leaders, the intelligence community and all the people who work for them that help shape the course of US policy will be that suspending habeas corpus is acceptable, that Gitmo is a good place to house terrorism suspects, and that not only do we not really need civilian trials, but military tribunals are unnecessary too.

The adjudication of who wins the War on Terrorism is going to be determined not by whether or not the US ceases to exist or becomes subsumed in an Islamic caliphate. Rather it will be determined by whether or not we fundamentally change who we are as a country in response to the threat of terrorism. We have undoubtedly changed who we are over the last ten years, surrendering some of our freedoms and some of our adherence to the rule of law in the titular name of national security. But these changes need not be permanent. Now is the time to roll back the security state, restore the rule of law, and make the Constitution paramount once again. The onus is on the President and congressional leaders to make this happen.

Bill Black on Fraud in the Financial Crisis

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/ls/ls110501le_show_-_may_01_201/embed-audio

It’s a long interview, but Bill Black’s appearance on Harry Shearer’s radio show is a really good listen. Black is expert at explaining how fraud was a causal factor in size, scope, and occurrence of the financial collapse. Black is an expert on white collar crime and a former regulator who was instrumental in the regulatory response and punishment of the fraudsters who caused the Savings & Loan crisis. Black is a frequent commentator on the 2008 financial collapse and the need for increased regulation and enforcement of the banking industry. His blog, New Economic Perspectives, is a must-read for anyone who cares about understanding the financial collapse, foreclosure fraud, and the regulatory capture that has prevented there from being an adequate response to the crisis.

Bin Laden Killed

Bin Laden is gone, but the threat of terrorist attacks remains, as do the policy responses following the 9/11 attacks. The surrender of our liberties for security continues. Guantanamo remains open. US troops are still fighting wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, as well as Libya and Pakistan. While some leaders are calling for an exit from Afghanistan following Bin Laden’s death, I doubt this will be a major piece of the next two years of the Obama administration. While the story of how this happened continues to emerge, it should be clear that the process of manual intelligence gathering, following leads, interviewing captured terrorists, and making a targeted incursion (versus, say, starting a war against Pakistan) were what lead to his apprehension and death. Hopefully the lessons of this man-hunt carry forward with US decision makers whenever pursuing the next individual who sought to destroy our country.

Eduardo Galeano wrote this vignette in his 1998 book, Upside Down:

A Star Is Born?

In mid-1998, the White House put another villain up on the global marquee. He uses the stage name Osama bin Laden; he’s an Islamic fundamentalist, sports a beard, wears a turban, and caresses the rifle in his lap. Will this new star’s career take off? Will he be a box-office hit? Will he manage to undermine the foundations of Western civilization or will he only play a supporting role? In horror movies, you never know.

Thirteen years later, it’s clear that Bin Laden’s actions, specifically, the 9/11 attack, prompted the US government to make choices which fundamentally undermined who we are as a country. The escalation of a security state, wiretapping Americans without warrant, holding Americans without charge, ignoring habeas corpus rights, using torture as a means of making people talk, at times outsourcing that torture to countries that are more comfortable with it, outsourcing key military security tasks to private corporations, creating black hole prisons around the world, and the list goes on. Bin Laden was the reason, the justification for so many of these changes to who we are as a country. In the end, he and his band of fanatics have never posed an existential threat to America. But the threat they did pose, both realized and potential, has been used as a justification for our government to take actions which fundamentally challenge the values we have held dear as a country.

The death of Bin Laden should prompt us to end the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya. It should prompt us to close Guantanamo Bay and bring every remaining prisoner there to trial in front of federal, civilian judges. It should cause legislation to be written giving privacy rights back to Americans, including a repeal of the FISA Reauthorization bill, which gives retroactive immunity to people and companies who illegally helped the Bush administration wiretap Americans, and the Patriot Act. The invasive security measures at airports through TSA body scanners and full-body pat downs should be dropped. In short, it’s time to make America look like we did before Bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks and a set of changes were enacted that fundamentally challenged who we are as a country. At the same time, the diminished resources being dedicated to fight wars in the Muslim world should be redirected in part to improving our human intelligence infrastructure and the rest going to help balance our budget. If and when these things start to happen, the real meaning of the death of Bin Laden will have become clear. But if his death changes nothing about how we look at the world, then the only logical assumption in answer to Galeano’s thirteen year old question is that Bin Laden played merely a supporting role in the changes American leadership sought to make in our country. Personally, I hope that President Obama and congressional leadership of both parties step forward and seize the opportunity to take our country back from the gripping fear of Al Qaeda which has driven so many policy decisions for the last ten years. To do so would require real leadership and real courage, characteristics which I truly hope will be on display in coming days.