The Inquiring Manatee

Welcome to Weimar

    The atmosphere in this country is beginning to smack of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and Adolf Hitler's accession to power in 1933.

    In that era of turmoil, German defeat, crippling inflation and worldwide depression, the struggling German democratic government based in Weimar was faced with repeated challenges from both left and right -- in the end, most strongly from extreme nationalists whose message of blame, scapegoating and hate appealed to lower-middle-class masses who felt threatened by change and by economic loss.
    In the United States at that time, and even more so through the Franklin D. Roosevelt years of the 1930s, democracy was under attack from the same populist Know-Nothing elements that have arisen in every national economic crisis dating back to the Whiskey Rebellion. Demagogues ranging from Huey Long and Father Coughlin to Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund kept the pot of civic discourse boiling with hatred.
    Nowadays, just as Nazis and their growing bands of sympathizers could not accept German defeat in World War I and the costs imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, suddenly booming extremist groups do not accept the legitimacy of the 2008 election, President Obama or any policy proposal of the Democrats. In short, having lost in 2008, they trumpet their loyalty to democracy but refuse to let the winners govern. We are witnessing the temper tantrums of ignorant, noisy, easily led children.
    Have you had enough of the wildly anti-government "tea party" types and "Christian warrior" militias like the vicious, deluded Hutaree? I have. It's time to call these intolerant, screaming mobs what they are. If they are not fascists, they are fodder for fascists. Spittle, insults and bricks flying, they are out of control -- and getting excessive media attention that attracts even more of the mentally unstable to their ranks.
    The stench of fascism is in the air. These people want to destroy the elected American government as the Nazis wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic.

    To which I say: Never again.

Capturing Taliban Leaders: Stuff it, Cheney

    It's sad to think that I spent the weeks from Labor Day to Election Day in 2000 aboard the Boeing 727 campaign plane of Dick Cheney, traveling America and watching him deliver speech after speech to an adoring Republican base.

    Cheney generally kept his distance from his small accompanying press corps -- I was assigned to his campaign by my employer, USA TODAY -- but was accommodating enough on the couple of occasions when I needed and was granted one-on-one interviews with him, including on the eve of his successful televised debate with Democratic nominee Joe Lieberman. I had no reason to dislike Cheney. (And I had fun rebutting his frequent comments that Al Gore and Lieberman had "never met a payroll." I reminded Cheney at a rare news conference in Pennsylvania that Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln never met a payroll, either.)

    Cheney had an awfully nice family, especially his charming 4-year-old granddaughter, Kate, on whom he and his wife Lynne doted. I was expecting nothing but positive contributions from him if the Republican ticket were elected.

    Cheney's performance as vice president, once the Supreme Court awarded the election to the Bush-Cheney ticket, requires no further comment here. That is a matter of the past, although his power, policies and actions retain a resonance today. It is his performance since leaving office that disappoints me now. 

   Cheney has become a parody of the bitter, blindly partisan ex-officeholder. He takes sniper shots at the Obama administration at every opportunity (and at no opportunity), trumpeting the glories of waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay and playing a time-worn Republican card by portraying the Democrats as weak on terrorism, "pretending that we are not at war." This at a time when Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out last weekend on two TV talk shows, is continuing many Bush administration policies.

    As others have pointed out, it's almost as if Cheney were praying for a massive terror attack on the United States, if only to discredit Obama -- and perhaps even to cause Americans to forget that 9/11 happened on the Bush-Cheney watch, after serious warnings of al-Qaeda intentions to mount airborne terror against the U.S.

    If Biden's many accurate citations of Obama administration successes against terrorists -- stepping up use of drones and killing 12 of 20 al-Qaeda leaders, for one example -- were not enough to reveal Cheney's views for the balderdash they are, the news that the CIA and the Pakistanis have joined to capture at least two leading Afghan Taliban figures in the past week may finally keep Cheney silent for a while. 

    Whether or not we get any more valuable information out of the captured Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar or the Kunduz province "shadow governor" Mullah Abdul Salam, their removal from the battlefield is a major coup for antiterrorism efforts -- and, yes, for the Obama administration. It shows that American intelligence and diplomacy are very much on the job, keeping the pressure on -- just as Cheney patriotically should wish.

    So let's cool it with the unconstructive criticism, Dick. But please say hello to Kate for me.

    

The Supreme Court, Corporations and Us

As if Bush v. Gore were not enough, the United States Supreme Court revealed again last week that its five-justice conservative majority has turned that constitutional body into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. It's the Fox News Channel in black robes. The court's 5-4 decision in the Citizens United Case overturned 103 years of practice and precedent, allowing corporations to buy ads touting candidates in federal elections (not that they're likely to do so openly, risking alienating half their customers; instead, they'll give from their corporate treasuries to front groups).

    Ostensibly the decision was a victory for free speech under the First Amendment -- but whose speech? The Court displayed a reverence for corporations as if they are people. The Court saw them as "associations of citizens." In fact, a corporation is a legal fiction, chartered by American states. The justices might as well have given robots full First Amendment rights.

    When a corporation influences a political campaign, as many now will do with bucketloads of money, it's not the mass of shareholders speaking. It's the powerful and outrageously overcompensated management, either effectively uncontrolled by shareholders or doing the bidding of a dominant shareholder such as News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch. (It's no accident that Murdoch's Fox News brainwashes viewers into supporting policies that allow Murdoch and his friends to make as much money as possible with as little government regulation as possible.)

    And what happens to American politics and government -- indeed, to our national security and independence -- when the government of China or Russia gains control of an American corporation? "Association of citizens," indeed. Citizens of where?

    The Citizens United case is a landmark victory for giant corporations that already dominate America's economy and its social and civic culture. Oriented naturally to Republicans who say government should play little or no role in regulating business, corporations can now do even more to enshrine their pet philosophy in law and policy and preserve themselves from government oversight. As things were, government had fallen down on the regulatory job in letting the private financial sector plunge the nation and the world into this recession. Now government will be even weaker structurally or through lax enforcement of existing laws, as under George W. Bush. Count on it.

    Karl Rove envisioned with W's Supreme Court-bestowed "win" in 2000 at least 30 resulting years of GOP triumph, akin to the era of Mark Hanna and Bill McKinley. The Republicans blew it, losing congressional majorities in 2006 and 2008 and the White House in 2008. The Supreme Court has restored Rove's vision. The nation is bound to be under Republican rule for the foreseeable future.

    Democrats can do two things to try to mitigate this disaster. They could resolve to tap their adherents for enough money to overcome the Republican advantage, though achieving this is unlikely. And the Democratic (for now) Congress could mandate immediate and meaningful disclosure of corporate contributions, piercing the veil of "independent" groups (such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) to link the candidate who is the end beneficiary of groups' expenditures with the corporate giver.

   Lots of luck on this point, as well. As soon as the Republicans take back Congress and the White House-- now likely as early as November 2012 -- they could repeal any such transparency laws. 

    What a gift the Supreme Court has given the GOP -- a gift that will keep on giving for decades.

The Meaning of Massachusetts

  What messages do we take away from what's aptly being called the Boston Massacre? How do we read what the voters of Massachusetts, led by the independents who make up a majority of that electorate, were saying on Tuesday?

  It's possible to read the victory of Scott Brown narrowly, crediting it to two local factors -- as some Democrats are doing today. One factor: The miserable performance of Martha Coakley, contrasted with the greater personal appeal of the hard-driving and much more passionate Brown. All the king's horses and all the king's men -- and the king, Barack Obama, too -- were not enough to put the Humpty Dumpty of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat together again in the limited time since the White House and Harry Reid finally realized that the stupidly coasting Coakley was letting a sure-thing win slip away.

    The other factor involves the national issue of healthcare, but with a unique local twist marking Massachusetts as unrepresentative of the nation as a whole.

   Massachusetts already has its own statewide system of mandatory health insurance for all -- passed under Gov. Mitt Romney, with support from Brown (who got away with his inconsistency, just as he successfully soft-pedaled his right-wing views on abortion and other issues, and even his party affiliation). It's a relatively new health insurance system that remains popular.

    Bay State residents validly felt they didn't need anything from the feds, and, not so validly, were led to fear that they would lose by having to switch to another system that Republicans loudly and falsely described as cutting benefits, threatening Medicare, raising taxes and adding to worrisome federal deficits.

    So you could read this special election as nothing much for Democrats to worry about nationally for November, as long as their candidates were less clueless than Coakley. You could do that, but, as Dick Nixon might say, it would be wrong.

    Massachusetts was voting in a national political environment and context of anger -- an anger that (fed by Fox News and the rest of the very effective conservative noise machine) has mushroomed in the year since Obama's historic and promising inauguration.

    Part of the anger is rational. Unemployment is at 10% and more, and only Wall Street seems to be benefiting from a supposed recovery. Home foreclosures and credit-card defaults are mounting. We're deep into the Great Recession, as most Americans see it. Yet hard-pressed middle-class citizens see government as hung up for months on what seems to them the secondary issue of health insurance. They want more emphasis on jobs.

    But here is where the irrational part comes in. Americans seemingly want politicians to get them jobs -- make a phone call, do something concrete and direct. In fact, the Obama administration instituted an enormous stimulus package for just that purpose, following the classical Keynesian theory that, deficits be damned, it's the job of government during a recession or a depression to spend to pump money into a flagging economy.

    Americans, however, don't see much benefit out of the stimulus package, and accept Republican claims that it has produced few jobs even though the White House claims it has preserved or created 2 million jobs.

    Voters want the politicians to do more for them. At the same time, they are buying Republican cries about "limited government" and federal overspending. They're saying, in effect, that they want the government to do less about the economy. It makes no sense.

    Nevertheless, the Democrats will not prosper by failing to listen to what the voters say they want, rationally or otherwise. And what they don't want, at least for now, is the complicated, hard-to-explain Democratic plans for healthcare reform. The polls show that.

    In a better economy, healthcare reform would be having a much easier time. Even in the economy we have, with millions losing their jobs and health insurance, you'd think that voters would see the need to overhaul the deeply flawed medical system. Instead, voters who said in November 2008 that they wanted change now are deeply worried about changes they can't understand (and that Democrats have not adequately explained).

    The majority of Americans are still employed and still have employer-based healthcare, or, if they're older, Medicare. They are nervous about losing benefits, susceptible to Republican fearmongering. It's "I've got mine, Jack, screw you." The mood out there is not generous. It never is in hard times.

    For the Democrats, it's deja vu -- 1994 all over again. They must stop what they're doing, admit that they have failed again on healthcare and take the next 9 months to build a record on other issues that they can carry to the voters in November. 

    After that, and assuming the economy puts voters in a sunnier mood, the Democrats (if they still have majorities in Congress) should call the Republicans' bluff and go back to the drawing board on healthcare, seeking bipartisan input.

    It's no secret that the Republican "let's start over" talking point is merely code for doing nothing and letting GOP contributors in the health insurance and medical fields continue to profit from an unfair and inefficient status quo. Looking beyond 2010 to 2012, Republicans are going to continue saying no to any Democratic initiative, driven by their rabid-dog base and their own eye for the main chance to deny Obama and the Democrats any credit for any accomplishment, no matter how beneficial it could be to the country. That's the strategy.

    "No" worked in Massachusetts on Tuesday. "No" will remain the GOP strategy for the foreseeable future, or at least until the economy picks up. The meaning of Tuesday for Democrats is that they should admit that their deliberations haven't produced a good healthcare bill, give it up for now, pivot to other issues for November and await an opportunity to make the Republicans put up or shut up on healthcare.

   Of course, it may be that this really is a conservative country, as the right-wingers love to say -- that no meaningful healthcare reform of private-sector medical insurance, much less a public option or single-payer system, will ever pass. That's a gloomy way to read the message of Massachusetts today. But let's give voters another chance to show the better angels of their nature, I say. It may take a few more years, but surely America is bound to catch up to the rest of the civilized world in assuring healthcare for her people.

   

   

   

 

That Big Pay Cut for Big-Bank Execs: Good Idea

    I reported many stories for USA TODAY on the Justice Department's 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund and its administrator, the experienced New York negotiations lawyer Kenneth Feinberg. He did a fine job. Now he's President Obama's executive-pay czar in connection with the Treasury Department's TARP bailouts of banking institutions. And again he's demonstrating an instinct for fairness as well as for politics.

    Feinberg today is imposing mandatory cuts amounting to 50% in the exorbitant compensation of top executives at the biggest financial institutions that have received taxpayer funds and have yet to pay the bailout money back. The move will strike a populist chord with a public that has been seething for months about the absurd and out-of-touch way these executives compensate themselves. The government may not be able to touch the insiders at Goldman Sachs and other firms not now covered by TARP; their billions in bonuses will continue to stick in the collective national craw. But taxpayers want to see the government asserting itself as the de facto owner of other giant institutions that royally screwed up their own balance sheets and the economy of the world.   

   It was amazing to see Sen. Mitch McConnell, the lemon-faced Kentuckian who's the top Senate Republican, endorse the compensation limits. If even Republicans are saying nice things about this obvious governmental intervention into free markets rather than denounce it as socialism, the political currents must be running mighty strongly against the fat paydays for the overweening incompetents of the financial world.

    Effective take-home cash at the TARP-dependent banks will now be limited to $500,000 a year (additional cash can be deferred) -- a munificent sum in the eyes of most earners, but chicken feed to Wall Street. Complicated new rules will restrict compensation in stock, too.
    Opponents of the new regulations say they will cause the most talented people at the TARP banks to jump ship for more money at the unregulated institutions. My answer is: What talented people? We're talking about the Masters of the Universe whose blind hubris ran their companies into bankruptcy or near-bankruptcy. Anybody who would hire these demonstrated losers is asking for trouble.
    Further, it's hard to identify sympathetically with professionals who have chosen a career of making money by, well, making money -- figuring out ever more arcane and allegedly ingenious ways for their institutions to invent profits, and taking a big cut of those profits in the form of bonuses, a corporate-jet lifestyle and multimillion-dollar salaries.
    What real value do any of these institutions add to the economy? What do they produce? Their money comes from other people with money, who go on to resell bizarre products to even more people with money until the ultimate consumers with the least money and sophistication buy these investment products and in many cases lose everything while the originators walk away laughing. 

    Try getting a real job and making something the world needs, guys. Meanwhile, as you labor on at $500,000 a year, try your best to make the living room rug in the Hamptons last another year.

Send This Man to Copenhagen

    

Wonderful, wonderful CO-penhagen, salty old queen of the sea!
                                                  -- "Hans Christian Andersen," The Movie

     If President Obama wants to go to Copenhagen to flog Chicago to the International Olympic Committee, let him go, says I.
     Those who criticize him for his decision -- they say it's unpresidential, it's too much like working for the "Illinois Chamber of Commerce," it risks having him look bad if Chicago loses -- are the same people who said he shouldn't even have dared to make a stay-in-school speech to America's children. Whatever Obama does or proposes, they're automatically against.
     Whether the 2016 Olympics end up in Chicago, Tokyo, Rio or Madrid, these carpers should be lined up in the stadium's javelin target area. Let the throwers heave at 'em.
      Now, personally, I think Rio deserves the Olympics more than Chicago does. No Olympics have ever been held in South America. And the Brazilians know how to throw a party, just as Chicagoans know how to rig an election.
     Oh, sure, there's lots of street crime in Rio, but how about Chicago, where a hapless teenager was beaten to death on the street the other day as a cellphone recorded the Third World scene? You want safety, go to Tokyo. Or maybe Madrid.
     But Chicago is Barack and Michelle's hometown, and if he's still thinking like the junior senator from Illinois that he was, it's hard to shake those habits. The benefits would not accrue merely to Chicago, moreover. It would be a patriotic plus for all Americans to snag another Summer Olympics, even though we had St. Louis in 1904, Los Angeles in 1932 and 1984, and Atlanta in 1996. We need something more to brag about these recessionary days.
     So bon voyage, President Obama. Come back with those quadrennial Games nailed to the wall. And if you don't succeed, you're still not likely to lose Illinois in 2012.

Same Sad Old Story: Guns With Violent Nuts Attached

    

First, two soldiers at a recruiting depot in Arkansas, shot by a convert to Islam. Then, Dr. George Tiller, gunned down in his church by a man who considers himself godly and acting for God. Today, a brave security guard killed at the U.S. Holocaust Museum by a vicious 88-year-old anti-Semite who once was a World War II hero but who has disgraced his Greatest Generation.
     Nobody in the United States is safe from unhinged haters. There are scores of thousands of them. They have severe mental issues. They are God-smacked or warped by a lifetime of losing and seeking scapegoats. They are armed to the teeth and lethal to anyone who gets in their way. A church vestry, a crowd of 2,000 in a public building. They don't care where they are. They come to shoot and kill.
    James Von (note the Von -- it's not even his real name) Brunn, the museum killer who was critically wounded in a shootout near the entrance, stalked in carrying a .22 rifle. He was a convicted felon, the kind of extremist who would attempt to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board at their meeting in 1981. Von Brunn should never have been allowed to own a firearm, but it is all too easy for anyone to buy one.
     Funny, Von Brunn reportedly was a frustrated artist. Just like Adolf Hitler, and without about Hitler's degree of talent. One the Holocaust organizer, the other a Holocaust denier. People like Von Brunn who blame Jews for their own failures are exactly like the Germans who turned to Hitler for the easy answers he provided. It is easier to hate than to work.
     We Americans are caught in a never-ending wave of murderous political crimes. Congress no longer has any stomach for gun control laws. The Second Amendment is on the march.
     We are sitting ducks. It may be your turn next. Wrong place, wrong time, you're gone.
     When are we going to do something about this reign of terror?  

A Modest Proposal on Guantanamo

    

As Republicans run wild on the issue of closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving the 240 inmates to facilities on U.S. soil, even Senate Democrats can't be blamed for shying from President Obama's plan to remove this symbol of Bush administration high-handedness and torture.
      The NIMBY fears so easily stirred up by the entirely emotional issue, even though the detainees would be secured in Supermax federal lockups from which no one has ever escaped, have potentially vulnerable politicians running scared of a future opponent's simplistic 30-second commercials.
      But before Congress prevents the administration from moving anyone to the U.S. mainland from Guantanamo -- thereby making it virtually impossible to convince any other country to accept a detainee -- policymakers should consider an alternative that could be a win-win choice for everybody, except perhaps for the terror suspects.
      Want to gratify the rest of the world and frustrate jihadist propagandists by closing Guantanamo? Fine, go right ahead. Want to keep any Guantanamo prisoner out of any U.S. states? You can do that, too.
      The strategy: Relocate the prisoners to a high-security facility that would be newly built and opened in Guam, American Samoa or -- just a short flight from Guantanamo -- the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Quiet St. Croix, somewhat off the tourist track, has the most land. Just don't put the Muslims in Christiansted, the island's chief city.)
      All these potential prison sites have these advantages:
      -- They're on U.S. soil, so Obama won't have to back down on that point.
      -- Residents there have no votes in Congress, only nonvoting delegates.
      -- Building and operating the new prison would create local jobs, a prospect that could mute opposition from NIMPT (Not in My Palm Tree) forces. Some of those giant Samoans would make great prison guards after their careers as NFL linemen end.
      -- The locations are in tropical settings that beat the bleakness of tropical but barren and ugly Guantanamo. How could jihadists or European moralists object to housing prisoners in the balmy South Pacific, the North Pacific paradise of Guam or especially the lovely Virgin Islands? (There, the alleged terrorists would be getting a symbolic downpayment on the 78 virgins, or whatever the number is, that jihadi "martyrs" are promised in heaven.) Or the inmates could learn the Argentine tago in Pago Pago.* 
      The president's executive order to close Guantanamo by the end of 2010 would not be blocked. The detainees, whether tried by Obama's tweaked military commissions or detained Cheney-style without charges, at least would have more pleasant quarters under the American flag.
       So how about it, Mr. President and members of Congress? Try the American Territorial Solution to the Guantanamo dilemma.
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* That's a rhyme. Pago Pago, capital of American Samoa, is pronounced "Pango Pango."      
      

Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame?

 Here's a commendation for the Rev. John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, for refusing to bow -- so far -- to mounting and near-hysterical pressure from anti-abortion Catholics to uninvite the pro-choice President Obama to deliver a commencement address at the South Bend, Ind., school on May 17.

   The local bishop says he won't attend. The Cardinal Newman Society, a national Catholic college group, says that more than 60,000 people have signed its online petition to stop the "scandal" at Notre Dame. The Pro-Life Action League is urging protests to Jenkins, demanding that he disinvite Obama. Social conservative student groups on campus are up in arms. Some of the Fighting Irish are wakening the echoes in fighting the nation's first African-American president, annoyed that he reversed the outrageously anti-progressive Bush administration restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

   The president is scheduled to speak at Notre Dame, Arizona State University and the U.S. Naval Academy in commencement season.

    Jenkins is admirably sticking to his guns. He told the campus newspaper that Obama is not being honored for his stands on abortion or embryonic stem cell research, but for his leadership in a difficult time. "You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade," he said. Jenkins issued a statement that Obama is "an inspiring leader" who is addressing the economy, two wars, health care, immigration and education "with intelligence, courage and honesty."

    Notre Dame's community and supporters should be proud that Obama is reaching out to American Catholics and honoring with his presence a university that for too long has been regarded only as a football school. Obama's address brings new prestige to Notre Dame, and everyone on campus should be open-minded about their differences with him.

   

Throwing Bonus AIGs at the Malfeasors

   

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, was being too kind to the AIG bonus-winners when he suggested in an Iowa radio interview Monday that they follow the Japanese model by bowing deeply, apologizing humbly and then either resigning or committing suicide.
    (The Japanese, by the way, describe the act as hara-kiri, not "harry-carry," as the American news media frequently mispronounce it. The ritual act of running a sword across one's midsection also is known as seppuku.)
    Why ask them to commit suicide? Why not take matters into our own hands by boiling these incompetent, greedy morons in oil? Or feeding them to the sharks off Isla Morada? Or parachuting them into the tribal areas of Pakistan?
    In truth, nothing is too bad for these AIG financial executives who have earned bonuses -- bonuses! -- of up to $1 million for running their huge company into the sewer, and taking the world's econony with it.
    No matter whether the taxpayers ever get the $165 million back -- and I favor a 91% special excise tax to be passed by Congress aimed squarely at these jerks -- let this become the death knell of the way the financial sector compensated its traders and managers. No more of this outrageous compensation. The people were helplessly angry and increasingly bitter for years as they witnessed these yearly bonuses and these stratospheric CEO salaries and options. Now, as owners of these companies, taxpayers aren't about to put up with a continuation of the status quo.
     These guys should be fired and perhaps prosecuted, certainly not rewarded.
     Enough.