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The Gun Battle Since Newtown |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30716"><span class="small">Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 15 December 2014 14:47 |
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Schecter writes: "The gun rights people may be better armed, but those demanding common sense laws and no more massacres of children have the arc of justice on their side."
Children being evacuated from Sandy Hook Elementary. (photo: Shannon Hicks/Newton Bee)
The Gun Battle Since Newtown
By Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast
15 December 14
The gun rights people may be better armed, but those demanding common sense laws and no more massacres of children have the arc of justice on their side.
 wo years ago today, while 20 children along with six teachers and administration members were being mass-murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., I was on a radio show (The Majority Report with Sam Seder), discussing the scourge of gun violence in this country. I suspect, like with 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, many people remember where they were when they heard about this unspeakable tragedy—one that was entirely predictable and we allowed to happen.
There’s no doubt that horrible day was a tipping point that had been building like a tidal wave: a mass-shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (and the killing of others with her in Tucson, Ariz.) and many other incidents, whose names you don’t remember, in the two years leading up to Newtown. But I’ve been writing and talking about this issue for over a decade, tracking how we’ve let the equivalent of those who think there should be no drunk driving laws decide which laws should regulate guns. Before Newtown, it was a lonely beat. No longer.
Change never comes easy, which is why Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Clearly, we still have a long, long way to go before we even have even the most basic sanity in our gun laws on the national level. But from public perception to the numerous defeats suffered by the ignominious sand-pounders known as the National Rifle Association in recent elections, the arc has begun to pick up the pace.
This is by no means to imply that manic, fluoride-phobic, tri-corner hatted half-wits are not still trying to dragoon the United States of America into governing via armed warlord. They control way too many state legislatures—which just got worse with the 2014 election—and have applied their usual lack of critical thinking and rain dancing to how we handle guns in many states. They continue to find willing recruits among an aging white working class that’s seen its domination over women, people of color and other “others” decline, and that needs to embrace some symbol of power.
For example, in the state I live in, Ohio, the right-wing Republican-controlled state legislature—which in no way represents the will of the people who have twice elected Sherrod Brown to the Senate and likewise twice voted for Barack Obama—has just passed a bill to allow reciprocal agreement with other states’ concealed carry laws. Considering that in some states like Utah and Texas, where certain house pets can probably qualify, it’s an amazingly stupid idea. So is a “Stand Your Ground” bill they’re discussing, because clearly, there hasn’t been enough evidence that shooting first with impunity is a license to kill for racist sociopaths. Your move, supposedly not Tea-Party-fevered Governor John Kasich.
How the polling firms and the media adjust to new realities also seems to be a rather long arc. Many news outlets breathlessly reported a new Pew poll finding that “gun rights” were more popular than “gun control,” as if that means anything. The right has turned the latter phrase into a synonym for taking everyone’s guns, so the fact that 46 percent support “gun control” while only 52 percent are for “gun rights” should scare the gunnies.
Additionally, what is clear is that if you talk about certain measures—for example universal background checks—and not the overall term “gun control,” there is overwhelming support. You can trust the many polls saying this, but only if you’re in the reality-based community. If you’re not, then perhaps the actual vote in Washington State to institute background checks might convince you to return to this galaxy. In a state with a heavily white midterm electorate, another gun initiative on the ballot to confuse voters and where the NRA spent more money than any other, 60 percent of the voters approved the measure.
I could spend the rest of this column debunking other gun extremist talking points, but I’ve already done that in the past. What’s new this year is that the NRA hung Democrats who supported its noxious agenda out to dry, which has led many of these once gun-fondler supporters to embrace common sense, such as supporting Vivek Murthy for Surgeon General. The NRA opposes him because he referred to gun violence as a “public-health crisis.” Also, your nose is in front of your face and the sun will come up tomorrow.
Meanwhile, a new grassroots coalition of state legislators (including Republicans) has joined mayors, moms, pediatricians, gun owners, prosecutors, and other groups dedicated to sane gun laws. A petition has been delivered in Nevada that will put a similar measure to the one in Washington on the ballot in 2016. It had more petition signatures than any previous Nevada ballot initiative. Ever. Oregon, Arizona and Maine may join the parade. The energy is clearly growing to rid this country of the fear-based rule of obtuse, aged white men. We’re becoming a more forward thinking, more multi-ethnic country where Gen X and Millennials are stepping into leadership roles.
There’s still a long way to go, however. This past week, America was once again horrifyingly reminded of who the most extreme gun nuts behind the open carry movement really are, the ones who feel a need to arm for battle when going to the local store to pick up diapers and 7-Up. In Texas, where this is a fetish, Veronica Dunnachie, one of the most high profile members of Open Carry Texas and Open Carry Tarrant County (you know, double the gun groups, double the pleasure), is in custody for shooting her husband and step-daughter to death, and then driving herself to a mental hospital. Because these kinds of things just happen in countries with common sense laws and “peaceful” protesters who feel a need to need to carry a Kalashnikov in public.
So while the arc is indeed bending, it often feels eternal. In the two years since Newtown, for students attending Apostolic Revival Center Christian School, Taft Union High School, Stevens Institute of Business & Art, Hazard Community and Technical College, Chicago State University, Lone Star College North Harris Campus, Price Middle School, Morehouse College, Indian River St. College, Hillside Elementary School, Henry W. Grady HS, University of Central Florida, Davidson Middle School, New River Community College, Elizabeth City State University, Grambling State University, La Salle High School, Santa Monica College, Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, Northwest High School, Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, Westside Elementary School, North Palona High School, Carver High School, Savannah State University, New Gloucester High School, Agape Christian Academy, Lanier High School, Sparks Middle School, Algona High/Middle School, North Carolina A & T University, Stephenson High School, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, West Orange High School Arapahoe High School, Edison High School, Liberty Technology Magnet HS, Berrendo Middle School, Martin Luther King Jr. ES, Delaware Valley Charter School, Widener University, Purdue University, South Carolina State University, Tennessee State University, Grambling State University, Cesar Chavez High School, North High School, Bend High School, Salisbury High School, Brush High School, Union University, Raytown Success Academy, McDaniel College, Madison High School, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, University of Delaware, Kent State University, East English Village Preparatory Academy, Stillman College, St. Mary Catholic School, Provo High School, Iowa Western Community College, Marquette University, Horizon Elementary School, Paine College, Georgetown College, Georgia Gwinnett College, Clark Street School, Seattle Pacific University, Reynolds High School, Kelly High School, University of Miami, Heather Ridge High School, Saunders Elementary, Idaho State University, Westbrook Elementary School, Joel C. Harris Academy, Indiana State University, Albermarle High School, Fern High School, Langston Hughes High School, Elizabeth City State University, Langston University, A. Maceo Walker Middle School, Marysville Pilchuck High School, Delaware State University, Florida State University, St. Johns College and Rogers State University, whatever we do won’t be soon enough.
But to honor them, our values, the will of the majority, and to protect future potential victims at schools or anywhere else in our society, it’s up to all of us who believe in this country to fight for it. To not give in to profiteers, paid-off politicians and an extreme minority who hate its government and way of life.
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FOCUS | The Real Torture Patriots |
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Monday, 15 December 2014 12:40 |
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Mayer writes: "At the end of a week in which we were faced anew with the awful facts of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program, it’s hard not to conclude that President Obama missed an important opportunity to set the record straight."
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who blew the whistle on CIA practices. (photo: Zinta Lundborg/Bloomberg)
ALSO SEE: The Charmed Life of a CIA Torturer
The Real Torture Patriots
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
15 December 14
 t the end of a week in which we were faced anew with the awful facts of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program, it’s hard not to conclude that President Obama missed an important opportunity to set the record straight.
As the revelations from the Senate Intelligence Committee poured forth, depicting even worse brutality than what was previously understood to have happened and a program that could only be described as sadistic, President Obama praised C.I.A. officers as “patriots” and allowed John Brennan, his C.I.A. director, to stop short of calling the tactics “torture.”
The White House spokesman Josh Earnest, meanwhile, shilly-shallied through one embarrassing press briefing after another, doing all he could to duck rather than answer the question of whether the inhumane interrogation tactics that Obama outlawed during his first week in office had proven useful during the Bush years. The message wasn’t just elliptical; the President and his top spokesmen were talking in circles.
It appeared that Obama and Brennan had a single purpose, which was to not “lose Langley,” as people in Washington say, meaning that they didn’t want to alienate those still working at the C.I.A. This calculation—that C.I.A. officers, unlike soldiers, law-enforcement officers, and other public servants who risk their lives to serve the country, are too fragile for criticism, too valuable to fire, and too patriotic to prosecute—somehow tied the Obama Administration in knots.
It didn’t have to be this way. There have been a number of true “torture patriots,” many of them at the C.I.A., who Obama and Brennan could have praised while sending a very clear message to the Agency and to the public. They are the officers who blew the whistle on the program internally and externally, some of whom have paid a very high price for their actions. The Senate report itself describes C.I.A. officers in tears at early interrogations, asking for transfers and, in some instances, expressing doubts and pushing back. By 2004, the internal criticism had grown loud enough that John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, conducted a serious and influential internal investigation. This, in turn, led the Justice Department to ask the C.I.A. to suspend the torture program until it could be reconciled with the law. Unfortunately, it was renewed for two more years, until the Supreme Court brought it to a halt.
Outside the C.I.A., many others risked their jobs and legal peril in efforts to blow the whistle on a program they found ethically, morally, and legally heinous. These were not only liberal lawyers and human-rights activists—although many of them acted nobly and selflessly—but also soldiers and F.B.I. agents, like Ali Soufan, and even some Bush Administration political appointees, like Alberto Mora, the former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, who risked everything to shine light on the abuses, in the hope of bringing America back from what Vice-President Dick Cheney called “the dark side.”
As David Luban, a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author of “Torture, Power, and Law,” suggested in the Times, there are many forms of accountability for torture, and one of the most meaningful would be to honor the real torture patriots—those who tried to stop it. What a better week it would have been if Obama had.
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Dodd-Frank Budget Fight Proves Democrats Are a Bunch of Stuffed Suits |
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Monday, 15 December 2014 09:42 |
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Taibbi writes: "Gosh, the Democrats are really pushing hard to save a key portion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, aren't they? Like tigers, or Siamese fighting fish they battle! Thrilling to watch! Oh, wait, that's what they aren't doing."
Matt Taibbi appearing on Democracy Now! (photo: Democracy Now!)
Dodd-Frank Budget Fight Proves Democrats Are a Bunch of Stuffed Suits
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
15 December 14
 osh, the Democrats are really pushing hard to save a key portion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, aren't they? Like tigers, or Siamese fighting fish they battle! Thrilling to watch!
Oh, wait, that's what they aren't doing. Actually what we're watching in the "Cromnibus" budget fight, is a stage-managed surrender that was inevitable pretty much from the moment the ink began to dry on the so-called sweeping reform of Wall Street the Democrats passed years ago.
The dominant media narrative this past week has been that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, firmly saddled in her high horse, is trying to hold up the passage of the budget over a trifle. In reality, the so-called "Citigroup" provision to kill a rule designed to prevent future bailouts (so named because it was allegedly written by Citigroup lobbyists) is potentially quite an evil and destructive little thing. But the nitpicking counter-spin is already coming hot and heavy.
"It's a marginal regulation," said Patrick Brennan of the National Review, about the Dodd-Frank rule Warren wants to keep. Brennan bro-ishly dismissed "Liz" as an "indefatigable academic" who is "picking a fight that really can't be said to help or hurt the economy," a political fight that is "hardly a hill to die on."
Republicans like South Carolina Senator Linsey Graham derided Warren's gambit as an immature squabble and blasted Democrats in the House who followed her line of thinking. "Don't follow her lead," he said. "She's the problem."
Making the budget fight a news story not about bailouts, but about the ambitions of Elizabeth Warren, is part of the game. And the Beltway hacks have succeeded there. Media on all sides have described last week's episode as Warren's political coming-out party. Former Obama aides sent a letter urging her to run for president, and Fox news said the rebellion showed Warren has the "clout" to "disrupt the best plans of the establishment."
The Atlantic saw the budget fight as an episode that secretly thrilled the Republicans, who came away with a powerful new talking point: Warren's "star is rising," and she's pushing the Dems leftward, to a platform that wouldn't carry a general election.
"Every leading Democrat," said RNC spokescreep Sean Spicer, "feels like Elizabeth Warren is looking over their shoulder to go further to the left."
All of this is infuriating on multiple levels, but mainly because Warren's opposition to the Citi provision wasn't a left-leaning move at all. It was very much a conservative position. Ayn Rand herself, dragged from the grave and lashed to a chair on the floor of the Senate, would have argued the same thing.
All the Dodd-Frank rule says is that if you're a federally-insured depository institution – if you're an FDIC-guaranteed bank, where real people have real bank accounts that are guaranteed by the federal government – you can't also be gambling with swaps and other dangerous derivative instruments.
Think of it in terms of a workman's compensation law. If you're going to be insured against injury by the state, the state should get to demand that you don't engage in fire-eating or base-jumping during work hours.
There's no logical argument against the provision. The banks only want it because they want to use your bank accounts as a human shield to protect their dangerous gambling activities.
Thus it was no surprise when JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon started personally calling lawmakers this week to make sure the Citigroup provision passed. Dimon's bank is the poster child for this rule, since the infamous London Whale episode of a few years ago is exhibit A of what this rule is designed to prevent: a trillion-dollar federally-insured depository bank engaging in tons of unsafe financial sex with risky derivatives, leading to spiraling losses in the billions that imperiled the savings of millions of ordinary people.
Both parties are moving against their ideological reputations in this fight. On one side, we have "conservatives" in the House and Senate who want to put taxpayers on the hook for massive future welfare payments. We had to have Senate hearings last year after the London Whale episode, which by itself ought to have infuriated conservatives everywhere. After all, why should the government have to get involved if Jamie Dimon feels like losing $6 billion at the blackjack table? Why is that our business?
Well, we had to have those hearings because the offending gambler, JPM, was and is a company whose bank deposits were federally insured. All Chase has to do is untether its consumer bank from its lunatic hedge fund, as both Warren and genuine conservatives like David Vitter want, and the state wouldn't have to so much as blink when these rich dweebs rack up big gambling losses.
Meanwhile, on the other side, we have "liberals" in the White House and in the lame-duck Senate leadership who are nakedly whoring for big business in this affair, unashamedly doing favors for banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase that in recent years have racked up tens of billions of dollars in penalties for a smorgasbord of corrupt practices. Establishment Democrats like Harry Reid almost certain to cave and wave through the Citigroup provision, foregoing a filibuster-type standoff.
Why? As Warren has cannily pointed out, veterans of Citigroup have dominated the Democratic Party establishment for quite a long time now, through figures like current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin.
Conservatives for welfare, and liberals for big business. It doesn't make sense unless we're not really dealing with any divided collection of conservatives or liberals, and are instead talking about one nebulous mass of influence, money and interests. I think of it as a single furiously-money-collecting/favor-churning oligarchical Beltway party, a thing that former Senate staffer and author Jeff Connaughton calls "The Blob."
What's happening here is that The Blob, which includes supposed enemies like Reid and Graham, wants to give donation-factory banks like Citi and Chase a handout. But a coalition of heretics, including the liberal Warren, the genuinely conservative Vitter and (surprisingly to me) the usually party-orthodox Nancy Pelosi is saying no to the naked giveaway.
Is killing the Citigroup provision really worth the trouble? Is it a "Hill to die on"? Maybe not in itself. But the key here is that a victory on the swaps issue will provide the Beltway hacks with a playbook for killing the rest of the few meaningful things in Dodd-Frank, probably beginning with the similar Volcker Rule, designed to prevent other types of gambling by federally-insured banks. Once they cave on the swaps issue, it won't be long before the whole bill vanishes, and we can go all the way back to our pre-2008 regulatory Nirvana.
If the Democrats actually stood for anything other than sounding as progressive as possible without offending their financial backers, then they would do what Republicans always do in these situations: force a shutdown to save their legislation. How many times did Republicans hold the budget hostage to rescue the Bush tax cuts?
But the Democrats won't do that here, because they're not a real party. They're a marketing phenomenon, a big chunk of oligarchical Blob cleverly sold to voters as the more reasonable and less nakedly corrupt wing of a two-headed political establishment.
So they'll punt on this issue in the name of "maturity" or "bipartisanship," Wall Street will get a nice win, and Hillary Clinton or whoever else is being set up as the Blob candidate on the Democratic side will receive an avalanche of Financial Services donations to stave off Warren (who will begin appearing in the press as an unhinged combination of Lev Trotsky and Spartacus). A neat little piece of business all around. I don't know whether to applaud or throw up.
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Elizabeth Warren Was Told to Stay Quiet, But She Didn't - and It's Paying Off |
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Monday, 15 December 2014 09:41 |
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Goldfarb writes: "She hasn't stopped throwing bombs at the rich and powerful - and causing trouble for the White House - but she's won a spot in Senate leadership, changed the shape of congressional debates over financial regulation and continued to draw widespread attention as a potential presidential candidate."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), right, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, express their outrage to reporters about the changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law in the $1.1 trillion spending bill. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Elizabeth Warren Was Told to Stay Quiet, But She Didn't - and It's Paying Off
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, The Washington Post
15 December 14
 n her book released this year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren recounted a dinner she had with President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, in April 2009, when Warren was the outspoken chairman of a congressionally appointed panel probing the government’s response to the financial crisis.
Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. ... He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don’t criticize other insiders.
I had been warned.
Warren ignored the warning.
And if the past few weeks are any indication, she can operate as an insider without giving her up outsider credentials. She’s remained outspoken, but has become even more influential. She hasn't stopped throwing bombs at the rich and powerful — and causing trouble for the White House — but she's won a spot in Senate leadership, changed the shape of congressional debates over financial regulation and continued to draw widespread attention as a potential presidential candidate.
It all helps to explain why – for the 300 former Obama campaign officials who last week urged her to run in 2016 – she is the one they’ve been waiting for.
“Rising income inequality is the challenge of our times, and we want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy,” they wrote.
Over the past week, Warren galvanized liberals across Capitol Hill against a government spending bill that weakened a key provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that tightened oversight of Wall Street.
The Senate may have passed the legislation late Saturday, but it was not before Warren and other liberals asserted their power in a confrontation with the White House, joining with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to oppose the legislation.
Warren is also in an unusually public battle with the White House and Treasury Department over Antonio Weiss, an investment banker who has been tapped for a key Treasury position. White House officials say Weiss is deeply sympathetic to Democratic views and is the right man for the job. But Warren has won over several colleagues in trying to block the nomination, saying the administration is too cozy with Wall Street.
It’s a topic she reprised in a speech Friday evening after losing the battle over the spending bill, in which see singled out mega-bank Citigroup as an example of a bank with too much power.
“Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism we have seen in the executive branch,” she said. “Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th-hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but that everybody comes to regret. Enough is enough.”
Critics of Warren, even if they're sympathetic to her view, would say that by taking absolutist positions, she won't achieve much more than fiery rhetoric.
On the government spending bill, Obama could have pushed for more, but ultimately gotten less – especially in a new Congress controlled by Republicans next year. And opposing hiring finance industry officials for Treasury jobs, one might argue, is like fighting for a Justice Department staffed with people who never worked for a private law firm.
The history of Obama's presidency, in many ways, is a story of compromises that disappointed liberals but still achieved substantial policy gains for Democrats, including the Affordable Care Act.
Looking forward, the power of Warren and likeminded senators seems only to be growing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made her a member of leadership. In the next Senate, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee will be liberal leader Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee will be Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-avowed socialist.
It's hard to imagine any of them leading the way on any legislation the Senate will actually consider, and it's equally difficult to know how Warren would respond if she was actually in a position where she had to negotiate legislation. To the degree he seeks congressional accords in his final two years, Obama will be forging them with Republican leadership in the House and Senate, and bringing along as many Democrats as he can.
But should he move far in hopes of a compromise with the GOP — on trade, the budget or any other issue — Obama will likely find Warren leading a liberal flank in opposition. It's hard to know if she would succeed, but the past few weeks show that she has the influence to make a difference.
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sually the sitting president is the leader of his or her political party until there is a new nominee. If the party is not in power then the highest ranking Congressional leader or the presumptive nominee is seen as the leader of the party.
