The America Where We Live

(Editor’s Note: The NYT has published a fine piece of reporting on Egypt: “Dual Uprisings Show Potent New Threats to Arab States” Reporters  DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER published the piece on February 13, 2011. Obama shows leadership and the young people of Egypt display  amazing grace and courage.)

At least the New York Times is coming round to a realistic view of the world. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the infamous reporter, Judith Miller, supported the war because she bought into a crook’s perspective, one Ahmed Chalabi. It was an embarrassment, as embarrassing as Donald Rumsfeld’s foolish lies and quips.

The image of Rumsfeld presenting himself as a common Taoseno, vest and work shirt, standing in front of the Sacred Mountain, suggests an irony too delicious to pass up. Among others, Bush and Cheney for instance, Rumsfeld can’t travel abroad lest he be arrested as a “war criminal.” At his second home here, he seeks protection behind the Sacred Mountain—like the rest of the outlaws, drug dealers; ne’er do wells, and politicos, who are members of the criminal subculture aqui en Taos.

Your local Taosenos—except for elite party goers and aspiring realtors–treated Rumsfeld with the contempt he deserved. Still Rumsfeld is counting coup and declaring himself a winner.

See Maureen Dowd’s comments below. Columnists at the Times, like Dowd, Rich, Herbert, Krugman, and Kristof, have struggled to get the word out about “The America Where We Live”—a democracy slowly sinking into an unequal and softly structured  totalitarian state.

Sunday’s New York Times is particularly piquant about the failures of the American establishment during the last decade up to and including the present. Obama’s muddled policy regarding banks, right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce types, foreign policy, and the fascist Patriot Act does not bode well for the future or his re-election—except that the Republicans have worse candidates.

The right wing characterization of Obama as “community organizer” is true. It’s just that “his community” is composed of American elitists who brought us the “forever war” and “forever bankrupt policies”—not to mention provisions of the no knock, no court order, no name “Patriot Act.”

To me, Obama’s support of the “Patriot Act” represents the worst and most inexcusable betrayal. Goodbye Civil Liberties. (Rumsfeld’s photo should be up on the wall of the post office but you can meet the man himself at Brodsky’s Books and pick up a signed memoir on a date and time TBA.) We post excerpts below. You can read the complete texts for free at The New York Times. (Roger Cohen’s notion that we have book-ended 9/11 with 2/11 puts to rest negative stereotyping. We are all Egyptians.)

Simply the Worst

By Maureen Dowd (NYT, Feb. 12, 2011)

“Donald Rumsfeld is starting to make Robert McNamara look good.

“At least McNamara felt sorry at the end for all those lives and limbs lost because of his colossal misjudgments and cretinous refusal to admit mistakes.

“We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose,” a penitent McNamara said.

“When Diane Sawyer asked Rumsfeld last week if he ever revisited decisions that cost lives, he blandly replied, “Well, you know, in a war, many things cost lives.”

“Rumsfeld is still blinded by ego.

“As part of his “Je ne regret rien pas” book tour, the 78-year-old former defense secretary stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, where he got the group’s annual “Defender of the Constitution” award. Only another person with such an ironic spin on the phrase “Defender of the Constitution” could present the award, of course, so Dick Cheney popped by to give it to his old pal.

“When supporters of Ron and Rand Paul heckled the crusty pair — yelling “draft dodger” at Cheney, “Where’s bin Laden?” at Rumsfeld, and “war criminal” at both — Cheney blithely ordered them to “Sit down and shut up.”

“He is still oblivious about how wrong it was to shunt aside Afghanistan and goose up reasons to go careering into Iraq, which he felt had easier-to-hit targets and easier-to-find villains. He doesn’t agree with the “If you break it, you own it” theory. He thinks you can break it and just leave and not get bogged down in trying to build democratic dream countries.

“Rummy’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed “anticipatory self-defense.”

At “Rumsfeld.com,” the author has put up an archive of records and memos. One, marked “SECRET” and declassified last month at his request, is dated Sept. 9, 2002. That was after his P.R. roll-out to the March 2003 Iraq invasion was under way.

Here, Rumsfeld, as Dowd shows, he himself reproduces what the Secretary of Defense did not know, including “0%” on “actual weapons,” whether nuclear, biological, chemical.

“Somehow,” as Dowd points out, “that was twisted into “a slam-dunk.” You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want.”

What Egypt Can Teach America

By Nicholas D. Kristof (NYT, Feb. 12, 2011)

On the Ground

“The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:

“1.) Stop treating Islamic fundamentalism as a bogyman and allowing it to drive American foreign policy. American paranoia about Islamism has done as much damage as Muslim fundamentalism itself.

“For far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field.

“Too many Americans bought into a lazy stereotype that Arab countries were inhospitable for democracy, or that the beneficiaries of popular rule would be extremists like Osama bin Laden. Tunisians and Egyptians have shattered that stereotype, and the biggest loser will be Al Qaeda. We don’t know what lies ahead for Egypt — and there is a considerable risk that those in power will attempt to preserve Mubarakism without Mr. Mubarak — but already Egyptians have demonstrated the power of nonviolence in a way that undermines the entire extremist narrative. It will be fascinating to see whether more Palestinians embrace mass nonviolent protests in the West Bank as a strategy to confront illegal Israeli settlements and land grabs.

“2.) We need better intelligence, the kind that is derived not from intercepting a president’s phone calls to his mistress but from hanging out with the powerless. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, there was a painful post-mortem about why the intelligence community missed so many signals, and I think we need the same today.

“In fairness, we in the journalistic community suffered the same shortcoming: we didn’t adequately convey the anger toward Hosni Mubarak. Egypt is a reminder not to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.

“3.) New technologies have lubricated the mechanisms of revolt. Facebook and Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of repression. The International Criminal Court encourages dictators to think twice before ordering troops to open fire.

“It was Arab satellite television broadcasts like those of Al Jazeera that broke the government monopoly on information in Egypt. Too often, Americans scorn Al Jazeera (and its English service is on few cable systems), but it played a greater role in promoting democracy in the Arab world than anything the United States did.

“4.) Let’s live our values. We pursued a Middle East realpolitik that failed us. Condi Rice had it right when she said in Egypt in 2005: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

“After a long wishy-washy stage, President Obama got it pitch-perfect on Friday when he spoke after the fall of Mr. Mubarak. He forthrightly backed people power, while making clear that the future is for Egyptians to decide. Let’s hope that reflects a new start not only for Egypt but also for American policy toward the Arab world. Inshallah

Frank Rich, Sunday, NYT, Feb. 12, 2011

(Picard is the inquisitor for the Bernie Madoff victims and is going after CEO Dimond of J.P. Morgan Chase , another failed banker, to try and claw back funds from  fraudsters.)

“Picard’s litigation asserts that JPMorgan saw red flags about Madoff’s legitimacy yet never bothered to notify either the authorities or its own Madoff-invested customers as long as there was money the bank could scoop off the craps table. According to Picard’s brief, Madoff could freely cycle billions of dollars of his clients’ money through Chase accounts until the end — even as the bank itself was busily dumping $241 million of its $276 million in Madoff investments.

“Late last month, in the days before the Picard suit was unsealed, Dimon appeared on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, titled “The Next Shock, Are We Better Prepared?” and complained not for the first time — or the 10th — about what he considers unfair treatment by the press and the Obama administration. He’s just sick, he said, of the “constant refrain” of “bankers, bankers, bankers.” His arrogance compelled even the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, no socialist, to speak up and chastise American banks for repeatedly defying “simple common sense” over the last decade. “The world has paid with tens of millions of unemployed, who were in no way to blame and who paid for everything,” Sarkozy said. “Too much is too much.”

“JPMorgan overcharged at least 4,500 soldiers on their mortgages and illegally foreclosed on 18 of them. Many of these victims have been battling JPMorgan for years to get it to obey the law.

“For the most part, we’re not better prepared for the next shock. It’s not even clear we want to be prepared. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was ridiculously under-supported by Congress — it had less than one-sixth the budget of the musical “Spider-Man” to shed light on years of opaque financial maneuvers by huge, lawyered-up institutions.

“Michael Lewis, author of “The Big Short,” was far more favorable about the report but scarcely less fatalistic. “I feel like we’re living in a house built on sand because we didn’t reform the system,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Noting that banks have returned to huge profits while helping themselves to zero interest loans, Lewis concluded that we still have “socialism for capitalists, and capitalism for everybody else.”

EDITORIAL (NYT, Feb. 12, 2011)

A Patriot Act Surprise

“Republicans have a long history of favoring small government except when it comes to surveillance and security, at which point civil liberties take a back seat. Last week, however, 26 Republicans in the House demonstrated a remarkable consistency by joining 122 Democrats to prevent the extension of three questionable provisions of the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law created during the Bush administration.

“Three provisions in the act are set to expire on Feb. 28, and would be renewed under the House bill, supported by the Obama administration, through December.

“One would allow a roving wiretap on a terror suspect to monitor his conversations as he moves from phone to phone. That can be a useful tool, but the authorization is so broad that the government does not even have to specify the suspect’s name to get a warrant. The failure to provide a more narrow identification of the suspect is too lax and could lead to abuse.

“Another expiring provision has long raised serious civil liberties concerns, allowing the government to examine library and bookstore records of suspects, along with hard drives, tax documents and gun records. Investigators are not required to show probable cause that the material is related to a terrorist investigation.

“The third provision, allowing surveillance of “lone wolf” suspects who may not be tied to recognized terror organizations, is also overly broad but has never been used. Rather than renew it without debate, the government should explain whether it is really necessary.

“The extensions will probably pass the House this week — though leaders do not plan to give anyone a chance to amend them — and go to the Senate, which should provide another opportunity for reconsideration. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has introduced a bill that would add several safeguards to the act, most notably the phasing out of “national security letters,” which the F.B.I. has used to obtain evidence without a court order. These letters have been subject to widespread misuse and have never received proper oversight.

“Unfortunately, the same bill that would bring the letters under control would extend the three expiring provisions in the Patriot Act through 2013. It is a much better measure, however, than a bill by Senator Dianne Feinstein that would extend the provisions for three more years without the new safeguards, or one by Senator Mitch McConnell that would make the three provisions permanent. Congress should not miss an opportunity to wield some oversight on this issue and determine whether the government could achieve its goals with less sweeping surveillance powers.”

From WikiLeaks we learned how the governors in the world hold the governed in contempt. Hosni Mubarak found out that the feelings are mutual. The ballot boxes in America increasingly present us with the worst of two evils. Perhaps we need a new “Declaration of Independence.” Vote “No.”