Another bit of good news — Barack Obama’s first-quarter fundraising came very close to Hillary Clinton’s, which puts a big dent in the assumption that Senator Clinton’s nomination is inevitable. Let the competition begin.
Even better — according to this chart at MyDD, Obama’s money came from 100,000 donors, while Clinton’s money came from 50,000 donors. That means Obama is getting smaller donations from more people, while Clinton is getting bigger donations from fewer people.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad has announced Iran will free the 15 British sailors. I don’t want to celebrate until the sailors are truly free, but I do get the impression it’s a done deal. The concession Britain made was to promise not to intrude into Iranian waters again, sort of admitting they had, although I’m not sure anyone really knows. I get the impression that exactly which waters are Iraqi and which are Iranian are a matter of long-standing dispute.
[Update: This post is being linked to in a forum in which some rightie claims it is only us lefties making a Big Bleeping Deal out of the scarf. The fact is, much of the rightie blogosphere went into hysterics about Nancy Pelosi’s scarf. Think Progress has a selection of links.]
Of all the dumb things to get worked up into a snit about, this one is almost as dumb as Ann Althouse’s boob post.
The jolly folks at Little Green Footballs have gone batshit bleeping crazy because Nancy Pelosi wore a headscarf to visit a mosque in Syria. “Pelosi in a hijab!” they shriek.
Hello? Some of us are old enough to remember when women were required to cover their hair in Catholic churches. Here’s the divine Jackie with that first guy she married outside a church sometime in the late 1950s.
Apparently scarves are still a requirement at the Vatican.
[Update] Speaking of Laura Bush, here’s a lovely photograph of her visiting the Muslim holy shrine the Dome of the Rock in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, May 22, 2005.
I’d also like to note that American women very commonly wore headscarves tied under their chins like that all through the 1950s and into the 1960s. I remember wearing them myself; one wrapped one’s head when going outside to protect one’s bouffant hairdo from wind and weather. Apparently the only woman on the planet who still does that is Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed below by Helen Mirren in The Queen (which is a lovely little flm, btw).
Nowadays it looks frumpy as hell, but Audrey Hepburn could carry it off.
I can’t say that Muslim women never wear a tied-under-the-chin scarf, but from what I see in photographs an actual hijab is usually wrapped rather than tied.
I’m certain I’ve seen photographs of Karen Hughes and Condi Rice with scarves wrapped around their heads hijab-style while visiting the Middle East, but I couldn’t find one to post here. If anyone else can, please leave the URL in the comments.
Update: Check out the exclusive Pelosi in ’07 tee shirt!
Update2: Thank you and a big smooch to maha reader johnnyrocket, who found this photo of Condi Rice in “hijab.”
Update3: Now LGF is whining that we lefties are being mean to them. The point was not about the scarf, they say, but that Pelosi was in Syria.
First, read this post and tell me the point isn’t about the scarf.
Second, three Republican congressmen were in Damascus last week.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has put the last piece of straw on the poor camel called Iraq. And its back is about to break. …
… After that snake Ahmed Chalabi talked to him, he has put the word out that he will not back the de-Baathification program (this NYT article explains it best). That means Sunnis will not get the stable jobs that would give them an incentive to join the Iraqi government. That means they will feel alienated and fight back against a government that completely excludes them. The insurgency will grow. The civil war which has already begun will now spiral out of control.
The Sunnis no longer have any incentive to make a deal. The only place where they think they might make gains is on the battlefield (I believe they are also sorely mistaken in that belief). So, it’s on. Iraq no longer exists.
By the way, in case you missed it — yes, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani makes the most important decisions in Iraq. The real power in Iraq runs through Sistani. He decided who would be elected to the Iraqi government in the first place when he selected the religious Shiite bloc that won the 2005 elections. George Bush handed Iraq over to a Grand Ayatollah. Brilliant work. Genius. Is it possible to be more incompetent?
So, now the rest of this will play out predictably. The Sunni insurgency will not let up at all. At some point, either we will start to withdraw and be replaced by Shiite militia (by the way, where is the Iraqi army, do they still exist?). That’s the best case scenario.
Expect the MSM “pundits” to figure this out in six to eight months.
I’m a little late commenting on the bogus charge that John McCain was heckled by Michael Ware, but it’s been weighing on me so I’ll comment anyway.
I sometimes wish videos of President Lyndon Johnson’s press conferences were available on the web (if they are, let me know). As I remember it, at some point after the Vietnam War began the Washington press corps began to hound LBJ mercilessly. The press became openly antagonistic to Johnson, and I won’t say he didn’t deserve it. When reporters began to treat Richard Nixon the same way they’d treated LBJ, Nixon sent out Spiro Agnew to stir up faux outrage against the nattering nabobs of negativism and whine about liberal media bias; thus a myth was born. The fact is, as I remember it the press was a shade gentler to Nixon than it had been to LBJ. And by the time Reagan came along they’d become sufficiently defensive about “”liberal media bias” that reporters generally treated Reagan with kid gloves compared to the way they’d treated presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. And in comparison to the press corps in Johnson’s day, today’s White House reporters are a neutered and toothless lot, indeed.
I thought of LBJ’s press conferences yesterday after I saw this post by the Instaputz:
DISINTERESTED JOURNALISM: John McCain heckled by CNN reporter.
Ah, professionalism.
UPDATE: Hard to argue: “Michael Ware’s behavior here is flat out unprofessional. If CNN keeps him on staff after this incident, that says something, doesn’t it?”
ANOTHER UPDATE: John Tabin: “Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn’t be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn’t dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi’s face during a press conference). That said, isn’t it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?”
Wouldn’t it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs?
Later, Raw Story posted videos of the alleged heckling and, um, it wasn’t heckling. And to be fair, several rightie bloggers, including Reynolds, retracted their allegations.
But I want to address the part about reporters being “disinterested,” which means objective or neutral. Objectivity and neutrality are splendid. But “neutrality” and “objectivity” don’t translate into “pretending not to notice when a politician is lying his ass off.”
“Objectivity” used to mean that one shouldn’t allow personal biases to get in the way of telling the truth. Now it seems to mean one mustn’t tell the bare-assed truth about what politicians are up to, especially if they’re Republicans, because it makes the politicians look bad.
Regarding John McCain’s stroll through a Baghdad market (accompanied by 100 troops and two Apache helicopters), Kirk Semple writes in today’s New York Times:
A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.
“What are they talking about?†Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!â€
The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.
“They paralyzed the market when they came,†Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.â€
He added, “This will not change anything.â€
At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,†offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.
McCain and Pence and everybody else who staged that little stunt in support of the war deserved whatever razzing they got from the press. The fact that we are still being told about the soldiers and helicopters is not “media bias“; it’s “what a free press looks like.”
The President is scheduled to throw another public temper tantrum in the Rose Garden at 10 a.m. today. Apparently Harry Reid stole the presidential rubber ducky, and Bush wants it back.
I’ll watch and let you know how pathetic it is.
Update: Make that 10:10 a.m.
Here we go. Bush just said he met with General Pace and the joint chiefs of staff. He’s claiming the surge is working just fine, although it will be early June before the entire surge is in place. Having an impact, making a difference, he says.
It has now been 57 days since I requested emergency funds. Instead of passing a clean bill, the politicians have passed bills that undercut the troops and substituted the judgment of politicians in Washington for commanders on the ground.
[Update: See Think Progress about the 57 days.]
He’s playing the pork card. Democrats are bad and have left Washington for spring recess without finishing the work. How dare anyone but Bush take vacations. Dems are making a political statement. He wants the bill quickly so he can veto it, and then Congress can get down to work and do what he wants.
He’s still claiming that if the bill isn’t enacted by mid-April the troops will suffer. I have debunked that claim in earlier posts.
Blah blah blah; units will be extended, blah blah, if Congress does not act, blah blah. You’ve heard this before. I’m waiting for him to say something new.
He’s answering questions. He’s worried there are “a group of people” who don’t think we should be in Iraq (like, most of the American public) and he has “listened patiently” to their complaints and has decided he is right and they are wrong. Basically that’s all he says; I think I’m right, so I’m going ahead and do what I want to do.
He’s saying that the solution to Iraq is more than a military mission, which is why he sent more troops to Baghdad. (Yes.) He wants to provide “breathing room” for the Iraqi government to work.
He is afraid if we fail in Iraq “the enemy” will find a “safe haven” from which to plot future attacks on America, and if we fail in Iraq the enemy will follow us here, and SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11. So there.
Have I ever mentioned how much it bothers me that the creature smiles at inappropriate times? I believe I have.
David Gregory is now “dancing man.”
Gregory said Congress is trying to exert more control over foreign policy, and isn’t that what the voters wanted? Bush says no, the voters want Congress to support the troops. And now he’s complaining about the pork again.
He’s basically dismissing what Congress passed as a political game, and he wants Congress to stop playing politics and get down to business, i.e. resume the role of rubber stamp.
He keeps harping on Congress for taking a week off at a time that’s inconvenient for him.
People have to understand what will happen if we fail, he says, grinning broadly. Oh, please, the radicals are being emboldened again. Please. And they will recruit more terrorists. Like they aren’t doing that now.
Defeat them there so we don’t have to defeat them here SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11. And the way to defeat their ideology is by a competing ideology, one that respects human rights. Yeah, that’s what Democrats are trying to do.
Somebody is asking him about being isolated from other Republicans, especially in Congress. He is baffled by the question. He says that once Congress is brought to heel passes his supplement bill the way he wants it, from then on everybody will get along just fine. And he opposes tax increases.
Somebody is questioning the “they will follow us home” scenario. Bush is brushing it off. SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11 SEPTEMBER 11. I don’t know how they’ll do it, Bush says, I just know they will.
He wants the Middle East to change into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world. Then he changed civilized to developed.
It’s over, thank goodness. Now Chris Matthews says Bush is just trying to hold on to his base. Matthews also says that if the “surge” isn’t working by August, Bush will finally be out of time. Earth to Tweetie: Bush will never admit that he is out of time.
Well, that’s it.
[Update: via email from John Kerry’s Senate office — Kerry will join Reid as a co-sponsor of Senator Feingold’s bill.]
The post-veto strategy is shaping up. Bob Geiger writes,
In anticipation of a Bush veto and the likelihood that they won’t be able to summon enough Republicans who care about the troops or public opinion sufficiently to override that veto, Senate Democrats are already rolling out a contingency plan that puts the GOP on notice about something very important: That they are going to be forced over and over again to be on the record as voting to strand our military men and women in the middle of a bloody civil war.
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), long one of the gutsy leaders on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle, has announced that he will propose legislation immediately on return from this week’s break that will cut off all funding for the Iraq war in less than a year.
Upping the ante on another major showdown immediately following the expected Bush veto of the war-funding (and withdrawal) bill, is the fact that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) supports the Feingold measure and has signed on as the bill’s first cosponsor.
On the other end of the wimp scale, Barack Obama believes the Senate will cave and pass a bill without the timeline because no one “wants to play chicken” over funding the troops.
“My expectation is that we will continue to try to ratchet up the pressure on the president to change course,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage.”
There are those who argue that would be a smart political move. I think they’re wrong; I think they’re misreading the public mood. I think a large majority of Americans would really like to see Congress stand up to Bush. On the other hand, the Dem political elite, long accustomed to caution and accommodation to the Right, are still tip-toeing. Jonathan Weisman writes in today’s Washington Post:
Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.
“That’s where their strength is,” Panetta said. “If they go into total confrontation mode on these other things, where they just pass bills and the president vetoes them, that’s a recipe for losing seats in the next election.”
Um, Mr. Panetta, that’s the same thinking that caused the Dems to get swamped in the 2002 midterm elections.
Republicans these days are full of helpful advice for the Dems.
Backed by a unified party and fresh from a slew of legislative victories, Democratic leaders appear to believe there is hardly any territory they cannot stray onto, a development that has Republican political operatives gleeful and some Democrats worried. Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned of a “political price” at the polls: “If they let their constituents and their ideology drive them past the point where the American people are comfortable, they will find how quickly the voters will react.” …
… Most Republicans are convinced the president will win his veto standoff over House and Senate war spending bills that would impose mandatory troop withdrawals from Iraq.
“It’s going to be like the government shutdowns” of 1995 and 1996, predicted Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). “The Democrats’ honeymoon is fixing to end. It’s going to explode like an IED.”
I don’t think the government shutdown episodes were anything like the potential standoff between Bush and Congress over Iraq. The shutdowns came out of a disagreement between Congress and President Clinton over the budget. At the time most Americans didn’t give a hoohaw about the budget. News reports were all about how much money was being wasted because of the shutdown and how citizens all over the country were being inconvenienced, including 2 million visitors turned away from closed national parks. Whatever principle Newt Gingrich was trying to stand on didn’t seem worth it to most folks.
Public reaction to the shutdown did explode on the Republicans like an IED, that’s true. But we’re looking at an entirely different set of facts here. In 1995, few Americans really understood (or cared) why Newt Gingrich was grandstanding over the budget. The Iraq War they understand — it’s a bleeping disaster. And they care about ending it with growing intensely. Read more about the false comparisons with the standoff episodes at Media Matters.
Back to the Weisman article in WaPo —
Even as their confrontation with President Bush over Iraq escalates, emboldened congressional Democrats are challenging the White House on a range of issues — such as unionization of airport security workers and the loosening of presidential secrecy orders — with even more dramatic showdowns coming soon.
For his part, Bush, who also finds himself under assault for the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the conduct of the Iraq war and alleged abuses in government surveillance by the FBI, is holding firm. Though he has vetoed only one piece of legislation since taking office, he has vowed to veto 16 bills that have passed either the House or the Senate in the three months since Democrats took control of Congress.
Bills such as?
A House-passed bill would require the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, highlighting what Democrats consider a shortcoming of the president’s landmark Medicare prescription drug law. Bush has promised a veto.
A Senate-approved measure would allow screeners at the Transportation Security Administration to unionize, prompting a veto threat. White House opposition to that in 2002 led to a legislative standoff over the creation of the Department of Homeland Security that proved devastating to Democrats, who were painted as soft on terrorism.
That’s not the whole story. When Bush decided to support creation of a Department of Homeland Security (a sudden flipflop) he inserted the anti-union provision into the bill as a “poison pill.” When Democrats balked at the bill because of the anti-union measure, Republicans hollered that the Dems were against a Department of Homeland Security (actually they had been pushing for it while Bush fought against it) and thus “soft on terrorism.” Most people who heard the Republican charge didn’t understand why the Dems were opposed to Bush’s version of a Department of Homeland Security.
A bill to ease the public release of official papers from presidential libraries also yielded a veto promise, although it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The measure would reverse one of Bush’s executive orders, which has helped keep reams of presidential documents under lock and key.
Budgets passed by the House and Senate assume the expiration of most of Bush’s tax cuts in 2012, and Democrats are demanding tough new standards for labor rights and environmental regulations as a condition of extending the president’s authority to expedite trade negotiations.
The White House has also vowed to block two separate House bills that would extend whistle-blower protections to national security and rail security workers.
My sense of the public mood — which I admit may be warped, since I live in one of the bluer blue states — is that a majority of Americans are leaning toward the Dem view on most of these issues. I don’t see how a Bush veto would hurt them politically one bit.
On the other hand, Dem attempts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and repeal the Patriot Act could still be politically dicey. The poll numbers I found on Gitmo and the PA were about a year old, and at the time approval-disapproval was at about fifty-fifty split.
Public education is critical. IMO the more the public knows about these issues, the more likely they will side with Democrats. The less they know, the more likely they will be taken in by Republicans.
Update: Russ Feingold writes “How Congress can end the war without hurting the troops” in Salon.
Yesterday I wrote that
American history since the Civil War can be read as a tug-of-war between progressivism and the “free market†fetishists. When people get tired of being ripped off and exploited by the malefactors of great wealth, they turn to government for help. But sooner or later they forget being ripped off and exploited and get taken in by “free market†hype again. Thus the Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, which was followed by the Roaring 20s (also called the Republican Era), which was followed by the Great Depression and New Deal. And when memory of the Great Depression had sufficiently faded, we got Ronald Reagan.
Today’s Paul Krugman column expands on this theme.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were being taxed to provide social programs for other people.
Since then, however, we have once again become a deeply unequal society. Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape.
For more on income inequality, see Bonddad at The Agonist.
Professor Krugman continues,
You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that “some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind.â€
But today’s Republicans can’t respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists won’t let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization.
The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections?
Krugman goes on to explain his “unified theory” of Bush Administration scandals, which he describes as “a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.” The “distraction” part amounts to stirring up fear and hysteria over Muslim terrorism. Rather than debate Democrats on the issues, the Republican Noise Machine painted Democrats as cartoon characters who are soft on terrorism.
The other part of the program was to keep poor people, especially poor black people, from voting. This appears to be the prime impetus behind the firing of U.S. Attorneys.
Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud — a phrase that has become almost synonymous with “voting while black.†Former staff members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia’s voter ID law to Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters.
In other words, in order to keep the “free market” ideologues in power, Republicans undermined republican government itself. Just one more example of why the libertarian battle cry “free markets make free people” is a pile of bleep. “Free,” as in “unregulated,” markets inevitably result in plutocracy, and once you’ve got a plutocracy you’re just a step away from corporatism, which in extreme form becomes fascism.
And on that note, be sure to read “Your modern-day Republican Party” by Glenn Greenwald.
Amy Goldstein and Dan Eggen write in today’s Washington Post:
About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney’s jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.
The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show.
Some of the four dozen jobs changed hands because of natural turnover.
No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.
The pattern from Bush’s second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous pursuit of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials have seeded federal prosecutors’ offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration’s agenda.
There’s more interesting stuff in the remaining article.
First off, let me assure you I will not be writing an “April Fool” post today. As long as George Bush is in the White House, every day is April Fool’s Day in America.
Raw Story reports (via Gun Toting Liberal) that the Bush Administration’s fixation on privatization is causing long-term damage to our government.
Due to its increasing practice of contracting out to private firms and agencies, the U.S. government is quickly losing its expertise and competence in vital national security and defense programs, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“Since the 2001 terrorist attacks and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the federal government’s demand for complex technology has soared,” writes by Bernard Wysocki, Jr. for the Journal. “But Washington often doesn’t have the expertise to take on new high-tech projects, or the staff to oversee them.
“As a result,” he continues, “officials are increasingly turning to contractors, in particular the hundreds of companies in Tysons Corner and the surrounding Fairfax County that operate some of the government’s most sensitive and important undertakings.”
The supposed superiority of private enterprise over public bureaucracy is a cornerstone of right-wing ideology. Privatization, along with tax cuts and deregulation, is one of the Right’s favorite knee-jerk answers to all of life’s problems.
Googling around this morning I came across the Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report 2006: Transforming Government Through Privatization. Much of the “report” reads like alternative historical fiction; thanks to privatization, since 1990 government has been getting better and better, it says. Sure.
I particularly like this brilliant bit of satire called “Advancing Limited Government, Freedom, and Markets” by Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina. Here’s just the first two paragraphs —
Any read through history demonstrates how essential limited government is to preserving freedom and individual liberty. What life experience shows us is that limited government is equally important in both making your economy flourish and in enabling citizens to get the most for their investment in government.
Let me be clear up front that in the long run the only way to make government truly efficient is to make it smaller, and this seems to me to be the real clarion call in highlighting the importance of privatization efforts. Efficiency and government are mutually exclusive in our system, and if our Founding Fathers had wanted efficiency I suppose they would have looked more closely at totalitarian systems. They wanted not efficiency, but checks on power in our republic.
I don’t believe “efficiency” was much of an issue in the 18th century, but let’s continue — Gov. Sanford goes on and on about the glories of privatization and “marketbased solutions” for problems in education and health care. He uses the word freedom a lot, although he doesn’t explain how privatization and small government protect civil liberties. (I argue here that the “small government equals freedom” notion made sense before the Industrial Revolution, but not so much after. Righties are a tad slow.)
Let’s go back to Raw Story:
The number of private federal contractors has now risen to 7.5 million, which is four times greater than the federal workforce itself, the report indicates. Such a trend is leading the government to what Wysocki calls the “outsourcing [of] its brain.”
The shift to private firms has not been without its problems, however, with faulty work and government waste becoming rampant.
“Today, the potential pitfalls are legion,” writes Wysocki. “Big contracts are notorious for cost overruns and designs that don’t work, much of which takes place under loose or ineffective government scrutiny.” The outsourcing of these government programs “can be a prescription for enormous fraud, waste and abuse,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is quoted as saying during a hearing.
Linda Bilmes wrote for Nieman Watchdog last year about the cost of the Iraq War.
Q. Why is this war so expensive?
One reason is the huge reliance on private contractors to do basic military tasks. … Contractors charge many times more than it would cost to have the military do the work. For example Blackwater Security, which provided security to the Coalition Provisional Authority, paid some of its security guards over $10,000 per week.
(For the past 30 years American business has been keen on outsourcing as a cost-saving measure, and in many industries all manner of functions that used to be performed in-house are now contracted out. This may work nicely in some circumstances, but in my experience companies pay — probably more than the CEOs realize — in inefficiency and loss of quality control. Someday they’ll figure this out, and the New New Trend will be insourcing. Just watch.)
There’s a book reviewed today in the NY Times called Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty, an editor at Reason magazine. The reviewer, David Leonhardt, is lukewarm about the book. I just want to quote this bit from the review:
Libertarianism has its roots in the writings of a pair of major 20th-century Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Both opposed economic planning and argued that only the forces of supply and demand could allocate re sources fairly and efficiently. If an item becomes scarce, its price will rise, ensuring that people who place the highest value on it — those who can use it most productively — will be able to get it. To this coolly economic argument, Rand and other writers added a moral one: laissez-faire capitalism equaled freedom.
This was a tough sell in the wake of the Depression and the war, but the ground began to shift in the 1970s. As the Vietnam War sputtered to a close and the economy stagnated, the wise men who built “big government†began to look ineffectual. In 1980, Ronald Reagan would win the presidency by campaigning on laissez-faire rhetoric. The day after his election, he was photo graphed on an airplane reading The Freeman, the flagship libertarian magazine, while Nancy Reagan rested her head on his shoulder.
In the nearly three decades since, libertarian arguments have enjoyed a nice run. Tax rates have been reduced; once-regulated industries have been opened to competition; any two consenting adults, including those of the same sex, can now marry in some places. One of today’s most fashionable political labels, “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,†Doherty shrewdly notes, is “the basic libertarian mix.â€
Actually, faith in laissez-faire economic policies as the key to salvation goes back to the 19th century; from time to time I rant about how “free market” ideology caused a million Irish to die in the Famine, which began in 1845. American history since the Civil War can be read as a tug-of-war between progressivism and the “free market” fetishists. When people get tired of being ripped off and exploited by the malefactors of great wealth, they turn to government for help. But sooner or later they forget being ripped off and exploited and get taken in by “free market” hype again. Thus the Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, which was followed by the Roaring 20s (also called the Republican Era), which was followed by the Great Depression and New Deal. And when memory of the Great Depression had sufficiently faded, we got Ronald Reagan.
Like I said; every day is April Fool’s Day in America.