Politiki

Congratulations! Job Well Done! Go Seals! Yeah Obama! You got Osama bin Laden!

But, the Pakistanis, they have been very naughty!

Pakistan was taking our money. That gives us the right to be critical. Not that we need a financial stake to legitimize in our own minds our right to the high moral ground and to imagine that we’ve been called on to speak from the mount.

What we we’ve been ostensibly paying them for, is to fight terrorism.

Meantime, Osama bin Laden was living there in “plain sight.” More precisely, he had a large home in the town of Abbottabad. He was not far from a military academy. All those proto-officers should have spotted the #1 on the FBI World-Wide Most Wanted Listed. It’s just thirty-five miles from Islamabad, the capital, and tenth largest city, so close it’s frequently described as a suburb.

First, let’s put the “Pakistanis shoulda, coulda, hadda know” theory in at least physical perspective.

Imagine that Glenn Beck is a terrorist in hiding. He’s holed up on the third floor of a big, ugly McMansion, up a dirt road near the Highland Country Club in Garrison, just across the river from West Point. He never venture out, not even down to the second floor. He just sits up there smoking weed, watching porn, sometimes visited by one of Rush Limbaugh’s ex-wives.

Would we expect our cadets, as alert and valiant as they are, to spot Glenn?

Although it’s 35 miles from Islamabad to Abbottabad as the crow flies, the cars don’t take that route. According to Google Maps it’s a two-hour trip along a winding road through barren hills. The time it takes to get the 100 miles from New York to Woodstock.

This is not meant to get Pakistan off the hook. It’s just to get a better notion of what “in plain sight” means. Still, the intelligence services were supposed to be actively looking for bin Laden. It raises what appears to be a legitimate, and a pretty good, question. Were the Pakistani intelligence services colluding? Or were they just incompetent?

…given the choice between pleading incompetence or complicity in bin Laden’s years-long stay in the garrison city of Abbottabad, Pakistani authorities have opted for the former. It is an explanation that strains credulity for many international observers, including U.S. policy makers, who have demanded an investigation into whether Pakistan sheltered the al-Qaeda leader.
Karin Brulliard, Washingtonpost.com, May 4, 2011

If we’re going to hold the Pakistanis to that standard – it was important to get bin Laden, he was right there, we gave you a lot of money to find him, so you’re either screw-up or traitors to the cause – are we going to hold our own intelligence and military services to the same standard?

At a bare minimum, American intelligence services have been watching Osama bin Laden since at least 1995, when he became a CIA special project with it’s own team.

Bin Laden was indicted for murder in American courts as far back as 1998.

By August, 1998, he was on that exclusive list: Wanted, Dead or Alive.

There is a certain amount of debate as to whether Bill Clinton issued an order that said “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” or one that said, “Try to arrest, only kill him if there’s a problem.” However, on August 20, US Navy ships launched 66 cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the belief that bin Laden was there. According to the axiom , “actions speak louder than words” that’s a clear statement, “shoot first, ask questions later.”

The next year the CIA organized a team of sixty Pakistanis commandos who were supposed to go into Afghanistan to “capture or kill” bin Laden. But Musharraf ’s coup that year, put a stop to it.

In May, 2001, the Federal Court in New York sentenced four of bin Laden’s associates to life in prison for crimes in which he was implicated.

When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the FBI and the intelligence services knew instantly that bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been behind it. And they said so.

In 2001, after three years of moderate attempts to locate, capture or kill, the hunt became super-charged and super-sized. And it still took ten years for the biggest military and intelligence services in the world to get bin Laden, “dead or alive.” What did it cost?

The U.S. government spent $2 trillion combating bin Laden over the past decade, more than 20 percent of the nation’s $9.68 trillion public debt. That money paid for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as additional military, intelligence and homeland security spending above pre-Sept. 11 trends, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-12/

Now, that’s an indictment.

If we follow the logic of the critiques of the ISI (Pakistan’s Intelligence Service), then we have to say that our intelligence services were protecting bin Laden (while taking trillions in US government money) or they are the most inept intelligence services on earth.

If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you will happily take choice #1.

The evidence is as follows. When Afghanistan was invaded, our best intelligence – we’ve been told – had it that bin Laden was cornered in the Tora Bora mountains. The Bush administration refused to send in enough troops to seal him off.

Was there ever any intention to get bin Laden?

The invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Just five months later, in March, 2002, George W. Bush said, “I don’t know where he [bin Laden] is … I truly am not concerned about him.” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=apLVd7_66ds).

Instead, the Bush Administration shifted to regime change. Out with the Taliban, in with Karzai. Then there were trumped up stories about WMD’s in Iraq and false connections to Al Qaeda, so our armies marched off to institute regime change there. .

In 2005, Bush shut down Alec Station, the team that had been hunting bin Laden for ten years. That was when bin Laden was building his compound in Abbottabad.

Double, double conspiracy theorists will say the response to 9/11 was part of the Republican plan to destroy the New Deal, Great Society, socialist, Marxist, government of the United State, by going to war while cutting taxes and running up debts that would turn America into a house of cards.

Bloomberg News points out that the hunt for bin Laden, the War on Terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Homeland Security account for 20% of the national debt. That we are paying $45 billion a year in interest alone on those debts.

Non-conspiracy theorists are, sadly, tragically, silent.

Because ineptitude is probably the right answer. It’s a little bit complicated, because there are two flavors of f**k-up wrapped on one stick, like a creamsicle. There’s the plain vanilla institutional problem. How can a set of intelligence services with a budget of at least $40 billion a year (best guess, ca. 2008), but probably closer to $80 billion a year (published amount, 2010), not be able to find one man for over ten years?

Wrapped around that, for eight years, was the special bright orange incompetence of a the Bush Team. They had a special inability to plan, carry out, or win a war. Yet in the days after bin Laden’s death, we were greeted by a parade of failed Bush Administration officials on television taking credit for what they didn’t do it. And, while they were at it, claiming the invasion of Iraq was necessary and justified, and that torture is the way to go!

We’ve questioned Social Security. We’re trying to dismantle Medicare. Both because they might someday, maybe, according to projections, bankrupt us! Those are successful programs. Yet we don’t question the existence and structure of our intelligence and military services, which have been astonishingly unsuccessful and are already leading us to bankruptcy. According to a fictional president on the TV show 24, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “In every democracy, the people get the government they deserve.” American politics is the greatest mini-series on TV. It’s scripted for drama, not for reason.

We’re in a class war.
It’s the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us.
We’re losing.

What’s wrong with the rich getting richer?

In the United States, periods of high income inequality correlate with bubbles followed by crashes that include massive bank failures. They cue depressions and recessions. It happened in the 1920’s, the 1980’s, and then again in 2008.

Timothy Noah, in The United States of Inequality (Slate, 9/30/10), wrote, “Income distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador.”

Take a look at that list.

Countries with wide income inequality don’t lead the world in research, technology, industry, and innovation. They’re unstable.

They have large under-classes. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.

In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the judiciary. They become self-perpetuating.

If current trends continue, “the United States by 2043 will have the same income inequality as Mexico.” (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now).

The most important arguments against income inequality are not about morality or fairness. They are about the economic and social well-being of the nation. Countries with high levels of income inequality are third world countries.

The primary, and best, weapon against income inequality is a progressive tax structure.

As people move up the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. It should also mean that unearned income –from dividends and capital gains – is taxed at least as high as earned income (money that people actually work for.)

Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans. From World War II until the mid1960’s, the top marginal rate was 90%. (Yes, that’s the same America that Bill O’Reilly is so nostalgic for. Selective blindness.)

From 1950 to 1965 – with those high tax rates – median family income rose at a steady 4% a year, close to 60% over the full fifteen-year period. That’s in constant dollars, adjusted for inflation.

The first big tax cut came in 1964-65. The top rate went down to 70%.

The rise in median income instantly slowed down.

By 1970, median family income, adjusted for inflation, started to decline. There were more tax cuts from 1982 to 1988, bringing the top rate all the way down to 28%. It was ‘morning in America!’ Except not in terms of income for ordinary people. In 1995, median income was exactly where it had been in 1971. (Source: Stanford University)

It was only after Clinton’s comparatively modest tax hike – from 31%-38% – that income for ordinary people began to rise at a rate resembling that of 1950-1965.

Those gains came to an abrupt end with Bush the Younger’s tax cuts.

We had a chance to slow the process by letting them expire.

We’ve lost that round.

That happens to have been incredibly important, not just in and of itself, but because it is the launching pad for the next set of assaults.

Governments, like businesses, have revenue and costs.

Revenue comes from taxes. America thrived with a top marginal tax rate of 90%. Indeed, those years were the period of our greatest increase in wealth and well-being for all classes. The second period of greatest growth followed the Clinton tax hikes.

We also know, as a matter of fact, that tax cuts don’t produce jobs. We just watched that happen for eight years under Bush and we’re watching it continue under Obama.

We also know from recent history – the Clinton years – that even moderate tax hikes can transform huge deficits – from the tax cuts of the Reagan/Bush I years – into surpluses.

Yet tax hikes are off the table.

So we either must accept deficits – going and growing forever – or look to costs.

Unlike businesses, governments spend their money on the general good. They build physical infrastructure, provide clean water, get rid of sewage and garbage, provide health care and education, fire, police, and a justice system, set standards for health and safety, care for the poor and disabled, support the arts and sciences, collect and distribute information. Nowadays they provide ballast to the whole economic system. At the bottom, with unemployment insurance, workman’s compensations and social security, ant at the top, they rescue banks, insurance companies, and industries.

In America we also spend huge sums on our defense industry and on an assortment of wars. But those things, like tax hikes, are off the table.

So what do we cut?

Among the biggest ticket items on the newly announced Republican agenda is repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act.

Davis-Bacon, passed in 1931, under President Herbert Hoover, requires contractors on federal projects to pay the ‘prevailing wage.’ Most federal projects require bids. The government has to give the job to the lowest bidder. Without Davis-Bacon, federal jobs will go to the contractor who will use non-union workers, pay the lowest possible wages, even if that means importing desperate people who will work cheap and take the jobs away from the people who live and work where the project is being done.

Davis-Bacon is considered pro-union legislation. Right-wing think tank literature makes it clear getting rid of it is a way to strike out against unions.

After tax policy, unions are one of our strongest defenses in the class war.

Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation, and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers, in order to stay that way, have to offer something at least within range of union rates, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote.

Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they’re getting better at it. According to Business Week, “over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups.” (How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay, 10/28/2002),

In the 1940’s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Today, it’s down to just 7.2%.

Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 37%.

If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public sector union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they’re the police and fireman.

Those stories will tell you that their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states. That it’s unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools – without unions – are the new favorite charity for billionaires.

Tax cuts for the wealthy led to a mad speculative bubble, which led to a crash, causing the current deep recession, which has caused a tax revenue crisis across the board – not just for the federal government, but for states and local governments as well. So what’s the solution we’re being offered?

In New York’s last gubernatorial campaign, both major candidates ran as Ronald Reagans – “No new taxes! Cut services!” One of the Reagans won. With unemployment high, his cure is to cut jobs. Because this will magically create jobs. Nobody challenges this because – I guess – there are no children in the audience to cry out “The emperor has no clothes.” No logicians, either.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, John Lekas (a self-promoting fund manager), said many states and municipalities are facing bankruptcy. Schools will close, garbage won’t be collected, there will be fewer cops on the street. But who cares, there’s a silver lining. “The good news on that is they can jettison their pension obligations, jettison their union contracts.”

People made a deal – work twenty or twenty-five or thirty years – and when they retired, they would get a pension. But they’re ordinary shlubs, teachers, firemen, clerks, guys who drove snowplows and filled potholes, so thank God, we don’t have to pay them what we owe them.

Even better, we can start driving down the wages of current workers in those positions. We can fire anyone we don’t like, or who looks at us funny, or stands up for their rights … well, they won’t have any, will they?

Meantime, corporate profits are at an all time high.