“Non-Journalistic Instincts”: Joe Scarborough, Mike Allen Form Journalistic Axis of Evil
One of the more fascinating sidelights of the crisis in Ferguson is the way it has revealed the complacent, obedient, and fundamentally non-journalistic instincts of certain leading centrist establishmentarian journalists. The precipitating event was the arrest of Wesley Lowery, a young Washington Post reporter who was illegally ordered to leave a McDonalds near the demonstrations and, correctly, refused, leading to his arrest.
This angered Joe Scarborough. And by “angered,” we should be clear, we mean angered at the presumption of Lowery for refusing. The avuncular host of Morning Joe instructed him, “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.” (Because nothing says “journalism” like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.) Scarborough attributed Lowery’s refusal not to any commitment to continue doing his job but to his desire to “get on TV and have people talk about me the next day,” because the desire to get on television in any way possible is the only motivation that makes sense to Joe Scarborough.
Lowery replied sharply. Riding to Scarborough’s side today, forming a kind of journalistic Axis of Evil, is Mike Allen. In Allen’s world, which is defined by overlapping and possibly coterminous circles of sources, friends, and paid advertisers, the sort of effrontery displayed by Lowery first toward the police and then toward an esteemed television commentator was thoroughly intolerable. Sniffs Allen, in today’s Playbook:
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP – Wesley Lowrey, 23-year-old Congress/politics reporter for the WashPost, responding on CNN to suggestions that he should have obeyed police amid a riot: “[L]et me be clear about this: I have LITTLE PATIENCE for talking heads.”
FYI, his name is spelled Lowery, and his age is 24. But if Lowery wants more favorable coverage from Allen, maybe he should think about sponsoring some ads in Playbook.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, August 15, 2014
“Republicans Embrace Their Phoniness”: The Truth Is Catching Up To Them
The Republican Party has finally admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news.
This is not an earth-shattering revelation to anybody who has been paying attention, but, still, it’s an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness.
“NRCC Launches Fake News Sites to Attack Democratic Candidates” was a headline in the National Journal on Tuesday.
As Shane Goldmacher reported, “The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.”
These two dozen sites, with names such as “North County Update” and “Central Valley Update” look like political fact-checking sites; the NRCC’s spokeswoman, Andrea Bozek, called it “a new and effective way to disseminate information.”
An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find, “Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee” in small print. “They’re not fake Web sites,” the official said. “These are real attack Web sites.”
Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP’s scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.
There was the assertion that the White House was covering up high-level involvement in Operation “Fast and Furious,” a gun program under the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives that went awry. No evidence was found.
There was the accusation that the Obama White House pushed through money for Solyndra to pay the president’s political cronies even though officials knew the solar-energy firm was going bankrupt. Didn’t happen that way.
Accusation: Obamacare would bring about the collapse of the American health-care system and replace it with socialized medicine and death panels. No such thing has occurred.
The IRS scandal, it was alleged, could be traced back to the White House, which targeted Obama’s enemies for political reasons. Nope.
The actual truth of the allegations doesn’t matter. Each one sullied President Obama’s name, and investigators’ failure to deliver the goods did little to remove the taint. That’s why fake news works: Falsehoods can drive a president’s approval rating into the cellar while the truth is still getting out of bed.
And now we have the Benghazi exoneration.
For nearly two years, Republicans have been alleging all manner of scandal involving the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in the Libyan city. That somebody — Hillary Clinton? — issued a stand-down order to prevent help from getting to American officials under fire; that Clinton rejected pleas for more diplomatic security in Libya; and that the Obama White House pushed false talking points to play down the terrorist attacks before the election.
The accusations have been roundly debunked, most recently in military officers’ testimony released by the GOP-controlled House Armed Services Committee.
Now there’s a bipartisan report, adopted unanimously by the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee on July 31, awaiting declassification by the administration. It throws yet another bucket of cold water on the conspiracy theories. In a statement, the top Democrat on the panel, Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), said the report finds that:
“[T]here was no intelligence failure surrounding the Benghazi attacks.”
“[T]here was no ‘stand down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, and no American was left behind.”
“[T]he talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”
“[T]here was no illegal activity or illegal arms sales occurring at the U.S. facilities in Benghazi.”
“And there was absolutely no evidence, in documents or testimony, that the intelligence community’s assessments were politically motivated in any way.”
The report is not yet public, and Republican sources indicate that there is more disagreement in the report than Ruppersberger’s statement indicates and that the report is not as exculpatory as he implies. But there has been no challenge from the Republican side to the accuracy of the findings Ruppersberger detailed in his statement.
Now that the truth is catching up to them, House Republicans will need to stay one step ahead. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, told CNN’s Deirdre Walsh last week that, despite what the Intelligence Committee found, “there is more work to be done and more to be investigated.”
Excellent. Maybe he can post his phony accusations on some fake news Web sites.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 13, 2014
“The Forever Slump”: The Debate Between The ‘Too-Muchers’ And The ‘Not-Enoughers’
It’s hard to believe, but almost six years have passed since the fall of Lehman Brothers ushered in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Many people, myself included, would like to move on to other subjects. But we can’t, because the crisis is by no means over. Recovery is far from complete, and the wrong policies could still turn economic weakness into a more or less permanent depression.
In fact, that’s what seems to be happening in Europe as we speak. And the rest of us should learn from Europe’s experience.
Before I get to the latest bad news, let’s talk about the great policy argument that has raged for more than five years. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, but basically it has been a debate between the too-muchers and the not-enoughers.
The too-muchers have warned incessantly that the things governments and central banks are doing to limit the depth of the slump are setting the stage for something even worse. Deficit spending, they suggested, could provoke a Greek-style crisis any day now — within two years, declared Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles some three and a half years ago. Asset purchases by the Federal Reserve would “risk currency debasement and inflation,” declared a who’s who of Republican economists, investors, and pundits in a 2010 open letter to Ben Bernanke.
The not-enoughers — a group that includes yours truly — have argued all along that the clear and present danger is Japanification rather than Hellenization. That is, they have warned that inadequate fiscal stimulus and a premature turn to austerity could lead to a lost decade or more of economic depression, that the Fed should be doing even more to boost the economy, that deflation, not inflation, was the great risk facing the Western world.
To say the obvious, none of the predictions and warnings of the too-muchers have come to pass. America never experienced a Greek-type crisis of soaring borrowing costs. In fact, even within Europe the debt crisis largely faded away once the European Central Bank began doing its job as lender of last resort. Meanwhile, inflation has stayed low.
However, while the not-enoughers were right to dismiss warnings about interest rates and inflation, our concerns about actual deflation haven’t yet come to pass. This has provoked a fair bit of rethinking about the inflation process (if there has been any rethinking on the other side of this argument, I haven’t seen it), but not-enoughers continue to worry about the risks of a Japan-type quasi-permanent slump.
Which brings me to Europe’s woes.
On the whole, the too-muchers have had much more influence in Europe than in the United States, while the not-enoughers have had no influence at all. European officials eagerly embraced now-discredited doctrines that allegedly justified fiscal austerity even in depressed economies (although America has de facto done a lot of austerity, too, thanks to the sequester and cuts at the state and local level). And the European Central Bank, or E.C.B., not only failed to match the Fed’s asset purchases, it actually raised interest rates back in 2011 to head off the imaginary risk of inflation.
The E.C.B. reversed course when Europe slid back into recession, and, as I’ve already mentioned, under Mario Draghi’s leadership, it did a lot to alleviate the European debt crisis. But this wasn’t enough. The European economy did start growing again last year, but not enough to make more than a small dent in the unemployment rate.
And now growth has stalled, while inflation has fallen far below the E.C.B.’s target of 2 percent, and prices are actually falling in debtor nations. It’s really a dismal picture. Mr. Draghi & Co. need to do whatever they can to try to turn things around, but given the political and institutional constraints they face, Europe will arguably be lucky if all it experiences is one lost decade.
The good news is that things don’t look that dire in America, where job creation seems finally to have picked up and the threat of deflation has receded, at least for now. But all it would take is a few bad shocks and/or policy missteps to send us down the same path.
The good news is that Janet Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, understands the danger; she has made it clear that she would rather take the chance of a temporary rise in the inflation rate than risk hitting the brakes too soon, the way the E.C.B. did in 2011. The bad news is that she and her colleagues are under a lot of pressure to do the wrong thing from the too-muchers, who seem to have learned nothing from being wrong year after year, and are still agitating for higher rates.
There’s an old joke about the man who decides to cheer up, because things could be worse — and sure enough, things get worse. That’s more or less what happened to Europe, and we shouldn’t let it happen here.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 14, 2014
“Losing Their Minds”: Why The Republican Freak-Out Over Obama’s Immigration Order Is Both Dumb And Inhumane
Like it or not, these are the facts: There are 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in United States. The U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement only has the capacity to remove about 400,000 per year. That’s less than 4 percent of the total undocumented population.
Keep these facts in mind as President Obama prepares to announce an executive action to protect certain classes of undocumented immigrants — and as Republicans lose their minds over it. Obama’s expected move isn’t a sinister example of “domestic Caesarism,” as Ross Douthat would have it, or “stealth amnesty,” in the words of Reihan Salam. It is an eminently reasonable response in the face of congressional inaction, while the conservative opposition puts them on the wrong side of both basic humanitarian instincts and public welfare.
The executive action is expected to expand deferred action to more undocumented immigrants. Deferred action provides an assurance to certain immigrants that they won’t be pursued for deportation. With it comes work permits, so those who won’t be deported can pursue legitimate work.
The legal basis for deferred action is grounded in prosecutorial discretion — the authority of law enforcement agencies to determine how and when to enforce the law. Such discretion is necessary given scarce agency resources. It’s why police and prosecutors devote most of their time to pursuing serious offenses rather than going after every crime on the books. It would be a waste of resources to charge and punish jaywalkers or adulterers, for instance.
Given these constraints, officials have prioritized certain classes of immigrants for removal. ICE specifically targets three categories of undocumented immigrants: those who present national security or public safety risks; those who have recently entered; and those who have reentered after being removed.
These targets guide immigration enforcement actions. In 2013, there were 368,644 removals. Ninety-eight percent met one of ICE’s three priorities. Of these, 235,093 were removed while trying to enter at the border. Among the 133,551 removed while living inside the United States, 82 percent had a previous criminal conviction.
Just as there are removal targets at the top of ICE’s list, there are non-targets at the bottom. These are classes of undocumented immigrants that agents opt to ignore. These categories, outlined in the 2011 Morton Memo, include U.S. military veterans, minors, elderly persons, and pregnant women, among others.
This list broadly tracks the immigrants that we may see benefit from expanded deferred action under Obama’s executive order. As Eric Posner argues, Obama’s order would in many respects do little more than bless preexisting policy. But it would also give some legal guarantee to peaceable immigrants at the distant, unreachable bottom of ICE’s priority list, allowing them access to aboveboard work in the process.
Conservatives will undoubtedly seethe over Obama’s unilateral action. But once they exhaust their procedural objections, any substantive opposition to the policy itself is either cruel or dangerous.
On the one hand, conservatives could object to a codification of ICE’s existing practices. Under this argument, it’s not selective enforcement of the law that’s the problem, but explicitly telling immigrants who arrived in the country illegally that they’re in the clear. Keeping the law hazy would subject law-abiding immigrants to an illusory fear, supposedly discouraging migrant flows.
This is a deeply inhumane tactic. Their preference would be for millions of immigrants to needlessly live with the specter of deportation hanging over their heads. This would condemn them to living in the shadows and working in tenuous, often-exploitative conditions — even though immigration officials have no interest in deporting them.
The other objection — rejecting prosecutorial discretion outright — isn’t any more heartening. This would involve ICE pursuing every undocumented immigrant with equal zeal.
This would be a policy that jeopardizes national security and public safety. Short of expanding enforcement capacity by a factor of 30, time spent expelling military veterans or parents would allow more gang members and felons to slip through the cracks of strained budgets. As John Sandweg, former Homeland Security general counsel, said, “If we eliminated all priorities, and treat [all undocumented immigrants] equally, you are going to make the country less safe, and make the border less secure.”
When he announces his executive action, Obama should remind the country that prosecutorial discretion in immigration keeps us safe. Deferred action is a fairly minor step to provide some peace of mind to those that our immigration system already doesn’t care about deporting, making it easier for them to live freely and work productively. If conservatives still object, it will be clear that they remain far from being fit to step in and lead as moral and protective stewards for our country.
By: Joel Dodge, Member of the Boston University School of Law’s Class of 2014; The Week, August 12, 2014
“The Entitlement Of The Very Rich”: Gutting Social Security And Medicare Far More Unthinkable Than Not Reauthorizing Ex-Im Bank
The very rich don’t think very highly of the rest of us. This fact is driven home to us through fluke events, like the taping of Mitt Romney’s famous 47 percent comment, in which he trashed the people who rely on Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of government benefits.
Last week we got another opportunity to see the thinking of the very rich when Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, complained at a summit with African heads of state and business leaders that there is even an argument over the reauthorization of Export-Import Bank. According to the Washington Post, Immelt said in reference to the Ex-Im Bank reauthorization, “the fact that we have to sit here and argue for it I think is just wrong.”
To get some orientation, the Ex-IM Bank makes around $35 billion a year in loans or loan guarantees each year. The overwhelming majority of these loans go to huge multi-nationals like Boeing or Mr. Immelt’s company, General Electric. The loans and guarantees are a subsidy that facilitates exports by allowing these companies and/or their customers to borrow at below market interest rates.
As a practical matter, whether the bank is reauthorized or not will have no noticeable impact on the economy. If the government took away the subsidy on this $35 billion in exports, it would probably lead to a decline of between 10 and 30 percent in these exports ($3.5 billion to $10.5 billion), while costing Boeing, GE, and the rest some of their profit margin on the portion they continued to export.
The loss of exports would be in the range of 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent of total exports or 0.02 percent to 0.06 percent of GDP. (This assumes that none of the exports include imported parts, which is obviously not the case.) In short the impact on the economy of ending the subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank would be almost invisible.
If the folks pushing for the Ex-Im Bank reauthorization were really concerned about jobs created through trade, we could generate far more jobs with even a modest decline (e.g. 1 percent) of the dollar against other currencies. This would make our exports cheaper to people in other countries and would reduce the price of domestically produced goods relative to imports, thereby leading consumers to purchase more U.S. made goods.
While ending the Ex-Im Bank would have little impact on trade and jobs it would be a big deal to Mr. Immelt’s company and presumably to Mr. Immelt’s compensation. Therefore it is not surprising that he might find it “just wrong” that we should even have to argue about it.
For some additional context, it is worth noting that Mr. Immelt is one of the members of the Peter Peterson initiated group, Fix the Debt. In that capacity he has gone around the country arguing for the need to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. So we have someone who makes $25 million a year, at least in part from taxpayer handouts, who runs around the country complaining about retired workers getting $1,300 a month from Social Security, whining because he has to argue to continue the handouts he receives.
It would be nice if Immelt were just another crazed one percenter who had no credibility outside of his country club, however this is not the case. It was not an accident that Mr. Immelt was at this summit. He is a highly respected business leader and apparently is close enough to president Obama to have been made head of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
The reality is that the Immelts of the world are able to put muscle behind their sense of entitlement because politicians need their campaign contributions to be credible candidates. For this reason, they are almost certain to secure the reauthorization of the Ex-Im Bank, which has the support of most of the leadership of both parties.
The rest of us just have our votes. But if the public has a clear understanding of the agenda of the Immelts of the world, and their political allies, it will be better positioned to protect the entitlements that workers depend on and have paid for. Gutting Social Security and Medicare should be far more unthinkable than not reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank.
By: Dean Baker, Co-Director, CEPR; The Hufington Posst Blog, August 12, 2014
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