Tent City: Then and now

The comparison can be made by walking through a MSNBC slide show.

Obama to limit his use of signing statements

The President recently stated that:

In recent years, there has been considerable public discussion and criticism of the use of signing statements to raise constitutional objections to statutory provisions. There is no doubt that the practice of issuing such statements can be abused. Constitutional signing statements should not be used to suggest that the President will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements. At the same time, such signing statements serve a legitimate function in our system, at least when based on well-founded constitutional objections. In appropriately limited circumstances, they represent an exercise of the President's constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and they promote a healthy dialogue between the executive branch and the Congress.

While President Obama should be congratulated for choosing to bind his office in this regard, the fact that this was his political choice only served to undermine the effectiveness of his gesture, as critics made clear. The best strategy available to limit the abuse of Presidential signing statements is to impeach the President who misuses this power. Congress, to the country and the world's great misfortune, failed to take this path during the George W. Bush's tenure. This egregious failure established as a historical fact that Congress might tolerate such abuses in the future along with the fact that only the President can act to limit his or her use of this power. Despite if not because of Obama's policy, an expanded use of these signing statements thus remains a feature of the President's powers. In other words, there is nothing in this self-binding act which deters President Obama from undoing his position. Nor does Obama's choice hinder any future President if he or she chooses to abuse this power. His Memo only reaffirms this Presidential power!

It’s only money

A Bloomberg report informs us that "[t]he value of global financial assets including stocks, bonds and currencies probably fell by more than $50 trillion in 2008, equivalent to a year of world gross domestic product…."

Create a “good bank”

An oxymoron for out time?

Joseph Stiglitz recently defended a bank nationalization program. He made his defense on the grounds that many banks are now insolvent, that transparency is lacking, that funding a bailout program such as the Bush and Obama administrations have will necessarily be too costly for the taxpayer and, finally, that the costs specific to any resolution to the financial crisis should be paid by the bankers and shareholders, not the taxpayers. His solution: Create a "good bank" by stripping the viable assets from the banks known to be insolvent, thus leaving the diminished banks with a project of making do by peddling their trash on the market.

Shrinking output vs. growing needs

According to the latest World Bank forecast (see also this):

The global economy is likely to shrink this year for the first time since World War Two, with growth at least 5 percentage points below potential. World Bank forecasts show that global industrial production by the middle of 2009 could be as much as 15 percent lower than levels in 2008. World trade is on track in 2009 to record its largest decline in 80 years, with the sharpest losses in East Asia.

The impoverished, especially those who live in developing countries, have also been hit hard by the depression: "94 out of 116 developing countries have experienced a slowdown in economic growth. Of these countries, 43 have high levels of poverty." The plight of the poor testifies to the systemic quality of the crisis and, of course, to the waste of human and natural resources common within the world economic system. After all, feeding, clothing and housing the poor is a social improbability, not a technical impossibility.

Prisons for the surplus population

It's a profitable growth industry

A recent CorpWatch report states that:

While the nation's economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings [links added].

GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008 – up from $38 million the year before. But the company's share value is not the only thing that's growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Naturally circumstantial evidence of financial corruption has emerged:

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, "to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country."

Just four months after GEO's announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds — the same number GEO was set to build – to be completed no later than September 2009 — the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington state, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. "I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they're doing it. That's a business decision that GEO made," said Dankers. "To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has [sic] some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect."

Dankers added that ICE's request for more space is still in the "pre-solicitation" phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to "guage [sic] interest."

"I don't have any information one way or the other as to what would happen," Dankers said. "I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there's a need. I think they're always looking for opportunities."

That GEO Group — they're real Merican go-getters!

Rumblings from the International Criminal Court

According to a Raw Story report:

An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, former US President George W. Bush could — and should —be next on the International Criminal Court's list.

We can only hope….

The Obama stimulus appears too small

To the astonishment of the Republican obstructionists

This claim appeared in a recent Washington Post report (see also this, this and this). It was not wholly unexpected since some liberal critics of the stimulus program long-believed the bill should have been larger. The proximate cause of the shortfall: The increasing unemployment rate relative to the unemployment rate assumed by the planners who crafted the stimulus bill. The greater unemployment entails a decrease in demand and thus a decrease in GDP, tax revenue, etc. Moreover, a concern with the size of the stimulus crosses party lines. Martin Feldstein, an economic conservative, weighs in:

The massive downturn in the US economy will last longer and be more damaging than previous recessions because it is driven by an unprecedented loss of household wealth. Although the fiscal stimulus package that US President Barack Obama recently signed will give a temporary boost to activity sometime this summer, the common forecast that a sustained recovery will begin in the second half of the year will almost certainly prove to be overly optimistic.

In other words, the stimulus is inadequate to address the problems it was meant to resolve. Now that Feldstein has made the gravity of the situation clearer, he goes on to predict that "A second fiscal stimulus package is therefore likely." More importantly, the next stimulus program:

… will need to be much better targeted at increasing demand in order to avoid adding more to the national debt than the rise in domestic spending. Similarly, the tax changes in such a stimulus package should provide incentives to increase spending by households and businesses.

Briefly put, Feldstein wants a stimulus program that stands a chance of working! This, oddly enough, is a radical idea when made by an American for the American economy!

What to do about the center that will not hold?

Writing for a recent Nation forum, Immanuel Wallerstein characterized the current moment thusly:

What is going on [today] is the disintegration of capitalism as a world system, not because it can't guarantee welfare for the vast majority (it never could do that) but because it can no longer ensure that capitalists will have the endless accumulation of capital that is their raison d'être. We have arrived at a moment in which neither farsighted capitalists nor their opponents (us) are trying to preserve the system. We are both trying to establish a new system, but of course we have very different, indeed radically opposed, ideas about the nature of such a system.

His practical recommendations:

First of all, we must be clear what the battle is about. It is the battle between the spirit of Davos (for a new system that is not capitalism but is nonetheless hierarchical, exploitative and polarizing) and the spirit of Porto Alegre (a new system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian). No lesser evil here. It's one or the other.

What must the left do? Promote intellectual clarity about the fundamental choice. Then organize at a thousand levels and in a thousand ways to push things in the right direction. The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of global justice and ecological sanity. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism. Victory is far from certain. But it is possible.

So, to resume: work in the short run to minimize pain, and in the middle run to ensure that the new system that will emerge will be a better one and not a worse one. But do the latter without triumphalism, and knowing that the struggle will be tremendously difficult.

A sound script for an unsound time.

Troubled by memories of a rebellious past

Ron Charles laments the conventional tastes of youth today:

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

I suspect that suburban contentment was not the choice term to use in this instance. After all, who could feel content in our current situation? Mass conformism may also be the product of fear or a collectively imposed lack of imagination. It may also reflect the lack of opportunities most believe they have to alter their world in a way that is significant and satisfying. When thus considered Charles' lament may issue from a sense of despair about the future, not any felt contentment about the countrified urban life found in the American suburbs.