What's good for GM is what's good for America
An early link compilation:
The New York Times
G.M. to Seek Bankruptcy and a New Start
After Many Stumbles, Fall of an American Giant
The Washington Post
U.S. Gets Majority Stake in New GM
The Wall Street Journal
New Era in Autos as GM Set for Bankruptcy
Potential Conflicts Abound in Government Role
Remnants of 'Old GM' to Linger
Workout Will Produce Shared Stress Throughout the Auto Business
According to the AP:
Media outlets are reporting that late-term abortion doctor George Tiller has been shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan.
Anonymous police sources told The Wichita Eagle and other media that the 67-year-old doctor was killed Sunday morning at Reformation Lutheran Church.
An arrest has been made, according to The Wichita Eagle.
Tiller, long an object of anti-abortion protests, had been shot once before and his clinic bombed. Tiller's clinic had been vandalized earlier this month, as reported by another AP article.
Michael Perelman identifies here what must be considered an instance of political Darwinism in the Obama and Bush crisis management efforts:
During the Vietnam War, a U.S. soldier seems to have anticipated the spirit of the current economic policy, explaining: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." The difference today is that while the government destroys villages of the working classes, it is devoting enormous [sic] to improve the castles of the rich.
Anyone can see the care and feeding of bankers and financiers, while treating much of the rest of the economy with an iron fist.
The problem is compounded because alongside the federal stimulus, funding for state and local government is falling off the cliff, in effect, neutralizing much of the stimulus. This contradiction in economic policy is nothing new.
These policies would be politically Darwinistic since the hand which effects the destruction of the misfits can be easily seen by anyone who cares to look.
Paul Krugman's latest article would rebuke those economists and pundits who believe the United States will soon or eventually suffer through a dangerous bout of inflation, with the coming price instability caused by the Obama recovery-stimulus program. Yet "Deflation," Krugman claims, "not inflation, is the clear and present danger." Why, then, would the fear-mongers miss this point, assuming Krugman rightly claims that deflation is the real threat? Krugman believes they have an axe to grind and are thus politicking the issue:
…it's hard to escape the sense that the current inflation fear-mongering is partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal seems to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts.
Needless to say, the president should not let himself be bullied. The economy is still in deep trouble and needs continuing help.
The market fundamentalists, it seems, would rather watch the economy collapse than to see the federal government implement the kind and number of reforms needed to effective manage the crisis.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "…Pittsburgh will host the G-20 world economic summit Sept. 24-25 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center." Naturally, the crises of the moment — the world economic crisis and the ecological crisis — will provide the prime topics on the agenda.
Why Pittsburgh? According to the Post-Gazette:
White House officials said they focused on Pittsburgh because of the city's economic recovery from the decline of the steel industry in the 1980s, and because of its leadership in environmentally friendly buildings. The administration also is funding research on solar window panels under development for office buildings by PPG Industries.
Briefly put, the White House believes Pittsburgh to be a post-industrial success story.
John Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley, a one-time legal counselor to the Bush regime, once a clerk to Clarence Thomas and currently an object of a Spanish war crimes trial, discusses Obama's first Supreme Court nomination:
President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor shows that empathy has won out over excellence in the White House. Sotomayor has sterling credentials: Princeton, Yale Law School, former prosecutor, and federal trial and appellate judge. But credentials do not an excellent justice make. Justice Souter, whom Sotomayor would replace, had an equally fine c.v., but turned out to be a weak force on the high court.
Empathy versus excellence… It seems Yoo believes Judge Sotomayor, like Souter before her, will produce results he dislikes, that will offend his political sensibilities, that he believes will be less-than-excellent and that she will be a probable "weak force" on the Court. Like Souter, she also has the bona fides of a successful lawyer…. Yet these are not enough to satisfy Yoo, who continues:
She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.
Now, it seems, Sotomayor will produce results Yoo could live with because her rulings will not likely disturb the constitutional fundamentalism associated with the Reagan Revolution and its aftermath! Since this belief — that Sotomayor is a lightweight that will hew to the fundamentalist program —leaves Yoo without a point to drive home in his critique of the Sotomayor nomination, his course changes to:
But conservatives should not be pleased simply because Sotomayor is not a threat to the conservative revolution in constitutional law begun under the Reagan administration. Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings.
In Yoo's judgment, then, although Sotomayor lacks the intellectual power required by a Supreme Court justice and poses no threat to the Reagan Revolution as it pertains to constitutional law, she will still somehow impose her prejudices on her Court rulings, an imposition that will undermine the "faithful application of the Constitution." Her inclination to rely upon her biography and her empathy thus makes her unworthy of a seat on the Court.
Yoo, unsurprisingly, does not address the issues raised by his strange argument, issues that follow from the misalignment between his prediction that Sotomayor will pose no threat to the Reagan Revolution in constitutional law and his prediction that Sotomayor will bring unworthy prejudgments to this lofty post and then impose them on her jurisprudential work. Of course, the tension between the beliefs which support the two predictions dissipates a bit if one were to accept that constitutional fundamentalism of the conservative stripe is logically consistent with some instances of constitutional prejudice, namely, those prejudices typical of a constitutional fundamentalist. A prudent person might even expect these acceptable prejudices to mirror Yoo's own! But tensions in Yoo's position would persist and remain effective even if one were to accept that constitutional fundamentalism is consistent with some instances of constitutional prejudice. If prejudices are unacceptable, why then should anyone accept those attributable to a constitutional fundamentalist? They should not accept them if they wish to remain logically consistent.
Inconsistency does not appear to bother Yoo. He does attempt to avoid problems of this sort by relying upon what can be called the shotgun technique of criticism: One can expect to down one's prey if one hits it with an adequate amount of buckshot. Thus Yoo's recourse to an ad hoc collection of criticisms of Sotomayor's nomination.
Of course, killing Sotomayor's candidacy by using this method does not conform at all to the ideal of a reasoned deliberation over the merits of a particular candidate for the Supreme court, her legal positions and past work or, for that matter, of the norms that ought to be used when considering a candidate for the Supreme Court. Yoo's criticism is not really criticism at all. It is, rather, just another political hatchet job.
Robert Scheer worries about the failure of the Obama regime to address directly and with a workable blueprint for solving California's budget crisis. As well he should given the attack California now plans to make on its safety-net and education system:
Bail out the banks, but not the 500,000 poor families with children served by the CalWorks program, which will be dismantled, or the 928,000 children covered by the Healthy Families program, slated for oblivion.
At a time when the feds are spending with such abandon in an effort to stimulate the economy why is it tolerable to leave states in a position where they are forced to fire teachers? As the Los Angeles Times reported: "Schwarzenegger has proposed slashing state spending on education by $3 billion to help close the budget gap, and the state would pay dearly for canceling classes, firing instructors, cutting class days and shortening the school year, experts said." How can there be federal funds readily available for banker bonuses but not to keep teachers in the classroom with their students? It must have been the kids who caused the meltdown.
Scheer could have also included the money wasted on America's national-security and surveillance state and the empire that state advances.
While addressing Barack Obama's recent National Security speech, Marjorie Cohn rightly asserts:
The pressure [produced mostly by the Reactionary Noise Machine] has caused Obama to buckle [on his decision to close Guantanamo Bay prison]. Timed to coincide with a Cheney speech to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Obama announced an appeasement plan to deal with the 240 remaining Guantánamo detainees. Parts of his plan would threaten the very foundation of our legal system — that no one should be held in custody if he has committed no crime.
"Unsurprisingly, Republicans are jubilant" with the new Obama, according to Joanne Mariner. They are elated, in Mariner's reckoning, because they can now plausibly represent "…Obama's reversal as a belated embrace of the Bush administration's war on terror, their tone is unabashedly triumphant." Obama's stance has been called "Cheneyism-without-Cheney," an apt depiction of a president who has done little more than to provide a bit of whitewash to America's empire and its criminal actions.
By applying the term appeasement in this instance Cohn thereby invokes the Munich Pact of 1938 which sealed the Sudetenland's fate and has come to represent a cynical and foolish real politics in action, a display of cowardice in the face of a mortal threat and the willingness of the powerful to betray the weak in order to gain meager advantages. Her use of the term also indirectly calls to mind Bill Clinton's infamous triangulation strategy, the net effect of which was to move the Democratic Party rightward without, however, slaking the crude desires of the reactionaries. Briefly put, it can be argued that Bill Clinton prepared the country for the militarism and authoritarianism of the George W. Bush regime with his triangulation strategy. He managed this feat by making a Republican program appear normal and inevitable. Appeasement is thus a powerfully critical symbol in this case. By relying upon this power Cohn suggests that Obama's new prisoner detention policy amounts to his capitulation to America's neoconservatives, militarists and imperialists, which is to say, to an evil within our midst.
Finally, it can be said that Obama's latest position not only advocates illegal and unconstitutional actions and institutions, as must be the case given America's treaty commitments and its constitutional safeguards against this kind of behavior, it also effects his greatest betrayal of the Americans who voted for him in the last election, a political outcome that clearly reflected a deep popular dissatisfaction with the kind of policies Obama now promotes. It is clear today that America's electoral mechanism and party system lack the power needed to restrain America's criminal state. More is needed if the country wishes to effectively refuse to become a massive gulag.
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