OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room

OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

by Sarah Leonard

The problem with Occupy Wall Street, an investment banker wrote to me, is that financial mechanisms are very complicated, and the protesters don't understand them. On the day that the New York occupation of Zuccotti Park spread to Washington Square, another visitor from finance looked out over the milling malcontents: "Things definitely went wrong, but you have to understand how the system works. Looking at these signs doesn't give me a lot of confidence."

And it was certainly true that, by themselves, the signs bobbing through the crowd urged a panoply of measures: Abolish the Fed! Tax the rich! Bail out the people! Lloyd Blankfein's head on a pike! Now! All this hectic sloganeering lent a sort of poignant sweetness to a placard that pointed out, reasonably enough, that "the economy could be more fair." But the mood got more rancorous the closer one got to the center of the action at Zuccotti Park, with anarchists, union folks, frustrated reformers, and hard-line anti-capitalists making up the bulk of the crowd. This was a far cry from a sensible policy luncheon at the liberal Center for American Progress.

And for some liberal critics of the Occupy movement, that's precisely the problem. The New Republic's first article on the movement by Mark Schmitt cautioned glumly, "Our Tea Party has come. And so all the good work and focused protests are tossed aside as liberals gravitate to the thing that looks and feels most like the early days of the Tea Party." The essay might have been called "Remember the Think Tanks!"

In a similar vein, consider the testimony of Peter Orszag, Obama's former budget director, darling of both the Democratic establishment and a media consensus uncritically accepting of his youthful good looks as telltale evidence of a fresh and creative interior. Rather than scolding the unruly masses at Zuccotti Park, Orszag hailed the virtues of the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street as generative of those experts who would provide the real solutions to economic crisis. After Orszag had left the OMB for the far grander emoluments on offer at Citibank he announced a paradigm shift in the making. "I am getting exposed to lots of different issues and problems, and that will then better inform my thinking and public writing," he informed New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman. "Direct experience need not undermine one's intellectual integrity; sometimes it can even bolster it."

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Photo Credit: (RC) Reasoned Comments

The secret war in Africa

The secret war in Africa

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

A series about undeclared wars...


This series is the result of a six-month investigation by Army Times senior staff writer Sean D. Naylor.


Naylor reached out to dozens of current and former diplomatic and military leaders and special operators about their activities in the Horn of Africa.


It is a war few will acknowledge and even fewer will discuss.


Nevertheless, Army Times was able to piece together a mosaic that shows the level of involvement by U.S. forces in Africa and the significant resources that have been employed — with mixed success — to hunt terrorists in Africa.

...read All Parts.

Why Do Liberals Keep Sanitizing the Obama Story?

Why Do Liberals Keep Sanitizing the Obama Story?

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

By Conor Friedersdorf

Jonathan Chait is the latest to write about the president as if his civil liberties abuses and executive power excesses never happened

When I pleaded with liberals to stop ignoring President Obama's failures on civil liberties, foreign policy, and the separation of powers, treating them as if they didn't even merit a mention, the quintessential example of the troubling phenomenon hadn't yet been published. Now it has. In New York, one of America's premier magazines, Jonathan Chait, a sharp, experienced political writer, has penned a 5,000 word essay purporting to defend the president's first term. It is aimed at liberal critics who, in Chait's telling, naively expected too much.

Tellingly, as Chait writes for affluent urban liberals who railed against the Bush Administration's excesses in the War on Terrorism, he neither desires nor feels compelled to grapple with President Obama's approach to foreign policy, national security, or homeland security. The closest he comes in a piece overwhelmingly focused on domestic policy and political maneuvering is the breezy assertion that Obama "has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes -- expanding targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (including one that killed Osama bin Laden), ending the war in Iraq, and helping to orchestrate an apparently successful international campaign to rescue Libyan dissidents and then topple a brutal kleptocratic regime."

Isn't that something?

... read Article.

International Criminal Court, Cosy club or sword of righteousness?

International Criminal Court, Cosy club or sword of righteousness?

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

An arrest in Libya, a change of guard at the top, and a big decision on Kenya will mark imminent moments of truth for the International Criminal Court

ON NOVEMBER 22nd Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), flew into Tripoli in perhaps the last high-wire act of his career. He and his deputy, Fatou Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer, began haggling over the fate of two men who are wanted in more than one place: Saif al-Islam, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who has just been arrested while trying to flee to Niger (above), and Abdullah al-Senoussi, a former Libyan spymaster.

On the Libyan street there is a palpable desire to see the two men hanged. The new Libyan authorities are insisting that they are capable of staging fair trials. Mr Moreno-Ocampo had at first argued that the prior claim belonged to the ICC, which issued arrest warrants for the two Qaddafis and Mr Senoussi at the behest of the United Nations Security Council in June. But on November 23rd—though doubting whether Mr Senoussi really had been arrested—he accepted that Libyan courts could give the younger Qaddafi a decent hearing. He added that the ICC, in its capacity as a court of last resort, would help if needed.

From the suspects’ viewpoint, a deliberate inquiry by the ICC in The Hague, with a chance to defend themselves and no death penalty on the statue book, would be preferable to a trial in the vengeful atmosphere at home. But an ICC trial would have limitations. The charges drawn up by Mr Moreno-Ocampo pertain only to misdeeds committed since February this year, when civil war escalated and the UN called in the court as one of many instruments designed to thwart the Qaddafi regime. The UN could in theory authorise a broader probe, but the court can never look into anything that happened before its doors opened in 2002. So a trial in The Hague could not investigate the downing in 1988 of an American passenger plane over Scotland, or the killing of 1,200 inmates in a Libyan jail in 1996.

Some institutional interests are at stake. A Libyan case would have thrust the court at last into the limelight, confirming its role as the place where victims of the worst misdeeds—crimes which might otherwise go unpunished—can seek restitution. Set against the Utopian predictions made in 1998, when the Rome statute providing for the court was signed, the record so far has been rather disappointing. The court was destined, said one campaigner for its creation, to “save millions of humans from suffering unspeakably horrible and inhumane death.” Of course, its very existence may have made some would-be dealers of death hold back; but such extravagant claims are hard to sustain.

The most ambitious thing the ICC has done is to indict Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, on a charge-sheet that includes genocide in the Darfur region. But he remains firmly in office and seems free to travel to a good number of countries. The indictment has not triggered the bloodbath some feared, but it has not done much good either—leaving untouched, for example, the military and intelligence apparatus of the Sudanese state.

The court faces a turning point next month, when member states confer in New York. A new prosecutor will be chosen from four candidates, including Ms Bensouda. Six of the 18 judges will also be replaced, in a ballot preceded by an unseemly round of bargaining and canvassing. Arcane rules govern the choice of judges: the sexes must be balanced, and each of the world’s main regions must be equally represented. But candidates need not have been judges at home; one Japanese member of the court has been a law professor and diplomat. Of the 19 runners in next month’s ballot, four seem unqualified, says one team of legal pundits; but they may still be voted in thanks to diplomatic back-scratching. The field at least looks better than it did in September, when the deadline had to be extended for want of suitable names.

Whatever happens, the court may be less of a cosy club than it has been hitherto, insiders say. A handful of individuals were closely involved in the talks to set it up, and many of them took senior jobs. Next month’s choices will help to determine whether the institution develops a robust life of its own, or simply becomes one more wagon in the UN gravy train.

Many hope the court will broaden its geographical ambit, although any such move will face huge political obstacles. No member of the UN Security Council has ever been in the court’s sights; indeed only two permanent council members, Britain and France, belong to it. All five countries where villains are expected to go to The Hague (see table) are in Africa. This year the court has also become involved in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya. In three cases, the countries themselves called in the court; but this narrow focus has made many African governments suspicious of a body which has many member states—119 and rising—but big absentees, from America to India to most Middle Eastern countries.

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Photo: One of the many leaked photos of US soldiers abuse in Afghanistan.

Game changer: Hillary says Israeli restrictions on women remind her of Rosa Parks and Iran

Game changer: Hillary says Israeli restrictions on women remind her of Rosa Parks and Iran

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced deep concern on Saturday over a wave of anti-democratic legislation in Israel and in particular a bill proposing to limit donations to human rights organizations. Clinton also criticized the growing exclusion of women from Israel's public life.

In a closed session at the Saban Forum attended both by Israeli and American decision-makers Clinton addressed the issue of discrimination against Israeli women. She expressed concern for Israel's social climate in the wake of limitations on female public singing and gender segregation on public transport....

Clinton, a longtime advocate for women's rights, noted she was shocked at the fact that some Jerusalem buses have assigned separate seating areas for women. "It's reminiscent of Rosa Parks," she said, referring to the black American woman who refused to give up her seat to white passengers in the 1950s.

Referring to the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where female soldiers were singing, she said it reminded her of the situation in Iran.

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The Historical Roots of Citizens United v. FEC: How Anarchists and Academics Accidentally Created Corporate Speech Rights

The Historical Roots of Citizens United v. FEC: How Anarchists and Academics Accidentally Created Corporate Speech Rights

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

by Zephyr Teachout; Fordham University - School of Law

Harvard Law and Policy Review, Vol. 5, p. 163, 2011
Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1769128

Abstract: This paper looks at how the early rhetoric around the First Amendment enabled later development of corporate political speech rights.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 26

Keywords: Elections, Corruption, First Amendment

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Down the wrong path

Down the wrong path

    Saturday, December 03, 2011   No comments

BOOK REVIEW
Down the wrong path
9-11: Was There an Alternative? by Noam Chomsky
Reviewed by Christopher Bartlo

"The book you are holding was conceived, produced, and published as an act of protest." This is the first line of the editor's introduction to Noam Chomsky's revised book about the causes and effects of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Originally titled simply 9/11, the book was published in November 2001. The 2011 edition features a new introduction - "Was There an Alternative?" - in which Chomsky comments on the assassination of Osama bin Laden and other developments since the book was first published.
Chomsky's initial comments 10 years ago provide a sobering perspective today, warning about events that have since unfolded. Chomsky argues that the US government has done exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted it to do: Dig into a series of expensive and bloody wars in Muslim countries, draining the American economy and causing many civilian casualties. As a result, "the security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels." The people of Afghanistan, teetering on the edge of starvation in September 2001, were deprived of much of the food and medical assistance from international aid that was keeping them alive because Coalition airstrikes destroyed infrastructure and made travel unsafe for aid trucks.

Chomsky laments that the US government largely dismissed these human-rights problems in its quest to "secure our interests." The invasion of Afghanistan was far from the first time North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) overran unstable civilian populations in the search for terrorists (Chomsky offers several examples in the book) and, as we now know, it was not the last.
...Article