Needlenose

As if the coming presidential election wasn’t already getting hairy for Dubya and his pals, the American people may be on the verge of another of those awkward “Eureka” moments like when David Kay confirmed for everyone that Iraq really didn’t have any of those fabled weapons of mass destruction.

See, the head of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, last week said that cutting Social Security benefits would be the only possible way to save the system. But some people, like David Cay Johnston in Sunday’s New York Times, remembered when Greenspan told a different story two decades ago:

Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.

Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan, who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.

. . . So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?

The advance payments have all been spent.

A former top economist in the Clinton administration wrote to the Washington Post to make a similar point about Greenspan’s sleight-of-rhetoric. The 1983 tax increase was designed to reduce the national debt so that future generations would be able to absorb the challenge of paying for baby boomers’ retirement, something that finally began to happen in 1999 and 2000. Since then, however, the additional revenue has been vastly outweighed by the enormous Bushite tax cuts — with the lion’s share of the benefits going not to the people paying the Social Security taxes, but to the wealthiest 1% of individuals.

In short, instead of contributing to our own retirement security, we’re simply being robbed … to the tune of $1.8 trillion so far, and millionaires and billionaires are the ones profiting as a result. That, to put it mildly, is the bad news.

The good news is, Greenspan’s comments have led people to connect the dots at a propitious time — a presidential election year. Now that the ugly truth has reared its head in the New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages, it’s almost certain to find its way into the stump speeches of Democrats nationwide.

Often, the importance of an issue to voters depends on how clearly its meaning comes across to them. The ongoing search for unconventional weapons in Iraq was a fuzzy concept to many people until you had David Kay on TV saying, “We were all wrong.” Similarly, abstractions like federal deficits, entitlement reform, and tax progressivity get a lot more real when you can point out, “You’re paying 50% extra in Social Security taxes so millionaires can keep their huge tax cuts.”

I’d like to see that line become part of the repertoire for every Democrat running for the White House or Congress in November — and I’d like to hear every one of them challenging their Republican opponents as to whether they really support that policy. I have a feeling that might just happen.

It all started so innocently. Over economist =http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_typeBrad DeLong[/url]‘s weblog, he was quoting someone else’s critique of Social Security privatization, which contained an example to help laypeople understand:

OK, so the plan has to be that the Treasury buys say x% of all stock and corporate bonds. Here I see another problem. It is very nice to deal with someone who has to buy x% of your stuff no matter how much and how bad it is.

Let me put it this way. There are two cows. One belongs to Mr A and one to Ms B. A and B, who are very very rich, incorporate and issue shares in an IPO, rating each cow as worth a billion dollars. They buy each other’s shares. Treasury has to give each of them 100 million dollars for 10% of a cow.

DeLong then followed up as you’d expect any self-respecting university professor (with a Ph.D. from Harvard) and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department to do … in the very next thread, he issued an open call for “two cows” jokes.

He got plenty of them. My favorite was the one about outsourcing the two cows to India.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled from Haiti today, not only encouraged but escorted by the United States. An emailer to OxBlog writes a progressive critique:

Some of Aristide’s critics have always hated him for a variety of Haitian reasons involving class and race and have been scheming to get him out for since he was reelected in 2000, through his incompetence and malfeasance his given them enough rope to hang him with. . . .

Many Republicans in and out of the Administration have hated Aristide since he was first elected in 1991 and won’t be shedding any tears if he goes. The Administration has been instrumental in blocking Haiti from receiving loans totaling $500 million from the World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank, and other multilateral institutions since 2000. USAID, IRI and other American institutions have given millions of dollars to the opposition. Many members of the armed opposition were trained by the U.S. military and the CIA. This Administration has yet to craft a balanced approach when it comes to Haiti, for example when the opposition failed to agree, yet again, to a power sharing agreement with Aristide. The Administration immediately placed the blame on Aristide, not even mentioning the opposition’s intransigence.

I don’t know one way or the other about U.S. support for Aristide’s opposition, but a Knight Ridder retrospective on Aristide’s reign does a good job of showing how he turned many of his own supporters against him, mentioning that the cutoff of loans followed questionable elections in 2000.

For an outstanding overview, I recommend reading what appears to be a new weblog called World on Fire, which does a particularly good job charting the changing U.S. public position on Aristide (just two weeks ago, Colin Powell was insisting that he remain in office).

Sadly, for all of Aristide’s well-documented flaws, the armed group rebelling against him is led by even more rancid characters — and although there is a peaceful opposition movement as well, the way these coups usually work is that the people with guns wind up calling the shots. So it’s likely to be a classic case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” all over again in Haiti.

From the New York Times for tomorrow’s paper:

President Bush’s campaign strategists say they now expect to trail or do no better than run even with Senator John Kerry through the summer, despite their aggressive new effort to counter months of Democratic attacks.

. . . “The real challenge, and the concern — not worry — is that they need to be able to implement a strategy, a series of tactics, that will enable the president to define the election on terms favorable to him,” said one Republican who works closely with the White House.

“Uniquely for a successful incumbent, he has not been able to do that so far,” said the Republican, who demanded anonymity in part because the White House discourages its allies from speaking openly to reporters but also because he said he wants to remain behind the scenes.

“The next phase of the campaign, from early March to mid- or late April, is about whether the election is going to be fought on safety, security, America’s place in the world and keeping the economy growing — the issues that are good for the president,” the Republican said. “If it’s about credibility, weapons of mass destruction, intelligence failures and job creation, Bush will lose.“

Once you filter out some of the “Really, it’s just a flesh wound!” spin from the rhetoric here, you can see how precarious Dubya’s position really is.

For example, saying that he’s been “uniquely for a successful incumbent” unable to define the terms of the election begs the question of whether he really is a successful incumbent, doesn’t it? For a genuinely successful president, running on his record is usually enough. But as the article notes, Bush’s handlers are revising his campaign speech to spend less time talking about his “accomplishments” (and if “keeping the economy growing” is one of them, it’s little wonder why).

But here’s the real bad omen for the Bushite crowd:

Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign’s chief strategist, predicted in a widely circulated memorandum late last year that the race would be neck-and-neck by spring, when the Democrats settled on their nominee. With that prediction having come true and then some, Mr. Dowd said in an interview that the Bush campaign now had to begin a methodical task of changing many of the perceptions created among voters by the intense focus given to the Democrats.

Lots of luck there, pal. When a president has been in office for three and a half years, voters’ image of him is more or less settled, and there’s not much an advertising campaign or platitude-filled speeches can do to change it. For better or worse, Dubya has made his bed, and now he’s got little choice but to lie about in it.

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman [ as long as they are not first cousins ]. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups [ especially if they are first cousins ].”

Changes to proposed constitutional amendment after it was discovered that quite a few states allow first cousins to marry (including Texas).

They show how creating democracy from scratch is an ugly process, as Oldman1787 points out:

Talk about lowering expectations. Russia in a new article by Foreign Policy online magazine isn’t an apparent failure despite its economic woes and widely recognized fallback into an authoritarian state. No, the authors claim that the problem is that the expectations were too high and that the Russia experience is the norm for a new country transitioning to democracy and free market economics.

. . . So yes, we removed Saddam and yes he was a very bad man. However the Iraqis like the Haitians don’t necessarily have to materially benefit from this. . . . And yes, just like Haiti it could all fall apart. This is the problem with the forward promotion of democracy, it’s a great idea but it’s incredibly hard to do properly. And you may end up stuck there or having it be a chaotic mess for years on end.

. . . Certainly if the United States is to put itself with blood and treasure on the line, the argument that we should do so to create only mildly totalitarian states with phony democracies controlled by economic oligarchies with possible intermittent civil wars that we will need to intervene in later is going to be less potent of a rallying cry than “making the world safe for democracy“. But that is the truth of the matter!

Oldman’s weblog is fairly new, but I’ve encountered him as a commenter on another site, and he’s a rare exception — a self-described lifelong Republican with an honest and clear-eyed view of events. (The latter has led him to develop a fiercely independent streak, for example, in opposing the war in Iraq.) I recommend visiting his site, if you’re interested in engaging in a little ideological affirmative action.

If you’ve spent any time reading Needlenose at all, you may believe that I never miss an opportunity to point out when I’ve predicted something before it happened. Well, I’m embarrassed pleased to say that you’re wrong — I did miss a chance to do so last week. Never fear, though, I’m here to rectify that oversight.

You see, it occurred to me yesterday that the temporary governing formula for Iraq that Ayatollah Sistani accepted on Thursday — a six-month delay in holding elections, with extremely limited powers for the interim government (almost certain to be the current Governing Council), is exactly the arrangement I said “has the ring of something that will come to pass” in a post more than a month ago.

Ironically, I began leaning away from that prediction almost as soon as I’d made it, seeing signs that the plan was a self-promotional smokescreen for the Governing Council, especially after Sistani’s spokesman began taking a harder line in public. Eventually I came to describe this solution as having no more than an “outside chance” in mid-February, compared to the greater likelihood of a demand for elections in October or earlier (exactly the opposite of how I’d viewed the situation in January).

So, what happened; how did I lead myself astray? The UN elections team, under apparent U.S. pressure, didn’t side with the ayatollah as much as I (and perhaps Sistani himself) thought they would — but because Sistani needs the United Nations to oversee a fair transition of power, he can’t dismiss their recommendations. Meanwhile, on the American side, a brief flirtation with handing Iraq completely to the UN appears to have sparked a resurgence of neoconservatives’ demands to keep control over the process, in a dispute that I doubt has been fully settled yet.

These developments forced Sistani to be less assertive than he probably wanted to be, and hindered the U.S. from giving in to him right away. Which leaves us at the awkward no-man’s land I described on Thursday — with the ayatollah laying down conditions that are likely to be ignored (due to a combination of U.S. denial and Governing Council ineptitude), but having no clear deadline or action that can be a “line in the sand” for rallying Shiite resistance. So, regrettably, for the moment at least I can’t predict what the next twist in the road will be. (I can, however, predict that I won’t stay shy about guessing for long.)

psychicfriend over at =http://www.friendlytakeover.comFriendlyTakeover.com[/url] sent me this silly email humor piece. It reminded me of RWC’s comments on my polygamy post, and the ‘Lazlo Letters‘-style I like to employ when ‘cranking cooks.’ Enjoy!

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination… End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them…

Well it looks like the reactionaries’ feared ‘breakdown of civilization itself’ is spreading; now the ‘lil town of New Paltz, New York, is marrying same-sex couples. I had mused that this movement would be harder to crush if it spread to other cities well-known for their support of civil rights, but hey, who can predict where courage will arise?

It sure doesn’t help the forces of intolerance to have big-name, long-time out-of-the-closet celebs like Rosie O’Donnell tying the knot on national television. I can’t help but wonder where the rest Hollywood gays are – perhaps they’re waiting to get their prenups in order? And where the hell is Mary Cheney’s voice in all this? Did daddy Dick buy her silence by hiring her for $100K to help in his re-election campaign? Or maybe daddy Dick just threatened to cut her off from her future (tax-free courtesy of the cuts if made permanent) inheritance – you know, the multi-million dollar one full of pumped-up and juicy Halliburton stock? Ask her yourself!

Just ahead of several other better-read weblogs, I noted the Pentagon’s golden parachute for Ahmed Chalabi as ongoing evidence that it didn’t mind his historic scamming of our government to lay the bait for the invasion of Iraq.

But tonight, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder say that not everyone’s willing to let Chalabi off with a wink and a nod:

The Iraqi National Congress, long championed by officials at the White House, Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, is facing a growing number of investigations into its provision of bogus intelligence on Iraq and whether some of its members may have tried to cash in on the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Democrats in the House of Representatives have asked the Defense Intelligence Agency to turn over raw intelligence supplied by the Iraqi exile group. They plan to review it for its accuracy and reliability, according to officials in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill.

The move follows a recent decision by the Senate Intelligence Committee to expand its probe of prewar intelligence on Saddam to include the INC and other groups that played important roles in President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq last March.

. . . A U.S. military official engaged in Iraq policy and deeply critical of the INC and its leader said, “Chalabi’s run is about over, and it’s about time.

“A lot of the information they provided was suspect from the start – some of it was almost laughably false – but it got into the bloodstream anyway, and the minute he and his people got to Baghdad, we started hearing horror stories about them taking over other peoples’ property – houses, cars and so on,” the official said.

“Now we’re looking to see whether they’ve stuck their noses into the (postwar reconstruction) contracting process, too,” he said.

I guess maybe there’s been some backlash after all about Chalabi hopping onto the early-elections bandwagon. I really doubt anything will come of these investigations — Chalabi would take too many of the neocons down with him, if push came to shove — but it’s nice to see a little heat being applied to someone who richly deserves it.