More on the secret photos

The Telegraph reports (via The Daily Beast) that retired Major General Taguba says the unreleased photos of detainee abuse show rape and sexual abuse taking place. These descriptions seem to immediately refute the argument, put forward at the point when Obama did his U-turn, that there is nothing new that these pictures say about Abu Ghraib. "The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it," Taguba says. Yet Obama was quoted saying, "I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib." Sorry: something doesn't add up here.

Maybe we don't need to see the pictures if they're so horrendous. But we do need to see justice taking place. Trite assurances that the individuals have been "identified, and appropriate actions taken" is just not good enough. At the very least we need a detailed, independent account of the crimes committed which these photographs provide evidence of, the names of the people involved, and detail of the punishment the perpetrators received. Are these people in prison? Or did they just get a demotion and told not to do it again? We just don't know. Were these actions ordered from above, or were they a product of an atmosphere of inaccountability at the local level? Let's face it, we never got adequate answers to these questions back when Abu Ghraib first broke. Why should we be satisfied with such weak, internally contradictory, and possibly misleading statements now?

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Judicial activism or constitutional democracy?

I don’t have a lot to add about the Sotomayor pick. If there’s one area where you should be able to trust Obama, it’s in constitutional law. She seems pretty good from the relatively little I’ve read about her. There’s no doubt that the White House has put a lot of thought and preparation into this, following nearly two decades of crazy scandal about appointments. And the Republicans are onto a loser if they spend much time fighting the appointment without finding any cause to do so other than that she’s liberal, she’s a woman and she’s a Latina.

It’s tempting to see the post-Clarence Thomas era of Supreme Court fights as a testament to the politicization of a formerly rigorously scholastic and juridical enterprise, the transformation of the Court from a place where the nation's best lawyers adjudicated on purely legal questions to a political vehicle for making laws behind the back of congress. The truth is not quite so simple. Certainly, something quite profound has changed since the 1930s, but the claim that this is a product of simply judicial power-grabbing is not especially persuasive. Rather, its changing decisions have been as much expressions of broad changes in the character of American life as they have reflected any shift in the balance of power between branches of government.

When the Supreme Court struck down much of FDR’s ambitious reform legislation in the early 1930s, FDR responded in 1937 by attempting to pack the court with a series of friendly appointees and force the retirement of some of the older conservatives. The effort failed, and though it contributed to the emergence of a more acquiescent court by the late 1930s it grievously damaged FDR’s previously unassailable reputation. Americans, who – as many presidents seem to have forgotten – take the independence of the court extremely seriously, strongly objected to his apparent disregard for constitutional procedure. In short, both court and presidency seemed cowed after the conflict; neither seemed to have gained power over the other.

Since then, the pattern has remained equally unclear. The post-FDR era in court politics was undoubtedly starkly different to the conservatism of much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This shift was unwittingly accelerated by Eisenhower’s decision to appoint Earl Warren to head the Court. But it’s hard to say that the new tone of the Court was a product of a more expansive definition of its role, rather than simply a product of the fact that the Court itself became more liberal in an era of Democratic party dominance in the executive branch and increasing liberalism in American life.

Conservatives, on the losing end of this shift, have tended to explain all unwelcome decisions as a sign of congressional activism. This is a neat argument. First, the constitution is a venerated document, and Americans are naturally suspicious of the idea of loosely interpreting it. Second, there are clear procedures for altering the law laid down in the constitution which do not require un-elected judges to take the power upon themselves. Third, seeing things this way gives the impression that conservative appointees are not political in the way that liberals are, but are simply impartial defenders of the constitution.

But as clever as the argument is, it’s hard to conclude that the court really has been running away with its power since the 1930s, rather than simply reflecting the slower shifts in American political life from conservatism to liberalism and back again. Judges are still appointed by the executive in consultation with legislature, and most of the time (though not always) they conform broadly to the expectations of those who appointed them. Whilst the Court has the power to deliver a bloody nose to the president, the fact remains that the best way to get a friendly court is to make sure your party gets elected not just once, but for an entire generation. In this sense, in a strange way the Supreme Court ends up sometimes seeming more democratic than the other branches of government, which tend to be in the game only for the short haul.

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One hell of a hangover

It’s very long, and (for US readers) it’s mostly focused on the British side of this sorry mess, but people with a spare hour or two should read John Lanchester’s piece on the banking crisis in the current London Review of Books. First, because Lanchester is really pretty fantastic, and is great at understanding complex things and explaining them in articles to simpler people like me. Second, because it’s (another) useful corrective to the view that recovering from the banking crisis is the whole story. Getting back to growth is just a small part of the problem.

Lanchester is a bit of a Cassandra. But even if the plans being implemented by the British and US economies do work, we still have to pay for them – and it’s in this phase of the crisis, recovery, that you get the social carnage. We’ve been out on the town all evening on a horrendous binge with our buddies. We’ve now decided that it might be best to stop drinking. We're trying to find a cab to take us home. But, let’s be clear about this, the night is hardly over and the hangover hasn’t even begun to kick in yet.

No-one knows what it’ll look like, but in Britain the price of this crisis may well come through inflation and high goods prices for decades. In America, who knows? Because the dollar will stay strong we’ll probably see falling exports, budget cuts, foreign policy crisis and massive long-term unemployment. “I get the strong impression, talking to people,” Lanchester says, “that the penny hasn’t fully dropped. As the ultra-bleak condition of our finances becomes more and more apparent people are going to ask increasingly angry questions about how we got into this crisis.”

And that’s what’s really worth worrying about. Look back over the last couples of months at the public outcry on both sides of the Atlantic about bankers’ bonuses and the recent British scandal about MPs expenses. I’m not going to rehearse my views on these matters again (you can read my ranting about bonuses here and here or MPs here and here if you like). But think a moment about how interconnected the two scandals are. Both are driven by a fundamental disjuncture between the attitudes of the elite, establishment classes on the one hand, who firmly (and, in my view, sincerely) believe that they have done nothing wrong; and an intense fury on the part of a huge swathe of non-elite public opinion on the other. This anger is like nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime. And as further evidence of the cognitive gap between the establishment and the masses, the angry people get just as angry about the refusal of the involved parties to recognise their misbehaviour as they do about the scandals themselves.

Whether it’s the bankers who are still lobbying for their bonuses on the basis that they weren’t in the departments who screwed up with the mortgage-backed securities, or the head of HBOS taking home tens of millions in a pension for helping to break capitalism, or the MP who declares that public anger is “like an episode of Coronation Street” and simply a matter of people being “jealous”, it’s clear that huge chunks of the establishment just don’t ‘get it’. They quietly believe that this is a media-driven frenzy which will disappear once the news cycle moves on, that the price of recovery will be the sacrificing of a few of the more egregious sinners, that this anger has come out of nowhere and will just as quickly disappear. (The last point is the most annoying argument to me. People have been raging about fat cats for decades, it’s just no-one was listening.)

Note: this is not to make an observation about the legitimacy of either position here. Both sides are skewed in their judgement. The important point, for all of us, is how very, very far apart the two different views of the world are. Because whoever's right or wrong, that division is undeniable.

That said, though, MPs are supposed to be at least vaguely aware of what’s going on in the real world, so even if they don’t get the public anger or credit it with legitimacy you’d think that they’d at least learn to shut up, as their leaders have been trying to get them to. I think the single most offensive recent example of this has to be Tory MP Nadine Dorries’ recent complaint that the harassment of MPs who have been fiddling their expenses was “a form of torture”. I mean, how completely removed from the world we live in, the world in which people are actually being tortured in our name, can it be to make such a comparison?

Oh, how long ago it seems when it was that John McCain’s advisor, Carly Fiorina, was able with a straight face to declare that none of the major political leaders running for office in the 2008 presidential election was capable of running a major corporation as well as she and her fellow CEOs were. And yet we are still a very long way from the end of the great disillusionment.

The first lesson you learn in Ideology 101 is that ideologies don’t look like ideologies when they’re yours, like Monsieur Jourdain amazed to discover he’s been speaking prose all his life. Ideologies are things that other people, like those strange Marxist types living in Russia, have, not us ‘non-ideological’ Anglo-Saxons. (Shock news, by the way: Marxists didn’t think they were ideological, at least not in the way we use the word. They thought they had a scientifically true view of history.) Ideologies are like magic spectacles that seem invisible to the wearer, despite the fact that everyone else can see them on you. And yet even knowing how amazing humans are at self-deception, it’s still astonishing to observe how segregated we have all become from each other.

Of course, many liberal reformers – the ones who are saying things like “this recession is going to turn out to be a good thing” – are secretly hoping that because of this crisis we will all get a bit more tolerant, that we will spend a bit less time bullying other countries, that we will refocus ourselves on the ‘important things’ like education and health care and pay less attention to the self-regarding nonsense put out by big city bankers. Well, that’s not going to happen. Recessions and depressions are not fun. That’s the equivalent of saying that the ‘good thing’ about a hangover is that you get to eat pizza and watch a few movies - and ignoring the bit about not being able to move from your bed for two days without spewing up.

The European elections in Britain next month, in which the British National Party and other extremist groups are likely to get a huge spike, will begin to show what nonsense it is to say that this crisis is a good thing. Paying for it is going to produce a society divided into angry interest groups, fragmented, decaying. As Lanchester says, “Even if we fall short of the IMF option in favour of a run-of-the-mill severe recession, the consequences for Britain are going to be horrific. Roads and schools and hospitals will go unbuilt and unrepaired, medical treatments will go unbought, nurses and policemen and council workers will be laid off. Six hundred thousand jobs have been created in local government in the last few years. Most of them will have to go.”

And here’s the rub. At the centre of the great free market Reaganite ideology, the only dominant ideology that people of my age and younger have known, lies a claim that we are all in it together and that we can all rise together. When Carter said that America was going to have to face up to a world in which it wasn’t all-powerful and make some tough decisions, people voted for Reagan instead. Reagan, who told them that it was morning in America and Carter was being a defeatist. We’ve been told for decades that we can have our cake and eat it, that there are effectively no hard choices to make on spending since debt will cover our shortfalls. That’s left us free to fight each other about things, like religion and prayer and gays in the military instead. We’ve been able to pretend that there aren’t real divisions between interest groups in society, between which we must choose. iPods and inner-city schools, plasma screen TVs and policemen, we’ve can have them all.

But as we start experiencing this terrible hangover, we’re going to have to face up to the return of real hard choices. Not the hard choices that politicians constantly talk about making but don’t actually make, but real ones. You know, the ones where you sack a nurse because you’re paying more each year to service your debt than you are on the entire nation’s transport budget. Or the ones where entire towns end up with endemic 75% unemployment because they aren't ever going to be Tory voters anyway, so what's the point in wasting the small amount of money on them. Or where your kid doesn't get to go to university because we can't afford to subsidize her. You know, those kinds of hard choices.

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How not to win friends or influence people

Tory MP Anthony Steen, who is to step down at the next election after it was shown that he had charged over £90,000 for work on his country home as MPs expenses, said today that he'd done nothing wrong and that people were just jealous of his lovely house (Telegraph, Evening Standard).

"You know what it’s about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s the photographs that make it look like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, but it does me nicely... It’s got room to grow a few trees." (The Telegraph report has a picture of the house from the air, by the way.)

"What right does the public have to interfere in my private life?" Steen continued. "None. Do you know what this reminds me of this whole episode? An episode of Coronation Street. This is a kangaroo court going on."

Oh my GOD! What planet are these people on...?! They've actually managed, in the space of just a few weeks, to make the whole matter of city bonuses disappear entirely from the public consciousness in the UK. Un-be-sodding-lievable.

Steen, by the way, last made headlines in 2007 when he was caught parking in a disabled parking slot to save time getting to the train. I think the only option left for him is to start shooting kittens on YouTube and have done with it.

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RIP David Herbert Donald

by Gil Troy (via HNN.)

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Obama's search for the middle ground on torture

The first sign came in the press briefing yesterday when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked if the decision to approve the release of further pictures of prisoners being abused by US military personnel could be reversed, replied “I don’t want to get into that right now.”

“So you can’t commit either way?” the reporter asked.

“I’m not going to add much to that right now.”

Bill Kristol spotted it, and concluded that it “sounds to me as if the president is getting ready to reverse the decision of his Justice Department. I expect him to announce, perhaps citing his discussions today with General Odierno and Ambassador Chris Hill, that he’s decided it would be damaging to our soldiers and the nation to release these photos.”

He was dead right. Today, the confirmation came (WaPo, NYT) as Gibbs told gathered pressmen that the White House would oppose the release of the images because, “The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces, and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The argument about the impact of the images in theatres of war doesn’t add up to me: especially if, as is said, this lot are not as bad as the ones already circulated from Abu Ghraib. After all, the administration has already brought the matter to the front of the public mind by deciding to release them and then changing course. Now enemies of the United States are left free to conjure whatever sordid details they like from the image of a bank of secrets locked up in the Pentagon.

Decisively drawing a line under the whole sordid affair by publically revealing the crimes and prosecuting those involved would have been far more likely to have a positive effect in the Middle East and Asia than this kind of cover up, since - admittedly unfairly - this decision just makes Obama look to be no better than Bush. As the ACLU said today, “The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government.” So either the Obama administration, advised by its senior military officers, has badly misunderstood the psychology of anti-Americanism around the world, or there’s more to this story than just military tactics.

In short, this is at least in part about domestic politics. And, ethics to one side for a minute, Obama has got himself into a sticky situation politically. From the outset, the president’s goal has been clear: to steer a middle course on the question of prisoner abuse, winning hearts and minds abroad by firmly repudiating the Bush administration’s conduct, and keeping the political situation stable at home by opposing prosecutions and calling for people to move on and look to the future. Unfortunately, he may be discovering the costly lesson that, on some issues, there just isn’t much middle ground.

By repudiating the torture memos and clarifying the legal situation at Guantánamo (that the Bush administration had worked so hard to muddy), Obama didn't put the issue of torture to bed, but actually strengthened the case for prosecution. Meanwhile, he inflamed the Republican right who waved the bloody shirt, claiming that Obama was risking American soldiers’ lives by damaging the reputation of the nation at a time of war. The same thing would undoubtedly have happened with these photos.

Meanwhile, the president knows that it is politically inconceivable that the originators of this policy – Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush – will end up in the dock: because a Democratic president seeking imprisonment for a Republican predecessor will create a constitutional crisis of a scale that will make the Clinton impeachment look laughable, and almost certainly bring much of the rest of his agenda to a halt. As Philip Gourevitch says in the New Yorker, “When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal.”

For those of us who want to see these criminals prosecuted for ordering their countrymen to torture and abuse detainees, it’s tough to bear in mind the fact that many Republicans see this as playing partisan politics with national security. But Obama's role as president is determined by domestic politics above all other factors. He knows that any attempt to bring senior officials to the dock has the potential to split Washington more deeply even than Watergate.

So, concerned with getting on with his job - winning the war in Afghanistan, disengaging from Iraq and bringing the country out of recession - he desperately wants this issue to go away. It seems he has come to the conclusion that by taking the political hit now, by appearing to be the bad guy to the Democratic faithful, he can finally get the “move on” part going and get on with what he considers to be his real job. A bit of the shine might wear off the halo, but this is the price that has to be paid, he might tell himself. Perhaps his advisers tell him that the public memory for these issues is short, and that once there is no more material for the press to play with, the news cycle will move on.

He may be right, and given the hunt for the middle ground that he's on, he certainly doesn’t seem to have a more sensible political course to take. But of course there are plenty of groups who are going to fight this conclusion in the law courts and the streets and the media - just like the abolitionists did with slavery and the civil rights activists did with segregation. This is a fundamental, constitutional question about the universalism of human rights, and it just may not be possible to duck. After all, “Torture,” as a certain 44th president of the United States said a few days ago, “corrodes the character of a country.”

Not for the first time, but certainly this time without wishing it, Obama seems to be echoing Abraham Lincoln, who had to steer a similar course over slavery in the context of trying to save the union. We're not in civil war territory yet (!), but the process of reaching a solution on this one is going to be deeply damaging to the American polity. It may have to happen anyway. One thing is clear now, though: it’s not going to be the White House that forces America to face up to this thorny matter.

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Ever get the feeling that you've been shafted?

From the Labour Party website: “The values Labour stands for today, social justice, a strong community and strong values, reward for hard work, decency and rights matched by responsibilities, are those which have guided it throughout its existence.” 

• Communities Secretary Hazel Blears pays no capital gains tax on the £45,000 profit she made on a property whose mortgage was paid for her by taxpayers.
• Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon claims over £60,000 for refurbishments on his second home.
• Culture Secretary Andy Burnham receives over £16,000 to refurbish his London flat.
• Chancellor of the Exchequer claims over £10,000 to refurbish his London flat.
• Taxpayers contribute more than £100,000 to pay the mortgage on Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward’s £1.35m flat.
• International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander claims more than £30,000 refurbishing his house.
• Foreign Secretary David Miliband claims over £30,000 for refurbishing his house.
• Tourism Minister claims over £25,000 for security patrols at her London home.
• Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee Keith Vaz claims over £75,000 to fund a second home around 12 miles from his first home.

“Taxpayers have a right to know their money is being used sensibly and correctly - and we are proud to be leading the way when it comes to increasing openness on the issue of MPs' expenses.” From Conservative Party website.

• Chairman of Conservative policy review team Oliver Letwin claims £2,000 to repair a leaky pipe under his tennis court.
• Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove claims over £7,000 to furnish a house then £13,000 to move to another one.
• Shadow Cabinet Office Francis Maude claims more than £35,000 in mortgage payments on a flat close to a house he already owned and rented out.
• Former Tory cabinet minister John Gummer claimed more than £9,000 a year for gardening.
• Deputy Speaker Alan Haselhurst claimed £142,119 in second home allowances despite having no mortgage on the property, including £12,000 on gardening.
• Chairman of Defence Select Committee James Arbuthnot claims over £108,000 on his property.
• MP Douglas Hogg denies reports that he claimed over £2,000 to have his moat cleaned at his Lincolnshire home...

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Newspapers: murder or suicide?

Perhaps harshly, a few weeks back, Maureen Dowd’s mopey piece about the unfair behaviour of Google and other aggregators toward poor suffering journalists became the focus of a piece I wrote that bid an unemotional goodbye to the newspaper industry. Since then, we’ve seen The Wire creator David Simon appearing before congress to claim, amongst other more sensible points, that the internet parasite has eaten the news-gathering host. Interestingly, his presence at the hearings can only be because he was the maker of a hit TV series, not an old-fashioned journalist; conclude what you will from that.

My view, as I stated before, is that journalism is not what's at risk here, and we'd all do well to distinguish journalism from newspapers. Journalism – professionals investigating the news of interest to the public at large – will prosper even if newspapers die a terrible death because this kind of professional work meets a real public need.

One of the persistent myths put out by the newspapers is that their troubles are caused by a public no longer willing to pay for the valuable work they do, that the internet has somehow made consumers into tightwads and skinflints who don’t care about the public good and aren't willing to pay for quality. “The tragedy of the commons,” journalists murmur quietly to themselves as they rock themselves to sleep in their plush city pads. No, more than that, we the public are actually criminals, stealing content, or in Simon’s words, parasites. Quick note, guys: a fairly reliable indicator that a business is out of touch is when it starts abusing its customer base.

I think the internet has just made consumers able to pay only for what they actually wanted and valued in the first place. The great revelation is that a whole load of stuff that publishers thought was first rate has been exposed as fluff.

The Victim Number One of the internet is, and has always been, the practice of bundling. As with albums, your traditional newspaper included a few tracks of real quality and a whole pile of filler. Back in the 1970s, when you had confidence in the bands you loved, this wasn’t a problem. But when the producers started forcing the cash cows to release half-finished albums every year just to keep up with their production schedules, things started going wrong. Remember when Michael Jackson released Thriller and virtually every track was a hit single as well? When was the last time that happened?

Same goes for bundling in the newspaper industry. Bundling wasn’t necessarily a bad thing – in fact, it could even be valuable if you had intelligent editors who understood their audience. This kind of editor could bring you stories on topics you hadn’t gone to look for but turned out to be interesting all the same. But quality bundling is increasingly rare, not least because editors simply ended up chasing the stories from their rivals’ headlines. Most of the time newspaper bundling became little more than a few pieces of expensive, quality journalism squeezed between a whole bunch of generic filler taken virtually wholesale off the AP feed and marginally repackaged. I presume that editors consoled themelves that this was the price they paid: that the fluff subsidised their true calling - the occasional Woodward and Bernstein piece. Actually, this was a way of reconciling themselves to spending less and less time on the thing that really mattered.

The best example I know of this is the British Sunday newspaper. Convinced that quality was measured by quantity, editors just kept adding crap, so that today you need a small wheelbarrow to get one home from the shops, and most of the rest of the day free to discard the 30-odd sections of absolutely no interest to you. (I briefly did some strategy work for a major international press chain which shall remain nameless about ten years ago, and the frame of discussion at that point was even about eliminating the journalist altogether from the newspaper production process. Troublesome, argumentative, and really not doing much that a news wire and copy editor couldn’t do as well, was their – now exposed as utterly self-destructive – view.)

As long as the distribution mechanism was controlled by a few businesses with a monopoly on the print and circulation of newsprint, editors could convince themselves that their bundled product was more valuable than most people actually felt it was. Their little self-regarding bubble could persist long enough to pay for their long expense account lunches. But then the internet offered people the opportunity to read the two or three articles they wanted from a newspaper without paying the bit they didn’t want. Instead of getting the price of the whole thing, newspapers were suddenly forced to live with a tiny share of ad rev from eyeballs on that page alone. To an insider, this looked like daylight robbery, but only because they misunderstood what their customers valued in the first place. Adding every topic under the sun to a Sunday newspaper wasn’t making them more appealing to readers, it was making them more generic – and, for that matter, more annoying.

The same could be said about the embarrassing way in which formerly respectable newspapers sought to put buxom film stars on the front page every day and covered the latest goings on in reality TV shows. Formerly high-brow journalists convinced themselves that an attitude of wry disapproval of the content they were covering would fool the public into thinking it wasn’t just celebrity news. Well, it didn’t: celebrity gossip is celebrity gossip. Besides, people who like that stuff don't want to be told at the same time as they're getting their fix that they're shameful and should really be reading Kierkegaard.

All too often, newspapers thus came to believe that their unique value lay in taking a particular attitude or ideological position rather than providing something to the consumer that wasn’t available in a dozen other places.

Now, I can only speak for a sampling of one person – me – but I stopped buying newspapers a long time ago. In fact, I stopped well before I started getting my news from the Internet. I preferred to go to the few good TV news programmes instead (Newsnight, for instance), which didn’t waste my time telling me what ‘Bennifer’ was getting up to, or how I should wear my hair to best look like a Shoreditch journalist. I do read individual news reports from the press online, but never more than a couple of pieces from any single source: for which I think the ad revenue they accrue is probably reasonable. Meanwhile, I subscribe to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, and regularly buy The New York Review of Books, The Economist, and other news magazines, all of which cost substantially more than a daily paper. So the total pot of money I spend on journalism has not only held up, it’s probably grown. My licence fee to the BBC is still being paid, the magazines are getting a fair whack of my disposable income, it’s just that only a little of it goes to newspapers anymore.

Why still pay for magazines if supposedly the internet's destruction of paying for quality journalism is to blame? Well, in my case the answer is simple: the magazines didn’t run off and try to be all things to all people, the magazines didn’t show contempt or ignorance of their readership. They understood their brand, they understood what their readers wanted, and they focused on delivering it, in a quality format. I know this is true for high end political and international news – what I like – but I'm sure it’s the same for other subjects as well. Why get The Guardian to keep me updated on celebrity tattle when Heat does it properly? Why read The Telegraph’s half-pint technology news section when I can read Wired?

So in the end, I don’t hold to this argument that we're witnessing the death of independent, professional journalism. Sadly, all too often it was the newspapers who squeezed out the good journalism from their workplace. The same newspapers are now trying to wrap themselves in the dead skin of investigative journalism in order to preserve a high-minded image of themselves in a public debate over their social value that they're badly losing.

The good journalists are going to continue to do their work because they believe in it, and the public will continue to value their efforts however the medium changes. I’m not claiming that bloggers are generally capable of producing the kind of ‘pounding the streets’ professional investigations that David Simon talked about. Blogging is about community engagement, not investigative journalism, and whilst they may overlap they're not the same thing. I just don’t believe that’s really what newspapers did anymore, either.

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America's finest news source

Ah, dontcha just love it?

"Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again", The Onion, May 4, 2009.

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Keep the champagne corked

Think the stress test has solved all our problems? I guarantee that one look at this chart, carefully assembled by those clever people at Calculated Risk, will make you think twice. Click on the image for a bigger version to see what all the pretty lines mean, or click here for the full article.

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Notes on Torture Memo (IV)

Apologies for being somewhat late to come across this part of the picture, but Philip Zelikow seems to have hit the nail exactly on the head in explaining why he opposed the torture programme as NSC deputy to Rice back in 2005:

There is an elementary distinction, too often lost, between the moral (and policy) question -- "What should we do?" -- and the legal question: "What can we do?" We live in a policy world too inclined to turn lawyers into surrogate priests granting a form of absolution. "The lawyers say it's OK."  Well, not really. They say it might be legal. They don't know about OK. (Source: Foreign Policy, 21 April 2009)

If it were needed, Zelikow's example also gives the lie to the argument that the role of a bureaucratic functionary should only be to follow the instructions of superiors, the position that defenders of Bybee et. al. have been taking:

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.

Oh, and if any Brits are feeling in any way superior relating to this whole murky affair at this point, don't. Read this instead.

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A few quick thoughts on the stress test results

1. Good news overall. As predicted, the certainty that has come from the stress test has overridden the fact that a fair amount of the detail consists of bad news. The markets are continuing to rally. Known knowns prove to be a good thing and known unknowns to be terrible. (Apologies Don Rumsfeld.)

2. This will not be the end of the crisis, in that the housing market is unlikely to rebound as quickly as people might hope in this current flush of optimism. There will be further losses next year and it will take much longer than that to get back to where we started. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this exercise makes a strong case for how to deal with future problems of over-leveraging: just do it again! I see no reason why this kind of stress testing can't become a standard part of the government's regulatory oversight function, perhaps an annual exercise at the time of year end results?

3. The banking crisis is not the sum of the crisis, even if it was the reason the bubble burst. Restoring stability in the financial markets will go a long way towards reviving the American economy. And, if it's matched by regulatory changes, it should help to avert a repeat performance. But profound problems remain in terms of economic fundamentals. Poor balance of payments, debt-fuelled consumption, deficits and national debt will continue to be ticking time bombs, and hold out the possibility in the medium term of painful tax rises or crippling inflation. The question now is to find a suitable way of managing these issues without cutting back government stimulus to the economy and shooting the economy into depression. The first two steps for this programme are obvious: seriously shrink military spending and produce a major overhaul of the benefits system.

So, time for a glass of champagne, but save the rest of the bottle for later.

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The Bankers' Dirty Little Secrets

The excitement about the release of the information from the stress tests later this week (admittedly already bubbling out) almost definitely belies the likely dullness of the information that’ll be provided – at least to most of us who do not have advanced degrees in economics. The complexity and strangeness of the issue is probably best shown by the fact that people are complaining on the one hand that the bankers have too much power, that the administration has been turned into a lackey of unrepentant masters of the universe; and on the other hand that banks are unhappy about the fact that so many of them are likely to fail the tests and be forced to borrow more from the state. In one version a bailout from government is lining the pockets of the wealthy; in another it’s some kind of punishment. Go figure...

In fact, this is not surprising when a government has to intervene to prop up failing businesses that are too important to the economy as a whole to be allowed to fail. On the one hand, we want to punish those people who we blame for the initial failure so as to create moral hazard; on the other, we don’t want to be so harsh that we don’t actually help the businesses, since if we don’t get them working again we’re just hurting ourselves. Ideally, a chorus of complaints from both sides of the argument is the noise we should want to hear come Thursday: this would be a sign that the balance of the Obama-Geithner measures are just about right.

The function of the stress tests are two-fold: one, to restore general public confidence in the banks, something that has been noticeably absent since before the election but is oozing back; and two, to restore confidence between the banks, so that the interbank lending rate will readjust toward the general rate of inflation and so on (thereby allowing the Fed’s basic mechanism of macroeconomic policy to start working again). In this sense, the exercise is one vast forced expose of the banking sector’s dirty little secrets in the hope that we can then get over them and move on. No wonder the bankers are unhappy.

Moreover, by holding out the requirement that banks falling below a certain level will be required to take government money (something the leading bankers know will dent their comparative standing in the market), the government has both a weapon to use against recalcitrant bankers and a way of reassuring the public that the banks are not going to fail.

This, then, is a good thing. During FDR’s successful reconstruction of the banking sector when he took office, he did a pretty similar exercise, albeit in a slightly more back-of-the-envelope way. First, he used the Trading With the Enemy Act to declare a national bank holiday and told the public that his people would use this time to conduct intensive examinations of the banking sector. Second, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation set up by Herbert Hoover was instructed to print loads of money and lend it to banks to keep them afloat - not for the banks' benefit, but so people wouldn't withdraw all their savings and crash the system. After a week, Roosevelt appeared on the radio to inform the public that the banks were solvent, conservative and protected, and so they should not rush to withdraw any more money. (Though of course, in a classic banking paradox, it was only the belief in their solvency that actually gave them solvency.) Within a month, more than 70% of the banks in the country had been reopened without any accompanying runs, and in the end the RFC lost only about $13.6m through failures.

From this perspective, then, I don’t think we need to worry too much about people who are complaining that Geithner and Obama are in the pockets of the bankers. Actually, they’re just following tried and trusted methods to restore confidence in a failed marketplace.

But that’s not the end of the story, because it’s not enough just to rebuild the old, flawed, radical banking sector and watch it fall over again under the next neoliberal administration. We need the banks to be working for us all, not just for the ultra-rich. We need a nice conservative, stable bunch of bankers, not a chorus line of Dolce and Gabbana wearing Gordon Geckos snorting cocaine through thousand dollar bills they’ve stolen from old ladies' pockets...

This is why Obama must follow up with the same fourth step that FDR took after rebuilding the system: substantial new regulation of the banking sector to eliminate the unholy profit a few people have managed to make from our savings and investments in the past thirty years. Indeed, given the amount of deregulation that's been passed since the 1980s which was aimed directly at New Deal measures, perhaps simply passing the 1933 and 1935 Banking Acts word for word once again might do the job!)

I’m no expert, but it seems that two elements are absolutely critical: first, the reimposition of the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking; and second, the raising of mandatory reserves for commercial bankers in order substantially to reduce the scale of leveraging. This makes money less cheap, true, but also makes it more secure.

A third element would be to dramatically increase the requirements on public release of information from these corporations so that we’re not forced to rely on external firms to tell us whether we can trust them or not. I’m all for making them utterly transparent. When it comes to banking and marriage, dirty little secrets are no good for anyone. And, finally, I doubt many of us would lose sleep if efforts are made to drastically limit the scale of pay and bonuses at the top of the tree. Over time, these measures should come together to perform the same confidence-building function as the government money has done so far, which can then be slowly paid off.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but it’s actually something that the United States has a pretty good history of dealing with. For better or worse, American politicians have been fighting the bankers since the Age of Jackson, if not of Alexander Hamilton. With an administration that seems to have a real sense of history behind it, this will serve the whole of the United States pretty well...

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Why is Congress so rubbish? And what does this have to do with torture?

An interesting conversation with a potential graduate student yesterday got me thinking about the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR). For those unfamiliar, this bill was introduced as an anti-Nixon post-Vietnam bill designed to reassert the power and prerogatives of Congress when it came to waging war, after at least forty years of impingement from the presidency. However, despite being seen as a textbook example of the reassertion of congressional power in the 1970s, the bill in practice actually codified the right of the president to wage war without consulting congress for 60 days – and, in practice, potentially a lot longer. As a result, a bill that was designed to re-empower the legislature did the opposite, and certainly didn't influence the conduct of Reagans’ wars in Central America and the Caribbean, Bush’s war in Panama, Clinton’s wars and near-wars in Haiti, Kosovo, and Iraq, and so on. (As background, academics or obsessives might want to look at Fisher in the Political Science Quarterly in Spring 1998 for more info than I can provide on the resolution.)

Why did congress bungle such a grand missed opportunity? First, because they were more interested in grandstanding than defending the constitution. As a result, most wanted a bill to pass that the press would symbolically recognise as a reassertion of congressional power rather than actually caring about reasserting congressional power. (A similar point could cynically be made about the Boland Amendments about Nicaragua in the Reagan years. Congress wanted to look like it was doing the right thing, so that if and when things went wrong people blamed the president.)

Second, because they wanted to beat up the president. Once Nixon vetoed the bill, it became a great opportunity to defy the president by overriding the veto, so the short term political benefits overrode the obviously poor quality of the legislation.

Third, because they included phrases like ‘imminent threat’ and ‘endangered citizens’ which were ultimately vague enough to be interpreted in all sorts of ways by subsequent presidents.

Underpinning all these problems was the fact that Congress, for all its newfound energy, still lacked the sense of self the Framers had given it in the constitution. After all, the WPR was really only an attempt to reassert the privilege over making the decision to go to war that the Framers had quite clearly asserted in the constitution in the first place. This lack of legislative power meant that not only did Congress fail to fulfil its role at the time, in pretty much every subsequent face-off over the presidential decision to go to war, it continued to behave in a subservient manner.

Why has Congress been like this when it comes to warmaking? Well, two points immediately spring to mind: the power of the media, and the power of party. The way in which a president is able to frame the national security debate, and the way in which the presidential leadership is able to discipline the party structure across all branches of government means that it often doesn’t really matter what laws are on the books: Congress will go with the flow anyway, even if that means not discharging its constitutional responsibility.

What has this to do with torture? Well, ever since I read some of those reprehensible torture memos earlier in the week, I’ve been struggling between two views of Yoo, Bybee et. al. The first might be called the ‘banality of evil' school: that is, such bureaucrats are crucial in facilitating the conduct of extreme and degrading practices on detainees by moving the debate from ethics to law, and their defences that they were only doing their jobs are the classic defence of the corporation man who fails to understand their moral and civic responsibility to humanity. The second is that I have a sneaking suspicion that these functionaries are being sold down the river. In part this is because the real criminals are too powerful to get got. And in part, it's because the whole damn system is culpable for these terrible acts, not just one or two morally compromised and weak-willed functionaries.

And into this second part goes the institution of Congress. They passed the blanket authorization for Bush to go to war, they passed the PATRIOT Act, they passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act. Perhaps some of them, even Democrats who weakly complain that their hands were tied because the Republicans were in charge, might do well to take a moment out from the debate over the torture lawyers, and look at their own role in acquiescing to unquestioned presidential primacy in times of war.

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