Outis

For all the nationalists – American exceptionalists – who could never imagine how so many parts of the world became so corrupt:

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny — one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.

From “The legalization of torture and permanent detention.”

More on this fine day: 800-900 attacks a week and $2 billion every seven days.

National Insecurity?

Read the short article, the first reader response and the author’s response to same. Wow.

The two trade more pointed and substantive arguments later on in the same post.

(via WashingtonMonthly)

Earlier this week I wrote down a little thought experiment: how is George W. Bush like Fidel Castro?

It was a long list, with links.

But I’m not going to post it here. Because, what I’d like to know, is how many other Cubans in exile have made the same list.

Back again for my now weekly “post” and I’m going to take a pass on the revelations that the U.S. government has to pay “reporters” to write bad stories about Fidel Castro’s regime. (Like, wtf? Is it that hard?)

Instead, and on a day which is for reflection on other topics, my attention is on an internal threat to the American Way.

Income inequality:

First, some statistics. Between 1979 and 2003, the income of the richest one percent of Americans more than doubled, the income of the middle 15 percent grew by only 15 percent, and the income of the poorest 20 percent barely budged, according to the CBO. By the late 1990s, the richest one percent of Americans households had a third of all wealth in the economy, and took in 14 percent of the country’s income—a greater share than at any point since the Great Depression. These days you can’t swing a dead gerbil without hitting some leftist faithfully reciting these figures, but I thought I’d repeat them anyway.

…

To some extent, these findings are likely a result of the fact that elected officials tend to hail from the upper classes, and so tend to be the sort of people who worry more about the burden the estate tax imposes than, say, food insecurity or too-high heating bills. In 2003, financial records revealed that 40 senators and 123 representatives were millionaires. This shouldn’t be surprising. Without publicly-financed elections, it takes a good deal of personal wealth to run for office—the average Senate campaign in 2006 will cost about $10 million, minimum, according to a University of Washington study.

But that’s only the most obvious way economic power begets political power. Consider the fact that wealthy Americans are far more likely to vote: 86 percent of those in families with incomes over $75,000 reported voting in 1990, compared to only 52 percent of those in families with incomes under $15,000. Whether that’s because the well-off are more likely to believe that government will work for them—evidently a sound assumption—or because they have more time and opportunity to inform themselves and do their civic duty is unknown.

But it’s not just voting. People in the $75,000 bracket are much more likely to join a political advocacy group like the NRA or the NAACP (73 percent vs. 29 percent), and much more likely to make campaign contributions (56 percent vs. 6 percent). Indeed, in the 2000 election, 95 percent of those donors making substantial campaign contributions came from households making over $100,000. While high-income donors don’t usually bribe politicians to do their bidding, they do get more face time with their representatives, during which they can frame issues and concerns in ways amenable to their interests.

From The New Yorker:

Sy’s most recent article, on the Lebanon war, suggests that the people who are in the key positions continue to learn the wrong lessons, which is that air power can destroy deeply entrenched groups that are as much political as they are military. Which is very worrying, because it shows that what one hears—that no unwelcome information reaches the President, that it is generally stopped at his door by people from the Vice-President’s office or by his immediate staff—is true. It’s something I hear over and over again. So I don’t think anyone in a position to make decisions has learned.

once more, via Robot Wisdom

And, from the same article, my personal take on American foreign policy as articulated by Jon Lee Anderson:

As an American… I was very keenly, acutely, and poignantly aware, in the late nineties and very early two-thousands, of a sense of abandonment of past responsibility, of a huge and, in some cases, quite destructive legacy that we had left during our many years of efforts to combat the Soviet expansion in Third World countries. We had left a huge hole; we had ceased to be the good Americans there. People were still waiting for us. The Clinton years have to be looked back on as almost golden years, despite the many mistakes in foreign policy Clinton made. The United States had somehow achieved, once again, this sense of promise in the world. Maybe it was the afterglow of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it all changed, as Sy and George were pointing out, as a result of the language chosen and the political decisions taken, about how America would respond to the new threat against it. We’ve had many opportunities since then to right the course, to alter those perceptions which have deepened and deepened—perceptions of bitterness and enmity toward America for not shouldering its true responsibilities.