Tag Archives: America

Ebola, Obama, Republicans, the Usual Nonsense

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From Evert Cilliers, writing at the very good Three Quarks Daily site:

What is it about Ebola and America? We have fewer cases than you can count on one hand of this horrible disease, among a nation of 300 million plus, and we’re freaking out as if ISIS has landed and beheaded everyone in Congress (not a bad idea, actually, they’d be doing us all a favor).

And now our President has gone and appointed an Ebola czar. What is this new Czar supposed to do? Go and comfort the families of the one dead from Ebola and the couple of others now in hospital? Big job. Jeez, why is our President acting like a scare-mongered wimp himself? He is supposed to be the grownup in the room. One would expect him to say something like this:

“My dear Americans,

Take a chill pill. Ebola is not a threat to our nation. The Republican Party is a bigger threat, the way they stand against raising the minimum wage for our folks who need to get food stamps even though they’re working all day. Why do Americans who actually work have to earn so little that they can’t even feed themselves? And why are we subsidizing Walmart and McDonalds who pay their employees so little they need food stamps? Walmart is costing you over $6 billion a year out of your taxes you pay in public assistance to their employees. Ebola is the last of our problems. Ignore it. I do. No need to act like a bunch of hysterical wimps. Let the GOP do that. They’re good at being wimps. It’s the other side of their coin. They act like wimps because they’re bullies. So why don’t you go out in November and vote against them? I need Congress back on my side so we can actually make some laws that will benefit the American people.”

Unless you’re a nurse with an Ebola patient, which you’re not.

More from Mr. Cilliers at Three Quarks Daily.

Political Corruption in America, Then and Now

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Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She recently ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a quixotic venture if her goal was to become the Governor of New York. Her more realistic goals included calling attention to Cuomo’s political shenanigans, highlighting ways to improve our politics and maybe selling a few copies of her book (we all have to eat).

The book is Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The snuff box was a diamond-encrusted gift that Louis XVI gave to our ambassador to France. “Citizens United” is the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and other organizations to influence elections as much as possible by spending unlimited amounts of money.

From a review of Corruption in America by the journalist Thomas Frank:

Today’s [Supreme Court] understands “corruption” as a remarkably rare malady, a straight-up exchange of money for official acts. Any definition broader than that, the justices say, transgresses the all-important First Amendment. Besides, as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced in the Citizens United decision, the court now knows that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — a statement that I guess makes sense somehow in law-land but sounds to the layman’s ear like the patter of a man who has come unzipped from reality….

Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Being “unzipped from reality” aptly describes much of our politics, including a series of decisions by our Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Did it matter that the Supreme Court helped George Bush get elected in 2000, which made it possible for him to be reelected in 2004? David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, reminds us:

… when Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor announced her retirement and Chief Justice Rehnquist died in office in 2005, President Bush, not Al Gore or a successor, had the privilege of appointing two new justices and shaping the Court for years to come. Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected. The validity of Obamacare would never have been in doubt. Consumers and employees would be able to challenge abusive corporate action in class action lawsuits. And Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down regulations on corporate political campaign expenditures and called into question a range of campaign spending rules, would have come out the other way. But it was not to be.

Returning to Thomas Frank’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s book, it’s hard to believe that political lobbying used to be shameful, even criminal, not a multi-billion-dollar industry:

Once upon a time, lobbying was regarded as obviously perfidious; in California it was a felony; and contracts to lobby were regarded as reprehensible by the Supreme Court. Here is a justice of that body in the year 1854, delivering the court’s decision in a case concerning lobbyists and lobbying contracts:

“The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome —omne Romae venale [in Rome, everything is for sale].”

Well, folks, it happened all right, just as predicted. State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

Considering how money pollutes our politics, and how gerrymandering, vote suppression, low turnout (especially among the young and the poor) and the Constitution itself skew the results, the idea that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, doesn’t sound hyperbolic at all.  

Nevertheless, quixotic or not, I’m still going to vote in a couple weeks for the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate (he’s sure to win) and the House (she’s sure to lose), as well as for bail reform and more environmental funding. It’s the least I can do.

Let Me Tell You What Those Other People Want

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How to blog when it’s hard to type: copy and paste Paul Krugman!

In today’s column, he points out how people who claim to speak for “the market” are usually speaking for themselves:

We have been told repeatedly that governments must cease and desist from their efforts to mitigate economic pain, lest their excessive compassion be punished by the financial gods, but the markets themselves have never seemed to agree that these human sacrifices are actually necessary. Investors were supposed to be terrified by budget deficits, fearing that we were about to turn into Greece — Greece I tell you — but year after year, interest rates stayed low. The Fed’s efforts to boost the economy were supposed to backfire as markets reacted to the prospect of runaway inflation, but market measures of expected inflation similarly stayed low….

… markets are practically begging governments to borrow and spend, say on infrastructure; … financing for roads, bridges, and sewers would be almost free.

….the next time you hear some talking head opining on what we must do to satisfy the markets, ask yourself, “How does he know?” For the truth is that when people talk about what markets demand, what they’re really doing is trying to bully us into doing what they themselves want.

The same applies to politicians and pundits who love to tell us what “the American people” want. Unless they’re quoting public opinion polls (like the ones that always say the American people want less military spending and higher taxes on the rich), they’re speaking for themselves.

Why Japan Surrendered in 1945

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It’s commonly said (in America anyway) that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 saved the lives of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of American soldiers, since our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced Japan to surrender, and that meant we didn’t have to invade Japan.

According to Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath, by the Australian historian Paul Ham, that’s not how historians view those events. I haven’t read the book and don’t know if I ever will (it’s 500 pages plus notes), but a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books site by Rutgers University historian H. Bruce Franklin strongly suggests that the book is worth reading if you want to understand what really happened at the end of World War 2.

Franklin summarizes the consensus view among historians:

…the atomic bombs were not necessary and did not significantly shorten the war, … no invasion of Japan prior to November was even contemplated, … the surrender of Japan was already imminent in July, … the Soviet entry into the war on August 9 was a major factor in the Japanese surrender, and therefore the atomic bombs probably saved no American lives at all.

He also summarizes Japan’s military situation in mid-July 1945:

… Japan had lost all its bases in the Pacific, and fleets of B-29 Superfortresses had reduced all but four Japanese cities to desolate ruins and smoking ashes while carrier-based navy bombers were systematically destroying its military facilities. Japan had no viable defenses against these aerial assaults. Japan’s only remaining army of any significance was isolated in Manchuria and Korea, and could not be brought home to defend the homeland because US ships were blockading Japan and shelling its coastal regions with impunity.

The most surprising aspect of this story (speaking as someone educated in the United States) is the role of the Soviet Union in ending the war with Japan. The Russians had agreed months before to enter the war by August. The Red Army had more than one million men in position by July. On July 17th, President Truman wrote in his diary that the war would be over as soon as the Russians began their offensive. 

Then Truman received a full report on the successful testing of the atomic bomb:

Up until the time he received the full report on July 21 …, Truman and his advisors kept urging the USSR to enter the war as soon as possible. After that date, they kept trying to delay the Soviet entrance into the war. On July 26, the United States and United Kingdom issued the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum that demanded Japan’s “unconditional surrender” or face “prompt and utter destruction.” … As Ham and many others have argued, the demand for “unconditional surrender” effectively rebuffed the numerous Japanese attempts to negotiate a surrender, which had been going on for months.

Ham argues that the decisive event in this rapid sequence was: 

the Soviet juggernaut that destroyed Japan’s last great land army and terrified that nation’s leaders… At midnight on August eighth, the Red Army launched the largest land engagement of the entire Pacific war. Within a few days, almost 600,000 Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Japanese generals had surrendered. Eighty thousand had been killed… [The Soviet  campaign] captured from the Japanese in a week of colossal combat an area almost the size of Europe.

Before reading this review, I’d never heard of this large-scale combat between the Russians and the Japanese. As Franklin says, the story we all heard was that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan after the atom bombs went off in order to join in the victory. America had already finished the job. But according to Ham:

A greater threat than nuclear weapons — in Tokyo’s eyes — drove Japan finally to accept the surrender: the regime’s suffocating fear of Russia. The Soviet invasion of August 8 crushed the Kwantung Army’s frontline units within days, and sent a crippling loss of confidence across Tokyo. The Japanese warlords despaired. Their erstwhile “neutral” partner had turned into their worst nightmare. The invasion invoked the spectre of a communist Japan, no less.

According to Ham, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t make much of an impression on the Japanese leadership. The firebombing of other Japanese cities, especially Tokyo, had already demonstrated our ability to destroy cities and kill civilians. Some of the Japanese leadership had already been advocating for peace. Franklin and Ham describe what happened next: 

An hour before the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, the war and peace factions of cabinet met in a bomb shelter under the Imperial Palace and began a furious and endless debate about the terms of surrender they should offer because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria… Ham describes how they greeted the news of Nagasaki:

“Nothing of great moment had occurred in Hiroshima to persuade them of the futility of further defiance; the militarists scorned the weapon as a cowardly attack on defenceless civilians. Toward the end of the interminable discussion — now into its third hour — a messenger arrived with the news of the destruction of Nagasaki — by another ‘special bomb’. The [Japanese leaders] paused, registered the news, and resumed their earlier conversation. The messenger, bowing apologetically, was sent on his way. ‘No record 
 treated the effect [of the Nagasaki bomb] seriously,” noted the official history of the Imperial General Headquarters’.

The doves in the Japanese leadership had been demanding that the Emperor remain in power after a Japanese surrender. That was the single condition they had insisted on. Now the hawks agreed. Japan would surrender so long as the Emperor’s position would be maintained. The U.S., which had previously insisted on unconditional surrender, finally conceded that the Emperor would remain in power. The war was over. 

Given this evidence, it’s clear that the Soviet Union played an important role in ending the War in the Pacific. The stories about Soviet opportunism are clearly false (they had, after all, been carrying the brunt of the war again Germany earlier in 1945). Whether Truman should have dropped the bomb is another question. The most charitable interpretation is that he truly believed using the bomb would significantly shorten the war and save lives (not just American lives but Japanese and Russian lives?). A less charitable interpretation is that his real target was the Soviet Union. Using the bomb against Japan showed the Russians that America had the most powerful weapon in the world and was willing to use it. It also resulted in the Soviet Union controlling less of East Asia when the war ended and America controlling more. He probably had all these considerations in mind before he ordered the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

New Video From That Day in Ferguson, Missouri

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New witnesses to the apparent execution of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have come forward. CNN has cellphone video of them watching what happened and, oh yeah, they’re two white contractors from out of town. Isn’t it funny how that “white” part makes a big difference (to us white people)? The video and the description of events offered by these witnesses is strong evidence that Michael Brown was indeed executed that afternoon.