This is not easy to watch. Right after the Tibetan Governmet in Exile released this video, the government of China effectively blocked YouTube in China.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has released a report documenting numerous human rights violations by U.S. immigration officials. Read about it at the other blog.
Here’s an update on Dr. George Tiller, who is on trial for violating Kansas abortion law. A reporter for television station KAKE, Cayle Thompson, is live blogging the trial. From the blog —
Monnat asks why so few doctors perform abortions now. Tiller says it’s because of the threat to the doctor’s families, themselves and their lives. He recounts how his clinic was bombed in 1986. “It takes people who are dedicated to the care of women and their health care rights after such a bombing,” Tiller says. The bombing caused around $100,000 in damages.
In 1991, Tiller’s clinic was the sight of the Summer of Mercy, where hundreds of protestors gathered to picket. Tiller says on days when women would come to his clinic, protestors would block the entrance and have to be forcibly removed by police for patients to get through. Tiller says police made approximately 2,000 arrests during the protests. …
… In 1993, Doctor Tiller was shot by an abortion protestor. It happened as he left work. Tiller said he saw somebody approach his car. He thought it was an abortion opponent preparing to hand him literature. But when he saw her clearly, he realized she was carrying a gun.
“She shot at me five times,” Tiller told jurors. “She hit me in each arm. It was attempted murder.” …
… In 1994, one year after Tiller was shot, FBI investigators learned he was the #1 target for assasination by radical abortion opponents. He was given protection by federal US Marshalls from 1994 to 1997.
This is terrorism. Why isn’t the government treating it as such? Well, I know why. Let’s go on.
Tiller tells the jury how some abortion protestors have broken into his church during services and disrupted worship. He tells them his staff has been picketed outside their own homes, with photos of aborted fetuses plastered around the neighborhood. …
… He also tells jurors how protestors would picket the hotel where his out-of-town patients stayed. Some would even follow patients to their rooms, and slip anti-abortion literature under the doors.
State and federal governments have coddled these people. Anti-abortion extremists are dangerous, and it is way past time they were treated as such.
Update: I see that in the afternoon testimony, the prosecutors asked Dr. Tiller how much money he makes. This is one of the obsessions of the Fetus People; that the abortion “industry” exists because it’s a big money maker.
Dr. Tiller, whose practice includes more difficult late-term abortions, says the average abortion in his clinic costs $6,000. But if he were just in it for the money, he’d do a lot better delivering live babies.
For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of a vaginal delivery without complications ranges from about $9,000 to $17,000 or more, depending on geographic location and whether there is a discount for uninsured patients. The typical cost for a C-section without complications or a vaginal delivery with complications ranges from about $14,000 to $25,000 or more.
I missed last night’s televised press conference. What did you think? I’m reading a critique at the Anonymous Liberal, and it sounds as if the questions sucked.
The “anger moment” seems to be getting a lot of notice. Ewen MacAskill writes for The Guardian:
The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, who asked the question, also suggested that the New York attorney-general, Andrew Cuomo, was doing a better job of dealing with AIG than the White House.
Obama gave a general answer and Henry again asked why he had taken a few days to tell the public. The normally cool and controlled president replied sharply: “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
The exchange was unusual, both because it is rare to hear US journalists ask Obama hard questions and rare to see Obama in a testy mood. Much of the rest of the press conference was so carefully choreographed, with a long opening statement, it seemed at times like an extended political broadcast
See also Mike Madden at Salon.
For years anti-reproductive rights goons have been trying to take out Dr. George Tiller. His Kansas clinic was bombed in 1985. A “pro-life” fanatic shot him in both arms in 1993. Patients trying to enter his clinic are viciously harassed.
Now the state of Kansas is trying to convict Dr. Tiller for violating Kansas abortion law, and opening arguments in the trial began yesterday. Robin Abcarian writes in the Los Angeles Times, “by day’s end, it was clear that the case could hinge on such nonmedical issues as who paid for copy paper and toner, the meaning of a hug and whether selling a beat-up sedan to a colleague can constitute proof of guilt.”
Copy paper? Hugs? Indeed, yes.
Kevin G. Hall writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
If the plan doesn’t work, the next step might be nationalizing some banks, as some high-profile analysts have advocated, including former Treasury Secretary James Baker, pointing to Sweden’s successful exercise in the early 1990s.
Geithner rejects the parallel.
“We’re the United States of America. We are not Sweden,” he said, arguing that the U.S. financial system is much larger and more complex than any other and includes the world’s largest capital markets and many nonbank financial institutions.
Which may be the problem. Maybe the whole financial sector needs to be taken down a few pegs.
I’ve mentioned Thomas Geoghegan’s “Infinite Debt” article in the April issue of Harper’s a couple of times. Very simply, the financial sector and the financial services industry is eating America. Directly or indirectly, we’re all indebted to and working for the financial industry. We’re turning into sharecroppers, basically, except the “crop” is money.
In a balanced economy, the financial sector should support manufacturing and labor. Instead, the financial sector drains manufacturing and labor.
What we’re looking at here is capitalism hitting the rocks. Fifty years ago the world seemed locked in a giant struggle between capitalism and communism. Communism collapsed from the inside; it is not a sustainable economic system.
Now its capitalism’s turn. I am all for private ownership and entrepreneurship and all that, but if capitalism isn’t kept in check it will eat itself. That’s what we’re seeing; capitalism eating itself. The financial sector metastasized and is destroying the economic body.
On the up side, Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho report for the Washington Post that
The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.
This suggests the Obama Administration hasn’t ruled out taking stronger measures. It would be good for the administration to declare right now that if the Geithner plan doesn’t do the job, receivership is the next step. That would be reassuring to me, at least.
The Timothy Geithner financial rescue plan has been released. I’ve been cruising around look for people who understand the financial sector for comments.
Consensus: Yeah, right.
The most optimistic analysis is Brad DeLong’s, here updated in a post titled “I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong.” Professor DeLong admits he is uncomfortable disagreeing with Professor Krugman, however. Professor Krugman’s column today was written before all the details were released, but he is opposed to the parts of the plan released earlier. Economist’s View has a roundup of reactions from economists, most of them pessimistic.
No one on the blogophere, Left or Right, is happy about it. Of course, the Right wouldn’t like anything Obama does, meritorious or not, so there’s no point reading them. But the Left generally is in agreement with James K. Galbraith at Washington Monthly, who writes, “Geithner’s banking plan would prolong the state of denial.”
The big concern, expressed by many, is that when Geithner’s plan flops (as most predict it will) President Obama will have lost the political capital necessary to do what really needs to be done, which is nationalize the bleepers.
Brad DeLong has a Geithner Plan FAQ that makes it sound as if it could work, although Professor DeLong’s still appears to be a minority view. Paul Krugman responds to DeLong and says he’s not buying it.
Frank Rich says, in effect, that Obama’s attempts at communication are fine, but the financial team has way too many ties to the old Wall Street boy’s network and is not going nearly far enough to overhaul the system. I cannot argue with that.
Tom Friedman wrote a reasonably perceptive “pox on both their houses” column that some rightie bloggers are selectively quoting as a slam on Barack Obama and the Democrats. But no, Friedman is pissed at everyone. So for the record, here is a paragraph the right-wing bloggers did not quote:
I saw Eric Cantor, a Republican House leader, on CNBC the other day, and the entire interview consisted of him trying to exploit the A.I.G. situation for partisan gain without one constructive thought. I just kept staring at him and thinking: “Do you not have kids? Do you not have a pension that you’re worried about? Do you live in some gated community where all the banks will be O.K., even if our biggest banks go under? Do you think your party automatically wins if the country loses? What are you thinking?â€
Thinking? Who’s thinking? Anyway, a number of rightie bloggers gleefully link to Friedman’s column as evidence that Obama is failing, which is what they are rooting for. Their side wins if he loses, you know.
See also Comments From Left Field.
From Matt Taibbi’s latest article at Rolling Stone:
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. …
…So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.
Well, yeah.
Although I might quibble with some details, I think on the whole Taibbi gets to the core of the matter better than most. His article also made me think of the Harper’s article by Thomas Geoghegan I mentioned last week, “Infinite Debt,” which you can now read online in PDF form. [Oops, it appears the PDF is available only to subscribers. Sorry.] In a nutshell, the financial sector has eaten the other sectors, and our national wealth has been hijacked into a vast scheme of money chasing money. Less and less of our wealth is being used to create tangible things like food or consumer products; more and more is plowed into financial investment instruments that are, basically, air.
And ordinary citizens have been sucked into a treadmill of debt bondage. I keep thinking of that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song —
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.
Maybe we didn’t see all of the details, but many of us have been viewing the bigger picture for some time. We unhappy few are called “liberals,” and of course nobody listened to us.
What’s remarkable is the degree to which apparently intelligent people still don’t see the bigger picture. These include, unfortunately, the Obama Administration, which appears to be in tweak rather than overhaul mode.
Not to say he is “apparently intelligent,” because he isn’t, but much of What’s Wrong With America is exemplified by the meathead anchor, CNBC’s Mark Haines, interviewing Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) in this video:
So to Power Tool John’s question, “Are We a Banana Republic?” I’d say yes, and for some time, but not for the reasons he thinks.
And you want to know how we gave it all away? Memory Lane time —
[Video no longer available, but I believe it showed Ronald Reagan claiming government is the problem.]
The disconnect in Saint Ronald’s thinking was that government is not a hindrance to self-government. It is the very tool the founders left us that enables self-government. By persuading people that government is irrelevant, Saint Ronald enabled the colossal power grab that is strangling our country. Forget the Road to Serfdom; we’re serfs already, and have been for years.
Josh Marshall has a point —
This seems like just another example of perverse outcomes from the ‘worst of both worlds’ approach we’re taking to the whole finance industry bailout — keep the same people in charge of the institutions, keep effectively insolvent institutions afloat, but throw a lot of federal dollars in their direction and put in place fairly draconian tax provisions for money that’s spent in ways we find either wasteful or offensive.
Well, yes, probably. People are enraged, and their rage is focused on only a small number of those who are responsible for what’s gone wrong. Indeed, some of the people being penalized probably were not involved personally.
On the other hand, sometimes we human have to act our what we feel. This is why there are rituals, religious and otherwise. An individual may feel helpless, but if he can get together with a lot of other people to make a display of strength, he feels empowered. This is true even if the display of strength is just theater, just ritual. Right now, I think many Americans feel a need for a punishment ritual. The people who mishandled the financial sector may never see a day in prison, or in the stocks, or experience any sort of genuine deprivation. But a public shaming of somebody would at least make us feel better.
On the other hand, the public shaming shouldn’t be policy. Policy needs to be a genuine remedy, not a ritual. Whether they deserve to be punished or not, punishing the AIG bonus babies isn’t going to solve anything.
On the third hand — appearances matter. This is what Eugene Robinson wrote about today.
There has been a steady flow of news indicating that Wall Street doesn’t realize that the Era of Excess is over, the latest coming yesterday with a Bloomberg News report that the CEO of troubled Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, plans to spend about $10 million redecorating the firm’s executive offices. I know that the company has made economies and that Pandit is working for $1 a year. I just think that after accepting $45 billion in bailout money, I’d cancel any improvement project that couldn’t be accomplished with a trip to Home Depot.
It’s as if we’re dealing with a puppy who will not stop making puddles on the kitchen floor. Whenever I hear of another Wall Street exec who doesn’t “get it,” I want to whack him with a rolled up newspaper. (I wouldn’t do that to a puppy, mind you.)
Anyway, back to what Josh was saying — I agree with Charlie Cray that we should stop messing around with the bozos who caused the problem, and instead “put AIG into full receivership and break it up.” That’ll learn ’em. See also Simon Johnson and James Kwak, “Off With the Bankers,” in the New York Times.