The Dissenter Who Changed the War. By Thomas E. Ricks
As the No. 2 Commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them
The Washington Post, Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
Full set or articles w/key documents here
Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.
A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers -- intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi "MAMs" (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. "I thought we had beaten this thing," he would later recall.
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a "surge" of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.
The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.
In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn't see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren't doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem," Abizaid emphasized.
This account of the military's internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials conducted in 2007 and 2008. In many cases, the interviews were embargoed for use until 2009.
Odierno's role has not been previously reported, and he remains a controversial figure because of his first tour in Iraq, when the tactics he employed violated many of the counterinsurgency principles he would later embrace.
Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer, concluded that the approach that many U.S. commanders used in the early days of the Iraq war effectively made them recruiters for the insurgency, and he was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno's division. "Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some -- the 4th ID is the negative example -- are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib," Herrington wrote in a 2003 report to Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq.
Odierno was determined to operate differently on his second tour of duty, but he will not talk about how his transformation occurred. "I think everyone's changed," he said, brushing aside the question in one of a series of interviews in Iraq over the past two years. "We've all learned."
But one impetus, Odierno agreed, was the severe wounding of his son in August 2004. Lt. Anthony Odierno, then in the 1st Cavalry Division, had been leading a patrol near Baghdad's airport when a rocket-propelled grenade punched through the door of his Humvee, severing his left arm.
"It didn't affect me as a military officer, I mean that," Odierno said one evening in Baghdad much later. "It affected me as a person. I hold no grudges. My son and I talked a lot about this. He was doing what he wanted to do, and liked what he was doing."
But he said it did deepen his determination. "I was going to see this through -- I felt an obligation to see this through. That drives me, frankly. I feel an obligation to mothers and fathers. Maybe I understand it better because it happened to me."
The most important factor in his change in thinking, however, was probably his growing belief, as he prepared to redeploy to Iraq, that the United States was heading toward defeat.
'THE STRATEGY HAS GOT TO CHANGE'
The General Fears That His Commanders' Plan Will Lead to Failure.
As the newly designated second in command in Iraq, Odierno was given a clear understanding of the scenario that Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his military superiors expected to play out: The United States would begin drawing down its forces in Iraq, cutting the number of combat troops in 2007 by as much as a third.
His responsibilities were equally clear: moving U.S. forces outside all major cities and establishing a handful of bigger bases along key roads leading into Iraq, deploying U.S. forces to the country's borders to limit outside influence, speeding up the transition to Iraqi security forces, and letting Iraqis handle fighting in the cities.
But the more the general and his team considered this plan, they less they liked it. They feared that it got ahead of the Iraqis' ability to do the job and thus, in keeping with the American pattern in Iraq since 2003, was likely to amount to one more rush to failure.
Odierno was "very nervous" about the course of U.S. strategy, he recalled. He decided to formally oppose any additional troop cuts. He wasn't even thinking about an increase, because, he said, "I didn't think I could get more."
He and a small group of advisers decided on a course almost the opposite of the plan given them. Instead of moving out of the cities, they would deploy more forces into them. Instead of consolidating their base structure, they would establish scores of smaller outposts. Nor would they withdraw to the borders. And most emphatically, they would slow, not accelerate, the transition to Iraqi forces.
Odierno realized that to take all those steps, he would need more troops -- and before long, it was clear to subordinates that Odierno was at odds with Casey, his commanding officer. "Casey fought it all the way," recalled Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, then Odierno's chief of staff.
In an interview last year, Casey seemed puzzled when told that Odierno had grave doubts about the direction of the war back in late 2006. "Ray never came to me and said, 'Look, I think you've got to do something fundamentally different here,' " he said.
But to their subordinates, the disagreement was obvious. "We would backbrief one general and get one set of guidances, and then brief the other and get a different set," remembered a senior Army planner in Iraq.
In Washington, Keane had his own doubts about U.S. policy and was not shy about expressing them. More influential in retirement than most generals in active service, he allied himself with Odierno, advising him to ask for five new brigades. But when Odierno raised that number with Casey, his commander dismissed the notion. "He said, 'You can do it with two brigades,' " Odierno recalled. "I said, 'I don't know.' "
Plotting with Odierno, Keane bypassed the Pentagon and called the White House, which he had already been lobbying for a troop surge. "Just think about what's going to happen," he told national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "You are not going to be effective in bringing down the violence with only two additional brigades, therefore you will call for an additional brigade three separate times, each time because we do not have sufficient troops. The media will be all over you for failing three more times. Meanwhile, the president is going to bite this bullet; he should only bite it once. He shouldn't bite it one time and then three more times."
Throughout that fall, Keane recalled, he had "a continuous dialogue" with Odierno. "He knows he needs more troops; he knows the strategy has got to change. His problem is General Casey."
In Baghdad, Odierno tasked his planners with considering how they would use the additional troops. "We have to secure the population, first thing," he told them. "We have to get back out into Baghdad."
They thought they really needed about eight brigades, but they knew that no more than five would be possible and that it would take months to get them all to Iraq.
The Joint Chiefs backed Casey. But after the Democratic victory in that November's congressional elections, Bush fired Rumsfeld, replacing him with former CIA director Robert M. Gates, who brought a skeptical view of how the Iraq war had been managed. And on Dec. 19, the day after Gates was sworn in, Bush acknowledged that "we're not winning, we're not losing" in Iraq -- a striking turnaround from his previously positive formulations.
Shortly thereafter, Gates and Pace, the Joint Chiefs head, left for Iraq. In Baghdad they met with Abizaid of Central Command, Casey and Odierno. The first two generals were at loggerheads with Odierno, the newer, younger and junior officer pushing hard for more troops. Gates listened without indicating which way he was leaning.
Gates later had breakfast with some young soldiers. "Never mind all the generals standing around," he began, according to a tape recording of the meeting, which reporters did not attend. He found far more agreement in the ranks on the need for more manpower.
On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, disappeared into his mobile home in the plane's belly with Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades.
"The surge really began the day that Gates visited," Odierno later concluded.
'DON'T TRY TO DO TOO MUCH'
The Military Transforms Its Mind-Set Along With Its Tactics.
Once it was decided that the troop buildup would have five brigades, Odierno laid down some key principles to his planners and commanders.
First, the strategy wouldn't be just about Baghdad -- a decision influenced by heeding the experience of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's generals. American analysts, studying Hussein's deployment of Republican Guard troops in 2002 and 2003 west and south of the capital, had assumed that the move was made to reduce the ability of commanders to launch a coup. No, the Iraqi generals told them: The elite troops were kept there, rather than in Baghdad, because that was where the trouble was.
So while the first two American brigades of the surge went into the capital, the next three went mainly into areas around the city. Ultimately, the surge forces were divided about evenly between Baghdad and its outskirts.
The second principle, Odierno said: Don't make a move unless your presence is sustainable, and once you take an area, don't leave it uncovered. "Don't give up terrain," he ordered his commanders. "Don't try to do too much." This tactical patience was consistent with the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the thinking of its author, who arrived in Baghdad in February as Odierno's commanding officer.
Odierno and Petraeus made an odd pair: Odierno, at 6 feet 5 inches and 245 pounds, is eight inches taller and 90 pounds heavier than Petraeus. Odierno's most noticeable physical trait is his bulk topped by his bald, bulletlike head. Petraeus is small and slightly buck-toothed. The nimble Petraeus is as much a diplomat as a soldier, while the hulking Odierno always seemed inclined to use firepower. Odierno is emotional, the type of general who will bear-hug a colonel having a hard day. Petraeus is cool to the point of being remote.
During their first tours, in 2003-2004, the two generals commanded divisions in adjacent areas -- Odierno with the 4th Infantry Division headquartered in Tikrit, and Petraeus with the 101st Airborne north of him in Mosul. But they had run their divisions very differently, with Odierno inclined to use the closed fist and Petraeus the open hand.
The guidance Odierno gave his subordinates during his second tour underscored just how much he had changed. His "key message" at one meeting, according to an internal Army summary, was that "planners must understand the environment and develop plans from an environmental perspective [instead of] an enemy situation perspective."
This was classic counterinsurgency thinking, almost the opposite of the strategy that Odierno and most of the Army had taken in Iraq in 2003-2004, when they emphasized a kill-and-capture approach.
"General Odierno has experienced an awakening," said Herrington, the retired intelligence officer who in 2003 wrote the report highly critical of the general. "I've now completely revised my impression of him."
The change in tactics and the increase in troops were not the only reasons that the security situation in Iraq would improve in the following months. By the time the surge began, the ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias had largely been completed. In addition, Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric, declared a cease-fire later in 2007. Most important, Petraeus that year decided to put large parts of the Sunni insurgency on the U.S. payroll, essentially paying them to stop fighting.
In a recent interview, Odierno expressed surprise that a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, published just as Odierno took command in Iraq, credited White House aides and others in Washington with developing the surge. From Odierno's perspective -- and that of many other senior officers in Iraq -- the new strategy had been more or less conceived and executed by himself in Baghdad, with some crucial coaching from Keane in Washington.
"We thought we needed it, and we asked for it and we got it," he said, referring to the strategy. "You know, General Petraeus and I think . . . I did it here, [and] he picked it up. That's how we see it. And so it's very interesting when people back there see it very differently."
Of course, Odierno said, ultimately Bush had to make the policy decision, and some White House aides encouraged that step. But, he continued, "they had nothing to do with developing" the way it was done. "Where to go, what [the soldiers] would do. I mean, I know I made all those decisions."
Odierno's focus is now the future -- and trying to influence the decisions of the new administration.
While he believes the surge has achieved some important tactical success, Odierno appeared uncertain of its long-term impact, specifically whether the improved security has created the breathing space for Iraqi leaders to foster reconciliation among the nation's warring factions -- the strategy's long-term political goal.
As 2008 proceeded, not only were some top Iraqi officials not seizing the opportunity, some were regressing, Odierno worried one day last November as he sat in the Green Zone office he had inherited from Petraeus.
"What we're finding is that as Iraq has become more secure, they've . . . moved backwards, in some cases, to their hard-line positions, whether it be a Kurdish position, an Arab position, a Sunni position, a Shi'a position, a Da'wa position, an ISCI position" -- the last two being the major Shiite parties.
Obama is likely to find Odierno and other generals arguing passionately that to come close to meeting his commitment to keeping U.S. troops safe, keeping Iraq edging toward stability and maintaining the pressure on extremists, he will need a relatively large force to remain in Iraq for may years.
When asked what sort of U.S. military presence he expected in Iraq around 2014 or 2015 -- well after Obama's first term -- Odierno said, "I would like to see a . . . force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000," with many troops training Iraqi forces and others conducting combat operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq and its allies.
One of the points he would stress to the new commander in chief, Odierno said, would be "the importance of us leaving with honor and justice. "
"For the military, he added, "it's extremely important because of all the sacrifice and time and, in fact, how we've all adjusted and adapted."
Sunday, February 8, 2009
In WaPo: New Powers for Obama's National Security Council
New Powers for Obama's National Security Council, by Karen DeYoung
Agency headed by former Marine Gen. James L. Jones to expand and increase role in setting policy across spectrum of foreign and domestic issues.
Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.
The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.
Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.
"We're not always going to agree on everything," Jones said, and "so it's my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented" to the president. "But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, 'Well, what do you think, Jones?,' I'm going to tell him what I think."
The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC's reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table -- historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state -- determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.
"The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community -- which, historically has been, let's face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things -- especially in the moment we're currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership," he said.
New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.
Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones's deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic disasters. In a separate interview, Brennan described his task as a "systems engineering challenge" to avoid overlap with the new NSC while ensuring that "homeland security matters, broadly defined, are going to get the attention they need from the White House."
Organizational maps within the government will be redrawn to ensure that all departments and agencies take the same regional approach to the world, Jones said. The State Department, for example, considers Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together as South Asia, while the Pentagon draws a line at the Pakistan-India border, with the former under the Central Command and the latter part of the Pacific Command. Israel is part of the military's European Command, but the rest of the Middle East falls under Central Command; the State Department combines Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it in its Near East Bureau.
"We are going to reflect in the NSC all the regions of the world along some map line we can all agree on," Jones said.
The national security process, he said, will also be "transparent to its clients" inside the administration, with meeting agendas and outcomes made available to "the whole community" in real time. Each department will appoint someone to monitor the NSC process, enabling senior officials across the government to be ready to jump into issues without steep learning curves.
Directorates inside Jones's NSC staff will oversee implementation of decisions. "It doesn't mean that we micromanage or supervise," he said. "But you have to make sure, . . . particularly if it's a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn't just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space."
Most modern chief executives have issued an early directive outlining a structure for making national security decisions. Although the 1947 National Security Act created the NSC and listed its membership -- including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense -- each president has redefined it to fit his own needs and style. In recent administrations, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at times the Treasury secretary have regularly attended principals meetings. At the same time, the role and power of the president's national security adviser, and the size of his staff, have grown larger or smaller depending on the president's wishes.
But initial presidential intentions have often been waylaid by personalities and events. George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton's NSC style as rambling and indecisive. Over the next eight years, however -- as first-term Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice was outmaneuvered by Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and as Bush's second term became mired in an unpopular war and a failing economy -- decision-making quickly became more reactive than strategic, and deliberations were opaque to all but a small inner circle.
The Obama administration -- with powerful figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- appears crowded at the top of the national security pyramid and heavy with military officials, including Jones himself and retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence. Special envoys to trouble spots -- former diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and former senator George J. Mitchell to the Middle East -- have been given broad presidential authority.
Although Jones said he strongly supports increased resources for the State Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken proponent of a "pro-active military" in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.
But Jones said he sees an administration filled with colleagues rather than competitors. Since Jan. 20, "I've had more meetings with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense than I've had in my entire lifetime," said Jones, who served as Marine Corps commandant, NATO military chief and, under Bush, a special Middle East envoy.
During a midafternoon interview last Thursday, Jones said he had already spoken face to face with Gates and had four telephone conversations with him that day. He has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton together in his office.
"I believe in collegiality . . . in sounding out people and getting them to participate," Jones said. "I notice the president is very good at that." But he made clear he plans to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. "The most important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you're the guy around which the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I'm the chairman." One of the first of many internal Bush administration clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair NSC meetings.
In his initial conversations with Obama before taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being "in charge" and having open and final access to the president on all national security matters. "We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the national security adviser," Jones said of Obama.
The NSC will take on all national security matters that are strategic in nature and "of such importance that the president of the United States would care" about them, he said. Action groups from various departments and agencies will be formed around specific issues for as long as it takes to resolve them. "Some of these things will be very short-term. When the problem goes away, the group goes away." Others will be ongoing. "An Afghan strategic review, that's going to take a while," Jones said. "The policy that is generated from that review, and the implementation, is going to take a while."
Some principals will be regulars at the NSC "just by force of issues," he said, and "you can't just designate the whole government as being there." But everyone should be kept aware of "what's going on" and given an opportunity to say, 'Wait a minute, I've got something to say here.' "
Agency headed by former Marine Gen. James L. Jones to expand and increase role in setting policy across spectrum of foreign and domestic issues.
Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.
The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.
Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.
"We're not always going to agree on everything," Jones said, and "so it's my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented" to the president. "But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, 'Well, what do you think, Jones?,' I'm going to tell him what I think."
The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC's reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table -- historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state -- determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.
"The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community -- which, historically has been, let's face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things -- especially in the moment we're currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership," he said.
New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.
Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones's deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic disasters. In a separate interview, Brennan described his task as a "systems engineering challenge" to avoid overlap with the new NSC while ensuring that "homeland security matters, broadly defined, are going to get the attention they need from the White House."
Organizational maps within the government will be redrawn to ensure that all departments and agencies take the same regional approach to the world, Jones said. The State Department, for example, considers Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together as South Asia, while the Pentagon draws a line at the Pakistan-India border, with the former under the Central Command and the latter part of the Pacific Command. Israel is part of the military's European Command, but the rest of the Middle East falls under Central Command; the State Department combines Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it in its Near East Bureau.
"We are going to reflect in the NSC all the regions of the world along some map line we can all agree on," Jones said.
The national security process, he said, will also be "transparent to its clients" inside the administration, with meeting agendas and outcomes made available to "the whole community" in real time. Each department will appoint someone to monitor the NSC process, enabling senior officials across the government to be ready to jump into issues without steep learning curves.
Directorates inside Jones's NSC staff will oversee implementation of decisions. "It doesn't mean that we micromanage or supervise," he said. "But you have to make sure, . . . particularly if it's a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn't just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space."
Most modern chief executives have issued an early directive outlining a structure for making national security decisions. Although the 1947 National Security Act created the NSC and listed its membership -- including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense -- each president has redefined it to fit his own needs and style. In recent administrations, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at times the Treasury secretary have regularly attended principals meetings. At the same time, the role and power of the president's national security adviser, and the size of his staff, have grown larger or smaller depending on the president's wishes.
But initial presidential intentions have often been waylaid by personalities and events. George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton's NSC style as rambling and indecisive. Over the next eight years, however -- as first-term Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice was outmaneuvered by Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and as Bush's second term became mired in an unpopular war and a failing economy -- decision-making quickly became more reactive than strategic, and deliberations were opaque to all but a small inner circle.
The Obama administration -- with powerful figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- appears crowded at the top of the national security pyramid and heavy with military officials, including Jones himself and retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence. Special envoys to trouble spots -- former diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and former senator George J. Mitchell to the Middle East -- have been given broad presidential authority.
Although Jones said he strongly supports increased resources for the State Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken proponent of a "pro-active military" in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.
But Jones said he sees an administration filled with colleagues rather than competitors. Since Jan. 20, "I've had more meetings with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense than I've had in my entire lifetime," said Jones, who served as Marine Corps commandant, NATO military chief and, under Bush, a special Middle East envoy.
During a midafternoon interview last Thursday, Jones said he had already spoken face to face with Gates and had four telephone conversations with him that day. He has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton together in his office.
"I believe in collegiality . . . in sounding out people and getting them to participate," Jones said. "I notice the president is very good at that." But he made clear he plans to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. "The most important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you're the guy around which the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I'm the chairman." One of the first of many internal Bush administration clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair NSC meetings.
In his initial conversations with Obama before taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being "in charge" and having open and final access to the president on all national security matters. "We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the national security adviser," Jones said of Obama.
The NSC will take on all national security matters that are strategic in nature and "of such importance that the president of the United States would care" about them, he said. Action groups from various departments and agencies will be formed around specific issues for as long as it takes to resolve them. "Some of these things will be very short-term. When the problem goes away, the group goes away." Others will be ongoing. "An Afghan strategic review, that's going to take a while," Jones said. "The policy that is generated from that review, and the implementation, is going to take a while."
Some principals will be regulars at the NSC "just by force of issues," he said, and "you can't just designate the whole government as being there." But everyone should be kept aware of "what's going on" and given an opportunity to say, 'Wait a minute, I've got something to say here.' "
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Back on World Stage, a Larger-Than-Life Holbrooke
Back on World Stage, a Larger-Than-Life Holbrooke. By Jodi Kantor
TNYT, February 7, 2009
Stashed in a drawer in his Manhattan apartment between snapshots of family vacations, a photograph shows Richard C. Holbrooke on a private visit to Afghanistan in 2006. He is mugging atop an abandoned Russian tank, flashing a sardonic V-for-victory sign and his best Nixon-style grin. The pose is a little like Mr. Holbrooke himself: looming, theatrical, passionate, indignant.
Three years later, he has inherited responsibility for the terrain he surveyed from that tank. As President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Holbrooke will help reformulate and carry out American policy in what many call the most problematic region on earth.
Between them, the two countries contain unstable governments, insurgencies, corruption and a narcotics trade, nuclear material, refugees, resentment of American power, a resurgent Taliban, and in the shadows of the tribal region that joins the two countries, Al Qaeda and presumably Osama bin Laden.
“You have a problem that is larger than life,” said Christopher R. Hill, a longtime colleague expected to be named as the new ambassador to Iraq. “To deal with it you need someone who’s larger than life.”
Few other diplomats can boast of the accomplishments of Mr. Holbrooke, 67, who negotiated the Dayton peace accords to end the war in Bosnia. But as he lands in Pakistan on Monday, back on duty after eight years of a Republican administration, he is still an outsider in the Obama circle, having only recently developed a relationship with the new president. His longtime foreign policy pupil, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has the secretary of state job he has always wanted. And he has taken on a task so difficult that merely averting disaster may be the only triumph.
“We are still in the process of digging our way into the debris,” Mr. Holbrooke said in an interview. “We’ve inherited an extraordinarily dysfunctional situation in which the very objectives have to be reviewed.” Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton chose Mr. Holbrooke because of his ability to twist arms as well as hold hands, work closely with the military and improvise inventive solutions to what others write off as insoluble problems. But no one yet knows how his often pyrotechnical style — he whispers, but also pesters, bluffs, threatens, stages fits and publicizes — will work in an administration that prizes low-key competence or in a region that is dangerously unstable.
“Richard C. Holbrooke is the diplomatic equivalent of a hydrogen bomb,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state and a friend.
Return to Washington
Already, Mr. Holbrooke’s return to Washington has caused tremors. His arrival at the State Department has rattled colleagues who remember him as someone who cultivates the powerful and tramples those with less to offer. Others worry about his assiduous courtship of the media. Judging from interviews with several officials, there seems to be confusion about whether the American Embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan will be controlled by Mr. Holbrooke or the regular State Department overseers.
And even friends acknowledge that Mr. Holbrooke is intently focused on his own legend. (Many people have personal trainers; Mr. Holbrooke has a personal archivist.)
For now, Mr. Holbrooke is both raising expectations and lowering them. He is talking about Afpak — Washington shorthand for his assignment — as his last and toughest mission. But along with the rest of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy staff, he is also trying to redefine success in the region, shifting away from former President Bush’s grand, transformative goals and toward something more achievable.
On Monday, Mr. Holbrooke begins a 10-day tour of the region, where he will try to vacuum up as much information as possible, he said, visiting high-level officials and local ones, women who serve in the Afghan National Assembly, military bases, nongovernmental organizations, antinarcotics programs, refugee camps and the perilous tribal region.
There is a reason for this wide-ranging tour: because official Afghan and Pakistani leaders are seen as weak, Mr. Holbrooke may have to seek alternative partners, a task to which he is naturally suited, according to Wesley K. Clark, the retired Army general.
“Richard Holbrooke sees power the way an artist sees color,” General Clark said.
Studying Afghanistan
Until a few years ago, Mr. Holbrooke had been to Afghanistan exactly once: in 1971, when he wandered around with a backpack, he said in the interview last week as he frowned at television reports of a kidnapping in Pakistan. The setting of the interview, Perseus LLC, a Manhattan private equity firm where he worked as vice chairman until recently, was an elegant one, at least until he began clipping his fingernails with office shears.
During the Bush years, Perseus was Mr. Holbrooke’s base, providing him with what friends say was a relatively undemanding job and lavish compensation as he bounced from topic to topic, almost as if seeking a problem tough enough to rivet all of his attention. He founded the American Academy in Berlin, which promotes cultural relations, and used a formerly quiet nonprofit called the Global Business Coalition to match corporate leaders with public health issues. He became chairman of the Asia Society, an institution mostly known for art exhibits, and pushed it toward more policy discussions.
At night, he retreated to his softly lighted, wood-paneled apartment in the Beresford, the grand Central Park West building, or to the homes in Colorado or the Hamptons that he shares with his wife, Kati Marton, a journalist and human rights advocate.
But with a Republican president, Mr. Holbrooke’s nose was pressed to the glass of the statecraft window. On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the greatest foreign policy challenge in generations came crashing into his own city, Mr. Holbrooke, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, sat in traffic like any other New Yorker.
Few New Yorkers, though, decide to inspect Afghanistan for themselves. By 2006, alarmed at the deteriorating conditions there and lured by a relative working for the United Nations, Mr. Holbrooke traveled privately around the country, returning for another visit in 2008. He went to a police training center in Herat, near the Iranian border, where he watched retired policemen from Alabama try to train Afghans. In Khost, Mr. Holbrooke slept on a cot at a reconstruction project office and met with madrasa students and former Taliban fighters, pouring the tea himself to convey respect, according to Kael Weston, a State Department political officer who served as his guide.
At another stop, Mr. Holbrooke met with newly elected female leaders who barely seemed to know the basics of legislation. Everywhere, Mr. Holbrooke passed enormous new villas built by narcotics smugglers.
At a maximum-security prison north of Kabul, the capital, Mr. Holbrooke fell into a long conversation with a senior Taliban operative, a mullah who patiently answered questions and then asked one of his own:
“When will you and the Americans be leaving?”
Mr. Holbrooke told him he did not know. “The more you think about it, the more it highlights the dilemma,” he said in the interview: the United States cannot say it is leaving, nor can it say it is staying forever.
At home, Mr. Holbrooke used the Asia Society to assemble his own personal think tank on Afghanistan. The group, which included Gen. James L. Jones until he became national security adviser, will soon release a study recommending that the United States declare an end to President Bush’s “war on terror” and negotiate with Taliban members willing to separate from Al Qaeda. Mr. Holbrooke has now left the group, but thanks to him, some of the regional experts who wrote the study are now briefing Mrs. Clinton.
Cultivating the Powerful
Every December, Mrs. Clinton can be found in Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton’s apartment, laughing through an annual dinner they throw in her honor. The guests and the entertainment have varied — Glenn Close has sung carols, Robert De Niro and Matt Damon have sat alongside business figures and writers, and one of the tamer toasters called Mrs. Clinton the nation’s “first shiksa,” or gentile. But Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton always give Mrs. Clinton fulsome toasts of their own.
From the beginning of her Senate career, Mr. Holbrooke served as a foreign policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton, contributing ideas for major speeches and weighing in on crises. Sometimes, Mrs. Clinton or her staff reached out to him, aides said. But Mr. Holbrooke was not exactly shy about calling or sending e-mail messages on his own. The moment the Democratic primaries ended, Obama aides say, Mr. Holbrooke showered them with ideas as well.
“I did not cross the DMZ until a cease-fire was declared,” he now says jokingly.
By the time Mr. Obama sat down for a sustained conversation with Mr. Holbrooke, he was president-elect, and Mrs. Clinton was already the leading candidate for secretary of state. Once she took the job, Mr. Holbrooke was considered for the deputy post, but the idea was quickly rejected: he was a negotiator, not an administrator, and the secretary and the president wanted to put a powerful person in charge of dealings with Afghanistan and Pakistan, State Department officials said.
“Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges.”
Thanks to Mr. Holbrooke’s negotiating skills, he won himself an unusual title: representative rather than envoy, meaning that his responsibilities extend beyond the State Department and that he will report to the president, but through Mrs. Clinton. It is a bit of Washingtonese whose precise meaning will become clear only with time.
His first task is to help lead a total review of American policy in the region, an assignment on which Mr. Obama has imposed a 60-day deadline. Another is to learn as much about Pakistan as Mr. Holbrooke has about Afghanistan; he is hiring staff members to fill some of the gaps in his knowledge, according to colleagues.
Asked about Mr. Holbrooke’s sometimes overbearing qualities, Mrs. Clinton replied with mock innocence. “Gee, I’d never heard that he could be any of those things before,” she said. Then she turned serious. “Occasionally he has to be, you know, brought down to earth and reined in.”
Ms. Marton, in defending her hard-driving husband, said, “Richard is all about outcome.” She described him and the new president as “kindred spirits” in their views on diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Both Ms. Marton and Mr. Holbrooke sounded relieved, even a little surprised, that he found a place in the Obama administration. Now, she said, “he won’t be able to look back and say he didn’t get a shot.”
TNYT, February 7, 2009
Stashed in a drawer in his Manhattan apartment between snapshots of family vacations, a photograph shows Richard C. Holbrooke on a private visit to Afghanistan in 2006. He is mugging atop an abandoned Russian tank, flashing a sardonic V-for-victory sign and his best Nixon-style grin. The pose is a little like Mr. Holbrooke himself: looming, theatrical, passionate, indignant.
Three years later, he has inherited responsibility for the terrain he surveyed from that tank. As President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Holbrooke will help reformulate and carry out American policy in what many call the most problematic region on earth.
Between them, the two countries contain unstable governments, insurgencies, corruption and a narcotics trade, nuclear material, refugees, resentment of American power, a resurgent Taliban, and in the shadows of the tribal region that joins the two countries, Al Qaeda and presumably Osama bin Laden.
“You have a problem that is larger than life,” said Christopher R. Hill, a longtime colleague expected to be named as the new ambassador to Iraq. “To deal with it you need someone who’s larger than life.”
Few other diplomats can boast of the accomplishments of Mr. Holbrooke, 67, who negotiated the Dayton peace accords to end the war in Bosnia. But as he lands in Pakistan on Monday, back on duty after eight years of a Republican administration, he is still an outsider in the Obama circle, having only recently developed a relationship with the new president. His longtime foreign policy pupil, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has the secretary of state job he has always wanted. And he has taken on a task so difficult that merely averting disaster may be the only triumph.
“We are still in the process of digging our way into the debris,” Mr. Holbrooke said in an interview. “We’ve inherited an extraordinarily dysfunctional situation in which the very objectives have to be reviewed.” Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton chose Mr. Holbrooke because of his ability to twist arms as well as hold hands, work closely with the military and improvise inventive solutions to what others write off as insoluble problems. But no one yet knows how his often pyrotechnical style — he whispers, but also pesters, bluffs, threatens, stages fits and publicizes — will work in an administration that prizes low-key competence or in a region that is dangerously unstable.
“Richard C. Holbrooke is the diplomatic equivalent of a hydrogen bomb,” said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state and a friend.
Return to Washington
Already, Mr. Holbrooke’s return to Washington has caused tremors. His arrival at the State Department has rattled colleagues who remember him as someone who cultivates the powerful and tramples those with less to offer. Others worry about his assiduous courtship of the media. Judging from interviews with several officials, there seems to be confusion about whether the American Embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan will be controlled by Mr. Holbrooke or the regular State Department overseers.
And even friends acknowledge that Mr. Holbrooke is intently focused on his own legend. (Many people have personal trainers; Mr. Holbrooke has a personal archivist.)
For now, Mr. Holbrooke is both raising expectations and lowering them. He is talking about Afpak — Washington shorthand for his assignment — as his last and toughest mission. But along with the rest of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy staff, he is also trying to redefine success in the region, shifting away from former President Bush’s grand, transformative goals and toward something more achievable.
On Monday, Mr. Holbrooke begins a 10-day tour of the region, where he will try to vacuum up as much information as possible, he said, visiting high-level officials and local ones, women who serve in the Afghan National Assembly, military bases, nongovernmental organizations, antinarcotics programs, refugee camps and the perilous tribal region.
There is a reason for this wide-ranging tour: because official Afghan and Pakistani leaders are seen as weak, Mr. Holbrooke may have to seek alternative partners, a task to which he is naturally suited, according to Wesley K. Clark, the retired Army general.
“Richard Holbrooke sees power the way an artist sees color,” General Clark said.
Studying Afghanistan
Until a few years ago, Mr. Holbrooke had been to Afghanistan exactly once: in 1971, when he wandered around with a backpack, he said in the interview last week as he frowned at television reports of a kidnapping in Pakistan. The setting of the interview, Perseus LLC, a Manhattan private equity firm where he worked as vice chairman until recently, was an elegant one, at least until he began clipping his fingernails with office shears.
During the Bush years, Perseus was Mr. Holbrooke’s base, providing him with what friends say was a relatively undemanding job and lavish compensation as he bounced from topic to topic, almost as if seeking a problem tough enough to rivet all of his attention. He founded the American Academy in Berlin, which promotes cultural relations, and used a formerly quiet nonprofit called the Global Business Coalition to match corporate leaders with public health issues. He became chairman of the Asia Society, an institution mostly known for art exhibits, and pushed it toward more policy discussions.
At night, he retreated to his softly lighted, wood-paneled apartment in the Beresford, the grand Central Park West building, or to the homes in Colorado or the Hamptons that he shares with his wife, Kati Marton, a journalist and human rights advocate.
But with a Republican president, Mr. Holbrooke’s nose was pressed to the glass of the statecraft window. On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the greatest foreign policy challenge in generations came crashing into his own city, Mr. Holbrooke, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, sat in traffic like any other New Yorker.
Few New Yorkers, though, decide to inspect Afghanistan for themselves. By 2006, alarmed at the deteriorating conditions there and lured by a relative working for the United Nations, Mr. Holbrooke traveled privately around the country, returning for another visit in 2008. He went to a police training center in Herat, near the Iranian border, where he watched retired policemen from Alabama try to train Afghans. In Khost, Mr. Holbrooke slept on a cot at a reconstruction project office and met with madrasa students and former Taliban fighters, pouring the tea himself to convey respect, according to Kael Weston, a State Department political officer who served as his guide.
At another stop, Mr. Holbrooke met with newly elected female leaders who barely seemed to know the basics of legislation. Everywhere, Mr. Holbrooke passed enormous new villas built by narcotics smugglers.
At a maximum-security prison north of Kabul, the capital, Mr. Holbrooke fell into a long conversation with a senior Taliban operative, a mullah who patiently answered questions and then asked one of his own:
“When will you and the Americans be leaving?”
Mr. Holbrooke told him he did not know. “The more you think about it, the more it highlights the dilemma,” he said in the interview: the United States cannot say it is leaving, nor can it say it is staying forever.
At home, Mr. Holbrooke used the Asia Society to assemble his own personal think tank on Afghanistan. The group, which included Gen. James L. Jones until he became national security adviser, will soon release a study recommending that the United States declare an end to President Bush’s “war on terror” and negotiate with Taliban members willing to separate from Al Qaeda. Mr. Holbrooke has now left the group, but thanks to him, some of the regional experts who wrote the study are now briefing Mrs. Clinton.
Cultivating the Powerful
Every December, Mrs. Clinton can be found in Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton’s apartment, laughing through an annual dinner they throw in her honor. The guests and the entertainment have varied — Glenn Close has sung carols, Robert De Niro and Matt Damon have sat alongside business figures and writers, and one of the tamer toasters called Mrs. Clinton the nation’s “first shiksa,” or gentile. But Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton always give Mrs. Clinton fulsome toasts of their own.
From the beginning of her Senate career, Mr. Holbrooke served as a foreign policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton, contributing ideas for major speeches and weighing in on crises. Sometimes, Mrs. Clinton or her staff reached out to him, aides said. But Mr. Holbrooke was not exactly shy about calling or sending e-mail messages on his own. The moment the Democratic primaries ended, Obama aides say, Mr. Holbrooke showered them with ideas as well.
“I did not cross the DMZ until a cease-fire was declared,” he now says jokingly.
By the time Mr. Obama sat down for a sustained conversation with Mr. Holbrooke, he was president-elect, and Mrs. Clinton was already the leading candidate for secretary of state. Once she took the job, Mr. Holbrooke was considered for the deputy post, but the idea was quickly rejected: he was a negotiator, not an administrator, and the secretary and the president wanted to put a powerful person in charge of dealings with Afghanistan and Pakistan, State Department officials said.
“Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges.”
Thanks to Mr. Holbrooke’s negotiating skills, he won himself an unusual title: representative rather than envoy, meaning that his responsibilities extend beyond the State Department and that he will report to the president, but through Mrs. Clinton. It is a bit of Washingtonese whose precise meaning will become clear only with time.
His first task is to help lead a total review of American policy in the region, an assignment on which Mr. Obama has imposed a 60-day deadline. Another is to learn as much about Pakistan as Mr. Holbrooke has about Afghanistan; he is hiring staff members to fill some of the gaps in his knowledge, according to colleagues.
Asked about Mr. Holbrooke’s sometimes overbearing qualities, Mrs. Clinton replied with mock innocence. “Gee, I’d never heard that he could be any of those things before,” she said. Then she turned serious. “Occasionally he has to be, you know, brought down to earth and reined in.”
Ms. Marton, in defending her hard-driving husband, said, “Richard is all about outcome.” She described him and the new president as “kindred spirits” in their views on diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Both Ms. Marton and Mr. Holbrooke sounded relieved, even a little surprised, that he found a place in the Obama administration. Now, she said, “he won’t be able to look back and say he didn’t get a shot.”
Conservative Views: Obama’s SG Pick Elena Kagan—Establishment Clause
Obama’s SG Pick Elena Kagan—Establishment Clause. By Ed Whelan
Bench Memos/NRO, Saturday, February 07, 2009
Last month, I discussed (here and here) SG nominee Elena Kagan’s vigorous opposition to the Solomon Amendment and the extremist rhetoric (“a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order”) she deployed against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law.
I’d now like to call attention to a memo (dated October 22, 1987) that Kagan wrote as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall in the case of Bowen v. Kendrick. As Kagan’s memo explains, at issue in that case was the Adolescent Family Life Act, which authorized federal funds to support demonstration projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents. AFLA specifically contemplated that “religious organizations” could receive funds under the Act. The district court ruled that the inclusion of religious organizations violated the Establishment Clause.
In her memo to Justice Marshall, Kagan agrees with the district court’s Establishment Clause ruling and adds this remarkable explanation (underlining in original; italics added):
The italicized sentences reflect a bizarre understanding of religious organizations. How is it that it “would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in [projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents] without injecting some kind of religious teaching”? Kagan offers no explanation. Either she had a remarkably narrow understanding of how many religious organizations operate, or she had a remarkably expansive view of what counts as “religious teaching”.
It’s also strange that Kagan, in the context of Establishment Clause concerns, would label projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents “so close to the central concerns of religion”. How do such projects in the abstract (apart from any particular concerns that could arise in their application) remotely raise genuine Establishment Clause concerns?
In (very limited) defense of Kagan, the aggressive and reflexive secularism that her comments reflect was part of a liberal orthodoxy on the Establishment Clause that had much greater currency in the mid-1980s than it does now.
President Obama purports to have grand plans for his faith-based office. If Kagan’s current Establishment Clause views are anything like they were two decades ago, they ought to set off alarm bells for those who recognize that the Establishment Clause should not be misused to discriminate against religious organizations.
Bench Memos/NRO, Saturday, February 07, 2009
Last month, I discussed (here and here) SG nominee Elena Kagan’s vigorous opposition to the Solomon Amendment and the extremist rhetoric (“a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order”) she deployed against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law.
I’d now like to call attention to a memo (dated October 22, 1987) that Kagan wrote as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall in the case of Bowen v. Kendrick. As Kagan’s memo explains, at issue in that case was the Adolescent Family Life Act, which authorized federal funds to support demonstration projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents. AFLA specifically contemplated that “religious organizations” could receive funds under the Act. The district court ruled that the inclusion of religious organizations violated the Establishment Clause.
In her memo to Justice Marshall, Kagan agrees with the district court’s Establishment Clause ruling and adds this remarkable explanation (underlining in original; italics added):
The funding here is to be used to support projects designed to discourage
adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents. It
would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in such
projects without injecting some kind of religious teaching.… [W]hen the
government funding is to be used for projects so close to the central concerns
of religion, all religious organizations should be off limits.
The italicized sentences reflect a bizarre understanding of religious organizations. How is it that it “would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in [projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents] without injecting some kind of religious teaching”? Kagan offers no explanation. Either she had a remarkably narrow understanding of how many religious organizations operate, or she had a remarkably expansive view of what counts as “religious teaching”.
It’s also strange that Kagan, in the context of Establishment Clause concerns, would label projects designed to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents “so close to the central concerns of religion”. How do such projects in the abstract (apart from any particular concerns that could arise in their application) remotely raise genuine Establishment Clause concerns?
In (very limited) defense of Kagan, the aggressive and reflexive secularism that her comments reflect was part of a liberal orthodoxy on the Establishment Clause that had much greater currency in the mid-1980s than it does now.
President Obama purports to have grand plans for his faith-based office. If Kagan’s current Establishment Clause views are anything like they were two decades ago, they ought to set off alarm bells for those who recognize that the Establishment Clause should not be misused to discriminate against religious organizations.
Barney Frank: TARP's compensation curbs could be extended to all businesses
Barney Frank: TARP's comp curbs could be extended to all businesses. By Neil Roland
Would be part of broader bill limiting hedge funds, credit-raters, and mortgage securitizers; 'deeply rooted anger'
Financial Week, February 3, 2009 3:01 PM ET
Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.
“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.
He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.
The provision will be part of a broader package that would likely give the Federal Reserve the authority to monitor systemic risk in the economy and to shut down financial institutions that face too much exposure, Mr. Frank said.
Also included in the legislation: registration requirements for hedge funds and proposals aimed at curbing conflicts of interest at credit-rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s.
The bill, which the committee is working on in consultation with the Obama administration, also will require financial institutions that bundle mortgages into securities to share in potential losses. This would give banks and mortgage-specialists an incentive not to make bad loans, he said. Institutions that securitize loans improperly will incur tougher penalties.
“There have been too few constraints on major financial institutions incurring far more liability than they could handle,” Mr. Frank said.
The committee hopes to have a general outline of the legislation by early April, he said. It will be the panel’s first priority in its effort to restructure financial regulation in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Mr. Frank has summoned the CEOs of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the seven other U.S. financial firms that got $125 billion from TARP to testify at a Feb. 11 committee hearing.
Mr. Frank seems to be in synch with the Obama administration in his plans for executive compensation.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said last month that he might try to extend to all U.S. companies a restriction that prohibits bailout banks from taking a tax deduction of more than $500,000 in pay for each executive.
The Troubled Assets Relief Program legislation enacted in October seeks to give companies receiving aid under the $700 billion bailout a number of incentives to curb what it calls excessive executive pay.
Mr. Geithner said he would consider “extending at least some of the TARP provisions and features of the $500,000 cap to U.S. companies generally.”
Under the legislation, banks receiving bailout money must limit golden parachute payments to senior executives to no more than three times the executives’ base pay. The companies also must subject any bonuses or incentives to clawbacks if the payouts are based on bank’s misleading financial statements.
In addition, bailout recipients can’t offer top managers incentives that “encourage unnecessary excessive risks that threaten the value of the financial institution.”
These limits apply to the chief executive officer, chief financial officer and the next three most highly compensated executives in a bank receiving rescue funds.
Mr. Frank said provisions on golden parachute payments and bonus clawbacks would probably be in the legislation, though he declined to provide more detail because “we’re early in the process.”
A congressional oversight panel headed by Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren also recommended last week that Treasury consider revoking executive bonuses at failed institutions getting federal aid.
Currently, these institutions must subject bonuses to clawbacks only if the payouts are based on banks’ misleading financial statements.
The top Republican on the committee, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, said last month he has reservations about giving the Fed new powers, such as the authority to monitor systemic risk.
Mr. Frank said today that after lawmakers address issues on systemic risk, they will consider how to bolster investor protection via changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The committee also will review proposals to assist struggling homeowners and expand the housing supply, and to strengthen international financial institutions such as the World Bank, he said.
Would be part of broader bill limiting hedge funds, credit-raters, and mortgage securitizers; 'deeply rooted anger'
Financial Week, February 3, 2009 3:01 PM ET
Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.
“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.
He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.
The provision will be part of a broader package that would likely give the Federal Reserve the authority to monitor systemic risk in the economy and to shut down financial institutions that face too much exposure, Mr. Frank said.
Also included in the legislation: registration requirements for hedge funds and proposals aimed at curbing conflicts of interest at credit-rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s.
The bill, which the committee is working on in consultation with the Obama administration, also will require financial institutions that bundle mortgages into securities to share in potential losses. This would give banks and mortgage-specialists an incentive not to make bad loans, he said. Institutions that securitize loans improperly will incur tougher penalties.
“There have been too few constraints on major financial institutions incurring far more liability than they could handle,” Mr. Frank said.
The committee hopes to have a general outline of the legislation by early April, he said. It will be the panel’s first priority in its effort to restructure financial regulation in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Mr. Frank has summoned the CEOs of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the seven other U.S. financial firms that got $125 billion from TARP to testify at a Feb. 11 committee hearing.
Mr. Frank seems to be in synch with the Obama administration in his plans for executive compensation.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said last month that he might try to extend to all U.S. companies a restriction that prohibits bailout banks from taking a tax deduction of more than $500,000 in pay for each executive.
The Troubled Assets Relief Program legislation enacted in October seeks to give companies receiving aid under the $700 billion bailout a number of incentives to curb what it calls excessive executive pay.
Mr. Geithner said he would consider “extending at least some of the TARP provisions and features of the $500,000 cap to U.S. companies generally.”
Under the legislation, banks receiving bailout money must limit golden parachute payments to senior executives to no more than three times the executives’ base pay. The companies also must subject any bonuses or incentives to clawbacks if the payouts are based on bank’s misleading financial statements.
In addition, bailout recipients can’t offer top managers incentives that “encourage unnecessary excessive risks that threaten the value of the financial institution.”
These limits apply to the chief executive officer, chief financial officer and the next three most highly compensated executives in a bank receiving rescue funds.
Mr. Frank said provisions on golden parachute payments and bonus clawbacks would probably be in the legislation, though he declined to provide more detail because “we’re early in the process.”
A congressional oversight panel headed by Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren also recommended last week that Treasury consider revoking executive bonuses at failed institutions getting federal aid.
Currently, these institutions must subject bonuses to clawbacks only if the payouts are based on banks’ misleading financial statements.
The top Republican on the committee, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, said last month he has reservations about giving the Fed new powers, such as the authority to monitor systemic risk.
Mr. Frank said today that after lawmakers address issues on systemic risk, they will consider how to bolster investor protection via changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The committee also will review proposals to assist struggling homeowners and expand the housing supply, and to strengthen international financial institutions such as the World Bank, he said.
Federal president's weekly address
Compromise
White House, Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 5:00 am
There was bad news and then there was good news.
Yesterday we learned that in January, the country suffered its largest one-month job loss in 34 years.
But last night, the Senate struck a compromise on the economic recovery plan and put us on our way to giving the economy the short-term jolt and long-term investments it needs.
"Americans across this country are struggling, and they are watching to see if we're equal to the task before us," the President says in this morning's Weekly Address. "Let's show them that we are."
Watch the President's address and read the full text here.
White House, Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 5:00 am
There was bad news and then there was good news.
Yesterday we learned that in January, the country suffered its largest one-month job loss in 34 years.
But last night, the Senate struck a compromise on the economic recovery plan and put us on our way to giving the economy the short-term jolt and long-term investments it needs.
"Americans across this country are struggling, and they are watching to see if we're equal to the task before us," the President says in this morning's Weekly Address. "Let's show them that we are."
Watch the President's address and read the full text here.
Industry views: EPA Decision to Move Towards Costly Regulations Disappointing
EPA Decision to Move Towards Costly Regulations Disappointing
IER, Feb 06, 2009
Washington, DC – Institute for Energy Research (IER) President Thomas J. Pyle today issued the following statement on the Obama Administration’s decision to move forward in the process to allow California to designate its own emissions standards for automobiles, which will force the American auto industry to take on massive new cost and compliance burdens and likely raise car and truck costs for consumers across the country:
“It is disappointing that the Obama Administration chose to move towards imposing this regulation—which basically creates a $3,000 car tax—at a time when our nation faces record unemployment, a struggling auto industry, and a troubled economy. Only a few months ago, taxpayers sent billions of their hard-earned and much-needed money to bail out the auto industry. That investment will surely be a waste if we allow Sacramento to set the standards for Detroit’s business plan.
“Alarmingly, there is no real evidence to support claims that the heightened emissions standards will even affect the environment. In fact, if all cars and trucks in the United States met this standard today, emissions increases from the rest of the world would more than replace those California reduced within a mere five months. Now is not the time to hike costs for consumers and hurt our auto industry to attempt a proposal that probably won’t meet its goals.”
NOTE: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today began the legal process required to green light California’s request to create its own emissions standards for automobiles. The Auto Alliance has estimated that the mandate will add up to $3,000 to the cost of each car and will cause the auto industry to slip further behind the technological curve as it struggles to adjust to California’s choices, rather than taking much-needed steps to meet the imperatives of customer choice.
IER, Feb 06, 2009
Washington, DC – Institute for Energy Research (IER) President Thomas J. Pyle today issued the following statement on the Obama Administration’s decision to move forward in the process to allow California to designate its own emissions standards for automobiles, which will force the American auto industry to take on massive new cost and compliance burdens and likely raise car and truck costs for consumers across the country:
“It is disappointing that the Obama Administration chose to move towards imposing this regulation—which basically creates a $3,000 car tax—at a time when our nation faces record unemployment, a struggling auto industry, and a troubled economy. Only a few months ago, taxpayers sent billions of their hard-earned and much-needed money to bail out the auto industry. That investment will surely be a waste if we allow Sacramento to set the standards for Detroit’s business plan.
“Alarmingly, there is no real evidence to support claims that the heightened emissions standards will even affect the environment. In fact, if all cars and trucks in the United States met this standard today, emissions increases from the rest of the world would more than replace those California reduced within a mere five months. Now is not the time to hike costs for consumers and hurt our auto industry to attempt a proposal that probably won’t meet its goals.”
NOTE: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today began the legal process required to green light California’s request to create its own emissions standards for automobiles. The Auto Alliance has estimated that the mandate will add up to $3,000 to the cost of each car and will cause the auto industry to slip further behind the technological curve as it struggles to adjust to California’s choices, rather than taking much-needed steps to meet the imperatives of customer choice.
Does SCHIP Work?
Does SCHIP Work? By Michael F. Cannon
Obama wants to expand the program, but eliminating it would be best for all involved.
NRO, February 02, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” If he was serious, he should veto the $115 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that is soon to reach his desk—and insist that Congress eliminate the program entirely.
For two years, SCHIP has been mired in an ideological standoff. Republicans described the Democrats’ proposed expansions—which were more moderate than those in the current bill—as “socialized medicine.” SCHIP supporters, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and columnist E.J. Dionne, claim the program works.
Researchers who actually study the program find that SCHIP does help uninsured children find coverage, but at great expense. They find no evidence that SCHIP actually improves health outcomes, or that the program addresses the systemic quality problems that confront even insured children.
SCHIP’s great expense stems from the fact that in many cases, it simply enrolls children who were already insured privately. Economists Jonathan Gruber and Kosali Simon estimate that out of every ten children added to the SCHIP rolls, six already had private coverage. Only in government is a program deemed to “work” when it covers four uninsured children for the price of ten.
The current proposal will only exacerbate this problem. Congressional Democrats want to expand SCHIP to children in families of four earning up to $80,000 per year. The Congressional Budget Office reports that 77 percent of such children already have private health insurance.
In terms of actually improving health outcomes, SCHIP looks even worse. Economist Robert Kaestner and his colleagues conclude, “The proposition that health insurance is the cure for adverse health outcomes among poor and near-poor children has not been adequately demonstrated.” About SCHIP specifically, they write, “It is remarkable that there is so little empirical evidence to support so large an expenditure.”
Economists Helen Levy and David Meltzer write that there is “no evidence” that SCHIP and similar programs are a cost-effective way of improving children's health. They observe that targeted health programs, policies that increase incomes, or even improved educational opportunities could deliver greater health improvements per dollar spent.
It’s not even clear that SCHIP’s method for improving children's health—expanding insurance coverage—is the right one. The New England Journal of Medicine reports large gaps between the quality of care children receive and what they should receive, even if the children have insurance. That study’s authors conclude, “Expansion of access to care through insurance coverage, which is the focus of national health care policy related to children, will not, by itself, eliminate the deficits in the quality of care.”
One thing SCHIP does accomplish is to discourage work. SCHIP and similar programs create enormous disincentives to climb the economic ladder. A single mother of two earning minimum wage in New Mexico who increased her earnings by $30,000 would find no change in her net income: She would pay an additional $4,000 in taxes and lose $26,000 in SCHIP and other government benefits, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute for the federal government.
Expanding SCHIP would pull even more families into that low-wage trap. Since income is an important determinant of health outcomes, expanding SCHIP could actually harm many children’s health.
The one positive thing that can be said of SCHIP is that, for all the inefficiencies and perverse incentives it creates, it does insure some children who wouldn’t have had coverage otherwise. But oddly enough, eliminating SCHIP could have this effect to an even greater degree.
When Congress eliminated Medicaid benefits for non-citizen immigrants in 1996, opponents predicted an explosion in the number of uninsured immigrants. But according to Harvard economist George Borjas, that didn’t happen: Immigrants sought out jobs that provided benefits, and were so successful that the employer-provided insurance completely offset the loss in government benefits. In fact, in the states that offered the fewest benefits, the immigrant insurance rate rose.
SCHIP families, which are more affluent than the families affected by the 1996 policy, would likely fare even better.
If President Obama wants to cover more uninsured children, he should set ideology aside and repeal SCHIP. After all, you can’t argue with what works.
Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.
Obama wants to expand the program, but eliminating it would be best for all involved.
NRO, February 02, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” If he was serious, he should veto the $115 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that is soon to reach his desk—and insist that Congress eliminate the program entirely.
For two years, SCHIP has been mired in an ideological standoff. Republicans described the Democrats’ proposed expansions—which were more moderate than those in the current bill—as “socialized medicine.” SCHIP supporters, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and columnist E.J. Dionne, claim the program works.
Researchers who actually study the program find that SCHIP does help uninsured children find coverage, but at great expense. They find no evidence that SCHIP actually improves health outcomes, or that the program addresses the systemic quality problems that confront even insured children.
SCHIP’s great expense stems from the fact that in many cases, it simply enrolls children who were already insured privately. Economists Jonathan Gruber and Kosali Simon estimate that out of every ten children added to the SCHIP rolls, six already had private coverage. Only in government is a program deemed to “work” when it covers four uninsured children for the price of ten.
The current proposal will only exacerbate this problem. Congressional Democrats want to expand SCHIP to children in families of four earning up to $80,000 per year. The Congressional Budget Office reports that 77 percent of such children already have private health insurance.
In terms of actually improving health outcomes, SCHIP looks even worse. Economist Robert Kaestner and his colleagues conclude, “The proposition that health insurance is the cure for adverse health outcomes among poor and near-poor children has not been adequately demonstrated.” About SCHIP specifically, they write, “It is remarkable that there is so little empirical evidence to support so large an expenditure.”
Economists Helen Levy and David Meltzer write that there is “no evidence” that SCHIP and similar programs are a cost-effective way of improving children's health. They observe that targeted health programs, policies that increase incomes, or even improved educational opportunities could deliver greater health improvements per dollar spent.
It’s not even clear that SCHIP’s method for improving children's health—expanding insurance coverage—is the right one. The New England Journal of Medicine reports large gaps between the quality of care children receive and what they should receive, even if the children have insurance. That study’s authors conclude, “Expansion of access to care through insurance coverage, which is the focus of national health care policy related to children, will not, by itself, eliminate the deficits in the quality of care.”
One thing SCHIP does accomplish is to discourage work. SCHIP and similar programs create enormous disincentives to climb the economic ladder. A single mother of two earning minimum wage in New Mexico who increased her earnings by $30,000 would find no change in her net income: She would pay an additional $4,000 in taxes and lose $26,000 in SCHIP and other government benefits, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute for the federal government.
Expanding SCHIP would pull even more families into that low-wage trap. Since income is an important determinant of health outcomes, expanding SCHIP could actually harm many children’s health.
The one positive thing that can be said of SCHIP is that, for all the inefficiencies and perverse incentives it creates, it does insure some children who wouldn’t have had coverage otherwise. But oddly enough, eliminating SCHIP could have this effect to an even greater degree.
When Congress eliminated Medicaid benefits for non-citizen immigrants in 1996, opponents predicted an explosion in the number of uninsured immigrants. But according to Harvard economist George Borjas, that didn’t happen: Immigrants sought out jobs that provided benefits, and were so successful that the employer-provided insurance completely offset the loss in government benefits. In fact, in the states that offered the fewest benefits, the immigrant insurance rate rose.
SCHIP families, which are more affluent than the families affected by the 1996 policy, would likely fare even better.
If President Obama wants to cover more uninsured children, he should set ideology aside and repeal SCHIP. After all, you can’t argue with what works.
Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.
State Dept on Russian Bases in Georgia
Russian Bases in Georgia, by Robert Wood, Acting Department Spokesman
US State Dept, Washington, DC, Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:36:46 -0600
The United States regrets the Russian Federation’s expressed intention to establish bases in the territory of Georgia as contrary to the spirit and the letter of Russia’s existing commitments. These Russian plans include a naval base at the port of Ochamchire, army bases in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, and the possible deployment of combat aircraft.
Under the August 12 and September 8 ceasefire agreements between Georgia and Russia, mediated by the French EU Presidency, Russia committed to return its forces to their pre-war numbers and locations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This latest announced build-up of the Russian Federation’s military presence in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia without the consent of the Georgian Government would clearly violate that commitment. Implementation of these basing plans would also violate Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, to which Russia repeatedly committed itself in numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The U.S. urges Russia to respect Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and facilitate stability in the region through implementation of its commitments and participation in the Geneva Process.
PRN: 2009/110
US State Dept, Washington, DC, Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:36:46 -0600
The United States regrets the Russian Federation’s expressed intention to establish bases in the territory of Georgia as contrary to the spirit and the letter of Russia’s existing commitments. These Russian plans include a naval base at the port of Ochamchire, army bases in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, and the possible deployment of combat aircraft.
Under the August 12 and September 8 ceasefire agreements between Georgia and Russia, mediated by the French EU Presidency, Russia committed to return its forces to their pre-war numbers and locations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This latest announced build-up of the Russian Federation’s military presence in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia without the consent of the Georgian Government would clearly violate that commitment. Implementation of these basing plans would also violate Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, to which Russia repeatedly committed itself in numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The U.S. urges Russia to respect Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and facilitate stability in the region through implementation of its commitments and participation in the Geneva Process.
PRN: 2009/110
Friday, February 6, 2009
USAID Assists in Aftermath of Liberia's Caterpillar Infestation
USAID Assists in Aftermath of Liberia's Caterpillar Infestation
USAID, February 6, 2009
Washington, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing assistance after a caterpillar infestation in Liberia has destroyed crops, contaminated water supplies, and temporarily forced residents from homes and farms in three counties in northern and central Liberia, particularly Bong County.
In response to the infestation, USAID is providing $100,000 for pest-control activities and water and sanitation programs in areas contaminated by caterpillar excrement. In addition, two USAID experts arrived in Monrovia on February 2 to conduct an environmental assessment of the infestation.
"The American people are standing by Liberians in their time of need," said U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. "We will work closely with the Liberian government's task force to help meet immediate needs, and we will look for longer term solutions to minimize effects of future pest infestations."
According to international media reports, the infestation has affected more than 500,000 people residing in approximately 100 villages. The Government of Liberia reported that the current infestation is the country's worst in three decades, and dispatched pest-control experts and insecticide-spraying teams to affected areas. On February 4, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that although caterpillars had affected agriculture, the infestation had not damaged staple crops, such as maize, rice, sorghum, and millet. On January 26, the President of Liberia declared a nationwide state of emergency and requested international assistance.
USAID will continue to monitor the situation in conjunction with humanitarian partners and is prepared to provide additional assistance should it be necessary.
For more information about USAID's emergency programs, please visit: http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for nearly 50 years.
USAID, February 6, 2009
Washington, D.C. - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing assistance after a caterpillar infestation in Liberia has destroyed crops, contaminated water supplies, and temporarily forced residents from homes and farms in three counties in northern and central Liberia, particularly Bong County.
In response to the infestation, USAID is providing $100,000 for pest-control activities and water and sanitation programs in areas contaminated by caterpillar excrement. In addition, two USAID experts arrived in Monrovia on February 2 to conduct an environmental assessment of the infestation.
"The American people are standing by Liberians in their time of need," said U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. "We will work closely with the Liberian government's task force to help meet immediate needs, and we will look for longer term solutions to minimize effects of future pest infestations."
According to international media reports, the infestation has affected more than 500,000 people residing in approximately 100 villages. The Government of Liberia reported that the current infestation is the country's worst in three decades, and dispatched pest-control experts and insecticide-spraying teams to affected areas. On February 4, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that although caterpillars had affected agriculture, the infestation had not damaged staple crops, such as maize, rice, sorghum, and millet. On January 26, the President of Liberia declared a nationwide state of emergency and requested international assistance.
USAID will continue to monitor the situation in conjunction with humanitarian partners and is prepared to provide additional assistance should it be necessary.
For more information about USAID's emergency programs, please visit: http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for nearly 50 years.
To improve the economy, eliminate the corporate income tax
Economic Change We Can Believe In. By Jeffrey A. Miron
To improve the economy, eliminate the corporate income tax
Reason, February 6, 2009
President Barack Obama's stimulus proposal entails an awkward tradeoff between spending and efficiency. Fiscal stimulation suggests large, rapid increases in spending, while efficiency means cautious, modest increases. Similarly, Obama's plan favors tax cuts for low-income families, since they are most likely to spend rather than save, yet the drive for efficiency means cutting marginal tax rates on high-income consumers.
One policy change, however, can stimulate both the economy in the short-run and enhance efficiency in the long-run: repeal of the corporate income tax, which collects up to 35% of the difference between revenues and costs of incorporated businesses.
From the efficiency perspective, the corporate income tax has never been sensible policy. Economic theory holds that an efficient tax system should not tax capital income, since this distorts the incentives to save and invest. Even if the tax base includes capital income, corporate income taxation is overkill. All income earned by corporations accrues to households as dividends or capital gains, and this income is then taxed by the personal income tax system.
Proponents argue that the corporate income tax makes sense because high-income taxpayers own corporations at a disproportionate rate. This desire to redistribute income can still be achieved using the personal tax system. That approach is better targeted than taxing corporate income, since many low and moderate income households own corporations via their pensions and 401(k)s. The true burden of corporation taxation falls not just on stockholders, but on employees through lower wages and on consumers through higher prices. Thus corporate taxation hits taxpayers across the income spectrum.
Corporate income taxation has other negatives. It requires a complicated set of rules and regulations, over and above the personal income tax system, generating compliance costs. Special interests ensure that corporate tax systems favor specific industries or activities, further distorting private investment decisions. Along those lines, corporation taxation reduces financial transparency, making it harder for investors to monitor corporate behavior.
So repeal of the corporate income tax is good policy independent of the state of the economy and would provide short-run stimulus.
Repeal means higher stock prices and improved cash flow. Corporations would respond to this change by investing in plant and equipment, and by hiring additional workers. These investments would be more productive than the ones funded by stimulus projects, since corporations respond to market forces, not to political influence. Since corporations could more easily invest out of retained earnings, repeal would also circumvent many banks' reluctance to lend.
The budgetary impact of a corporate income tax repeal—roughly $300-350 billion per year—might seem daunting, but this amount falls well short of the Obama fiscal package. The long-run impact will be less than what is implied by current revenues, since repeal will expand economic activity and therefore increase other kinds of tax revenue.
The stimulus impact of a corporate income tax repeal is likely to be substantial. Recent estimates by Christina Romer, the head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, suggest that tax cuts have a multiplier of three, meaning that repeal would increase GDP by roughly $1 trillion. By comparison, the administration's assumption that the government spending multiplier is about 1.5 suggests that the $500 billion in the Obama stimulus package would increase GDP by about $750 billion.
Elimination of the corporate income tax is a no-brainer. It benefits the economy in both the short-run and the long-run, with modest implications on the government budget.
The broader lesson here is that policymakers should attempt to improve the economy by eliminating currently existing bad policies, not just by adding new layers of government. By focusing equally on efficiency and stimulus, policymakers can set the stage for a sustained and healthy recovery.
Jeffrey A. Miron is a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University.
To improve the economy, eliminate the corporate income tax
Reason, February 6, 2009
President Barack Obama's stimulus proposal entails an awkward tradeoff between spending and efficiency. Fiscal stimulation suggests large, rapid increases in spending, while efficiency means cautious, modest increases. Similarly, Obama's plan favors tax cuts for low-income families, since they are most likely to spend rather than save, yet the drive for efficiency means cutting marginal tax rates on high-income consumers.
One policy change, however, can stimulate both the economy in the short-run and enhance efficiency in the long-run: repeal of the corporate income tax, which collects up to 35% of the difference between revenues and costs of incorporated businesses.
From the efficiency perspective, the corporate income tax has never been sensible policy. Economic theory holds that an efficient tax system should not tax capital income, since this distorts the incentives to save and invest. Even if the tax base includes capital income, corporate income taxation is overkill. All income earned by corporations accrues to households as dividends or capital gains, and this income is then taxed by the personal income tax system.
Proponents argue that the corporate income tax makes sense because high-income taxpayers own corporations at a disproportionate rate. This desire to redistribute income can still be achieved using the personal tax system. That approach is better targeted than taxing corporate income, since many low and moderate income households own corporations via their pensions and 401(k)s. The true burden of corporation taxation falls not just on stockholders, but on employees through lower wages and on consumers through higher prices. Thus corporate taxation hits taxpayers across the income spectrum.
Corporate income taxation has other negatives. It requires a complicated set of rules and regulations, over and above the personal income tax system, generating compliance costs. Special interests ensure that corporate tax systems favor specific industries or activities, further distorting private investment decisions. Along those lines, corporation taxation reduces financial transparency, making it harder for investors to monitor corporate behavior.
So repeal of the corporate income tax is good policy independent of the state of the economy and would provide short-run stimulus.
Repeal means higher stock prices and improved cash flow. Corporations would respond to this change by investing in plant and equipment, and by hiring additional workers. These investments would be more productive than the ones funded by stimulus projects, since corporations respond to market forces, not to political influence. Since corporations could more easily invest out of retained earnings, repeal would also circumvent many banks' reluctance to lend.
The budgetary impact of a corporate income tax repeal—roughly $300-350 billion per year—might seem daunting, but this amount falls well short of the Obama fiscal package. The long-run impact will be less than what is implied by current revenues, since repeal will expand economic activity and therefore increase other kinds of tax revenue.
The stimulus impact of a corporate income tax repeal is likely to be substantial. Recent estimates by Christina Romer, the head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, suggest that tax cuts have a multiplier of three, meaning that repeal would increase GDP by roughly $1 trillion. By comparison, the administration's assumption that the government spending multiplier is about 1.5 suggests that the $500 billion in the Obama stimulus package would increase GDP by about $750 billion.
Elimination of the corporate income tax is a no-brainer. It benefits the economy in both the short-run and the long-run, with modest implications on the government budget.
The broader lesson here is that policymakers should attempt to improve the economy by eliminating currently existing bad policies, not just by adding new layers of government. By focusing equally on efficiency and stimulus, policymakers can set the stage for a sustained and healthy recovery.
Jeffrey A. Miron is a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University.
Soviet incentives
Soviet economy, by Eric S. Weisman, Former Assistant to the US. Executive Director, International Monetary fund
In: "Some Comments upon the Retirement of Professor Vladimir G. Treml", Duke University, Economics Dept, Fall 2001
Vlad loves to tell stories of how perverse incentive structures in the Soviet Union led to seemingly bizarre, but in fact entirely rational, economic decision-making. The story I like the best is the one about the used light bulb market. For most of us, it is hard to fathom the rationale for a market in burnt-out light bulbs. But in the scarcity-driven Soviet economy, the market was entirely reasonable. Light bulbs were rarely available to individual consumers, but were obtainable for state-sponsored activities. Thus, it would be difficult to purchase a light bulb for a new lamp in one's home, while burnt-out bulbs in state-run offices or factories were routinely replaced. So if someone purchased a new lamp and needed a bulb, he would buy a used light bulb for a small fee and replace a functioning bulb at work with the dud. He would then take the functioning bulb home for the new lamp, while the burnt-out bulb at the office/factory would be replaced with a new functioning bulb. Meanwhile, the maintenance person at the office/factory would take the used bulb and sell it on the used light bulb market.
In: "Some Comments upon the Retirement of Professor Vladimir G. Treml", Duke University, Economics Dept, Fall 2001
Vlad loves to tell stories of how perverse incentive structures in the Soviet Union led to seemingly bizarre, but in fact entirely rational, economic decision-making. The story I like the best is the one about the used light bulb market. For most of us, it is hard to fathom the rationale for a market in burnt-out light bulbs. But in the scarcity-driven Soviet economy, the market was entirely reasonable. Light bulbs were rarely available to individual consumers, but were obtainable for state-sponsored activities. Thus, it would be difficult to purchase a light bulb for a new lamp in one's home, while burnt-out bulbs in state-run offices or factories were routinely replaced. So if someone purchased a new lamp and needed a bulb, he would buy a used light bulb for a small fee and replace a functioning bulb at work with the dud. He would then take the functioning bulb home for the new lamp, while the burnt-out bulb at the office/factory would be replaced with a new functioning bulb. Meanwhile, the maintenance person at the office/factory would take the used bulb and sell it on the used light bulb market.
President's remarks on the Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Advice from "beyond the echo chamber"
White House, Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
We just learned the economy lost another 600,000 jobs last month. It's a staggering number, and it underscores just how deep this crisis is – and, as the President pointed out this morning, it’s accelerating.
That's why he created the Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to solicit ideas from "beyond the echo chamber of Washington, DC."
"I’m not interested in groupthink, which is why the Board reflects a broad cross-section of experience, expertise, and ideology," he said. "We’ve recruited Republican and Democrats; veterans of government and the private sector; advocates for business and labor. Not everyone is going to agree with each other, and not all of them are going to agree with me – and that’s precisely the point. Because we want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate."
Before the President signed the executive order officially creating the board, he addressed the jobs numbers and brought home the individual pains behind those almost incomprehensibly large numbers.
"Somewhere in America, a small business has shut its doors; a family has said goodbye to their home; a young parent has lost their livelihood, and doesn’t know what’s going to take its place," the President said.
Read the rest of his remarks below -- along with those of PERAB chairman Paul Volcker -- and the list of board members below that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY ADVISORY BOARD
East Room, The White House
February 6, 2009
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you. Please have a seat. (Applause.) Good morning, everybody.
AUDIENCE: Good morning.
THE PRESIDENT: I have just had the opportunity to welcome the members of my Economic Recovery Advisory Board. And I'm grateful that I will have the counsel of these extraordinarily talented and experienced men and women in the challenging months to come.
If there's anyone, anywhere, who doubts the need for wise counsel and bold and immediate action, just consider the very troubling news we received just this morning. Last month, another 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. That is the single worst month of job loss in 35 years. The Department of Labor also adjusted their job loss numbers for 2008 upwards, and now report that we've lost 3.6 million jobs since this recession began.
That's 3.6 million Americans who wake up every day wondering how they are going to pay their bills, stay in their homes, and provide for their children. That's 3.6 million Americans who need our help.
I'm sure that at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, members of the Senate are reading these same numbers this morning. And I hope they share my sense of urgency and draw the same, unmistakable conclusion: The situation could not be more serious. These numbers demand action. It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay, or politics as usual, while millions of Americans are being put out of work.
Now is the time for Congress to act. It's time to pass an Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to get our economy moving.
This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those 600,000 jobs that were lost this month. Somewhere in America a small business has shut its doors; somewhere in America a family has said goodbye to their home; somewhere in America a young parent has lost their livelihood -- and they don't know what's going to take its place.
These Americans are counting on us, all of us in Washington. We have to remember that we're here to work for them. And if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis could turn into a catastrophe. We'll continue to get devastating job reports like today's -- month after month, year after year. It's very important to understand that, although we had a terrible year with respect to jobs last year, the problem is accelerating, not decelerating. It's getting worse, not getting better. Almost half of the jobs that were lost have been lost just in the last couple of months.
These aren't my assessments -- these are the assessments of independent economists. If we don't do anything, millions more jobs will be lost. More families will lose their homes. More Americans will go without health care. We'll continue to send our children to crumbling schools, and be crippled by our dependence on foreign oil. That's the result of inaction. And it's not acceptable to the American people.
They did not choose more of the same in November. They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, to try to score political points. They did not send us here to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected, because we saw the results. They sent us here to make change, with the expectation that we would act.
Now, I have repeatedly acknowledged that, given the magnitude and the difficulties of the problem we're facing, there are no silver bullets and there are no easy answers. The bill that's emerged from Congress is not perfect, but a bill is absolutely necessary. We can continue to improve and refine both the House and Senate versions of these bills. There may be provisions in there that need to be left out; there may be some provisions that need to be added. But broadly speaking, the package is the right size, it is the right scope, and it has the right priorities to create 3 to 4 million jobs and to do it in a way that lays the groundwork for long-term growth -- by fixing our schools, modernizing our health care to lower costs, repair our roads and bridges and levees and other vital infrastructure, move us towards energy independence. That is what America needs. It will take months, even years, to renew our economy, but every day that Washington fails to act, that recovery is delayed.
Now, we also know that no single act can meet the challenges of this moment. This process is just the beginning of a long journey back to progress and growth and prosperity. Given the scope of this crisis, we'll need all hands on deck to figure out how we are going to move forward. And I'm pleased to have an extraordinary team of folks in my administration -- Tim Geithner at Treasury, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag -- they're all here in the White House. I also want to be sure that we're tapping a broad and diverse range of opinion from across the country, because a historic crisis demands a historic response. And that's why we took the unique step of creating the new institution whose members have gathered here today.
Put simply, I created this board to enlist voices to come from beyond the Washington echo chamber, to ensure that no stone is unturned as we work to put people back to work and get our economy moving.
Within this group, you've got leaders of manufacturing and leaders of finance. You've got labor and you've got management. You've got people who work in small businesses and people who work in large businesses. You've got some economists and some folks who think they're economists. (Laughter.) By the way, these days everybody thinks they're an economist. (Laughter.) We will meet regularly so that I can hear different ideas and sharpen my own, and seek counsel that is candid and informed by the wider world.
The board is headed by Paul Volcker -- not only because he's the tallest among us -- (laughter) -- but because, by any measure, he is one of the world's foremost experts on the economy; one of the most experienced and insightful economic minds that we have. He's advised me for many months. He has helped steer the American economy through many twists and turns. Probably prior to this one, the worst economic crisis we had back in the early '80s, it was Paul Volcker who helped restore confidence and pull us out of that extraordinarily difficult time.
So I'm glad that Paul has decided to continue his public service at this critical moment. Assisting Paul and the rest of the board will be Austan Goolsbee, who's been one of my closest economic advisors, one of the finest young economists that we have in the country. He's going to ensure that we are making the best possible use of this unique resource.
I'm not interested in groupthink, which is why the board reflects a broad cross-section of experience and expertise and ideology. We've recruited Republicans and Democrats, people who come out of the government as well as the private sector. Not everyone is going to agree with each other, and not all of them are going to agree with me -- and that's precisely the point, because we want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate.
And we're also going to count on these men and women to serve as additional eyes and ears for me as we work to reverse this downturn. Many of them have ground-level views of the changes that are taking place, as they work across different sectors of the economy and different regions of the country, and they can help us see the trends that are not fully formed, the trouble that may be on the horizon, and the opportunities that have yet to be seized. I look forward to relying on their input and recommendations on specific questions as we jumpstart job creation and pursue strong and stable economic growth.
This new institution should send a signal of how seriously I take the responsibility of building an economic recovery that is broad and enduring. These are extraordinary times. For far too many Americans, the future is filled with unanswered questions: Can I get a job? Will my family be able to stay in their home? Will I be able to retire with dignity, and see my children lead a better life? And these are the questions that we will answer affirmatively during the course of this administration.
We are going to create the jobs that our people need and the future that this great nation deserves. Those are the challenges that I've put before my economic team, and these distinguished advisors will be tackling those same issues in the months and years to come.
So I'm grateful to them. And before I officially sign this executive order, I would like Paul just to say a quick word.
MR. VOLCKER: Well, thank you, Mr. President. I will say a very quick word. You've spoken about the variety of experience and talent you brought together. One thing I am sure they all share, we all share, is a sense of urgency, that you alluded to and emphasized. The figures this morning simply reenforce that. And I can't imagine that the Congress won't share this sense of urgency and you can get on the road toward the kind of program you want.
But thank you for the confidence that you've shown in all of us. We hope to help.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Paul. All right, let me get over there.
(The executive order is signed.) (Applause.)
The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Chairman Paul Volcker
Staff Director and Chief Economist Austan Goolsbee
Members
William H. Donaldson, Chairman, SEC (2003-2005)
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE
John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
Anna Burger, Chair, Change to Win
Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley
Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
White House, Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
We just learned the economy lost another 600,000 jobs last month. It's a staggering number, and it underscores just how deep this crisis is – and, as the President pointed out this morning, it’s accelerating.
That's why he created the Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to solicit ideas from "beyond the echo chamber of Washington, DC."
"I’m not interested in groupthink, which is why the Board reflects a broad cross-section of experience, expertise, and ideology," he said. "We’ve recruited Republican and Democrats; veterans of government and the private sector; advocates for business and labor. Not everyone is going to agree with each other, and not all of them are going to agree with me – and that’s precisely the point. Because we want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate."
Before the President signed the executive order officially creating the board, he addressed the jobs numbers and brought home the individual pains behind those almost incomprehensibly large numbers.
"Somewhere in America, a small business has shut its doors; a family has said goodbye to their home; a young parent has lost their livelihood, and doesn’t know what’s going to take its place," the President said.
Read the rest of his remarks below -- along with those of PERAB chairman Paul Volcker -- and the list of board members below that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY ADVISORY BOARD
East Room, The White House
February 6, 2009
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you. Please have a seat. (Applause.) Good morning, everybody.
AUDIENCE: Good morning.
THE PRESIDENT: I have just had the opportunity to welcome the members of my Economic Recovery Advisory Board. And I'm grateful that I will have the counsel of these extraordinarily talented and experienced men and women in the challenging months to come.
If there's anyone, anywhere, who doubts the need for wise counsel and bold and immediate action, just consider the very troubling news we received just this morning. Last month, another 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. That is the single worst month of job loss in 35 years. The Department of Labor also adjusted their job loss numbers for 2008 upwards, and now report that we've lost 3.6 million jobs since this recession began.
That's 3.6 million Americans who wake up every day wondering how they are going to pay their bills, stay in their homes, and provide for their children. That's 3.6 million Americans who need our help.
I'm sure that at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, members of the Senate are reading these same numbers this morning. And I hope they share my sense of urgency and draw the same, unmistakable conclusion: The situation could not be more serious. These numbers demand action. It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay, or politics as usual, while millions of Americans are being put out of work.
Now is the time for Congress to act. It's time to pass an Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to get our economy moving.
This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those 600,000 jobs that were lost this month. Somewhere in America a small business has shut its doors; somewhere in America a family has said goodbye to their home; somewhere in America a young parent has lost their livelihood -- and they don't know what's going to take its place.
These Americans are counting on us, all of us in Washington. We have to remember that we're here to work for them. And if we drag our feet and fail to act, this crisis could turn into a catastrophe. We'll continue to get devastating job reports like today's -- month after month, year after year. It's very important to understand that, although we had a terrible year with respect to jobs last year, the problem is accelerating, not decelerating. It's getting worse, not getting better. Almost half of the jobs that were lost have been lost just in the last couple of months.
These aren't my assessments -- these are the assessments of independent economists. If we don't do anything, millions more jobs will be lost. More families will lose their homes. More Americans will go without health care. We'll continue to send our children to crumbling schools, and be crippled by our dependence on foreign oil. That's the result of inaction. And it's not acceptable to the American people.
They did not choose more of the same in November. They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, to try to score political points. They did not send us here to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected, because we saw the results. They sent us here to make change, with the expectation that we would act.
Now, I have repeatedly acknowledged that, given the magnitude and the difficulties of the problem we're facing, there are no silver bullets and there are no easy answers. The bill that's emerged from Congress is not perfect, but a bill is absolutely necessary. We can continue to improve and refine both the House and Senate versions of these bills. There may be provisions in there that need to be left out; there may be some provisions that need to be added. But broadly speaking, the package is the right size, it is the right scope, and it has the right priorities to create 3 to 4 million jobs and to do it in a way that lays the groundwork for long-term growth -- by fixing our schools, modernizing our health care to lower costs, repair our roads and bridges and levees and other vital infrastructure, move us towards energy independence. That is what America needs. It will take months, even years, to renew our economy, but every day that Washington fails to act, that recovery is delayed.
Now, we also know that no single act can meet the challenges of this moment. This process is just the beginning of a long journey back to progress and growth and prosperity. Given the scope of this crisis, we'll need all hands on deck to figure out how we are going to move forward. And I'm pleased to have an extraordinary team of folks in my administration -- Tim Geithner at Treasury, Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag -- they're all here in the White House. I also want to be sure that we're tapping a broad and diverse range of opinion from across the country, because a historic crisis demands a historic response. And that's why we took the unique step of creating the new institution whose members have gathered here today.
Put simply, I created this board to enlist voices to come from beyond the Washington echo chamber, to ensure that no stone is unturned as we work to put people back to work and get our economy moving.
Within this group, you've got leaders of manufacturing and leaders of finance. You've got labor and you've got management. You've got people who work in small businesses and people who work in large businesses. You've got some economists and some folks who think they're economists. (Laughter.) By the way, these days everybody thinks they're an economist. (Laughter.) We will meet regularly so that I can hear different ideas and sharpen my own, and seek counsel that is candid and informed by the wider world.
The board is headed by Paul Volcker -- not only because he's the tallest among us -- (laughter) -- but because, by any measure, he is one of the world's foremost experts on the economy; one of the most experienced and insightful economic minds that we have. He's advised me for many months. He has helped steer the American economy through many twists and turns. Probably prior to this one, the worst economic crisis we had back in the early '80s, it was Paul Volcker who helped restore confidence and pull us out of that extraordinarily difficult time.
So I'm glad that Paul has decided to continue his public service at this critical moment. Assisting Paul and the rest of the board will be Austan Goolsbee, who's been one of my closest economic advisors, one of the finest young economists that we have in the country. He's going to ensure that we are making the best possible use of this unique resource.
I'm not interested in groupthink, which is why the board reflects a broad cross-section of experience and expertise and ideology. We've recruited Republicans and Democrats, people who come out of the government as well as the private sector. Not everyone is going to agree with each other, and not all of them are going to agree with me -- and that's precisely the point, because we want to ensure that our policies have the benefit of independent thought and vigorous debate.
And we're also going to count on these men and women to serve as additional eyes and ears for me as we work to reverse this downturn. Many of them have ground-level views of the changes that are taking place, as they work across different sectors of the economy and different regions of the country, and they can help us see the trends that are not fully formed, the trouble that may be on the horizon, and the opportunities that have yet to be seized. I look forward to relying on their input and recommendations on specific questions as we jumpstart job creation and pursue strong and stable economic growth.
This new institution should send a signal of how seriously I take the responsibility of building an economic recovery that is broad and enduring. These are extraordinary times. For far too many Americans, the future is filled with unanswered questions: Can I get a job? Will my family be able to stay in their home? Will I be able to retire with dignity, and see my children lead a better life? And these are the questions that we will answer affirmatively during the course of this administration.
We are going to create the jobs that our people need and the future that this great nation deserves. Those are the challenges that I've put before my economic team, and these distinguished advisors will be tackling those same issues in the months and years to come.
So I'm grateful to them. And before I officially sign this executive order, I would like Paul just to say a quick word.
MR. VOLCKER: Well, thank you, Mr. President. I will say a very quick word. You've spoken about the variety of experience and talent you brought together. One thing I am sure they all share, we all share, is a sense of urgency, that you alluded to and emphasized. The figures this morning simply reenforce that. And I can't imagine that the Congress won't share this sense of urgency and you can get on the road toward the kind of program you want.
But thank you for the confidence that you've shown in all of us. We hope to help.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Paul. All right, let me get over there.
(The executive order is signed.) (Applause.)
The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Chairman Paul Volcker
Staff Director and Chief Economist Austan Goolsbee
Members
William H. Donaldson, Chairman, SEC (2003-2005)
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE
John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
Anna Burger, Chair, Change to Win
Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley
Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
What Michael Phelps Should Have Said
What Michael Phelps Should Have Said, by Radley Balko
Smoking pot shouldn't be a crime. Or the public's business.
Reason, February 2, 2009
Dear America,
I take it back. I don’t apologize.
Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months a year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.
I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.
Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have, without a shred of evidence, beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.
You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.
Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.
So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.
Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.
Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.
Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen...is also a proud pot smoker.
Yours,
Michael Phelps
Smoking pot shouldn't be a crime. Or the public's business.
Reason, February 2, 2009
Dear America,
I take it back. I don’t apologize.
Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months a year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.
I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.
Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have, without a shred of evidence, beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.
You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.
Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.
So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.
Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.
Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.
Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen...is also a proud pot smoker.
Yours,
Michael Phelps
Survey of Life Scientists' Views on 'Dual Use' Research and Bioterrorism
Survey Samples Life Scientists' Views on 'Dual Use' Research and Bioterrorism; Some Respondents Already Taking Action to Avert Misuse of Research
National Academies, Feb 05, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Rapid advances in the biological sciences over the last several decades have yielded great benefits such as medical therapies and vaccines. But some of these same scientific advances could also be used for malicious purposes, a threat that has become more salient to the science and policy communities since the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The National Research Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) surveyed a sample of AAAS members in the life sciences to assess their awareness of and attitudes toward such "dual-use" research – studies undertaken for beneficial purposes that could also have harmful applications such as bioterrorism. The survey also explored actions the scientists might support to reduce the risk of misuse of research, as well as steps that scientists may already be taking in response to these concerns. The results of the survey, conducted in 2007, are summarized in a new report from the Research Council, which includes recommendations for next steps.
The survey yielded some of the first empirical data on U.S. life scientists' views about biosecurity and the potential misuse of legitimate scientific research. The survey results offer insights and generate hypotheses that can be tested in future efforts, said the committee that wrote the report. However, a low response rate and uncertainties about whether the sample reflects the broader life sciences community limit the ability to generalize from the responses about the full U.S. life sciences community. Nevertheless, even with this limitation, the survey results are useful and informative, noted the committee.
The results suggest that survey respondents perceive a potential but not overwhelming risk of a bioterror attack in the next five years, a risk they believe is greater outside the U.S. Most respondents do not believe it is likely that dual-use knowledge, tools, or techniques will facilitate a bioterror attack in that time period.
Survey results also indicate that some respondents -- more than the committee had expected -- have been so concerned about dual-use issues that they have already taken action to try to avert misuse of research in the life sciences, even in the absence of guidelines or government restrictions. Some respondents reported that they had broken collaborations, not conducted some research projects, or not communicated research results.
Many of respondents' precautionary actions were taken during design, collaboration, and initial communication stages of research, before reaching the publication stage, the report notes. Of particular interest and concern to the committee, a few respondents offered comments about foreigners as potential security risks, which may be reflected in the reported avoidance of some collaborations.
"The fact that some scientists are changing their research activities may indicate that the life sciences community is responsibly responding to reduce the risk of misuse of science," said committee chair Ronald Atlas, professor of biology and public health at the University of Louisville. "But it is also possible that some scientists are overreacting to the perceived threat, for example by breaking collaborations and excluding foreigners from their laboratories. Our committee feels that it's important to further investigate how research activity is being changed in response to dual-use concerns."
With regard to future actions that the life sciences community would support to reduce the threat of misuse of research, the survey results indicate that life scientists in the U.S. may be more willing to consider mechanisms to reduce risks if they are developed and implemented by the scientific community itself. Most respondents favor their professional societies prescribing a code of conduct to help prevent misuse of life science research, for example, while a minority supported greater federal oversight. Among possible government restrictions, respondents were more supportive of restrictions on access to biological agents and certification of researchers than of any control of scientific knowledge generated from the research.
In addition, respondents showed support for mandatory training by institutions for practicing life scientists regarding dual-use concerns, as well as education materials and lectures for students.
The survey results also highlight the need to better define the scope of research that is of concern, the report notes. Fewer than half the respondents who reported carrying out dual-use research activities felt that their work falls into one of the seven categories of research of concern identified by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which was created in 2004 to advise federal agencies about dual-use research.
Based on the survey results, the committee urged further exploration of ways to provide guidance to the life sciences community about appropriate actions that could protect against misuse of dual-use research. The committee also recommended further research to examine the effectiveness of educational programs on these topics and find ways to enhance them.
In addition, the report recommends surveys and interviews that can reach additional life scientists or begin to probe more deeply into life scientists' attitudes. And surveys of scientists outside the U.S. would increase knowledge and help facilitate international discussions of potential measures to address concerns about dual-use research.
The report was sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Academies' Presidents' Circle Communications Initiative.
National Academies, Feb 05, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Rapid advances in the biological sciences over the last several decades have yielded great benefits such as medical therapies and vaccines. But some of these same scientific advances could also be used for malicious purposes, a threat that has become more salient to the science and policy communities since the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The National Research Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) surveyed a sample of AAAS members in the life sciences to assess their awareness of and attitudes toward such "dual-use" research – studies undertaken for beneficial purposes that could also have harmful applications such as bioterrorism. The survey also explored actions the scientists might support to reduce the risk of misuse of research, as well as steps that scientists may already be taking in response to these concerns. The results of the survey, conducted in 2007, are summarized in a new report from the Research Council, which includes recommendations for next steps.
The survey yielded some of the first empirical data on U.S. life scientists' views about biosecurity and the potential misuse of legitimate scientific research. The survey results offer insights and generate hypotheses that can be tested in future efforts, said the committee that wrote the report. However, a low response rate and uncertainties about whether the sample reflects the broader life sciences community limit the ability to generalize from the responses about the full U.S. life sciences community. Nevertheless, even with this limitation, the survey results are useful and informative, noted the committee.
The results suggest that survey respondents perceive a potential but not overwhelming risk of a bioterror attack in the next five years, a risk they believe is greater outside the U.S. Most respondents do not believe it is likely that dual-use knowledge, tools, or techniques will facilitate a bioterror attack in that time period.
Survey results also indicate that some respondents -- more than the committee had expected -- have been so concerned about dual-use issues that they have already taken action to try to avert misuse of research in the life sciences, even in the absence of guidelines or government restrictions. Some respondents reported that they had broken collaborations, not conducted some research projects, or not communicated research results.
Many of respondents' precautionary actions were taken during design, collaboration, and initial communication stages of research, before reaching the publication stage, the report notes. Of particular interest and concern to the committee, a few respondents offered comments about foreigners as potential security risks, which may be reflected in the reported avoidance of some collaborations.
"The fact that some scientists are changing their research activities may indicate that the life sciences community is responsibly responding to reduce the risk of misuse of science," said committee chair Ronald Atlas, professor of biology and public health at the University of Louisville. "But it is also possible that some scientists are overreacting to the perceived threat, for example by breaking collaborations and excluding foreigners from their laboratories. Our committee feels that it's important to further investigate how research activity is being changed in response to dual-use concerns."
With regard to future actions that the life sciences community would support to reduce the threat of misuse of research, the survey results indicate that life scientists in the U.S. may be more willing to consider mechanisms to reduce risks if they are developed and implemented by the scientific community itself. Most respondents favor their professional societies prescribing a code of conduct to help prevent misuse of life science research, for example, while a minority supported greater federal oversight. Among possible government restrictions, respondents were more supportive of restrictions on access to biological agents and certification of researchers than of any control of scientific knowledge generated from the research.
In addition, respondents showed support for mandatory training by institutions for practicing life scientists regarding dual-use concerns, as well as education materials and lectures for students.
The survey results also highlight the need to better define the scope of research that is of concern, the report notes. Fewer than half the respondents who reported carrying out dual-use research activities felt that their work falls into one of the seven categories of research of concern identified by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which was created in 2004 to advise federal agencies about dual-use research.
Based on the survey results, the committee urged further exploration of ways to provide guidance to the life sciences community about appropriate actions that could protect against misuse of dual-use research. The committee also recommended further research to examine the effectiveness of educational programs on these topics and find ways to enhance them.
In addition, the report recommends surveys and interviews that can reach additional life scientists or begin to probe more deeply into life scientists' attitudes. And surveys of scientists outside the U.S. would increase knowledge and help facilitate international discussions of potential measures to address concerns about dual-use research.
The report was sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Academies' Presidents' Circle Communications Initiative.
When Is a Lobbyist Not a Lobbyist?
When Is a Lobbyist Not a Lobbyist? By Andrew C. McCarthy
When he’s up for a job in the Obama administration.
NRO, February 06, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
In Chicago, Barack Obama’s M.O. was to talk the talk of a reformer and walk the walk of an old-school machine politician. When he got called on it, he did what machine politicians do: He waxed eloquent about his commitment to transparency even as he stonewalled, obfuscated, and lied.
That is how convicted fraudster Tony Rezko was transformed, before our very eyes, from a guy Obama barely knew to a contributor who may have helped Obama’s political campaigns, then to a bundler who’d actually raised more than $250,000 (some five times the amount claimed in Obama’s initial admission), to a developer who won contracts with Obama’s assistance, to a fixer who helped Obama buy a pricey home the future president couldn’t afford on his own—an ethical lapse Obama finally had to acknowledge was “boneheaded.”
Obama began his administration promising the toughest ethical standards ever imposed by any White House—and, on his first day, issued an executive order restricting the familiar practice of filling government jobs with lobbyists that have private interests in how policy is shaped. The president’s directive is self-consciously reflective of candidate Obama’s scathing condemnation of traditional Washington-style insider-dealing.
Obama would have us believe the order closes the “revolving door” between government and lobbying, whereby the politically connected achieve progressively more influential and lucrative positions by moving frequently between the public and private sectors. In fact, that door remains wide open. Transparency being the order of the day, President Obama’s order is transparently designed to make voters believe he’s going to put the brakes on the gravy train. And to do so he’s dispatching his two top lawyers: tasking the White House counsel and the attorney general with the interpretation and enforcement of the new, stringent guidelines. If you’re keeping score at home, those would be Gregory Craig and Eric Holder, each of whom has been deeply enmeshed in unsavory influence-peddling.
As National Review’s Byron York has reported, Craig has an extensive history of representing leftist regimes hostile to the United States, which led him to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of one Pedro Miguel González, an alleged terrorist. Since 1992, González has been evading an indictment for murdering a U.S. army sergeant in Panama City. When pressed about his client during the campaign, Craig—a lawyerly lawyer if ever there was—explained that he hadn’t really “undertaken to represent” González in legal “proceedings.” You wouldn’t even really call it lobbying. Instead, Craig explained, he had merely sought “to open up a path of communications” between the fugitive and the Justice Department.
Which is to say, the principal interpreter and enforcer of Obama’s celebrated lobbying rules does not believe that a lawyer’s arranging negotiations between an international fugitive and the federal government constitutes “representing” that fugitive or acting as his agent. Just call him a Good Samaritan. The Obama administration’s response to questions about González has been that familiar rallying cry of openness and transparency: “No comment.”
No discussion of lobbying on behalf of international fugitives should get very far without turning to the case of Eric Holder. Beginning in 1999, when he was deputy attorney general, Holder allowed himself to be lobbied on behalf of Marc Rich (at that time, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives) by an influential Democratic lawyer, Jack Quinn. Until 1997, Quinn had been the Clinton White House counsel, i.e., Clinton’s Greg Craig. He then left for private practice and, by late 1999, had started his own lobbying firm.
Lobbying Holder put Quinn in violation of President Clinton’s own good-government executive order. Like Obama’s order, Clinton’s was announced with great fanfare on the first day of his presidency. It was duly lauded by the press—especially for the five-year lobbying ban it purported to impose on former administration officials. But in Quinn’s view, that ban didn’t apply to him because—try to follow this—he was not so much lobbying an administration official as he was representing a client in a “judicial proceeding.” This was transparently specious: The Justice Department is not a court and a pardon is not a judicial proceeding—to the contrary, a pardon is an executive exercise designed to undo judicial proceedings. But the hocus-pocus reasoning was good enough for Quinn, and that meant it was plenty good enough for Holder, who helped get Rich his pardon.
So Obama’s guidelines will be interpreted and enforced by these two guys. This should prove fruitful for the many lawyers who inevitably drift from the new administration back into more lucrative endeavors: If they’d prefer their legal representation to be low-balled as something less than lobbying, they can go to the White House counsel; if they’d rather dress up their lobbying as legal representation, the attorney general is their man.
Not every lobbyist is a lawyer—though some non-lawyers, such as Tom Daschle, manage to get themselves paid more than a million dollars a year by top law firms. For what? Certainly not for lobbying. At the well-connected firm of Alston and Bird, known in Washington parlance as a “lobbying firm” because it represents lots of lobbyists, Daschle was retained as a “special policy adviser.”
But if you are paid by the legal agents of lobbyists to instruct lobbyists in lobbying, aren’t you, in fact, a lobbyist? Especially considering the fact that the top asset you bring to the table is your Rolodex? Obama thinks not, since Daschle never legally registered as a lobbyist.
“If you’re not registered to lobby, you can’t be a lobbyist.” Thus decreed Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, a man who is starting to make Scott McClellan sound like Elmer Gantry (a fictional character who, unlike most Obama administration figures, only seems to have worked in the Clinton administration). Gibbs’s kindly diagnosis of Daschle brings us to the fine print of the executive order. To “lobby,” the president says, “shall mean to act or have acted as a registered lobbyist.” Presto: no registration, no lobbyist; no lobbyist, no problem—unless you don’t pay your taxes on the millions you’ve earned not lobbying.
But now that we’ve narrowed it down to registered lobbyists, does that mean that we’ve discovered one category of Washington insiders that is, in fact, banned by the ethical standards Gibbs describes as the “strongest that any administration in the history of our country has had”? Not exactly. The order provides that these very stringent rules can be ignored whenever the scrupulous interpreting authorities decide it is in the public interest. Don’t be alarmed: The administration says waivers will only be approved for extraordinarily qualified officials.
Have you ever heard of an administration that did not portray its appointees as extraordinarily qualified? Already we have the extraordinarily qualified William J. Lynn III, the nominee for deputy defense secretary, who got a waiver despite being, up until recently, a lobbyist for the military contractor Raytheon. William Corr will serve as the No. 2 official at the Department of Health and Human Services regardless of the last year he spent as a lobbyist. And then there’s Mark Patterson. He’s now chief of staff to Timothy Geithner, this ethics-obsessed administration’s tax-cheating Treasury secretary, even though Patterson used to be a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs—the outfit that could have patented the revolving door even before scoring $10 billion in TARP money.
Obama says he’s come to Washington to bring change. So far, he’s changing it into Chicago.
National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
When he’s up for a job in the Obama administration.
NRO, February 06, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
In Chicago, Barack Obama’s M.O. was to talk the talk of a reformer and walk the walk of an old-school machine politician. When he got called on it, he did what machine politicians do: He waxed eloquent about his commitment to transparency even as he stonewalled, obfuscated, and lied.
That is how convicted fraudster Tony Rezko was transformed, before our very eyes, from a guy Obama barely knew to a contributor who may have helped Obama’s political campaigns, then to a bundler who’d actually raised more than $250,000 (some five times the amount claimed in Obama’s initial admission), to a developer who won contracts with Obama’s assistance, to a fixer who helped Obama buy a pricey home the future president couldn’t afford on his own—an ethical lapse Obama finally had to acknowledge was “boneheaded.”
Obama began his administration promising the toughest ethical standards ever imposed by any White House—and, on his first day, issued an executive order restricting the familiar practice of filling government jobs with lobbyists that have private interests in how policy is shaped. The president’s directive is self-consciously reflective of candidate Obama’s scathing condemnation of traditional Washington-style insider-dealing.
Obama would have us believe the order closes the “revolving door” between government and lobbying, whereby the politically connected achieve progressively more influential and lucrative positions by moving frequently between the public and private sectors. In fact, that door remains wide open. Transparency being the order of the day, President Obama’s order is transparently designed to make voters believe he’s going to put the brakes on the gravy train. And to do so he’s dispatching his two top lawyers: tasking the White House counsel and the attorney general with the interpretation and enforcement of the new, stringent guidelines. If you’re keeping score at home, those would be Gregory Craig and Eric Holder, each of whom has been deeply enmeshed in unsavory influence-peddling.
As National Review’s Byron York has reported, Craig has an extensive history of representing leftist regimes hostile to the United States, which led him to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of one Pedro Miguel González, an alleged terrorist. Since 1992, González has been evading an indictment for murdering a U.S. army sergeant in Panama City. When pressed about his client during the campaign, Craig—a lawyerly lawyer if ever there was—explained that he hadn’t really “undertaken to represent” González in legal “proceedings.” You wouldn’t even really call it lobbying. Instead, Craig explained, he had merely sought “to open up a path of communications” between the fugitive and the Justice Department.
Which is to say, the principal interpreter and enforcer of Obama’s celebrated lobbying rules does not believe that a lawyer’s arranging negotiations between an international fugitive and the federal government constitutes “representing” that fugitive or acting as his agent. Just call him a Good Samaritan. The Obama administration’s response to questions about González has been that familiar rallying cry of openness and transparency: “No comment.”
No discussion of lobbying on behalf of international fugitives should get very far without turning to the case of Eric Holder. Beginning in 1999, when he was deputy attorney general, Holder allowed himself to be lobbied on behalf of Marc Rich (at that time, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives) by an influential Democratic lawyer, Jack Quinn. Until 1997, Quinn had been the Clinton White House counsel, i.e., Clinton’s Greg Craig. He then left for private practice and, by late 1999, had started his own lobbying firm.
Lobbying Holder put Quinn in violation of President Clinton’s own good-government executive order. Like Obama’s order, Clinton’s was announced with great fanfare on the first day of his presidency. It was duly lauded by the press—especially for the five-year lobbying ban it purported to impose on former administration officials. But in Quinn’s view, that ban didn’t apply to him because—try to follow this—he was not so much lobbying an administration official as he was representing a client in a “judicial proceeding.” This was transparently specious: The Justice Department is not a court and a pardon is not a judicial proceeding—to the contrary, a pardon is an executive exercise designed to undo judicial proceedings. But the hocus-pocus reasoning was good enough for Quinn, and that meant it was plenty good enough for Holder, who helped get Rich his pardon.
So Obama’s guidelines will be interpreted and enforced by these two guys. This should prove fruitful for the many lawyers who inevitably drift from the new administration back into more lucrative endeavors: If they’d prefer their legal representation to be low-balled as something less than lobbying, they can go to the White House counsel; if they’d rather dress up their lobbying as legal representation, the attorney general is their man.
Not every lobbyist is a lawyer—though some non-lawyers, such as Tom Daschle, manage to get themselves paid more than a million dollars a year by top law firms. For what? Certainly not for lobbying. At the well-connected firm of Alston and Bird, known in Washington parlance as a “lobbying firm” because it represents lots of lobbyists, Daschle was retained as a “special policy adviser.”
But if you are paid by the legal agents of lobbyists to instruct lobbyists in lobbying, aren’t you, in fact, a lobbyist? Especially considering the fact that the top asset you bring to the table is your Rolodex? Obama thinks not, since Daschle never legally registered as a lobbyist.
“If you’re not registered to lobby, you can’t be a lobbyist.” Thus decreed Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, a man who is starting to make Scott McClellan sound like Elmer Gantry (a fictional character who, unlike most Obama administration figures, only seems to have worked in the Clinton administration). Gibbs’s kindly diagnosis of Daschle brings us to the fine print of the executive order. To “lobby,” the president says, “shall mean to act or have acted as a registered lobbyist.” Presto: no registration, no lobbyist; no lobbyist, no problem—unless you don’t pay your taxes on the millions you’ve earned not lobbying.
But now that we’ve narrowed it down to registered lobbyists, does that mean that we’ve discovered one category of Washington insiders that is, in fact, banned by the ethical standards Gibbs describes as the “strongest that any administration in the history of our country has had”? Not exactly. The order provides that these very stringent rules can be ignored whenever the scrupulous interpreting authorities decide it is in the public interest. Don’t be alarmed: The administration says waivers will only be approved for extraordinarily qualified officials.
Have you ever heard of an administration that did not portray its appointees as extraordinarily qualified? Already we have the extraordinarily qualified William J. Lynn III, the nominee for deputy defense secretary, who got a waiver despite being, up until recently, a lobbyist for the military contractor Raytheon. William Corr will serve as the No. 2 official at the Department of Health and Human Services regardless of the last year he spent as a lobbyist. And then there’s Mark Patterson. He’s now chief of staff to Timothy Geithner, this ethics-obsessed administration’s tax-cheating Treasury secretary, even though Patterson used to be a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs—the outfit that could have patented the revolving door even before scoring $10 billion in TARP money.
Obama says he’s come to Washington to bring change. So far, he’s changing it into Chicago.
National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
Andrew Napolitano's Imaginary Constitution
Andrew Napolitano's Imaginary Constitution, by Matthew J. Franck
Bench Memos/NRO, Friday, February 06, 2009
Today's Wall Street Journal features an exchange on whether the government should cap executive compensation in companies receiving federal assistance. Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk is for 'em—he thinks, indeed, that they should be more stringent than the administration proposes—and former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano is agin 'em. Napolitano would have the better argument if he would stick to what's really wrong with compensation caps—that they're economically counterproductive, politically unwise, and morally objectionable as a species of envy-driven vindictiveness.
But Napolitano can't leave well enough alone. He adds the argument that compensation caps are unconstitutional. Why? "[B]ecause freedom of contract is protected by the Constitution." Oh, really? Where? For about 40 years, from the 1890s to the 1930s, the Court protected (inconsistently, to be sure) something it called "freedom of contract," but it was based on an illegitimate reading of the due process clauses that was cut from the same "substantive due process" cloth that gave us the protection of slavery in the Dred Scott case and of abortion in Roe v. Wade. You don't have to be a fan of the New Deal to recognize how right the Supreme Court got this one when it gave up on this line of reasoning in 1937, with Chief Justice Hughes saying, "What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract."
Napolitano doesn't even attempt to defend his remark about "freedom of contract," but instead moves immediately to saying that compensation caps "also constitute a taking" prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. It has been a hardy perennial in the imaginary constitutional garden of the libertarians to say that all manner of taxes and regulations are "takings" without "just compensation" ever since Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago published his book Takings in the 1980s. But this reading of the Constitution is as insupportable as "freedom of contract" under "substantive" due process, and invites rampant judicial activism—only substituting conservative activism for the liberal variety. All sorts of government regulations of the economy favor some behaviors over others, impinge on people's earning power, and thus in some extremely remote sense "take" resources people would otherwise acquire or keep. The Epstein-Napolitano version of the Constitution would sweep like a scythe through good regulations and bad ones, blatant ones and subtler ones, and without any basis in the original understanding of the document.
The idea of executive compensation caps is a very bad one on all sorts of policy grounds. It is also unjust. But injustice and unconstitutionality are not the same thing, try as Napolitano may to equate them.
Bench Memos/NRO, Friday, February 06, 2009
Today's Wall Street Journal features an exchange on whether the government should cap executive compensation in companies receiving federal assistance. Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk is for 'em—he thinks, indeed, that they should be more stringent than the administration proposes—and former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano is agin 'em. Napolitano would have the better argument if he would stick to what's really wrong with compensation caps—that they're economically counterproductive, politically unwise, and morally objectionable as a species of envy-driven vindictiveness.
But Napolitano can't leave well enough alone. He adds the argument that compensation caps are unconstitutional. Why? "[B]ecause freedom of contract is protected by the Constitution." Oh, really? Where? For about 40 years, from the 1890s to the 1930s, the Court protected (inconsistently, to be sure) something it called "freedom of contract," but it was based on an illegitimate reading of the due process clauses that was cut from the same "substantive due process" cloth that gave us the protection of slavery in the Dred Scott case and of abortion in Roe v. Wade. You don't have to be a fan of the New Deal to recognize how right the Supreme Court got this one when it gave up on this line of reasoning in 1937, with Chief Justice Hughes saying, "What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract."
Napolitano doesn't even attempt to defend his remark about "freedom of contract," but instead moves immediately to saying that compensation caps "also constitute a taking" prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. It has been a hardy perennial in the imaginary constitutional garden of the libertarians to say that all manner of taxes and regulations are "takings" without "just compensation" ever since Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago published his book Takings in the 1980s. But this reading of the Constitution is as insupportable as "freedom of contract" under "substantive" due process, and invites rampant judicial activism—only substituting conservative activism for the liberal variety. All sorts of government regulations of the economy favor some behaviors over others, impinge on people's earning power, and thus in some extremely remote sense "take" resources people would otherwise acquire or keep. The Epstein-Napolitano version of the Constitution would sweep like a scythe through good regulations and bad ones, blatant ones and subtler ones, and without any basis in the original understanding of the document.
The idea of executive compensation caps is a very bad one on all sorts of policy grounds. It is also unjust. But injustice and unconstitutionality are not the same thing, try as Napolitano may to equate them.
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