Is Kamala Harris The One? Not So Fast

Cotton-headed California progressives seem to be so relieved that our neoliberal lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, has decided to forego a Senate run-- who cares about the governorship, anyway?-- that they appear to be falling head over heals in love with Attorney General Kamala Harris based on... I'm not sure. She has a liberalism reputation but no one seems to know much about where she stands on the issues that will face the Senate if she's elected. I noticed a tweet Tuesday morning that indicated she had consulted with... not Elizabeth Warren, not Bernie Sanders, not Jeff Merkley, not Sherrod Brown... but with Wall Street puppet Cory Booker. That's scary. EMILY's List has embraced her with open arms which might be something or might not, but certainly never means anything good.

Guy Saperstein, a Bay Area-based major Democratic donor and strategist and a former president of The Sierra Club Foundation, is one of the few progressive activists not jumping right onto her bandwagon. He seems as wary as I am. Yes, she's an attractive black female but are people asking themselves if there is any real substance or record of achievement that would indicate she's be the best person for this job? Better than Jane Harman, Loretta Sanchez, Adam Schiff, Ellen Tauscher... well sure, but we need to hold our public officials to higher standards than that. Guy put together a few ideas about the picture of Harris he has and agreed to allow me to share it here:

Kamala Harris was a politically unknown assistant DA when she started dating and sleeping with Willie Brown, then the most powerful Democrat in California, a married man 30 years older than her. She parlayed that connection into support by the powerful Brown political machine to challenge and beat the incumbent Democratic San Francisco DA, Terry Hallinan. I don't know what you think about sleeping your way to the top but in my opinion it was not a high-integrity career beginning. Shakespeare warned us of the dangers of unchecked ambition and I think we should take the warning.

Then as DA, she presided over a wholesale violation of the constitutional rights of defendants-- violations so fundamental that nearly 1,000 felony prosecutions had to be dismissed by several very angry judges. There were a variety of incidents, but many of them had to do with the police crime lab failing to provide accurate "chain of custody" for evidence, as well as evidence of police techs stealing evidence.

"Chain of custody" is a technical term, but an important term, that insures, for example, that if someone is prosecuted for possession of drugs, when the police or police experts testify about those drugs, they actually are testifying about the drugs the defendant is being accused of, not just some drugs pulled out of a police file cabinet. "Chain of custody" is something every trial lawyer learns about and DAs deal with every day, but Harris' DA's office not only were screwing it up, but when they knew they were not sure of the chain of custody, they were required by law, Maryland v. Brady, a US Supreme Court case, to disclose any mishaps to defense counsel immediately, which Harris failed to do.

Worse, when caught, Harris tried to deny the problems, then tried to put all the blame on the police. Well, the police were responsible, but DA's present evidence every day and vouch for it and if the DAs don't know they are presenting tainted or the wrong evidence, then they are fucking incompetent or corrupt or both. In fact, as I recall, there was a memo or email written to Harris by the Sheriff or one of her deputies apprising her of the evidence problems and Harris failed to alert defense counsel, as she was constitutionally required to do. As I recall, Harris got personally called in by at least three SF Superior Court judges and just ripped for her malfeasance.

There also were incidents of the DA's office using experts and technicians who had been found by prior courts of being unreliable, one even had been called a "perpetrator of fraud" in her prior job, facts which the Brady case requires DAs to disclose to defense counsel, but which Harris failed to disclose.

If a Republican DA had been guilty of such malfeasance and wholesale violations of constitutional rights, Democrats would have tried to burn him/her alive, but Democrats have preferred to look the other way. I, for one, think that these violations were substantial, important, and that they reveal a pattern of low-integrity behavior which does not warrant giving her more power in a more powerful political office.

My recollection of Harris' performance during the foreclosure settlement isn't that glowing a recommendation for her as others contend. She had to be pushed and the idea for the [homeowner's] bill of rights came from, as I recall, the California Courage Campaign.

There is a very progressive potential alternative to Harris, Dave Jones, a lawyer who currently is California's Insurance Commissioner. Dave is probably the most progressive statewide office-holder in California, but he doesn't have the buzz or money Harris will have.

Harris is far from invulnerable and unless her record is carefully scrutinized and a real debate of ideas in engaged in for California voters, there is-- as unlikely as it would seem-- a chance a Republican could grab the seat. After all, in 2010 Harris beat Republican Steve Cooley 4,443,070 (46.1%) to 4,368,617 (45.3%). And after 4 years in office she was reelected in November against an unknown Republican opponent, Ronald Gold, 4,102,649 (57.5%) to 3,033,476 (42.5%) on the same day Governor Jerry Brown was beating Neel Kashkari 4,388,368 (60%) to 2,929,213 (40%).

UPDATE: STEYER POLLING

Once the rumors about Boxer retiring started picking up steam in December, Tom Steyer hired a polling firm, Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, to take a look at how he might fare. The polling memo was positive, as they usually tend to be. It calls him a "strong contender."

Lest anyone worry how healthy an opinion Steyer, 57, of San Francisco has of himself, the memo was addressed to “Team Cincinnatus”-- presumably referring to the Roman statesman hailed as an icon of virtue, selflessness and humility after twice being chosen for, and then twice resigning, the mantle of dictator in order to protect the republic. Big sandals to fill, there.

The poll conducted from Dec. 18-22 asked 600 California registered Democrats and nonpartisan voters about their priorities; they named the environment-- including climate change, the need for clean-energy jobs, and anti-pollution efforts-- among the three top issues facing California’s next senator, along with education and income inequality. The poll also found:

75 percent would be likely to support a candidate who led the fight to pass Proposition 39, the successful 2012 ballot measure that closed a corporate tax loopholes for out-of-state companies and set some of the revenue aside for schools and clean-energy construction jobs;

79 percent would be likely to support a national leader in promoting new clean energy technologies;

66 percent would be likely to support a candidate who “believes climate change is the biggest challenge of our times”;

66 percent would be likely to support a successful businessman who understands how the global 21st Century economy works; and

65 percent say they would be likely to support a candidate who has committed to giving away the majority of his personal wealth to help the next generation get a fair shake.

All of these questions were asked without any mention of Steyer’s name. Afterward, when respondents were read an actual description of Steyer, 75 percent said they would be likely to support him, including 41 percent who said “very likely.”

Will Hillary Be The Official Candidate Of The Wall Street Plutocrats?

Hillary fans have been grumbling to me about the way I highlighted Mike Lofgren's phrase stuck on awful for the next decade to equate Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Rather than defend myself in a series of emails, I figured I'd say a few words about it, or around it, here at DWT, if you don't mind.

The worst thing-- the most ugly and dysfunctional thing-- about running for office in our democracy is that politicians have to spend most of their time on the phone personally begging campaign donors for money-- hours and hours a day, every day. So when a money machine like Bill Clinton-- and there aren't many like him-- agrees to help raise campaign cash for you, it's a godsend. It's hours of humiliating, frustrating calls you don't have to make in the life and death struggle for political survival. Tuesday, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown had that loving' feeling as Bill Clinton announced 1- and endorsement and 2- that he'd be in Maryland in May to help him raise money.

Tomorrow he'll be in Philly raising money for, as ABC News indelicately termed it, "Chelsea Clinton’s scandal-plagued mother-in-law, Marjorie Margolies."

With the May 20 primary just six weeks away, Margolies will welcome President Clinton to the district for a fundraiser this Thursday. For $1,000, donors can attend an hors d’oeuvres reception and hear Clinton’s remarks. A little bit more-- $5000-- buys a private VIP reception and photo opportunity with Clinton. The event is not open to the public without a donation.

I can't find the photos of me and Clinton, one at a identical VIP reception and one at a state banquet at the White House-- although I know they're around here somewhere. I was so fat both times, I don't keep them handy. I always liked Clinton, not politically, of course-- way too corporate for me-- but personally. What a charming, fun guy! He always want dot talk about music and loved so many of the artists on my label, especially Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks and kd lang. But he asked me to bring Lou Reed to a state dinner in honor of Lou Reed fanatic-- and Czech President Vaclav Havel. How could you not overlook stuff like the passage of NAFTA, the gutting of Glass-Steagall, welfare "reform," Rwanda, the special dispensation for Australian neo-nazi Rupert Murdoch to own American mass media, DOMA and Don't Ask, Don't Tell? And Robert Rubin, as bad as any Treasury Secretary any Republican could ever appoint? And Rahm.

Last May, Clinton was in Los Angeles campaigning and raising money for corrupt corporate careerist nightmare Wendy Greuel in her vicious-- and doomed-- race against Eric Garcetti. Clinton allies financed one of the ugly smear campaigns against Garcetti that backfired so beautifully and elected him mayor. Yes, Clinton's endorsement of the hideous Greuel was supposed to win her the election, but it didn't. Clinton almost always backs the worst possible candidate in Democratic primaries. If you don't know who the candidates are and you hear Bill Clinton is backing one, you can almost be 100% certain that candidate is a corrupt corporate hack. Almost 100%.

Never mind that both Anthony Brown in Maryland and Marjorie Margolies in Pennsylvania-- two more-of-the-same, garden variety hacks, have opponents, respectively Heather Mizeur and Daylin Leach, who are far better candidates and would make extraordinary, possibly transformative, leaders. Clinton isn't looking for extraordinary transformative leaders. In fact, leaders isn't ever what he's pumping for-- followers, in fact, is what he wants… zombies who will be cogs in the Clinton Machine.

Late last year Politico assigned reporters Ben White and Maggie Haberman to take at look at why the Wall Street plutocrats are grumbling ominously about both Obama and the Republicans-- and why so many of their warm remembrances of Bill Clinton are likely to help finance Hillary's run for the presidency. At a fat cat shindig Goldman Sachs put on for Hillary at the Conrad Hotel, she "offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it. What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy-- it needs to stop. And indeed Goldman’s Tim O’Neill, who heads the bank’s asset management business, introduced Clinton by saying how courageous she was for speaking at the bank. (Brave, perhaps, but also well-compensated: Clinton’s minimum fee for paid remarks is $200,000)." One thing that was clear, Hillary Clinton is not Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown, the kinds of senators who will hold them accountable for their avaricious and predatory systematic criminality. Before we start swimming around in this ugly swamp, here's a treat-- the brand new Rick Weiland 30 second spot for his populist campaign for the open South Dakota Senate seat:

To say Wall Street’s initial rosy expectations for its relationship with Barack Obama were dashed would be an understatement. Finance executives--a donor demographic traditionally loaded with Republicans who factored heavily in propelling George W. Bush into the White House-- gave Obama twice as much financial support in 2008 as they did his opponent, GOP Sen. John McCain. Obama established his prowess as a Wall Street fundraiser early in his battle for the Democratic nomination against the well-connected Clinton by cementing a relationship with Blair Effron, a young banker who bundled more than $200,000 for Obama. Effron was first invited into the Obama donor fold by the legendary investor and Democratic philanthropist George Soros in December 2006, when then-Senator Obama was on the verge of launching a presidential campaign.

Obama also secured help from investment executives who had not previously been a part of the Democratic money world-- csupporters like Mark Gallogly, the founder of the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners who inspired a slew of other new donors (“They all saw themselves in [Gallogly],” recalls a Democratic source involved in Obama’s fundraising efforts). Other backers had tough choices to make. For instance, Orin Kramer, the hedge fund manager and head of Boston Providence, had long-established ties to the Clintons. But he went with Obama instead.

In many ways, Obama’s fundraising team was helped by the fact that Clinton already had such a full roster of powerful backers. “In 2007, the Clinton table was set and full. So there were a lot of guys who’d made money between 2000 and 2007 who wanted to play [in politics], and there was no room for them,” says one Democratic source who was involved in Obama’s 2008 fundraising. “We offered this very sexy, very cool alternative for people to have a seat at the table.”

When financial markets crashed just prior to his election, Obama’s cadre of Wall Street supporters expected their donations had earned for them a measure of understanding from the White House. And in keeping with the practice of both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years, the finance executives also felt entitled to at least a couple of significant administration jobs going to one of their own-- not to mention fairly regular access to the president, either via White House visits or get-togethers in New York. After all, they had important policy recommendations to make on everything from financial reform to deficit reduction to trade policy and immigration; previous administrations had a record of being very interested in their views. But under Obama, very little of this happened. “It’s not that there weren’t any meetings. It’s just that nothing ever happened after the meetings, and people fell out of love,” said one senior Wall Street banker who gave to the Obama campaign in 2008 and attended many of the early confabs.

Disillusionment set in quickly as Obama’s disdain for extensive relationships with the Wall Street wealthy became clear. He had no use for the niceties and glad-handing that Bill Clinton elevated to an art form, aided by a Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, who came straight to the job from Goldman Sachs and his role as Clinton’s top Wall Street rainmaker. One senior Wall Street executive says his realization that the financial industry under Obama would instead become a regular punching bag dates to a meeting in early 2009 with then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. According to this executive, Emanuel told an assembled group of financiers that the administration did not plan to “waste” the financial crisis-- a common refrain of his in public and private-- and would push for the strongest Wall Street reform measures possible, including having the White House respond swiftly and brutally to any industry efforts to water down the final product.

“I knew right at that moment, standing in Rahm’s office, that they did not really have any interest in understanding Wall Street or working with us in any significant way,” says the executive, who, like most interviewed for this article, spoke on condition that they not be identified by name or by firm to avoid possible political retribution.

Despite Emanuel’s own foray in banking (he earned more than $18 million in a two-and-a-half year stint as a managing director in the investment firm Wasserstein Perella) there was a prevailing sense among these Wall Street Democrats that nobody in the White House understood the industry. Bankers could certainly present their arguments to first-term Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whom many knew from Geithner’s tenure as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but they believed that was as much of a hearing as they would get. “Tim was someone everyone knew and could talk to, but beyond him it’s fair to say the business community was uniquely without influence,” one senior Wall Street executive says of the early days of the Obama administration. And besides, while Geithner had deep relationships on Wall Street and pushed Obama hard to follow through on the Bush-initiated Wall Street bailout, he also worked hard to push tough financial reform and was not inclined to be seen as going soft on banks receiving those huge federal checks.

Elsewhere in the New York investment community, private equity and hedge fund officials who had backed Obama quickly and publicly turned on him over White House attempts to raise the tax rates on their investment returns and their profits from sales on investment management partnerships. They argued they were being targeted unfairly.

Instead of turning to an insider like Bill Clinton had with Rubin, Obama put his close friend and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett in charge of managing relationships with Wall Street and corporate America more broadly. From the start, the feeling across the financial industry was that while Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman and attorney, was smart and friendly and for the most part accessible. But she knew almost nothing about how the banking and finance industry worked and was interested only in pushing the administration’s agenda, rather than engaging in any kind of dialogue about how to foster better economic growth in the wake of the financial crisis.

…[T]he president’s Wall Street donor class felt stung again in September 2010, when Obama appeared on 60 Minutes and doubled down on his disdain for the rich guys, saying he “did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.” Obama said “nothing had been more frustrating to him” than to “salvage a financial system at great expense to taxpayers” from a calamity “that was caused in part by completely irresponsible actions on Wall Street.” What’s more, he thundered, “People on Wall Street still don’t get it.”

Many in the financial sector saw the interview as the end of their relationship with the Obama administration. “The ‘fat cat’ and ‘throw everyone in jail’ stuff pretty much did it,” says one executive who later supported Mitt Romney. The White House was never inclined to apologize. “Sure, the rhetoric got hot,” one administration official who worked with the financial industry told us. “We were trying to pass financial reform, and they didn’t want it.”

The disappointment in the White House wasn’t just politics; it was personal, adds one senior Wall Street banker who had supported Obama: “A lot of people began to feel attacked and singled out in inappropriate ways they did not feel were fair.” The sour feelings festered through the 2012 campaign, when Wall Street all but abandoned Obama, pouring more than $20 million into Romney’s failed effort, compared with the $6 million the president got.

…Ordinarily such dissatisfaction with one political party would redound to the benefit of the other. But Wall Street donors have been equally turned off by the GOP for much of 2013. Even when Romney, a corporate executive like them, ran for president in 2012, he failed to earn the adoration of the donors who twice had helped propel Bush to the White House. Romney was, in the words of one former Bush campaign bundler, “the worst messenger in the world. … I can’t believe the shit that comes out of his mouth.”

Even before he’d lost the 2012 presidential election (indeed, even before he’d won his party’s nomination), Romney was thought of as a bad bet by some on Wall Street, who were instead falling fast for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie-- the candidate with the best chances at winning the support of bankers in the next presidential election. In July 2011, Christie ventured across the Hudson to the exclusive Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where he found roughly 40 of New York’s wealthiest men waiting for him.

The meeting, called by club member and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, was held in a private wood-paneled dining room and stuffed with eager business leaders urging Christie to jump into the 2012 race. The disembodied voice of David Koch, the co-owner of Koch Industries and a major GOP benefactor, was piped into the room by conference call, as was that of hedge funder Paul Singer, the CEO of Elliott Management, an attendee told Politico Magazine. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, stood and pleaded with the governor to enter the presidential race for the good of his country. Christie would, of course, resist their pleas, becoming perhaps even more alluring to those on Wall Street as a prospect for 2016.

…But a shift back to Wall Street’s historic Republican roots is by no means a given, especially if the Democratic nominee is local favorite Hillary Clinton-- and the former New York senator has been shrewdly tending to would-be donors for much of the last year, whether in the form of speaking engagements like the one at Goldman this fall, or by glad-handing as she helps to raise $250 million for her family’s foundation. Lasry, fresh off a fundraising tour of duty on the Terry McAuliffe campaign for governor in Virginia, figures to be a critical component of an expected Clinton run; he is described as a likely contender to fill the role of Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, McAuliffe’s post in her 2008 bid.

The worry on Wall Street is about how far to the left Clinton might have to drift to appease what’s been proclaimed the “Warren wing of the Democratic Party”-- the vocal populists buoyed by Elizabeth Warren’s tough critiques of Wall Street greed, as well as by the recent election of liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio on their New York home turf. According to people in Clinton’s extended circle, John Podesta-- the former White House chief of staff under her husband who this week joined the Obama White House for a year-long stint-- was poised to work with Hillary Clinton on her messaging on income inequality, a role he seems less likely to fill while he's in government. Still, some say fears that Clinton will end up alienating financial sector donors the way Obama has, even if she tacks left, are overblown. “Wall Street folks are so happy about [having Clinton run] that they won’t care what she says,” says one well-placed Democrat.

And if the banking class is delighted with Clinton lately, the feeling appears mutual. In Manhattan last week, Clinton sat down with the Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein for their second question-and-answer session in the last two months. Unlike the first one, held for his private equity firm’s investor conference, this was a more public appearance, part of a program honoring the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clinton easily regaled the well-heeled crowd with stories from her past before Rubenstein ended their half-hour chat with a joke about her future: Would she be interested in joining a private equity firm?

“Is that an offer?” Clinton asked, laughing as the audience knowingly joined in. She may soon need many things from the titans of finance, but a job is probably not one of them.

Yeah… so stuck on awful for the next decade. Or more. Blue America has never endorsed anyone in a presidential election and you can rest assured that Hillary Clinton won't be the first. Instead, we ask our readers to contemplate a simple question, Why Settle? Really, why? The lesser of two evils, as we like to say, is still evil.

Over A Third Of The People In The World Live In India And China

"We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign-- foreign from top to bottom-- foreign from center to circumference-- foreign inside and outside and all around-- nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness-- nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! in Tangier we have found it."

-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Having lived in Europe and Asia for nearly 7 years after college, I was always a bit of a globalist when it came to the business world. After I returned to the U.S., my own indie record company survived because I was able to make lucrative distribution and publishing deals abroad. And when I was at Warner Bros. I was one of the few advocates for internationalizing our approach and our business model. Aside from the folks who actually worked in our international department, and the folks who ran the foreign-based subsidiaries, there was one other real champion for this approach, the legendary Sire Records chairman, Seymour Stein, who first brought me into Warner Bros. Like me, Seymour is a world traveler and someone who appreciates foreign history and culture in every way-- from food, style, and literature to movies and, of course, music. He called the other day, having just landed in L.A. after a trip to Beijing and Shanghai. He's making a record in China and is always, always, always fostering relations with and bolstering in every way he can the music business in China. And India. He's been a one-man globalization team. No one in the home office understands what he's doing and many take that a step further and express that ignorance very negatively. But Seymour is a force of nature and he just keeps chugging along. He sure inspired me to do likewise when I worked there.

China has a population of 1,340,570,000 (almost 20% of the world). India has a population of 1,190,080,000 (just over 17% of the world). The U.S. has the third biggest population, 310,688,000, a billion less people than China. And we account for 4.5% of the world's population. When I went to work at Warner Bros, the attitude-- often verbalized-- was that we're an American company and whatever we make by selling our music overseas was "gravy." I remember hearing that in a meeting one day when we were going over sales figures that showed our biggest artists-- Madonna, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. all had records out at that moment-- were selling far more records outside the U.S. than inside the U.S. So were some of our "baby bands," like the Ramones and Talking Heads. And a significant-- and growing-- amount of business was being generated by artists our affiliates or A&R guys had signed abroad, from Depeche Mode, Erasure and The Smiths to Nick Cave, Barenaked Ladies and Enya. The gravy was drowning the main course.

Americans tend towards the insular and can even imagine they're dealing with someone from Iowa when negotiating with someone from India or China. Sometimes unexpected or even bad experiences make people think it isn't worth the trouble. That's a mistake; it just has to be done right.

Some years ago I was visiting our Indian company in Mumbai. I was the first executive from the home office to do so and it was a big deal. The head guy took me to see a store whose entire window was covered in Chris Isaak posters. That might have impressed me if I hadn't lived in India for 2 years and recognized that the posters would be down within 2 minutes of our driving away. But something worse happened as well. I got an urgent fax from our international chief back in L.A. telling me to immediately stop meeting with the head of our Indian company and to call home as soon as possible. Turns out the head guy was buying CDs at a very low intra-company rate from our German affiliate and then returning them at the full rate, pocketing the difference. Ah... Asia.

Obama's trip to South Korea didn't work out very well, because Korea was not going to give an inch when it came to protecting domestic beef producers while Obama was more in tune to making sure U.S. auto workers (and Ford Motors) weren't sacrificed for a free trade agreement, the way these agreements were always done under Bush-- and the way Boehner had been pushing for it to be done again. But in India, at least on the surface, it looks like Obama may have done well, actually working on "$15 billion worth of contracts that will support 53,670 American jobs" and putting the U.S. in a good position to get a piece of the trillion dollars India plans to spend of infrastructure projects between 2012 and 2017.

Neither India nor China is Iowa-- far from it. As Robyn Meredith pointed out in her NY Times best seller The Elephant and the Dragon, the definitive book on Indian and Chinese economic development, the pollution from a nearly unfettered policy of economic development is almost beyond imagining.

Nothing can prepare visitors for the pollution in China... One of the worst places to breathe on the planet is the world's biggest city: Chongqing, China, with a population of 30 million people counting the exurbs, about the same number of people as live in the entire state of California. There the New China coexists with the Old China: skyscrapers and construction sites decorate downtown, but scrawny bong-bong men wait for work on street corners. Bong-bong men are paid sixty cents an hour to ferry heavy loads-- from building materials to groceries-- up and down the city's hilly streets using bamboo poles slung over their shoulders. They must have powerful lungs, not just strong legs: the city is half dark most days. Sunlight barely reaches the ground, dimmed by thick, gray smog. Skyscrapers just three blocks away are mere outlines because of air pollution. Emerging from the inside of a building onto the streets prompts one's eyes to water. The air is filthy but that is not all. The raw sewage produced by 30 million people-- 30 million-- is dumped straight into the Yangtze River as it flows past. The countryside nearby is not the place to go for fresh air: there you notice that the leaves of trees-- along with everything else-- are coated with black dust from the coal mines and factories in the region. More acid rain falls on Chongqing than anywhere else on earth.

...Nearly a third of China's rivers are so polluted that they aren't even fit for agriculture or industrial use, according to Chinese government statistics. Village doctors have documented increased cancer rates near polluting factories and chemical plants. Untreated waste water dumped into China's famed Yangtse River is killing marine life and turning its water "cancerous," according to Xinhua, the state-controlled media outlet.

...Lack of enforcement of environmental laws is also a big problem in India. Its capital city, Delhi, used to have pollution levels ten times higher than the nation's legal limit, mostly because of the high-pollution taxis, trucks and buses on its roads. Delhi has the world's worst air pollution in 2002, but managed to clean up its filthy air after being taken to task by India's Supreme Court. The overhaul began in 1997. Some steps were long overdue: the city finally banned lead gas. However belatedly, the city reduced pollution from Delhi's power plants by installing scrubber to clean up smokestack emissions and requiring them to burn cleaner coal. It banished motorized rickshaws and buses built before 1990 from the roads. In 1998, the court required all city buses to run on compressed natural gas (CNG)-- a cleaner fuel than gasoline-- by 2001... Just 10 percent of sewage is treated in India, with the rest dumped into waterways, along with industrial pollution. India's rivers-- even the holy Ganges-- have become sewers.

While bearing in mind that India planning and India doing are only tangentially related, it is about time the U.S. start taking the trade situation with India seriously. India has had a very well-protected economy but it has been coming out of that, in fits and starts, in the last years. Also keeping in mind that there really are two Indias and that the bigger India is a long way off from being consumers of anything that we make in America, the inequity of U.S.-India trade has been startling. Here's a report I got from the Alliance for American Manufacturing last week:

• India has a steel policy to promote its industry, as well as a $60 billion call/service center industry built on outsourcing.

• The U.S. goods trade deficit with India in 2010 will be more than double the $4.7 billion deficit in 2009.  Through August, 2010 the U.S. trade deficit with India had already reached $7.0 billion. 

• Big U.S. companies are investing in India instead of the U.S.:

1. Motorola performs 40% of its software development in India. 

2. GM has 2 research labs in India.  Pfizer has outsourced significant drug development to India. 

3. Microsoft employs more than 4000 workers in India, and its largest development center outside of the U.S. is in India. 

4. Intel has 2500 R&D workers in India, with more than $1 billion in additional planned investments.

• According the 2010 National Trade Estimate by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, regarding U.S. trade with India:  

1. "U.S. exporters continue to encounter tariff and nontariff barriers that impede imports of U.S. products."

2. Regarding intellectual property rights, "India was listed on the Priority Watch List in the 2009 Special 301 report."

3. "India maintains restrictions on the export of certain high-grade iron ore. These restrictions reduce Indian exports of these inputs, and may reduce supplies on international markets for raw materials used in steel production. The Indian government appears to be using these measures to improve the availability and lower prices of inputs used by India's rapidly growing steel industry."

Said Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) Executive Director Scott Paul: "India is to American office parks as China is to American factories.  Unless we change course, we're going to see higher trade deficits, more job loss, and deeper frictions, despite periodic announcements about one-off business deals."

Here at DWT there has been a consistent drumbeat against unfair "free" trade policies. But this isn't necessarily that should be used to demonize other countries, not India or even China. As an old friend Guy Saperstein pointed out to me yesterday, America's constant search for a villain sometimes needs go no further than a mirror. "The real problem," he insists, "is that we simply spend too much and save too little." And Guy has some sensible suggestions:

Changing our tax policy could do a lot towards solving our trade deficit problem. Scrap the present tax system and institute a greatly simplified system that lowers income taxes and greatly increases tax on energy and encourages savings. A simpler system alone would save the government and consumers $2-300 billion annually. Approximately half of our trade deficit [$600 billion annually] is the importation of oil. Instead of gas at the pump being one of the lowest in the world we should be at $7-8/gal with a constantly increasing tax in future years so consumers know the price will be rising. That will drive conservation and better protect our currency.
 
China is investing $15 billion in developing an electric car industry. They will be producing the kind of products we need to buy. Where are we?
 
They are investing billions in alternative energy. More in stem cell research. Incredible amounts in transportation systems.
 
AND THEY DON'T SPEND HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS ON WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST. EVEN IF WE COULD WIN IN AFGHANISTAN [an impossible expectation] WHAT WOULD WE WIN? China conserves its military resources; we squander ours maintaining 800 military bases around the world and engaging in counterproductive, expensive wars.
 
There should be no question why our currency is weak, which allows the Chinese leverage they would not ordinarily have.
 
We need to modify our own behavior, not blame the Chinese.

The Sotomayor nomination may be safe, but at what cost for future Supreme Court picks?

"There was something distasteful about Sotomayor’s being lectured on civil rights by the likes of Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, whose own retrograde views on race back in 1986 led to his being rejected for a federal judgeship by the very committee on which he now serves."

-- Jeffrey Toobin, in his July 20 New Yorker "Comment"

on the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings

by Ken

I imagine a lot of folks on our side of the war for the soul of the federal judiciary are breathing easier after the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee seem to have blown their wad in the hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. They were so lame, it was hard to tell whether they were just going through the motions or are just, well, that lame.

After watching "Little Jeff" Sessions at work, though, I have to say I'm inclined more to the they're-just-that-lame theory. I think the Senate Republicans thought they were upgrading their attack-dog profile by slotting Little Jeff into the SJC ranking minority member slot vacated by the hated turncoat Arlen Specter. I don't doubt that Little Jeff has all the viciousness and hatred and ignorance necessary for a high-profile demagogue; he just doesn't appear to have any communications skills, which are traditionally highly prized in demagoguery. He seems to have more the cunning of Wile E. Coyote, watching his latest scheme for Road Runner neutralization blow up in his face. (I still say the R's should have Henry Gibson playing Little Jeff.)

In the larger scheme, though, I'm still thinking about the SJC hearings in the context of the point I tried to make this morning: that all these battles the R's are losing don't necessarily mean they're losing the war, taking the long view.

Really and truly, in the absence of something really damning, what were the chances the nomination was going to be shot down? I suppose there was always the possibility of a filibuster, but were the R's really prepared to face the electorate after doing that to a Hispanic woman of such impeccable legal credentials? Oh, they had their mini-gotchas, the "making policy" remark," and the "wise Latina" one, and then the Ricci case. But even master obfuscators would have had a tough time cashing in those meager chips.

Still, it seems to me dangerous to underestimate the amount of damage the "Just Say No"-ers inflicted, to be applied to the next Supreme Court nomination, which is once again much likelier to be one of the remaining moderates rather than one of the neanderthals being replaced, meaning that on our side we're going to be fighting just to hold our ground..

Now I hope no one was surprised by my reference to "one of the remaining moderates." Surely there isn't anyone who thinks there are any actual liberals among what is casually referred to in the Infotainment News Media as the Court's "liberal bloc"? Like who? These are fine, honest folk, who performed heroic service during the Dark Ages of the Bush regime, but they're not liberals.

Is there any way we can ever repay our debt to Justice John Paul Stevens? Remember, he was within months of his 81st birthday when Chimpy the Prez took the oath of office, and any hope that he might merely have to survive another four years was dashed in the 2004 election. It's possible that the justice, apparently in good physical and mental health, would have chosen to remain on the Court anyway, but the fact is, he was pretty much deprived of the option of retirement.

(Ironically, the justice who probably helped install Chimpy as president precisely so she could retire, Sandra Day O'Connor, may have left with more regrets than she expected, as she watches the transformation wrought since her departure by the advent of the two new justices. Justice O'Connor was a bona fide conservative, but in case after case the XXXXXXs of the Roberts Court are going places she knows perfectly well they wouldn't, couldn't have gone with her still sitting.)

That said, it doesn't make Justice Stevens a "liberal." Justice William Brennan was a liberal. Justice Thurgood Marshall was a liberal. These folks, honorable justices all, are moderates.

And both the selection of Judge Sotomayor and the process by which she appears to be securing confirmation are stacking the deck even more against the appointment of a liberal judge to the Court at any time in the foreseeable future -- even if we had a president inclined to make such an appointment, which I'm sure not persuaded we do at the moment. I think "moderates" may be just fine for President Obama.

As a piece of political calculation, as I've already written, the Sotomayor selection was brilliant. It became apparent pretty quickly that it wasn' going to be necessary to read all of her huge number of judicial opinions to know that this was not a judge who had a secret "liberal streak" that had to be hidden. Now, Justice Sotomayor (to jump the gun a little) may yet surprise us; there's no such thing as dead certainty when it comes to Supreme Court justices, who -- once confirmed -- are about as beyond the reach of detractors as anybody in the workforce gets. But I think the R naysayers knew pretty quickly that they weren't dealing with a closet liberal. The judge's participation in the panel that ruled against firefighter Frank Ricci in the New Haven case may have been an undeserved gift for the R's, but surely none of them are so lame-brained as to believe they had found evidence of a disguise masking her "liberalism."

Does this mean that the next Court nominees will have to be as visibly moderate? Well, maybe even more so, since they aren't likely to have the secret weapons of Judge Sotomayor's gender and ethnicity.

And does this mean that those next nominees are going to have to maintain the fiction that the criterion for appeals-court judging is, plain and simple, applying the law?

Jeffrey Toobin expresses regret in his July 20 New Yorker "Comment" piece on last week's hearings:

In fact, Justices have a great deal of discretion—in which cases they take, in the results they reach, in the opinions they write. When it comes to interpreting the Constitution—in deciding, say, whether a university admissions office may consider an applicant’s race—there is, frankly, no such thing as “law.” In such instances, Justices make choices, based largely, though not exclusively, on their political views of the issues involved. In reaching decisions this way, the Justices are not doing anything wrong; there is no other way to interpret the majestic vagueness of the Constitution. But the fact that Judge Sotomayor managed to avoid discussing any of this throughout four days of testimony is indicative of the way the confirmation process, as it is now designed, misleads the public about what it is that Justices do.

For once that blowhard Sen. John Cornyn wasn't wrong when he said that Judge Sotomayor's answers explaining her judicial philosophy made her sound exactly like Chief Justice Roberts, who of course is even less a believer than Judge Sotomayor that the job consists of just-applying-the-law.

Oh, Toobin understands why nominees of all ideological persuasions have arrived at the practical wisdom that during the confirmation process you say nothing of substance, and especially nothing that can be used as ammunition against them. Nevertheless, he makes a great point: We have now more or less officially conceded that the subject of what judges actually do is too complicated to be discussed with, or even in front of, the American people.

And once again whole areas of public and legal policy have been declared off limits, not just as subjects of discussion, but perhaps also as areas of belief that can disqualify future Supreme Court (and lower federal court) nominees. There was, most notably, the grotesque spectacle of a vile toad like Little Jeff Sessions playing the race card, just the way Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan would -- well, did. Toobin writes aptly:

There was something distasteful about Sotomayor’s being lectured on civil rights by the likes of Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, whose own retrograde views on race back in 1986 led to his being rejected for a federal judgeship by the very committee on which he now serves. (One of the more cringe-worthy moments of the hearing was Sessions’s expression of incredulity that Sotomayor might disagree with another judge on her court even though he was also Puerto Rican.)

To focus on just one point, in the extreme case -- by which I mean the ignorant and rawly hate-filled mouthing off we heard from Buchanan, most notably in the infamous interview with Rachel Maddow. Buchanan, as I've pointed out, has managed to turn the very idea of affirmative action into something shameful and unworthy. As I wrote, "In the lunar landscape that is Pat Buchanan's brain, 'affirmative action' is nothing more than a piece of the massive plot -- watch out, the plotters are everywhere! -- to cheat white males, the very people who made America what it is, out of their rightful share of the pie, which is all of it."

As a result, there's hardly any point documenting what I assume are typically Buchananite misrepresentations of Judge Sotomayor's own relationship to affirmative action. After all, confronted with the issue of her outstanding academic record at Princeton, poor Pat actually blithered on about everybody knowing about Ivy Leaguers all getting those high grades. At that point, I find it unfathomable that whoever at MSNBC is responsible for signing his paychecks, or a flunky thereof, didn't simply walk onto the set gun in hand and put the pile of puke out of his misery. As it is, as I say there's no point going back to the judge's testimony, because she would have had no reason to speak of affirmative action with any measure of hostility or derision.

People like Rush and Pat have done everything they could to load the term just that way in the American imagination -- hey, them my-norities is gittin' special vantages! But by being afraid to answer them, again on the assumption that the American people are too stupid to understand the real issues, we have more or less allowed them to define those issues. It is, I tell you, one creepy experience to see and hear Rush Limbaugh announce that of course Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Your impulse is to say, "And you would know, huh, Rush?" But of course he wouldn't, or at least he wouldn't say, not publicly. When he's among his own kind, he can brag about his racism, but of course it isn't real racism that Judge Sotomayor was being accused of.

I was feeling pretty glum about this state of affairs when a colleague who has actual experience with affirmative action, and by experience I mean 25 years litigating affirmative-action cases, offered the first sense I've heard in, well, a while, on the subject.

I was going to cherry-pick a few paragraphs, but in the end I think I'm going to quote the whole piece, which isn't that long, with just a bit of highlighting of points so basic that we need to find a way to make them part of the national understanding.

Pat Buchanan Continues His Racist Attacks on Sotomayor

By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet. Posted July 17, 2009.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan attacked Sonia Sotomayor, specifically, and affirmative action, in general. Included in his attack were such claims as "this has been a country built basically by white folks," that Sotomayor was purely an affirmative-action candidate who lacks real credentials and his suggestion that we need more white, male Supreme Court nominees -- like Robert Bork -- despite the fact that 108 of the 110 Supreme Court justices in our nation's history have been white.

What opponents of affirmative action like Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males -- and you don't have to go back to the Founding Fathers to see this in action.

If you go back to the 1950s, which Buchanan apparently wants to do, and look at the major private universities, you would find that 20 to 30 percent of the admissions were "legacies" -- people who got there not on merit but because they were the sons of alumni and donors. George W. Bush, of course, is the poster child for this generation of affirmative action babies.

I'd like to see Buchanan, or any conservative, defend Bush's admission to Yale on the basis of merit. And I'd like to stack up Bush's credentials next to Sotomayor's and ask which one was more deserving of admission to a major university, or the bench, or the presidency, or anything.

The white-male affirmative action that bozos like Bush benefited from and want to protect was a monopoly of opportunities; monopolies work to undermine healthy competition and produce bad results.

The affirmative action that emerged from the 1960s civil rights movement was an effort not only to promote diversity of people and opportunities, but to democratize opportunities so that white-male hierarchies did not automatically get all the perks. This has been healthy for America, not only because society has become more diverse, but also because it now is less likely that the truly unqualified -- the frat boys like GWB with no academic credentials and problems with excessive alcohol consumption [but a connected family] -- are not automatically passed on to graduate schools, and then on to unsuccessful business careers, not to mention catastrophic political careers.

I prosecuted employment discrimination class actions for 25 years, in the process forcing many major corporations to hire and promote women, minorities, older people and the disabled. In every single case I had, when the case was over and the workforce was integrated, no matter how bitter the litigation had been, the companies would confide in me that their workforces after "affirmative action" were stronger, more competitive, more productive.

Affirmative action has been good for American business and good for America. Indeed, corporate America, which has seen the benefits of fair-employment practices firsthand, long ago abandoned opposition to it. Too bad racists like Buchanan have failed to pay attention to what really has happened in the American workforce, and in America, over the past 40 years.

Guy T. Saperstein is a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation; previously, he was one of the National Law Journal’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America."

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