Thomas Friedman-- The Bride Stripped Bare

Robert Naiman, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, recently described NY Times proud neo-liberal columnist Thomas Friedman as "the U.S.-affiliated atrocity apologist columnist of last resort. In case of emergency, break glass. Can't get anyone else to be an apologist for this U.S.-affiliated atrocity? Call Thomas Friedman. That Time Tom Friedman said the Iraq War was All About Telling Muslims "To Suck. On. This.. Thomas Friedman, Iraq war booster... Thomas Friedman Can't Stop Comparing Afghanistan to a "Special Needs Baby".

The guy has always been a fucking idiot-- but, like Paul Ryan until the last couple of years-- the Beltway punditocracy has created a myth that he has a clue what he's talking about. His new column, romanticizing Saudi Arabia's newest despot, is beyond contemptible. Kidding ass in Riyadh, he wrote that he never thought he’d "live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia. Yes, you read that right. Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi style." I knew I should have turned the page at that point but... you know how hard is to take your eyes off a smoldering car wreck. Everything he wrote about one of the most corrupt places on earth is just flat out wrong-- to the point that almost makes me wonder if the Saudis gave him something (cash? a drug? a night in a harem?)

Unlike the other Arab Springs-- all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia-- this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success-- but only a fool would not root for it.

To better understand it I flew to Riyadh to interview the crown prince, known as “M.B.S.,” who had not spoken about the extraordinary events here of early November, when his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail-- the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton-- until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day.

We met at night at his family’s ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja, north of Riyadh. M.B.S. spoke in English, while his brother, Prince Khalid, the new Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and several senior ministers shared different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation. After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.

We started with the obvious question: What’s happening at the Ritz? And was this his power play to eliminate his family and private sector rivals before his ailing father, King Salman, turns the keys of the kingdom over to him?



It’s “ludicrous,” he said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab. He pointed out that many prominent members of the Ritz crowd had already publicly pledged allegiance to him and his reforms, and that “a majority of the royal family” is already behind him. This is what happened, he said: “Our country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today. The calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government spending was siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom. Over the years the government launched more than one ‘war on corruption’ and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.”

So when his father, who has never been tainted by corruption charges during his nearly five decades as governor of Riyadh, ascended to the throne in 2015 (at a time of falling oil prices), he vowed to put a stop to it all, M.B.S. said:

“My father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to collect all the information about corruption-- at the top. This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they came up with about 200 names.”

When all the data was ready, the public prosecutor, Saud al-Mojib, took action, M.B.S. said, explaining that each suspected billionaire or prince was arrested and given two choices: “We show them all the files that we have and as soon as they see those about 95 percent agree to a settlement,” which means signing over cash or shares of their business to the Saudi state treasury.

“About 1 percent,” he added, “are able to prove they are clean and their case is dropped right there. About 4 percent say they are not corrupt and with their lawyers want to go to court. Under Saudi law, the public prosecutor is independent. We cannot interfere with his job-- the king can dismiss him, but he is driving the process... We have experts making sure no businesses are bankrupted in the process”-- to avoid causing unemployment.

“How much money are they recovering?” I asked.

The public prosecutor says it could eventually “be around $100 billion in settlements,” said M.B.S.

There is no way, he added, to root out all corruption from top to the bottom, “So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is, ‘You will not escape.’ And we are already seeing the impact,” like people writing on social media, “I called my middle man and he doesn’t answer.” Saudi business people who paid bribes to get services done by bureaucrats are not being prosecuted, explained M.B.S. “It’s those who shook the money out of the government”-- by overcharging and getting kickbacks.

The stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

But one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

But guess what? This anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual and important initiative launched by M.B.S. The first is to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation-- whence it diverted in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S. described to a recent global investment conference here as a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples.”

I know that year well. I started my career as a reporter in the Middle East in Beirut in 1979, and so much of the region that I have covered since was shaped by the three big events of that year: the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi puritanical extremists-- who denounced the Saudi ruling family as corrupt, impious sellouts to Western values; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

These three events together freaked out the Saudi ruling family at the time, and prompted it to try to shore up its legitimacy by allowing its Wahhabi clerics to impose a much more austere Islam on the society and by launching a worldwide competition with Iran’s ayatollahs over who could export more fundamentalist Islam. It didn’t help that the U.S. tried to leverage this trend by using Islamist fighters against Russia in Afghanistan. In all, it pushed Islam globally way to the right and helped nurture 9/11.

M.B.S. is on a mission to bring Saudi Islam back to the center. He has not only curbed the authority of the once feared Saudi religious police to berate a woman for not covering every inch of her skin, he has also let women drive. And unlike any Saudi leader before him, he has taken the hard-liners on ideologically. As one U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S. “uses a different language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s not sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.”

Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam-- we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins-- and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

Then one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s-- women without heads covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.

If this virus of an antipluralistic, misogynistic Islam that came out of Saudi Arabia in 1979 can be reversed by Saudi Arabia, it would drive moderation across the Muslim world and surely be welcomed here where 65 percent of the population is under 30.

One middle-age Saudi banker said to me: “My generation was held hostage by 1979. I know now that my kids will not be hostages.” Added a 28-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur: “Ten years ago when we talked about music in Riyadh it meant buying a CD-- now it is about the concert next month and what ticket are you buying and which of your friends will go with you.”

Saudi Arabia would have a very long way to go before it approached anything like Western standards for free speech and women’s rights. But as someone who has been coming here for almost 30 years, it blew my mind to learn that you can hear Western classical music concerts in Riyadh now, that country singer Toby Keith held a men-only concert here in September, where he even sang with a Saudi, and that Lebanese soprano Hiba Tawaji will be among the first woman singers to perform a women-only concert here on Dec. 6. And M.B.S told me, it was just decided that women will be able to go to stadiums and attend soccer games. The Saudi clerics have completely acquiesced.

The Saudi education minister chimed in that among a broad set of education reforms, he’s redoing and digitizing all textbooks, sending 1,700 Saudi teachers each year to world-class schools in places like Finland to upgrade their skills, announcing that for the first time Saudi girls will have physical education classes in public schools and this year adding an hour to the Saudi school day for kids to explore their passions in science and social issues, under a teacher’s supervision, with their own projects.

So many of these reforms were so long overdue it’s ridiculous. Better late than never, though.

On foreign policy, M.B.S. would not discuss the strange goings on with Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon coming to Saudi Arabia and announcing his resignation, seemingly under Saudi pressure, and now returning to Beirut and rescinding that resignation. He simply insisted that the bottom line of the whole affair is that Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, is not going to continue providing political cover for a Lebanese government that is essentially controlled by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, which is essentially controlled by Tehran.

He insisted that the Saudi-backed war in Yemen, which has been a humanitarian nightmare, was tilting in the direction of the pro-Saudi legitimate government there, which, he said is now in control of 85 percent of the country, but given the fact that pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, who hold the rest, launched a missile at Riyadh airport, anything less than 100 percent is still problematic.

His general view seemed to be that with the backing of the Trump administration-- he praised President Trump as “the right person at the right time”-- the Saudis and their Arab allies were slowly building a coalition to stand up to Iran. I am skeptical. The dysfunction and rivalries within the Sunni Arab world generally have prevented forming a unified front up to now, which is why Iran indirectly controls four Arab capitals today-- Damascus, Sana, Baghdad and Beirut. That Iranian over-reach is one reason M.B.S. was scathing about Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s “supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.” What matters most, though, is what Saudi Arabia does at home to build its strength and economy.

But can M.B.S. and his team see this through? Again, I make no predictions. He has his flaws that he will have to control, insiders here tell me. They include relying on a very tight circle of advisers who don’t always challenge him sufficiently, and a tendency to start too many things that don’t get finished. There’s a whole list. But guess what? Perfect is not on the menu here. Someone had to do this job-- wrench Saudi Arabia into the 21st century-- and M.B.S. stepped up. I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.

And so are a lot of young Saudis. There was something a 30-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur said to me that stuck in my ear. “We are privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.” The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never imagine a day when a woman could drive and the coming generation will never be able to imagine a day when a woman couldn’t.

“But I will always remember not being able to drive,” she told me. And the fact that starting in June that will never again be so “gives me so much hope. It proves to me that anything is possible-- that this is a time of opportunity. We have seen things change and we are young enough to make the transition.”

This reform push is giving the youth here a new pride in their country, almost a new identity, which many of them clearly relish. Being a Saudi student in post-9/11 America, young Saudis confess, is to always feel you are being looked at as a potential terrorist or someone who comes from a country locked in the Stone Age.

Now they have a young leader who is driving religious and economic reform, who talks the language of high tech, and whose biggest sin may be that he wants to go too fast. Most ministers are now in their 40s-- and not 60s. And with the suffocating hand of a puritanical Islam being lifted, it’s giving them a chance to think afresh about their country and their identity as Saudis.

“We need to restore our culture to what it was before the [Islamic] radical culture took over,” a Saudi woman friend who works with an N.G.O. said to me. ”`We have 13 regions in this country, and they each have a different cuisine. But nobody knows that. Did you know that? But I never saw one Saudi dish go global. It is time for us to embrace who we are and who we were.”

Alas, who Saudi Arabia is also includes a large cohort of older, more rural, more traditional Saudis, and pulling them into the 21st century will be a challenge. But that’s in part why every senior bureaucrat is working crazy hours now. They know M.B.S. can call them on the phone at any of those hours to find out if something he wanted done is getting done. I told him his work habits reminded me of a line in the play Hamilton, when the chorus asks: Why does he always work like “he’s running out of time.”

“Because,” said M.B.S., "I fear that the day I die I am going to die without accomplishing what I have in my mind. Life is too short and a lot of things can happen, and I am really keen to see it with my own eyes-- and that is why I am in a hurry.”

Even if the torture allegations turn out to be false, this whole operation appears to be part of a Trump, Kushner-in-law, Erik Prince operation. What does that tell you? What should it have told that numbskull Friedman? The "royal" family's corruption is written into the "constitution" and that family just arrested the two richest men in the kingdom, Alwaleed bin Talal and Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, and are squeezing them-- shaking them down-- to sign over their wealth to the "government" (i.e., M.B.S.' branch of the family). I'm surprised Friedman didn't cite Steve Mnuchin telling CNBC "I think that the Crown Prince (Mohammed bin Salman) is doing a great job at transforming the country."

Adam Johnson was laughing at the western media's naïveté (or collusion?) yesterday as well.

Two weeks ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman carried out a brutal crackdown on his political opponents, arresting dozens of high-ranking relatives, kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, and seeing eight of his political rivals die in a convenient helicopter crash. The “consolidation of power” by the de facto Saudi ruler comes as his government ramps up its siege of Yemen and gets even closer to its US sponsor, thanks to a Trump’s dopey love affair with-- and direct assistance of-- the regime.

The cynical plan has been met, in some media quarters, with condemnation, but for many in the Western press, Mohammed’s self-serving power grab is the action of a bold “reformer,” a roguish bad boy doing the messy but essential work of “reforming” the kingdom—the “anti-corruption” pretext of the purge largely repeated without qualification. The most prominent sources for this spin were two major newspapers, the New York Times and Guardian.

...With Guardian editors again painting Mohammed as a populist hero by insisting he “upended” “previously untouchable ultra-elite,” one is left to wonder why they don’t consider the absolute-monarch-in-waiting-- who just bought a $590 million yacht-- part of the “ultra elite.” It’s a curious framing that reeks more of PR than journalism.

This was a trope one could see emerging over the past few months. Similar “bold reformer” frames were used in New York Times editorials (“The Young and Brash Saudi Crown Prince,”) and straight reporting (“Saudi Arabia’s Grand Plan to Move Beyond Oil: Big Goals, Bigger Hurdles”). Everything’s new and exciting. The brutal, routine functions of the Saudi state are seen as laws of nature-- and those in charge of it are the reformers of the very oppression they initially authored.

Blue America Is Looking For A Few Good Women And Men To Help Save Social Security From The Cluthes Of The DC Conservative Elites

Don't let the ruling elites get away with it. Fight back!

Unless I'm getting bad information, there really are some excellent things in Obama's budget, like universal pre-K paid for with a cigarette tax, a decent and long-overdue increase in the minimum wage and expanded Medicaid. It doesn't matter. Obama doesn't get to make it easier to eliminate Social Security by making it less deadly for politicians to tamper with it. Anyone-- from Nancy Pelosi to John Boehner-- to vote for Obama's Chained CPI scheme should be driven out of office. Social Security should remain the third rail of American politics.

In an OpEd at Truthout over the weekend, Robert Naiman is clear about what grassroots voters have to do to resist the DC elites: primaries. He even pledged to help recruit a candidate to run against Dick Durbin, his own senator, if-- as expected-- Durbin sells out on this.

The only thing that can stop President Obama from cutting Social Security now is Congress. Therefore, the only thing that can stop President Obama from cutting Social Security now is public pressure on Congress to stand up to Obama and say no. The pressure that has been exerted so far was not sufficient to stop President Obama from doing this. Therefore, public pressure against Social Security cuts must significantly escalate.

Let's be clear about what's not true. From the point of view of the interests of the 99%, there was no legitimate reason for President Obama to do this. The President's marketing strategy will be to say that Obama had to do this because it was necessary to get a deal with Congressional Republicans to raise taxes.

But from the point of view of the interests of the 99%, there is no urgency or benefit to getting a deal to raise taxes if Social Security cuts are the price of doing so. Raising taxes, even raising taxes on the 1%, isn't an intrinsic good. Raising taxes on the 1% is a good thing if it enables the government to do good things and avoid doing bad things. Raising taxes on the 1% is a bad thing if it enables the government to do bad things and avoid doing good things.

If there is no "grand bargain," then under the sequester, the Pentagon budget will be cut and Social Security benefits will be protected. If there is a "grand bargain"-- a "Grand Betrayal"-- Social Security benefits will be cut and the Pentagon budget will be protected. Thus, to be only a little bit crude, the "grand bargain" is about cutting Social Security to protect the Pentagon budget. Raising taxes on the 1% as part of a deal to cut Social Security and veterans' benefits and protect the Pentagon budget for wars and useless military junk is a bad deal for the 99%.

In general, liberals who follow budget issues know this. We are at a fork in the road: one branch of the fork leads to cutting Social Security to protect the Pentagon budget and the other branch of the fork leads to cutting the Pentagon budget while protecting Social Security.

The fact that cutting Social Security is even on the table, even though cutting Social Security is overwhelmingly unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans, and both Democrats and Republicans would rather cut the Pentagon budget and end the war in Afghanistan instead, is a barometer of 1% control of the political system. If not for the domination of the political system by the 1%, we wouldn't even be talking about cutting Social Security.

And therefore, if the chained CPI cut goes through, it's going to do more than unjustly cut the earned benefits of seniors and disabled veterans. It's going to be a body blow to the idea that we live in a democracy where the majority rules. If the #ChainedCPI attack on the 99% is successful, it's going to be even harder to engage the 99% in politics in the future than it is today.

How can we stop this? How can we escalate?

Of course everyone should sign every petition, send every letter, make every phone call, contact every newspaper, attend every demonstration. But so far these efforts have not been enough to turn back the 1%'s assault. How can we escalate?

What if we all looked each other in the eye and made a pact: every Senator and Representative, Democrat or Republican, who supports cutting Social Security and veterans' benefits by imposing the "ChainedCPI" cut is going to face a primary challenge. We'll do everything we can to recruit the richest and famous and most popular people to do it. But if we can't recruit the rich and the famous and the popular to do it, we'll do it ourselves. We'll pledge to do whatever we can to support the challengers: get them on the ballot, turn out the vote. It is a fact that it's extremely difficult to defeat incumbents in primaries, but it is not impossible. Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman. Carol Mosely Braun defeated Alan Dixon. But beyond that, to compel an incumbent to face a primary challenge is to impose a real cost on them, regardless of whether they are defeated. And therefore, a primary challenge answers a key question: how can we impose a cost on incumbents for backing the agenda of the 1%, instead of the agenda of the 99%?

Primary challenges are definitely not the only answer to the question of how to impose a political cost on incumbents for doing the bidding of the 1%. There are definitely other answers. We could #occupy Congressional offices, for example. But it is certainly one answer, an obvious answer, and if we are going to ignore this obvious answer, we certainly should have a good explanation and justification. Why do Republicans take the Tea Party more seriously than Democrats take progressives? Because Republicans are afraid of the Tea Party-- afraid the Tea Party will primary them. Why are progressives less competent in our political engagement than the Tea Party?

Blue America has never shied away from tough primary battles. We went head to head with party leaders like Pelosi and Hoyer when we helped Donna Edwards end the miserable and corrupt political career of their despicable crony Al Wynn. And we helped Matt Cartwright vanquish the dean of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation last year, Tim Holden, who had Hoyer in the district campaigning for him... as though anyone but a bunch of criminal lobbyists cares about that kind of Beltway bullshit. We don't always win; but we do always fight. Any Democrat who votes for this Chained CPI piece of the Austerity Agenda that is destroying Europe's middle class makes himself or herself eligible for a primary as far as we're concerned. And right now we're recruiting House candidates all across the country.

We have a special page-- still in its infancy-- highlighting one thing, a single issue: opposition to cutting the earned benefits of seniors with tricks like the Chained CPI. This particular page is just for challengers, not for the heroic incumbents who are standing up to Obama and Boehner. Take a look at what the candidates who want to save Social Security have to say and please consider contributing to their campaigns.

Recall the message of the Grayson-Takano No Cuts letter they sent to Obama: "We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits-- including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need." I think they have around 40 co-signers-- out of over 200 Democrats in the House. We need more Democrats in Congress willing to stand up for working families, not to cater to special interests who finance their careers. Less Mike McIntyres, Jim Mathesons, Ann Kirpatricks, Patrick Murphys-- and more people like Raul Grijalva, Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison and Jerry Nadler. We found some-- and we're just getting started.

Impending Grand Bargain And DC's Conservative Consensus

If Obama wins a great big victory everything will be fine, right? The right-wing threat to America will recede... right? Well, that's silly... from the first day conservative shitheads-- they called them "Loyalists"-- enlisted in the British occupation army to fight against the Patriots, America has been threatened by right-wing selfishness and sociopathic greed. It will never go away. It was kind of under control until they elected a handsome young plutocrat in the 60's-- one of their own-- and he began the radical change in tax policies that could create the toxic billionaires seeking a final showdown against American democracy again. (Yes, I just described JFK, the son of a wealthy dynastic family, who radically shifted the tax structure to allow for unlimited wealth accumulation for a tiny handful of dangerous and violently anti-democratic predators.) Ironic how they got a Democrat to do their dirty work for them. Dwight Eisenhower was too wise to fall for their siren calls. When he handed the keys to the Treasury over to Kennedy, the top tax rate-- the one that protected us from marauders like Sheldon Adelson, the Koch family, the Waltons and the rest of the families financing the coup d'etat known as the Romney campaign-- was 93%. That's what it should be again; it was a good idea and one that was extremely healthy for America.

So now they have not just a Democrat in power, but the first African-America president. Will he preside over the destruction of Social Security and Medicare for them? Not the way Romney would, of course. But...

Former NY Times executive editor Bill Keller penned an OpEd in the Times over the weekend leading a national conservative prayer for a "Grand Bargain" in which the plutocrats will pay a TINY amount of bit more in taxes for a couple of years in return for turning Social Security and Medicare over to the tender mercies and always patriotism-first approach of Wall Street banksters. What a bargain! "Talk to any credible economist,: suggests Keller, "wire any serious politician to a polygraph, and you will hear at least 80 percent agreement on what is to be done: investment to goose the lackluster recovery and rebuild our infrastructure, entitlement reforms and spending discipline to lower the debt, and a tax code that lets the government pay its way without stifling business, punishing the middle class or rewarding sleight of hand. The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission assembled a grand bargain that does most of this."

You known what "entitlement reform" means, right? Keller isn't talking about curbing the self-entitlement of billionaires who think the rest of us are mute beasts in their otherwise beautiful world of achievement. He's talking about Social Security and Medicare. And he's whining that "in this Washington, in this election year, there is no chance of accomplishing anything constructive." Keep in mind that "constructive" to an incredibly wealthy New York Times ex-executive editor is probably totally destructive to a normal American working family. Keller, of course, has a "solution," not for us, but for people like himself.

President Obama has a bold option at hand, should he choose to use it. And some of his fellow Democrats are starting to warm to the idea. It has been called the nuclear option and likened to falling off a cliff. It is widely regarded as a possible catastrophe. In fact, it may be our best hope.

In January, two fiscal time bombs planted by Congress are due to explode. On Jan. 1, all the Bush tax cuts expire, constituting a $400-billion-plus tax hike in 2013. The next day-- unless Congress agrees on a major deficit-reduction plan-- a fiscal discipline known as sequestration will slash about $100 billion a year from federal spending, divided between defense and nondefense.

Blanket repeal of the tax cuts and across-the-board spending reductions are both pretty bad ideas. Taken together they are a kind of grotesque, automated austerity program. Lawmakers of both parties are desperately seeking ways to evade some of the consequences. Republicans are more focused on sparing the defense budget, and Democrats are pressing to preserve the middle-class tax cuts.

For months now, Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton chief of staff and a co-chairman of the Simpson-Bowles commission, has been quietly proposing that Obama treat the January Armageddon as an opportunity. The president should head straight for the cliff and let Congress know he’s prepared to take us over the edge unless they build a bridge.

In other words: President Obama should declare now that unless Congressional leaders come up with a serious bargain on fiscal reform, something very like Simpson-Bowles, he will allow all of the Bush tax breaks to lapse and all of the draconian cuts to take effect.

Assuming no deal is consummated in the poisonous pre-election climate, he should insist on a lame-duck session after Election Day. He should invite Congressional leaders to Camp David, put Simpson-Bowles on the table, and negotiate-- not a lot, since the plan already includes considerable compromise, but enough to show good will. If no deal emerges, all the Democrats have to do is take a page from the Republican playbook: dig in their heels and do nothing.

The best case (Bowles is optimistic, I’m a little less so) is that the lame-duck session passes a bipartisan plan that actually helps the country out of its enduring recession. Worst case, the president and his party seize the moral high ground and shape the economic debate around a plan that would be both wise and popular. When the tax breaks expire and the robo-cuts go into effect, the next Congress and president, whichever party prevails, will be forced to face the subject with real urgency. Lawmakers will be under siege from legions of constituents, and the markets, demanding an end to stalemate.

Moreover, as Jonathan Weisman pointed out in the Times the other day, after Armageddon the issues on the table would no longer be the perilous business of raising taxes and cutting spending, but the opposite: cutting taxes (at least some of them) and restoring spending (at least some of it).

Republicans will howl that this is blackmail, a priceless complaint from the party that periodically threatens to let America default on its debt.

But does Obama have it in him? This is the kind of tactic Lyndon Johnson would have employed with relish. You can imagine Bill Clinton pulling it off. President Obama, whether out of diffidence or inexperience, has not shown a comparable audacity or mastery of political leverage.

Well, here’s his chance to show us what we can expect if he’s re-elected: fruitful leadership, or another four years of gridlock.

Yesterday, looking at some predictably similar claptrap from Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post-- after all, who but the obscenely wealthy and their tribunes get to define who is and who isn't a "grown up" and "serious?"-- Dean Baker warns of the same kind of coup we've been warning about here at DWT. Baker is clear about what Pearlstein is demanding-- that the rest of us "all should be hopeful that a group of incredibly rich CEOs can engineer a coup."

While the rest of us are wasting our time worrying about whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney are sitting in the White House the next four years, Pearlstein tells us (approvingly) that these honchos are scurrying through back rooms in Washington trying to carve out a deficit deal.
The plan is that we will get the rich folks' deal regardless of who wins the election. It is difficult to imagine a more contemptuous attitude toward democracy.

The deal that this gang (led by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles) is hatching will inevitably include some amount of tax increases and also large budget cuts. At the top of the list, as Pearlstein proudly tells us, are cuts to Social Security and Medicare. At a time when we have seen an unprecedented transfer of income to the top one percent, these deficit warriors are placing a top priority on snatching away a portion of Social Security checks that average $1,200 a month. Yes, the country needs this.

The most likely cut to Social Security is a reduction in the annual cost of living adjustment of 0.3 percentage points. While that might sound trivial, the effect accumulates through time. After ten years, a typical check will be about 3 percent lower, after 20 years it will be 6 percent lower, and after 30 years it will be about 9 percent lower.

Social Security amounts to 90 percent or more of the income for one-third of seniors. For this group, the proposed cut in benefits would be a considerably larger share of their income that the higher taxes faced by someone earning $300,000 a year as a result of the repeal of the Bush tax cuts on high income earners. The latter is supposed to be a big deal, therefore the proposed cuts to Social Security are also a big deal.

The most likely Medicare cut is an increase in the qualifying age from 65 to 67. Those who pay attention to policy issues know that the health insurance market for people in their sixties is a disaster. And, if they could be bothered to look at the Congressional Budget Office's analysis, they would know that this change would hugely increase the cost of care for the country as a whole, even if it saved the federal government money. In other words, it is exactly the sort of budget cut we would expect from a group of cynical rich people.

Just about everything in Pearlstein's piece is upside down. Of course the major problem facing the country at present is massive unemployment. If the economy was near full employment we wouldn't have a big deficit. The long-term story behind the deficit projections is of course projections of exploding private sector health care costs, as every budget analyst knows. That should lead to a discussion about fixing the health care system, not a discussion of the budget.

Pearlstein even bizarrely brags that his deficit fighting crew has been warning about the problem for the last decade. Well, we haven't had a deficit problem for the last decade. We had a housing bubble problem. And because the Washington Post and other elite media outlets obsessed in reporting about the deficit non-problem, the housing bubble continued to grow unchecked.

Eventually the housing bubble blew up and wrecked the economy and also gave us large deficits. So now who does the Post turn to as authorities on the economy, naturally the people who ignored the housing bubble. And they wonder why the country has contempt for the Washington elite.

Driving home Saturday night I listened to Tavis Smiley's show on PRI about the "impossibility" of defense cuts. The Military Industrial Complex is covering it's ass by claiming that cutting defense spending will drive up unemployment and tank the economy. Take a listen:



They don't think they should even by part of the Grand Bargain. Robert Naiman, Policy Director for Just Foreign Policy has a much more perceptive and independent way of looking at it. Naiman isn't part of the Beltway Conservative Consensus. He also took at look at Pearlstein's unserious, non-adult piece in the Post and he counted 1,421 words in it.

Occurrences of the word "military": zero

Occurrences of the word "Pentagon": zero

Occurrences of the word "Defense": zero

How big a deal is this?

Here's a rough calculation.

The target for deficit reduction is $1.2 trillion over 10 years. That's the size of the automatic budget cuts a negotiated deal is supposed to replace.

The status quo of the automatic cuts is: $600 billion military, $600 billion domestic. (It's less actually, because due to interest costs, you can save $600 billion by reducing spending less than $600 billion, but let's ignore that for now for simplicity.)

There are three ways these cuts can be replaced: revenue increases, other military cuts, other domestic cuts.

Now, suppose that military cuts are off the table. Then the automatic cuts can only be replaced by revenue increases or other domestic cuts.

Now, the big drama supposedly is to what extent Republicans are going to agree to revenue increases at all. But let's suppose they do-- it's certainly not totally implausible, they almost did in the Boehner-Obama deal; Coburn claimed in the NYTimes a bunch of Senate Republicans are
ready to agree.

Does anyone think that the Republicans are going to agree to a package of one-for-one? A dollar of new revenue for every dollar in cuts?

If not, then according to arithmetic, the revenue increase in the deal will be less than $600 billion and the domestic cuts will be greater than $600 billion.

In this case, taking military cuts off the table guarantees that domestic spending will be cut MORE under a deal that replaces the sequester than under the automatic budget cuts. The deal would
essentially replace the military cuts of the sequester with a mix of revenue increases and domestic cuts, causing domestic cuts to increase over the sequester.

If that is the case, then why should anyone who cares about protecting domestic spending support a deal to replace the sequester?

Note that under the sequester, Social Security and Medicare benefits are protected.

Democrats and liberals are being told that we should pressure the Republicans to agree to revenue increases to stave off domestic cuts. But if military cuts are off the table, this is a colossal lie. If
military cuts are off the table, then the effect of the revenue increase deal will be to increase domestic cuts and stop military cuts.

Naiman wants to know why Democratic constituency groups aren't calling out this lie? The veal pen? It does look like the Congressional Progressive Caucus leadership-- Grijalva and Ellison-- will fight hard to hold the line. They have plenty of weak links in their caucus, of course, especially if Obama cracks the whip, but if independent-minded progressives like Alan Grayson, Darcy Burner, David Gill, Chris Donovan, Nick Ruiz and others on this list are elected, Grijalva's and Ellison's hand will be strengthened.

Winds Of Change Blowing In Egypt-- But Not Everyone Is Thrilled With The Direction

Last week in Tahrir Square- ©2011 Reese Erlich

How long will it take for Fox News to find this article in the English-language edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm and then start yowling about who lost Egypt... and it won't be McCain or Lieberman they turn their guns on.

Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail announced his intention to run in Egypt’s upcoming presidential elections.

He said that if elected he would implement Islamic sharia law and cancel the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

...Abu Ismail said that his platform revolves around Islam, while "Mohamed ElBaradei, Amr Moussa, and Hamdeen Sabahi, the liberal candidates, will be unable to present a clear vision” for the country.

“If I could apply sharia in Egypt, all people, including non-Muslims, would applaud me four years later,” said Abu Ismail.

The sheikh said that no current presidential candidate represents the Egyptian people.

“We seek to apply Islamic law, but those who don’t want it prefer cabarets, alcohol, dancers and prostitution, as the implementation of Islamic law will prohibit women to appear naked in movies and on beaches,” Abu Ismail added.

...Concerning the peace treaty with Israel, he said, “The Camp David peace treaty is insulting to the Egyptian people, so it must be canceled, and I will do my best to convince people to cancel it."

Our old friend Reese Erlich is in Cairo this week, on assignment for a number of public radio networks and blogging for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He's been writing about the struggle to determine what kind of new government Egyptians will create post-Mubarak. Last week, on his first day in Egypt he "lit out for Tahrir Square."

Tahrir has taken on mythic status in the Arab world, but it’s really just a large traffic circle surrounded by high rise buildings. At one point several million people filled the square, symbolically stopping the government, and leading to the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak.

On this day, however, only a few thousand rallied here, chanting slogans against the military government that took over from Mubarak, and demanding release of political prisoners. Dozens had been arrested on May 15 for protesting in front of the Israeli Embassy. They were tried in military, not civilian, courts. Under popular pressure, one week later, almost all the protesters were given one-year suspended sentences and released. The military also released over a hundred demonstrators from previous protests.

And that’s the contradiction facing today’s Egypt. The old dictatorship has been replaced with a military council that carries out many of the same domestic and foreign policies as Mubarak, according to the Tahrir activists. It arbitrarily arrests dissidents, and still engages in abuse and torture. Tahrir activists want the military out of power as soon as possible.

But many other Egyptians support the military as a force for stability. They see developments in Syria and Libya, where most of the military supports the old regime, and praise the Egyptian Army for forestalling a similar disaster.

“We should give the government some time,” truck driver Ahmad Fathi tells me. “We shouldn’t have sit-ins and demonstrations every day. We need time for things to get back to normal.”

Tahrir activists admit they’ve got a lot of organizing to do if they are to have a significant impact on the wider public. “We need 5 million in the streets to make change,” Tahrir Square leader Tarek Shalaby tells me.

Everyone is scrambling to prepare for parliamentary elections now scheduled for sometime in September. Presidential elections may be held two months later, although no date has been set. Tahrir Square activists are hoping to consolidate their gains by backing leftist candidates. But so far the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and elements from Mubarak’s old party, the National Democratic Party, seem better organized.

Meanwhile, workers continue wildcat strikes demanding higher wages. Violent conflicts have broken out between extremist Muslims and Coptic Christians. And activists have called for a mass mobilization against the military government to be held in Tahrir on May 27.

The revolution is far from over.

This morning Reese sent us an update from Cairo as he prepares to set out for his next stop: Gaza via the newly-opened Rafah crossing. He writes that "for many young activists Egypt’s revolution isn’t over" and describes a large Tahrir Square rally he covered-- over 100,000 people-- Friday. It had been called by many of the same people who had called the rallies and demonstrations that had toppled the Mubarak regime this past January and February.

They demanded that a civilian dominated council take over from the current all-military government. They wanted an end to military trials for civilians and stronger protection for Coptic Christians being violently attacked by Muslim extremists. They were angry that former President Hosni Mubarak and his entourage weren’t already facing trials for corruption and ordering the murder of protesters.

Student activist Shimaa Helmy told me, “This is our day of anger because we feel our revolution is being taken over by people who didn’t participate.”

But the Moslem Brotherhood, which did participate in the Tahrir Square uprising, boycotted today’s event. Officially, Brotherhood leaders were affronted because they weren’t consulted about rally plans. But many protesters believe that the Brotherhood’s senior leadership doesn’t want to offend the military.

Some Moslem Brotherhood youth defied their leaders and came anyway. The Brotherhood faces numerous internal contradictions, with two of its former leaders announcing plans to run for president. They defied Brotherhood national leadership’s decision not to run anyone for president and to run parliamentary candidates for not more than 50% of the eligible seats.

Many of the demonstrators were middle class, but workers and urban poor also attended. Activist Helmy admits, however, that the mainly secular and leftist demonstrators had their work cut out to win over ordinary Egyptians.

“Some people are starting to hate the uprising,” she told me. “The prices are getting high, and they think it’s the revolution. We’re trying to explain ‘it’s for you, not just for us.’”

Pro-military government rallies were called in other parts of Cairo and a few hundred supporters showed up.

Protesters argued that popular support for the military is declining. They saw today’s demonstration as one more battle in what promises to be a long struggle for power.

To the degree most Americans have any interest in what's going on in Egypt, it revolves around how the events there-- a country of over 80 million people with immense influence on the entire Arab world-- impacts Israel's 7 million people. But, as Robert Naiman wrote for Common Dreams yesterday, "You can't love democracy and denigrate protest, because protest is part of democracy. It's a package deal. Likewise, you can't claim solidarity with Egyptian protesters when they take down a dictator, but act horrified that the resulting government in Egypt, more accountable to Egyptian public opinion, is more engaged in supporting Palestinian rights. It's a package deal."

It was the Tahrir uprising that brought about an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion, and it was inevitable that an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion would open Rafah, because public opinion in Egypt bitterly opposed Egyptian participation in the blockade on Gaza.

In addition, opening Rafah was a provision of the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord brokered by the Egyptian government-- an achievement facilitated by the fact that the post-Tahrir Egyptian government was more flexible in the negotiations with Hamas that led to the accord.

Mubarak had a deal with the U.S. government: I obey all your commands on the Israel-Palestine issue, and in exchange, you shut your mouth about human rights and democracy. Tahrir destroyed this bargain, because it forced the U.S. to open its mouth about human rights and democracy in Egypt, regardless of Egypt's stance on Israel-Palestine. When it became clear to Egypt's rulers that subservience to the U.S. on Israel-Palestine would no longer purchase carte blanche on human rights and democracy, there was no reason to slavishly toe the U.S. line on Israel-Palestine anymore.

The Mubarak regime also had a domestic motivation for enforcing the blockade: it saw Hamas as a sister organization of Egypt's then semi-illegal opposition Muslim Brotherhood, and it saw enforcing the blockade as a means of denying Hamas "legitimacy," figuring that more "legitimacy" for Hamas would mean more "legitimacy" for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, thereby threatening Mubarak's iron grip on Egypt's politics.

But of course post-Tahrir developments in Egypt threw that calculation out the window: the post-Mubarak government in Egypt has reconciled with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a de facto partner in the present interim government, and is expected to do well in September's parliamentary elections. It would be absurd for the Egyptian government to try to isolate the Muslim Brotherhood by trying to isolate its sister Hamas, when the Muslim Brotherhood is de facto part of the Egyptian government and the role of the Brotherhood in running Egypt is likely to increase.