WSJ: Israel Spied on U.S.–Iran Talks & Shared the Results with Republicans

Looking down the rabbit hole of U.S. domestic politics,
where everything you thought you knew, you don't;
click to enlarge (source)

by Gaius Publius

There are more ways to think about this news than I can count, so I'm just going to present it with more questions than comment afterward. According to a Wall Street Journal article (subscription or login required), the Israeli government spied on U.S. communications in talks between the U.S. and Iran, and then passed what they learned to the President's political opponents in Congress to help those opponents derail the negotiations.

The Journal (my emphasis everywhere):

Israel Spied on Iran Nuclear Talks With U.S.

Ally’s snooping upset White House because information was used to lobby Congress to try to sink a deal

Soon after the U.S. and other major powers entered negotiations last year to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.

The spying operation was part of a broader campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to penetrate the negotiations and then help build a case against the emerging terms of the deal, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to eavesdropping, Israel acquired information from confidential U.S. briefings, informants and diplomatic contacts in Europe, the officials said.

The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with U.S. lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.

“It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

The rest of the article notes that U.S. intelligence officials figured it out when their own spying on Israel revealed that the Israelis had information that only Israeli spying on U.S.–Iran negotiations could discover. Another part of the piece notes that, "[u]sing levers of political influence unique to Israel, Messrs. Netanyahu and [Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Ron] Dermer calculated that a lobbying campaign in Congress before an announcement was made would improve the chances of killing or reshaping any deal."

One of those "levers unique to Israel" has to have been U.S. casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is widely seen as one of the hands behind Netanyahu's speech to Congress, if not the hand.

There's quite a bit of she-said, he-said in the article, with Israel denying everything, from the source of their information to how much was revealed to Republicans in Congress. It's an interesting read. After much good reporting about the aftermath of the Republican invitation to speak — Dermer meets with Joe Manchin, Dermer meets with Dianne Feinstein, and the like — the article closes:

“If you’re wondering whether something serious has shifted here, the answer is yes,” a senior U.S. official said. “These things leave scars.” 

Again, there's good reporting in the article; it's worth a read if this is your area of interest. As bad as the WSJ editorial page is, the reporting is often excellent. The writer of this piece is Adam Entous.

Who Is the Writer's Main Source and What Does That Question Tell Us?

The first question to ask in any piece like this is — Who are the sources and what are their goals? In this case, the primary sources are identified this way:

current and former U.S. officials said

At another point, the attribution is:

said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter

The second category could easily include the first. At a third point we learn:

“People feel personally sold out,” a senior administration official said.

Note the word "senior." Does this mean the Journal was pitched this story by the White House via a "senior" official as a "designated" leak to punish Netanyahu further? Or did Adam Entous discover all this by himself — against U.S. government wishes — and thus put himself at risk for leaking classified information on his own say-so? I don't know for sure, obviously, but my guess is the former.

Are We Being Interfered With the Way We've Interfered With Others?

That explains the writer's perspective on this story (or at least examines it), and suggests what the White House perspective might be. The article makes clear, says explicitly, that the spying itself is not troubling to the U.S., but sharing the results with Republicans as part of partisan domestic politics is.

Now the second question: If the Israelis are guilty of spying on the U.S. government in order to aid the party out of power — and the Obama administration certainly thinks they are — are we getting payback (or blowback) for what we've done so many times in the past? I won't "go long" here, but the list is almost exhausting — to name just a few, Mosaddegh, Guatemala, Chile, on and on, even to the failed "revolt" in Venezuela. Is at least one nation (Israel) using its espionage service to control our own internal politics?

If Israel is doing to us what we did to so many others — what are the implications of that for U.S. voters and their beliefs about our political processes?

Are Republicans Using a Foreign Spy Service to Obstruct the U.S. Government?

Now look at this from a Republican perspective. Are Republicans using the espionage services of a foreign government to advance their own party-first, party-in-opposition agenda? If true, what are the limits to what they would do (or are doing)? If there are no limits, what are those implications for U.S. voters?

If the Republicans are, in effect, subcontracting their espionage to a foreign power and getting away with it — and at this point the Obama administration is only complaining, not taking more forceful action — what's next for us?

See what I mean? More ways to think about this than I can count. I'll say one thing though. If an American political party is using a foreign government's espionage service for partisan gain, we're in a different world from the one we thought we were in. Hello, Alice.

GP

The full DC Circuit Court of Appeals pulls back from the brink of health-care loony-tune-itude

It was a good day for judicial sanity, not such a good day for the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine. Cartoon by Joel Pett (March 2013) -- click to enlarge.

"When the full DC Circuit announced they would rehear the case, by contrast, that was an indication that the two Republicans who blocked the subsidies may be outliers who reached an idiosyncratic result in an easy case. The fact that all six of the other judges who have considered the Obamacare subsidies have also upheld them also lends credence to this view."

-- legal eagle Ian Millhiser, today, in "BREAKING: Federal
Appeals Court Withdraws Decision Defunding Obamacare"

by Ken

In late July, I posed the question "Can the ideological perversions of two unapologetic far-right-wing activists on the District Circuit Court of Appeals lead to defunding Obamacare?" At that point, a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court had decided -- by the vote of the aforementioned pair of right-wing judicial psychopaths -- to ignore normal judicial standards and allow some admittedly fuzzy language in the Affordable Health Care Act, whose intent was almost impossible to mistake in the context of the law, to advance the agenda of a national conspiracy of Obama-loathers.

The Obama-loathers, of course, don't know or care anything about the U.S. health-care system. Presumably they're happy with the access to the system they have, or think they have. (A lot of them are in for rude surprises when they need access. And of course the large number of the supposed mortal foes of government-run health care already rely on Medicare, and are too dim or dishonest to grasp that they are already beneficiaries of, and in many cases only alive because of, "socialized medicine."). Their idea of our health-care "system" is that anybody who doesn't have access can just, as Alan Grayson pointed out so eloquently, drop dead.


THE LEGAL LOONS: CONFUSED OR JUST OPPORTUNISTIC?

No, the battle has never been about health care. These demonic sociopaths who have made Obamacare a defining national issue, all they care about is destroying America, if by "America" we mean a country of decency, reason, and hope. To this end they have rabble-roused an all too gullibly rousable public because, although these people know even less about Barack Obama than they do about health care, except maybe the color of this Obama guy's skin, they have chosen to make him the arch-demon of their deranged mental universe -- and drag the country with them. In the process, they have guaranteed that there is no possibliity of addressing actual human problems. Far-right-wing crazies will fight to the death to make sure that actual human problems are never addressed.

Naturally there are roving cohorts of demagogues in public life who are only too happy to pounce on this cauldron of psychosis for their own demonic purposes, purposes that begin with naked, raw, insatiable self-interest. In the course of their health-care-related crusade against honesty and decency, this gaggle of America-loathers succeeded in hornswoggling the above-referenced pair of ideologically deranged judicial perverts on the DC Circuit Court, traditionally ranked second in U.S. judicial importance only to the Supreme Court itself.

The substance of the issue latched onto by the Obama-loathers and their judicial-pervert supporters concerns use of the word "state," which in one instance in the ACA is used as a term for the government ("the State"), a sense that is utterly clear in context but when maliciously misread can be erroneously taken to refer to a state, as in one of the 50. Here's how ThinkProgress's legal eagle Ian Millhiser explained what he called at the time "a proofreading error" in the statute.

The two Republicans’ decision rests on a glorified typo in the Affordable Care Act itself. Obamacare gives states a choice. They can either run their own health insurance exchange where their residents may buy health insurance, and receive subsidies to help them pay for that insurance if they qualify, or they can allow the federal government to run that exchange for them. Yet the plaintiffs’ in this case uncovered a drafting error in the statute where it appears to limit the subsidies to individuals who obtain insurance through “an Exchange established by the State.” Randolph and Griffith’s opinion concludes that this drafting error is the only thing that matters. In their words, “a federal Exchange is not an ‘Exchange established by the State,’” and that’s it. The upshot of this opinion is that 6.5 million Americans will lose their ability to afford health insurance, according to one estimate.

NOT THE RESULT THE LEAGUE OF LOONS EXPECTED

In that post Ian also gave us a crash course in the judicial history of the two DC Circuit ideological perverts, Raymond Randolph, a GHW Bush appointee, and the reputationally "more moderate" Thomas Griffith, a GW Bush appointee.

Now, you may recall that at almost the same moment a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (Jesse Helms's old court, which under his watchful eye was an all but impregnable fortress of far-right-wing ideology) reached the opposite conclusion about the reading of the ambiguous "the State" -- that it's not judges' job to make it up according to the sawdust shaking around in their heads.

Interestingly, the far-right America-loathers devised a strategy that made the Fourth Circuit panel's incalculably saner and legally sounder ruling work in their favor. The strategy depended on their being now opposite rulings from two different circuits, a condition that generally argues for resolution by the Supreme Court. As Ian explains in his post today, the far-right-wing judicial perverts (my term, I should make clear, not his) obviously reasoned that they stand a much better chance now with the Supreme Court, with its generous supply of far-right-wing legal perverts, than with a hearing ("en banc") by the full DC Circuit Court.

So the League of Far-Right Legal Perverts devoted much of their appellate bravado to arguing that the full DC Circuit should be bypassed in favor of an immediate emergency hearing by the Supreme Court. Ian patiently explains how the argument was framed as well as why it was ridiculous -- and how it was nevertheless trumpeted by the Lying Liars of the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine, like the bloviators of the Wall Street Journal and National Review, who fill in with outright lies where obfuscatons and delusions alone won't do the job.

To be clear, what the full DC Circuit Court did today wasn't to overturn the panel's ruling, but simply to void it, undertaking to hear the case itself and issue its own ruling. It's still possible that the full court will reach the same conclusion as the pair of judicial psychopaths who prevailed in the panel ruling, but that doesn't seem likely. And today's action represented an immediate setback for the legal-pervert strategy of targeting the Supreme Court -- as of now, there are no longer opposite rulings in force from two different circuits.

Ian's explanation takes the matter a step further, and I found it fascinating. Essentially, today's action potentially changes the cast of characters in the eyes of the Supreme Court justices, recasting the two loons on the DC Circuit panel as possible "outliers who reached an idiosyncratic result in an easy case."

[T]he justices typically use the lower courts as a mechanism to screen the few cases raising issues that are difficult enough to warrant Supreme Court review from the vast bulk of cases that do not. This is one reason why the justices tend to hear cases where two courts of appeals disagree — because that disagreement is a sign that the case is sufficiently challenging that it requires a definitive ruling from the nation’s highest Court. When the full DC Circuit announced they would rehear the case, by contrast, that was an indication that the two Republicans who blocked the subsidies may be outliers who reached an idiosyncratic result in an easy case. The fact that all six of the other judges who have considered the Obamacare subsidies have also upheld them also lends credence to this view.

"Now that the DC Circuit has ignored [the right-wing legal loons'] attempts to scare them off with accusations of partisanship," Ian concludes, "this case no longer meets the usual criteria for Supreme Court review."

Not at all the result the League of Legal Loons was expecting today. (Thank goodness.)

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Fascism In Cairo Cheered By The Americans Who Always Cheer Fascism

Fascists love those military strongmen

There's always been a big audience-- and cheering section-- for fascism in the United States, which explains the popularity of the Wall Street Journal, not to mention Fox News and Hate Talk Radio. The other day we looked at the 1933 fascist coup attempt against Franklin Roosevelt led by Republican industrialists and financiers Irénée du Pont, J.P. Morgan, Prescott Bush, Grayson Murphy, and other prominent Wall Street figures, as well as the pro-Nazi families behind Remington, Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodyear, and Maxwell House. Roosevelt could have-- should have-- hung all the plotter for high treason, but he preferred to allow the plot to be covered up in return for their quiescence as he worked to implement the New Deal.

America's wealthy fascist families did quiet down during World War II, of course, but they've been busy beavers since then. Today, the Koch family is preeminent among the leaders of American fascism... although they try to disguise it as a kind of "libertarianism." Predictably, the Wall Street Journal is cheering the fascist coup in Egypt last week and encouraging the Obama Administration to break the law by calling it something other than a "coup." (A coup jeopardizes the billion-plus dollars of non-Sequestered aid to Egypt in general and the Egyptian military in particular. The powerful Likud lobby insists the U.S. taxpayer continue underwriting that huge burden.) They Journal editorial page has their collective fingers crossed that military Islamist Abdul Fatah al-Sisi turns out to be "as good as" Chilean neo-Nazi hero Augusto Pinochet, up there with Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Ludwig con Mises in the pantheon of right-wing loons.

The Journal blames the popular protests against the democratically-elected Morsi on chronic gas and food shortages and a sinking economy without mentioning that these conditions were carefully orchestrated by the military. There are no long gas lines or shortages in Cairo today... convenient. They credit a powerful "secular business class" with saving Egypt from... democracy?

Yet a military coup riding mass protests carries its own risks to future stability. One danger is the reaction of the Brotherhood, which is still the strongest single political party. The secretive group renounced armed struggle in the 1970s. But that could change if its leaders conclude that democracy works for everyone except for them.

Adly Mansour, a judge and interim president sworn in Thursday, called the Brotherhood "part of the nation." But at the same time the military closed down pro-Brotherhood TV stations and put out warrants for the arrest of the party's senior leaders. The Brotherhood is unpopular now, but as memories fade it could return to power with a vengeance if Egypt's next rulers are also unable to fix the country's many problems.

A more hopeful sign is that General Sisi gathered prominent opposition and Coptic Christian and Muslim leaders to announce a new "roadmap" for Egypt's future. The roadmap proposes, among other steps, a broadly representative committee to rewrite the constitution and to form a technocratic government.

General Sisi is also promising new elections, albeit without a timetable. Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent (and anti-American) secular leader, and the hardline Islamic Salafist Nour Party, a rival to the Brotherhood, have publicly backed the military plan.

The generals don't seem eager to govern directly, especially after they mismanaged the transition after Hosni Mubarak's 2011 ouster until Mr. Morsi's election. Civilians were tried in military courts and abused in custody. As crime worsened and the economy stalled, public ire turned against the generals.

It will do so again without more enlightened leadership that focuses on economic revival and a political transition to a system of checks and balances. Any transition government will no doubt seek money and oil from the Gulf states as well as an early deal with the International Monetary Fund to make up for Egypt's rapidly declining currency reserves.

America can also do more than it has. The Obama Administration has been caught trailing events at every turn, supporting Mr. Mubarak before abruptly throwing him over, and then embracing Mr. Morsi despite his authoritarian turn.

President Obama stayed quiet throughout the latest crisis, finally issuing an anodyne call Wednesday night for "a democratic political order with participation from all sides and all political parties—secular and religious, civilian and military."

Mr. Obama also requested a review of U.S. aid to Egypt, but cutting that off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, $1.3 billion in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel. Washington can also do more to help Egypt gain access to markets, international loans and investment capital. The U.S. now has a second chance to use its leverage to shape a better outcome.

Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy. If General Sisi merely tries to restore the old Mubarak order, he will eventually suffer Mr. Morsi's fate.

Sisi and his puppet presidente were on the air calling for a free and open national discussion-- at the exact same time, his soldiers were shutting down all the TV stations they didn't control and rounding up Muslim Brotherhood leaders and arresting them for... whatever. Meanwhile, aren't New Yorkers lucky that they're not stuck having to read the reactionary Wall Street Journal! After all, they can read the NY Times instead and find out useful info, like how Egyptians seem "to lack even the basic mental ingredients" for a democratic transition.

Just 'cause you can't read without moving your lips doesn't mean you aren't able to extract a ringing endorsement of capitalism from the Bible

by Ken

And the best thing is, when you find it, the Wall Street Journal will print your name and give you money! How sweet is that? The system works!

I'm guessing this Rabbi Aryeh Spero is the kind of prince whose life work has been spreading anti-Semitism. No, not fighting anti-Semitism, spreading it. I mean, who wouldn't hate a miserable lying sack of doody like this? Your average street-level sex worker, by comparison, is at least providing a useful service, especially by comparison with a wackadoodle clergywhore who interprets his calling from God as a mandate to provide blowjobs for deep-pocketed economic predators.

I almost wrote "deep-pocketed economic predators who are the object of their God's wrath," and officially this is probably true, since not many religions can afford to be caught fronting for the avatars of greed and selfishness. The reality, though, is that it's the grandees of greed who keep nearly all religions going, and in more cases than note provide their reason for being -- they're just not supposed to talk about that.

But I haven't told you yet what I'm talking about. OK, folks, it's time for you to meet the good rabbi, courtesy of Catherine Rampell yesterday on the NYT's Economix blog.

February 2, 2012, 1:40 PM
What Else Does the Bible Teach About Capitalism?

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Rabbi Aryeh Spero titled “What the Bible Teaches About Capitalism,” which argued that Americans should laud Mitt Romney’s private equity career.

An outline of his reasoning: The United States was founded upon “the Judeo-Christian ethos,” and within that ethos “resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.”

The Bible and related Judaic-Christian teaching are pro-capitalist, he argues, because God’s people are told to work and encouraged to be creative (which could be read as entrepreneurial), and because the Tenth Commandment forbids envy (including envy of the 1 percent). Additionally, Rabbi Spero notes, “King Solomon’s thriving kingdom crashed once his son decided to impose onerous taxes.”

Whatever capitalism’s merits, I’m not sure hanging its moral legitimacy on Jewish Scripture is such a solid plan. The Holy Book also conveys plenty of ideas that are anti-capitalist and anti-free-market.

Deuteronomy 23:19, for example, orders: “Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.” “Foreigners” can be charged interest, however. Exactly who counts as a foreigner has fueled centuries of debate, and at least one Shakespearean play. (That play, “The Merchant of Venice” was home to the line “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” by the way.)

Additionally, a biblical prohibition against “taking advantage” of the person on the other side of a sale was interpreted by ancient rabbis to mean that sellers were permitted a profit margin that was no greater than one-sixth of a good’s selling price. Any markup beyond that had to be returned to the buyer.

That restriction might not go over very well in private equity circles.

The one thing we can be grateful for is that the rabbi, being a rabbi, isn't pretending to be speaking in the name of Jesus, who has suffered the cosmic indignity of having millions of sociopathic Crap Christian power-mongers pretending to be speaking in his name when in fact they devote all their energies to making a mockery of everything he believed and preached.

Of course the right-wing Crap Christians have been working overtime on a modern mistranslation of the Bible to reinvent Jesus as One of Their Own, a really macho monger of war and hate. It's a piece of cake, actually, as long as you rewrite everything the poor guy is reputed ever to have said or done. Luckiily, modern-day right-wingers believe they were born with a divine mandate to lie their putrid guts out.

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Bracing for Climategate 2.0, remember (let's say it all together): Every word out of the mouth of every right-winger is a lie

Here's Jon Stewart a couple of weeks back reporting on the story we covered as well, about the Koch-funded project that carefully rechecked the data and found that the climate-change data supposedly "disproved" in Climategate 1.0 were, in fact, correct -- and "global warming is real," as study director Richard Muller reported in a WSJ op-ed that somehow never found its way into the U.S. print edition.

"This is clearly an attempt to sabotage the international climate talks for a second time, and there has not been enough attention paid to who is responsible for these illegal acts. If this happened surrounding nuclear arms talks, we would have the full force of the Western world’s intelligence community pursuing the perpetrators. And yet, with the stability of our climate hanging in the balance with these international climate treaty negotiations, these hackers and their supporters are still on the loose. It is time to bring them to justice."

-- Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), in a statement yesterday

by Ken

Ohmygod, it's Climategate 2.0. And now the cadre of sociopathic liars like those we see in the above Daily Show clip, instead of apologizing for having been born, and maybe doing something to rectify the error, can be expected to trumpet -- ta-da! -- another bunch of conveniently stolen and no doubt even more conveniently doctored e-mails.

I feel as if I've never escaped from last night's post, in which I succumbed to hopelessness over the fact that Orly Taitz's psychotic birther lies not only got a hearing before New Hampshire's Ballot Law Commission but continue to be denounced by practically nobody in the GOP (or on the Right, if that's different) and endorsed in life-or-death terms online by sad souls who have allowed their brains to be used for mulch.

When it comes to science, I imagine the Demon Disinformers of the Right have the obvious advantage that Americans by and large hate science, very likely because it makes them feel dumb. Oh, that attitude extends to pretty much all forms of knowledge, I suspect for the same reason, but science takes it especially hard on the chin because it's so damn, you know, scientific (translation: "hard"). And you know it's all only a theory anyways.

Our friend A Siegel, in a "Get Energy Smart! NOW!" post, "'Climategate' redux: An opportunity to show learning . . .," after tracing for us the useful distinction between "lessons learned" (by and large, a pipe dream) and "lessons identified" (and subsequently forgotten, only to be reencountered later, usually when it's too late to do much good), and recalling the sad story of the right-wing hoax that was Climategate 1.0, notes:

Earlier today, another batch of stolen emails were released (notice passive voice … who released them?) and the disinformation machine is already spinning up to foster continued and deepened global confusion about the status and quality of climate science. As climate scientist John Abraham put it

While Texas experiences record droughts that cost $9 billion and while the evidence of climate change becomes more clear, the denialists quit discussing the science. Instead, billionaire oil tycoons continue their personal attacks against scientists.

These emails are, reportedly, all from prior to 2009. E.g., those electronic thieves seeking to foster confusion about climate science held back this material for several years seeking an opportune moment to seek to create noise. That the world community is gathering in Durban, South Africa, to discuss climate issues creates an eerie similarity to the 2009 release just prior to the Copenhagen climate summit.

The question, this time around, is whether “the” media and journalists have actually learned a lesson from 2009 and will actually engaged in truthful reporting rather than providing stenographic services to truthiness and lies.

Oh, I think AS would make the same guess that we would as to whether the infotainment noozers "have actually learned a lesson." The Fox Noisers and their kind, after all, aren't interested in learning, of any kind. Consider Jon Stewart's point above about the massive Fox Noise "coverage" of the release of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project findings. The Right, we have to remember, has no interest in truth -- only the swirl of malignant delusions in their muddled brains, which by unearthly coincidence so often happen to coincide with massive profit-making opportunities for their megacorporate paymasters.

AS, by the way, has a nicely linked bibliography of Climategate information sources in the post. Read them and pass them on, because unless I'm much mistaken, it's going to be another bumpy ride. It might help, though, if we make some noise of our own -- in the interest of reality and truth.

Here's yesterday's statement by Rep. Ed Markey, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. (Click to enlarge.) Isn't it interesting than when WikiLeaks publishes carefully preserved actual documents, it's treason and amber alert, if not the end of the world, but when right-wingers produce their carefully doctored stolen documents, they're hailed by the infotainment noozers as heroes and truth-tellers.

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Whatever the WSJ may have been in pre-Murdoch days, it's now apparently the Journal of Wall Street Bullshit

If there was ever really a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde-like Wall Street Journal holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

by Ken

Admirers of the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal always claimed that the paper had to be thought of as two fundamentally different entities. Yes, they acknowledged, the editorial pages were as shamelessly propagandistic as anyone with eyes could tell. However, they insisted, the news pages were strictly legit, and one of the journalistic world's great reportorial sources.

Since I avoided the paper like the plague, I was never in a position to judge. Certainly the filth spewed out daily on those editorial pages was so egregious, and lent such unwarranted respectability to heaps of the most vicious lies and obfuscations to be found in print, that I considered mere possession of the rag a mark of intellectual squalor.

Of course I was aware that the paper employed actual journalists who at least occasionally produced actual journalism, and even journalism of high quality. I know too that even the paper's staunchest defenders worried openly about the future of actual journalism following the News Corp takeover. I go into this background by way of explaining that I have no way of judging whether the monumental fraud the Journal has just perpetrated in its propaganda war against the reality of global warming is a product of the paper's News Corp-ification.

As it happens, the story, as reported by Media Matters (here courtesy of Nation of Change: "Wall Street Journal Downplays Study Confirming Global Warming"), concerns one that we took note of: "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." It concerns a study by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, spearheaded by physicist Richard Muller, who had long argued that the data on which other scientists based their theories of climate change couldn't be trusted without verification. The story was, essentially, that the Berkeley project's exhaustive study confirmed the data.

To say that this hasn't gone over well among right-wing counterscientific thugs is an understatement. Ironically, the project was funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation, which I think it's safe to say -- although Richard Muller denies it -- was clearly expecting a very different result.

Muller was careful to note in the op-ed piece he wrote when the project's basic findings were released that the study did not take any position on whether the clearly measurable global warming was man-made. But he made it clear that where climate-change skeptics had previously had grounds for skepticism, they no longer did. In a phrase that has been widely picked up -- though not at the Wall Street Journal -- he argued, "You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer."

As Media Matters notes, though, there was one curious thing about the Muller op-ed. It was published -- on October 21, "the same day the preliminary reports from the BEST study were released" -- in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and on the paper's website, but not in the U.S. print edition.

A Factiva search of the Wall Street Journal shows that the Journal's U.S. paper did not mention the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study for over two weeks after the results were published. The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media noted that the Journal published an editorial in the following days titled "The Post-Global Warming World" that was "dismissive of climate change" and had not "a word about the BEST study." [Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, 11/1/11]

And when the Journal broke its mysterious silence on the subject? As Media Matters' headline puts it: "WSJ Eventually Prints Article About Study -- Only To Downplay It." In a November 5 article, "Global Temperatures: All Over The Map," Carl Bialik (billed by the paper as "The Numbers Guy") reports it as a story about the "uncertain nature of tracking global temperature." What he's actually assembled, the MediaMatters report suggests, is an orgy of obfuscations if not outright lies.

I get the feeling reading Bialik that he knows less about climate science than I do, which isn't much, but he's clearly good at searching out people with the slant he wants on the story and then performing tricks with numbers. Given enough prompting from the scientific peanut gallery, he had what he needed to be able to throw bunches of numbers up in the air and have them land as superbly adulterated right-wing bullshit.

Naturally this all gets kind of technical, though again my impression is that Bialik hasn't a clue what the discussion is actually about. He makes a federal case, for example, of supposedly expert allegations that the BEST study ignores satellite temperature readings in favor of allegedly much inferior ground readings, but NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt (in an e-mail to Media Matters via the Climate Science Rapid Response Team) notes that "the satellites and the ground stations are measuring different things, and it isn't obvious that they should be the same," and insists that the "factor of two difference" claimed by Bialik "is not supportable from the data." (Richard Muller points out in an e-mail to Media Matters that the article's claim "is misleading because he doesn't point out that satellite measurements do not give ground measurements, but only temperatures up higher in the atmosphere. Also the satellite measurements he is referring to are, I believe, global and not land only.") Media Matters cites other scientists saying that the satellite data in fact accord quite well with the ground data.

But perhaps the best indicator of the quality of Bialik's "reporting" is this claim:

This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database.

He does actually quote Richard Muller on the subject of peer review. He ends his piece:

"Some people mistakenly think peer review means secret review by anonymous referees at journals," Mr. Muller says. "We're getting wonderful peer review, from McIntyre, from Briggs, from other people. That's the process of science."

However, it seems most unlikely that Bialik, when he got this quote from Muller, mentioned the use he planned to make of the peer-review issue, which is to blatantly imply, without a ghost of a whisper of a hint of substantiation, that those "updates and corrections to the research" in any way alter the study's findings or the report's conclusions. And we can be pretty sure that Bialik never said anything to Muller about Berkeley Earth planning on "fixing errors in its database." How can we be sure? Because Media Matters quotes Muller again via e-mail:

In response to that passage, Richard Muller wrote: "I can't imagine what he is referring to." Muller noted that his team had updated data from NASA in a chart, not their own results.

I would suggest that it's hopelessly naive Bialik has any interest at all in the truth. It's all about furthering the mission of the Wall Street Journal as the prime propaganda outlet for the 1%. As some guy once said, "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." Media Matters reminds us about the September 2009 WSJ editorial, "Rigging a Climate 'Consensus,'" which extrapolated from the famous stolen e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia that climate-change data could no longer be trusted, now that it was revealed as possibly rigged, which the BEST report clearly indicates was not the case.

Of course that was the WSJ's editorial side, the universally acknowledged Mr. Hyde of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde operation. If there ever was a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

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Re. the News Corp scandal(s): The thing about corruption is that it's so, um, corruptational

by Ken

If there was any thought that the decision of News International -- the tentacle of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp that controls the British holdings that have become the subject of such mountingly embarrassing (not to mention quite likely prosecutable) disclosures -- to shut down the once-massive-circulation News of the World, which has been at the center of the scandals, would lessen the heat on the company, so far it isn't working out.

Their best hope at this point is that so many people in authority are being incriminated -- not just News Corp execs who've been promoted to lofty positions, including in the U.S., but the Metropolitan Police (i.e., Scotland Yard), British pols like now-PM David Cameron, parliamentary "overseers" -- that there may be enough nabobs with enough power to keep some of the mess safely swept under the rug. Is it any wonder that one of the free "newspapers" circulated to weary New York commuters, Metro New York, had as its front-page head this morning: "Is Murdoch's empire crumbling?"

It's important to remember that the "signature" booboo of the case, that enterprising News of the World reporter's clever stung in hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped teenage girl and deleting phone messages during the investigation, is not only the proverbial tip of the iceberg but, more importantly old news; there are already NOTW creeps in prison for it.

ASST. COMMISSIONER YATES: IT'S NOT MY FAULT
NEWS INT'L DIDN'T, YOU KNOW, TELL US STUFF

In one form or another the scandal goes back to 2005. In fact, John Yates, the Met's assistant commissioner for terrorism, who in 2009, as assistant commissioner in charge of specialist operations had the mess dumped in his lap, and totally bungled it, reminded us of the timeline in his testimony today before a Home Affairs select committee of the House of Commons:

Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner John Yates: "Please do not take that admission as in any way accepted, I accept responsibility for what News International have not done with regard to this case from 2005 to 2006 to 2009 to 2010 and even up until yesterday." (You can watch Commissioner Yates try to maintain a shred of dignity on the Guardian website.)

Yates, according to the Guardian team's account, "acknowledged in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph that his decision not to reopen an investigation in 2009 was 'pretty crap.'" However, in his opening statement to the select committee today, he set the tone for his testimony, "Had I know then what I know now, I would have made different decisions."

Yates's people are currently poring over "11,000 pages of material containing nearly 4,000 names of possible hacking victims," which "he conceded" he hasn't seen, and whose contents . . . well, apparently our guess is as good as his. Also in the course of his testimony, according to the Guardian account, "Yates said he had 'never, ever, ever' received payment from journalists for information but admitted it was 'highly probable' that some of his officers did."

Well, that's OK then.

In case you hadn't heard, one of the directions well beyond phone hacking into which the case has slithered is police, er, "cooperation" with "inquiring" reporters. And it's not just News of the World that's involved. Suspicious glances are being cast at the other News International papers in London -- the surviving tabloid, the Sun, and even the Times and Sunday Times. The question rightly raised, it seems to me, concerns an entire culture of corruption.

After all, the editor of NOTW from 2000 to 2003, when the first illegal hackings took place, was Rebekah Brooks, who went on to edit the Sun from 2003 to 2009 and is now chief executive of News International! And the man whom Rupert M installed as CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal after he took control of them in December 2007, Les Hinton, came to these august journalistic positions from 12 years as executive chairman of . . . oh my, News International! (His Dow Jones bio adds that "Mr. Hinton is chairman of the Dow Jones Foundation, which supports the promotion and defense of journalism as well as literacy and education." Roger that.)

Somebody (I wish I remembered who) made the excellent point is that the most frightening thing about this whole still-emerging stinkpot is that the practices being uncovered seem to have become standard practices -- for so-called journalists (in search of money-making headlines) whose bosses hobnob with the coppers' bosses and the political elites. (And are we to believe that it's only News International journos who behave in such dastardly fashion. How about their American counterparts? Fox Noise, anyone? And are News Corp minions the only ones playing these games?)

During his testimony today, Commissioner Yates was asked by select committee chair Keith Vaz whether he has given any consideration to resigning. The commissioner seemed quite adamant that there was no reason for him to consider such a step. After all, how could it be his fault that News International didn't turn over all that information that if only he'd known he wouldn't have made the same "crap" decision he made in 2009?

Apparently police work in the U.K. goes something like this:

SCOTLAND YARD [shaking fist]: We demand that you turn over any information you have that would tell us how naughty you've been.
NEWS INTERNATIONAL: Information? Information? We have no information.
SCOTLAND YARD: Well, that's all right then, because otherwise we might have to, like, do something. Cheerio!

[CURTAIN]

Select committee chairman Vaz, by the way, pronounced himself dissatisfied with Yates's testimony, giving rise to the Guardian head: "Met officer John Yates's evidence on phone-hacking inquiry 'unconvincing.'"

WHAT DOESN'T GET LOST EN ROUTE TO MUMBAI?

Meanwhile, I have to say my favorite episode in all of this mess goes way back to when those Met bulldogs were still trying to shake information loose from NOTW, in particular several zillion e-mails that were mysteriously unaccounted for. We Yanks recall when we had our own missing e-mail scandal, back when the thugs of the Bush crime regime were wiping out everything they could get their zappers on. Our brave American thugs know how to tough it out. "E-mails?" they said. "Nah, they're all gone. Close the door on your way out." And that was pretty much the last we heard of it.

British investigators, however, are more tenacious, and insisted on an answer. Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer nevertheless. Here's the Friday Guardian account:

NI originally claimed the archive of emails did not exist. Last December, its Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the emails had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, the company's solicitor, Julian Pike from Farrer and Co, gave a statement to the high court saying it was unable to retrieve emails more than six months old.

The first hint that this was not true came in late January when NI handed Scotland Yard evidence that led to the immediate sacking of its news editor, Ian Edmondson, and to the launch of Operation Weeting. It was reported that this evidence consisted of three old emails.

Three months later, on 23 March, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged News International could locate emails as far back as 2005 and that no emails had been lost en route to Mumbai or anywhere else in India. In a signed statement seen by the Guardian, Pike said he had been misinformed by the NoW's in-house lawyer, Tom Crone, who had told him that he, too, had been misled. He offered no explanation for the misleading evidence given by Bird.

What can I say except that I am in awe? Lost en route to Mumbai! But of course! That happens all the time! Why, just last week my watch went missing, and as soon as I read about Bob Bird and his breakthrough in uninvestigation, I knew immediately that the darned thing must have been lost en route to Mumbai.


Now editor Bird could just have said that his dog ate those millions of e-mails. But apparently with that image of e-mails wafting off course en route to Mumbai, his interrogators were charmed into complaisance. Nobody in Scotland seemed to wonder how the e-mails came to be en route to Mumbai. Or for that matter just what was en route to Mumbai. Was the idea that those millions of e-mails had been dumped into a really, really big old steamer trunk and dragged to the post office? Really now, even in my state of technical innocence I know that you can't crate a batch of e-mails up for shipping to India or anywhere else. Maybe the e-mails were on a server that somehow got crated up and somebody slapped a label with a Mumbai address on it?

I like to think that editor Bird didn't even crack a smile when he broke the news about the grief to which the Mumbai-bound e-mails had come. When you come up with a story like that, you really have to sell it.

Hey, I'm sold. I don't even have a dog to accuse of eating my homework. In any case, the "lost en route to Mumbai" story is so much classier, more elegant. As it happens, I found the missing watch this morning, so apparently it wasn't lost en route to Mumbai after all. However, if my DWT post tomorrow should happen not to appear on schedule . . . well, you know where it is.

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Who Exactly Is Sounding The Right's Clarion Call Of Battle Against Teachers And Public Service Unions?

The video above gave the Tory scum (in England) a little taste of what could happen if they keep squeezing and squeezing-- in the name of the Conservative Consensus war against working people (under the "sensible" guise of "austerity")-- and get common peoples' backs up against the wall. And the video below, just a reworking of some old Pulp song, a band no one in America ever heard about anyway, about a bunch of British politicians no one in America has ever heard of. So who cares? Well, Monsieur Jones, something's happening and it's happening worldwide. Lately Americans have started hearing of places called Iceland and Greece that politicians now routinely use to try to frighten voters. It's the tip of the iceberg. There's an international counterrevolution going on-- and our side hasn't started fight back yet, not in America, anyway.

The Economist is kind of a weekly, British version of the Wall Street Journal, but with slightly higher standards. You might be interested in knowing, though, that almost half of its weekly circulation of 1.6 million is sold in the U.S. and Canada. Like the Wall Street Journal it is an unabashed proponent of so-called "free" trade and a dedicated organ of wealth and privilege, a mouthpiece for the interests of the ruling class and the Establishment in all things. The Economist isn't as blinkered, as venal or as apt to fall into neo-fascism on a regular basis as the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It's owned by the Financial Times and the U.K. banksters, the Rothschilds while the Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Wikipedia has an interesting description of The Economist's voice:

The editorial staff enforces a uniform voice throughout its pages, as if most articles were written by a single author, displaying dry, understated wit, and precise use of language.

The paper's treatment of economics presumes a working familiarity with fundamental concepts of classical economics. For instance, it does not explain terms like invisible hand, macroeconomics, or demand curve, and may take just six or seven words to explain the theory of comparative advantage. However, articles involving economics do not presume any formal training on the part of the reader and aim to be accessible to the educated layman. The newsmagazine usually does not translate short French quotes or phrases, and sentences in Ancient Greek or Latin are not uncommon. It does, however, describe the business or nature of even well-known entities, writing, for example, "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank."

...The Economist does not print bylines identifying the authors of articles, other than surveys and special "by invitation" contributions. The editors say this is necessary because "collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists" and reflects “a collaborative effort.” In most articles authors refer to themselves as "your correspondent" or "this reviewer." The writers of the titled opinion columns tend to refer to themselves by the title (hence, a sentence in the "Lexington" column might read "Lexington was informed...").

Critics say editorial anonymity gives the publication an "omniscient tone and pedantry" and hides the youth and inexperience of those writing articles. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” quipped American author Michael Lewis in 1991. “If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.” John Ralston Saul describes The Economist as a "magazine which hides the names of the journalists who write its articles in order to create the illusion that they dispense disinterested truth rather than opinion. This sales technique, reminiscent of pre-Reformation Catholicism, is not surprising in a publication named after the social science most given to wild guesses and imaginary facts presented in the guise of inevitability and exactitude. That it is the Bible of the corporate executive indicates to what extent received wisdom is the daily bread of a managerial civilization."

...In 1991, James Fallows argued in the Washington Post that The Economist suffers from British class snobbery, pretentiousness, and simplistic argumentation, and "unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our [US] shores." He also accused it of an editorial line often contradicted by the news stories. Andrew Sullivan complained in the New Republic that it uses “marketing genius” to make up for deficiencies in analysis and original reporting, resulting in “a kind of Reader's Digest” for America’s corporate elite. (However, criticism in the same 1999 article regarding as-yet-unfulfilled pronouncements by The Economist that the American stock market was overvalued was proven wrong a few months later when the Dot-com bubble burst.) He also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College. The Observer wrote that "its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation."

The photo above is from The Economist. As usual, they're slightly ahead of the curve in comparison to the Journal which isn't likely to run such a picture until there's actual bloodshed in lower Manhattan. Last week's Economist featured a typically red-baiting story on public-sector workers subtitled "Public-sector unions have had a good few decades. Has their luck run out?" Right off the bat, they make it crystal clear just why the international Conservative Consensus has launched a jihad against public service unions:

The past 30 years have been dismal ones for the labour movement. In the American private sector trade-union density (ie, the proportion of workers who belong to unions) has fallen from a third in 1979 to just 7% today. In Britain it has dropped from 44% to 15%. Nor is this just an Anglo-Saxon oddity: less than a fifth of workers in the OECD belong to unions.

There is one big exception to this story of decline, however: the public sector. In the Canadian public sector union density has increased from 12% in 1960 to more than 70% today. In America it has increased over the same period from 11% to 36% (see chart). There are now more American workers in unions in the public sector (7.6m) than in the private sector (7.1m), although the private sector employs five times as many people. Union density is now higher in the public sector than it was in the private sector in its glory days, in the 1950s.

...This private-public shift has transformed the trade union movement. In the 1950s unions were solidly working class, dominated by men who had left school at 16 and leant left on economics but right on social issues. Today they are much more middle-class: more than a quarter of American unionists have college degrees, and even more have liberal views on social and environmental issues.

The shift has also created tension between the public and private sectors. The private sector is dominated by competition and turbulence. Performance-related pay is the norm, and redundancy [arbitrary layoffs] commonplace. The public sector, by contrast, is a haven of security and stability. Many people have jobs for life and performance measures are rare. The result is a paradox: the typical public worker is better off than the people he is supposed to serve, and the gap has widened significantly over the past decade. In America, pay and benefits have grown twice as fast in the public sector as they have in the private sector.

Now that the sovereign-debt crisis is forcing governments to put their houses in order, the growing discrepancy between conditions in the public and private sectors has eroded much of the sympathy public-sector workers might once have enjoyed. This briefing will look at what the future holds for them. But first it will try to answer two questions: how did public-sector unions become so powerful? And what impact has their power had on the way the public sector works?

...Public-sector unions now face the biggest challenge in their history. Governments almost everywhere-- particularly in the rich world-- are being forced to cut back public spending. Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.

In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s [ex-Gov.] Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new “privileged class” of public-sector workers. Do the public exist to serve public-sector workers with their high pay and inflated benefits, they ask, or do public-sector workers exist to serve the public?

Even people on the [so-called] left are beginning to echo these complaints. Andrew Cuomo, the incoming Democratic governor of New York, is rattling his sabre against public-sector unions despite the fact that they make up an important part of his base. Davis Guggenheim, an impeccably liberal film director whose credits include Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, subjected the teachers’ unions to a merciless critique in Waiting for Superman, flagellating them for perpetuating a broken system and presenting Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as “something of a foaming satanic beast,” as the Variety reviewer put it.

The unions have responded by proclaiming war on cost-cutting governments. They have already organised strikes and protests. Millions of French workers marched against Nicolas Sarkozy’s modest plans to raise the retirement age by two years. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Ireland and Greece against austerity measures. London Underground workers have repeatedly paralysed transport in the city. But this is a mere prelude. Unions across Europe have promised strikes in 2011 on a scale not seen since the 1980s.

The pressure to rationalise the public sector is likely to continue in coming years. The debt level in OECD countries is expected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2014, thanks to a combination of ageing populations and inherited obligations, some of them driven by the public sector’s insatiable appetite for pensions. Joshua Rauh, of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, reckons that seven American states will have exhausted their pension assets by 2020.

In the same issue, another story, the one accompanying a reprise of the magazine's cover graphic, just above, The struggle with public-sector unions should be about productivity and parity, not just spending cuts. There's not a whisper nor a hint that it was The Economist's target audience, in sustained paroxysm of fits of carefully cultivated, well-nurtured and little-resisted greed, that caused the economic collapse by throwing all caution and sense of trust and accountability to the winds because... well, they all think they are entitled to be millionaires billionaires. They have a much easier target in mind.

Look around the world and the forces are massing. On one side are Californian prison guards, British policemen, French railworkers, Greek civil servants, and teachers just about everywhere. On the other stand the cash-strapped governments of the rich world. Even the mere mention of cuts has brought public-sector workers onto the streets across Europe. When those plans are put into action, expect much worse.

“Industrial relations” are back at the heart of politics-- not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as “tax eaters.” People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else’s expense. In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.

While union membership has collapsed in the private sector over the past 30 years (from 44% of the workforce to 15% in Britain and from 33% to 15% in America), it has remained buoyant in the public sector. In Britain over half the workers are unionised. In America the figure is now 36% (compared with just 11% in 1960). In much of continental Europe most civil servants belong to unions, albeit ones that straddle the private sector as well. And in public services union power is magnified not just by strikers’ ability to shut down monopolies that everyone needs without seeing their employer go bust, but also by their political clout over those employers.

Many Western centre-left parties are union-backed. Britain’s Labour Party gets 80% of its funding from public-sector unions (which also, in effect, chose its new leader). Spain’s sluggish state reform may be partly explained by its prime minister’s union membership. In America teachers alone accounted for a tenth of the delegates to the Democratic convention in 2008. And the unions are more savvy: this time, the defenders of vested interests are not brawny miners spouting Trotsky, but nice middle-class women, often hiding behind useful-sounding groups like the National Education Association (American teachers) or the British Medical Association.

Politicians have repeatedly given in, usually sneakily-- by swelling pensions, adding yet more holidays or dropping reforms, rather than by increasing pay. This time they have to fight because they are so short of money. But it is crucial that the war with the public-sector unions is won in the right way. For amid all the pain ahead sits a huge opportunity-- to redesign government. That means focusing on productivity and improving services, not just cutting costs. (Indeed, in some cases it may entail paying good people more; one reason why Singapore has arguably the best civil service in the world is that it pays some of them more than $2m a year.)

The immediate battle will be over benefits, not pay. Here the issue is parity. Holidays are often absurdly generous, but the real issue is pensions. Too many state workers can retire in their mid-50s on close to full pay. America’s states have as much as $5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. Historic liabilities have to be honoured (and properly accounted for, rather than hidden off the government’s balance-sheet). But there is no excuse for continuing them. Sixty-five should be a minimum age for retirement for people who spend their lives in classrooms and offices; and new civil servants should be switched to defined-contribution pensions.

Another battleground will be the unions’ legal privileges. It is not that long since politicians of all persuasions were uncomfortable with the idea of government workers joining unions. (Franklin Roosevelt opposed this on the grounds that public servants had “special relations” and “special obligations” to the government and the rest of the public.) It would be perverse to ban public-sector unions outright at a time when governments are trying to make public services more like private ones. But their right to strike should be more tightly limited; and the rules governing political donations and even unionisation itself should be changed to “opt-in” ones, in which a member decides whether to give or join.

Fixing the public sector must not be allowed to degenerate into demonising it. Its health is vital to the health of society as a whole, not least because of its impact on economic growth. Bad teachers mean a lousy talent-pool for employers. Allowing a subway driver to retire at 50 on an artificially inflated pension means less to spend on infrastructure: just look at America’s highways and railways. Even if many public services are monopolies, private capital is mobile: it goes to places where government works. With ageing populations needing ever more state help, the left should have as much interest as the right in an efficient state sector (perhaps more so, as it thinks government is the way to right society’s ills).

Private-sector productivity has soared in the West over the past quarter-century, even in old industries such as steel and carmaking. Companies have achieved this because they have the freedom to manage-- to experiment, to expand successful innovations, to close down bad ones, to promote talented people. Across the public sector, unions have fought all this, most cruelly in education. It can be harder to restructure government than business, but even small productivity gains can bring big savings.

The coming battle should be about delivering better services, not about cutting resources. Focusing on productivity should help politicians redefine the debate. The imminent retirement of the baby-boomers is a chance to hire a new generation of workers with different contracts. Politicians face a choice: push ahead, reform and create jobs in the long term; or give in again, and cut more services and raise more taxes.

"It is time, indeed past time, that we accord [gays and lesbians] the basic human right to marry the person they love"

Famed liberal lawyer David Boies . . . oops, sorry, that's Ed Begley Jr. playing David Boies. Boies has a bit more hair.

"The argument in favor of Proposition 8 ultimately comes down to no more than the tautological assertion that a marriage is between a man and a woman. But a slogan is not a substitute for constitutional analysis. Law is about justice, not bumper sticker."

-- David Boies, in a WSJ op-ed piece today (see below)

by Ken

David Boies is known, not just as one of the country's leading trial lawyers, but as one of our hardest-core liberal legal eagles. He achieved a new level of notoriety as Gore campaign's chief lawyer in legal wrangling following the 2000 presidential voting -- not exactly his finest legal hour, of course, but with the Supreme Court "fix" in, it doesn't seem likely that in the end anyone could have done any better.

A lot of eyebrows were raised earlier this year when Boies and his opposite number in the Bush v. Gore legal wrangling, former Bush regime Solicitor General Ted Olson, announced that they were joining forces to mount a federal court challenge to California's recently passed Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Olson is known as the bedrockiest bedrock of the D.C. right-wing legal establishment -- his Wikipedia bio notes that he " was present at the first meeting of the Federalist Society." It turns out that he is by no means as doctrinaire a right-wing loon, or at least not as strictly "party line" a right-wing loon, as many of us assumed, and he has deep feelings of an apparently libertarian nature in this area.

Today the opinion-mongers of the Wall Street Journal gave Boies space to explain "why Ted Olson and I are working to overturn California's Proposition 8." I think the whole thing is worth reading.

Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Why Ted Olson and I are working to overturn California's Proposition 8.

By DAVID BOIES

When I got married in California in 1959 there were almost 20 states where marriage was limited to two people of different sexes and the same race. Eight years later the Supreme Court unanimously declared state bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

Recently, Ted Olson and I brought a lawsuit asking the courts to now declare unconstitutional California's Proposition 8 limitation of marriage to people of the opposite sex. We acted together because of our mutual commitment to the importance of this cause, and to emphasize that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue, not a liberal or conservative issue, but an issue of enforcing our Constitution's guarantee of equal protection and due process to all citizens.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it. In 1978 the Court (8 to 1, Zablocki v. Redhail) overturned as unconstitutional a Wisconsin law preventing child-support scofflaws from getting married. The Court emphasized, "decisions of this Court confirm that the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals." In 1987 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a Missouri law preventing imprisoned felons from marrying.

There were legitimate state policies that supported the Wisconsin and Missouri restrictions held unconstitutional. By contrast, there is no legitimate state policy underlying Proposition 8. The occasional suggestion that marriages between people of different sexes may somehow be threatened by marriages of people of the same sex does not withstand discussion. It is difficult to the point of impossibility to envision two love-struck heterosexuals contemplating marriage to decide against it because gays and lesbians also have the right to marry; it is equally hard to envision a couple whose marriage is troubled basing the decision of whether to divorce on whether their gay neighbors are married or living in a domestic partnership. And even if depriving lesbians of the right to marry each other could force them into marrying someone they do not love but who happens to be of the opposite sex, it is impossible to see how that could be thought to be as likely to lead to a stable, loving relationship as a marriage to the person they do love.

Moreover, there is no longer any credible contention that depriving gays and lesbians of basic rights will cause them to change their sexual orientation. Even if there was, the attempt would be constitutionally defective. But, in fact, the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians is as much a God-given characteristic as the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their straight brothers and sisters. It is also a condition that, like race, has historically been subject to abusive and often violent discrimination. It is precisely where a minority's basic human rights are abridged that our Constitution's promise of due process and equal protection is most vital.

Countries as Catholic as Spain, as different as Sweden and South Africa, and as near as Canada have embraced gay and lesbian marriage without any noticeable effect -- except the increase in human happiness and social stability that comes from permitting people to marry for love. Several states -- including Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont -- have individually repealed their bans on same-sex marriage as inconsistent with a decent respect for human rights and a rational view of the communal value of marriage for all individuals. But basic constitutional rights cannot depend on the willingness of the electorate in any given state to end discrimination. If we were prepared to consign minority rights to a majority vote, there would be no need for a constitution.

The ban on same-sex marriages written into the California Constitution by a 52% vote in favor of Proposition 8 is the residue of centuries of figurative and literal gay-bashing. California allows same-sex domestic partnerships that, as interpreted by the California Supreme Court, provide virtually all of the economic rights of marriage. So the ban on permitting gay and lesbian couples to actually marry is simply an attempt by the state to stigmatize a segment of its population that commits no offense other than falling in love with a disapproved partner, and asks no more of the state than to be treated equally with all other citizens. In 2003 the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas held that states could not constitutionally outlaw consensual homosexual activity. As Justice Anthony Kennedy elegantly wrote rejecting the notion that a history of discrimination might trump constitutional rights, "Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

There are those who sincerely believe that homosexuality is inconsistent with their religion -- and the First Amendment guarantees their freedom of belief. However, the same First Amendment, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses, preclude the enshrinement of their religious-based disapproval in state law.

Gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters, our teachers and doctors, our friends and neighbors, our parents and children. It is time, indeed past time, that we accord them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It is time, indeed past time, that our Constitution fulfill its promise of equal protection and due process for all citizens by now eliminating the last remnant of centuries of misguided state discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The argument in favor of Proposition 8 ultimately comes down to no more than the tautological assertion that a marriage is between a man and a woman. But a slogan is not a substitute for constitutional analysis. Law is about justice, not bumper stickers.

Mr. Boies is the chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.

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Wall Street Banksters Want Us To Think Their Dominance Is Inevitable And Permanent

I read in The Hill today that Gary Peter's bill taxing the AIG bonuses has been buried by the "more deliberative, less passionate," and way more bribed-- most senators get millions and most House members get just hundreds of thousands from Big Finance-- Senate. And the Senate Democratic leadership did it with Obama's team pushing them in that direction.

Despite the public outcry over $165 million in bonuses awarded at troubled insurer AIG, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) showed little inclination Monday to bring the explosive issue to the floor this week or next. Instead, Reid is likely to delay action on executive compensation until late April, after the Senate returns from a two-week recess starting April 4.

The lack of enthusiasm to expedite the bonus legislation comes after Obama said over the weekend that he didn’t think it was a good idea for Congress to target individuals with tax proposals.

“As a general proposition, I think you certainly don’t want to use the tax code … to punish people,” Obama said in the interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday.

Earlier today, we heard a clear explanation from Gary about why the bonus take back is so important.

"People are sick of the double standard in which working class and middle class workers are treated differently than financial industry executives... Thousands of UAW members are making sacrifices & renegotiating their contracts right now as a condition of receiving federal support."

This morning the ultimate media mouthpiece for the Wall Street/bankster elite-- the Wall Street Journal crowed over the slap down of the unwashed, angry masses by "their own" representatives. The Obama Administration supposedly realizes, giving the power of Big Business, they can't get anything done without the banksters cooperation. In other words, the banksters will destroy him and his administration (and the rest of us), if he screws with them.

In recent days, in spite of public furor over huge bonuses paid at American International Group Inc., the administration has concluded that it needs the private sector to play a central role in fixing the economy. So over the weekend, the White House worked to tone down its Wall Street bashing and to win support from top bankers for the bailout plan announced Monday, which will rely on public-private investments to soak up toxic assets.

But weeks of searing criticism by politicians and the public had left bankers leery of working with the government. After brainstorming about what to do about that problem, the White House resolved to try to take control of the debate, according to several administration officials. In weekend television appearances, President Barack Obama and other administration officials tempered their criticisms of the financial sector.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his colleagues worked the phones to try to line up support on Wall Street for the plan announced Monday. They told executives they don't favor using the tax code to retroactively penalize specific individuals who had received bonuses, according to people familiar with the calls. They asked officials to sign on "in pencil, not ink," and to "validate" or "express support" for the plan, these people say.

Some bankers say they turned the conversations into complaints about the antibonus crusade consuming Capitol Hill. Some have begun "slow-walking" the information previously sought by Treasury for stress-testing financial institutions, three bankers say, and considered seeking capital from hedge funds and private-equity funds so they could return federal bailout money, thereby escaping federal restrictions.

"Our great challenge is to make clear that we can't have an economic recovery without Wall Street, but these AIG bonuses make it that much harder," said David Axelrod, President Obama's top political aide, in a recent interview.

...Early in the Obama presidency, top banking executives were frozen out of internal discussions about how to fix the economy. In its first few weeks in office, the administration closely hewed to the anticorporate sentiment that was a campaign hallmark. As the White House began filling top economic posts, it largely avoided market veterans, or applied strings to their employment... [A]s the furor [over the AIG bonuses] intensified, Mr. Obama's words to Congress-- "we cannot govern out of anger"-- seemed to take on less importance. Last week, he was asked by reporters on the White House South Lawn whether anger was getting in the way of pushing through banking reforms. "I don't want to quell anger," he replied. "I think people are right to be angry. I'm angry."

Bankers were shell-shocked, especially when Congress moved to heavily tax bonuses. When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the tables. They used the calls to lobby against the antibonus legislation, Wall Street executives say. Several big firms called Treasury and White House officials to urge a more reasonable approach, both sides say. The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

Unless some of these people wind up in prison all we'll ever hear from them is how the unwashed masses are threatening their children with piano wire and how they can't even fly their taxpayer subsidized private jets in peace anymore. Take a look at how the new Gallup poll measures people rating Americans give the main actors in this tragedy:


In his Washington Post column this morning, career-long corporate shill George Will called the members of Congress who voted for Gary Peters' tax on bonuses "the braying of 328 yahoos." That's predictable. What do you think we should do about the members of Congress-- and the Wall Street elite and the media-- who think it's appropriate for the taxpayers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars so wealthy corporate executives can get even richer? I think we know where California Congresswoman Maxine Waters stands on that. She just kicked Geithner's ass at the Financial Services Committee hearing today. Looks like she's not a big fan of the banksters, especially not Goldman Sachs. Also at that hearing Geither and Bernanke told Congress there is no Plan B-- just the Wall Street way:




The Banksters Fight Back

The prediction: another million jobs will be lost if the criminal banksters don't get to keep their taxpayer-funded bonuses.

The predictor: Michael Feroli, an economist at JP Morgan

Question: What would happen if all the criminals on Wall Street were rounded up and thrown in prison? I think a lot of people would like that... a lot.