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"The Quiet Coup"

Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street.

Simon Johnson is interviewed here about his view that there has been a "quiet coup" in America, a takeover of the financial sector by powerful interests and by the political figures who support them.  Whether or not you've read the article (excerpted above)  the interview is fascinating -- and scary.

Saying goodbye to the Electoral College

Nate Silver tracks the movement which, state by state and over time, may eliminate the Electoral College.

Not just a Spanish prosecutor, please

Okay, I admit it.  On the one hand I'd like to see the Bush/Cheney administration investigated and stretched on the rack.  On the other, the self-righteousness of those who want-justice-and-want-it-now-!  gets tiresome. 

The lovely quiet work of a legal machine doing its job is almost sexy and  its critics are not -- as long as that machine is really at work and we're  not just watching a replay of Bleak House.  Scott Horton thinks Cheney is talking and walking a straight line into the newly-oiled legal machinery of Eric Holder's Justice Department.

Every harebrained scheme the country was dragged into over the last eight years seems to have had its start in Dick Cheney’s office. And now, the more Cheney talks, the more manifest his delusions and poor judgment become.

Horton quotes his colleague, Andrew Sullivan:

Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects. But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture”…

The documents detailed horrifying CIA practices that the Red Cross unequivocally called torture—shoving prisoners in tiny, air-tight coffins, waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions: all the techniques we have now come to know almost by heart. And torture is a war crime. War crimes have no statute of limitations and are among the most serious crimes of which one can be accused.

Horton is keeping an eye Eric Holder's Justice Department.  He warns Holder against "operating on auto-pilot."   The response of the new DOJ to the growing evidence of Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors will tell us whether we're right to wait for justice to catch up with our impatience.

Uh, the quiet wisdom of capitalism?

Rick Wagoner, the witless guy who (though he may be a livin' doll in person) brought GM to its knees, will walk away with a pension and handshake totaling $23 million.  Mr. X (actually, its current operating chief) -- the new guy who will take over and try to save GM -- will likely be allowed .... $500,000 yearly.

If you own stock in GM or in pretty much any other large corporation in America, each year when you vote those shares you're given the increasingly popular option of limiting the CEO's salary.  Companies have fought this option for years.  Looks like "the people" (the real owners of large public  corporations) may win in the end.

Chance of US being dragged back into Iraq?

In America, the U.S. "surge" of additional troops to Baghdad is heralded as a success, and President Barack Obama has said he'll draw down American forces in Iraq and turn his attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Iraq, however, what the U.S.-led invasion and occupation started is far from over.

Most Iraqis think that today's lower level of violence is the eye, not the end, of the storm, and that the decisive power struggles are just beginning. The U.S.-backed Iraqi government is widely regarded as an undeserving group of exiles who returned to Iraq on the backs of American tanks.

Over the weekend, fighting broke out between Sunni Muslims and Iraq's Shiite Muslim-led security forces, and it's unclear whether the security forces, still heavily backed by U.S. air and ground support, are loyal to their nation rather than their sect, tribe, town or ethnicity.

Many Iraqis, according to a detailed report from McClatchy, don't really think the US will pull its troops out.  What's more, they don't think the US will ever get away from having drummed up the Iraq war in the first place. One Iraqi teacher interviewed may have hit the nail on the head:  "History will not have mercy on America... I believe that it reached its peak, and now it is on its way down. America was hijacked from the Americans."

Kind of feels that way to many Americans, too.

In the background, the quiet release of detainees at Guantanamo -- one by one

In slower motion than many would like to see, the Obama administration is going through the case histories of Guantanamo detainees and releasing them, one after another.  The latest is a Yemeni doctor the Bush administration decided had something to do with anthrax attacks.

The decision to release Dr. Batarfi came in the third case the Obama administration has reviewed under new procedures the president put in place to analyze the cases of military detainees in preparation for closing the Guantánamo prison in Cuba.  ...

... The decision on Monday came as the government was preparing for an April 6 federal hearing in a habeas corpus case in which Dr. Batarfi was challenging his imprisonment.

The hearing was one of the first scheduled for a decision by a federal judge of more than 200 such cases filed on behalf of Guantánamo detainees.