Browsing PBH By Articles

The Shrinking Democrats

The Article: The Submissive, Indifferent Democrats by Falguni Sheth in Salon.

The Text: If you noticed that there was a lot of news this week in the Senate, but hardly any mention of Democrats, you weren’t alone. By mid-afternoon Thursday, after a 12-hour filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, John Brennan was confirmed to be the next CIA director by a vote of 63-34. The “nay” votes were clearly short of a successful challenge to Brennan’s confirmation (whose nomination to the same office was undermined four years ago).

Much of Paul’s protest centered on the White House’s refusal to answer where it stood on targeted killings. Although it broke no records, Paul’s filibuster met with telling widespread negative reactions on the parts of liberals and progressives. Democrats were virtually invisible, with one or two notable (and weak) exceptions, during Paul’s time on the floor.

Prior to Wednesday, Paul and others in the Senate asked over and over for confirmation that American citizens were not in danger of being killed on American soil. The question was itself hospitably narrow: There was no challenge to the legality of killing foreigners on American soil, to the kill list, to drone strikes on international soil, to the arbitrary (secretive, procedure-less) executions of foreigners deemed a threat.

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The Crucifixion Of Tomas Young

The Article: The Crucifixion of Tomas Young by Chris Hedges in TruthDig.

The Text: I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.” He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.

“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intends to die. “I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration. …”

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Laundering Hundreds Of Millions? Acceptable In America

The Article: Laundering $881 Million Is Now Acceptable by Greg MacSweeney in Wall Street & Technology.

The Text: Elizabeth Warren, the newest member of the Senate Banking Committee, was at it again this week. This time the freshman Senator, who seemingly has more experience dealing with financial services matters than her more “senior” colleagues, interrogated banking regulators on HSBC’s money laundering settlement.

Remember that settlement from last December? HSBC was fined for failing to monitor over $670 billion in wire transfers and over $9.4 billion in purchases of physical U.S. dollars from HSBC Mexico from 2006 to 2010. At least $881 million of those funds were tied directly to drug trafficking proceeds, according to the Department of Justice.

Once again, Warren relied on a simple and direct approach to her questioning. In fact, she used the same method to grill regulators a few weeks ago about how no bank has been taken to trial for the financial crisis. The method: ask a simple question, and press for a direct answer.

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McCain Hates The GOP He Created

The Article: John McCain Hates the Ridiculous GOP He Created in The National Memo.

The Text: When Senator Rand Paul ended his nearly 13-hour filibuster of President Obama’s nominee for CIA director — to visit the restroom — Republicans were ecstatic. They’d found a way to attack President Obama from the left on drone policy while mentioning the Constitution, Jane Fonda and Hitler over and over.

It was like a Tea Party fever dream come to life on C-SPAN 2.

For some on the left, including The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill, The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald, Esquire‘s Charles Pierce, Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer, and Marcy Wheeler — many of whom Paul cited from the Senate floor — the junior senator from Kentucky was opportunely raising the issue of extrajudicial killings in a way their years of journalism could not. Other progressives joined Republicans in standing with Rand, knowing if a Republican ever got into the White House, it would be too late to check the broad executive power that’s been unfurled in the war against al Qaeda.

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The Last White Election?

The Article: The Last White Election? by Mike Davis in The New Left Review.

The Text: Last September, while Bill Clinton was delighting the 2012 Democratic Convention in Charlotte with his folksy jibe at Mitt Romney for wanting to ‘double up on the trickle down’, a fanatical adherent of Ludwig von Mises, wearing a villainous black cowboy hat and accompanied by a gun-toting bodyguard, captured the national headquarters of the Tea Party movement in Washington, DC. The Jack Palance double in the Stetson was Dick Armey. As House Majority Leader in 1997 he had participated in a botched plot, instigated by Republican Whip Tom DeLay and an obscure Ohio Congressman named John Boehner, to topple House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Now Armey was attempting to wrest total control of FreedomWorks, the organization most responsible for repackaging rank-and-file Republican rage as the ‘Tea Party rebellion’ as well as training and coordinating its activists. Tea Party Patriots—a national network with several hundred affiliates—is one of its direct offshoots. As FreedomWorks’ chairperson, Armey symbolized an ideological continuity between the Republican congressional landslides of 1994 and 2010, the old ‘Contract with America’ and the new ‘Contract from America’. No one was better credentialed to inflict mortal damage on the myth of conservative solidarity.

Only in December did the lurid details of the coup leak to the press. According to the Washington Post, ‘the gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.’ The chief target was Matt Kibbe, the organization’s president and co-author with Armey of the best-selling Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. Although Kibbe, originally a protégé of Lee Atwater, is an equally devout Misean (indeed, ‘distinguished senior fellow’ at the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna), he is a generation younger than 72-year-old Armey or, for that matter, most of the Tea Party base. On the FreedomWorks website Kibbe describes himself as living ‘with Terry, his sublimely awesome wife of 25 years’ and spending his leisure time ‘reading Hayek or Rand, watching The Big Lebowski or listening to a killer Grateful Dead show.’ Yet as Armey himself had put it, ‘sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.’

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