There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. Victory goes to the falsifiers.

dahlia lithwick on obama's eschewing of any accountability for our nation's criminal behavior...

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

scott horton in harper's...

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

i've been posting about accountability - more specifically, the lack thereof - since i started this blog in 2005 (see google's 97 hits here) and we're still not seeing any...

(above courtesy of information clearing house...)

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Spitzer: "Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?"

eliot spitzer seems to be taking a much more public profile in the last week... it's good stuff and i hope he keeps it up... i'd like to hear a lot more from joseph stiglitz as well...

from the 28 july slate...

Presenting income data is fraught with risks, as there are so many ways to look at any arrangement of numbers. So I will use three sets of data to shed light on the road we have traveled. The single most frequently used measure to gauge income distribution is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from zero to one, with zero representing perfect equality (that is, everyone has the same level of income) and one representing perfect inequality (that is, one person has all the income).

U.S. Gini Coefficient
1967	0.397
1977	0.402
1987	0.426
1997	0.459
2007	0.463

As a point of reference, the Gini coefficient for Canada is 0.326, for the United Kingdom it is 0.36, for Norway it is 0.258, and for Germany it is 0.283. In fact, the U.S. Gini coefficient is significantly higher than that for any Western European nation.

More textured are the data showing the percentage of total income garnered by each quintile of the population over a particular time frame.

Percentage of Total Income by Population Quintile
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	4.0	17.3	43.6
1977	4.2	16.9	44.0
1987	3.8	16.1	46.2
1997	3.6	15.0	49.4
2007	3.4	14.8	49.7

The top 1 percent of all income earners garnered 21.8 percent of all income in 2005, up from 8.9 percent in 1976.

Of course, it can be argued that these pure distributional percentages are less meaningful if everybody's absolute income grew substantially over the period of time measured. But that is not the case. In fact, the gap here is quite remarkable:

Mean Household Income
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	$8,683	$38,415	$96,725
1977	$10,394	$45,323	$110,579
1987	$10,706	$45,492	$130,768
1997	$11,385	$47,886	$158,128
2007	$11,551	$49,968	$167,971

Before 1987, it might have been reasonable to argue that overall income growth was softening the effects of rising inequality. But since then, the rate of overall growth for all but the top quintile has slowed dramatically, with the lowest quintile seeing its income grow by only 7.8 percent in the last two decades, while income for the top quintile grew by 28 percent. And looking at after-tax income, which factors in the impact of favorable tax policy for the rich, the numbers are even starker: Between 1979 and 2004, the top 1 percent of all earners saw their income grow by an astounding 176 percent.

Pretty much no matter how you examine the numbers, they are not encouraging for those in the middle class—and they are even worse for those at the bottom of the income totem pole. Once upon a time, America's income was distributed across the economy like a bell curve, with an increasing share of both population and income converging in the middle. Now a slow but continuous redistribution to the top, with the middle being squeezed, makes the graph look more like a barbell, with a bigger bump at either end—income at one end, population at the other.

[...]

The outcry over Wall Street salaries and bonuses is more understandable when you realize that, over the last 40 years, there has been an inexorable shift of wealth and income toward the upper end of the income spectrum. With the return to profitability of many of the institutions that needed bailouts, taxpayers are wondering why we have socialized the risk of failure but allowed the rewards of success to remain private. Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?

indeed...

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Is this maybe why Spitzer was set up for a fall...?

spitzer seems to be talking pretty straight to me, something that was certainly not a quality that endeared him to the powerful moneyed elites who saw to it that he went down...

here he's talking about the federal reserve bank of new york in slate magazine...

[I]s it any wonder that the N.Y. Fed has been complicit in the single greatest bailout of poorly managed banks in history? Any wonder that it has given—with virtually no strings attached—practically the entire contents of the Treasury to the very banks whose inability to manage risk has brought our economy to its knees? Any wonder that not a single CEO or senior executive of a major bank has been removed as a condition of hundreds of billions of direct cash and guarantees? Any wonder that, despite its fundamental responsibility to preserve the integrity of the banking system, it sat quietly on the sidelines as the leverage beneath the banks exploded and the capital underlying their investments shrank?

I do not mean to suggest that any of these board members intentionally discharged their duties with the specific goal of benefitting themselves. Rather, what we have seen is disastrous groupthink, a way of looking at the world from the perspective of Wall Street and Wall Street alone. That failure has brought the world economy to the edge of unraveling. And some of Geithner's early missteps betrayed an inability to get beyond this tunnel vision, such as the idea that the banks need to be first in line to be paid and to be paid in full. We can only hope that Geithner, who, to his credit, did try to raise some of the regulatory issues that mattered while he was at the Fed, is no longer in the mental prison of Lower Manhattan and will have more success now that he has a board of one—President Obama.

Perhaps it is time to calculate what these board members have been paid by their banks in salary and bonuses over the years and seek to have them return it to the public as small compensation for their failed oversight of the N.Y. Fed. And more fundamentally, perhaps it is time to take a hard look at the governing structure and supposed independence of this institution that actually controls the use of our tax dollars and, heaven help us, the fate of our economy.

it's not only time, it's way, way, WAY past time...

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By George, I think she's GOT IT!

Dahlia: They're hiding something in the White House.
Higgins: I think she's got it. I think she's got it.
Eliza: They're hiding something in the White House.
Higgins: By George, she's got it. By George, she's got it.

(with apologies to Lerner and Loewe)

i must agree with dahlia lithwick... at this stage of the attorneygate game, chasing gonzo's lies is simply ignoring that the REAL problems are in the white house...

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

and those REAL problems at the white house would be...?

The White House wanted party loyalists placed in either key battleground states, or in states where Republicans were being investigated or they thought Democrats should have been. Gonzales rolled out the welcome mat at the Justice Department and told them to install whomever they wanted while he played hearts on his computer. If Gonzales truly wants to rebut that narrative, he needs only to offer some plausible alternative. Anything at all. But he doesn't. He offers only distractions.

so, what's next...? the trail needs to be followed while it's still warm...

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