The Insanity of America's Cuba Policy

Insanity, people say, is doing something the same way over and over, and expecting different results. That also has been the definition of United States policy toward Cuba, and those who have sought to maintain that misdirected policy.

For a little more than half a century America has waged an economic war against the island nation and its people in an effort to topple the Castro regime. It hasn't worked. Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President in 2008, outlasted 10 U.S. presidents before turning power over to his younger brother, Raul. Still, too many political hacks have wanted to stick with the same outdated and unproductive policies toward Cuba. They were unable or unwilling to recognize that something different was needed.

President Barack Obama finally made the correct decision for them: On Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014, he announced the United States would seek to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Under the agreement, the United States will open an embassy in Havana, and Obama will call for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. In addition, Cuba released Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned there for 5 years, and another man who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. The United States released three Cubans convicted of espionage. (Early reports of the agreement also suggested that Cuba would release more than 50 political prisoners.)

"We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said. "These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It's time for a new approach."

Obama's noon announcement from the White House was met with the usual hand wringing, hyperbole, and kvetching.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida blasted Obama's actions as "another concession to tyranny," and vowed that he and other Republicans would do all in their power to thwart Obama's efforts, particularly any efforts to roll back the economic embargo.

"This whole new policy is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to stay in power," the Cuban-American senator said -- as if the Castro government was set to fall any minute now.

Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey was just as opposed. "Let's be clear," said Menendez, who is Cuban-American, "this was not a 'humanitarian' act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American. President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Castro government."

Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush said Obama was rewarding the Castro brothers' "heinous" behavior, a remarkable comment considering it was Jeb's brother who defiled America's reputation abroad through mendacity, torture, and an unjustified, decades-long war in Iraq.

Of course the irony and hypocrisy of the criticisms are lost on Republicans, many of whom have spent the last week or so defending the torture methods used during George W. Bush's administration. According to Republicans, Obama's overtures to Cuba are misguided because the Castro brothers preside over a corrupt and totalitarian government that does not respect democratic principles.

That should sound very familiar to the party that added a possible bailout of the nation's six largest banks in a must pass budget bill; shut down the federal government to get its way; oversaw a sweeping expansion of government spying on its own citizens; passed laws that made it harder for people to vote; seeks to deny women control over their own bodies; pushes a conservative Christian theocracy in a nation founded on the principles of the separation of church and state; is shamelessly in the pockets of corporate America, particularly the Koch brothers; seeks to deny health care to poor Americans; and justifies police killings of unarmed black men by saying its black people's fault police are killing them. 

Nonetheless, many Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., and Miami showed muted enthusiasm. While many of the older generation lamented that nothing will change for Cubans until the Castro brothers were gone, many in the younger generation were delighted that the United States and their homeland would move toward normalization.

As they should be.

The issues that have kept this country from correcting a five-decade old wrong are dying with many of those who fled Cuba after Fidel's fighters moved from the mountains into the Presidential Palace.

Surveys by Gallup since 1999 show a shift in how Americans view Cuba, with a majority -- ranging from 55 percent to 71 percent at any given time -- favoring normalizing diplomatic relations. Among Cuban-Americans, support for normalization ran as high as 79 percent in Florida and 73 percent nationwide. A similar poll by Florida International University found that 68 percent of Cuban Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, while 69 percent want travel restrictions relaxed, and 52 percent want the embargo lifted, according to an article published on The Atlantic's web site.  In addition, the old Cold War complaint that Cuba is a communist country no longer carries the same weight considering U.S. relations with Russia, China, and Vietnam.

That so many Americans would want an end to an economic war on a country whose most serious crime appears to have been an association with this country's worst Cold War enemy has not moved Republicans.

"I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it," Jeb Bush said in a speech earlier this month. According to The Miami Herald, "the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba's exiled elite, applauded loudly."

But not loud enough to drown out the calls for America to end one of its longest and possibly most unjust wars in history. 

The True "Racial Hucksters"

So much for that post-racial America.

 

Anyone hoping for some form of justice, or at least an attempt at justice, after the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown was quickly brought back to reality when a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson this week.

 

That the grand jury did not indict was not unexpected. Whenever a police officer kills a civilian, whether that civilian is armed or not, the chances of an indictment are slim to none because all the officer has to say is that he or she felt that his or her life was in danger. Once such a statement is made the officer is given the benefit of the doubt with little done to ascertain if the supposed threat was real and the actions taken justified.

Such was evident from the beginning of the Ferguson case. The St. Louis County Prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, had all but signaled that there would be no indictment. The same was true of many Missouri officials. Legal precedent had already told Americans which way the wind was blowing.

The only way a white cop will be indicted on state charges for shooting an unarmed black male is the circumstances of the case must be so revolting, so egregious that even white America is appalled. Indeed, some white Americans were, especially when they saw the heavily armed police response to protests in the aftermath of Brown’s death.

But a majority of white Americans, or at least those who were given the largest megaphones, saw little wrong with the police tactics either in the slaying or during the post-slaying protests that ensued. To them, a white cop waving an automatic weapon at protestors and calling them animals that he would kill was a reasonable response. That police withheld the identity of the officer for days; that the officer disappeared from public; that anonymous police sources were quoted as saying Wilson was beaten “almost unconscious;” or that he suffered a broken orbital bone did not stir questions about police practices.

No.

The problem as they saw it was the black male.  

And there is the rub.

A white police officer kills an unarmed black teenager and Rudolph Giuliani, the man who was once dubbed “America’s Mayor,” proclaims on “Meet the Press” that the problem is not with police or police-community relations: It is with black people.

“White police officers wouldn’t be there,” Giuliani told the nation and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, “if you weren’t killing each other.”

He also said: “Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.”

“Black people who kill black people go to jail,” Dyson said. “White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.”

Sometimes the white killer does not have to be a police officer.

An unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a dime-store vigilante and wannabe hero, and it was Martin whose character was assassinated. Trayvon’s killer walked free after a trial.

 

Yet, the most compelling cases seem to always involve police, who seem to have been conditioned to consider every black man a threat. In describing why he killed Michael Brown, Officer Darren Wilson went to great lengths to describe Brown in hulking and animalistic terms. Brown was Hulk Hogan to Wilson, who said he felt like a 5-year-old in trying to defend himself. Brown made a “grunting, like aggravated sound,” his fist clenched, before charging.   

But black men do not have to exhibit animalistic characteristics to be a threat.

In August, John Crawford, a 22 year old black man, was killed by police while carrying a toy gun in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

Recently, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed when officers claimed he pulled a toy gun from his waistband in a Cleveland park. According to police, Tamir did not point the gun at police or make any verbal threats. He was shot twice, nonetheless.

In Brooklyn, Akai Gurley was fatally shot by a rookie police officer when Gurley entered the seventh floor landing at the Louis H. Pink Houses. The officer, Peter Liang, his weapon drawn, was on the eighth floor landing. Liang’s weapon, according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, discharged accidentally from 11 feet away. The weapon of Liang’s partner was still holstered.

An even more egregious case involved Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former FAMU athlete, killed in the Charlotte area in 2013. Ferrell had been in a serious traffic accident, and appeared to be seeking help when he was fatally shot for running toward three police officers. One of the officers was charged with voluntary manslaughter, meaning the officer is accused of using excessive force in self-defense.  

The Ferrell case is the rarity where an officer claimed self-defense, but still faces felony charges.

More often, there are no charges, just as there is no clear idea of how many people are killed by police officers every year in America.

According to a Nov. 24 article on The Washington Post web site, 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2013. That is down from 49 in 2012. Meanwhile, there is no reliable data on how many civilians were killed by police.

The best we know is that America’s 17,000 law-enforcement agencies self-report about 400 “justifiable homicides” per year, according to FBI statistics. Of course, journalists and scholars who study police shootings estimate that as many as 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year.

Instead of taking that information and using it to ask questions or demand answers, the pundit class – and particularly those who wish to blame black people – decry black activists, saying that those activists are the real issue. Such was the case when Adam Brodsky wrote recently in The New York Post that the real problem with blacks being killed by police are blacks themselves.

According to Brodsky, blacks have failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them, instead relying on such “racial hucksters” as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Blacks, Brodsky claimed, need to be more like Jews who do not complain about anti-Semitism. Brodsky does not discuss that Jews have the anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith, and other organizations that battle anti-Semitism every day.

Of course the more appropriate response would be to ask if there is a problem with local police and the communities they serve, and whether each could work to change the perceptions each has of the other.

 

To do that, of course, would mean that the “racial hucksters” have to be stopped in their tracks, which won’t be done. After all, what would FOX News, conservative politicians, and all those white pundits do if they can’t blame black people and engage in race-baiting.

The Dangers of Perception

There is a saying that one’s perception of reality can be just as dangerous as reality. Last week’s midterm elections are proof positive to that point.

 

Despite six years of Republican obstructionism that has wreaked havoc on the nation, voters in several states rewarded the petulant children that make up the GOP with a resounding victory that gave Republicans the U.S. Senate and expanded the Republican majority in the U.S. House.

Journalists and the pundit class have offered several post-mortems on the elections, and there will be many more such pieces down the road. So far, several things appear clear: Most people have no idea what they are talking about, and too many rely on conventional wisdom without realizing that wisdom is anything but conventional.

If the exit polls are correct and many people voted for the Republicans because they are displeased with the direction in which the nation is headed or because they feel government is not working, then we must ask in exactly which direction do the voters wish the country to go and what makes them think the dysfunction that is the GOP will cease to exist come January?

Despite the sabotage from Republicans and the dire, “sky-is-falling” warnings from their sycophants the economy is doing remarkably well. Preliminary jobs numbers released by the U.S. Department of Labor last week showed that the nation created 214,000 jobs in October. That means the nation has gained an average of 235,000 jobs a month for the last six months. The averages are 224,000 over the last three months, and 220,000 over the last 12 months. The October numbers marked the 56^th month of job gains. In addition, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.8 percent in October, and, more important, the four-week average for unemployment claims hit a 14-year-low the previous week.

The good news does not stop there. Bankruptcies were down 13 percent for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30; gas prices are below $3; the third quarter gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent; the budget deficit has dropped to 2.8 percent of GDP; the Dow keeps setting records; and the labor force actually grew.

Of course, there is some bad news to go with the good news. Most revealing is that wages continue to be stagnant, although many business leaders and economists say the continued reduction in the unemployment rate should provide upward pressure on wages. And as Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky reported on Nov. 6, median household income fell each year from 2009 to 2012. While it grew to $52,100 in June 2013, the growth is not enough to make up for the losses American households have endured since 2000 when median household incomes dropped to $55,987 after hitting a peak of $56,080 in 1999 under President Bill Clinton.

So what does all that have to do with the midterm elections?

Apparently very little because according to some exit polls 78 percent of those who voted on Nov. 4 felt that the country is headed in the wrong direction economically. Such a number says either the voters who responded to those exit polls were not being totally truthful, or that they are extremely ignorant of current events. Both may actually be true.

Because if a lack of faith in the direction of the economy and a disdain for dysfunctional government were the motivators for voters then why would Republicans win? It was Republicans who blocked a vote to increase the minimum wage, an issue that passed ballot initiatives even in states that voted for Republican legislatures and governors.  It also were Republicans who blocked efforts to help jump start the economy by improving the nation’s infrastructure, something nearly all agree must be done eventually. Most important, it was Republicans who took the nation hostage, shutting down the government in an effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act and threatening default during the debt ceiling brinksmanship.

As Paul Krugman wrote in a Nov. 6 post on The New York Times web site:

“…the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, [Mitch] McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

“This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.”

Apparently, some pundits are just as clueless. David Brooks of The New York Times and Dana Millbank of the Washington Post each offered his take on the election.

In his Nov. 6 post on The New York Times website, Brooks basically argued that the Republican Party’s massive victory on Nov. 4 occurred because the party had grown up, that its leaders had pulled “back from the fever swamps” that followed the injection of Sarah Palin and the like onto the national stage. The key, according to Brooks, was that Republicans returned to their stalwart roots.

“Republicans didn’t establish this dominant position because they are unrepresentative outsiders,” Brooks proclaimed after reciting Republican gains. “They did it because they have deep roots in four of the dominant institutions of American society: the business community, the military, the church, and civic organizations.”

In support of his argument, he offered up several examples: Larry Hogan, who won the governor’s race in Maryland; David Perdue, who was elected to the Senate from Georgia; Thom Tillis, who was elected senator in North Carolina; Bruce Rauner, who was elected governor in Illinois; and James Lankford, the Senator-elect from Oklahoma who ran “the nation’s largest Christian camp.”

Of course Brooks did not mention, for example, that Rauner has been accused of questionable practices in how his private equity firm, GTCR, has handled Illinois’ pension fund, which Rauner now says cannot pay retirees the promised nearly $2,500 a month in benefits. Brooks also does not mention that Tillis championed the 2011 North Carolina bill that would have forced women seeking abortions to view an ultrasound against their wills. Brooks also did not mention several other extreme candidates, including Joni Ernst of Iowa.

Millbank, in his Nov. 5 post to the Washington Post web site, simply decided the real problem was that President Obama did not humble himself after the midterm election, that he did not take serious the idiocy of an American electorate that gave control of the government and economy to the very same people who wrecked it six years ago, an electorate that passed a referendum calling for a hike in the minimum wage while electing people who have vowed to fight any such increase.

That Republicans have spent the last six years rejecting all of the President’s overtures in an effort to embarrass him is of no consequence to Millbank. To Millbank, the fact that an exit poll showed that 33 percent of the voters who responded said their vote was to show disapproval of Obama was all that mattered. Apparently Millbank did not notice that 47 percent of the American electorate voted against Obama in 2012, or that if 33 percent said they wanted to show disapproval of the President that would also suggest that 67 percent had other reasons for voting as they did.

Simply, there is no single reason why Democrats were trounced during this year’s midterm elections. There appears to have been several factors involved – a lack of understanding of the political process, an aversion to facts, low voter turnout, a party ashamed of its leader – and many of those things may not be easily fixed. That is the reality, and it is froth with as much danger as the one many perceive.

Republican Rationalizations: When Up Is Down

Is the Republican Party schizophrenic? Are its members and supporters bipolar? The fight over sequestration, the party’s efforts to remake itself and the recent embrace of Obamacare by several Republican governors seem to answer both questions in the affirmative.

In the 2011 debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to place a sword of Damocles over their heads. At the time, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders hailed the sequester as a “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.” Now that the across-the-board budget cuts loom large on March 1, Republicans claim that it is all the President‘s fault. In addition, Republicans, who for months decried the cuts as ominous, now argue that maybe the cuts aren’t so bad after all. Yes, the sequester could lead to 700,000 people losing their jobs and major cuts to state aid, but that is a small price to pay for shrinking the size of the federal government, they now argue.

“The sequester is something of a political phenomenon,” Ed Rogers, a Republican political consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post in declaring that the sequester may not be a disaster. “When it goes into effect, it will be one of the most significant things to occur in Washington in the last four years and oddly, none of the Congressional leadership nor the president is for it. Again, something big is about to happen that no one in power supports. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps we should write more laws that declare if the president and Congress don’t act then spending cuts will ensue. We have never been particularly successful in slowing spending any other way.”

Boehner, who once embraced the sequester as a hammer that could be used to force spending cuts, now argues that the bipartisan agreement is actually “Obama’s sequester.” Instead of negotiating a deal to eliminate the sequester or even to delay it, Boehner and other Republicans have spent the last few weeks blaming the President.

“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester’s going to go into effect,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently. “I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month.”

Faced with the sudden Republican shift on the sequester – remember Republicans and Democrats said the sequester should never, ever, ever happen – the party’s sycophants have been forced to engage in mental gymnastics in an effort to shift the blame to the President.

In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks argued that neither the Republican Party nor President Obama has a plan to avoid the sequester. That such a statement is patently false – the President and Senate Democrats have come up with a plan that calls for new revenue and budget cuts – does not matter to Brooks.

To Brooks, the sequester allows Democrats and Republicans to “dance the moves they enjoy the most:” the Permanent Campaign Shimmy for Democrats and the Suicide Stage Dive for Republicans.

“The conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like ‘Learning to Love Sequestration,’” Brooks wrote. “Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.”

Ron Fournier, of the National Journal, was even more schizophrenic is his recent column. Fournier, unlike Brooks, acknowledges that Obama has “reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” But Fournier says that while seeking compromise makes the President right, it does not negate his failure to reach a deal with a party that refuses to compromise.

“Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011) just about scoring political points, or is it about governing? If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama,” he wrote. “A majority of voters will likely side with the President over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.

“If it’s about governing, the story changes: In any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress – castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one President. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history.”

Such thinking is why so many are urging the Republicans to remake themselves, not just repackage their ideas.

In making his argument, Fournier quoted an op-ed in the Green Bay Post-Gazette by Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican. Ribble argued that Republicans must accept that new revenues must be considered if we are to deal with the nation’s debt. “Neither party is without fault,” Ribble wrote. “Republicans must confront their own conventional wisdom that says ‘The only way to shrink government is to starve it of resources.’”

Ribble is not the only Republican advocating that Republicans rethink their party and its ideas. In an article for Commentary magazine, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that GOP leaders must recognize that that they cannot lash out at middle-class Americans as an undeserving 47 percent as Mitt Romney did. Instead, they must come up with ideas that help the bulk of Americans.

One way would be to seek policies that help “individuals attain the skills and values – the social capital – that allow them to succeed in a free economy,” the two wrote. “The Republican goal is equal opportunity, not equal results. But equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares a responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.“

They later added: “Instead of signaling that America is a closed society, which it is not and never has been, Republicans would do better to stress the assimilating power of American ideas – the power whereby strangers become neighbors and fellow citizens. In this connection, they would also do better, for themselves and for the country, to call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers; to champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants; and, for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, to provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship.”

Mostly, they argue that Republicans must begin to see themselves as champions of the collective, which may have been what drove some Republican governors to accept Obamacare after spending several years fighting it.

“This country is the greatest in the world, and it’s the greatest largely because of how we value the weakest among us,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in announcing that his state will expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “It shouldn’t depend on your Zip Code or on your tax bracket. No mother or father should despair over whether they have access to high-quality health care for their sick child.”

“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” he said.

Apparently Scott wasn’t the only Republican governor to grow a conscience. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, urged his fellow lawmakers there to “examine your conscience” before opposing his plan to embrace the Medicaid expansion.

“I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” Kasich said. “For those that live in the shadows of life, those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored. We can help them.”

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona also joined the chorus of Republicans singing the praises of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion

Yet even as they do, the party of Lincoln and its apologists continue to suffer from a personality disorder, unable to determine which way is up.

Rubio and the GOP's Big Gulp

There was a very good reason why Sen. Marco Rubio took a swig of water during his reply to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night: Even the Republican Senator from Florida could not swallow the political bane he was peddling to the American public.

Rubio, as expected in his official response for the GOP, labeled Obama in a way that fits neatly into the Republican myth about the President – he is a taxing, big spending, liberal, Democrat, Socialist – but has little to do with the political reality. Then Rubio offered no realistic alternatives to what the President suggested. Instead, he offered the same tired and faulty Republican bromides.

“Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity,” Rubio said. “But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.

"This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies,” the senator said.

On Wednesday, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, assailed that argument.

“OK, leave on one side the caricature of Obama, with the usual mirror-image fallacy (we want smaller government, therefore liberals just want bigger government, never mind what it does); there we go with the ‘Barney Frank did it’ story,” Krugman wrote. “Deregulation, the explosive growth of virtually unregulated shadow banking, lax lending standards by loan originators who sold their loans off as soon as they were made, had nothing to do with it — it was all the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie, and Freddie.”

In his Wednesday post to Wonkblog in The Washington Post, Mike Konczal noted that the housing crisis was driven by subprime loans in the private market, not mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the Community Reinvestment Act.

“The fly-by-night lending boom, slicing and dicing mortgage bonds, derivatives and CDOs, and all the other shadiness of the mortgage market in the 2000s were Wall Street creations, and they drove all those risky mortgages,” Konczal wrote.

To support his contention, Konczal cited data that showed “more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions… Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.”

He went on to quote David Min, a University of California, Irvine law professor, who said the argument that the government directly created either the housing bubble or subprime loans has a serious problem with the timing:

“From 2002-2005, [GSEs] saw a fairly precipitous drop in market share, going from about 50 percent to just under 30 percent of all mortgage originations. Conversely, private label securitization [PLS] shot up from about 10 percent to about 40 percent over the same period. This is, to state the obvious, a very radical shift in mortgage originations that overlapped neatly with the origination of the most toxic home loans.”

Of course Rubio’s arguments fly in the face of other realities. Republicans are quick to say that the government creates regulations and laws that destroy America. They also argue that government, especially on the federal level, is incapable of getting things done. 

No Child Left Behind was passed to improve education, yet our schools continue to flounder. The Environmental Protection Agency and several presidents have pushed to reduce carbon emissions from industry and cars, yet those emissions remain high. The government is trampling the people’s right to bear arms, yet gun sales continue to climb. The Obama administration is pushing socialist ideas, yet the markets continue to climb and many companies are enjoying large profits.

But somehow a federal government that cannot get anything else done was able to force private bankers to give housing loans to undeserving families at great risk to the banks. How could such an incompetent government get private banks, which seek to maximize profits, to put those profits at risk?

The point is the government was not able to accomplish that.

“Did Fannie and Freddie buy high-risk mortgage-backed securities?” Min asked. “Yes. But they did not buy enough of them to be blamed for the mortgage crisis. Highly respected analysts who have looked at these data...including the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission majority, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and virtually all academics, including the University of North Carolina, Glaeser et al at Harvard, and the St. Louis Federal Reserve, have all rejected the Wallison/Pinto argument that federal affordable housing policies were responsible for the proliferation of actual high-risk mortgages over the past decade.”

The sub-prime lending leaders among private banks in 2008 were Countrywide Financial, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance. In 2011, the Center for Public Integrity reported that “mortgages financed by Wall Street from 2001 to 2008 was 41/2 times more likely to be seriously delinquent than mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie.”

Yet Rubio and other Republican sycophants continue in the misguided meme that the housing crisis was the fault of Fannie, Freddie and the CRA. Never do they mention the removal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that banned banks from gambling with depositor’s money.

Rubio also argued that more government will not “help you get ahead;” will not “create more opportunities;” will not “inspire new ideas.” Of course, history tells us that argument does not hold water. It was through government programs after World War II that many returning veterans were able to attend school and make themselves more valuable to employers.

While one may not be able to say definitively that the computer industry would not be at its current level without government, one cannot honestly claim that government research and contracts did not help to support the industry as it grew. Can one claim that the Internet would have been created without government support? Maybe, but one cannot honestly claim that the government did not play a major role in its development. 

And the Republican Party cannot claim to support innovation in education, as Rubio did in his comments, after vowing to eliminate the Department of Education, seeking to cut PELL Grants, and denigrating the teaching of critical thinking skills.

Rubio was correct when he said that we need to “incentivize” local school districts to offer more advanced placement courses and more vocational and career training. He also was correct in saying that the cost of college must be contained if we wish to have an educated workforce and populace. Yet, Republicans cannot make those arguments without looking like hypocrites. They cannot claim to be for education when they are the party of cuts to the education budget, are dismissive of science, and unwilling to reign in the biggest abusers of education funding – for-profit colleges that offer students a GED and an associate’s degree or certification, but only give them a large federal loan bill that cannot be forgiven.

“I believe in federal financial aid,” Rubio proclaimed. “I couldn’t have gone to college without it. But it’s not just about spending more money on these programs; it’s also about strengthening and modernizing them.”

Indeed, much of that may be true. The problem is that it is hard to swallow when it comes from Republicans.

Obama's Drone War: A Bourne-like Identity

The President, in wanting to keep the nation “safe” from terrorists, asks a few select members of his staff to put together a list of people to be targeted for death. Once the list is compiled, the President and his staff meet secretly in the White House where the President goes through the list, listens to suggestions then decides who will be assassinated. To make his acts legal, the President has his lawyers draw up a secret memorandum justifying his decisions. That would be an excellent plot for a Robert Ludlum-like novel or movie – if it were not so true.

President Barack Obama’s drone war has taken us beyond the point in which art imitates life and dropped us squarely in that realm where life imitates art. Using drone strikes, the Obama administration – through the Central Intelligence Agency and the military – has made assassination a regular part of the presidential routine. Members of the President’s national security team meet to discuss the administration’s kill list.

We have known about this for some time. (The New York Times and The Washington Post have written news articles as far back as 2010 detailing different aspects of the international drone war.) But many of us have been too obtuse to its particulars. That is until 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki was killed in a drone attack in Yemen several weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awalki, was killed.

The al-Awalkis were United States citizens. The father had been identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operative, a man plotting to kill Americans. The son seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of the secrecy of the drone program and the mystery of his death we cannot be sure.

Since January 2009, the Obama administration has conducted six times the number of drone attacks as the Bush administration. Most of the Obama administration attacks – 283 as of September 2012 – have been CIA operations in remote parts of Pakistan. There have also been attacks in Yemen and Somalia. Most Americans – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – support the drone strikes, according to several national polls. (A Washington Post-ABC poll from February 2012 found that 83 percent of Americans approved of the Obama administration's use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas. Two-thirds of those surveyed even agreed with strikes against U.S. citizens.)

And there lies the rub.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sought, and received, from Congress a naked declaration of war. According to that declaration:

The “President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts on international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

That declaration — as well as other events – led this nation into armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The declaration was also used to redefine a battlefield and war, and what the United States could do to protect its people – warrantless wiretaps, rendition and torture. To rationalize its actions, Bush had his own lawyers draw up the legal precedent under which he could act. Much of the public was rightly outraged.

Since then, President Obama has not only embraced the very same tactics and definitions the Bush administration used to justify its actions, he has expanded those tactics and definitions to make White House ordered assassinations legal – even on U.S. citizens – without any outside oversight. The President – to borrow from conservative author and professor, George W. Carey – has ratcheted up his presidential powers.

“An incoming president will assume whatever advances in presidential power were made by his predecessor,” Carey wrote recently in The Imaginative Conservative. “In turn, an incumbent will strive to accrue new powers that can be passed on.”

And that is what makes this so scary. Who or what will stop the next president from going even further. Bush pushed the envelope when he had John Yoo, a lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel, draw up a legal opinion justifying “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Obama, even while drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has embraced too much of the Bush doctrine on what constitutes a battlefield and what is a war in explaining how and where the Federal government gets the authority to target people for death.

A white paper explaining the Obama administration’s reasoning states that the “United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces outside the area of hostilities that targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces. Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities.”

And who identifies who is a “senior operational leader” of a terrorist group?

It only takes “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” according to the white paper. It does not matter if the accused is a United States citizen or not. The discussion of who will be targeted in a drone strike can be initiated by a “high-level official” in the secrecy of the White House, without outside oversight, without what we in this nation have come to know as due process. Under this policy, the accuser, jury, judge, and executioner are one in the same.

When the Bush administration created its own legal opinions to justify its questionable actions, Democrats were up in arms. Several leading Democratic lawyers, such as Dawn Johnsen who Obama considered for his Office of Legal Counsel, declared that the “Bush administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public the legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the systems of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government,” according to an article by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian last week.

For years, many of us ignored the events unfolding around us, leaving the questions about the drone war to a few. It left us not knowing who we were as a nation. Then three American citizens – Anwar al-Awalki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awalki – were killed, and some of us recoiled at what our President was doing in our names. According to the White House, Anwar al-Awalki was a senior al-Qa’ida operative. What was his son’s alleged crime? As far as we know it simply may have been that he was the son of a man who the President and his committee of secrecy had declared a terrorist.

Considering our government’s track record on getting things right in this post-9/11 world, that may be the scariest scenario of all.

Naysaying the Economic Naysayers

Things are starting to look better economically in the United States. Not because of any particular thing that is going on, but because of several things that spark guarded optimism for 2013. Of course in expressing this optimism we cannot be naïve, nor can we ignore or deny the extreme resistance that remains in some quarters – particularly among the naysaying, sky-is-falling denizens of the Republican Party.

But as we acknowledge that resistance we cannot be distracted from the facts. The nation is, indeed, a long way from experiencing robust economic growth. (After all, we just learned this week that fourth quarter GDP was a negative 0.1 percent.) Yet, there are signs all around us that we are making steady strides toward coming to grips with what ails this nation economically. In doing so we may finally be able to make some fixes if we can just get enough people to accept policies over politics.

America is not in decline, no matter how often the extreme declare it. America is not on the verge of bankruptcy, no matter how loud the extreme proclaim it. America is not headed toward “European-style Socialism,” no matter how forcefully the extreme assert it.

How do I know this? Why do I express such optimism?

For one, the amount of investment some companies are pouring into their businesses. Just recently, General Motors announced that it plans to invest $1.5 billion in its plants around the country. The company said $600 million of that will go into its complex in Kansas City. Although the improvements will not result in more hiring at the plant it should help several businesses that supply the plant and will be assisting in its makeover. At the same time, Ford, Daimler and Nissan announced that they will work together to build fuel-cell electric cars by 2017, and Ford and Toyota have partnered to develop hybrid rear-drive trucks.

We also have more people recognizing the need to create an infrastructure bank to pay for numerous much needed projects, which should lead to jobs and economic growth, as Mark Thoma argued in his Fiscal Times article, "One Investment That Can Reduce Our Long-Term Debt." And even though the fourth quarter GDP numbers were not impressive, there were some impressive things in the report. For example, "real disposable personal income increased 6.8 percent," leading to a rise in both personal consumption and personal savings. There were also increases in nonresidential fixed investment (up 8.4 percent.) and residential investment (up 15.3 percent).

The icing on the cake came Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its January jobs report. According to the bureau's preliminary numbers, the nation added 157,000 private sector jobs last month. The bureau also revised its jobs numbers for November (247,000) and December (196,000). That means the country has experienced more than 30 months of positive job growth. Included in those January numbers were 28,000 construction jobs and 33,000 retail jobs. The education, health care, and business services industries each added 25,000 jobs.

In addition, for what might be the first time in many years, economists across the ideological divide have come to grips with one of the most argued points since the start of the Great Recession: It’s not about the national debt; rather it is about revenue, jobs, and economic growth. While that could be seen as a minor adjustment in emphasis, it is an important one because it removes the cover that so many hid beneath.

Economists from Paul Krugman to Bruce Bartlett to Jan Hatzius to Richard Koo to Alan Blinder to Lawrence Summers to James K. Galbraith to John Makin and Daniel Hanson have declared that the way to worry about the nation’s long-term deficit is to not worry, to stay calm, to deal with it in a few years when the economy is better.

“The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy,” economics columnist Martin Wolf said last week in the Financial Times. “If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”

According to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Wolf, a “thoroughly pro-market economist," offers excellent advice. Wolf is not alone.

In the same column, Dionne quotes conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, a former White House advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, saying: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”

In his Jan. 29 column, “Outsourcing, Insourcing and Automation,” for The New York Times, Bartlett wrote that one of the major issues facing the nation is unemployment, in particular cyclical unemployment that is turning into structural unemployment. Cyclical unemployment, Bartlett argues, does not have the same long-term impact as structural unemployment, which occurs when workers’ skills do not match the jobs being created.

“The longer someone is out of work, the less likely that person is to find a job,” Bartlett wrote. “Skills deteriorate, younger workers tend to be hired for available vacancies, jobs move to new geographical locations and so on.”

According to former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, we cannot “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans live and what they bequeath to the next generation.”

Even the International Monetary Fund has admitted that it underestimated the damage poorly-timed austerity has on economic growth.

Meanwhile, economic analysts at Goldman Sachs recently told clients that this country still has the world’s strongest economy. Goldman’s analysts also said there are “key economic, institutional, human capital and geopolitical advantages the U.S. enjoys over other economies.”

For example, gross domestic product in the U.S. is almost $16 trillion, “nearly double the second largest (China), 2.5 times the third largest (Japan).” Goldman also says America will continue to enjoy an advantage over other nations because this nation's work force is younger and more energetic; America has greater natural resources, including oil, gas and arable land; America performs the greatest amount of research and development; and America is still the land of choice for motivated immigrants, including those who are highly educated.

So as James K. Galbraith said: Stop worrying about our long-term deficit problem because we don’t have one.

“Foggy rhetoric about ‘burdens’ that will ‘fall on our children and grandchildren’ sets the tone of discussion,” Galbraith wrote in an Aug. 9, 2011, article for The New Republic. “The concept of ‘sustainability’ is often invoked, rarely defined, never criticized; things are deemed unsustainable by political consensus. Backed by a chorus of repetition from the IMF, headline-seeking academics, think-tankers, and, of course, the ratings agencies.

“But there isn’t, in fact, a ‘long-term deficit problem.’ So long as interest rates stay below the growth rate, as they are, debt-to-GDP levels eventually stabilize and even decline. The notion that there is a big problem is pure propaganda based on pseudo-debate, pitting two viewpoints that nevertheless converge on the practical issue.”

Galbraith’s point from more than a year ago was recently supported by Makin and Hanson of the conservative American Economic Institute. The two concluded that trillion dollar deficits are sustainable for now because of low interest rates.

“The Chicken Little ‘sky is falling’ approach to frightening Congress into significant debt reduction has failed because the sky has not fallen,” the two wrote. “Interest rates have not soared as promised… Trillion dollar federal budget deficits have continued to be sustainable because the federal government is able to finance them at interest rates of half of a percent or less. Two percent inflation means that the real inflation-adjusted cost of deficit finance averages -1.5 percent.”

Indeed, it's about jobs and growth.