Tag Archives: jobs

Robert Gates Thinks Obama Was Right. So Why Is He So Down On Him?

by KandyWozniak Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his newly published memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes a 2011 meeting about Afghanistan: “As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Andrew Sullivan points me to Rod Dreher, whose pithy reaction seems like the right one:

Is it just me, or is this nuts? Obama’s judgment of the sleazy Karzai was correct, Obama knew the war was unwinnable, Gates thinks Obama made the right calls — but he faults the president for not being a True Believer? As if George W. Bush’s unwillingness to reassess American strategy in light of cold, hard experience is a sign of wisdom and character! I suppose Gates has a point if he’s faulting Obama for pursuing a military strategy that he (the president) didn’t believe in, but does Gates believe that an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been the better strategy, even if it had been politically feasible (which it may not have been)?

Based on the excerpts we’ve seen, this seems like the right response. Over and over, Gates seems to suggest that Obama made the right decisions and made them in the right way. And yet, he remained uneasy because Obama’s attitude toward the military wasn’t as deferential as he thought it should be. It’s easy to understand why a guy with Gates’ background might feel that way, but honestly, after over a decade of mostly fruitless war does Gates truly think that deference was in order? The truth is that Obama and his staffers should have been extremely skeptical of the military’s judgment by 2011. Nobody in the Pentagon wants to hear this, but by that time they had failed enough times that skepticism was really the only reasonable response from a new president.

It’s interesting to see how this book is being handled by different people. Obviously Gates has some criticisms of Obama, and every review notes that. However, he also had some very positive things to say about Obama, and most of the reviews are fairly evenhanded about pointing that out. Not so for Bob Woodward, though, whose front-page review in the Washington Post is so unremittingly negative that you’d think Gates’ book was little more than a 600-page hatchet job against Obama. Once again, I find myself wondering what’s up with Woodward. He obviously has a fairly intense loathing for Obama, but I can’t really figure out why.

Also interesting is Andrew Sprung’s comparison of Gates’ mid-90s memoir to this one. Gates has obviously changed a lot:

Gates 1996 and Gates 2014 are rather like America 1996 and America 2014. The first, ebullient, a tad triumphal, serenely confident that U.S. policymaking will be driven by countervailing democratic pressures both to express the will of the people and to secure order in the world as well as national security. The second, embittered, exhausted, fearful that the country has lost its capacity for problem-solving.

The whole post is worth a read. It’s obvious that Gates doesn’t much like what’s happened to America over the past decade, both politically and militarily. It’s hard to blame him for that.

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Robert Gates Thinks Obama Was Right. So Why Is He So Down On Him?

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Here Are the Chris Christie Emails Everyone Is Talking About

by DomingaHooley Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, news outlets released emails indicating that top aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blocked lanes on a major bridge last year in retaliation against a political opponent.

Last September, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey abruptly closed two lanes on the George Washington Bridge, causing a massive traffic jam that clogged the streets of Fort Lee, N.J. News outlets and New Jersey Democrats began to look into the circumstances surrounding the bridge closure, suspecting that the Port Authority closed the bridge lanes in an act of political retaliation against Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat who backed Gov. Chris Christie’s opponent in the 2013 gubernatorial campaign. The emails released today suggest that was indeed the case:

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Christie administration traffic jam correspondence (PDF)

Christie administration traffic jam correspondence (Text)

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Here Are the Chris Christie Emails Everyone Is Talking About

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Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

by BrandiNic Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has published a memoir of his time in government. He served in Obama’s cabinet for two years:

Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy — expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Gates was frustrated about this, and I don’t blame him. And needless to say, conservatives are going to have a field day with it.

But it’s pretty frustrating for those of us on the other side of the fence as well. Apparently, we’ve spent the past three years fighting a war that the White House no longer believes in. There’s been essentially no hope of victory, or even of doing much good, and yet we gutted it out anyway. What a waste.

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Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

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A Wee Question for the Climate Change Skeptics

by ZWMWyattjthn Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Kleiman poses an interesting question:

I’d like to hear the climate-change deniers explain why Monsanto wanted to pay almost $1 billion for a company whose business model is protecting farmers against increasing volatility in the weather, and whose models predict that Kansas will become inhospitable to corn and Alaska a good place to grow wheat.

The context here is the $1 billion acquisition of the Climate Corporation by Monsanto—which these days is purely a seed company, having spun off its old chemical business years ago. Apparently Monsanto is willing to invest a lot of money in the proposition that climate change is real and they need to be prepared for it. Just like insurance companies. And the US military. There sure are an awful lot of hard-headed types out there who have fallen for the climate change hoax.

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A Wee Question for the Climate Change Skeptics

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Unemployment Bill Moves Closer to Inevitable Defeat in House

by LynnePilkington Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of hours ago, the Senate voted 60-37 to move forward on a bill extending unemployment insurance benefits. If those same 60 senators continue to vote the same way, the bill will pass sometime in the next day or two.

But that will require making some concessions to Republicans, and this is getting a ton of ink. But why? Am I missing something here? Does this bill have even the faintest chance of getting a vote in the House, let alone passing? I haven’t read anything that suggests John Boehner plans to bring it up no matter what concessions Democrats make in the Senate.

Help me out here. I could use some good news. Does this bill have a prayer of passing the House, or is this just another round of Capitol Hill game playing, with poor people as the pawns?

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Unemployment Bill Moves Closer to Inevitable Defeat in House

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Ask an Expert How to Avoid Exploitive Clothing Companies

by KelliTaxac Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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“The supervisors said we would get less work if we slept with them.” That’s what a 19-year-old Indian woman told me this year, about her experience working in a factory that makes products for international clothing companies. She’s one of thousands of “sumangali girls” who take jobs at textile factories under false promises, believing that they will earn enough money for education or a dowry. After traveling to India to learn about the brutal conditions under which sumangali girls work—and getting chased by thugs in the process—it’s been hard for me to shop for clothes in Washington, DC, without feeling guilty. So what’s the solution?

At 11 AM EST on Tuesday, January 7th, I’ll be discussing this question with Sindhu Kavinamannil, a native of Southern India who investigates government contracts for labor violations and served as my translator during my reporting trip, and Elizabeth Cline, author of the 2012 book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. We’ll talk about the sumangali scheme, efforts by US clothing companies to reform their supply chains, and tips for American consumers who want to make sure that their clothes don’t support exploitation. Here’s our discussion:

Link: 

Ask an Expert How to Avoid Exploitive Clothing Companies

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Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

by SadyePereira Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, USA., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy. There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life. These days, I suspect, not so many.

Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins. Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn’t top any New Year’s list. Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced. In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the US military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual “defense department,” as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing. It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.

The expansion of Washington’s national security state—let’s call it the NSS—to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the “right” of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort. The debate about this—invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two—has been reasonably vigorous. The problem is: it doesn’t begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.

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Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

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Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now

by BeauDrewvd Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Perhaps the best analogy yet for the insane cold weather now afflicting the US came from science blogger Greg Laden, who created the viral image above. “Go home, Arctic,” it reads. “You’re drunk.”

When it comes to the reason why the United States is currently experiencing life-threatening cold—with temperatures in the negative-20s in the Upper Midwest, and wind chills much lower than that—that’s actually not so far from the truth. “It’s basically the jet stream on a drunken path going around the Northern Hemisphere,” explains Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis. In other words, we’re experiencing record-breaking cold temperatures because a wavy and elongated jet stream has allowed frigid Arctic air to travel much farther south than usual.

And according to Francis’ research—which has drawn increasing attention in the past few years—we’re seeing more of just this kind of jet stream behavior, thanks, at least in part, to the rapid warming of the Arctic.*

To understand how it works, it first helps to think of the jet stream as a river of air that flows from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere, bringing with it much of our weather. Its motion—sometimes in a relatively straight path, sometimes in a more loopy one—is driven by a difference in temperatures between the equator and the north pole. Southern temperatures are of course warmer, and because warm air takes up more space than cold air, this leads to taller columns of air in the atmosphere. “If you were sitting on top of a layer of atmosphere and you were in DC, looking northward, it would be like looking down a hill, because it’s warmer where you are,” explains Francis.

The jet stream then flows “downhill,” so to speak, in a northward direction. But it’s also bent by the rotation of the Earth, leading to its continual wavy, eastward motion.

As the Arctic rapidly heats up, however, there’s less of a temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and the downhill slope in the atmosphere is accordingly less steep. This creates a weaker jet stream, a jet stream that meanders more or, if you prefer the new analogy, staggers around drunkenly. “As the Arctic continues to warm, we expect the jet stream to take these wild swings northward and southward more often,” says Francis. “And when it does, that’s when we get these particularly wild temperature and precipitation patterns, and they tend to stay in place a long time.” (For a more thorough explanation, see here.)

That’s not to say the jet stream never staggered around drunkenly in the past. It did. But Francis thinks this is happening more often, and the result is all manner of weather extremes, including both cold snaps and also record heat. (Not every scientist agrees; for the debate over Francis’s work, see here.)

Thus, it is not at all nuts to draw a connection between extreme weather, including extreme winter weather, and climate change. In fact, what would be truly stunning would be if the dramatic warming of the Arctic were not affecting the weather.

* This sentence was updated to reflect Francis’s view that Arctic warming may not be the sole cause of these jet stream patterns.

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Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now

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Congress Set to Decide Whether It Cares About Poor People or Corporations

by kx93z6g Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Brad Plumer lists seven things that Congress needs to do this month. Two of them amount to “don’t be stupid and shut down the government.” One is just miscellaneous stuff. And another is confirmation of Janet Yellen as Fed chairman, which is uncontroversial and should take only a day or two. So really, we’re left with three things:

  1. Decide whether to extend emergency unemployment insurance.
  2. Pass a farm bill.
  3. Decide whether to extend 55 different tax breaks.

Unemployment insurance is a social safety net program. The farm bill is stalled over whether to enact cuts to food stamps. The 55 tax breaks mostly benefit corporations and campaign donors.

Any guesses about which of these urgent priorities will produce adamantine opposition from Republicans and which will get broad support and pass without too much trouble? Did you guess that #3 would be the easy one, despite the fact that it costs about five times more than the other two combined? Congratulations! You too can be a political pundit.

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Congress Set to Decide Whether It Cares About Poor People or Corporations

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Medicaid Expansion Is a Stealth Success, and That’s Just Fine

by PhoenixBrook3 Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Obamacare ended the year with about 2 million people who signed up through the insurance marketplaces and maybe three times that many who signed up for Medicaid. That makes the Medicaid expansion a big success, but neither party really wants to admit it:

To Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, this exposes a core reality of U.S. health-care politics. “Republicans don’t like entitlement programs, and Democrats want to portray the ACA as mostly a marketplace solution based on private insurance and not another expansion of a government program,” he said, “so neither side wants to emphasize the ACA’s success enrolling people in Medicaid even though it may be the law’s biggest achievement so far in terms of expanding coverage.”

This has left both the Obama administration and Republicans in a tight spot. The White House can’t really tout the Medicaid expansion because it’ll revive fears on the right that Obamacare is really a stealthy effort to create a single-payer health-care system, and it’ll arouse criticism on the left that the administration should have expanded Medicaid to all.

As for Republicans, they can’t admit the Medicaid expansion is going well because doing so is dangerously close to advocating a single-payer health-care system. The exchanges, marred by their troubled introduction, are also a problem as they are a Republican idea, enshrined in Rep. Paul Ryan’s health-care bill.

I think I’d analyze this a bit differently. I don’t really have a sense that much of anyone associates Medicaid expansion with a push for single-payer. Rather, Democrats don’t want to talk about it because Medicaid is a program for the poor, and they don’t want middle-class voters thinking that Obamacare is just another way to funnel their tax dollars into welfare programs for other people. Likewise, Republicans oppose Medicaid expansion simply because they don’t like entitlement programs; they don’t like higher taxes; and they’ve always wanted to block-grant Medicaid and starve it to death. I don’t think it’s really any more complicated than that.

In any case, I’m fine with this. I think Medicaid expansion is great, but unlike a lot of lefties, I also think it’s a dead end. It’s not going to lead to single-payer, and it’s never going to be a template for future health care reforms. The marketplaces, despite all their problems, have far more potential to eventually lead to health care coverage for all. I think they also have more potential to produce delivery reforms down the road and to rein in cost growth. For that reason, I’m OK with the Medicaid expansion staying under the radar. That’s a fine place for it.

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Medicaid Expansion Is a Stealth Success, and That’s Just Fine

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