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Rick Perry Is One Lucky Dude

by ChristiGuest Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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From James Pethokoukis:

The energy sector gives, and the energy sector takes. The stunning drop in oil prices looks like bad news for the “Texas Miracle.” (Texas is responsible for 40% of all US oil production — vs. 25% five years ago — and all of the net US job growth since 2007.) This from JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli: “As we weigh the evidence, we think Texas will, at the least, have a rough 2015 ahead, and is at risk of slipping into a regional recession.”

Man, Rick Perry is one lucky guy, isn’t he? It’s true that the “Texas Miracle” may not be quite the miracle Perry would like us to believe. As the chart below shows in a nutshell, the Texas unemployment rate has fared only slightly better than the average of all its surrounding states.

Still, Texas has certainly had strong absolute job growth. However, this is mostly due to (a) population growth; (b) the shale oil boom; and (c) surprisingly strict mortgage loan regulations combined with loose land use rules, which allowed Texas to escape the worst of the housing bubble. Perry had nothing to do with any of this. And now that oil is collapsing and might bring the miracle to a sudden end, Perry is leaving office and can avoid all blame for what happens next.

One lucky guy indeed.

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Rick Perry Is One Lucky Dude

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

by RitaCantor Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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The Ruble Continues Its Free Fall

by SelinaSkirving Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, we have our answer: the Russian central bank’s last-ditch effort to stop capital flight didn’t work. It was indeed taken by the market as a sign of desperation, not strength. The ruble recovered a bit right after the surprise interest hike in the middle of the night, but by mid-morning panic had settled back in and the ruble was once again in free fall. Even the enticement of 17 percent interest wasn’t enough incentive for people to keep their rubles in Russian banks:

By early afternoon in Moscow, the ruble dropped sharply, reaching 80 to the dollar, a record low and a 35% decline from opening levels when it rallied briefly. At 1630 local time, the dollar was trading around 73 rubles….Deputy Chairman Sergei Shvetsov called the situation “critical,” the Interfax news agency reported. “At lot of (market) participants are in serious condition because of these events.”

“The choice the central bank made (to raise rates) was between very bad and very, very bad,” he said, noting that the bank could yet take more measures to stabilize the market….Economists warned that the central bank appeared to be losing control of the market and might have no alternative but to restrict trading. “Capital controls as a policy measure cannot be off the table now,” said Citigroup’s Mr. Costa.

Stay tuned.

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The Ruble Continues Its Free Fall

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

by CaseyHSJTjrd Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Neil Irwin, commenting on the huge interest rate jump announced by Russia’s central bank in the wee hours of the morning:

It may go without saying, but a 6.5 percentage point emergency interest rate increase announced in the middle of the night is not a sign of strength.

Roger that. Russian central bankers hope that this will be an incentive for people to keep their money in Russia, earning high interest, instead of shipping rubles out of the country at warp speed and squirreling them away in any safe haven that comes to hand. And maybe it will work. Alternatively, as Irwin suggests, it may be viewed as a sign of desperation, causing Russia’s oligarchs to pile on the dilithium crystals and ship out their money even faster. You never know what’s going to work when a currency crisis goes into panic mode.

In any case, even if it works, the price is going to be high. Here in America, we argue about whether the Fed will choke off recovery if it raises interest rates to 2 percent. Russia is now at 17 percent. Even if this puts a halt to currency flight, it’s going to kill their economy. In Russia tonight, there are no good options left.

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

by LyndonQuintanil Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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So what should we think about the recently concluded climate talks in Lima? They were, as usual, a dog’s breakfast. Rich countries fought their usual battles with poor ones. The talks nearly foundered completely. Over the weekend the wording of the draft agreement went from “weak to weaker to weakest,” in the words of Sam Smith, chief of climate policy for the environmental group WWF. And in the end, no legally binding limits were set on greenhouse gas emission.

That sounds pretty bad. And yet, something important happened in Lima. As weak as the final language turned out, it does do one thing: it asks every country on the planet to submit a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t mandate what the plans should be. It doesn’t require any independent review of the plans. It doesn’t set out any timetables. But it does require a plan from everyone.

This is something new. It may not be legally binding, but then, no agreement was ever likely to be. For the first time ever, though, Lima enshrines the idea that every country should have a plan to fight climate change. This is similar to Obamacare, which is flawed in dozens of ways but, for the first time in American history, enshrined in law the idea that everyone should have access to affordable health coverage. Once you do that—once you get that kind of public agreement to an idea—you can use it as a building block. Eventually Obamacare will become universal health care. In the same way, Lima may eventually be the building block that produces a universal agreement to fight climate change on a global scale.

This is a fairly rosy view of the Lima agreement, and I don’t want to oversell it. Still, the mere principle that every country on the globe should have a formal plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is important. Once the plans are in place, they become a concrete starting point for climate activists everywhere. And then they go from weakest to weaker to weak to something that’s actually meaningful. Everywhere.

It’s not enough. But it’s something.

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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

by BradyT03jjkzycx Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Brian Beutler writes today about the enormous amount of attention we’ve paid to the cromnibus spending bill this week:

Until the country came to be governed by serial brinksmanship, the writing and passage of annual spending bills weren’t huge stories in American politics, and you had to be unusually attuned to both the content and the process to understand the political currents underlying both. When problems arose, there was always the palliative of earmarks to smooth things over.

But the narrow passage Thursday night of a big spending bill in the House of Representatives brought everything to the surface, even though the risk of a government shutdown was near zero.

I think that’s only part of the story. It’s true that as recently as a decade ago, spending bills didn’t have a big audience. Genuine insiders—aides, lobbyists, single-issue activists—paid attention to the minutiae, but most of us didn’t. More to the point, most of us couldn’t. Even if you were the kind of person who read TNR and National Review and Roll Call religiously, you just weren’t going to be exposed to that much coverage.

This wasn’t because budgets were more boring back then. Or because the political shenanigans were less egregious. It’s because print publications didn’t devote very much space to them. You’d get the basics, but that was it. And given the limitations of print production schedules, the drama of watching deals rise and fall on a daily or hourly basis simply wasn’t possible in real time.

But the often maligned rise of blogs and Twitter, along with their new media offshoots, has created a whole new world. Over at Vox, for example, they ran nine pieces about the spending bill just yesterday. If you follow the right people, Twitter will keep you literally up to minute on even the smallest issues. Dozens of blogs will explain the policy implications of obscure provisions. Politico will flood the zone with pieces about conflicts and personalities as the fight unfolds.

By normal standards, the spending bill the House passed yesterday was fairly routine. But digital media turned it into High Noon and we all played along. We pretended that this was something uniquely shameless, when it wasn’t. The sausage has always been made this way. The only difference is that now we all have box seats on the factory floor.

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Thanks to New Media, We All Have Box Seats at the Sausage Factory

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Rumain Brisbon Is Just the Latest to Be Shot Dead by a Cop Over a Phantom Gun

by JacksonMackinla Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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A student at a “die-in” protest at the University of Michigan on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014. The Ann Arbor News, Patrick Record/AP

Last week, 34-year-old father of four Rumain Brisbon was shot and killed by a police officer at an apartment complex in north Phoenix. The officer, 30-year-old Mark Rine, approached Brisbon’s SUV while investigating a suspected drug deal. According to police officials, after Brisbon stepped out of his car and Rine ordered him to show his hands, Brisbon reached for his waistband. Then Rine drew his gun, and Brisbon fled. After a short chase the two engaged in a struggle, with Rine firing two shots into Brisbon’s torso. Rine later said that he thought he’d felt a gun in Brisbon’s pocket, but it turned out to be a vial of Oxycodone, a pain reliever. Rine has since been placed on desk duty pending an internal investigation.

Brisbon’s death is just the latest example of police killing suspects—often black men—over guns that aren’t actually there. And scientific research has shown that unconscious racial bias can be a factor in these situations. As Chris Mooney wrote recently, in an experiment testing whether an object such as a wallet or a soda can be mistaken for a gun, “police are considerably slower to press the ‘don’t shoot’ button for an unarmed black man than they are for an unarmed white man—and faster to shoot an armed black man than an armed white man.”

Below are 10 other cases since 2006 in which an officer shot a suspect after mistaking some other object for a gun. Two of the victims in this list (which is hardly comprehensive) were white, one was Latino, and seven were black. As is common with police shootings, few of the officers faced charges, and none were convicted of a crime.

Date: February 25, 2014
Location: Clover, South Carolina
Race of victim: White
What happened: Terrance Knox, a county deputy sheriff, stopped Bobby Canipe, a 70-year-old white man, for driving with an expired license tag on a highway north of Clover. Officials said that Canipe stepped out of his car and began walking toward Knox while holding a cane, which Knox said he thought was a gun. Knox fired six shots, one of which hit Canipe in the chest, injuring him. Prosecutors declined to charge Knox in August 2014, saying that the shooting was “without question accidental.”

Date: February 14, 2014
Location: Euharlee, Georgia
Race of victim: White
What happened: Officer Beth Gatny and another officer were serving a search warrant for the father of Christopher Roupe, for a probation violation. When the officers knocked on the door of the family’s home, Gatny said she thought she heard “the action of a firearm” before the door opened, and drew her weapon. When Roupe, 17, opened the door, Gatny opened fire, killing him, later saying that she thought she’d seen him holding a pistol. Roupe’s family members said he was holding a Nintendo Wii game controller. A Bartow County grand jury declined to indict Gatny in July.

Date: May 8, 2011
Location: North Little Rock, Arkansas
Race of victim: Black
What happened: North Little Rock police officer Vincent Thornton and two other officers chased Henry Lee Jones, Jr., in the Silver City Courts housing projects, after responding to a domestic violence complaint. “As he charged toward me and put his shoulder down…I saw a light-colored object I believed to be a gun,” in Jones’ hand, Thornton, then a 28-year veteran of the force, later testified. The object was a cell phone; Thornton shot Jones, a black 20-year-old, in the upper back, lodging a bullet between Jones’ lungs, severing his spinal column, and leaving him paralyzed. Jones died two years later. In May 2014, a federal court jury cleared Thornton of charges, deeming his use of force reasonable.

Date: July 5, 2010
Location: Miami, Florida
Race of victim: Black
What happened: Rookie Miami police officer Joseph Marin and his partner pulled over DeCarlos Moore, who they suspected of driving a stolen vehicle. Moore stepped out of his car, and the officers ordered Moore to put his hands on his vehicle, according to a report by a civilian investigative panel. When Moore reached for a shiny object inside his car, Marin shot Moore in the head, killing him. Police investigators discovered that the shiny object was rock cocaine wrapped in tin foil (and that the car was not stolen). The State Attorney’s office declined to prosecute Marin in May 2011, and in 2013, the independent panel also exonerated Marin. Moore was one of seven black men killed by Miami police in an eight-month period, eventually prompting a civil rights investigation by the US Department of Justice.

Date: March 12, 2010
Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Race of victim: Black
What happened: Around 11 a.m., Metro Police Canine Officer Joe Shelton was responding to call about a burglary and ended up chasing 40-year-old suspect Reginald Dewayne Wallace. As he caught up to Wallace and grabbed him, the two engaged in a struggle. When Wallace reached into his pocket and pulled out a shiny object, Shelton fired three times, thinking it was a weapon. The object turned out to be a silver iPod he allegedly stole from the home. Wallace died of his wounds two hours later at a hospital. Wallace’s family members sued the government of Nashville and the officer for damages and deprivation of civil rights. The Nashville Metro Police told Mother Jones that Shelton is still serving in the department and did not face disciplinary action for Wallace’s death.

Date: July 13, 2009
Location: Los Angeles, California
Race of victim: Black
What happened: Two LA County deputy sheriffs pulled up to the car of Woodrow Player III around 9 p.m., believing he matched the description of a man who had reportedly threatened people with a gun. Player fled, and in the foot chase that ensued pointed a “dark object” at the deputies, which they thought was a gun, according to the sheriff’s office. The deputies shot and killed Player, who was 22. Investigators later found a cell phone next to Player’s body. Player’s family filed a wrongful death suit against the department; in September 2011 a jury exonerated the deputies. The LA County Sheriff’s department told Mother Jones that an internal investigation found the deputies did not violate any department policy, and that both still serve on duty there.

Date: March 1, 2008
Location: Los Angeles, California
Race of victim: Black
What happened: At about 7 p.m., several officers from the city’s South Traffic Division saw a gray truck speeding in the Hyde Park area and crash into a palm tree. According to the police account, when Officer Jose Campos approached the truck on foot, Maurice LeRoy Cox, 38, who was driving truck, reached into the glove compartment and threatened to kill the officers if they didn’t move away. Cox stepped out of his truck and pointed what looked like a gun at the officers before running away, police said. Other officers shot at Cox as the chase led to a bank parking lot. Cox died shortly thereafter of his wounds. Police later recovered a cigarette lighter power adapter on the scene. Cox’s wife filed a $10 million claim against the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD officers for civil rights violations, battery and negligence. In November 2010, a LA Superior Court jury ruled in favor of Campos.

Date: February 27, 2008
Location: Los Angeles, California
Race of victim: Latino
What happened: Around 7 p.m., LAPD motorcycle officers in the Van Nuys neighborhood pulled over Julio Eddy Perez in a 1997 burgundy Saturn for a traffic violation. After the officers approached the car and had a brief conversation with Perez, Perez drove off and a chase ensued. Byron San Jose, a 25-year-old Latino who was riding in the backseat, jumped out of the car as it slowed down. San Jose walked toward the officers holding a “black metal object,” and one officer hit San Jose with the front of his motorcycle. The other officer, Derek Mousseau, fired several shots, killing San Jose. The aspiring rapper had been carrying a 2-foot-long microphone stand. San Jose’s family later sued the LAPD and Officer Mousseau for use of excessive force, asking for $750,000 damage compensation. The family lost the suit in November 2010.

Date: November 30, 2006
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Race of victim: Black
What happened: Joseph Fennell and Coby Taylor were walking to work when a San Antonio police officer drove onto the sidewalk, blocking their path. Officer Robert Rosales, who was investigating a string of robberies, ordered them to put their hands in the air and move toward a fence. Police officials later said Rosales stopped Fennell, 24, and Taylor, 20, because they both matched the description of a robbery suspect: a short black man in his twenties. Fennell pulled his hands out of his coat pocket; he was holding a set of keys, which prompted Rosales, who mistook the keys for a gun, to shoot. The bullet grazed Fennell’s forehead. In 2007, a grand jury declined to indict Rosales and the City Council approved an $80,000 settlement for Fennell. An internal probe into the incident did not result in disciplinary action, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

Date: June 6, 2006
Location: San Francisco, California
Race of victim: Black
What happened: Three San Francisco police officers, John Keesor, Michelle Alvis, and Paul Morgado entered a town house near Lake Merced after responding to a call about suspected trespassing. After apprehending one man and finding a knife near him, they found another man, Asa B. Sullivan, hiding in a dark attic. Police said that Sullivan had stretched out his arms holding a “cylindrical object” when the officers confronted him and refused to cooperate, prompting the three officers to shoot and kill Sullivan. The object was an eyeglasses case. Sullivan’s family sued the SFPD for entering the building without a warrant and using excessive force. Eight years later, a federal court declined to charge the officers, ruling that they had acted reasonably and did not violate Sullivan’s rights. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in May 2009 that Alvin was placed on desk duty after the shooting incident. SFPD told Mother Jones that the officers were still serving on duty, but declined to disclose whether they’d faced disciplinary action related to the case, saying it was confidential.

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Rumain Brisbon Is Just the Latest to Be Shot Dead by a Cop Over a Phantom Gun

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It’s a Miracle! Spending Bill Contains Virgin Birth Provision.

by MaryannHickey Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Our new $1 trillion spending bill1 contains a provision that allows donors to give ten times more money to political parties than in the past. This may or may not be a good thing. Jonathan Bernstein, for example, tells us that some experts on campaign finance consider formal party organizations (as opposed to independent Super PACs) to be “a force for pragmatism and against extremism.” So more money flowing in that direction might be a net benefit.

Fair enough. But check out the third paragraph of the Washington Post’s writeup:

Neither party’s leaders in Congress would claim responsibility for inserting the new provision, which was tucked into the final pages of the more than 1,600-page spending bill on Tuesday evening.

The bare minimum we should expect in an alleged democracy is to know where our laws come from and who sponsored them. Instead, our two major parties, which are normally at each others’ throats like rabid dogs, regularly connive to produce the legislative version of a virgin birth whenever the subject is something that benefits politicians themselves. This happens again and again, and it’s ridiculous. If Mitch McConnell is truly dedicated to a transparent Senate, how about putting a stop to this nonsense when he takes over next year?

1In case you’ve been vacationing on Mars, this bill is affectionately known as the Cromnibus, a mashup of CR (continuing resolution) and omnibus. That’s because it’s an omnibus spending bill that funds lots of agencies in one swoop, but for one particular agency it’s merely a short-term continuing resolution. That one agency is Homeland Security, and they get only a CR for now because Republicans consider this a kind of revenge against President Obama for his recent executive order on immigration. Welcome to kindergarten.

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It’s a Miracle! Spending Bill Contains Virgin Birth Provision.

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It’s Only Taken Us 5 Years to Forget the Single Biggest Lesson of the Financial Meltdown

by MakaylaAsher Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the Federal Housing Finance Agency issued new underwriting guidelines that allow some home buyers to take out mortgages with down payments as small as 3 percent. Dean Baker brings down the hammer:

The NYT misled readers about the relative risk from low down payment loans in an article on the decision by the government to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase loans with just 3 percent down payments. The piece cited several commentators saying that the risk of defaults would not increase substantially by lowering down payment requirements.

A study by the Center for Responsible Lending found that the default rate for loans with down payments of between 3 to 10 percent was nearly 9 percent. This is more than 80 percent higher than the default rate it found for mortgages with down payments of 10 percent or more.

….It is dubious housing policy to encourage moderate income people to take out mortgages on which they are likely to default….I think it’s great to help low and moderate income people get good housing. But this policy is about helping banks get their bad mortgages insured by taxpayers.

This decision by the FHFA is almost criminally myopic. After all, the go-go years that produced a towering housing bubble and then ended in an epic global financial meltdown are less than a decade in the past. Have we really forgotten so soon the primary lesson of these years?

For the record, here it is: If there was a single primary culprit in the collapse of the global economy, it was excessive leverage. It was embedded in exotic financial instruments. It was encouraged by weak banking regulations. It was exploited by traders and executives who all knew they could make a quick buck as long as the music kept playing. In the end, though, it turned Wall Street into a house of cards that didn’t have the strength to withstand meaningful losses. When those losses finally, inevitably, materialized, the financial system collapsed.

But it’s not just bank leverage that’s a problem. Wall Street’s most dangerous debt all originated with consumers, who had been relentlessly encouraged to take on ever more debt and ever more leverage for nearly a decade—mostly in the form of risky mortgages that were almost designed for failure thanks to down payment requirements that got steadily weaker as the housing bubble steadily inflated. If you make a 20 percent down payment, your leverage is 4:1. That’s fine. If things go south, your house can lose a lot of value and you’re still OK. (And so is your bank.) With a 10 percent down payment, your leverage is 9:1. That’s more dangerous. But a 3 percent down payment? Now we’re talking about leverage of 32:1. That’s crazytown territory. Even a moderate setback can wipe you out completely. Put enough loans like that together and then lash them into leverage-soaked financial derivatives that no one truly understands, and a moderate setback can wipe out the entire financial system.

The FHFA’s justification, of course, is that this 3 percent deal is only being offered to people with strong credit histories. But that’s always how it starts, isn’t it? The question is, where does it end?

Nowhere good. The single biggest lesson of the 2008 meltdown is that a strong financial system is built on a foundation of limited leverage. Limited leverage for everyone. Anything else is a foundation of sand. How can we have forgotten that so soon?

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It’s Only Taken Us 5 Years to Forget the Single Biggest Lesson of the Financial Meltdown

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

by VedaWhited Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

The Senate torture report seems likely to be published this week in some form or another, but there’s already a campaign in full swing to keep it under wraps. Why? Because its release might put Americans in danger. Paul Waldman acknowledges that this might be true, but provides the right response:

The cynicism necessary to attempt to blame the blowback from their torture program on those who want it exposed is truly a wonder. On one hand, they insist that they did nothing wrong and the program was humane, professional, and legal. On the other they implicitly accept that the truth is so ghastly that if it is released there will be an explosive backlash against America. Then the same officials who said “Freedom isn’t free!” as they sent other people’s children to fight in needless wars claim that the risk of violence against American embassies is too high a price to pay, so the details of what they did must be kept hidden.

There’s another thing to be said about this: our conduct during the early years of the war on terror almost certainly inflamed our enemies, bolstered their recruitment, and prolonged the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This cost thousands of American lives.

President Obama may have banned torture during his administration, but is there any reason to think we’ve now given up torture for good? Not that I can tell, and it will cost many more thousands of American lives if it happens again. So for our own safety, even if for no other reason, we need to do everything we can to reduce the odds of America going on another torture spree.

How do we do that? Well, all it will take for torture to become official policy yet again is (a) secrecy and (b) another horrific attack that can be exploited by whoever happens to be in power at the moment. And while there may not be a lot we can about (b), we can at least try to force the public to recognize the full nature of the brutality that we descended to after 9/11. That might lower the odds a little bit, and that’s why this report needs to be released. It’s not just because it would be the right thing to do. It’s because, in the long run, if it really does reduce the chances of America adopting a policy of mass torture again in the future, it will save American lives.

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

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