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Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

by EliseNivison076 Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Long post ahead. Sorry.

I think I’ve made it clear that I generally support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race. I don’t make a big deal out of this because I like Bernie too. My preference for Hillary is clear but fairly modest. Without diving into a long and turgid essay about this, here are few quick bullet points explaining why I like Hillary:

Her entire career has demonstrated a truly admirable dedication to helping the least fortunate.
Unlike her husband, she obviously doesn’t enjoy the cut and thrust of partisan campaigning. Yet she soldiers on after taking decades of sewage-level abuse that would overwhelm a lesser person. This demonstrates the kind of persistence that any Democrat will need governing with a Republican Congress.
She takes policy seriously and she’s well briefed. She doesn’t pretend that one or two big ideas can suddenly create a revolution.
She’s a woman, and yes, I’d like to see a woman as president.
Special pleading to the contrary, a moderate candidate is almost certain to be more electable in November than a self-declared democratic socialist.
In the Senate she demonstrated that she could work with Republicans. Yes, it was always on small things, the GOP being what it is these days. Still, she built a reputation for pragmatic dealmaking and for her word always being good.

Needless to say, Hillary also has weak points. She has decades in the public eye, and voters usually prefer candidates with more like 10-15 years of national exposure. What’s more, she obviously comes with a lot of baggage from those decades. On a policy level, I don’t get the sense that her foreign policy instincts have changed much based on events since 9/11, and that’s by far my biggest complaint about her. Finally, I’m not thrilled with political dynasties.

OK. That’s the throat clearing. The real point of this post is Matt Taibbi’s article explaining why he disagrees with Rolling Stone’s endorsement of Hillary. It’s hardly surprising that Taibbi is a Bernie fan, but I was little taken aback by the thinness of his argument. Here’s the nut of it:

The implication of the endorsement is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don’t realize what it takes to get things done. But I think they do understand….The millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary’s campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.

Let’s go through those one by one.

The Iraq invasion: This one is totally fair. Hillary did support the invasion, and it was the wrong call. What’s more, this is a good proxy for her general hawkishness, which is her weakest point among millennials and her weakest point among an awful lot of older voters too.

The financial crisis: Taibbi doesn’t even bother making an argument for this aside from some snark about the speeches Hillary gave to Goldman Sachs. But that’s just petty point scoring. Beyond that, it’s plainly unfair to blame her by association for legislation signed by Bill, which she had no hand in. And look: the only Clinton-era law that probably had a significant effect on the financial crisis was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was supported by 83 percent of the House and 100 percent of the Senate. Even Bernie voted for it. The truth is that Hillary’s positions on Wall Street reform are reasonably solid.

Free trade: This is a “foundational issue” for millennials? Starting in the late 90s, there was a 3-4 year period of anti-globalization protests, and that was about it for high-profile attention. Most millennnials were barely in their teens at that point. A recent Gallup poll asked Americans if increased trade was good or bad, and 35 percent said it was bad. Among millennials, it was 32 percent, lower than most other age groups. Trade is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to TPP and Donald Trump, but it’s just never been a foundational issue for millennials.

Mass incarceration: This again? Taibbi says that Bill Clinton “authorized more than $16 billion for new prisons,” and slams Hillary because she “stumped for that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation that inner-city criminals were ‘super-predators’ who needed to be ‘brought to heel.'” The truth: Bill Clinton had barely any effect on incarceration; Hillary’s “super-predator” remark was reasonable in context; and both Clintons have long since said they regretted the carceral effects of the 1994 crime bill—which, by the way, Bernie Sanders voted for. Give it a rest.

Domestic surveillance: Taibbi doesn’t actually say anything further about this, but I’ll grant that I prefer Bernie’s instincts on this issue, just as I prefer his instincts on most national security issues. But anyone who thinks Bernie could make a dent in this is dreaming. In concrete terms, mass surveillance enjoys substantial public support and virtually unanimous support among elites and lawmakers—and that’s after the Snowden revelations, which were basically the Abu Ghraib of mass surveillance. It’s really not clear that in practice, Bernie would do much more about this than Hillary.

Police brutality: Bernie barely even mentioned this until he was the target of protests from Black Lives Matter a few months ago. It’s hardly one of his go-to subjects, and there’s no real reason to think Hillary’s position is any less progressive than his. In any case, this is almost purely a state and local issue. As president, neither Hillary nor Bernie would be able to do much about it.

Debt and income inequality: Once again, Taibbi doesn’t bother to say much about this. Here’s his only actual argument: “Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.” But this is just plain false. And while there’s no question that Bernie is stronger than Hillary on Wall Street issues, both rhetorically and in practice, Hillary has generally been pretty strong on all these issues too. And her proposals are generally a lot more serious and a lot more practical than Bernie’s.

Put this all together and here’s what you get. Hillary’s instincts on national security are troublesome. If that’s a prime issue for you, then you should vote against her. It’s certainly the issue that gives me the most pause—though I have some doubts about Bernie too, which I mention below.

She also lags Bernie in her dedication to bringing Wall Street to heel. But this is a much trickier subject. Bernie has thunderous rhetoric, but not much in the way of plausible plans to accomplish anything he talks about. Frankly, my guess is that neither one will accomplish much, but that Hillary is actually likely to accomplish a little more.

In other words, there’s just not much here aside from dislike of Hillary’s foreign policy views. That’s a completely legit reason to vote against her, but it’s hard to say that Taibbi makes much of a case beyond that.

Bernie Sanders too often lets rhetoric take the place of any actual plausible policy proposal. He suggested that his health care plan would save more in prescription drug costs than the entire country spends in the first place. This is the sign of a white paper hastily drafted to demonstrate seriousness, not something that’s been carefully thought through. He bangs away on campaign finance reform, but there’s virtually no chance of making progress on this. The Supreme Court has seen to that, and even if Citizens United were overturned, previous jurisprudence has placed severe limits on regulating campaign speech. Besides, the public doesn’t support serious campaign finance reform and never has. And even on foreign policy, it’s only his instincts that are good. He’s shown no sign of thinking hard about national security issues, and that’s scarier than most of his supporters acknowledge. Tyros in the Oval Office are famously susceptible to pressure from the national security establishment, and Bernie would probably be no exception. There’s a chance—small but not trivial—that he’d get rolled into following a more hawkish national security policy than Hillary.

I’m old, and I’m a neoliberal sellout. Not as much of one as I used to be, but still. So it’s no surprise that I’m on the opposite side from Taibbi. That said, I continue to be surprised by the just plain falseness of many of the left-wing attacks on Hillary, along with the starry-eyed willingness to accept practically everything Bernie says without even a hint of healthy skepticism. Hell, if you’re disappointed by Obama, who’s accomplished more than any Democratic president in decades, just wait until Bernie wins. By the end of four years, you’ll be practically suicidal.

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Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

by MicheliEtv Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s another excerpt from Jeffrey Goldberg’s essay on President Obama’s foreign policy:

One afternoon in late January, as I was leaving the Oval Office, I mentioned to Obama a moment from an interview in 2012 when he told me that he would not allow Iran to gain possession of a nuclear weapon. “You said, ‘I’m the president of the United States, I don’t bluff.’ ”

He said, “I don’t.”

Shortly after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama’s no-bluff promise was itself a bluff. I answered that I found it difficult to imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something so consequential. But Barak’s question had stayed with me. So as I stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: “Was it a bluff?” I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.

“That’s interesting,” he said, noncommittally.

I started to talk: “Do you—”

He interrupted. “I actually would have,” he said, meaning that he would have struck Iran’s nuclear facilities. “If I saw them break out.”

He added, “Now, the argument that can’t be resolved, because it’s entirely situational, was what constitutes them getting” the bomb. “This was the argument I was having with Bibi Netanyahu.” Netanyahu wanted Obama to prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from possessing a bomb.

“You were right to believe it,” the president said. And then he made his key point. “This was in the category of an American interest.”

But is he bluffing even now? We’ll probably never know.

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Obama Says He Would Have Bombed Iran

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

by NorineAlison Posted on March 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Supreme Court heard arguments last week as to whether Ronald D. Castille, former chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, should have stepped aside from considering the appeal of a death penalty case he personally greenlighted when he was Philadelphia’s district attorney.

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? “He made the most important decision that could be made in this case,” Justice Elena Kagan commented during oral arguments.

Castille didn’t think so. Back in 2012, public defenders for Terrence Williams—who was convicted and sentenced to death at age 18 for murdering a 56-year-old named Amos Norwood—asked Castille to step aside because he oversaw the prosecutors who handled the case. The judge explained to the New York Times that he was merely functioning as an administrator. “I didn’t try the case,” he said, according to the paper. “I wasn’t really involved in the case except as the leader of the office.”

But Castille had additional baggage that raise questions about his involvement.

An appeals judge found that Andrea Foulkes, the prosecutor who tried Williams on Castille’s watch, had deliberately withheld key evidence from the defense—and thereby the jury. Norwood, the victim, had started a relationship with Williams when the boy was 13, and abused him, sexually and otherwise, for years. Although the details weren’t known at the time, the prosecution suppressed trial evidence suggesting that Norwood had an unnatural interest in underage boys.

Williams had previously killed another older man he’d been having sex with—51-year-old Herbert Hamilton. (Williams was 17 at the time of the crime.) The jury in that case, presented with evidence of their relationship, voted against the death penalty and convicted Williams of third-degree murder, a lesser charge. But Foulkes, who prosecuted both cases, told the Norwood jury that Williams had killed Norwood “for no other reason but that a kind man offered him a ride home.”

So there’s that. And then, as death penalty appeals lawyer Marc Bookman points out in an in-depth examination of the Williams prosecutions for Mother Jones, Castille was a big fan of the death penalty:

In the five years before the Williams case came onto its docket, the court, led by Chief Justice Ronald Castille, had ruled in favor of the death penalty 90 percent of the time. This wasn’t too surprising, given that Castille had been elected to his judgeship in 1993 as the law-and-order alternative to a candidate he labeled soft on crime…

“Castille and his prosecutors sent 45 people to death row during their tenure, accounting for more than a quarter of the state’s death row population,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted in 1993. “Castille wears the statistic as a badge. And he is running for the high court as if it were exclusively the state’s chief criminal court rather than a forum for a broad range of legal issues.” Castille was pretty clear about where he stood: “You ask people to vote for you, they want to know where you stand on the death penalty,” he told the Legal Intelligencer, a law journal. “I can certainly say I sent 45 people to death row as District Attorney of Philadelphia. They sort of get the hint.”

Castille also had it out for Williams’ defenders, with whom his old office was at odds. Bookman again:

Castille had a fraught relationship with the Federal Community Defender Office, a group of lawyers who represent numerous death row inmates, including Williams. Castille claimed that federal lawyers had no business appearing in state courts. He complained bitterly over the years about their “prolix and abusive pleadings” and about all the resources they dedicated to defending death row inmates—”something one would expect in major litigation involving large law firms.”

The defenders, for their part, routinely filed motions arguing that Castille had no business ruling on the appeals of prisoners whose prosecutions he had approved—particularly not in a case in which his office was found to have suppressed evidence helpful to the defense. But as chief justice, Castille had the last word. He denied all such motions, and accused the federal defenders of writing “scurrilously,” making “scandalous misrepresentations,” and having a “perverse worldview.”

It’s not too hard to predict which way the Supreme Court will rule—although whether their decision helps Williams get a resentencing is another matter. America’s justice system makes it unbelievably hard to get a second chance once you are convicted of a serious crime.

But all of this brings up a broader, question: Prosecutors like Castille are appointed to the bench in far greater numbers than former defenders—even President Obama has perpetuated this trend. Which is why it was so worthy of note that California Gov. Jerry Brown, under federal pressure to reduce incarceration in the Golden State, has broken with his predecessors and moved in the other direction. Northern California public station KQED recently pointed out that more than a quarter of Brown’s 309 judicial appointments have been former public defenders, whereas only 14 percent were once DAs (31 percent had some prosecutorial experience). From that report:

“We never had a tradition that said to be a judge you had to be a district attorney. That developed probably in the ’90s,” Brown said. “The judges are supposed to be independent. You want judges that have a commercial background, you want judges that have a prosecutorial background, city attorneys, or county counsel, or small practice, plaintiffs’ practice—you want a diversity, instead of kind of a one note fits all.”

When it comes down to it, politicians are still eager to appear tough on crime. But is it really good policy—financially or ethically—to stack the bench with judges who are accustomed to being rated according to the number of people they lock away?

“Most district attorney judges that I’ve experienced are unable to divorce themselves from their background once they become a judge,” Michael Ogul, president of the California Public Defenders Association, told KQED. “They are still trying to help the prosecution, they are still trying to move the case towards conviction or towards a harsher punishment.”

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

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Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday

by AltonMast09011 Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. On the Republican side, Donald Trump continues to hold a commanding lead both nationally and in nearly every state being contested. No surprise there. But what happened on February 15 or thereabouts?

The Pollster chart on the right shows the state of play over the past few weeks. Since February 15, the non-Trump part of the field has gone nowhere. They attract almost exactly the same aggregate share of the vote today as they did two weeks ago. Trump, by contrast, has gained more than five points.

Is this a bandwagon effect, in which Trump has been picking up undecided voters who felt like they had permission to take him seriously after he won New Hampshire? Is it because Trump is picking up nearly all of the votes of the candidates who have dropped out of the race? Is it somehow related to the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13?

It’s a bit puzzling. Trump’s sudden spike comes after two months of holding pretty steady in the national polls. So what happened on February 15?

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Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday

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Today’s Bad Memes: Faulty Earpieces and Gotcha Politics

by BradlyYates Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump “explains” why he declined to denounce David Duke and the KKK yesterday:

“I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece they gave me and you could hardly hear what he was saying,” Mr. Trump said on the “Today” show on Monday, after about 24 hours of condemnation from Democrats and Republicans.

The transcript makes it crystal clear that Trump heard the question just fine. He just didn’t want to disavow the support of white supremacists on national TV. And Laura Ingraham thinks that’s peachy:

We know what’s going on here. David Duke is repugnant, but, frankly, it’s also repugnant to not talk about the issues that really matter to Americans….And the old games of gotcha politics, they’re going to do it, but it’s really not going to help any black American get a job. It’s not going to help any Hispanic American get a job or any poor white guy from West Virginia to get a job.

Yeah, that’s gotcha politics for you. How dare the liberal media play these kinds of games?

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Today’s Bad Memes: Faulty Earpieces and Gotcha Politics

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

by AXIJacinto Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hey, look what I got. That’s right: I’ve completed MoJo’s required course on sexual harassment, no longer limited just to supervisors.

This doesn’t have much practical value, since I work at home and have no one to harass even if I wanted to. Nonetheless, I was eager to take the course. You see, I’m immersed in opinions about PC culture and diversity and the idiocy of it all etc. etc. But I have no personal experience of it. If you’re talking about schools, I graduated 40 years ago and I have no kids. If you’re talking about Silicon Valley or Wall Street, I have no clue about either. If you’re talking about workplace harassment, it never really came up at any of my previous jobs, and I haven’t participated in an actual workplace since 2001.

So how was it? Pretty boring, really. If someone rejects your advances repeatedly, back off. Don’t fire someone for rejecting you. Don’t go into a woman’s cubicle a dozen times of day to take a deep sniff. (Yes, that was a real example.) Don’t spend three hours a day watching hardcore porn in your office. Don’t go around telling black people they’re “articulate” or Asian people that “of course” they’re good at math. Don’t lose your temper. Talk out your problems. Don’t be an asshole.

Of course I, along with almost everyone who reads this blog, is an overeducated know-it-all who finds all this stuff trivially obvious. That’s not true of everyone by a long way, and stuff like this is probably useful for them. This was also a pretty breezy course, not like the 8-hour sessions that are apparently required at some places. (I guess. How would I know?)

Bottom line: I didn’t learn much, but I suppose plenty of people would. And it really wasn’t very onerous. Mostly just common sense, not lefty indoctrination. So what’s everyone complaining about?

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

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Trump Is Going to Raise Taxes on the Rich!

by RoseMyres0634 Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not a fan of New York magazine’s “conversations” with 100 Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. I suspect that its sample is skewed; its conversations are skewed; and that pulling out just the juicy quotes from longer interviews makes it even more skewed. And all of these skew in the same direction: to make Republican voters look angry, dumb, and ignorant. I very much doubt that it provides a remotely accurate picture of how the average conservative in Iowa and New Hampshire really feels about life.

That said, I can be just as suckered by an eccentric quote as the next guy. Here is Nicole Martin of Manchester, New Hampshire:

Trump is bold, and he says what’s on his mind, but I feel like he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he has in business if he wasn’t a good negotiator. At our office, we plugged his tax plan into our software, to see, and it’s genius. We couldn’t believe it. It’s still a little higher taxes for people that are wealthy, but it’s not going to hurt them. And it’s going to save a lot of the smaller people a lot of money. They need it. He’s just not going to tax them. It makes sense.

I really want to know more about this. They “plugged” Trump’s tax plan into their “software”? What software is that? And how does it tell them that Trump’s plan means “a little higher” taxes on the rich? On average, Trump’s plan would cut taxes on the rich by more than a million dollars.

Oh well. He’s going to make America great again. What else do you need to know?

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Trump Is Going to Raise Taxes on the Rich!

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China Baits the Forex Gods

by ChristoSlama Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday:

Wagers that the yuan will slump 10% or more against the dollar are “ridiculous and impossible,” a senior Chinese economic official said Monday, warning that China had a sufficient tool kit to defeat attacks on its currency. “Attempts to sell short the renminbi will not succeed,” said Han Jun, deputy director of the office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, at a briefing at the Chinese Consulate in New York.

I suppose he’s probably right. Still, this has an uncomfortable ring of the kind of thing treasury officials tend to say just before a sustained assault on their currency demonstrates that even huge autocracies with lots of foreign reserves aren’t immune to market forces. Stay tuned.

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China Baits the Forex Gods

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My Right to Die

by LUWLonnyyzfkhi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Several years ago, my father-in-law was in the end stages of multiple myeloma. He was a retired doctor, and he knew what was coming. So one night he called us all over to his house, said his last goodbyes, and then went into his bedroom and took his own life.

But Harry died before he had to. Assisted suicide was illegal in California at the time, and he was afraid he might soon lose the physical ability to take his life. And he almost died alone. Until a friend talked him out of it, he had decided not to tell any of us beforehand, out of fear that we might be held responsible for assisting him.

Now I’m the one with multiple myeloma. I’m still years away from having to make the decisions Harry did, but when my time finally does come, I have an option that he didn’t: legal, doctor-assisted suicide thanks to a right-to-die bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year:

When I’m within six months of death, I can ask my doctor for a prescription sedative that will kill me on my own terms—when I want and where I want. Will I ever use it? I don’t know. I suspect that taking your own life requires a certain amount of courage, and I don’t know if I have it. Probably none of us do until we’re faced with it head-on.

But either way, I won’t have to die before I want to out of fear that I’ll lose the capacity to control my own destiny if I wait too long. Nor will I have to die alone out of fear that anyone present runs the risk of being hauled in by an overzealous sheriff’s deputy. I’ll be able to tell my wife I love her one last time. I can take her hand and we can lie down together on our bed. And then, slowly and peacefully, I’ll draw my last breaths.

I don’t want to die. But if I have to, this is how I want it to happen. I don’t want a “suicide party,” but neither do I want to suffer needlessly for months. Nor do I want to cause other people any more pain than I have to. I want to go out quietly, with my loved ones at my side.

Please read the whole thing. Doctor-assisted suicide is not a simple issue. There are legitimate fears about how it will be used and what it might lead to—and it’s not for everyone. In fact, the evidence suggests that it will never be used by more than a few percent of terminal patients. But I’m convinced that, for those who do want it, it’s simply a better, more humane way to treat our fellow human beings.

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My Right to Die

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

by DanteDornllauqi Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s some welcome news. The Fed is bringing back an old tool to regulate leverage in the financial market: increased margin requirements. And in even more welcome news, these requirements will apply to everyone, not just banks:

A little-noticed global agreement recently paved the way for the central bank to move forward with plans to alter margin requirements. Under the accord announced Nov. 12, regulators representing 25 economies agreed to adopt rules similar to ones the Fed is developing, a united front intended to prevent financial firms from moving transactions offshore in response to tighter Fed rules.

….Unlike earlier Fed margin rules, which focused largely on stock purchases, the new rules being crafted by the central bank would apply to securities-financing transactions, a multitrillion dollar market involving repurchase agreements, or repos, for stocks and bonds, as well as lending of securities.

….Unlike most of the central bank’s regulatory authority, this rule would reach beyond banks and across the entire financial system, affecting investment funds and other nonbank players, reflecting the Fed’s growing concern about what has been called shadow banking.

The tighter that regulations become on banks, the more incentive there is to move transactions into the shadow banking sector.1 That’s why we need rules that apply everywhere. As we learned in 2008, a run on the shadow banking sector is every bit as dangerous as a run on ordinary banks. In fact, since shadow banks are so loosely regulated, shadow runs can be even more dangerous than normal runs.

In any case, this is basically an effort to reduce leverage in yet another corner of the financial industry. That’s a good thing. Pretty much any effort to reduce leverage in any part of the financial sector is a good thing. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d trade pretty much every financial regulation we’ve put in place since 2008 for a simpler, more robust restriction on leverage everywhere and anywhere it occurs. This stuff is boring, but it’s important.

1Commercial banks take short-term deposits and make long-term loans. They are inherently vulnerable to runs since depositors can remove their money anytime they get scared, but banks can’t just call in their loans at will in order to fund all the depositors who want their money.

A shadow bank is any entity that isn’t a commercial bank but acts just like one (borrows short, lends long). By 2008, the shadow banking sector was about as big as the ordinary commercial banking sector, and the shadow banking run in that year was responsible for a large part of the Great Meltdown.

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Good News: The Fed Is Finally Going After Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

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