The Divider

Via Paul Krugman, veteran political journalist Tom Edsall has the scoop on Rudy Giuliani's readying the race card as the G.O.P. continues its ongoing Philadelphia Mississippi Experiment to cling to power.

As the late New York City journalist Jack Newfield told us a few years ago, this is nothing new for Rudy:

Giuliani's lowest moment as Mayor came in March 2000, when the unarmed Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover narcotics police in midtown Manhattan. Dorismond, 26 and black, an off-duty security guard, was standing outside a bar when a plainclothes cop, part of a narcotics detail patrolling the area, tried to buy crack from him. "What are you doing asking me for that shit?" Dorismond asked.

A fight developed, and one of the cops killed him. The shooting came just three weeks after a jury had acquitted four white police officers in the death of another unarmed black man--Amadou Diallo--who was shot forty-one times on his Bronx doorstep. The cops claimed they had mistaken his wallet for a gun. So Dorismond's shooting occurred in an atmosphere of tinderbox racial tension.

At first Giuliani called for calm, asking the city to withhold judgment until all the facts were established. But the next morning he ignored his own counsel and started demonizing the dead man. Instead of trying to be fair-minded and reassuring, Giuliani made a series of prejudicial and venomous remarks about Dorismond--even before his funeral. The Mayor seemed unable to express any human sympathy for the dead man's mother, or to grasp the fact that this was a citizen of his city who was killed--by police--for saying no to drugs.

Giuliani authorized the release of Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record, which contained nothing more serious than a violation punishable by a summons, to discredit him. Juvenile arrest records are supposed to be kept confidential, and Giuliani violated legal ethics by breaking the seal without getting a court order. Dorismond was 13 at the time his arrest was entered into a police computer. At a press conference Giuliani argued that the dead man's conduct at age 13 was "highly relevant." Dorismond, he sneered, was "no altar boy." But Dorismond had actually been an altar boy. He had even attended the same elite Catholic high school as the Mayor--Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn.

A few nights later television journalist Dominick Carter asked Giuliani about his "no altar boy" comment. "This is not a fair question," the Mayor complained. He declared that Dorismond had "spent a good deal of his adult life punching people," and that he had a "propensity" for violence.

The Mayor's defense for opening the records was that Dorismond had no privacy rights because he was dead.

In 1993 Giuliani had run on the positive slogan "One Standard, One City." But in practice he treated the black community by a different standard. He actually argued that by ignoring New York's elected black leadership, he had been able "to accomplish more for the black community." He defended his boycott of black leaders by claiming that most of them have "a philosophy of dependence" that keeps their constituents "enslaved." On another occasion he argued that it wasn't productive to "engage in dialogue" with "political leaders that pander." But he had no trouble at all engaging in dialogue with white Republican leaders who could pander with the best of them.

Moderate black leaders like State Comptroller H. Carl McCall say they had only one or two meetings with Giuliani during his eight years in office, and those were only "for show" after the Diallo shooting, with no follow-up. McCall told me that Giuliani ignored his requests for a meeting for five years. Respected Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks says he didn't have a single meeting or even phone conversation with Giuliani in eight years.

The volatile combination of the questionable police shootings of Dorismond and Diallo, plus the police precinct torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, plus the brutal blitz of insults of Dorismond by the Mayor, plus the absence of any channel of communication between City Hall and the black community, all help explain why under Giuliani blacks felt that New York was a city with a double standard.

The Philadelphia Mississippi Experiment

In the ongoing TPMCafe discussion of Paul Krugman's new book The Conscience of a Liberal, Bruce Bartlett claims Krugman is calling Reagan a crypto-racist for his 1980 call for states rights in the infamous locality of Philadelphia, Mississippi which despite Bartlett's protestations is pretty much generally known only for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 and Reagan's infamous invocation a scant 16 years later:

The only way he could have avoided such a charge would have been by not campaigning in the South and ceding that region once again to Carter.

"The only way" if we don't count invoking states rights.
"The only way" if we don't count invoking states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

For example, Michael Dukakis spoke there on August 4, 1988. According to press reports, he made only a passing reference to civil rights and, like Reagan eight years earlier, basically gave a standard stump speech. Yet no one has ever suggested that Dukakis was winking and nodding to local racists by speaking in Neshoba and not giving a strong pro-civil rights speech.

Yet no one has ever suggested "not giving a strong pro-civil rights speech" is somehow equivalent to "I believe in state's rights."

This question of the Conscience of a Conservative does not rest on any premise of crypto-racism but rather in the willingness to campaign on race, to exploit anti-minority animus in the electorate.

And the question of the resulting social and political-economic impact as exemplified by the 1990 chart [AFDC Monthly Maximum vs. Percent Black By State] on page 55 of the Alberto Alesina paper Krugman mentions,Why Doesn’t the US Have A European-Style Welfare System?[PDF], literally graphically demonstrating the inverse correlation between AFDC benefits voted by state electorates and the percentage of black population and the whole question Krugman gets into on the role of anti-black animus in the paucity of American social democracy.

Where we're going we don't need roads to have Doc set the odometer from Philadelphia to Philadelphia when it comes to witnessing Ronald Reagan's exercise of that ol’ Philadelphia Mississippi Freedom to articulate and embody the diminishment and debasement of the American spirit.

And not just of that ol' Philadelphia Pennsylvania Freedom…

Now, as history has grievously demonstrated, this is a reality that conservatives have been shown to want to walk out from.

But it's not something that they can walk away from.

The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People -- People -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

Hubert H. Humphrey
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 14,1948

I believe in states rights. I believe in the people doing as much for themselves at the community level and the private level. And I believe that we have distorted the balance of our government by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to the federal establishment.

Ronald Reagan
Philadelphia, Mississippi, August 3, 1980

Iraq Backstory: Josh Marshall on the CIA vs. Chalabi

From an August 2003 Talking Points Memo post :

Bob Drogin article in Thursday's Los Angeles Times put me in the mind of something I came across a year and a half ago when I was researching my first long article on Iraq -- a murky moment from Ahmed Chalabi's past, which played a key role in making him an object of deep distrust and animosity for many at the CIA.

In case you haven't read the earlier posts, Drogin's article says that US intelligence has concluded that a number of defectors with stories about Saddam's WMD programs were probably either double-agents or dupes who unwittingly passed on disinformation from Saddam. (One might also suppose they simply saw the rewards in store for any Iraqi defector who told the Americans what they wanted to hear ...) The piece went on to say that the Agency was applying renewed scrutiny to many of those defectors and implied that that scrutiny would also be applied to the man who was the conduit and handler of many of those defectors: Ahmed Chalabi.

Here's the incident I'm talking about ...

In the Iraq hawks' version of the events of the last dozen years, a key turning point was the failed CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996. The coup was run out of Amman, Jordan; it centered on a group of Iraqi army defectors. And it came apart in a particularly humiliating manner: Saddam's agents used the radios the Agency operatives had given the plotters to radio them back and tell them they'd foiled the coup and that the plotters would be executed.

From any perspective it was a pretty low moment.

But, again, back to the Iraq hawks' version of events.

In early 1996 - a few months before the plot unraveled - Chalabi came to Washington to warn the US that the CIA's coup plot had been compromised and should be called off. Chalabi went to Richard Perle - already the eminence grise behind the INC's shadow war in Washington - who arranged a meeting with then-CIA Director John Deutsch, his then-deputy George Tenet, and the CIA's Director of Operations for the Near East, Steve Richter.

According to the INC, Chalabi warned the three of what he had discovered --- that the plot had been compromised. But his warnings went unheeded. That meant the CIA brass was doubly responsible for the plot's eventual failure: Not only was the operation poorly run, but they refused to call it off even when they'd been warned that the plot had been compromised.

In September, a couple months after the coup attempt went bust, Deutsch was called to testify on Capitol Hill about whether Saddam had bested the United States with the thrust into northern Iraq he had just made. (This move back into northern Iraq came after a series of US setback earlier in the year and came after Saddam was able to sow division between the two main Kurdish factions.) Before Deutsch went to testify, Perle went to him and put that earlier meeting to good use, bullying
Deutsch into, in essence, breaking with the administration on Iraq. "Richard Perle got a hold of him and really busted him up," one source familiar with both meetings told me. With the knowledge of the earlier tip-off meeting, this source told me, "Richard had even more ammunition come September."

When Deutsch appeared before the Senate he broke with the administration's position and agreed that Saddam was, in fact stronger, than he had been before the thrust North.

INC sources tell this story as an example of how they used the CIA's incompetence as a tool to advance their own agenda in Washington.

In any case, that's their version of events.

The CIA had a very different take on what had happened with the 1996 coup debacle. Many at the Agency thought that Chalabi, rather than warning that the plot had been compromised, had in fact been the source of the compromise.

The key thing about the 1996 coup attempt, after all, was that it didn't include Chalabi --- but rather the rival umbrella group, the Iraqi National Accord, an assortment of Sunni military defectors. And Chalabi had a history of scuttling anti-Saddam plans that didn't involve him.

Most believed that Chalabi had intentionally compromised the plan, though some thought he might have unwittingly done so or that his group had been infiltrated by Iraqi agents.

Let's make clear that the CIA also wasn't an unbiased observer to all this. The plot had gone south. It was their operation. And they weren't crazy about Chalabi to begin with. It's not unreasonable to question whether these operatives were just looking for a convenient person to blame the whole mess on.
Without all sorts of security clearances, it's almost impossible to judge the basis of their suspicions, though senior people at the Agency implied that their evidence was more than circumstantial.

However that may be, the fact that many folks at the Agency believed Chalabi had leaked word of their plot and gotten a number of US assets executed helps explain why their distrust and animosity toward him runs so deep.

If the CIA is now taking another look at Chalabi's organization, suspecting it may have been infiltrated by or used by Iraqi double-agents, will this earlier incident come in for more attention?

It certainly should be. And given the hostility between the CIA and Chalabi, you'd expect they would if for no other reason than bureaucratic payback.

But according to one former Agency employee, quite the opposite might happen. The CIA, this source told me recently, is in full circle-the-wagons mode. They've got their hands full a) trying to find some WMD and b) investigating why so many points in their pre-war intelligence analysis seemed to be wrong. Looking back to the mid-1990s might drudge up some facts
that would sully Chalabi's reputation. But it would probably bring up many of the Agency's errors too. At the moment, they're trying to keep the self-examination and investigation limited to only the most recent events.

They've already got more problems than they can deal with...

Secular Non-Insularity

A year ago January, I linked to an extract from Garry Wills' 1990 book Under God accusing mid-twentieth century American historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Henry Steele Commager of ignorance of religious trends and influences in American history.

Now I've found a response from Conservative historian John Patrick Diggins to a New York Review of Each Other's Books review:

In his review of Garry Wills' Under God [NYR, February 14], C. Vann Woodward missed an opportunity to set the record straight. According to Wills, Henry Steele Commager and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. are two eminent historians "for whom much of American history simply does not exist" because they allegedly ignore the important role of religion. Curiously, these two historians were among the first secular liberal scholars to recognize that role. Commager's Theodore Parker: A Yankee Crusader (1936) is nothing less than a tribute to a transcendentalist as a Christian hero. Schlesinger's Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress (1939) offered a brilliant, sympathetic analysis of America's greatest Catholic social philosopher. But these matters of omission are minor compared to the author's conviction that religion and skepticism are incompatible and that in America religion has its most powerful expression in evangelical fundamentalism. Could it be that Wills has written a book prefaced by the assumption that religion is absent in American historiography only because he failed to perceive its true presence?

Wills seems to assume that because a historian sees the American mind as "skeptical,pluralistic, irreverent, and relativist" (Schlesinger), that historian cannot account for America's religious sensibility. Yet anyone who has read Perry Miller or Reinhold Niebuhr will appreciate what Edmund Burke was forced to recognize in the eighteenth century: American Protestants love nothing so much as to "protest" and "suspect," and thereby challenge authority and interrogate philosophy, even in full awareness that reason may be corrupt and the will decayed. The New England Calvinist "Augustinian strain of piety" (Miller) gave America what George Santayana called "an agonised conscience," a religious mentality haunted not only by guilt but by the thought that we may not really know how we know what we think we know. A Calvinist sense of sin enabled humankind to understand its own finitude and the contingency and relativity of all knowledge. "Sin," Niebuhr reminds us, "is the refusal to admit finiteness." Precisely what Wills' righteous fundamentalists refuse to admit...

Federal Budget Archive 2000 - 2020

Chronology


2001

3/1
Thinking About a New Economy
Economist Timothy Taylor subjects “New Economy” hype to some basic knowledge of productivity history.

12/19
Supply-Siders Go to War
Robert McIntire writes in the American Prospect on the Bush Administration’s wartime tax-cutting strategy. A “decelerated appreciation for accelerated depreciation.”
Full Employment at Risk
Jared Bernstein assesses the threats and challenges of maintaining “full employment.”

2009

6/25
The Long-Term Budget Outlook[PDF]
Courtesy of your friendly local CBO.

2013

6/27
Our New Look at the Long-Term Budget Picture 
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, via its Off the Charts blog,  updates its projections in view of Obamacare cost-cutting and beyond..

Federal Budget Archive 1980 - 2000

Online Resources

The Budget
Archive maintained by The Atlantic Online.

Debate Chronology

1991

The Roots of the Public Sector Fiscal Crisis [PDF]
A paper by Max Sawicky of the labor-funded Economic Policy Institute.

1992

11/1
A Program for Economic Policy Watchers
Then-Harvard economist Brad DeLong tells what to watch for in economic policy in Clinton’s first term.

1994

11/3
Where Does the Deficit Come From?
A Lloyd Bentson Wall Street Journal op-ed drafted by Brad DeLong outlines the causes.

1996

2/21
Clinton Policy Accomplishments
An assessment by Brad DeLong.

1997

6/11
The Market, the State and the Dynamics of Public Culture
Kevin Phillips outlines and updates his cyclical economic thesis from his 1990 book Politics of Rich and Poor.
7/15
Reaganomics: What Worked? What Didn’t?
Former Reagan Deputy OMB Director Lawrence Kudlow attributes the 1980s deficits to the reduction of inflation:

Moreover, I believe the single largest cause of the deficit was the sharp reduction of inflation, from a zone of 12-15% in 1980 and 1981, to a zone of 2-3% in 1986. The government had been living on inflated revenues and inflated personal income revenues for over a decade, from LBJ through Nixon and Ford, to Jimmy Carter. The government’s appetite for inflated revenues was virtually insatiable, and it supported, nourished, and ultimately overfed the rise of the entitlement state. Reagan inherited that.

Rising inflation was a huge effective tax increase on the economy on top of the already high actual tax rates. So, getting inflation down was a huge tax cut, though it probably resulted in a loss of nominal GDP income of, I would say, by 1986, close to a trillion dollars from what might have been the case if the inflation had continued at a 10-12% annual rate. If the choice is to finance a deficit in order to lower inflation and improve the economy, or to oppose a deficit and maintain the inflation that was destroying our economy, I would take the former any time. I believe Reagan made a brilliant economic and political decision to give Volker the green light to do what he had to do.

1998

1/1
The End of Federal Deficits
Brad DeLong outlines the events leading to the end of deficits.

1999

1/1
Meeting Challenges and Building for the Future
Eugene V. Kroch on business cycles and public finance.
3/4
Economic Growth Through Tax Cuts
William Gale of Brookings surveys challenges in a potential tax-cutting environment.

2000

1/1
Clintonomics: A Report Card [PDF]
Economist Timothy Taylor reviews and critiques the Clinton administration’s economic policy choices.
4/
Formation of Fiscal Policy:The Experience of the Past Twenty-Five Years [PDF]
Economist Alan J. Auerbach writing in the FRBNY Economic Policy Review.
9/15
How Much Credit Does Clinton Deserve for the Economy?
Brad DeLong’s take.
11/14
The Federal Budget and Interest Rates
Analysis by Richard J. Keating of the Small Business Survival Committee.

2002

11/18
Wile E. Coyote Explains Bush Administration Fiscal Policy
Brad DeLong examines whether deficits constrain spending, looking at the 1980-2000 time period.

Those silly Europeans

Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, 2003:

American policymakers have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem of Iraq--by taking unilateral and extralegal military action--than they ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Since then, neocon Kagan has hit upon the solution of treating China primarily as a problem, while the rest of us--given the neoconservative stewardship of the size of the Iraq problem--are onto the problem of treating neoconservatism as any kind of a solution.

Shifting balances of terror

Daniel Drezner reports he is off to a conference entitled "Nuclear Weapons in a New Century: Facing the Emerging Challenges."

Reminds me of the classic Harvard (or was it National?)Lampoon parody of Newsweek, unforgettably entitled "Nuclear Arms and Terrific Legs: The Atomic Threat to America's Cover Girls."

Social Security, in Ecolanguage

Frequent econoblog commenter Lee Arnold's presentation is up on YouTube:

Who Was Milton Friedman?

Mark Thoma links, as Paul Krugman asks (and answers) in The New York Review of Each Other's Books:

What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. As I pointed out earlier, he made great contributions to economic theory by emphasizing the role of individual rationality—but unlike some of his colleagues, he knew where to stop. Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?

The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.

In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there's a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.