Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters

By MAUREEN DOWD, NY Tiimes, January 28, 2009

WASHINGTON

As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.

Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?

Now that we’re nationalizing, couldn’t we fire any obtuse bankers and auto executives who cling to perks and bonuses even as the economy is following John Thain down his antique commode?

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.

Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.

“They woke up pretty quickly,” says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit. “Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.”

Senator Levin said that the financiers will not be able to change their warped mentality, but will have to be reined in by Geithner’s new leashes. “I have no confidence that they intend or desire to change,” Levin told me. “These bankers got away with murder, and it’s obscene that close to nothing is being asked of financial institutions. I get incensed at the thought that a bank that’s getting billions of dollars in taxpayer money is out there buying fancy new airplanes.”

New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, always gratifying on the issue of clawing back money from the greedy creeps on Wall Street, on Tuesday subpoenaed Thain, the former Merrill Lynch chief executive, over $4 billion in bonuses he handed out as the failing firm was bought by Bank of America.

In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Thain used the specious, contemptible reasoning that other executives use to rationalize why they’re keeping their bonuses as profits are plunging.

“If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.

Hello? They destroyed the franchise. Let’s call their bluff. Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.

Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”

Does that mean you can only throw used parchment in it or is it made of parchment? It’s psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.’s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?

“Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,” Thain replied. “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.”

Did it have a desk and a phone?

How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) — and not as perps?

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Alberto Gonzalez, The Sequel

NY Times Editorial, January 28, 2009

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should have considered himself a lucky man when he was allowed to resign in disgrace in August 2007 without being hauled into Congress on perjury or contempt charges.

He was in the thick of President George W. Bush’s most damaging attacks on the rule of law. As White House counsel, he helped to justify torture and illegal wiretapping. As attorney general, he politicized the Justice Department. And he misled Congress in both jobs.

He could have told the truth about those things. Or, he could have gone quietly away and waited for a subpoena from the Obama administration.

Instead, he is trying for some sort of bizarre comeback by painting himself as an upstanding man victimized by a “mean-spirited town.”

In an interview with National Public Radio this week, Mr. Gonzales attacked President Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, for saying that waterboarding is torture. To hear Mr. Gonzales tell it, Mr. Holder was in the wrong — not the lawyers like Mr. Gonzales who tortured the law to justify torture, or the former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who approved its use, or the interrogators who actually subjected detainees to waterboarding and other inhumane and illegal interrogation techniques.

Making a “blanket pronouncement like that,” Mr. Gonzales warned, might affect “the morale and dedication” of intelligence officials. He said agents at the Central Intelligence Agency “no longer have any interest in doing anything controversial.”

We’re certainly glad to hear that.

No one in the Bush administration — certainly not Mr. Gonzales — has offered evidence that torturing prisoners produced reliable information. It did undermine the law, further endanger American soldiers who might be captured in the field and destroy the nation’s image.

Mr. Gonzales did not stop there. He said it was his subordinates’ fault that nine United States attorneys were fired for obviously political reasons. “I deeply regret some of the decisions made by my staff,” he said.

Mr. Gonzales had no regrets about the infamous visit he paid to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004 while he was White House counsel. Mr. Ashcroft was barely conscious after serious surgery, but Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, tried to get him to sign off on a program to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, rushed to the hospital and managed to thwart the plan. As for reports that the illegal eavesdropping program had prompted threats of a mass resignation by top Justice officials, Mr. Gonzales dismissed that with an airy “lawyers often disagree about important legal issues.”

Mr. Gonzales said he was not worried about being prosecuted for his actions because he was “acting in good faith” and — yes — following orders.

That smug self-assurance should be another powerful reminder to the White House of the need for an unsparing review of all of Mr. Bush’s policies on torture, wiretapping and executive power. Only by learning the details of those disastrous decisions can the nation hope to undo the damage and make sure these mistakes are not repeated.

The Same Old Song

By BOB HERBERT, NY Times, January 28,2009

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Why the Uniter Divided Us

by E.J. Dionne, Jr. , Washington Post, January 19, 2009

There are many reasons why most Americans are not mourning President Bush's departure. But our new president would do well to concentrate on the deeper causes of the public's disaffection with the man headed to Texas.

From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue. It is partly because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama's first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed analysis and put the challenge into some larger context. He loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his "if you have a better idea, I'll take it" approach is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not have.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war would have required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election using political threats and campaign-trail rhetoric. "It's better to fight them there than here" was not an argument that took the average citizen's intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking us to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush's larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect. But they reflected broadly shared goals -- expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education -- and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation. Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush's dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and they surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terrorism for electoral advantage.

A hyper-partisan domestic politics of us vs. them followed naturally from Bush's instinct to confuse moral certainty with moral clarity. In his farewell address, he declared yet again that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security vs. liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq vs. a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not an us-vs.-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. Of course it will take more than that to be successful. But it's a start.

Wall Street Voodoo

by Paul Krugman, NY Times, January 19, 2009

Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans.

But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.

To explain the issue, let me describe the position of a hypothetical bank that I’ll call Gothamgroup, or Gotham for short.

On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.

So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.

Why would the government bail Gotham out? Because it plays a central role in the financial system. When Lehman was allowed to fail, financial markets froze, and for a few weeks the world economy teetered on the edge of collapse. Since we don’t want a repeat performance, Gotham has to be kept functioning. But how can that be done?

Well, the government could simply give Gotham a couple of hundred billion dollars, enough to make it solvent again. But this would, of course, be a huge gift to Gotham’s current shareholders — and it would also encourage excessive risk-taking in the future. Still, the possibility of such a gift is what’s now supporting Gotham’s stock price.

A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders. Then it transferred their bad assets to a special institution, the Resolution Trust Corporation; paid off enough of the banks’ debts to make them solvent; and sold the fixed-up banks to new owners.

The current buzz suggests, however, that policy makers aren’t willing to take either of these approaches. Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first.

Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recently tried to describe how this would work: “The aggregator bank would buy the assets at fair value.” But what does “fair value” mean?

In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent because the alleged $400 billion of toxic waste on its books is actually worth only $200 billion. The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.

Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth: “We don’t have really any rational pricing right now for some of these asset categories,” Ms. Bair says. But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is it really likely that paying “fair value,” whatever that means, would be enough to make Gotham solvent again?

What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets.

Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal — and that we’re about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job.

U.A.E. 123

NY Times Editorial, January 19, 2009

The United Arab Emirates has bested other oil-rich Persian Gulf countries by becoming the first to conclude a legally binding nuclear cooperation agreement with the Bush administration. It deserves even greater congratulations for forswearing uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. Those are the key processes for making fuel for nuclear reactors — or nuclear weapons.

Many countries have these agreements — known in the business as 123’s — with Washington, which allow them to buy American nuclear reactors and fuel. But none have made that important concession.

Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, all members in good standing have the right to make their own fuel. But the temptations are considerable and the technology far too easy to divert (see Iran).

That is why the U.A.E’s choice is so especially important, and why other nuclear suppliers should be encouraging their clients to make the same choice.

Nuclear energy is one way to address climate change, and developing countries — that agree to international rules for inspections — must have the same access to nuclear technology as the developed world.

President Bush promoted nuclear energy with gusto but notably failed to develop a strategy to ensure that a proliferation of nuclear power would not also lead to a proliferation of nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama and the new Congress must do better.

More than 25 nations plan to build nuclear power plants for the first time. That includes Saudi Arabia, which is negotiating its own cooperation deal with Washington.

Many of these countries say they must diversify to meet future energy needs. And the major nuclear suppliers are only too eager to compete for their business.

Too often these countries ignore serious questions about whether more nuclear plants will pose new safety and waste disposal hazards, and whether their clients’ sudden enthusiasm is driven less by concerns about global warming or declining oil reserves and more by rising fears of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and appetites for their own weapons programs.

Congress must review the U.A.E. deal before it is finalized. Some lawmakers have raised worrisome questions about goods with military or potential nuclear- related uses moving through Dubai, one of the emirates, to Iran. Officials there must explain how they plan to strengthen their export controls. If not, Congress may have to slow its approval or place tougher restrictions on the 123 agreement until it is sure that American technology sold to the U.A.E. cannot be diverted.

There is also something unsettling about the slick lobbying campaign the U.A.E. has mounted to push the deal through quickly.

The agreement sets an important and welcome new standard. But Congress must exercise due diligence with this agreement and all of the others that will follow.

The Long, Lame Goodbye

By MAUREEN DOWD, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2009

WASHINGTON

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.

As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”

Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)

W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.

W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.

Forgive and Forget?

January 16, 2009

Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, NY Times

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

Why We Have to Look Back

By John Conyers Jr.
Friday, January 16, 2009; A19, Washingtonpost.com

This week, I released "Reining in the Imperial Presidency," a 486-page report detailing the abuses and excesses of the Bush administration and recommending steps to address them. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. popularized the term "imperial presidency" in the 1970s to describe an executive who had assumed more power than the Constitution allows and circumvented the checks and balances fundamental to our three-branch system of government. Until recently, the Nixon administration seemed to represent a singular embodiment of the idea. Unfortunately, it is clear that the threat of the imperial presidency lives on and, indeed, reached new heights under George W. Bush.

As this report documents, there was the administration's contrived drive to a needless war of aggression with Iraq, based on manipulated intelligence and facts that were "fixed around the policy." There was its politicization of the Justice Department; unconscionable and possibly illegal policies on detention, interrogation and extraordinary rendition; warrantless wiretaps of American citizens; the ravaging of our regulatory system and the use of signing statements to override the laws of the land; and the intimidation and silencing of critics and whistle-blowers who dared to tell fellow citizens what was being done in their name. And all of this was hidden behind an unprecedented veil of secrecy and outlandish claims of privilege.

I understand that many feel we should just move on. They worry that addressing these actions by the Bush administration will divert precious energy from the serious challenges facing our nation. I understand the power of that impulse. Indeed, I want to move on as well -- there are so many things that I would rather work on than further review of Bush's presidency. But in my view it would not be responsible to start our journey forward without first knowing exactly where we are.

We cannot rebuild the appropriate balance between the branches of government without fully understanding how that relationship has been distorted. Likewise, we cannot set an appropriate baseline for future presidential conduct without documenting and correcting the presidential excesses that have just occurred. After the Nixon imperial presidency, critical reviews such as the Church and Pike committees led to fundamental reforms that have served our nation well. Comparable steps are needed to begin the process of reining in the legacy of the Bush imperial presidency. I consider these three points crucial:

First, Congress should continue to pursue its document requests and subpoenas that were stonewalled under President Bush. Doing so will make clear that no executive can forever hide its misdeeds from the public.

Second, Congress should create an independent blue-ribbon panel or similar body to investigate a host of previously unreviewable activities of the Bush administration, including its detention, interrogation and surveillance programs. Only by chronicling and confronting the past in a comprehensive, bipartisan fashion can we reclaim our moral authority and establish a credible path forward to meet the complex challenges of a post-Sept. 11 world.

Third, the new administration should conduct an independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities. Just this week, in the pages of this newspaper, a Guantanamo Bay official acknowledged that a suspect there had been "tortured" -- her exact word -- in apparent violation of the law. The law is the law, and, if criminal conduct occurred, those responsible -- particularly those who ordered and approved the violations -- must be held accountable.

Some day, there is bound to be another national security crisis in America. A future president will face the same fear and uncertainty that we did after Sept. 11, 2001, and will feel the same temptation to believe that the ends justify the means -- temptation that drew our nation over to the "dark side" under the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. If those temptations are to be resisted -- if we are to face new threats in a manner that keeps faith with our values and strengthens rather than diminishes our authority around the world -- we must fully learn the lessons of our recent past.

The writer, a Democrat, represents Michigan's 14th District in the U.S. House and is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

President Bush... Vice President Cheney... Open Your Books.. and start again!

Epitaph for the Bush Presidency

"Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153."

This is what the teacher of the elementary class said just before George Bush started to read his story, "The Pet Goat", as the planes flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.It defines Bush's Presidency.

He hid in reading to school children rather than get up and deal with the greatest crisis in our nation's recent history as events continued to unfold with his head buried in a childrens' story.

He has maintained that head-in-the-sand manner through every other crisis created under his administration as those disasters flew into other national landmarks... Katrina into New Orleans, torture (along with Abu Ghraib) into our armed forces heretofore good reputation, lack of oversight in our financial institutions as they came crashing down, spying on individual citizens not involved in terrorism (with agents laughing at the private conversations). It would be tedious and frightening to continue to list similar situations under his watch.

Yes, this quote sums it up again for another reason. This is where President Bush and Vice President Cheney should start over... in the grade where he was reading "The Pet Goat", rather than dealing with responsibility. They can go back and learn what responsibility and honor mean, starting in second grade.

So please...President Bush... Vice President Cheney..."Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153.".... and start again.