Category Archives: Barack Obama

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Power is always abused, eventually.

So be afraid, be very afraid, about what our national security apparatus is up to these days. When you have too many law enforcement types chasing too few bad guys, as the US government does now, you are going to end up with bored or corrupt federal agents going after the wrong people through ineptitude, spite or ideology.

Scarier yet: first the Bush administration, then the Obama administration, knocked down rules and the rule of law to give this overpopulated policing world more power and the policed world far less protection from its protectors.

Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek, laid out some details:

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.

Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

Everyone feel safer now?

Obama’s $50 billion

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President Obama used a Labor Day appearance here to announce that he wants to spend $50 billion on infrastructure over six years.

Hold the applause, please, at least until we get the details.

First, Republicans don’t like the plan, announcing that it is dead on arrival. Republicans don’t like anything Obama does, so the opposition isn’t new. It still could be significant, though.

Second, it’s not really very much money. $50 billion nationwide over six years. The fine folks at the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission told us seven years ago that spending $6 billion in a small area of a smallish state to rebuild and unnecessarily expand freeways is such a minor consideration that it need not be mentioned in surveys measuring support for the $6 billion effort.

Just kidding. The SEWRPC freeway study planning process, as we all know, was a joke driven by road builders and HNTB (sponsors of the broken Marquette Interchange ramp) to justify a conclusion already reached by road builders and HNTB.  (See how it works? HNTB helps SEWRPC conclude that freeway expansion is needed and then grabs the design contracts for the resulting projects. Sweeeeet.)

What is serious is that $50 billion over six years over 50 states is less than it might first appear. Economist Dean Baker says it is 1.4% of the federal budget and adds:

It is also equal to about 4 percent of the $1.2 drop in annual demand (@ $600 billion in lost consumption and $600 billion in reduced construction) due to the collapse of the housing bubble.

Obama says the $50 billion, targeted at transportation, would be the first phase of an infrastructure bank. But adding $50 billion in spending is just wasting a lot of it if it isn’t spent well. And highway spending, in this country, isn’t done well.

According to the Government Accountability Office report, Highway Trust Fund: Nearly All States Received More Funding Than They Contributed in Highway Taxes Since 2005:

As we have reported, for many surface transportation programs, goals are numerous and conflicting, and the federal role in achieving the goals is not clear. Many of these programs have no relationship to the performance of either the transportation system or of the grantees receiving federal funds and do not use the best tools and approaches to ensure effective investment decisions.15 Our previous work has outlined the need to create well defined goals based on identified areas of federal interest and a clearly defined federal role in relation to other levels of government.16 We have suggested that where the federal interest is less evident, state and local governments could assume more responsibility, and some functions could potentially be assumed by the states or other levels of government.17 Furthermore, incorporating performance and accountability for results into transportation funding decisions is critical to improving results.

So major jobs program? Absolutely, yes. But spending large, but insufficient sums in the usual ways that don’t produce the desired results? Absolutely, no. Please. Let’s get it right.

The end of the combat mission

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I got an email from the White House yesterday about the end of the combat mission in Iraq:

We are at a truly historic moment in our nation’s history. After more than seven years, our combat mission in Iraq will end tomorrow.

As both a candidate and President, I promised to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. Now, we are taking an important step forward in delivering on that promise. Since I took office, we’ve brought nearly 100,000 U.S. troops home from Iraq, millions of pieces of equipment have been removed, and hundreds of bases have been closed or transferred to Iraqi Security Forces.

Our combat mission in Iraq is ending, but our commitment to an Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant continues. As our mission in Iraq changes, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq to advise and assist the Iraqi Security Forces as they assume full responsibility for the security of their country on September 1. We will forge a strong partnership with an Iraq that still faces enduring challenges.

I am glad for the lives of soldiers still serving that the combat mission is over, but what a terrible, terrible terrible waste of lives and resources it was. What the hell did it accomplish?

And what happens to the Iraqi people now? Are we going to better for our friends there than we did for the Hmong people after the Vietnam War?

Wow! Feds finally get it!

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It’s amazing, but perhaps true: the importance of transit is beginning to dawn on federal officials an d.

This isn’t about high-speed rail or big new capital projects. Someone’s actually paying serious attention to the nuts and bolts of buses and (existing)  urban rail lines!

From the Dedham Transcript:

BOSTON — Federal funding to help operate cash-strapped transit systems like the MBTA will likely be on the table as billions of dollars of transportation spending are meted out by Congress, a top Obama administration transportation official said Wednesday.

“It’s been a challenge for mid-size systems in Cleveland to rural systems in the Dakotas to the big systems in the urban areas,” Therese McMillan, second in command of the Federal Transit Administration, told the News Service after delivering remarks at a meeting of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. “Everyone is really struggling.”

McMillan cited the national recession as a cause for stress of transit systems nationwide, and she noted that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 permitted 10 percent of capital transportation spending to be used for operating expenses, such as running trains and paying employees.

But McMillan remained mum on a proposal that would permit large urban transit systems to regularly spend more federal dollars on transportation operations, acknowledging the proposal, supported by Rep. Michael Capuano, but saying the Obama administration has yet to take a position.

On the other hand, McMillan pointed to a transportation authorization bill pending in Congress that would provide $2 billion to cover operating costs for transit systems, a proposal supporters say would stave off fare increases and service cuts. According to the bill’s preamble, 84 percent of federal transit systems have raised fares, cut services or have considered one of those actions since January 2009.

Under the bill, sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), federal transportation funds may be used to transit systems’ operating expenses in order to “restore a reduction in public transportation service and related workforce reductions” or to “rescind all or a portion of a fare increase.”

Improvements to the mortgage relief plan

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President Obama is going to unveil a real mortgage relief plan, about three years after he should have.

It’s got some very good elements, but it is crying out for some income limits.

Here are the major elements of the plan, according to the Washington Post:

  • Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to skip payments altogether.
  • The government will provide financial incentives to lenders that cut the balance of a borrower’s mortgage. Banks and other lenders will be asked to reduce the principal owed on a loan if the amount is 15 percent more than their home is worth. The reduced amount would be set aside and forgiven by the lender over three years, as long as the homeowner remained current on the loan.
  • The government will double the amount it pays to lenders that help modify second mortgages, such as piggyback loans, which enabled home buyers to put little or no money down, and home equity lines of credit.
  • More incentives will be paid to those lenders that find a way to avoid foreclosing on delinquent borrowers even if they can’t qualify for mortgage relief. For example, the administration is scheduled to launch a program next month encouraging lenders to have borrowers sell their homes for less than the mortgage balance in what is known as a short sale.
  • The FHA will offer incentives to lenders that reduce the amount borrowers owe on their primary mortgages by at least 10 percent.

All of those are much-needed measures, but should be limited. There is a fundamental difference between a family of four living on in a 1,500-square-foot house and a twosome living in a 3,500-square-foot monstrosity. Even if layoffs equalize the two households incomes, the former should simply be given more consideration. The couple in the bigger house has more options — like downsizing.

This proposed measure will provide a little relief, but probably less than will be hyped. A six-month mortgage grace period, in the form of lower payments, may really benefit those who can find a job within six months, but will only delay the inevitable for those who can’t and will cost taxpayers a tidy sum even for those not ultimately helped.

It also would be nice for the government to include a “stupid choices” factor that would disqualify homeowners who can’t make their mortgage payments because they made stupid choices — fancy car debt over a savings account, for example, or a $600,000 house on a $100,000 income.

It is, alas, unlikely that the federal government, which often moves with the grace of a large bulldozer, will make those fine distinctions. And this bailout will cause resentment, too.