Quotes from the AP report ElBaradei Suggests War Crimes Probe Of Bush Team.

The Iraq war taught him that “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” ElBaradei writes in “The Age of Deception,” being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.
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“I was aghast at what I was witnessing,” ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls “aggression where there was no imminent threat,” a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, “should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a `war crime’ and determine who is accountable?”

In the video, Obama tries to explain the few available options to try to get gasoline prices under control.

I am trying to figure out if he could have recast this speech to take into account the prescription of my previous post about why we do not believe facts.

In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

He did start out with the values of family and religion. At least Obama is recognizing his most important role as President – educating the voters

The article The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science by Chris Mooney could have the subtitle, “Why Steve’s Politics Blog is completely ineffective.”  Perhaps the solution is to follow the prescription at the end of the article:

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Are the people in this video a sign that the public is awakening from its long hypnotic trance?

The Columbia-Journalism Review quotes Senator Tom Coburn from the Levin-Coburn report on the financial disaster.

The subcommittee’s findings show “without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions who embraced known conflicts of interest to accomplish wealth for themselves, not caring about the outcome for their customers,” said Coburn. “When that happens, no country can survive and neither can their financial institutions.”

Remember that Senator Tom Coburn is the conservative Republican member of the subcommittee.

According to the Huffington Post coverage of the story

Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, will recommend that Goldman executives who testified before his panel, including chairman and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, be referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, the Michigan Democrat announced Wednesday. Members of the subcommittee will now deliberate Levin’s proposal.

If Obama were really trying, he would make the case that the Republican’s understanding of economics is only at a very childish level.  It may be true that the Republicans have plans that came make a few people very wealthy, but it is at the expense of everybody else.

The adult economic plan makes almost all of us better off.  That improved outlook for us all is for the long term.  The Republicans can only focus on the short term profit of a few.

The adult plan would repeal the Bush tax cuts as one of many ways to start bringing the budget into balance. A tax plan that favors manufacturing and other useful work over excessive money manipulation and the creation of asset bubbles shows a mature understanding of economics and tax policy.

Other parts of an adult plan are stated in the Congressional Progressive Caucus prescription.

Individual income tax policies

1. Extend marriage relief, credits, and incentives for children, families, and education, but
   let the upper-income tax cuts expire and let tax brackets revert to Clinton-era rates
2. Index the AMT for inflation for a decade (AMT patch paid for)
3. Rescind the upper-income tax cuts in the tax deal
4. Schakowsky millionaire tax rates proposal (adding 45%, 46%, and 47% top rates)
5. Progressive estate tax (Sanders estate tax, repeal of Kyl-Lincoln)
6. Tax capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income

Corporate tax reform

1. Tax U.S. corporate foreign income as it is earned
2. Eliminate corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies
3. Enact a financial crisis responsibility fee
4. Financial speculation tax (derivatives, foreign exchange)

If the Obama team were really trying, they would embrace this progressive plan. It is not so much that Obama and his team are failing. What really irks me is that they don’t seem to be trying.

Has Obama and his team’s association with the University of Chicago (where Milton Friedman promoted his wacky economic ideas) so poisoned their minds with regard to economics that they have lost the ability to think straight?

Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism by Robert McChesney provides more evidence of how modern economic thought has concerned itself more with an idealistic view of the world than one based on reality.

For all economists, mainstream and left, the assumption of competitive markets being the order of the day also has a striking impact on how growth is assessed in capitalist economies. Under competitive conditions, investment will, as a rule, be greater than under conditions of monopoly, where the dominant firms generally seek to slow down and carefully regulate the expansion of output and investment so as to maintain high prices and profit margins-and have considerable power to do so. Hence, monopoly can be a strong force contributing to economic stagnation, everything else being equal. With the United States and most of the world economy (notwithstanding the economic rise of Asia) stuck in an era of secular stagnation and crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930s-while U.S. corporations are sitting on around $2 trillion in cash-the issue of monopoly power naturally returns to the surface.

Compare this understanding with what has happened to economic study in the last 30 years.

In the early 1980s, an unquestioning belief in the ubiquitous influence of competitive markets took hold in economics and in capitalist culture writ large, to an extent that would have been inconceivable only ten years earlier. Concern with monopoly was never dominant in mainstream economics, but it had a distinguished and respected place at the table well into the century. For some authors, including Monthly Review editors Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, as well as Paul Baran, the prevalence and importance of monopoly justified calling the system monopoly capitalism. But by the Reagan era, the giant corporation at the apex of the economic system wielding considerable monopoly power over price, output, investment, and employment had simply fallen out of the economic picture, almost as if by fiat. As John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 2004 in The Economics of Innocent Fraud: “The phrase ‘monopoly capitalism,’ once in common use, has been dropped from the academic and political lexicon.”4 For the neoliberal ideologues of today, there is only one issue: state versus market. Economic power (along with inequality) is no longer deemed relevant. Monopoly power, not to mention monopoly capital, is nonexistent or unimportant. Some on the left would in large part agree.

For a long time, I have been wondering why there is very little enforcement of laws against using monopoly power no matter which political party is control of the executive branch of the government.

James DeWolf Perry and Katrina Browne wrote the article Civil War’s Dirty Secret About Slavery for CNN.  It adds some information for us smug northerners to consider.

Abolition was a radical cause embraced by only a minority in the North. Northerners would march to war in vast numbers not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union.

…let’s use this anniversary to face and learn from our shared history in all its complexity. In this way, we can take a fresh look not only at the legacy of the Civil War for race in our society, but at lingering tensions between North and South, as well.

The lessons to be learned from considering this information go far beyond issues of The Civil War, Slavery, Racism, and the continuing differences between North and South.

What I take from this is that even those who are opposed to certain policies may have some vested interest in their continuance.  Despite this, if the policy is wrong, we must rise above our own vested interests and learn to live with the consequences of making corrections.

People face this kind of paradox every day in learning to eat a healthy diet, decide to get more exercise, postpone expenditures in favor of investing for the future.  Sublimating certain urges for the betterment of ourselves and society is what we have all learned to do to form a civilized society.

Perhaps when I made the post What Would Finally Convince You That Bush (Obama) is A War Criminal?, it wasn’t clear why I might include Obama in the story.

The article by Congressman Dennis Kucinich,  My Experience Dealing With the Department of Defense Regarding Pfc. Bradley Manning Has Been Kafkaesque, gives some details of what sparked Obama’s inclusion in the original post and this post too.

We now hear that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Mendez, was denied a private meeting with Pfc. Manning in order to determine whether the conditions of Manning’s confinement amount to torture. The very existence of a U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture investigation speaks volumes about the conditions of his treatment.

The continued delays I have experienced amount to a subversion of Pfc. Manning’s legal rights as well as my own rights and obligations as a Member of Congress to conduct oversight. The whole world is now watching.