Doing handstands on the political third rail

[unixronin]

It seems it's a day for revelations in Washington.  Expect howls of outrage any time now.

The walking on the third rail starts out with the House having, apparently, just killed the plan to close Guantanamo.  (Hey, wasn't that a campaign promise?  Oh, right, that's right, it was a campaign promise.  Well, there you go.)

And on the heels of that comes rumor of the real political handstands-on-the-third-rail act:  It's alleged that President Obama is cutting a deficit-reduction deal in which Republicans agree to tax increases, while Democrats agree to sweeping cuts in future Social Security benefits and Medicare.  William Greider, writing in The Nation, apparently had this to say:

Targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reassure foreign creditors and avoid confronting the true sources of US indebtedness.  The politicians might instead address the cost of fighting two wars on borrowed money or the tax cuts for the rich and corporations or the deregulation that led to the recent financial catastrophe and destroyed vast wealth.  But those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests.  Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, let’s whack the old folks while they’re not watching.

(Disclaimer:  I have not read the Greider article.  I don't subscribe to The Nation, and therefore don't have access to it.)

I'm not sure I really have a clear position on either of these.  While I suspect that most of the people being held at Guantanamo are being held there for no sufficiently good reason and that most — if not all — of the "intelligence" being "developed" from them is all but worthless, I also can't help but believe that relocating the entire operation to Illinois and calling that "closing" it would be at least an equally bad idea.  Transferring just the people whom we have actual substantive reason to believe are dangerous, and sending the rest home, I could see.  Intelligence from those to be sent home?  Pshaw, get real.  If you haven't gotten it out of them by now, you aren't going to.

Likewise, this is a terrible time to make deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare, when huge amounts of wealth have just vanished like a pricked soap bubble and even many prudent, thrifty people who prepared carefully for their own retirements — my own parents among them — have seen their carefully managed savings and investments all but wiped out.  Far too many people approaching retirement age in the US now don't have anything else to fall back on.

Yet at the same time, all the realistic numbers say that Social Security as it now exists is already doomed, and deep cuts in entitlements may be the only way to stop entitlements from devouring the US economy from the inside.  Last year, Social Security and Medicare between them accounted for 39% of the total Federal budget.  GAO figures from 2007 project that sometime between 2030 and 2040, Federal mandatory spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest — will exceed total government revenues, and those figures were drawn up before the staggering deficits of 2009.  The status quo is clearly unsustainable.

I think I can safely say this much, though:  If these are true, there's shortly going to be a lot more very angry people out there, and this administration and this Congress don't have a whole lot of approval left in the bank to spend.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Because none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been arraigned and indicted. I can't see any reason not to transfer them to a mainland prison.

My principal objection to relocating the whole shebang to Illinois is that I think it sets a dangerous precedent. Bad enough we're incarcerating people indefinitely without habeas corpus or due process on a base on a Caribbean island. Much worse that we establish a precedent that it's OK to do so in the US proper.

Remember, mission creep is eternal. If it's here in the mainland US, it will be used, and sooner or later they'll find a reason to expand the class of people it's OK to use it on. And then they'll expand it again, and again...

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

They have already tried to expand the class once, and succeeded in doing so temporarily. I'm referring to the fact that for a while after 9/11 the FBI was authorized to go into any library in the US and demand a list of people who had checked out certain (unspecified) books, and if the librarian wouldn't (or couldn't) produce such a list they could be carted off and held incommunicado indefinitely. It's my understanding that this was removed when the US Patriot Act was reauthorized, but it was on the books for a while.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was ... disturbing, to say the least.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Sorry--I misunderstood you. I agree completely. It's a horrible precedent added to a horrible precedent. But it's what conservatives want, and conservatives dominate the Senate and the President.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Remember, too, that a large number of the people held there are in the strange doublethink state of being supposedly too dangerous to go free, yet so innocent of wrongdoing that we haven't found anything we can actually charge them with. As long as Guantanamo remains open, it remains a public embarrassment that every administration has to field. If we transfer those guilty-yet-innocent people to some hidden prison somewhere in Illinois, will they just ... disappear?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The House has tried to put the kibosh on this: http://washingtonindependent.com/85355/house-panel-deals-gitmo-closure-a-major-setback, but there are still problems. I wish the Administration would just go ahead and put the prisoners into the civilian court system so that their cases can be resolved. If Congress objects, Obama could wrap himself in the Constitution. But that would, I suppose, make too much sense.

The places where prisoners do disappear is the CIA's black prison network. Many of them seem to have been closed--we hope!--but there is a new one in Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/05/14/dods-latest-black-site/.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Right. And we don't need the Guantanamo "detainees" swept under the rug into yet another black prison, which is what I'm concerned would happen with the Illinois plan.