How to Cripple the Capital

Yup, that's me

Just add snow—the more, the messier. A few wet, white flakes in the Washington metro area are all it takes to wash away the veneer of efficiency local politicians try to maintain. When faced with nearly 30 inches of snow, as it was last weekend, America’s seat of government freezes up.

As the virulent debate over health care has made clear, America’s legislative process already moves at a glacial pace. The near record-setting snowstorm has not only suspended the city’s semi-reliable buses and commuter trains, but has halted all congressional momentum (such as it was) for two days straight. Only the centre lanes of most important thoroughfares have been ploughed, leaving Congressmen, lobbyists and well-paid bureaucrats stranded in the suburbs. Cars that ventured out on unploughed roads packed the snow between the wheel ruts into block-long medians. Wet snow snapped branches off magnolia trees and stately pines; broken boughs still clutter the sidewalks in many neighbourhoods.

In defence of Adrian Fenty, the city’s mayor, administrators everywhere struggle to cope with extreme weather. In Britain any break from the despairing rain causes officials to panic. Closer to the DC, the governments of Maryland and Virginia exhausted their snow-removal budgets even before this latest storm had hit. They could take a page from the government of New York City, which stretches its municipal dollars by hooking ploughs to the front of its biodiesel garbage trucks.

The threat of the coming snowstorm caused a run on area supermarkets. In its aftermath, some fashionable shops dug themselves out and lured discharged workers with snow-day sales. Most bus stops still sit behind a fortress of thigh-high snow, but entrances to smart shops soon sparkled in the afternoon sun with puddles and salt crystals. I noticed the Banana Republic near my office was mobbed with shoppers yesterday when I attempted to buy lunch at the closed food court across the street.

Washingtonians seem to be making the best of the snow, despite the municipal ineptitude. Massive organised snowball fights have been staged across multiple neighbourhoods. Even the president, who spent many winters in America’s snowy Midwest before moving into the White House, took a moment to poke fun at his adopted city’s inability to process precipitation. At an event over the weekend, he thanked his party faithful for being “willing to brave a blizzard—Snowmaggedon right here in DC”.

But the collective amusement may wear off soon: an additional six to 16 inches are expected in the area later today.

Click here to see the original MIL blog post or to make a comment.

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H1N1 Outbreak Made Worse by Lack of Sick Days

Below is a quick Blue Marble blog post on swine flu that was assigned by the bureau chief. Click here to see the original or to make a comment.

One component of comprehensive health care reform that has been notably lacking from the drawn out legislative discussions is access to paid sick leave. In the US—the only industrial nation where workers are not guaranteed paid sick leave for short-term or long-term illnesses—39 percent of workers do not recieve paid sick days. A new briefing paper released today by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), which links the spread of the virulent H1N1 flu to a lack of paid sick days, makes a compelling case for why that should be changed.

“Employees who attended work while infected with H1N1 are estimated to have caused the infection of as many as 7 million coworkers,” said Pennsylvania State University Professor Robert Drago, one of the authors of Sick at Work: Infected Employees in the Workplace During the H1N1 Pandemic [PDF], in a statement accompanying its publication. Combing through data on rates of illness and work attendance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Drago and his coauthor Kevin Miller found that, of the 26 million working Americans who may have been inflected with swine flu in 2009, nearly 8 million continued to work while they were infected. Although most government employees receive paid sick days, the majority of Americans work in the private sector where only three out of five workers have access to any paid time off when they are sick. “Workers without paid sick days must choose whether to go to work sick or lose pay, a choice that many can’t afford to make,” Miller noted.

Presenteeism, attending work while ill, is an especially troubling phenomena in a time when climate change is likely to increase global outbreaks of infectious diseases. While passing a comprehensive climate bill is still the most important step Congress can take to prepare the US for climate change’s effects, the IWPR report also makes clear the need to make paid sick leave universal. One bill to do just that—the Healthy Families Act—was introduced by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) last May. Like the prospect of universal health care, which Kennedy championed his entire career, the paid sick leave bill is also languishing in congressional limbo.

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Imperiled UBS Threatens the Entire Swiss Economy

On Friday, I explained why UBS was the only bank that offered to take a hit on its contracts with AIG during the government’s backdoor bailout of the ailing insurer. The reason? A looming US investigation of UBS that meant the Swiss banking behemoth was in no position to play hardball. In an interview this weekend, one of Switzerland’s justice ministers revealed the extent to which the fate of UBS—and the entire Swiss economy—is again in the hands of the American government.

As Mother Jones reported in November 2008, UBS helped wealthy Americans hide billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in violation of a 2001 agreement signed by the bank promising to identify and document customers with any US sources of income. The agreement was a major departure from historic Swiss banking secrecy laws—one which Swiss courts recently deemed to be illegal. The high court’s decision could also prevent UBS from fulfilling its plea deal with the US government, in which it promised to provide more names of US customers with illegal accounts. If UBS fails to live up to its side of the agreement, the bank could face the revocation of its license to operate in America. Now, Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf warns, “the Swiss economy and the job market would suffer on a major scale should UBS fail as a result of its license being revoked in the United States.”

If there ever was a bank that’s too big to fail, it’s UBS. It is the biggest bank in Switzerland and—before massive subprime mortgage write-downs and the attention of the IRS scared many of its wealthy customers away—it was the largest provider of high-net worth private banking services in the world. (In an ironic twist, Bank of America has since taken its wealth management crown.) UBS and its chief domestic competitor, Credit Suisse, are six times larger than Switzerland’s entire economy—an imbalance reminiscent of the failed banks that decimated the economy and currency of Iceland. Last year the $2 trillion balance sheet of UBS alone was roughly four times the size of the total Swiss output. As Investment International magazine observed at that time, “a UBS ‘blow up’ would be catastrophic to Switzerland’s financial stability.”

Click here to read about the US response or to make a comment on this MoJo blog post.

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Golf-Loving, Ethically Challenged Rep. to Retire

A week of heat from the IRS was all it took for this corrupt GOP congressman to decided he wanted to spend more time with his family. And his lawyer, presumably.

Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), who has recently come under fire for his shady charity, won’t seek reelection in the fall. In a statement released this afternoon, the nine-term GOP congressmen attributed the abrupt annoucement “to the recent diagnosis of my wife” with an “‘incurable’ autoimmune disease.” No mention was made of allegations made surrounding the Frontier Foundation, a six-year-old educational nonprofit that has bankrolled golfing trips for the congressman instead of handing out scholarships. The Internal Revenue Service is still determining whether to investigate Frontier and Buyer, its “honorary chairman.”

While Buyer’s decision can be read as a victory for government accountability groups, it is less clear what effect it will have on voters in Indiana. A Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson crowed to The Hill, “Instead of drinking Eric Cantor and the NRCC’s Kool-Aid, House Republicans continue to show a lack of confidence in their ability to take back the House as Republican retirements are mounting and their own members refuse to invest in the [National Republican Congressional Committee].” Questions about the foundation did little to damage Buyer’s lead in the opinion polls—Republicans maintain a 14-point edge in his district. With a less ethically challenged candidate, it now seems even more likely that the GOP will hold Buyer’s seat in the 2010 midterm elections.

Click here to see the MoJo post or to make a comment.

UBS: Bank Bailout Good Guy?

I’m working on a larger piece on the UBS whistleblower, Bradley Birkenfeld, so I’ve been following news of the bank rather closely. One exchange from the Congressional hearings on AIG regarding UBS caught my eye so I decided to put the piles of research I’ve done on it to good use. My editor liked the blog post and promoted it to the Top Stories slider. (I led the site for about an hour—the bureau chief’s Twitter-heavy review of the Obama and GOP question session knocked me into the second slot.)

UPDATE: Like my previous post on waterboarding, this piece was the top story on a conspiracy theory website, New World Order Report–this time in the Economics section. Any traffic is good traffic?

UPDATE 2: My reporting was featured in a Media Consortium post about the implications of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which has allowed unlimited corporate cash in US elections. Their post was republished on the Huffington Post, Open Salon, Daily Kos, MyDirectDemocracy, and the Canadian site Rabble.

At this week’s congressional hearings on the AIG bailout, Swiss bank UBS received some undeserved praise.

UBS was one of eight large investment banks that benefited from the now-infamous backdoor bailout of AIG—resulting in government cash infusions totaling $182.5 billion—in the dark days of September 2008. At the hearing, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, revealed to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that UBS was the only bank willing to settle its soured credit default swaps (CDS) contracts for less than their face value. Why did UBS play ball when all the other banks didn’t? As the Washington Independent reported, “Barofsky speculated that the firm probably simply recognized that the American taxpayers ‘had taken the global economy on its back.’”

The financial crisis has proved time and again, big banks don’t account for taxpayers—except when they need their help. And that’s the more likely explanation for UBS’ good behavior during the AIG rescue. Like the rest of the global financial industry, UBS was hurting from the subprime mortgage meltdown. (The bank’s colossally bad bet on the US housing market—it had already written down $38 billion in bad loans as of April 2008—earned UBS the nickname Used to Be Smart.) But unlike its intransigent peers on Wall Street, the Swiss banking giant also faced the mounting threat of a US federal investigation. It was in no position to play hardball.

Click here to read the rest of this MoJo Top Story and to make a comment.

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CIA Agent Reluctantly Recants Waterboarding Claims

This MoJo blog post was assigned by the bureau chief. It’s both amazing and depressing that the full story hasn’t been more widely told.

UPDATE: The story got out: Kevin Drum, the most popular blogger on MotherJones.com, also featured the news on his blog after seeing it on Time magazine’s Swampland blog.

UPDATE 2: My post got picked up by the amusing conspiracy theory site Question Everything.

A prominent backer of waterboarding has quietly walked back his endorsement of the torture technique. In December 2007, recently retired CIA operative John Kiriakou told ABC News that 30 to 35 seconds of simulated drowning was all it took to make senior al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah sing like a bird. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

Kiriakou’s stunning account—made in an exclusive interview with ABC’s Brian Ross—was seized upon by torture proponents as proof that they’d been right all along. But the New York Times discovered last April that Kiriakou “was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia.” Now, Jeff Stein of Foreign Policy magazine has discovered Kiriakou himself retracting the waterboarding claims in his recently released memoir, The Reluctant Spy:

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Two years after Kiriakou went public with his ill-considered support for waterboarding, public opinion has turned in favor of the formerly controversial tactic. In the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing, Rassmussen polling found “58% of US voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information” from the underwear bomber—who spoke readily to authorities without the threat of torture.

Stein goes on to get a priceless response from the CIA and lays into ABC’s shoddy investigative reporting. (In the transcript of the interview, Ross fails to ask Kiriakou if he actually witnessed the questioning of Zubaydah.) The whole piece is worth a read.

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A Mulligan for Ethically Challenged GOP Rep?

I wrote this quick MoJo blog post while I was waiting to hear back from sources for another story. My editor liked it and immediately promoted it to the Must Read section. While I appreciate the praise, she did chop out both a fun golf reference–that’s about par for the course for the golf-loving congressman’s shady charity–and a section culled from my interview of the CREW executive director that I’ve pasted below the jump. (The asterisk* in the text denotes where it would have gone.)

Indiana Republican Rep. Steve Buyer formed the Frontier Foundation in 2003 to provide scholarships to students in his state—and since then his charity has raised an impressive $880,000 in corporate donations. Unfortunately, none of that money has found its way to needy undergrads. It has, however, paid for a lot of Buyer’s swanky golf junkets. Speaking recently with CBS Evening News about his foundation, the eight-term congressman—a graduate of the Citadel with a degree in business administration and Frontier’s “honorary chairman”—suggested that he “was so focused on making sure that we were legal, that I probably didn’t pay as close attention as I should have on, quote, appearances.”

And the appearances aren’t pretty. After a thorough review of Frontier’s tax filings, the government accountability organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has recommended that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) investigate Buyer and what they refer to as his “so-called charity.” CREW alleges Buyer has used Frontier “to foot golf fundraisers at exclusive resorts where he hobnobs with corporate donors—who also contribute to his campaign committee and leadership [political action committee].” In 2008, the most recent year for which tax returns were available, the foundation wrote off over $25,000 in expenses for “meals” and “travel for fund-raising.” These fundraising outings got the golf-loving Republican onto the links at Disney World, the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, and the Phoenix-area Boulders resort.

Most of the $10,500 in donations that the foundation has made in its seven-year history went not to college scholarships but to the National Rifle Association and “a charity run by a pharmaceutical company lobbyist.” And Buyer’s family benefited too: both his son and daughter were paid to serve as directors at the charity, which until recently shared its headquarters with the congressman’s campaign office. “It is hard to imagine something more callous than playing golf on the backs of poor students—at least one of whom surely could have gone to college on the money Frontier spent on Rep. Buyer’s golf trips,” CREW’s director, Melanie Sloan, said in a statement.

And who were the lobbyists that Buyer was courting? According to analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical industry—which is regulated by the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, of which Buyer is a member—has been the congressman’s second largest campaign contributor. Only health professionals like doctors have contributed more over the course of Buyer’s political career. Buyer’s son was also hired directly out of college to lobby for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association.

Details of the foundation’s activities were unearthed by Indiana’s Lafayette Journal and Constitution in October 2009—too late for Buyer to merit inclusion on CREW’s annual list of the most corrupt lawmakers.* Sloan told me that she is confident that IRS will take CREW’s allegations seriously. But she has less faith that Buyer’s colleagues on the OCE will hold him accountable. “I don’t think Ethics will examine in depth if Buyer misused his seat on Energy and Commerce,” she said.

Nor does there seem to be much in the way of public pressure on Buyer to step down. The day before CREW filed its complaints—and nearly three months since the congressman’s phony foundation scandal first broke in Indiana—the Swing State Project published its latest 2010 election forecast for the fourth district of Indiana, which Buyer represents. Prediction: safe GOP hold.

The NY Times Paywall: Worth the Wait

This morning, Kevin commented on the announcement by the New York Times that it intends to build a paywall around its content… starting next year:

This is sort of odd. Why wait until 2011? The technology for tracking visits isn’t very hard to implement. And why announce this without answers to basic questions like “how many stories can I read for free?”

Reading between the lines of their carefully worded announcement, I think the answers to his questions are pretty clear. The Grey Lady has an out-sized presence in the American media market. Any move she makes is both influential—and unsettling.

The lead time allows the Times‘ other competitors here and abroad to carefully rethink their online media strategies. The current online model practiced by most major newspapers—put everything on the Web for free—is less of a strategy and more an accident of history. The Internet pounced on a profitable and antiquated industry and has been diverting content and revenues it ever since. On the bright side, this change has brought about the advent of blogging and an unparalleled era of free information. But as Times‘ media critic David Carr noted, “people who remain reflexively bullish on free ignore the fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content.” (For “legacy business,” see the Los Angeles Times.)

If other news sites don’t choose to fight over the NYTimes.com readers repelled by its paywall, a surprise beneficiary of their new strategy could be Steve Brill’s much-hyped Journalism Online venture. Carr dismissed working with third parties like Brill, Amazon, or Apple, saying, “the golden rule in digital matters is that the man in the middle makes the gold.” Still, smaller rivals like the LA Times or Chicago Sun-Times could find working with a middleman preferable to being out of work.

Click here to read the rest of the MoJo blog post.

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Keep Jazz Real

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2008 jazz fans were less numerous and much older than ever before.  Stuffy, stodgy jazz aficionados couldn’t figure out why. I explain.

In his lament for the state of jazz, Terry Teachout began by noting that in 1987 Congress passed a measure honouring jazz as “a rare and valuable national treasure,” which accorded it an “institutional status commensurate with its value and importance”. The resolution, introduced in the House as HR-57 and later confirmed by the Senate, could just as easily have applied to the blues, also “a uniquely American musical synthesis and culture through the African-American experience”.

Blues musicians should be glad they were spared the tribute. It clearly didn’t help jazz, which has been declining in popularity in part due to such well-meaning measures. The move to institutionalise and aggrandise jazz has placed it on a pedestal, far above the innovation and vibrancy that made it great. The effect has been to make the music more rare and less valued in contemporary American culture.

Click here to read the rest of the MIL blog post or to make a comment.

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Mother Jones on TV: Moyers, Maddow, and Countdown

I volunteered to fill in for one of the San Francisco editors on weekend website duty and got stuck writing this post on a Saturday. I will not make that mistake again.

One highlight: Bill Moyers asked a question regarding the Wall Street-bashing article from Rep Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), about which I had previously blogged.

Recently DC Bureau Chief David Corn and blogger Kevin Drum have had to wear a lot of makeup—that’s what happens when you’re on three different shows in the course of two days. If you haven’t had a chance to see all the clips yet, the links are below in bold.

On Friday, the two sat down with PBS’ Bill Moyers for an insightful hour-long conversation about the unrepentant and unreformed financial industry. Moyers began his show by detailing how completely Wall Street has recovered since bankers like Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, the Financial Times‘ Person of the Year, nearly destroyed the global economy. “How do the bankers pick our pockets so thoroughly with barely a pang of guilt or punishment?” he asked. “You will find some answers in this current edition of Mother Jones magazine, one of the best sources of investigative journalism around today.”

Moyers went on to point out that MoJo and, surprisingly enough, the Wall Street Journal are both skeptical of the administration’s efforts to reform derivatives trading. They discussed the House Committee on Financial Services, which David pointed out “is called a money committee…because if you serve on that committee, you have access to a lot of money. Campaign cash.” The first half hour concluded with talk about the lack of outrage over the infamous carried interest rule that allows hedgefund millionaires to pay income tax rates lower than those of their secretaries. “We should lay some of the blame,” Kevin suggested, on “the media…People don’t see it enough to get angry about it.”

In the second half of Bill Moyers Journal, Kevin said that part of the reason real financial reform hasn’t occurred is because “the bailout last year succeeded in a way, too well” and now people think “we can go back to business as usual.” After a lost decade in which new jobs were not created and median wages did not increase, Moyers asked what the two made of the much discussed new article in Forbes by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) bashing Wall Street. “Well, the Democrats have to worry,” David replied. “There is an opening here for the Republicans.” Kevin concluded by offering Obama a suggestion from FDR’s playbook: “If there’s any one issue where…a real show that he was going to take these guys on could bring the country together, it very well might be taking on Wall Street.” Better late, than never!

Click here for the Rachel Maddow Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann links or to comment on the MoJo blog post.

Photo of Mother Jones and her TV: georgia.g (via Flickr)