Krugman on Lincoln, McClellan, the Deficit and the Stimulus

Lincoln, McClellan, And Stimulus

By Paul Krugman

There’s now a lot of talk about the fact that U.S. corporations are sitting on a lot of cash, but not spending it. I don’t find that particularly puzzling: with huge excess capacity, why invest in building even more capacity. But almost everyone seems to agree that if we could somehow get businesses to spend some of that cash, it would create jobs.

Which then raises the question: how can you believe that, and not also believe that if the U.S. government were to borrow some of the cash corporations aren’t spending, and spend it on, say, public works, this would also create jobs? (Brad DeLong has tried to make this argument repeatedly).

Which brings me to Lincoln and McClellan. General McClellan had raised a powerful army, but seemed disinclined to actually seek battle. So Lincoln sent him a letter: “My dear McClellan: If you don’t want to use the Army I should like to borrow it for a while.” (Yes, there are various versions of the quote).

So shouldn’t that be our response to all that idle corporate cash? We don’t literally have to borrow from the corporations; they’re parking their funds in the money market, and the feds would borrow from that market. But the end result would be to put some of that idle cash to work — and, ultimately, to give the corporations a reason to start investing, too, so that the deficit spending would crowd investment in, not out.

I have never seen a coherent objection to this line of argument.

BP and Corrupt Southern Cops Work Together to Block BP-Disaster Coverage

By Glenn Greenwald in Salon

Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened. She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who -- after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because "BP didn't want him filming" -- was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official. McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding: "One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff's office."

Today, an article that is a joint collaboration between PBS' Frontline and ProPublica reported that a BP refinery in Texas "spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies" two weeks before the company's rig in the Gulf collapsed. Accompanying that article was this sidebar report:

A photographer taking pictures for these articles, was detained Friday while shooting pictures in Texas City, Texas.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said that shortly after arriving in town, he was confronted by a BP security officer, local police and a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. He was released after the police reviewed the pictures he had taken on Friday and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information.

The police officer then turned that information over to the BP security guard under what he said was standard procedure, according to Rosenfield.

No charges were filed.

Rosenfield, an experienced freelance photographer, said he was detained shortly after shooting a photograph of a Texas City sign on a public roadway. Rosenfield said he was followed by a BP employee in a truck after taking the picture and blocked by two police cars when he pulled into a gas station.

According to Rosenfield, the officers said they had a right to look at photos taken near secured areas of the refinery, even if they were shot from public property. Rosenfield said he was told he would be "taken in" if he declined to comply.

ProPublica's Paul Steiger said that ProPublica told law enforcement agents that they were working on a deadline for this story about that facility, and that even if DHS agents believed they had a legitimate reason to scrutinize the actions and photographs of this photographer, there was no reason that "should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company."

These are true police state tactics, and it's clear that it is now part of a pattern. It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area; Newsweek reported this in late May:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable. In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP's other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP's personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer. BP's destructive conduct, and the government's complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are.

UPDATE: More evidence here (h/t bamage):

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure". . . .

[S]ince "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be" . . . .

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill.

"Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June. . . .

"[T]o create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency." [said Cooper].

The rule has come under severe criticism not only from journalists but from observers and activists involved in the Gulf Coast clean-up.

"With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening," writes Mike Adams at NaturalNews. . . .

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches.

We've frequently heard excuses that the Federal Government has little power to do anything to BP, but they certainly seem to have ample power to do a great deal for them. Public indifference about such things is the by-product of those who walk around like drones repeating the mantra that political officials know what's best about what must be kept secret, and that the Threat of Terrorism (which is what is exploited to justify such acts) means we must acquiesce to such powers in the name of Staying Safe.

Remembering D-Day in Bedford, Virginia

When visiting the Washington D.C. area, please consider seeing the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in Bedford, Virginia.

Imagine a place where the lessons and legacy of D-Day are remembered and preserved, a place where veterans of all ages are welcomed and honored, a place where visitors discover and recognize the worthy service of those who answer duty’s call, a place where gravity and dignity are hallmarks. The National D-Day Memorial is such a place.

Deliberately sited to rise above the community that experienced this country’s severest per capita losses on D-Day, the National D-Day Memorial reminds all who enter it of the heavy price that heartland communities have paid, and still pay, for freedom. ...

D-Day: It is hard to conceive the epic scope of this decisive battle that foreshadowed the end of Hitlers dream of Nazi domination. Overlord was the largest air, land, and sea operation undertaken before or since June 6, 1944. The landing included over 5,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and over 150,000 service men.

After years of meticulous planning and seemingly endless training, for the Allied Forces, it all came down to this: The boat ramp goes down, then jump, swim, run, and crawl to the cliffs. Many of the first young men (most not yet 20 years old) entered the surf carrying eighty pounds of equipment. They faced over 200 yards of beach before reaching the first natural feature offering any protection. Blanketed by small-arms fire and bracketed by artillery, they found themselves in hell.

When it was over, the Allied Forces had suffered nearly 10,000 casualties; more than 4,000 were dead. Yet somehow, due to planning and preparation, and due to the valor, fidelity, and sacrifice of the Allied Forces, Fortress Europe had been breached.

Pres Obama on Veterans Benefits - Raised the Veterans Administration's budget by 11 percent

From Wednesday's Town Hall Meeting in Racine, Wisconsin:

THE PRESIDENT: If you take a look at it -- first of all, our military has just been extraordinary. So much burden has been placed on them -- (applause) -- I mean, they've been fighting two wars now for a long time. And, frankly, a lot of folks have been going about their business, not really changing how they behave.

People in uniform have made all kinds of adjustments and their families have made all kinds of adjustments and sacrifices. That's part of the reason why, even though I've frozen discretionary domestic spending, I haven't frozen the budgets that are needed to give pay raises to our troops, to make sure that our veterans are properly cared for, to make sure that their families are getting support on things like child care. (Applause.) Because my attitude is, we've got a solemn obligation to those who put on the uniform to protect the United States of America.

And in the past, there have been times, frankly, where we didn't live up to that obligation. I mean, Veterans Affairs is a great example. When we came in, for all the talk about how we were going to take care of veterans, the truth was the backlogs were so bad and a lot of the facilities for veterans were just not up to snuff. So we actually raised the Veterans Administration's budget by 11 percent -- the biggest hike in 30 years -- just so we could catch up and start making sure that our veterans got the kind of care that they deserve. (Applause.)

Now, but what I may have been referring to is this. When you look at a place like Afghanistan, or you look at a place like Iraq, so many of our military personnel are having to engage in work that really should be civilian work -- helping to build schools, helping to build bridges, helping to set up rule of law and courts, helping -- agricultural specialists to help people learn how to irrigate their fields so that they can grow more food. And the problem is, is that we don't have a civilian effort that has always matched up to the military efforts.

So the military goes in there, they clear out everything, they're making everything secure -- and now the question is, all right, can we get the civilians to come in to work with the local governments to improve the situation. And a lot of times, that civilian side of it has been under-resourced.

So what I'm trying to say is, don't put all the burden on the military. Make sure that we've got a civilian expeditionary force that when we go out into some village somewhere and the military makes it secure, let's have that agricultural specialist right there. Let's have that person who knows how to train a police force right there. Let's have all those personnel and let's make sure that we are giving them the support that they need in order for us to be successful on our mission.

And that means that --by the way, the State Department, our diplomatic arms, we've got to give them more support. A lot of times -- we really support our military, but I'll be honest with you, when you go up to Congress and you start talking to them about the budget for training our diplomats and training our development specialists and all that, then people want to cut their budget because they think, well, that's just foreign aid, that's not -- we don't want to spend our money on that.

But the problem is, is that if you shortchange that, you may end up having to send our troops in to a very dangerous situation because a country has collapsed. We didn't do the good diplomatic work and it's too late, and now the only solution is a military solution that might cost us five times as much. So we've just got to be smart about using all the elements of American power, not just one element on American power. All right? (Applause.)

Okay. Right there in the green. Right there in the green blouse.

Q First of all, thank you very much for all that you do. (Applause.)