History is Happening Now

Our next president has come under some fire on this blog for apparently breaking a campaign promise to raise taxes on the wealthiest 5% of Americans. Lee — the other regular blogger on this site — has suggested that this is an important issue:

Let’s get this straight: Obama campaigned on the promise of raising taxes on a certain segment of “high-income” Americans. He won. He might be said to have received a mandate from the American people to do so. Does anyone think it’ll be easier to return to this promise in 2011?

Lee also reiterated his belief that the left needs to put pressure on Obama to steer this country in keeping with the views of the left-wingers who made it possible for him to win:

Obama’s weakness, his dependency on large numbers of enthusiastic (mostly progressive, but somewhat cynical and alienated) voters, is our strength. Politicians should ideally fear their supporters. They should be terrified of betraying their supporters because doing so, theoretically, ought to destroy their credibility and careers in the long term.

So here’s to the so-called “netroots.” Keep twisting the screws. Keep putting on the pressure. Make Obama sweat.

I don’t have a problem in principle with the idea of making Obama sweat – if Obama is doing things that are bad for the country, we need to speak truth to power. There’s plenty of evidence that pressure from online activists prevented Obama from appointing John Brennan to head the CIA.

But I do have a problem with the idea of trying to “make Obama sweat” for abandoning his plan to immediately push for a tax increase on the top 5% of the population, income-wise.

I don’t think it’s a good idea, politically or economically, for Obama to push for a tax increase on anybody right now. Eventually, the wealthiest 5% of the population should be paying a lot more in taxes — but I don’t think such an increase would help the economy in the short-term, and I think pushing for this increase could sabotage everything else Obama must strive to accomplish over the next six months.

That said, I wanted to point out that if Lee and like-minded activists want to try to “make Obama sweat” over the tax hike issue, they’ll have to do it with no help whatsoever from the most prestigious left-wing economic pundit in America — Nobel Laureate and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman.

I’m not a huge fan of Krugman because I feel he was disrespectful of Obama supporters during the Democratic primary earlier this year, and because I thought he was somewhat misleading in explaining his opposition to the $700 billion bailout plan originally proposed a few months back by Treasury Secretary Paul Krugman.

But I have to acknowledge Krugman’s prestige and credibility right now — and it’s hard to imagine how the netroots could “make Obama sweat” over tax increases while Krugman has Obama’s back.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview Krugman gave on NPR to Tom Ashbrook:

ASHBROOK: Question for you from our website, www.onpointradio.org: ”Mr. Krugman, please discuss how the tax structure should be changed in order to help bring the new gilded age to an end,” by which I guess our correspondent here is looking at income inequality.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, uh, there’s a fair bit you can do. Although most of the surge in inequality has been in pre-tax income. But it’s been exaccerbated by a real reduction in the progressivity of taxes. So we’ve gone from — well, if you go back to the days when that Socialist Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, the top tax rate was actually 91% and now it’s 35%. Now, most economists, myself included, don’t actually think that a 90% tax rate is actually a good idea. But, we certainly have sharply reduced taxes at the top end of the scale, which has made things worse. I’m not sure that you — Yeah, let me say that reforming the tax code is not in itself going to be enough to bring us back to a middle class society, but it sure is a step in the right direction and we have to get over this notion that if you tax rich people even a dime more, that somehow they’ll all go away and refuse to invest or be entrepreneurial. If you require some CEO to pay 38% of his income instead of 35% of his income in taxes, he’ll quit his job and go home. We have a lot of scope for being more progressive again in taxes.

ASHBROOK: Obama has indicated he may put off those higher taxes for upper-income groups while we’re in this ditch. Are you with him on that?

KRUGMAN: Yeah. I actually never thought it was going to happen anyway until 2010. I mean, the, uh — Legislatively, it’s quite hard to change the tax code. The Democrats, unless Al Franken pulls it off and there’s an upset in Georgia, are not going to have 60 seats in the Senate, so the great hope for rolling back the Bush tax cuts actually was the fact that Bush tried to hide the true cost of it, wrote it so the tax cuts turn into a pumpkin at the end of 2010.

So I never thought it was actually going to happen before 2011, anwway. And look, raising taxes in the face of a recession is not great policy even if the tax cuts were very ill-advised when they took place. Ideally, we’d be able to completely restructure the tax code right now, instantly, and also, in the process, avoid having too great a tax increase. But you know, that’s too hard to do, legislatively. So, you know, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t think that’s a major concession on Obama’s part.

So here’s the deal for those of you hoping to “make Obama sweat” for abandoning his campaign plan to push for a tax increase — a rolling back of the Bush tax cuts — as soon as he took office: If you try to pressure Obama to keep his promise, your opponents (if they feel the need to even argue the point at all) will point out that even Krugman, the most left-wing progressive economist with a national audience and a Nobel prize, says “raising taxes in the face of a recession is not great policy even if the tax cuts were very ill-advised when they took place.”

Now why would Krugman say a thing like that if it weren’t true? 

You’ll need an answer to that question, liberal netroots, if you intend to convince Obama that he’ll face the wrath of the lefties if he doesn’t follow through on the tax hike.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to assume that a tax increase on the rich would be bad right now just because Krugman says so. Obviously, Krugman could be wrong. But Krugman’s opinion is a lot to overcome if you want to rally an anti-Obama revolt.

Who is “Matthew Alexander”? He’s a former interrogator of Iraqi detainees, and he just wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here’s how he describes himself:

I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.

What he saw was torture:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

“Alexander” didn’t participate in the torture:

I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Here’s what he has to say about the argument that torture is necessary to fight terrorism:

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

When he returned from Iraq, “Alexander” wrote a book about his experiences — a book the Pentagon did everything it could to suppress when he brought it to them for review:

I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don’t even want the public to hear them.

This is what he has to say about our torture and about our next president, Barack Obama:

I’m actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We’re better than that. We’re smarter, too.

I know I’m not alone in my hope that “Alexander’s” optimism is well-placed.

Stopping torture saves American lives.