Nearly a trillion dollars, and where is it going?

First of all, a happy new year to all my readers. This is In Perspective's first post of 2009; too bad we aren't starting the year on a better note.

The $700bn bailout is just one big mess, benefiting the institutions that brought the financial system into this crisis mode in the first place. We need government spending to stimulate the faltering economy, but this is the wrong way to go about it. There is little to no oversight where billions of taxpayer dollars are going. This is a disgrace, plain and simple. Worse yet, while there were articles about the initial GAO report (albeit pushed to the back of the news section, incredibly enough), the media has once against failed to challenge the Bush administration to make sure these flaws in the bailout are fixed in time; the White House has dodged the spotlight, and thus the pressure. Congress also deserves its great share of blame, handing out the money without figuring out an endgame first. The financial institutions who received this generous (worth somewhere in between the nominal GDPs of Turkey and the Netherlands), practically no-strings-attached handout remain silent on where the money's even going.

I'm legitimately angry because it's my generation that will be paying for the effects of all this insane government spending. The interest on the trillions of dollars of loans taken out from Japan, China, Britain, and other countries adds up year by year, we dig ourselves deeper and deeper into this deficit of trillions.

I'm hoping the upcoming Obama administration will bring enhanced oversight of Wall Street and beyond — such a shadowy area of the American economy. While I think this rushed bail-out was the wrong way to go about things, government-sponsored programs helped pull America out of its last major economic funk: the Great Depression of the '30s. However, despite what one might read in the news rags these days, that was an economic crisis many times more severe than the current recession. Amidst all this financial downturn, one hopes people will learn the lesson of reaching for gold that just isn't there; perhaps our system free-wheeling free-marketism that was born in the 1980s will begin to be scaled back, but people can only learn so much...

F is for failure (in Iraq)

The long-awaited first in a series of (predictable) September benchmarks paints a disappointing but not surprising picture of Bush-supported Iraqi government.

Washington Post:

The Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of the 18 political, economic and security benchmarks it set for itself, and violence remains high despite the U.S. troop surge, the Government Accountability Office reported today.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Comptroller General David M. Walker, who heads the GAO, painted a mostly grim portrait of the Iraqi government's progress ahead of a crucial report due to be presented next week by the top U.S. military commander and the U.S. ambassador in Iraq.

"The government is dysfunctional," Walker told the panel in response to a question. He noted that 15 of the 37 ministers in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have withdrawn their support for him and that there are "significant" problems with the capabilities of remaining ministries.

Formally presenting a GAO report that Congress requested on the benchmarks, Walker said the Iraqi government has met three of the 18, partially met four and failed to meet 11. The benchmarks, based on commitments the Maliki government made in June 2006, were inserted in U.S. legislation authorizing emergency war funding. Under the legislation, the administration must report on progress in achieving them.

As could only be expected of the Bush administration, the White House has criticized the GAO report.

General Petraeus, the leading commander in Iraq, is due to release an even more awaited report later this month — 10 September — outlining the military situation in Iraq following the thus-failed 'surge'. (If need some ways to not think about the Petraeus report, see The Daily Dish.) No matter what the report says, the reaction to it is pretty predictable: 'Why are we fighting this war?', 'How can there be progress when there's failure?' — rhetorical questions abound. I doubt the Senate will ask too many meaningful questions; the Republicans will, for the most part, try to make the war sound a bit cheerier than the Democrats and the Democrats will fill their quota of empty emotional blather.

How do you solve a problem like Iraq? Withdrawal and the country descends into total proxy wars and anarchic chaos; stay and the extremists have a rallying cry against the 'Western occupiers'. Withdrawal equals more terrorism; staying equals more terrorism. Hmm, I'll leave the decision to the highly-competent policymakers on Capitol Hill (*cough*). Or there could be an international force and a massive rebuilding and political reconciliation program that include all major international actors and Iraq's neighbors...

Well, you know some superficial, perceived, or rhetorical policy shift is being planned in the West Wing when President George W. Bush makes his third ever visit to Iraq.

Why Bush doesn't need to veto often

Signing statements — legal clauses the president can put on legislation exempting his office from the law — have come to the public eye more and more thanks to the Bush administration. This has been a source of worry and helplessness for those of us who do not always see eye to eye with the White House; and it makes Congress look even more impotent to the power of the executive.

The New York Times ran an editorial on Friday about this disgrace:

President Bush is notorious for issuing statements taking exception to hundreds of bills as he signs them. This week, we learned that in a shocking number of cases, the Bush administration has refused to enact those laws. Congress should use its powers to insist that its laws are obeyed.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, investigated 19 provisions to which Mr. Bush objected. It found that six of them, or nearly a third, have not been implemented as the law requires. The G.A.O. did not investigate some of the most infamous signing statements, like the challenge to a ban on torture. But the ones it looked into are disturbing enough.

In one case, Congress directed the Pentagon in its 2007 budget request to account separately for the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a perfectly appropriate request, but Mr. Bush issued a signing statement critical of the rule, and the Pentagon withheld the information. In two other cases, federal agencies ignored laws requiring them to get permission from Congressional committees before taking particular actions.

The Bush administration’s disregard for these laws is part of its extraordinary theory of the “unitary executive.” The administration asserts that the president has the sole authority to supervise and direct executive officers, and that Congress and the courts cannot interfere. This theory, which has no support in American history or the Constitution, is a formula for autocracy.

Other presidents have issued signing statements, but none has issued as many, or done so with the same contemptuous attitude toward the co-equal branches of government. The G.A.O. report makes clear that Mr. Bush’s signing statements were virtually written instructions to executive agencies to flout acts of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, has said that the report shows that Mr. Bush “is constantly grabbing for more power” and trying to push Congress “to the sidelines.”

Members of Congress have a variety of methods available to make the administration obey the law. They should call the agency heads up to Capitol Hill to explain their intransigence. And they should use the power of the purse, the authority the founders wisely vested in the people’s branch, as a check on a runaway executive branch.

When the Bush presidency ends, there will be a great deal of damage to repair, much of it to the Constitutional system. Congress should begin now to restore the principle that even the president and those who work for him are not above the law.

Kudos to America's best newspaper for the great editorial. I couldn't have written it better myself, which explains why I posted it — I couldn't resist.