Wow. Matt Taibbi has done it again, unleashing another furious and righteous broadside regarding Wall Street and the financial industry…only this time it’s aimed at an Obama administration that appears to be home-away-from-home for a legion of Wall Street expatriates and Clinton-era New Democrat-ish advisors who are determined to destroy any effort to enact fundamental reform. Taibbi’s article is dense and fact-heavy, so it doesn’t really do justice to excerpt any of it; you really should read the whole thing, and carefully at that. But here’s a taste:

The significance of all of these appointments isn’t that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It’s that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. “Bob Rubin, these guys, they’re classic limousine liberals,” says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. “These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.”

And:

“The investment community feels very put-upon,” [Daniel] Fass explained. “They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.”

Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?

This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we’re getting no real reform of the finance industry. There’s no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America’s racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a “moral hazard” creeping over his administration.

“The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted,” Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank’s bill. “Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase.”

I haven’t followed the financial reform efforts nearly as closely as someone like Taibbi, but every time I read about one of these clowns I’m amazed to the extent at which they all seem to be proponents of the New Democrat “free markets/low regulation” approach. But it’s obvious why they support it; they all made millions in this system. Why in God’s name would the Obama administration make them the top economic advisors, when they were largely behind (or connected to, or getting paid by, people behind) the anti-regulatory approach of the Clinton administration? Maybe somebody can ask Obama that question when they get a moment free from asking Sarah Palin her opinion of global warming.

One more excerpt:

These teabaggers don’t know that, however. All they know is that a big government program might end up using tax dollars to pay the medical bills of rapidly breeding Dominican immigrants. So they hate it. They’re also in a groove, knowing that at the polls a few days earlier, people like themselves had a big hand in ousting several Obama-allied Democrats, including a governor of New Jersey who just happened to be the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. A sign held up by New Jersey protesters bears the warning, “If You Vote For Obamacare, We Will Corzine You.”

I approach a woman named Pat Defillipis from Toms River, New Jersey, and ask her why she’s here. “To protest health care,” she answers. “And then amnesty. You know, immigration amnesty.”

I ask her if she’s aware that there’s a big hearing going on in the House today, where Barney Frank’s committee is marking up a bill to reform the financial regulatory system. She recognizes Frank’s name, wincing, but the rest of my question leaves her staring at me like I’m an alien.

“Do you care at all about economic regulation?” I ask. “There was sort of a big economic collapse last year. Do you have any ideas about how that whole deal should be fixed?”

“We got to slow down on spending,” she says. “We can’t afford it.”

“But what do we do about the rules governing Wall Street . . .”

She walks away. She doesn’t give a fuck. People like Pat aren’t aware of it, but they’re the best friends Obama has. They hate him, sure, but they don’t hate him for any reasons that make sense. When it comes down to it, most of them hate the president for all the usual reasons they hate “liberals” — because he uses big words, doesn’t believe in hell and doesn’t flip out at the sight of gay people holding hands. Additionally, of course, he’s black, and wasn’t born in America, and is married to a woman who secretly hates our country.

These are the kinds of voters whom Obama’s gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots.

The idiots aren’t all on that side either. On our side we have people like Gary Willis who are abandoning Obama because he’s sending more troops to Afghanistan, a move that had roughly a 75% or better chance of happening upon his election, and then we have people who have decided they can’t be liberal because other people are being mean to Obama about this decision. So while we’re busy fighting about things that liberals have legitimate differences of opinion on, Wall Street executives are becoming the best buddies of the Obama administration (when they aren’t one and the same, that is.)

As has become typical, Taibbi takes fire from people who mistake his style for his substance. Because Taibbi acts like a blogger instead of a mainstream journalist, he takes the time to carefully demolish his critic’s arguments. But even someone like Fernholz, who mistakes hyperbole with a purpose for fact, can see as clearly as any of us how men and women with ties to Wall Street have come to dominate this administration, and what that’s doing to the reform efforts in Congress. People ought to be angry about this but they aren’t, because they don’t understand what’s happening and so don’t know why they should be angry in the first place except that some bankers are getting big bonuses. But Taibbi explains it in detail, and his righteous indignation becomes are rage at a system that appears to be rigged against people losing their homes, their life-savings, and their dignity. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that we need Taibbi right now, because he’s the only one who’ll make us angry enough to pay attention.

A settlement has finally been reached in the thirteen-year old suit over mishandled Indian trust funds:

Tribal members have long contended that they are owed billions of dollars in unpaid dues for farming, grazing, timber-cutting and other government leases on their land dating back to the 1887 federal act that broke up reservations and gave Indians individual parcels.

Records about who owns — and are owed — are scattered across the country in remote locations and dusty files, or simply don’t exist.

And many tribal elders waiting for their rightful recompense have been dying in poverty.

That, perhaps more than anything, says Indian activist Elouise Cobell, is what persuaded her to agree this week to settle her 13-year legal fight to force the government to account for what’s due to a half-million Indian landowners, and to pay up.

She joined administration officials Tuesday in announcing an agreement under which the government would spend about $3.4 billion to pay out a fraction of the unpaid royalties claimed in the lawsuit, and to help tribes acquire small, Indian-owned parcels to establish larger, more usable tracts.

“Too many individual beneficiaries are dying every day without their money,” said Cobell, a banker and member of Montana’s Blackfeet Tribe.

The suit arose as a result of the failure of the U.S. government to manage and account for various lands held in trust by Native Americans, a mismanagement that dates back to policies by the Federal government that encouraged the unlimited fractionalization of tribal lands held by individual owners such that proper accounting for the lands and any profits from them became practically impossible. Though the plaintiffs have suggested that the Federal government is liable for up to $176 billion in mismanaged trust funds, as the article states accounting for lost funds with complete accuracy (in whatever amount) would be extraordinarily difficult. But that’s not the only reason that the plaintiffs in the case were willing to settle for a relatively low figure:

The cost to the government to defend Cobell’s class-action suit, coupled with the major issues it was set to resolve, had essentially brought to a halt government action on a host of other urgent issues in tribal communities — from law enforcement and water rights to health care and education.

Many tribal leaders and their legal representatives, stymied for years in their efforts to move other issues forward, had agitated for a settlement much earlier.

“The lawsuit created paralysis within the federal government’s relationship with tribes in many areas,” says Henry M. Buffalo Jr., a St. Paul lawyer representing Indian interests and member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.

“For many years, tribal leaders have been saying to the Cobell plaintiffs, ‘You’ve got to get this settled,’ ” Buffalo says. “The [royalty] amounts are important, but from an operational standpoint, we needed to get it behind us.”

In other words, the plaintiffs felt pressure to settle because other Natives were suffering from the lack of attention the Dept. of the Interior could afford to devote to other issues. Native Americans suffered from thoughtless Federal policies, and from the effort to right those policies, proving once again that in fact there is no justice in the world. However, some credit must be given to the Obama administration for their willingness to settle the case, a willingness that did not exist during the Clinton and Bush administrations (though it probably also helps that the government suffered a defeat in a Federal court of appeals earlier this year.)

The terms of the settlement will provide for a token payment to beneficiaries of the trusts, but it also hopes to undo the severe fractionalization that is the result of a century of land being automatically divvied up:

The proposed settlement, which has to be approved by Congress and the court, would send an initial $1,000 payment to all beneficiaries. A distribution model would be developed to award the remaining $1.4 billion royalty award, Cobell says.

In addition, another $2 billion would be used by the government to buy, in trust for the tribes, parcels of what are called “fractionalized” land interests — parcels that have been divided and redivided among tribal heirs over the past century or so. The voluntary buy-back program, says lawyer Harper, would allow tribes to piece together larger parcels that could be used more productively — and under tribal control.

The administration has also proposed a new commission to oversee the management of the Indian trust in the future. Indian leaders and their legal representatives say the board should be comprised of Indians to encourage a rebuilding of trust.

The deal must still be approved by Congress, where it already has the support of Sens. John McCain and Byron Dorgan.

The NY Times has a pretty interesting look at the process by which Obama and his senior civilian and military advisors arrived at the planned escalation of troop strength in Afghanistan. If you want some idea of what the administration’s strategy is in Afghanistan, this is probably as close as you’re going to get. What it makes clear is that Obama remains as focused on getting troops out of Afghanistan as he is getting them in, despite having come around to accepting the urgency of the situation. Though the conditions for withdrawal are obviously quite vague, and the administration is determined to hedge their bets, it’s clear there is no open-ended commitment to Afghanistan. If anything, it appears the administration’s strategy is focused on buying time for the Karzai administration to bolster it’s forces, but that they are willing to buy only so much time for the Afghan government. The article gives you the strong impression that Obama decided on a maximum commitment that we can make to Afghanistan in terms of money and manpower, and developed a strategy to take advantage of what we’re willing to give as quickly as possible. Which sounds great if-like me-you’re someone who believes that however “necessary” the war in Afghanistan is, there is an absolute limit to the amount of money we can spend and the amount of casualties our military can endure. At the same time, it’s going to be awfully difficult politically for the Obama administration to start pulling those forces out if Afghanistan is mired in similar circumstances to the ones that it exist today, and it’s going to be awfully tempting to stretch those deployments beyond what was initially planned for. Given an inch of wiggle room in the withdrawal strategy, and it’s going to be hard not to take a mile, especially when there’s no appreciable Afghanistan “awakening” on the horizon.

Anyway, it’s a good read. Check it out.

Two different perspectives, both of which I think are reading. First, Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch, on the “inertia” of war:

If the fight in Afghanistan is really one of national necessity, then refusing to give the Karzai government a “blank check” and putting something like a timetable on withdrawal makes no sense. If the fight is truly necessary, then we must commit as many resources as it takes for as long as it takes to win. If it really isn’t, on the other hand, then why spend more blood and treasure? Saying that Afghanistan is a war of urgency and necessity, then qualifying our commitment to it, isn’t a coherent strategy. Stephen Walt guesses, and I think he’s right, that Obama’s decision has as much to do with domestic politics as it does with the broader strategic situation. To test that, do a thought experiment. If we had no military presence in Afghanistan right now, and the situation were similar (a small contingent of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Af-Pak border region, a weak and corrupt Afghan government, a large scale Islamist insurgency that threatens that government’s continued viability), would committing 100,000 troops to stabilize the government, defeat the Taliban and eliminate al-Qaeda be something we were seriously considering? I doubt it.

The problem, it seems to me, is that once wars get started, it’s politically almost impossible to end them without either a) winning or b) committing political suicide. Some have proposed that President Obama should have the “courage” to tell the American people that the war isn’t winnable in any real sense, and that it’s time for us to begin winding it down. That may be true. Americans’ lives are at stake, after all. Still, it should at least be acknowledged that were Obama to follow that course, he would probably be sealing the fate of his administration. I don’t care how many Americans are skeptical about the war in Afghanistan. Most of those same people would punish Obama severely if the U.S. were to withdraw and they watched the government there fall to the Taliban.

I’ve bolded the crucial nugget of his post. He’s right of course. Who could imagine such a thing? But now that we’re there, who can imagine simply leaving?

That thought doesn’t temper the bitter disappointment of Garry Willis though, at Obama’s decision to ramp up what he regards as an unnecessary and intractable conflict:

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

Iraq at least had a functioning government (though a tyrannical one). The Afghanistan government that replaced the Taliban is not only corrupt but ineffectual. The country is riven by tribal war, Islamic militancy, and warlordism, and fueled by a drug economy —interrupting the drug industry will destabilize what order there is and increase hostility to us.

We have been in Afghanistan for eight years, earning hatred as occupiers, and after this record for longevity in American wars we will be there for still more years earning even more hatred. It gives us not another Iraq but another Vietnam, with wobbly rulers and an alien culture.

Although Obama says he plans to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011, he will meanwhile be sending there not only soldiers but the contract employees that cling about us now like camp followers, corrupt adjuncts in perpetuity. Obama did not mention these plagues that now equal the number of military personnel we dispatch. We are sending off thousands of people to take and give bribes to drug dealers in Afghanistan.

If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.

I think we still have a chance in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean Eckel isn’t right about the insanity of the circumstances that have led us to this point, and it doesn’t mean that Willis might not be right about the utter foolishness of hoping for a positive outcome.

It’s not exactly a surprise that Obama is set to announce an escalation of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan in his address tonight, for two reasons: one, McClatchy tipped us off last week and two, escalation almost seems like it was inevitable. For all the stories about Obama’s painstaking deliberations, can anyone imagine that he would go on TV tonight and announce no increase, or a draw down of troops? Yeah, me neither. There is one element to this NY Times story on the announcement that catches my eye though:

… clearly Mr. Obama does not trust the central government with much of the new American aid. Money will go to individual ministries depending on their performance, American officials have said in recent weeks. The United States, officials said, will also funnel more money and other assistance through local leaders to foster change from the bottom up, avoiding the country’s corrupt central government.

That is bound to foster some resentment inside Mr. Karzai’s government because it creates a direct link between the United States and local governments and leaders, a process that could further weaken Mr. Karzai’s authority over parts of the nation.

That makes sense…sort of. Except, if we’re undermining the authority of the central government, and cementing the loyalty of local leaders to American and NATO commanders, who exactly is supposed to take over when we decide it’s time to go? I’m not a huge fan of funneling billions of dollars to a corrupt government (and the corrupt leaders of that government) but if we’re out of the nation-building business as the article states earlier, then at what point do we stop giving money to local tribal leaders, and what do they do then? I’d like to know the answers to those questions.

Also, I recommend Glenn Greenwald as a counter-point to the supporters of the escalation (which includes myself, most reluctantly) who are assuming an extraordinarily more capable performance from the Obama administration. I won’t excerpt the post because the whole thing should be read, but suffice it to say he catalogs the depressingly similar justifications and goals trotted by the Bush administration and the Obama administration for their relative “surges.”

When I say I support this escalation reluctantly, I mean exactly that. I don’t mean I shake my head and sigh and lament the loss of lives and say “these things must be done sometimes.” I don’t mean I support the escalation because I think it has to be done even though it means more American and Afghan lives will be lost. What I mean is, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do at all, but neither am I sure that it’s the wrong thing to do. I will tell you that this is the direct result of years of reading and blogging about Iraq. Anybody who reads our archives can figure out pretty quickly that I was convinced that the situation in Iraq would only worsen until we were forced to withdraw our troops in futility. I wasn’t alone in that regard. It’s not difficult for me to admit that I was wrong about something (it had better not be for anybody who posts their opinions for everyone in the world to read.) But it is difficult for me to face the fact that despite reading almost everything I could find about Iraq for years from the invasion up to the surge in early 2007, I was utterly uninformed about the dynamic in Iraq that would eventually tamp down the conflict that boiled over in 2006. This is not to say that Iraq is at peace (far from it) but it’s clear that the situation in Iraq now is dramatically better than it was in early 2006, or even in 2007. Maybe it’s temporary, but only in the sense that conflict could still break out over certain flash points (say between the Kurds and the central government) and not in the sense that conflict once existed; for the most part, it would appear that a widespread Sunni insurgency is largely over.

All of that which is to say that the experience in Iraq has taught me a hard lesson about the certainty of our knowledge about the internal dynamics of a country at war. Which is why, despite the ever-worsening fight against the Taliban, I cannot say for certain that the escalation (and our entire mission) in Afghanistan, is doomed to failure. Is that possible? Yes. Maybe even probable. Is it certain? I don’t think so, and I don’t think anyone who says that it is can possibly be as certain as they sound.

That being said, it is the inevitability of the escalation that depresses me the most. I think there’s still a chance that the Taliban can be co-opted into giving up the fight via a power-sharing arrangement, and I think that’s worth fighting for on our behalf and on the behalf of the Afghan people who would prefer such a thing. But we could be far more cynical (and perhaps realistic) and draw-down our troops to focus almost solely on hunting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and I’m not sure that our overall security against terrorist attacks would be greatly worsened. Perhaps it would be better. But such an approach would be something different at least. Maybe the Obama administration is doing the right thing in raising troop levels in Afghanistan, and maybe it’ll even work this time. But that isn’t what rescued us in Iraq, and it sure as hell didn’t work in Vietnam. And can you imagine any politician saying “You know what? Enough is enough.” I sure as hell can’t, even if they believed it to be true. So maybe we’re doing something right over there…or maybe we’re just going through the motions. That remains to be seen.

UPDATE: About that “extraordinarily more capable performance”, check this Army Times article entitled-I’m not kidding-”Trigger-happy security complicates convoys” (via ProPublica):

Ill-disciplined private security guards escorting supply convoys to coalition bases are wreaking havoc as they pass through western Kandahar province, undermining the coalition’s counterinsurgency strategy here and leading to at least one confrontation with U.S. forces, say U.S. Army officers and Afghan government officials.

The security guards are responsible for killing and wounding more than 30 innocent civilians during the past four years in Maywand district alone, said Mohammad Zareef, the senior representative in the district for Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security.

[...]

Until recently, the identities of the companies for whom the security guards worked remained shrouded in mystery, even from the coalition headquarters whose troops they are supplying. French said he requested information on the companies through his higher brigade headquarters — 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division — but had yet to receive any word back.

An International Security Assistance Force spokesman said the convoy security workers are employees of the logistics contractors running the convoys. Those contractors work for one or several of the ISAF, NATO or 26 countries operating in Afghanistan. As a result, he said he did not know how much is spent on the security firms or which companies had hired them.

The only difference is the guys we’re paying to shoot up Afghan civilians are themselves Afghans this time. You know who uses contractors whose employer’s identities we can’t even figure out to fight their insurgencies? Nations with overstretched militaries, that’s who.

Philip Carter, the Defense Dept. official whose job is to oversee the closing of Guantanamo Bay, has quit. Honestly, the only reason this note resonates with me is because Phil Carter used to run the blog Intel Dump (which eventually got him a gig doing the same thing for the Washington Post) which I read on a fairly regular basis until he went on a lengthy hiatus to work for the Obama campaign. Of course Obama recently announced that his administration will not meet the self-imposed deadline of January 2010, for closing the camp, and given the timing I’m naturally suspicious that Carter’s resignation has something to do with that failure.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald isn’t afraid to speculate, but he’s probably right. Anyone with any ounce of principal is going to have difficulty hanging with Obama on Gitmo and the “government always wins” approach to detainee trials.