In yesterday’s post, I described the way the budget process should run in the Congress, with the twelve appropriations committees in each chamber passing a spending bill, reconciling it with the bill passed by the other chamber if there are differences, and then passing a single reconciled bill that is sent to the president for his signature. All twelve such bills are supposed to be passed before the August recess, to be signed into law by the president to take effect with the new fiscal year starting October 1.

Congress and the White House also have the option of using Supplemental Appropriations. This is meant to provide a way to deal with unexpected major expenditures that could not have been anticipated in the budget process, such as catastrophes like hurricanes and earthquakes. (In the past few years, however, this option has been heavily exploited to fund expenditures that are not emergences, like the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries. For example, in 2008 about $200 billion, about 17% of the total discretionary budget, was allocated to the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ using supplemental appropriations. By not using the regular budget for these expenditures, the government can disguise the true cost of those wars. See this site for what the real costs of the wars are and how they are hidden from us.)

It all sounds very orderly, as one would expect from a government that has had over 200 years to develop a smooth working structure.

But what actually happens? “In 26 of the past 31 years (FY1977-FY2007), Congress and the President did not complete action on a majority of the regular bills by the start of the fiscal year (see Table 2). In eight years, they did not finish any of the bills by the deadline. They completed action on all the bills on schedule only four times: FY1977, FY1989, FY1995, and FY1997.” (My italics)

In the current year as of today, already three months into the fiscal year, the Senate has not voted on a single one of the twelve appropriations and the House has voted on only two of them (Military/Veterans and Transportation/HUD). In an effort to obtain a budget, Congress tried as a last resort to pass all twelve separate appropriations bills by rolling them all into one gigantic $1.2 trillion ‘omnibus’ bill. But that attempt failed on December 16th because the Senate Republicans blocked it.

(Note: The total government expenditure (using the 2008 budget figures) is around $3.0 trillion. Of this, about $1.8 trillion consists of mandatory spending that Congress cannot tinker with (such as Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the national debt, etc.), leaving the Congress with just $1.2 trillion of so-called discretionary spending to cover all the rest of government. It is the allocation of this money that Congress has control over. The recent tax deal that was signed into law reduced revenue and increased expenses to the tune of $858 billion, about three-quarters of the discretionary budget, and yet it sailed through Congress because it benefited the oligarchy.)

So given that not a single appropriations bill has been passed and the omnibus bill failed too, the country is operating without a budget.

So how is the government functioning? By using the option of ‘continuing resolutions’, which allows the Congress to pass stopgap appropriations that are based on the previous year’s expenditures, plus a few ad hoc changes to meet any contingencies that were not present the previous year. This means that almost all government agencies will be able to continue doing what they did the previous year.

In 2010, the first continuing resolution was passed on September 29, just before the beginning of the new fiscal year, that continued funding until December 3. Then just as that expired, a new continuing resolution was passed on December 4 extending the spending until Saturday, December 18. On Friday night, they passed another continuing resolution that lasted through December 21. Another continuing resolution was passed yesterday that extends this form of temporary funding until March 4, 2011.

So we now have a situation where the Congress will have to start the process of planning the budget for fiscal year 2012 before it has even passed a budget for fiscal year 2011. Is this any way to run the world’s biggest economy, living hand-to-mouth by passing temporary spending authorizations that can last as little as just a few days?

It costs an enormous amount of money (over four billion dollars) to pay for both chambers of Congress. You would think that they would be obliged to complete the most basic task required of them, which is to pass a budget. It is an absolute disgrace that they have not passed a single one of the twelve appropriation bills so far, and that there seems to be no sign of them doing so in the near future. If members of Congress were treated like any other employees, they would have been fired for gross incompetence, instead of being allowed to bloviate over non-essential matters and preen before the TV cameras.

Much of the criticisms aimed at Congress have involved the high-profile legislative stalemates on some issues involving filibusters and the like, that have stymied progress on those issues that did not involve the interests of the oligarchy. What all that hoop-la has obscured is a far more serious criticism, the fact that the government has stopped carrying out the most basic of its functions.

The most essential function of government is to make sure that its institutions function smoothly. At the very least, this requires that the government pass a budget that allocates money to those institutions so that they know what they can and cannot do. It is shocking to realize to what extent the Congress has abdicated that fundamental responsibility.

A quick investigation reveals that the appropriation process by which the government allocates money has a straightforward and logical sequence.

1. The President gives his State of the Union address at the end of January in which he lays out his general goals for the coming year.
2. He is required to submit to Congress by the first Monday in February a budget for the fiscal year beginning on October 1.
3. By April 15 the two chambers of Congress are supposed to pass a non-binding budget resolution that provides guidelines for taxes and appropriations for the next five years and this serves to provide a framework for both bodies to debate and allocate funds for the various agencies under their purview.
4. In Congress, the budget expenditures are divided into twelve major appropriations categories:
   • Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies;
   • Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;
   • Defense;
   • Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies;
   • Financial Services and General Government;
   • Department of Homeland Security;
   • Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies;
   • Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and
     Related Agencies;

   • Legislative Branch;
   • Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies;
   • State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs; and
   • Departments of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.

   The twelve appropriations committees in each body farm out the work to its own specialized sub-committees to work on the budget for their agencies and report back to the committees, which then has to vote to submit their appropriation package to the full House or Senate, which has the option of proposing amendments to the committees’ recommendations.

   (Technically, there is just one Appropriations Committee in the House and the above twelve are subcommittees of that body which have their own sub-sub-committees, but that gets confusing. There is also some difficulty in figuring out how money is allocated because the president’s budget proposal is specified according to agencies and not split up according to these twelve categories. They do not seem to provide a summary spreadsheet of allocations, with the closest that I could find being here.)

5. If the two chambers pass appropriation legislation that disagree (as often happens), a conference committee is set up to smooth out the differences and the jointly agreed-upon conference report is then sent to both chambers for voting. They two chambers cannot amend the conference report in any way but can only vote to accept or reject it. If it is rejected, it goes back to the conference committee for further work.
6. The 12 appropriation resolutions are supposed to be presented to both full chambers and approved by the August recess, so that a final budget bill can be sent to the president.
7. “After Congress sends the bill to the President, he has 10 days to sign or veto the measure. If he takes no action, the bill automatically becomes law at the end of the 10-day period… If the President vetoes the bill, he sends it back to Congress. Congress may override the veto by a two-thirds vote in both houses. If Congress successfully overrides the veto, the bill becomes law. If Congress is unsuccessful, the bill dies.”

This whole structure is set up so that all government agencies know well in advance how much money they have been allocated for the coming year and how it should be spent so that they can transition smoothly when the new fiscal year begins on October 1. It allows them to plan what new initiatives to undertake and what old programs to end.

In theory, this should result in a smoothly running government.

Tomorrow: How the reality compares with the theory.

This blog has been Sarah Palin-free for some time because I have little patience for the kind of obsession the media seem to have with breathlessly reporting her every utterance and tweet, however inconsequential. But for my own amusement I have been idly speculating as to whom she might choose as her running mate in the unlikely event that she becomes the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Who could possibly match her in the looniness factor? Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachman is a possibility since she is surely nutty enough.

But we now have a clear winner! John Bolton is considering running for the nomination as well. Yes, John Bolton is so crazy that he thinks the country is looking for someone like him to lead it, which makes him a perfect match for Palin.

Palin-Bolton in 2012. Who could ask for anything more?

As expected, after much posturing about how much it pained them, Obama and the Democratic leadership joined with the Republicans and voted to give the oligarchy everything they demanded, while throwing some crumbs to the rest of us and deliberately inserting a Social Security bomb that will explode later. They even snuck in an extra goodie for the rich at the last minute in the form of more generous itemized deductions for high-income households that cost $20.7 billion. Yes, what rich people, who have smart accountants to find all manner of itemized deductions (legal and illegal) to reduce their taxes, really need are more deductions.

Did you notice how quickly action was taken to pass this legislation? How the so-called gridlocked Congress can act so rapidly when the oligarchy’s interests are involved? It is just like the lightning speed with which Congress passed the Wall Street bailout in 2008. But when it comes to matters that affect the powerless, like the Zadroga bill aimed at providing medical relief to those first responders after 9/11 who now have serious health issues, nothing gets done. Jon Stewart has been outraged by this and his entire show on Thursday dealt with this single issue.

The absurdity of the tax cuts given to the rich becomes even more obvious when we look at this graph from the Congressional Budget Office at how after-tax average incomes have changed since 1979 for the various income categories. Note the steep rise in the last decade for the top 1% after the Bush tax cuts (that were just extended) were put into place.

The top 1.0% of incomes have increased four fold in that period, while the bottom 60% has been pretty much stagnant.

My prediction is that there will be a new ‘bipartisan’ effort to benefit the oligarchy even more. This one will be called tax ‘reform’. (You should always be on your guard when the two parties speak of ‘bipartisanship’ and the ‘reform’ of any institution that serves the general public.) This will be promoted by saying that the present tax code is too complicated and needs to be ‘simplified’. The servants of the oligarchy (aka the Democratic and Republican leadership) will agree that the changes must be ‘revenue neutral’, because it is now an article of faith that increasing taxes is the greatest evil in the world. But if there is to be no net gain or loss in net revenue, then any changes must mean that some will pay more tax and others will pay less. Guess who is going to win. And why? Because those who look after the interests of ordinary people will be excluded from the backrooms where the deal is hashed out.

David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, points out how ordinary people get the short end:

It’s hard to achieve because the general taxpayer is busy every day taking care of his own needs, his family, his job. And he doesn’t have time to lobby for a broad tax base and reasonable rates. On the other hand, every special interest group has an economic interest in raising money through some kind of political action committee or education fund and then lobby for targeted, narrowly focused, sometimes even obscure language that they get either into the tax code on Capitol Hill or into the regulation.
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So there’s a kind of an asymmetry of democracy, which there is no clean answer to. So until we really change the role of money in politics, I don’t know that we’ll ever address the question you raised.

During such debates, there will be a lot of talk about ‘fighting for the middle class’ and it is important to keep in mind the actual facts about family income, because politicians use the label ‘middle class’ vaguely to hide the fact that they only care about the rich. According to the US Census Bureau’s latest figures, the household income distribution by quintiles in 2009 was:

20% of households earn less than $20,450
20% of households earn between $20,450 and $38,530
20% of households earn between $38,530 and $61,800
20% of households earn between $61,800 and $100,000
20% of households earn over $100,000

The median household income (i.e., the 50% dividing line) is $50,221.

Only 5% of households earn over $180,000.

If we label the five quintiles as poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich, then a narrow definition of the middle class would be the middle 20% earning between $38,530 and $61,800 and the broadest definition of middle class would be the middle 60%, those households earning between $20,450 and $100,000. Obama’s talk about ‘middle class tax cuts’ included households earning up to $250,000 which is ridiculous since that is five times the median income. People earning more than that constitute only 2% of all households. In a country with such enormous income disparities, how can anyone speak of 98% of the population as the middle class?

But such dishonest language comes easily to those politicians whose real agenda is different from their stated one. As George Orwell said in his classic 1949 must-read essay Politics and the English Language: “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different…. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

A recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon targets the TSA’s invasive airport searches.

While everyone is up in arms about the TSA’s security methods, let us not forget the bigger picture, that such practices are enabled because we have passively let the government create a national security state that thinks it can abuse people at will.

The really serious abuses are happening elsewhere, in the denial of basic protections to preserve the life and liberty promised in the constitution. Paul Craig Roberts provides a horrific account of what the government did with Omar Khadr and to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children who are now missing.

As Roberts says:

We have a Congress that has forfeited its power to declare war and sits complicit while the president not only usurps its power but uses illegitimate power to commit war crimes by launching naked aggressions on the basis of lies and deception.

We have a Congress that turns a blind eye to criminal actions by the president, vice president, and executive branch, including violations of US statutory law against torture, violations of US statutory law against spying on Americans without warrants, and violations of every legal protection in the Bill of Rights, from the right of privacy to habeas corpus.

The hallmarks of the remade US legal system, thanks to the “war on terror,” are coerced self-incrimination and indefinite detention or murder without charges or evidence.

We should not be satisfied with reforming just airport security, we should seek the dismantling of the entire national security state and restoring the democratic rights that are being stolen from us.

Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Yesterday Congress finally repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military. This move has both small and big implications.

It is small in the sense that it affects a small segment of the population (gay people in the military) and eliminating this rule will not cost any money or changes in the way the military is run or affect the nation in any noticeable way. It will not be long before people wonder (if they remember it at all) what all the fuss was about, why we had such an absurd rule in the first place, and why it was so hard to eliminate it.

But this change is big in a symbolic sense, and should give a boost to efforts to obtain full equal rights for gays in all areas of society. When the government condones discrimination in one of its major institutions, it gives ammunition to all the homophobes who want to deny gays their rights in other areas. So the long-term significance of this repeal should not be underestimated. It may well symbolize the beginning of the end for anti-gay discrimination in the US.

But this high profile debate illustrates another feature. The one-party oligarchic state that we have in the US cannot be too obvious about its monolithic nature. It needs hot-button issues that the oligarchy does not care about (sexuality, abortion, guns, religion, etc.) that the two factions can strongly disagree on and fight over, and which serve to give us the illusion that we have two opposing parties instead of two factions of the same party. This allows for heated fights and gives each faction’s supporters the impression that they are winning some battles and losing others, when in reality, the oligarchy is winning on all the major issues. So repeal of DADT gives supporters of the Democratic faction something to feel good about and to rally around their leaders.

But even allowing for that, the repeal of DADT is to be welcomed and congratulations extended to all those who fought so hard for it.

David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, slams the recent tax cut deal that was passed with such speed and bipartisanship:

What we’re doing is perpetuating the most colossal fiscal mistake in history. These tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts were originally put in in 2001, 2003. They were premised on the prospect of a five trillion budget surplus over the coming 10 years, and the idea was to give some money back to the taxpayer.

Well, here we are 10 years later, two unfinanced wars, housing boom and bust, and bailouts everywhere, the huge stimulus programs, massive deficits have broken out. And in that 10 years, we’ve actually had five trillion of deficits.

So, we have accomplished over the last decade a $10 trillion swing from an illusory surplus to a gigantic deficit. And therefore, it just underscores even more as unaffordable as they were a decade ago. It is utter folly in the face of this deficit to be extending them. (My italics)
…
The idea of this will stimulate domestic production and jobs as wrong. That’s an obsolete idea that may have been true 40 years ago. But today, given that we buy almost everything we consume from abroad, this tax cut-induced spending really is going to stimulate the Chinese economy, not ours, build up our debt further and require that we borrow from China so that we can increase the deficit here in the United States.

When one of the architects of Reagonomics (whose views haven’t changed much since those days) blasts away at the fiscal irresponsibility in government and comes off as a militant progressive, you know that the greed of the oligarchy is out of control.

Bank of America has said that it will no process any transactions for WikiLeaks.

It is interesting that this is the same bank that is rumored to be a target of a release in January 2011 by WikiLeaks of documents that will presumably expose its shady practices.

I wrote about this earlier where I said that the oligarchy (of which the big banks are a central part) will fight back with everything they’ve got to preserve their right to continue looting the system.

In this radio program, Glenn Greenwald discusses the WikiLeaks issue with Jamie Rubin, a former State Department spokesperson, and John Burns of the New York Times, whom Greenwald has criticized before for his hatchet job on Julian Assange.

The first 22 minutes consists of Burns talking about the Assange court hearing in London and the next 10 minutes has Rubin making the case why what WikiLeaks does is bad. Greenwald only enters the discussion around the 32-minute mark. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, I would suggest that you start there because it then becomes very lively as Greenwald points out how people like Rubin simply make up stuff in their efforts to discredit Wikileaks.

It is interesting that when confronted with facts that go against their position (and Greenwald usually has the goods), both Rubin and Burns either make up stuff or say that they cannot be bothered to debate Greenwald. The common view of Burns and Rubin symbolizes perfectly the collusion between the mainstream media and the government when any challenge to the establishment comes up.

After the program, Greenwald put up a blog post documenting how Rubin was flat out wrong in his statements.

In most countries that have endemic terrorism, leaders know that they cannot protect their people from random attacks and their usual appeal is for people to remain calm and go about their normal business. In the US, though, the leaders seek to ratchet up the fear all the time. When did you last hear a leading US politician or high government official say that we should simply go about our business and not be obsessed with terrorist attacks? Where is the modern day equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to say that the only thing we need to fear is fear itself?

Instead we now have the US government joining up with Walmart (yes, Walmart!) and other places in a “See something, say something” program to encourage people to keep a sharp eye on the people around them and report any ‘suspicious’ behavior to store managers. Isn’t there something creepy about the cabinet secretary in charge of the equally creepily named ‘Department of Homeland Security’ appearing on video screens all over the place urging people to become essentially spies and informants for the government?

Besides, what are people supposed to be looking for? Are they supposed to be like Mr. Whipple, constantly on the lookout for people squeezing the Charmin?

It seems like the next logical step will be to pass laws to create some kind of counter-terrorism investigative unit that reports only to high government officials (say the head of the Department of Homeland Security) and is exempt from all the quaint old legal restraints that used to preserve our civil liberties, such as obtaining warrants to intercept our private communications or to take people in for questioning or to read them their rights and allow them to have lawyers. The people who work for this agency will be granted immunity from any legal oversight in order to allow them to pursue ‘terrorists’ freely, all to keep us safe of course. People will be asked to cooperate with this agency and report to them anyone who is acting suspiciously, whether it be neighbors, co-workers, passers by, shoppers (see Walmart, above) or even friends and family members. Such an organization will bear a strong resemblance to the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police, but our media will not be so impolite as to point this out.

Does this sound paranoid? Paul Craig Roberts says that initial steps in this direction are already being taken and that all the half-baked terrorist plots that required government coaxing and even bribes to get people to agree to participate in are part of the process of softening us up to accept these moves as being necessary to ‘protect’ us.

What is it really all about? Could it be that the US government needs terrorist events in order to completely destroy the US Constitution? On November 24, National Public Radio broadcast a report by Dina Temple-Raston: “Administration officials are looking at the possibility of codifying detention without trial and are awaiting legislation that is supposed to come out of Congress early next year.” Of course, the legislation will not come out of Congress. It will be written by Homeland Security and the Justice (sic) Department. The impotent Congress will merely rubber-stamp it.

The obliteration of habeas corpus, the most necessary and important protection of liberty ever institutionalized in law and governing constitution, has become necessary for the US government, because a jury might acquit an alleged or mock “terrorist” or framed person whom the US government has declared prior to the trial will be held forever in indefinite detention even if acquitted in a US court of law. The attorney general of the United States has declared that any “terrorist” that he puts on trial who is acquitted by a jury will remain in detention regardless of the verdict. Such an event would reveal the total lawlessness of American “justice.”

Scott Horton at Harpers describes how all this is done by abusing the term “terrorist” so that it becomes a catch-all term that can be applied to anyone the government dislikes, like Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Burma and Zimbabwe are the leaders in this kind of abuse but the US is quickly catching up, and the proposed SHIELD legislation is another step towards that goal.

Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America (2007), has also been warning about this for some time and says that the invocation of the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is a dangerous sign of things to come.

The Espionage Act was crafted in 1917 — because President Woodrow Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the troublesome First Amendment, wished to criminalize speech critical of his war. In the run-up to World War One, there were many ordinary citizens — educators, journalists, publishers, civil rights leaders, union activists — who were speaking out against US involvement in the war. The Espionage Act was used to round these citizens by the thousands for the newly minted ‘crime’ of their exercising their First Amendment Rights.
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That is why prosecution via the Espionage Act is so dangerous — not for Assange alone, but for every one of us, regardless of our political views.

This is far from a feverish projection: if you study the history of closing societies, as I have, you see that every closing society creates a kind of ‘third rail’ of material, with legislation that proliferates around it. The goal of the legislation is to call those who criticize the government ‘spies’, ‘traitors’, enemies of the state’ and so on. Always the issue of national security is invoked as the reason for this proliferating legislation. The outcome? A hydra that breeds fear. Under similar laws in Germany in the early thirties, it became a form of ‘espionage’ and ‘treason’ to criticize the Nazi party, to listen to British radio programs, to joke about the fuhrer, or to read cartoons that mocked the government. Communist Russia in the 30’s, East Germany in the 50’s, and China today all use parallel legislation to call criticism of the government — or whistleblowing — ‘espionage’ and ‘treason’, and ‘legally’ imprison or even execute journalists, editors, and human rights activists accordingly.

Do we really want to create a society where measures carefully developed over centuries to preserve civil liberties and encoded in laws and constitutional protections are tossed away, and where people see as their duty to act as spies for the government on their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and random people around them?

What such initiatives invariably do is result in a lot of ‘false positive’ information, where people who were doing perfectly legal things are reported because their actions lie outside the narrow range of activities that the observer is familiar with. This will result in law enforcement agencies being swamped chasing false leads and the falsely accused people spending enormous amounts of time and money trying to clear their names.