One issue that the incoming administration has on its plate is what to do with the various war criminals now kicking around as a result of the Bush-Cheney torture and detention policies. On the merits, I’d like to see forgiveness for implementers who were following what they were (falsely) assured were lawful orders and harsh measures for people on the policy level. In practice, it’s pretty clear that Don Rumsfeld isn’t going to wind up in jail. Michael Isikoff reports on the Obama campaign’s thinking:

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible.

….”If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks.

I think the model being reached for here is something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But as Kevin Drum says, on this plan “we’ll get the truth, but not the reconciliation, since I doubt that any of the perpetrators of this stuff are inclined to show the slightest remorse for what they did. I suppose that here in the real world this might be the most we can expect, but I don’t have to like it. And I don’t.”

I’m half inclined to say there should be neither truth nor reconciliation. Instead, George W. Bush should be kidnapped, drugged, flown to Spain in an unmarked plane, and wake up on the streets of Madrid tied up with a bunch of files and evidence pinned to his chest so Judge Garzón can sort the whole thing out. If anyone asks how that happened, deny knowledge and mention “executive privilege.” I dunno.

On a more serious note, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simply declining to engage in war crimes prosecutions as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, and actually taking prosecution off the table. The latter should be done, if at all, only in exchange for confessions, expressions of remorse, and cooperation with investigations. The former may is probably the better part of wisdom for now, but many of the perpetrators can be expected to live for decades and absent something like a real Truth and Reconciliation Commission the door should be left open to doing something down the road if circumstances change. I don’t think it’s even remotely acceptable to just give a full retrospective stamp of approval on everything that was done during the Bush years merely because that might be the most convenient way to build legislative support for Obama’s domestic agenda.

Almost everything I’ve read about Hillary Clinton going to the State Department has focused on the personal reconciliation between the two people. Which is nice. And, indeed, crucially important in an effective Secretary of State. But what I’d like to hear more about is the policy agenda. All Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times piece says is this:

Substantively, the two were at odds over the Iraq war — Mrs. Clinton voted to authorize it and Mr. Obama said he would have opposed it had he been in the Senate then — and to a lesser extent over negotiations with Iran. But although Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Obama for being willing to sit down and talk to dictators, he has said he would have a lower-level envoy do preparatory work for a meeting with Iran’s leaders first. Mrs. Clinton has said she favors robust diplomacy with Iran and lower-level contacts as well.

This idea that a relatively small disagreement about diplomacy with Iran was their only disagreement during the primaries is widespread, but strikes me as something of a mutually convenient myth. The Iran thing really was an example of an issue where the disagreement seemed to generate more heat than light. But they had a related, and more clear-cut, disagreement about Cuba policy with Obama indicating a desire to soften the hard line that prevailed through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations while Clinton indicated a desire to stick with the status quo. Obama wholeheartedly embraced the Shultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn nuclear disarmament agenda while Clinton was more equivocal. Obama implicitly criticized the Clinton administration for waiting until its waning days to really buckle down on the Arab-Israeli conflict. They disagreed about whether the US should join the international treaty to ban cluster bombs.

None of it is earth-shattering stuff, but there was a consistent trajectory to these disagreements, and Obama was on the right side of them. People who supported Obama in the primary — or who voted for the Democratic candidate in November — are going to be looking for assurance that adding Clinton to his team, or having a Republican run the Pentagon, doesn’t indicate a desire to move away from the course he outlined.

Throughout the financial crisis, I’ve been dimly trying to remember something I read on Tyler Cowen’s blog a long time ago. Today, Paul Krugman shows off his Nobel Prize skillz by finding the post in question:

I also found myself thinking about the Kaplan-Rauh paper finding that Wall Street was largely responsible for the surge in very high incomes, which was widely taken as evidence that the new rich were really earning their money (though to be fair Tyler Cowen didn’t say that.)

Time for some reevaluation, don’t you think?

Here’s a link to the paper itself. The abstract:

We consider how much of the top end of the income distribution can be attributed to four sectors — top executives of non-financial firms (Main Street); financial service sector employees from investment banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, and mutual funds (Wall Street); corporate lawyers; and professional athletes and celebrities. Non-financial public company CEOs and top executives do not represent more than 6.5% of any of the top AGI brackets (the top 0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%, and 0.0001%). Individuals in the Wall Street category comprise at least as high a percentage of the top AGI brackets as non-financial executives of public companies. While the representation of top executives in the top AGI brackets has increased from 1994 to 2004, the representation of Wall Street has likely increased even more. While the groups we study represent a substantial portion of the top income groups, they miss a large number of high-earning individuals. We conclude by considering how our results inform different explanations for the increased skewness at the top end of the distribution. We argue the evidence is most consistent with theories of superstars, skill biased technological change, greater scale and their interaction.

In retrospect, it seems that the “Wall Street” proportion of this wasn’t much more than people taking a general upward trajectory in the market and adding lots of leverage to generate extraordinary returns. And the Wall Street portion is extremely large relative to the Main Street portion.