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Minuteman Leader Allegedly Kills 9-Year-Old And Father To Finance Hate Group

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jun 15, 2009 at 5:00 pm

arivacavictimThis weekend, Shawna Forde, 41, leader of the Minuteman American Defense (M.A.D.) group and two of her associates were arrested in connection with the murder of a 9-year-old girl, Brisenia Flores, and her father, Raul, in Arivaca, AZ. Local police are reporting that Forde and her posse broke into the Flores home dressed as law enforcement officers looking for money and drugs to finance her border watch group with the intention of leaving no witnesses behind.

Much like Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project and Chris Simcox’s Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Forde’s group is an extreme nativist organization made up of volunteer border vigilantes. M.A.D. has gone into damage control, posting a statement expressing condolences for the Flores family and distancing itself from Forde’s violent crime. Yet directly below its offering of “deepest regrets,” the website boasts a message from Shawna Forde, Executive Director:

“I would like to let everyone know that we are in full operation we have people coming from Florida and other parts of the country to assist in gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking…We will expose and report what we know and find, we will recruit the serious and train the revolutionist, time for words have passed the time for bravery and conviction are now. I shall lead you to challenge yourself and your American heart into the future of what was once a great country and will be again but at what price?“

Other border vigilante groups are disassociating themselves from Forde and M.A.D. However, the Anti-Defamation League points out that many of them have publicly supported her anti-immigrant statements in the past. On three different occasions, Forde claimed to have been shot, raped, and beaten by Spanish-speaking assailants. Most inside her own anti-immigrant community questioned her credibility and accused her of faking the attack, but some, like Minuteman Project Executive Director Stephen Eichler stood by her, saying:

“I believe what I have been told, and the reports I have read in the newspaper, to be factual and accurate…I may be called gullible, sucker, and naïve, but it is of little consequence to me if I am right and the victims were comforted.”

Laine Lawless, an anti-immigration activist who started the group Border Guardians, praised Forde’s border activities and argued that Forde’s alleged attack was “obvious proof that the reach of the Mexican cartels extends way beyond the borders of Mexico deep into the United States.” After the Flores family murder, Minuteman in-fighting has lead the San Diego Minuteman to blame The Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist for continuing to support Forde, who served as Gilchrist’s 2008-2009 Border Director, “despite warnings.”

Finger pointing aside, what all of these groups have in common is that they target individual immigrants rather than immigration policies. Their mission and rhetoric consistently fits the description of “rightwing extremist groups” that the DHS report warned have “the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence” in part due to pent-up “frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration.” Forde’s alleged murder comes shortly after a white supremacist shooting rampage in Pittsburgh, an abortion doctor murder in Kansas, and a racially-motivated shooting at the Holocaust Museum that have caused some to “herald a disturbing surge in U.S. hate crimes.”

Update

America’s Voice has posted a new video of Forde speaking on behalf of the anti-immigrant organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In it, Forde addresses a 2006 townhall in Yakima, Washington, as a Minuteman and FAIR activist.

Featured

Michael Lafferty writes:

And now, the trigger-man who allegedly acted at her direction and killed both victims, will face a DNA-matched second degree murder charge in eastern Washington for the 1997 killing of Hector Lopez Partida, a Hispanic man then living in Wenatchee.

For anyone doing the math, this homicide took place before the self proclaimed Iraq war and ’special forces’ operative joined the US Army. If, in fact, he ever did, or is what he has claimed to be.

How prescient that Department of Homeland Security advisory now seems…

Climate Progress

Brookings: Fears that cap and trade will hurt farmers are baseless

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 pm

Climate legislation is a necessity for the agricultural sector to survive and thrive (see “Eight reasons for farmers to support global warming action“).  Yet many farmers mistakenly think that their sector would suffer from strong efforts to promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions — no doubt because bill sponsors have not done a great job explaining things.  So I’m reprinting this post from WonkRoom. I have previously blogged on the new Brookings study and how it fails to model key features of Waxman-Markey that would reduce costs (see “New Brookings finds strong climate action would NOT hurt the economy“). Yet, “even without the inclusion of an offset program to allow the agriculture sector to benefit from carbon market, their analysis found the impact on agriculture to be minimal”:

Cap And Trade: Effect On Agriculture Sector (No Offsets)

Read more

Politics

Cheney responds to Panetta: ‘I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted.’

By Guest Blogger on Jun 15, 2009 at 4:35 pm

In an interview with Jane Mayer for the New Yorker, CIA Director Leon Panetta responded to former Vice President Cheney’s recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, saying, “It’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.” Earlier today, Cheney released a statement in response to Panetta. “I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted. The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years,” the statement read. Cheney’s reference to Panetta as his “old friend” is significant. Indeed, it reminds us that Panetta’s assessment of Cheney’s intentions was not from the mouth of a long-time political enemy, but rather from a former colleague and long-time friend. Cheney endorsed Panetta’s nomination to CIA in January, specifically noting their long relationship. “I am very fond of him. He is a very talented guy,” Cheney said:

FOX NEWS: Leon Panetta for CIA director — does that choice trouble you in any way, due to his lack of intelligence experience?

CHENEY: I know Leon. We first met back in the Nixon administration when we were both Republicans. And then I served with him for 10 years in the House of Representatives. He was, of course, a Democrat, I was a Republican in the House. I like him a lot. He is one of my favorite Democrats, if I can put it in those terms.That may be the kiss of death for Leon, but I am very fond of him. He is a very talented guy. [Fox News, 1/12/09]

– Claire Teitelman

Update

CIA’s Paul Gimigliano walked back Panetta’s comments:

The Director was simply expressing his profound disagreement with the assertion that President Obama’s security policies have made our country less safe. That’s all there is to it. Everyone understands that al-Qaeda and its allies are a dangerous and determined enemy.

Yglesias

Noodling on Global Imbalances

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 15, 2009 at 4:13 pm

I’m going to mostly think out loud here if you don’t mind. At the moment, there’s a common view of the relationship between “global imbalances” of financial flows and the bubble in the United States that relies on the idea of a “global savings glut.” Too much money was being saved in Asia, and it had to go somewhere. So it poured into the US and helped generate our bubble. Ezra Klein says maybe it’s the other way around:

I just had a conversation with Steve Pearlstein that’s making me somewhat reconsider the point. The causality, he argued, isn’t as clear as all that. It may be that we developed these exotic financial instruments as a response to the river of money being pumped into our system. Or it may go the opposite way: That money was pumped into our system because we concocted abnormally attractive investments that caught the eye of foreign investors.

This is a slightly different spin on the same argument: In this telling, the current account deficit was still the problem. But it grew so large not because of foreign investors but because of Wall Street’s decisions. Without the development of seemingly safe, high-return assets, that money would have been left to low-yield treasuries, and because those wouldn’t have delivered sufficient returns, the money would have ended up going elsewhere. If that’s true, then it may be that sufficient regulation of the financial sector actually could do quite a bit to ease our current account problems.

I think that all depends on what you think the “problem” is exactly. After all, we’re talking about a period of time in which average people’s earnings were flat or falling. The current account imbalance allowed people to skirt that problem via debt-financed borrowing, thus allowing consumption and apparent living standards to continue growing. If you regulated the (apparently) high-yield, (apparently) low-risk investment opportunities out of existence, the money would have flowed elsewhere—to Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Lithuania, the UK wherever else people were willing to offer an (apparent) free lunch to savers. It’s hard to imagine American politicians actually doing that. The crux of the matter is that foreign capital flows into the United States weren’t a “problem,” they were a solution to the problem of stagnating income. Our problem today is that those flows were unsustainable, so now everyone’s in trouble. But it seems to me that what’s really needed is a solution to the problem of wages and income. And the tragedy of the bubble years is that for all the money that flowed into the country, what we have to show for it is stuff that’s of little enduring utility—houses that are now vacant, or more-or-less frivolous consumption goods. In principle that money could have funded the kind of investments in infrastructure and education that would pay off in terms of faster growth and higher incomes down the road. Instead, it basically all went into depreciating assets.

Health

How To Finance Reform: Hold Hospitals ‘To Cost And Quality Promises’

By Igor Volsky on Jun 15, 2009 at 4:04 pm

On Saturday, the White House identified “proposals that will contribute another $313 billion over 10 years to paying for health care reform.” Obama’s budget had previously identified $635 billion in new revenues and savings that could be used to finance reform, and his latest proposal of cutting “more than $200 billion in expected reimbursements to hospitals over 10 years” would seed nearly $950 billion and almost cover the full cost of health care reform.

The White House is proposing the following changes:

- Incorporate productivity adjustments into Medicare payment updates: Productivity in the U.S. economy has been improving over time. However, most Medicare payments have not been systematically adjusted to reflect these system-wide improvements.

- Reduce subsidies to hospitals for treating the uninsured as coverage increases: Instead of paying hospitals to treat patients without health insurance, we should give people coverage so that they have insurance to begin with. As health reform phases in, the number of uninsured will go down, and we would be able to reduce payments to hospitals for treating those previously uncovered.

- Pay better prices for Medicare Part D drugs: For example, drug reimbursement could be reduced for beneficiaries dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. The Administration is working with the Congress to develop the most appropriate policy to achieve these savings.

Speaking out on CBS’s Face The Nation, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the proposal “extremely controversial” and predicted that “you’re going to hear from every hospital in American and virtually every doctor pushing back, because they’re having a hard time dealing with the cuts that have been imposed already.” But in a letter to the President, the American Hospital Association — along with other members of the health care industry — freely admitted that hospitals must adopt efficiencies to slow the growth of health care spending.

As CAPAF Senior Fellow Judy Feder and Marilyn Moon, of the American Institutes for Research, argue in a column for Kaiser Health News, “The industry needs a push, in the form of a little financial pressure.” Policy makers should use Medicare to prod the industry, which accounts for over 40 percent of all spending, to slow cost growth and enhance health quality:

Hospitals respond rapidly to Medicare changes. They have done so in the past and could do so again….Hospitals will challenge reductions in payment updates with claims that they lose money from Medicare. Medicare payment rates are indeed below those of private payers. But for about two-thirds of all hospitals, Medicare’s payments exceed the cost of care. Moreover, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has found that the hospitals that lost money on Medicare are in areas where private insurers aren’t pressuring them to reduce costs. Medicare payments exceed costs where hospitals are pressured to be more efficient. Geographic differences remind us that lower costs are possible and that “good” hospitals can be role models for the rest.

In an interview with the Wonk Room, Feder explained that increasing system efficiency will not lead to a corresponding reduction in the quality of care. To the contrary, “adjustments will create incentives for providers to deliver care more effectively.” Watch it:

As President Obama explained during today’s address to the AMA, “I am committed to making these cuts in a way that protects our senior citizens. In fact, these proposals will actually extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by 7 years and reduce premiums for Medicare beneficiaries by roughly $43 billion over 10 years.”

Politics

McCain Doesn’t Know That Other Countries’ Gov’t-Run Systems Are More Efficient Than U.S.

By Ali Frick on Jun 15, 2009 at 3:46 pm

Today, President Obama spoke before the American Medical Association about the immediate need for far-reaching health care reform. He insisted that one of the options presented to Americans “needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market so that force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.”

On CNN earlier today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) rejected the public option as “a non-starter.” He admitted that the current “competition” between “1,300 health insurance companies in America today” is not successfully driving down costs — but insisted that a government plan could never be more cost efficient:

MCCAIN: Look, if we have a government option, then sooner or later it will dramatically increase the cost, it will crowd out private health insurance. And if you’re doing it in the name of competition, we have 1,300 health insurance companies in America today. They’re competing but they’re not getting the kinds of health care costs under control that is necessary.

CNN: Yeah. Do you think that is absolutely necessarily so? That if you have a competing government system, that invariably what will happen is that you will drive some of the private health insurers out of the business?

MCCAIN: I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Over time you’ll drive them all out, and the idea that somehow the government can administer health care in a more efficient fashion than the private sector I think flies in the face of examples of other countries that have done so.

Watch it:

McCain is simply wrong. The United States ranked last in terms of efficiency among five other nations with universal health care, according to a Common Wealth study. In fact, the purely government-run Great Britain ranked first:

Compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom — the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives.

Efficiency: On indicators of efficiency, the U.S. ranks last among the six countries, with the U.K. and New Zealand ranking first and second, respectively. The U.S. has poor performance on measures of national health expenditures and administrative costs as well as on measures of the use of information technology and multidisciplinary teams. Also, of sicker respondents who visited the emergency room, those in Germany and New Zealand are less likely to have done so for a condition that could have been treated by a regular doctor, had one been available.

One needn’t even look abroad: The government-run Veterans Administration health care system is the most effective health care system available, not just on results but on cost efficiency as well:

Or consider this measure of the VA’s medical efficiency. Veterans enrolled in its health care system are as a group far older, sicker, poorer, and more prone to mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse than the population as a whole. … Yet the VA’s average expenditure per patient in 2004 was $5,562, including prescription drug and longer-term care benefits that have long been available to VA patients. By comparison, Americans as a whole, including children and those who never saw a doctor during the year, consumed an average $6,260 in health care dollars in 2004.

Yglesias

A “Limited State” Example

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 15, 2009 at 3:29 pm

200px-irish_farthing_coin_obverse

In light of Netanyahu’s decision to give a speech reneging on past Israeli commitments to a two-state solution, and instead offering a “limited” Palestinian state, I’d been pondering the question of whether there’s any kind of historical precedent for a state-but-not-really of the sort Netanyahu seems to have in mind. I think the Irish Free State of the 1920s and early 1930s might count as something of a precedent. Basically, the British had decided that trying to rule Ireland by force was more trouble than it was worth, but for a variety of practical and prestige-related reasons didn’t want to concede Irish independence either. So they worked out a form of quasi-independence that went along with a bunch of slightly odd vocabulary and an oddly worded oath of allegiance to the King. The upshot was an inherently unstable situation full of ambiguity and a steady Irish march toward real independence.

As far as Israel and Palestine, however, the more one thinks about it the more this all comes back around to the fact that what matters is deeds more than words. What America needed from Israel before the speech was to stop settlement growth and a start to meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians. What’s needed today is a stop to settlement growth and a start to meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians. The demands Netanyahu was making of the Palestinians aren’t so much ridiculous as they are ridiculous to present as preconditions. If you’re serious about creating any kind of Palestinian state, then it’s clear from looking at a map that in the future there need to be fewer settlers and settlements than there are now. So Israel should stop creating more settlements and more settlers. To raise the existence of a hypothetical Palestinian military as a reason to avoid doing things in the here and now is just a way of trying to deflect attention from the actual, operational issues at hand.

Politics

Beck: ‘[W]e’re in the same situation here’ as in Iran.

By Ali Frick on Jun 15, 2009 at 2:55 pm

Glenn Beck "Shhh"Today, the Washington Post hosted Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who is currently promoting his latest book, for a brief online chat. The first question asked whether Beck believed that “we’re facing the destruction of our country.” “Yeah,” Beck replied, and compared the United States to the current political upheaval in Iran:

CHICAGO: Glenn, On June 6 you said”(I)f we don’t have some common sense, we’re facing the destruction of our country… it’s coming” Do you really believe that the USA is facing destruction?

GLENN BECK: Yeah, I said on Sept. 11 that we should fear no outside force, the only that would destroy America is us, from the inside. I look at what’s happening in Iran, and they are arquing [sic] on who is going to be a better leader in their theocracy. Both candidates were picked buy [sic] the mullahs, neither candidate can do anything without the mullahs telling them it’s okay.

I think we’re in the same situation here. Bill Mahr said this weekend that Barack Obama was George Bush Lite. What are we fighting over? What is the difference between these two parties? There are reasons to speak out, but tearing ourselves apart over these scraps of freedom is odd. We’ve stopped melting together. Our strength was that we were a melting pot.

Beyond the comparison to Iran, it’s odd that Beck purports to lament the disappearance of the “melting pot,” considering how frequently he rails against minorities.

Yglesias

At Least One Protester Killed by Iranian Security Forces

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 15, 2009 at 2:37 pm

I’m not going to try to provide up-to-the-minute coverage of the situation in Iran, but it seems worth noting that at least one of the 100,000+ protestors demonstrating in Iran today was shot dead by security services. BBC Persian is reporting as many as four dead. And with shots being fired, there’s no telling how bad the bloodshed may get. I think it’s probably counterproductive for foreign governments to try to back Moussavi directly in this dispute, but certainly everyone ought to be in a position to condemn shooting at unarmed demonstrators.

Economy

Will Regulatory Reform Really Address ‘Too Big To Fail’?

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 15, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and NEC Director Larry Summers

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and NEC Director Larry Summers

In today’s Washington Post, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers laid out the principles guiding the Obama administration’s plan for reforming financial regulation, which is supposed to be rolled out in full this week. “The goal,” Geithner and Summers wrote, “is to create a more stable regulatory regime that is flexible and effective; that is able to secure the benefits of financial innovation while guarding the system against its own excess. ”

There has already been plenty of reaction to the piece, but I’ll turn it over to Simon Johnson, who takes on Geithner and Summers’ claim that “a few large institutions can put the entire system at risk,” so we need a systemic regulator:

You need to control the behavior of large institutions, more than a few of which got us into this mess. If you can’t come up with a proposal to prevent them from taking system-damaging risk (and there is nothing in today’s article about this), then break them up. The article mentions penalties for being large — higher capital and liquidity requirements for larger banks; we’ll see the details in/after Geithner’s speech tomorrow, but I am not holding my breath for anything meaningful.

Back in April, Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Solow said that the “most disappointing” aspect of the administration’s regulation plan was that it didn’t fundamentally reorganize the way in which large financial firms operate, and I think that concern is still valid. It really depends on how stringent the capital and liquidity requirements end up being, but by counting too much on a systemic risk regulator and a new resolution authority (for taking apart large firms that go bust), the administration may not be doing enough to directly stop firms from becoming so large and interconnected that they threaten the system.

This is especially important since the plan seems to be leaning toward a “council” of regulators, loosely overseen by the Fed, that will monitor systemic risk. As Felix Salmon put it, “we need a powerful single regulator with teeth, not a council of bickering sub-regulators.” Indeed, we’ve already seen spats between the various agencies and their regulators, which, if they continue, will work to the advantage of the banks playing regulators off against each other.

I know it means stepping on the toes of some congressional committees and regulators themselves, but if the administration is serious about getting systemic risk under control, it needs to have both strict rules governing Wall Street and an enforcer that has enough power to ensure that the rules are followed. Hopefully, both of those will come to pass as the administration makes the extent of its plans clear.

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