Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.
In other words, after inflation the median worker is earning 1.5% less than the same time last year. And that is using an inflation number which underestimates inflation somewhat. It's not a huge decreaase, but when you consider that this is the boom period of this business cycle and that people have been taking on debt to increase spending and to pay the interest on loans, suddenly it doesn't look so good.
Here's the real short sharp economic picture. For the last deacade or so the Fed has been flooding the world with liquidity. Roughly the money supply has been increasing at about double the rate of GDP growth. In the late nineties that money was shoved into stocks (where it doesn't show up inflation numbers). In the early 2000's it went into the housing market (where it doesn't show up inflation numbers either, at least mostly), in the mid 2000's it had been going into commodity speculation (where it shows up in non core inflation which the Fed pretends doesn't matter) and into the hands of rich oilarchies, which has been a major cause of the run up in oil prices.
This is a problem that Bernanke inherited from Greenspan, who from the 1998 Asian crisis on, seemed to respond to every crisis (including crises like "Bad economic times will hurt Republican election chances in 2002 and 2004") by putting the pedal to the metal and releasing more gushes of liquidity, and then by tightening far later and slower than he should have (and yes, I said that at the time.)
It started after World War II, as Britain, broken and bleeding red ink from two world wars, in full imperial overstretch, gave up its colonies one by one and likewise gave up the job both of keeping the world's sea lanes open, and of slapping around minor powers who bucked the system. The formal birth of the Pax Americana and the final grave of the old regime, was the Suez canal, when the US told Britain and France in no uncertain terms to withdraw from the Suez and threatened to cause a financial crisis for England by selling off the US's pound reserves. Britain and France were forced to withdraw and it was clear that the days of British supremacy (and French free action in the Med) were over.
History is indeed odd. When Bretton Woods was set up there were two competing plans - one British, one US. The British plan had mechanisms which considered a trade deficit a problem of both the country with the deficit, and the one with a trade surplus with that country. The US plan didn't - the US had such a huge trade surplus with the rest of the world that the US simply could not imagine that it would ever have the problem of a trade deficit. And the early years of the post war period had the US central bank holding large amounts of other people's currency. Now Bretton Woods is long gone, but what we find today is a situation where the US has both a trade deficit and a current account defict. And other countries, most especially Korea, Japan and China have large US reserves (although even countries we don't think of having large reserves, like the Europeans, have a lot. It's all relative.)
(In that sense, Hezbollah may have found the sweet spot in Fourth Generation War: It isn't a state and doesn't carry the political or defensive burdens of one, but it controls enough territory, commands enough popular loyalty and has enough allies to mount some fairly sophisticated military operations, using both conventional and nonconventional weapons. It's powerful enough to be successful -- and be seen as successful -- but not so powerful that state actors like Israel can fight it on equal terms. We may be looking at the New Model Army of the 21st century.)
Hezbollah is a state. One of the reasons that people have trouble analyzing situations is that see the forms, not the underlying reality. Because in our world a "State" is whatever other States recognize as a State, and because no country recognizes Hezbollah as a state, people treat it as if it isn't a State.
Taylor Marsh has up links to some Lebanese blogs as well as a running compentary on the Middle Eastern open sore. They seem to all be blogs written by Lebanese Christians and at this point they're angrier at Hezbollah and they are at Israel. I would be careful, however, about reading too much into this. Some people seem to be taking this to mean "the Lebanese people are turning against Hezbollah". Unless the Shia base of Hezbollah turns against Hezbollah, even if everyone else does, that's only a slim majority.
Remember, the reason "Lebanon" hasn't disarmed Hezbollah, is that the Lebanese army would lose a confrontation against Hezbollah. If the other Lebanese factions cooperate with Israel in breaking Hezbollah, they'll start another 20 year internicine civil war in Lebanon. It's not possible to stop weapons from getting into Southern Lebanon from Syria (and thus Iran), the Shia are outbreeding the Lebanese Christians and Sunni, and they are poor and tough. They don't have nearly as much to lose as the northern Lebanese and they have no real liking for the rich Christians who abandoned them to Israel last time around. They know they won against Israel, they know it took a long time, and while weary, they probably think they can do it again.
Stratfor thinks that Israel, who has called up their reserves, are going to move full into Lebanon and try and break Hezbollah. They reason that the US thinks this is in its interest; that from the Israeli point of view they need to the forward ground which is being used to launch rocket attacks; and that if Israeli troops are in danger of being kidnapped anyway, then they might as well put the troops out there in Lebanon and create a buffer zone to protect civilian Israel. They further argue that Israel believes that at this point they're going to be condemned no matter what by the international community and that if they're in for a penny, they're in for a pound - the consequences of condemnation are no more severe for invading Lebanon than for what they've already done.
As everyone knows by now, Hezbollah captured to Israeli soldiers, and in retaliation the Israelis have been on a bombing spree in Lebanon - hitting the main airport in Beiruit, and hitting bridges, a TV station, and various other infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
Leaving aside the ethical issues for the time being, let's examine how this plays out.
Facts on the ground:
1) Palestinians and Arab Israelis are outbreeding Israeli Jews.
2) Lebanon is not capable of disarming Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the actual government of southern Lebanon, whether it is recognized as such or not - it provides law, civil defense and most of the social welfare services.
US politicians are remarkably poll deaf on certain issues. Those issues are almost always those where they are being paid well to ignore polls. (A correlation has been shown on the oil subsidy vote, I suspect someone enterprising could find the same thing on most votes. In fact, if some poli sci academic hasn't done it, I'd wonder why not.)
As an outsider, I really found it remarkable the extent to which Democrats ignore poll esults that indicate a majority of people upport things like universal health care. It really floored me.
joint-venture Kaesong industrial complex in North Korea" that "combines South Korean capital with North Korean labor" (read: combines multinational corporate cash with exploitable slaves). By the time the complex is in full operation in 2012, "it could employ more than 750,000 North Koreans" – again, North Koreans who are literally enslaved and barred from leaving their prison.
Here's the deal. Low wage labor, even slave labor, is what helps keep US inflation down. Economists who blather on about how such deals with developing countries help US consumers (as long as they aren't also the workers who lose their jobs, or get bad jobs rather than good manufacturing jobs) aren't wrong. At the same time, the record corporate profits of the last 5 years are driven by both labor arbitrage (moving production jobs to places where they can be done cheaper, and keeping as much of the cost savings as profit as possible) and by old fashioned money arbitrage. Banks like the Fed and the Bank of Japan spent most of that period essentially giving money away. It's not hard to make money when you can borrow it at zero or one percent and loan it at 4 or 5 percent - or invest it in oil and make 200% returns in a year with proper leverage.
How much would you pay to save your life, or that of your son or daughter, or you husband or wife? Your mum or dad?
There are, basically, two types of pricing. There is "cost of production" pricing, and there is "need" pricing.
Cost of production pricing is the price for food in normal times. It costs you about what it costs to grow it, prepare it and ship it, plus a few percentage points for profit. Because if anyone tries to charge more, another seller will just undercut him.
But when food becomes rare - when there isn't enough to go around, suddenly the price of food isn't how much it costs to make and ship - it's whatever those who have it are willing to take. How much will you pay to eat another day?
In California Governor Schwarznegger was going great guns, until he attacked the nurses. The nurse's union turned around and rallied to help defeat every single one of Schwarzneggers ballot initiatives.
It turns out that people generally like nurses more than they like Governators. And no one believes that nurses are overpaid fat cats sitting on their butts.
Enter the National Labor Relations Board - which is set to remove the right to belong to unions from all Registered Nurses. As Nathan Newman observes:
The core of the problem derives from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which denies labor rights to "supervisors", meaning that anyone deemed a supervisor can be fired at will if they say anything nice about unions or try to take action to support unions in their workplace.
New York Magazine has out an article on Kos and the netroots in general. It's not a bad article and it is one of the few that get the point that the netroots isn't all that ideological in who it is supporting. Any group of people who can support Jim Webb and Paul Hackett, obviously aren't a bunch of ideologically pure left wingers.
But John Heilemann is only about half right. The left wing blogosphere is broadly pretty progressive. If you took a poll of any of the major sites, I'm willing to lay bucks against any sucker willing to take the bet, that the majority of the regulars are, for example, pro-universal healthcare, believe in doing something about global warming, would like to see an increase in the minimum wage and believe in progressive taxation.
However having George Bush as president has made the issue not ideology, but integrity and competence. Do you live in the real world where things are getting worse in Iraq, the Iraq war was sold on lies, the scientific consensus is that global warming is real and the deficit is out of control or do you live in a world where denial of reality is job 1?
And if you live in the real world, do you have the balls to actually stand up and be counted? Will you bend over for George Bush and for incompetent delusional unethical Republican policies, or will you fight?
The netroots - the blogosphere, understand what Churchill meant when he said "Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning."
Periodically, I read stories about intra-Democratic Party committee battles. They are basically all the same. Rahm Emanuel (DCCC), and occasionally Chuck Schumer (DSCC), are tough, smart guys with metal testicles, and they are hard-nosed and mean. They will do anything to win. Howard Dean is ignoring them and their pleas for money to run TV ads for their candidates because Howard Dean is grassroots-y. But party leaders are 'concerned' and Howard Dean doesn't care.
This storyline just continues to pop up every month.
Today it's in the Chicago Tribune, and it's titled titled 'Democrats fear rifts risk midterm victory'. It's the standard mixture of whining and sour grapes by Rahm Emanuel that not enough DNC money is going to the DCCC.
There are three basic problems with pieces like this.
1) If party leaders are going to complain about resources, they shouldn't spend money and time intervening in primaries.
2) I've hit this point before, but I'll hit it again. Dean was elected by DNC members to support the state parties. Party leaders had their chance to back a different DNC Chair. They did not get their shit together in time, and Dean beat them.
3) It's transparent that this is a 'cover your ass' strategy to innoculate leaders against an electoral failure this cycle. If Democrats do well, it's because our hard-nosed mean leaders are great. If we don't, it's because crazy internet lefties drained resources from our hard-nosed mean leaders. Insider Democrats can't lose!
Bad things happen in wartime. Innocents are killed, people's livelihoods are destroyed and men, under pressure, discover what their morals are really worth. Many find out that with a little power comes a lot of temptation to do evil.
It is a further rule of warfare that occupations corrupt the armies doing them. Occupation armies, especially those occupying resisting countries, always wind up corrupt, and usually wind up committing atrocities.
Armies that are not designed as occupation armies - that are instead battlefield supremacy forces, suffer even more during an occuption. The US military is still a battlefield supremacy force, meant to take on the Warsaw Pact in Germany. It is not an occupation army, or a colonial army. Neither by doctrine, nor by training nor by force makeup is it intended to occupy foreign countries.
ContactBabel said that a typical high street bank would save £9.26m a year in operating costs by replacing 1,000 UK agents with the same number in India. However, if only an extra 0.343% of customers defected in protest, the bank's revenues would be reduced by the same amount. Last year, 1.09% of UK banking customers changed banks as a direct result of customer service offshoring.
In my last article on leadership I asked if it existed, and came down on the side that it does. And yet, in most cases and in most organizations, leadership often doesn't seem to matter very much. What would have happened with another leader is about what happens with this leader, and life goes on.
The reason for this is that most hard decisions - the decisions that leaders at the top of any organization or society have to make, are marginal decisions. What that means, is that it's generally not obvious which one is better - if it was, it wouldn't be a hard decision. Most marginal decisions are also marginal in their effects, as far as we can tell - the difference between the outcomes of choosing one or the other isn't large.
In other words, most of those decisions, are hard to make because there's very little difference between making them. You saw this all through the eighties and nineties, for example, in decision making by the President on budget and taxation issues. Economists will go through each of these decisions and tell you that as best they can tell such a decision shaved less than .1 of a percent off of the GDP in most cases.
There are, it seems to an outsider, two Americas. One is the America we have come to know under George Bush. Self sure, self righteous, aggressively Christian in a right wing evangelical sense and dedicated to US power, might and an intense belief in American exceptionalism. America, runs this line of thought, is innately good. It is not a goodness born of works, but of the innate character of the United States and its citizens and thus it always applies so long as belief is maintained. Even as an Evangelical Christian, so long as he has given himself to Christ, and so long as he his chosen, can be forgiven any sin, no matter how horrible and still go to heaven, so the innate goodness of the United States (as is also the case with Israel) is innate. Nothing, not torture, not corruption, not illegal wars, can take that innate chosen status from the United States because American goodness, greatness and exceptionalism is not due to works.
This interview with Chuck Yoos, in which he suggests that there really is no such thing as leadership, that we go looking for what it is before determining if it even exists, deserves a response.
I think he goes too far - forget sociology, which is the discipline he seems to come out of - move back to small group anthropology and to the psychology of small groups, as well as non-human anthro and you find that human groups naturally select dominant individuals.
Whether or not those dominant individuals display "leadership" (how he can say it doesn't exist when he doesn't define it is beyond me - I understand that's his point, but still to "prove" a negative you have to come up with a definition of what a positive would look like) is another question - it depends what you mean by leadership. Do they make day to day decisions? Yup. Do they manage change? Are they visionaries? Most of them aren't, no, but do you have to be a visionary to be a leader? Do things work better because of them sometimes? I think you can make a case for that. (You can sure make a case that a person in a leadership role can mess things up.)
To me what is pathetic about human nature is not that there are no leaders, but that we sort ourselves into leadership hierarchies so instinctively. Anyone who doesn't believe this is welcome to read the literature on playground behaviour by children, as an example, or the literature on what happens when normal leadership is removed from a group of adults. Or to just be observant whenever they're in an unstructured group where people don't know each other.
A friend of mine, noting that Edwardsl had made a showing at Gnomedex, mentioned that tech people generally consider themselves too smart to vote. My response was as follows:
With all due respect tech people aren't too intelligent to vote, they're too stupid. They should have more political clout than Hollywood or the Telco's, instead they keep having other interests eat their lunch, legislatively speaking. Anti-net neutrality may be stopped (it may not, it's neck and neck down the stretch right now), but it's a much closer thing that it should have been if tech types voted and gave. It's also asking government to regulate the internet (that's the one thing the anti-net neutrality guys are right about. Net neutrality is government intervention in a market. Of course, it's a market which wouldn't even exist withot the government having created it, but it's still amusing that tech libertarians find themselves grovelling to the government to save their bacon.)
Techies thought that they got paid a lot because they were smart, not because US government research handed them the internet first, so they had a jump start on the hundreds of millions of other smart people in the world. Brains are more common that good dirt.
Tech libertarianism is about the stupidest political philosophy on the planet, the entire computer industry wouldn't even exist if the US government hadn't nurtured it from birth, dumped billions into research, acted as the primary purchaser for decades, bought the cutting edge computers for decades, built the internet in government labs and given massive subsidies for the build out of the internet's backbone.
Yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court on Texas's redistricting said, in effect, that as long as districts are drawn so as to not dilute minority representation you can redistrict as often as you want.
As the LA Times notes, at first blush this seems like something Democrats can do - redistrict in every state they control to enhance their chances. What is fair for the goose, is fair for the gander. But...
It turns out that Rush Limbaugh didn't have narcotics on him, but only Viagra. The former narcotics user thus may, or may not, be off the hook. However while the story was still breaking last night I had a couple people tell me that it wasn't nice to go after Rush - after all, he was an addict, and addicts often can't control themselves. Thus he deserves our sympathy.
There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.
Last week saw a crescendo of attacks on left wing blogs, starting with Jason Zengerle at The New Republic (TNR) and ending with David Brooks at the New York Times (who talked about Kos, among other things, unleashing his "rabid lambs" on his enemies.)
Zengerle had what he supposed were 3 e-mails sent to the Townhouse list (an e-mail list that has a lot of progressive bloggers on it.) Two were, one, as Steve Gilliard notes, wasn't.
I have a ton of charts on my hard drive, and I have reviewed many many more, but this is my favourite chart of all time (yeah, as Hale Stewart would say, how lame is it that I have a “favourite chart”)
The chart shows wages for non-supervisory, goods producing, hourly employees from 1947 to today. It shows, graphically, a point I think needs to be hammered home – you can’t talk about the “post war economy”, as if there is only one. There were two, and the first one ended sometime in the seventies.
I first became interested in how governments measure unemployment back in the early 90’s recession. I was unemployed and I couldn’t find a job and the same was true of many of my friends. Those who were able to find jobs were generally working farm below the level they had been in the past. And I’d read the unemployment rate numbers and it seemed to me they didn’t really reflect what I was seeing around me. So I decided to investigate. What I found out was that the unemployment rate didn’t measure exactly what I had thought it did.
The unemployed includes those people who don’t have a job, have looked for a job in the last four weeks, and who would take a job if it were offered. The unemployment rate is determined by dividing that number by the number of people in the labor force – which is equal to all the employed people + all the unemployed people.
An epidemic of sexual violence during 15 years of lawlessness in Somalia was among the factors that strengthened opposition to this city's notorious warlords, residents said. The Islamic militias who drove them out in months of recent fighting were embraced as keepers of public order, as a force strong enough and pious enough to keep Mogadishu's daughters safe....
Why More and More Countries Are Cutting Deals With China
by Ian Welsh
There is a tale I have heard, possibly apocryphal, of a USSR ambassador talking to a Pakistan leader in the eighties. His talk ran as follows:
"The problem with the Americans is that things change. One day they're your friends, the next day they aren't. You can't tell what they will want from election to election. They're unreliable. I don't know who will be in charge in Moscow in 15 years, but I tell you this, no matter who they are the goals of Russian foreign policy then will be the same as the goals of Russian foreign policy today. You can trust us, not because we are altruistic, but because we aren't - we know what our interests are, we are public about what they are, and we follow them."
Probably the most important article on al-Q'aeda that most people haven't read (although it was posted to the Agonist) is this Asia Times Article.
What the article says, in summary, is that bin Laden is out of money and no longer in charge of al-Q'aeda. In Afghanistan Omar is in charge, in Iraq Zarqawi was in charge, and as much as al-Q'aeda proper has an active leader it is Zwahiri.
A couple years ago a letter was intercepted from bin Laden to Zarqawi telling him that he should not be engaging in sectarian violence, recently, according to the Asia Times:
They related that about two weeks ago, three men representing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in charge of Iraqi operations, were summoned from that country. The men met with Zawahiri in South Waziristan and were bluntly told to "immediately stop attacking Shi'ites in Iraq" and to "bring about [Sunni] reconciliation with Shi'ite groups" in Iraq. Further, they were ordered to "develop a common anti-US strategy along with the Shi'ites in Iraq".
Japan, the Fisheries, and the Tragedy of the Commons
by Ian Welsh
Ever since the original whaling ban a number of nations, the most notable of which is Japan, have been working to overthrow it. The original treaty had a loophole in it whereby you could kill whales for scientific reasons (ie. for autopsy). Japan, especially, has widened that loophole to a multi-lane freeway.
TheoCons, NeoCons, CorporateCons, RichCons, LibertarianCons, PaleoCons and MilitaryCons
As with all big tent parties the Republicans are filled with factions which disagree about a great deal. Today I'm going to take a quick whirl through the 7 main factions.
The first are the TheoCons. The so-called Religious Right. People often think that clout and power in a movement is about money. It isn't, it's about votes. And the TheoCons deliver votes. The problem in modern campaigning is finding people who can reliably deliver votes - the religioius right, in any riding can often say "I can delivery X thousand votes." That's worth a lot - it may only be a few percentage points, but it's a few percentage points they can give you, or can deny - thousands of votes you don't have to try and reach through expensive saturation advertising or time consuming canvassing to identify your voters. Almost no other group can quantify the number of people they can get to vote in the way the religious right can, and that is the source of their power.
These people are as much of a problem as the Repblicans are - if they have their way a Democratic Congress would keep passing bills like the Medicare drug benefit fiasco and the attempted bill gutting net neutrality.
Why Mutual Companies Perform Better Than Stock Companies
by Ian Welsh
Standard Life in the UK is undergoing demutualization. Over the last ten years or so most of the major life insurance companies in the US and Canada have demutualized. At one time, as measured by risk under management, mutual companies were the largest part of the industry, but that's no longer the case. I think it's worth a brief discussion because demutualization is more important than it seems.
My second job in life insurance was helping prepare a major insurer for demutualization. (My first was helping pay out a class action suit we had lost.)
A mutual company, for those who don't know (no reason why you should) is one that is owned by its policy owners. So if you have a participating insurance policy with a mutual insurance company, you are also an owner who is due some of the company's profits and has a vote, just like a shareholder would.
WATTENBERG: So you would feel comfortable putting a doctor in jail for performing a procedure that a woman wants? And not just on-demand, but it could be rape, incest, life of the mother.
ZINSMEISTER: Sure. No, again, I have a definition that had some exceptions for rape and incest where there could be real psychological damage to the mother. But yeah, Ben, I mean, you know, if a Ghanan immigrant wants to have a clitorectomy done by a doctor on his daughter, I would also send him to jail for that. There are places we have to draw lines and I don't pretend to, you know, have the only answer in this area. I understand that's a contentious area but I think the larger point that you have to have some boundaries is an important one. And my own preference is not to have these rules and these laws that externally oppress people, but instead incorporate these inside people, to have them decide for themselves that they would rather get married than have children without being married; to have them decide for themselves that they'd rather put their child up for adoption rather than have an abortion. You do that in a slow organic process by encouraging and teaching and leading people to try to make more socially constructive choices, and religion is a very important tool for doing that. It's, for instance, we know it's one of the best ways to get off of drugs; it's one of the best ways, one of the only ways that's had any affect [sic] in getting people form [sic] becoming repeat criminals when they get out of prison. You can't coerce this, you can't press people. It has to be sincere.
The Supreme Court has ruled that if police only waited a few seconds after knocking before charging into your house and seizing evidence, even though that's illegal, the evidence so seized an be used. In the past such evidence would have been considered "fruit of a poisonous tree" and as it was seized illegally neither it, nor any evidence gained through such seized evidence, could have been used. Hey, as Blanton's and Ashton's notes - at least they haven't gotten rid of the need for warrants yet.
According to Hotline On Call, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee "fully supports" Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) in his primary bid against Ned Lamont (D), "and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent."
Schumer explained that there were degrees of independence: "You can run as an independent, you can run as an independent Democrat who pledges to vote for Harry Reid as Majority Leader."
Meanwhile, the AP says Lieberman "must soon decide whether to begin gathering signatures for a possible independent run." By August 9, the day after the Democratic primary, he'll "need to collect 7,500 signatures from registered voters to appear on the November ballot as an unaffiliated candidate."
Let me give fair warning - if Schumer does this, I suspect the DSCC, Schumer himself, and anyone they support, can kiss goodbye the vast majority of any netroots support. And Schumer may want to start preparing for the nasty primary challenge that I can assure him will come if his way if anyone even remotely credible steps up to the plate. Disloyalty is the cardinal political sin, and Schumer is only two steps away from commiting treason.
The first major politician to sign up to speak at Yearly Kos was Mark Warner. Warner's a centrist democrat, the ex-governor of Virginia, and someone whom my friends have talked to me about for a while.
Coming into Yearly Kos my primary impression of Warner was competence. He ran a very tight administration of Virginia, one which cleared up the deficit and made incremental gains in a lot of areas, including education and health care. He hires very competent people and lets them do their job and as a result has a very good team - he surrounds himself with the best he can find.
Friday night Warner threw a party for the conventioneers and it was a smashing success with amazing food and drink. I did hear some hair-shirt Democratic wailing at the cost (which I've heard as anywhere from 70K to 100) but overall it was enjoyed by all who went.
As everyone knows by now (ah, going offline for a week) the New York Times has reported that Rove won't be indicted. There's been a lot of disappointment on this, but I think it is necessary to remember that the pattern of Fitzgerald's interactions with Rove was that of a prosecutor steadily ratcheting pressure higher and higher.
We have every reason to believe that it was not Rove's decision to out Valerie Plame in order to punish her husband. He isn't the man that Fitzgerald is ultimately after - that man is whoever gave the order (on the current evidence, probably Cheney).
If Fitzgerald folds up his tent it means the administration was able to weasel out and limit the damage to Libby. If he doesn't... well, Cheney may want to start drafting that resignation letter... I'm sure he wants to spend more "time with his family."
I don't usually endorse anyone's fundraising efforts. In fact, the only time I can ever recall asking was for Digby. However I think it's worth your while to take a look at BlogPac. Kos and Jerome have stepped down, and Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers have taken it over. Matt has done an excellent job with Net Neutrality (for no pay), including being a big part of why the House Judiciary committee voted the way we wanted. He's also a significant hub of the progressive blogosphere. Chris is one of the smartest (and nicest) people writing on politics today.
BlogPac's two main efforts right now are the defeat of Net Neutrality, and the defense of the netroots. There's currently a strong effort to brand the Progressive blogosphere as a bunch of angry, immature latte-sipping extremists who can be safely ignored. One thing we've learned over the last few years is that you can't ignore smear campaigns even if they are complete BS. Anyone, and any group, can be Swiftboated and the influence we're steadily gaining can be destroyed.
So take a look at Chris's post, and consider giving a few bucks if you think it's a worthwhile cause.
I'm off late tomorrow to Las Vegas for Yearly Kos. I've got a free day on either side (Wednesday and Monday) to explore Las Vegas a bit. Anyone else heading to Yearly Kos? Anyone have any suggestions for things to do in Las Vegas for a couple days other than gamble?
Because I don't have a laptop posting from me will probably be light for the next week but if anything really interesting happens at the Con (or elsewhere) I'll try and find an internet cafe or beg use of a laptop.
Why Does the Media Have Pro-Republican Storylines?
by Ian Welsh
(Source: Ben Bagdikian in this book "The New Media Monopoly")
There've been a lot of posts today about the media and its pro-Republican, anti-Democratic biase. (Today: Bush still a strong man of principle beloved by the heartland.) Peter Daou weighed in, Stirling discussed where private and media narratives depart from one another, and Digby asked "what can we do to fix this?"
All are worth reading, but I'm going to tackle Digby's question.
First, let me restate something I've said in the past. The US is a propaganda state. There is no other explanation for the fact that pluralities or majorities of Americans believe things that are clearly untrue, and known to be untrue to the public in every other democratic state in the world. (The iconic example, which cannot be explained away, is the fact that most Americans thought that the Iraq was involved with 9/11. There is no credible evidence for this, there never was any credible evidence for this, and yet they believed it. As a result George Bush was able to sell an illegal war against a country that had done nothing to the US and offered no threat to the US. Simply put, the administration told a Big Lie, and the media didn't call them on it.)
There are those who will tell you that the Telcos need the extra money from getting rid of net neutrality, so they can connect poor neighbourhoods.
Riiiigggghhhttt.... If extending broadband to the poor neighbourhoods was the issue, in any way shape or form, the telcos wouldn't be suing the municipalities who created wireless broadband to make them stop.
If we want broadband extended we can do it cheaply and faster than the telcos.
This is an attempt to create a legal oligopoly, and to be able to charge the sort of profits oligopolies make. Nothing more, nothing less.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Thursday that she'll sign a near-total ban on abortion - without exceptions for rape or incest victims - that is nearing final legislative passage...
...It only would allow abortion in cases where the woman's life is in danger or when childbirth would permanently harm her health.
The bill could only go into effect if the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision is overturned.
"I anticipate signing that bill. It's got a safety measure for extreme situations for the life of the mother and some other health issues," Blanco said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Ezra, Half Sigma and Majikthise discuss internships. I basically agree with Lindsay, but my view of unpaid internships takes a lot less words.
Unpaid and underpaid internships are nothing more than yet another ladder into good careers which isn't available to people who don't have rich mummies and daddies.
For a long time the very idea of affirmative action offended me. I really did (and do) see it as government mandated discrimination on the basis of gender or skin colour. But over time I came to change my mind and decided it was justified anyway. The reason was a number of studies showing just how pervasive discrimination in the US was. The classic, and the one that broke the watershed for me, was this study, which showed that the exact same resume, with a white name, would get about 50% more callbacks than a resume with a black name, and that the higher you moved up the education and credential scale, the worse it got. And that study was done in Boston and Chicago - hardly the most discriminatory places in the US.
No surprise. But it's nice to see it in charts. The Sunshine Foundation's Larry Makison has a nice blog post on it, but this is the bottom line - in the 1990's Congress gave incentives to oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, since oil prices were very low, and they wanted those reserves utilized. Now oil prices are sky high, and oil company profits are setting new records. The subsidies were due to expire.
On the eighteenth a bill passed to extend the subsidies. Strangely, reps who received larger amounts of money from oil companies somehow tended to vote for the bill. Good to know that Senators aren't influenced by money. Here are the key charts:
Let me unpack that. I don’t say 9/11 was an exception because of the number of people it killed. It was an exception because it actually provoked the response that bin Laden wanted. The US invaded Afghanistan. Which is what bin Laden had wanted. He thought he could win a war there. He wanted to draw US troops into Afghanistan and both prove that they could be defeated and bleed them white the way Afghanistan bled the USSR white and eventually contributed to its fall.
It's easy to see this as an attempt by the Senate to assert privileges other people don't get, or, more cynically, as Republicans members suddenly asserting separation of powers after years of supineness because a number of them, possibly including Hastert, know that they may be next in line.
Arianna has up an ode to Al Gore, one of what will be many. Truly Al Gore has become a new man since 2000. In many respects I would welcome him running for the nomination, and I would be happy to see him as President.
But here's the deal: in 2000 Gore folded. When the chips were down, and people were begging him to allow strong counter demonstrations - when the Democratic foot soldiers were ready to march out and confront those who were trying to steal the election (remember the Republican "riot") he called them off. He feared it might lead to violence.
Matt Stoller mentions, in an off hand way, that one of the reasons the Telcos are having trouble with the Democratic caucus on the Net Neutrality legislation is that corporations reduced or cut off funds to Democrats over the last few years.
The K Street project was simple: if you give money to Democrats, the Republican controlled Congress and Presidency won't do anything for you. All your money had to go to Republicans.
This didn't mean that Democrats got no corporate money, but proportionally they got a lot less. And a see change occured where the party became more and more reliant on individual donors and not corporate donors or big money donors.
As a result, when the Telcos came sliming around the House, trying to convince Democrats to vote for their takeover of the internet, Conyers, Pelosi and the netroots were able to make it so that not one Dem voted for their side.
Let's talk about Afghanistan a bit more. Via Steve Gilliard I see reports that indicate not just an uprising by the Taliban, but that various of the tribes are also starting to attack the Coalition.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Afghanistan. The US didn't defeat Afghanistan when it invaded, what it did was bribe the various tribal leaders to rise against the Taliban, and provide sufficient air support to make it impossible for the Taliban to stand against them. Without that air support, odds are the Taliban would have crushed such an uprising, they were, simply, better more coordinated soldiers than the tribes, taken as a whole.
Since then the peace has been maintained through systematic bribery, letting the Warlords grow opium (something the Taliban had put a stop to - with extreme prejudice), and in general by letting the tribes and warlords do their thing without much interference.
The Afghanistan "government" is a joke, and always has been. It doesn't do more than control the capital, and sometimes not even that.
The route to victory in Afghanistan - a lasting victory, was economic. Roads, jobs, infrastructure in general - flooding the country with money and opportunity, so that for most people times got better... a lot better.
The key question, it seems to me, is this: what can we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan by sending troops, and is it worth the cost, including the opportunity cost. (Which is to say, Canadian troops in Afghanistan can't be sent anywhere else.)
The original mission of the Afghanistan invasion was to capture Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and make sure that Afghanistan couldn't be used as a major terrorist staging base in the future, by destroying the Taliban.
On May 17th Parliament agreed to extend Canada's deployment in Afghanistan for two years. Now I have decidedly mixed feelings about our deployment there - in principle I support it, but in practice it's not clear to me that there is any victory in Afghanistan which is achievable. The so-called Afghani government doesn't even control the entire capital, let alone the country, which is conctrolled mostly by opium growing warlords and a resurgent Taliban. The deployment size is too small, and there has been nowhere near the necessary commitment to rebuild the country and build up the central government. In short - a lot of Canadians are going to die, with no sight in end. Their goal is a purely negative one - to make sure the Taliban don't get back into power, which is the most likely outcome if western forces leave, since there is no indigenous counter force capable of stopping them. Now, that goal may or may not be worth Canadian lives, but I'd be more happy about it if there was some plan to make sure Canadians wouldn't be needed there forever.
But I would have voted against the extended deployment, and then I would have introduced a motion to bring them home immediately. The reason is this:
The Conservative government had underlined its commitment to the mission by threatening to extend it unilaterally by one year if it had been defeated in parliament.
What office Harper thinks he holds is unclear to me. What office Harper thinks he holds is unclear to me. But he clearly doesn't think he's Prime Minister of a democratic state. While he had the right to deploy troops without parliament's approval, if he intends to do so without Parliament's approval I see no reason for him to go get it. Not to put it too delicately, but who the fuck does he think he is?
Pelosi Asks Jefferson to Resign: Jefferson Refuses
by Ian Welsh
Pelosi has asked Louisiana Representative William Jefferson to step down from the Ways and Means committee. Jefferson refused. (Copies of both letters at Raw Story.)
Jefferson is under investigation for fraud. Among other things, $90,000 was found in his freezer!
Pelosi has done the right thing here, and Jefferson has done the wrong thing. The Democratic party leadership cannot, and should not, tolerate corruption.
The Times) Friends -- eager to smooth any rough edges on the relationship -- tell old-married-couple stories of them gardening, playing Scrabble, and dining out at Le Cirque, Rasika, and Bayou in Harlem with old pals like the former party leader Terry McAuliffe, the power broker Vernon Jordan, and others. Last Christmas Eve, they wandered through the near-empty Chappaqua Village Market together, noticed by the occasional fellow shopper.
Rarely, however, do the Clintons appear in public when they are together. That physical distance is largely driven by their careers, but it is also partly by choice.
[...]
Democrats preparing for 2008 describe the political challenge this way: Clinton could prosper as a presidential candidate, yet the return of "the Clintons" could revive memories including the oft-derided two-for-the-price-of-one appeal of his 1992 presidential campaign, her role in the universal health care debacle, and the soap opera of infidelity.
(Digby) No folks, that excerpt isn't from Hello magazine or even Vanity Fair. That's the New York fucking Times and it's on page one. If people aren't thinking about the Clintons in terms of infidelity and betrayal now, New York's newest tabloid rag is going to make damned sure they are reminded of it.
Now that's being extremely unfair to the tabloids. Can you imagine the National Inquirer running this story on the front page? Of course not - because there's no story there. They wouldn't have run it without a picture of Clinton (either one) with a floozy in their lap, or at least holding hands or having an intimate dinner with someone other than their spouse. That would be a news story - because there would actually be well, er, news.
George Bush Sr. famously said that he didn't get the vision thing. I'm glad to say that some Democrats are beginning to get it when they call for energy independence.
People overthink framing. The thing to do when trying to frame is to always try and move back to mythic values and structure and to always tell a story.
Being dependent on foreigners for energy makes American weak. We can become energy independent. Here's how we're going to do it.
Americans strongly believe in independence - standing alone, strong and free. Being dependent on others is always a negative for Americans. Words like "interdependence" and "multilateral" will always smack of weakness to Americans.
Lieberman is facing a stiff opposition challenge for one reason and one reason only. It's not, as much of the corporate press has been suggesting, just because he's pro-war. It's because he spends all his time agreeing with Republican and compromising with Republicans. He agreed with Republicans that Social Security needed to be fixed. He constantly derides Democrats as being soft on terror. And, yes, he supported Bush's splendidly illegal little war. But none of these things would be sufficient, if it wasn't that Democrats have spent most of the last six years watching Lieberman, on TV shows, agreeing with Republicans.
Here's how opposition politics go: the incumbent does things. If those things go well, odds are the incumbent will be re-elected. If Bush's splendid little war had turned out to be a smashing success, with a new compliant government in Baghdad and $12/barrel oil - the Democrats could have bent over and kissed their collective asses goodbye. So, given that an outstanding victory in the war means an outstanding loss for the Democrats, and given that George Bush has never, in his entire life, been able to manage anything, you bet against the war. You say that it's illegal, you say that it won't work, you say that it's unconstitutional. You get out in front of it, so that when Bush screws it up you are the natural party or person to turn to.
One of the great mysteries of economic life is how technology effects growth. The Greeks made at least one steam engine which we are aware of (a toy), but never used steam engines for work. The British took steam and used it to change the world.
On a more prosaic scale, the question of how to treat ideas in economic law has long perplexed us. On the one hand, we want those who create new ideas, new designs; those who write books and who discover new chemical formulas - to profit from them, because we believe that if they could not profit, many would simply not bother. Note carefully that I say "many", the foolish idea that all people operate on a crude motive is beyond stupid - indeed many inventors would invent without any possibility of gain, and most scientists will perform their research for a modest university salary.
Among my regular blog reads is Majikthise. Not only is Lindsay whip smart, not only does she actually do real reporting on occasion, but she comes up with amusing posts like this one on origimi. All politics all the time is no more healthy for you than an all brocolli diet.
There’s been some debate lately about whether or not to run the ads from the telecom companies Astroturf campaign “Don’t Regulate the Internet”.
Those who think blogs should run them tend to believe that one shouldn’t stifle free speech – and hey, why not take their money and then write against them?
For me, the issue is simpler – they’re liars. They’re advertising a fundamentally dishonest idea – that the Internet has never been regulated, and that we shouldn’t start now.
PCC leaders were being questioned on the subject when the attacks started on Friday night, targeting officers in police stations, mobile units, at their homes or in bars.
The assailants used machine-guns and grenades. In one incident a home-made bomb was thrown into a police station.
As well as in the city of Sao Paulo, the attacks took place in the suburbs of Osasco, Guarulhos and Carapicuiba, and in the coastal cities of Cubatao and Guaruja.
In addition to the dead, at least 15 policemen and 15 attackers were wounded and 16 attackers arrested, police said.
The attacks sparked revolts in more than 20 state jails.
Over at FireDogLake Jennifer Nix has a guest post up. It's worth reading, if you haven't already (head on over), because Jennifer discusses the way that many of the people who should have lead the fight against the Bush regime fell down on the job. They were too cynical, or too inbred, or too compromised - or perhaps just too tired, to really bother. Massive violations of the constitution, an illegal war based on lies, and outright electoral fraud weren't sufficient to really get them worked up enough to fight.
Now Jennifer has some suggestions about how people who do care, people who do believe it is their duty to their country to protect its constitution (as Oldman might have said) can fight back.
But one of the things that Jennifer said is something I want to expand on:
But, despite my hopes for what Glenn’s book may be able to accomplish, we are still fighting an uphill battle in the public opinion arena. It is astounding to me that conservatives have been far bolder in criticizing the president over his NSA shenanigans. And even in the face of the USA Today story, detailing more administration lies and explaining the NSA’s plans to build a database of every call made within the country, we see no collective demand from Democrats to stand up and say, NO MORE!
Ah, David Brooks (I'd link, but ya know, subscription wall):
But even here, the latest news is good. Look around at all the green shoots of political renewal.
Not long ago, the temper-tantrum left seemed to be on the verge of capturing the Democratic Party, but now the Clintonite centrists are reasserting their intellectual, financial and political supremacy.
Last month, Hillary Clinton gave a proto-campaign speech in Chicago, laying out an economic agenda that Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute called remarkably centrist. Clinton called for a return to "pay as you go" budget rules. Congress couldn't raise spending or cut taxes unless it filled the hole in the budget right away, the only effective way to restore fiscal balance.
Robert Rubin and others have begun the Hamilton Project, which is churning out policy ideas that defy easy categorization and serve as a blueprint for an innovative, moderate administration. The Democratic agenda will be fleshed out by the free-trade progressive Gene Sperling, and by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, whose coming book will push ideas on how to increase savings and such.
It's odd, in both the US and Canada, to watch the inability of people who grew up in the system to deal with those who don't play by the rules. To this day, in the US, the majority of Democratic Congressman still don't really understand that the rules have changed and that they are in a parliamentary system where there really can be no collegiality.
Today, in Canada, something similiar has happened. The Conventional wisdom is coalescing: Harper will rule cautiously, he will not run again for a couple of years, and the Liberals are due for six to ten years in the wilderness. Bearing all this in mind, and given certain internal problems, the Liberals have set their new leadership convention in November. November!
Politics is the art of getting what you want by giving people what they think they want. I have often said that if I am ever in office, on my office wall will be a picture of the Queen giving Snow White the poisoned apple, sweet, red, round… beautiful and luscious.
Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, probably doesn’t think of politics in quite that way, but he understands exactly what I mean. His 2006 budget is that apple – sweet and beautiful, shining in the media glare with a sheen of sweet tax cuts.
And Stephen has come up with many of those tax cuts by doing exactly what he has always wanted to do – he’s cut shared federal and provincial programs, to the tunes of billions of dollars, and redirected those dollars either to cuts, or to subsidies to his base (such as the child care allowance, whose greatest benefit goes to families with stay at mums (no, not stay at home husbands. That’s an unintended and unfortunate result from the point of view of the Conservatives. Let’s not gild this already burnished apple.))
Harper, Softwood Lumber and the Selling of Sovereignty for Peace
by Ian Welsh
Harper began as Prime Minister with what I considered a promising start – by telling the US Ambassador that his suggestion that Canada doesn’t have sovereignty over arctic waters wasn’t welcome. One of the big advantages that you have as a right winger is that people assume you’re a hardass – that you’re willing to be tough, because you care more about principles than people. That a stereotype, and generally not true, but because people believe it, it has power.
But Harper has proved that he doesn’t have a spine when it really matters – talking tough about sovereignty is one thing, but actually acting tough to protect it and to protect other Canadian interests is another, and Harper has flunked with the new Softwood deal.
Canada won seven times in front of NAFTA tribunals, but Harper’s negotiated deal does everything the US timber lobby wanted. It caps sales at 34% of the US market. It provides for automatic tariffs if Canadian lumber prices fall below a certain point (a point the US timber companies can’t compete with). Perhaps most importantly, it gives the US government a veto over provincial lumber laws (which is something a principled Conservative who claims to believe that Provinces have a right to control their areas as asigned in the constitution shouldn’t be willing to do.)
In the negotiated settlement with Washington, the United States has a clause that allows it to veto provincial policy changes.
That clause worries some Interior forestry companies because of the pine-beetle outbreaks that have devastated trees where timber is now being rushed to market.
When I was a kid, living in Vancouver, a city with piles of Chinese immigrants, I once observed to my father that there was very little racism. His reply has stuck with me:
“just wait till there are bad times and there’ll be plenty of racism.”
Driving the immigration debate in the US are three things – jobs, profit and racism. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, there is in fact a measurable effect on the wages of the poorest workers in the US of immigration. At 8% it isn’t huge, and even if it didn’t exist it would be assumed to exist. For most people, however, immigration is a net benefit (especially if you’re old. Immigrants are young. Young workers pay your SS and Medicare, chuckles.)
Politics is theater. Every politician should understand how to set up circumstances, how to use gestures, how to use language and be able to align himself with the correct symbols to make his or her point. The “symbolic” gesture, done right, is far from empty – it is the only way to crystallize your stand in the iconic language necessary to move the debate in your direction.
In my last post on this subject I discussed how to present the War on Terror – at Ground Zero with a “Where’s Osama” banner; or overstanding an Aircraft with a “Mission Accomplished” banner, or perhaps at Walter Reed Hospital.
Today, let’s talk about the political theater of immigration.
First: use Reagan against the Republicans. Have a simulcast press conference at the Mexican border – and at the remains of the Berlin wall. Have a huge banner “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”. On the border of Mexico, a huge banner “The Reagan Wall?”. Read, on the Berlin wall, Reagan’s speech. On the Mexican border, ask “when did the city on the hill become a poor place? When, instead of building a land with opportunity for all did our leaders become so scared that all they can do is huddle, scared and weak behind a wall? When did we decide that those fleeing repression and poverty have no home, no hop, in America?”
The recent attempts by telecom companies to charge sites to allow visitors to see them; to charge e-mail senders to delivery their e-mail and so on, which activists have managed to downplay by naming “net neutrality” is worth a brief discussion as an example of the tendency to monopoly.
There is no stronger economic tendency in human history, taken as a whole, than the desire of economic actors to gain the security of monopoly positions. Guilds, unions and professional associations are nothing more, or less, than an attempt to secure labor monopolies (yes, this applies to doctors, nurses, teachers, teamsters, engineers, and anyone else who wants the government to punish people who practice their trade without a license or some other form of certification, fee or license.)The recent attempts by telecom companies to charge sites to allow visitors to see them; to charge e-mail senders to delivery their e-mail and so on, which activists have managed to downplay by naming “net neutrality” is worth a brief discussion as an example of the tendency to monopoly.
Awwwww. Michelle Malkin published the names and contact info of protestors on her website. They then were deluged with threats, including death threats. They begged her to take the info down, and she refused.
Now someone has discovered her info and published it, and she's receiving death threats and whining about it.
Unlike Steve Gilliard, I find this amusing. But then I've always tended to somewhat old testament on such issues of hypocrisy.
Has Rush Limbaugh been sentenced to hard time yet for being a drug abuser, like he wanted other addicts to be?
I just don't think proponents are as aware as they should be about the limitations in the improvements gotten from single payer. Mostly, what I think will happen is that it will lay the more essential problems of US health care bare for all to see. I strongly suspect that if certain elites saw single payer as a truly viable concept in reducing medical costs, then everyone would have ganged up on the entrenched interests already and pushed for it. We are losing too much economic power to other places that have basic universal health care. I also strongly suspect that the current system is left in place because not only is it profitable for a bunch of people, it also disguises the increasing disfunction of the general health care system (instead of it plain not working, pretend that working is a function of paying extra $$$). The US isn't like France or Japan in demographics and challenges facing the health care system. It's almost not even like Canada! In the end, universal health care for 300 million plus people of very diverse heritage, over large distances constitute tremendous challenges that really should not be overlooked.
I think that's worth a formal reply.
Before Canada went to single payor healthcare in the 60's its health care costs parallelled the US's, but were higher. We have more truly isolated settlements than the US and are geographically about as large even if our gross population is lower. We are, in fact, probably the best test case possible.
I spent a good 6 years in a role that involved a lot of direct interaction with clients. They were, mostly, clients with a lot of money on the line – hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases. And a lot of them were upset. If I got through a day without having to calm someone down, it was a good day. I’ve been screamed at, sworn at, threatened and offered bribes. And I’ve been called to the carpet a few times for deciding that the customer needed a short sharp does of reality. “No sir, we won’t be doing that. It’s illegal,” or, “no ma’am, actually I can’t make that happen. It is technically impossible. The CEO could not make it happen.” I’ve calmed down more people than I can remember, but everyone has their limits, and a few clients have pushed me past mine.
We had a number of cynical jokes. Perhaps my favourite was “it doesn’t matter who screwed up, it’s your fault”. Another was “it doesn’t matter if the customer made 30 mistakes and you caught 29 of them, you’ll get blamed for missing the thirtieth”.
If I were to pick key problems with the way customer service is run they would be the following.
Customer Service Reps rarely have the actual authority to fix problems. Any unusual problem (and there are always unusual problems) generally requires management permission. Sometimes rather high management permission. This is generally driven by a lack of trust in CSRs, a lack of trust which is sometimes entirely legitimate and which sometimes isn’t. The key question is whether the CSR has the knowledge to make the decision. In most companies the CSRs don’t have the knowledge of why rules exist. Because they don’t know why they were created, and because they don’t really understand how the business works, they cannot be trusted to make exceptions.
America's rich, it's powerful, it's professional classes and its politicians have spent a generation now not just betraying ordinary working Americans, but telling them that their endless betrayal was actually good for them, and that just like cod liver oil, they should shut up, suck it down, sit down and wait for the good times to happen again if they just do everything they were told to.
The result, for non-supervisory, hourly employees has been that they haven't made a single wage gain since about 1976. The result for the US's rich is that they have a greater proporiton of the nation's wealth and income than at any time in the United States history, surpassing even the Gilded Age.
But ya'know, I've covered the numbers before, what I want to talk about today is the disconnect and the rhetorical betrayal. Think about it, for a generation the talking heads, the academics, the think tankers, the politicians, the journalists and the chattering classes have all had some nostrum they wanted the middle and working classes to swallow. In the 80's they first had to suffer through Volcker strangling inflation. Then Reagan dropped progressive taxes and told working people that they'd get a "trickle down effect". Well, perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh on Reagan - it was true, they got nothing more than a trickle. Or to put it more vulgarly, all they got was trickled on.
Principle 1: Iran wants its neighbours to not be a threat. The Iraq/Iran war was WWI trench warfare, complete with mustard gas and human wave attacks. It destroyed an entire generation of young Iranian men. So, the countries nearest to it have to either be unable to attack, or have to not want to attack Iran.
Principle 2: Iran needs a deterrent against the US and other great powers. The US gave Saddam the greenlight to attack Iran, costing it an entire generation of its young men. It supplied Iraq with weapons and money, including WMD. The US then attacked Iraq, after declaring Iraq part of the “Axis of Evil” along with... Iran. The US attack on Iraq was clearly not because Iraq had WMD, because by the time the US attacked Iraq it had no WMD.
The US is either rational and willing to invade countries for reasons that may apply to Iran; it is irrational and you can’t be sure who the hell it will attack; or it is gullible and got played by Iran, in which case someone else (like, say, the Israelis), could play it and trick it into attacking Iran. No matter what way you look at it, that means that Iran needs to be able to make any US attack unthinkable.
Principle 3: The Mullahs intend to stay in charge. Thanks very much for your interest in the infidel idea of liberal democracy.
Courage, said the Romans, is not the only virtue, but it is the single virtue without which all the other virtues are meaningless. - Netanyahu
Bravery is the most important trait a person can have. It makes good people better, and bad people even more evil. Bin Laden and Zarqawi would not be half as dangerous as they are if they were cowards.
And people understand this, even if they can't always put it into words. It's why Americans wanted a strong leader. It's why the blogosphere gives byes to Reid, and bashes Pelosi. It's why McCain has very strong favourable ratings amongst Democrats.
People respect bravery, because they know that without it they will get sold down the river. It doesn't matter what you believe in if you aren't willing to fight for it when the chips are down.
...Americans love scrappers fighting for what they believe. And you need to give a figurative finger to the powers that be, the ones shutting down your debate. People learn to despise those who take abuse without fighting back -- as unfair as that might be. People love to see others stick it to the man. And in this case, the man is the Republicans who control Congress.
That's one of the reasons why when Harry Reid shut down the Senate invoking a little known Senate rule on national security, Americans loved it. Punndits railed against it. But that was the moment when Democrats began to rise in the polls.
What's Harry Reid done for you lately? Was he there on Roberts? What about Alito? Could he bothered to even rally enough Dems to come close to a filibuster on the man who pioneered Presidential signing statements and who has perjured himself in front of Congress in the past? (Of course, since Reid is a pro-life conservative who thinks forced child birth is wonderful I wouldn't expect him to try and stop Alito because women could lose the right to safe, legal abortions.)
Let me tell you the advice I'd give Nancy Pelosi - do one spectacular piece of theater for the netroots, once, like Reid, and you you can cruise on that and betray them when it really matters, and they'll suck it up and kiss your butt. I'm guessing one good piece of theater is probably good for a year or so of free passes on real issues. Give them their theater, then sell them down the river.
Nancy Pelosi seems to be some sort of whipping girl for the Progressive blogosphere these last few months. I'll tell you this - she isn't perfect, but she is, actually, a liberal, not a conservative. She did, actually, support Murtha when it mattered. She has increased caucus discipline immensely and forced House Republicans to keep sessions open past midnight, twisting arms, to pass bills. She needs to learn theater, I agree, but I'm tired of the netroots puckering up for Reid and bitch-slapping Pelosi when, objectively, Reid has betrayed progressive principles in far more serious ways.
Reid's a fighter. I respect him as a person. But if you're a progressive or a liberal and you think Reid is in your corner, you have been played.
There's a rule in politics that runs as follows: "run to the base, then run to the center". What this means is that during the down years between elections you run to the base. Why? Because only they are watching. Then, during the election campaign you run to the center.
If you do it right, the base trusts you because you've been there for them for years. So, when during the election campaign you run to the center, they don't undermine you, because they trust you. They keep their mouths shut, and their wallets open.
Let's take a look at McCain and Hillary through that lens. First McCain. The Republican base doesn't trust McCain. In the past he slagged the religious right. And he has often been seen as disloyal to Bush, even though, on the facts, he's been there for Bush when it mattered... most of the time.
Now, I know John, though not well, but we've met and I've listened to him giving a seminar on media tactics; then been trained alongside him on how to deal with the media one-on-one. And John, out of all the bloggers I know, is one of the people I'm most glad is on our side, because he knows how to fight and he's whip smart and media savvy.
But the larger point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with having power and money. Nothing. There are ways you can get money or power that are wrong, by screwing other people, or by betraying trust and so on. And there are people who, in fact, are rich because they fucked other people. A lot of people.
Of all the trends in economics that I watch, the one that concerns me most is intellectual property law. What passes for intellectual property these days is an attempt to fence off all of the commons as private property, and then charge for it. It includes things like the fool who wanted to patent a story line, and this Senator who wants to outlaw fashion (hat tip to Magikthise):
Mr. Rodriguez designed the white slip wedding gown worn by Caroline Bessette Kennedy in 1996, a style that inspired innumerable brides to don copies, and Ms. Von Furstenberg's signature wrap dresses have been copied so many times that she may no longer wish to be associated with them. They are asking lawmakers to support a proposed fashion design anti-piracy act.
If passed, it could change the retail landscape in ways merchants and designers are only beginning to absorb. Major department stores with private labels, which often include close copies of designer looks, are divided on the proposed law because they also do business with the offended designers.
1) President Bush switched a speech to begin just before the Democratic rollout. The people who would cover the Dems are the same people who would cover the President. The President is more newsworthy. He kept the news conference running way over time. THUD.
The answer to that, needless to say, is that you yourself reschedule. "Well boys, we think it's only fair to allow the President to make his excuses before we take him to task. We'll have this after he's done."
2) No real theater. Politics is theater. Reporters would show up if there was something to report beyond some "boring" policy. There are plenty of things you could do, here are three ideas.
First idea: Have the meeting at Ground Zero. Fly a huge banner which says "Osama Bin Laden: Wanted Dead or Alive" - George Bush, September 17, 2001". Each speaker starts their speech with "where's Osama Mr. Bush?"
It's unremittingly negative. But, alas for Jacob, if he wants to take down Kevin Phillips as a no nothing geek who gets everything wrong, then he's gone about it the wrong way....
In 1969, an obscure Republican political strategist named Kevin Phillips published a nerdy, statistics-laden book titled The Emerging Republican Majority that offered a Machiavellian analysis of how the GOP could use the issue of race to win over working-class Democrats and ensure future political dominance. In the years since, almost every aspect of that description has been turned around. Phillips long ago left behind both obscurity and conservatism, becoming one of our most ubiquitous political commentators and one of the most left-wing. His biennial books have become illogical, dizzying screeds. And his diagnoses, predictions, and advice to Democrats have been consistently, embarrassingly wrong.
Jacob, it's nice that you say that he's been consistently wrong, and you attempt to show where he is wrong repeatedly in the rest of the article - but you only talk about his most recent book. If you're going to say he's been wrong all the time, perhaps you should give some examples?
I often write of the things that are going wrong, to the point where Matt Stoller once introduced me as "the guy who figures out just how screwed we are." So today, let's look at a part of the better world we can have, a world we can create ourselves. A new world that is available if we but reach out and grasp it.
Let us dream of what we can do with our technology, soon, very soon. It will be a world where you what you see and hear is what you choose to see and hear. It is a world where the anomie of modern life will give way to a mesh of relationships based on common interests and real values. It will be a world where who you are isn’t based on your credentials, isn’t based on your money, but is based on who you know and what you have done.
I have called it The Flash Society in the past – a world where help is a word away, where tribes and guilds enmesh their members in a web of friendship, obligation, duty and protection. The technology is almost here, and the social norms are already changing.
They have to be outed, the same way that gays who work for homophobic politicians are, or gays who are homophobic politicians are. No more double standard - if you believe that a fetus is a life, and that abortion is murder then you shouldn't be having an abortion. And if you are, then it should be made public. And if you help your wife, or your daughter or you mistress get one - same thing.
Now a lot of people will find this advice harsh, but people need to have their face rubbed in the fact that abortion is actually most common in communities that oppose it. It isn't the blue states which have the highest abortion rates, it is the red states. And the redder the state, the more abortions are going on.
Likewise, politicians who know their dirty laundry will be washed in public will be much less likely to support abortion bans.
Harsh? Sure, but this isn't about being nice. It's about making sure women aren't dying in back alley abortions on the end of coat hangers. And if that means a few (or even many) moral hypocrites are embarassed, that's the way it should be.
Over 10 years ago I wrote a paper stating that Japan needed to repeal article 9 - the part of Japan's American imposed constitution which sharply limits how much money it can spend on its military. (Although Japan already spends more than that by classifying as much money as possible as not military spending. Americans should be familiar with this practice, since billions of dollars of defense expenditures are hidden, for example, in the Energy budget.)
Today I read that Japan has suspended infrastructure loans to the Chinese. As Stratfor notes:
The Chinese government routinely makes an issue of its grievances with Japan, using the resulting upsurge in nationalist sentiment for its own domestic purposes. And Beijing once again has recently brought up the shrine and textbook issues in the media. This serves two crucial purposes. First, the government is struggling to retain control as the communist ideology loses its hold over the public. Rallying the masses with nationalist sentiment against Japan is a useful way of unifying the country. And second, the five-year plan the government just introduced calls for an important shift in the way resources, including wealth, are allocated between the coastal regions and interior. Such a structural change will be difficult to implement -- but by turning attention to Japan, the regime will deflect some of the heat it expects to feel during this transition.
Meanwhile, Delphi's largest individual shareholder, Appaloosa Management, demanded in a letter to Mr. Miller that the company hold the annual meeting that it canceled in 2005 and said that the company had not proved its financial condition was dire enough to require bankruptcy. Delphi declined comment, but the company said it would delay filing its annual report until talks with the union concluded.
Delphi's showdown with the UAW was always about breaking the union. Sure, cutting costs would be great, since the executives of Delphi would like to have more money floating around so they can give themselves even larger bonusses than the millions they awarded themselves for supposedly driving the company into bankruptcy and thus denying its working, debtors and investors the money contractually owed them.
But it's really GM I want to talk about, because treating Delph as if it isn't still part of GM despite the spin-off is ridiculous - Delphi is completely integrated into GMs supply chains.
It's a constant refrain. Liberals are traitors for doubting George Bush. If I were an American politician this would be my reply:
If believing a man shouldn't trade freedom for illusionary safety makes me a traitor;
If believing that America shouldn't torture makes me a traitor;
If believing in the fourth amendment right to freedom from arbitrary wiretapping by some presumptuous bureaucrat makes me a traitor;
If these things make me a traitor, then I am proud to be a traitor.
George Washington was a traitor to King George. Jefferson was a traitor to King George.
And today, I am proud to defend the Constitution, and if that means I am traitor to King George, then so be it. Because Americans don't trade illusionary safety for real freedoms.
In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn't occur to most people to wonder whether the country's very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute.
On the day of 9/11 I turned to the person who sat next to me at work and I said "I hope they don't overreact and attack the wrong people."
In the days after 9/11 I was disturbed by the rhetoric and the actions. The immediate passage of the Patriot Act, a butcher's bill of civil rights violations that law enforcement had never been able to pass before, and which we would later find out wouldn't have helped stop 9/11 at all, was among the first indications that something was very wrong.
Let us talk, today, of the basics of holding power.
In the end, power comes from the barrel of a gun
Weber called this the State’s monopoly on violence. There is no state, as moderns understand it, without this monopoly. Places like Lebanon are not states – Hezbollah controls violence in southern Lebanon, for example. To put it in older terms – the King’s writ does not extend to large parts of Lebanon.
In Iraq, when the US did not stop the rioting in the early days, when it did not challenge the militias during the first few months, it gave up its sovereignty over Iraq. As militias, religious leaders and tribal leaders became the ones who enforced such law as there was, they became, such as it is, the real government of Iraq.
Many years ago I took a sociology course which really turned out to be about anthropology. (Indeed the two disciplines are so close that Carleton U used to offer a 100 level course called "Introduction so SocioAnthropology" or something fairly similiar to that.)
Anthropologists roughly divide societies into groups by how they extract a living from the environment. The basic groups are hunter/gatherers, horticultural (take a stick, push it in the ground, drop a seed in), agricultural (plows) and industrial (nomads exist off to one side). What's interesting about this is that that with very few exceptions (the Inuit are one) hunter gatherer bands are the most egalitarian societies, by far - even more egalitarian than modern industrial societies.
Today is one of those days when I look at my fellows and I feel there is a distance between us that is uncrossable.
Because I have never understood, how, to the dead or their loved ones, it matters whether they are killed by a terrorist or a man in a pretty uniform who belongs to the army of a nation.
The bottom line is this: Hamas is competent, they are not corrupt and they have provided effective social services to the Palestinian people. Indeed Hamas grew out of a prior social services organization (the Islamic Center).
The international community, frankly, is disgracing themselves with their refusal to recognize Hamas. They won an election, and they won it fair and square. You either believe in democracy, or you don't, and the West, again, is proving it couldn't give one good goddamn about democracy if the election result is one we don't like.
Arguably the longest standing, nastiest, most irrational US foreign affairs policy is Cuba.
In part this is for domestic reasons - a powerful Cuban expat community. But in another sense it is that Cuba is the most instrangient nation inside what the US considers its most important sphere of influence - Central America and the Carribean. Cuba is very, very close to the US mainland, as the Cuban missile crisis showed - potentially dangerously close.
Much of the American nineteenth century (and to a lesser extent, the twentieth), in foreign policy terms, can be viewed as the US gaining a normal great power sphere of influence in its geographic proximity - first pushing out the remains of the Spanish empire, and then making it clear to the successor states that if the US didn't like what they were doing, the US would quite happily punish them, up to and including invasion.
Let's talk about the religious right for a moment. For years whenever I brought up the religious right, Democrats would tell me "oh, the Republicans just use them. They never give them anything real. It's the corporate types who really call the shots in the Republican party."
Now that Alito and Roberts have been appointed to the Supreme Court it's quite clear that, in fact, the religious right got what mattered to them. In fact Bush's Myers nomination was shot down in part because she wasn't a safe vote on abortion, and the religious right felt that Alito was. Likewise Roberts, married to an important anti-abortion activist, was considered safe for them.
I can't say I care. That tribunal epitomized for me the sort of victor's "justice" that is always in danger of being nearly meaningless. Milosevic was, as with Saddam, carefully forbidden from really naming names. Because, as with Saddam, plenty in the West did business with him even when they knew he was killing people. Those people were protected, very carefully, by the court.
Milosevic was drenched in blood. But many others were also. He was tried not because he was a monster, but because he lost a war, and his country was pressured and bribed into giving him up. There was never any possibility of real justice in that kangaroo court, with its careful refusal to hear things that would hurt its powerful patrons. And as such, neither it's death, nor his, is any cause for anything but a shrug, and reaching to turn the page in the book of history.
Shaula sent me a link to the amusing Under Odysseus, a blog telling about the Trojan war, a day at a time.
That got me thinking about the Judgement of Paris. Assuming you were able to, in fact, keep your judgement and not be overwhelmed by Aphrodite, which gift would you choose? Why?
Hera's Gift of wealth and power - to rule over the greatest nation on earth?
Athena's Gift of victory in all battles, glory and wisdom?
Or Aphrodite's gift:
‘Give me the apple and in return I will give you the gift of love. You will possess the most beautiful woman in the land, a woman equal to me in perfection of form. With her you will experience the greatest delights of love-making. Choose me, Paris, and she will be yours.’
The Carry Trade, for those not familiar with the term, is when people or institutions borrow low and lend high. For example, interest rates in Japan are effectively zero, so if you borrow there, and then lend here (say by buying mortgage backed bonds) you can make the spread. It’s effectively risk free money for financial institutions (there can be currency risk, but governments do often issue foreign denominated debt).
I work in the financial industry, and despite being in Canada, I work in the US financial industry. So let's talk a bit about this, because I've been involved with it on the other end. 9/11 led to a huge tightening of money laundering tracking. Before 9/11 you had to report payments of over $10,000 in cash or cash like instruments (money orders and cashiers checks, for example), and you had to report any payments that looked structured to avoid the $10,000 limit. (So, don't send in 9,999.99 - you'll get reported. Also don't send in two 5,000 money orders, a day apart.)
Let's talk energy. Leaving aside the Eurotrib plan, which Stirling has dealt with, there are two main options on the table. There's the Republican plan, and there is the Democratic house plan.
The Republican plan runs as follows: use nukes to crack shale oil to make usable oil and oil products. The energy ratio is bad, the nuclear plants are sitting right on the shale oil (to paraphrase an Alberta minister "one accident, and we make our entire oil field radioactive for the next 1,000 years. I think not."
Every once in a while I say something that I assume is blindingly obvious, and people try and dispute it. So let's start talking about the two post war economies.
Simply put, you can't discuss the post war economy. There were two of them. There was an expansionary period from the war to the 70's which floated all boats, and then there was a period, ongoing to the current day, which floated only the privileged.
As regular readers are probably aware Stirling is not well, and required surgery. At this point, I don't have more news than that, except that he is not on death's door so far as I know.
I just returned from a trip to Victoria and Vancouver, during which I had only intermittent internet access. I should have some articles over the next few days.
I think, if you're honest with yourself, you'll have to admit that Reid is a Conservative. There's a joke about Clinton that runs as follows: "best damn Republican President of the last 50 years."
A while back I started a post I've yet to finish. It was a State of the Union summary for the US. What I did was try and look at the US from as great a distance as I could, and then record what I saw.
Today I'm going to hit the high points without a lot of argumentation.
The US is bankrupt. It is beyond the historical norms where countries are forced to make painful adjustments and is only still able to hold them off because it has the world's anchor currency. At this point you could shut down the entire government, not including the defense department and entitlements, and still be running a deficit. The political battle of the next generation is going to be based on who pays the bill for this.
The US is a propaganda state. I've discussed this at more length in a prior post, but the reason this is clearly the case is that on important issues, like who attacked the country, US citizens simply believe things that are lies. That doesn't happen by accident.
The US has a military it can't afford. That military is a battlefield superiority force and completely unsuited for colonial wars of occupation.
The US political system is irredeemably corrupt. Bills are bought and sold openly. Incumbents have a massive advantage. Politicians spend the vast majority of their time fund raising. The priveleged routinely buy favours and preferment.
"You can't fool all the people all the time. You can fool all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time...." Bush Codicil, "and those are the people you have to concentrate on."
The US is now a propaganda state. There is no other way to put it. The majority of Americans thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. There was never any good evidence for it, and the President and his lackeys were always careful not to actually say it, instead they would make speeches about Iraq, calling for war, mention 9/11 repeatedly, and let listeners draw their own conclusions. The Press repeated this, somehow making Iraq about 9/11. Of course, al-Q'aeda was in Iraq, with US Kurdish allies...
Hackett's decision to drop out was one of those revealing moments in politics. A lot of people were very dismayed, others were "well, of course."
Stirling has a simple rule:
People on the inside understand pressures.
People on the outside understand consequences.
So - on the bankruptcy act, for example, we were all sceaming "look at what will happen to people". The Dems who voted for it were thinking "these people have given me money and help for years and now they are calling in their favours and it's going to pass anyway, so I may as well pay them back now - it's not a vote that matters."
Now that's an egregious example, but in the Hackett case, here's the thing:
Tweed's point raises a controversial question that most crusaders in the "war on boys" would rather dismiss. Despite their flagging performance in elementary and high school, men have hardly abdicated their power to women. While women may have held the majority in higher education for more than a decade, men still earn more than women, still hold the vast number of tenure-track university positions. Women possess executive positions at less than 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Could it be that men aren't going to college because they don't have to?
Uh yeah, 10 years eh? It takes a lot longer than that to move into executive positions. Now even in 30 years I don't expect 50% of positions to be female for a number of reasons, but after 10 years that fact proves nothing. Also, if you want to be an executive, male or female, your odds of doing so without a college degree are small, and every year they diminish in our credential obsessed society. Men who want to earn a decent living do not need a degree - they can go into the trades. Men who want to be executives do need a degree.
There's an old story which illustrates the heart of what I consider to be conservative political philosophy.
There's a road with a fence down the middle. You come to me and say "let's get rid of this."
My response is, "tell me why it's there, and maybe I'll let you remove it."
You should never, ever, make a policy change, unless you can say why the policy was enacted in the first place. You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you are able to make the argument for not changing it.
The Emerson defection, in which a newly elected Liberal MP jumped to the Conservatives in exchange for a cabinet seat - just days after the election, has sparked predictable cries for reforms disallowing MPs from changing parties.
I'm afraid I am mystified by just what it is that "reformers" seek to accomplish. Let me ask this question: if MP's can't leave their parties without undergoing an automatic and immediate bi-election then in what sense are MP's free to choose their votes?
Is it that they must stay in the party and vote consistently against their party, and then they aren't forced to undergo a by-election? If that is the case, what happens if the party leader kicks them out of the party? Does that trigger an automatic by-election?
Ralph Klein has wasted no time challenging the election promises of Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government.
This week, Alberta Health Minister Iris Evans presented the first phase of Alberta's health-care reform plans to the provincial cabinet. Evans, who plans to announce additional reforms this month, acknowledged that the reforms will potentially violate the Canada Health Act.
My friend Kevin wrote this e-mail, and was gracious enough to allow me to reprint it here.
The Democrats Need to Talk to the Liberals
Seriously, the Liberal Party has either re-learned how to play opposition politics in record time or they've had the greatest run of luck I've ever seen.
Some background for the Americans among us.
Last year, the Liberal minority government looked like it was about to defeated on a non-confidence vote in the House of Commons, which would have forced an election. At the last minute, Belinda Stronach, a high-profile member of the Conservative party, crossed the floor to the Liberals allowing the government to survive by a single vote. The Conservatives screamed to high heaven about the "treachery" and kicked up a massive fuss, claiming that she had been bribed by accepting a Cabinet position.
After the election, it seems that the Conservatives decided to get some revenge. On Monday, they surprised everyone by announcing that David Emerson, who had been a junior cabinet minister in the Martin government, was himself crossing the floor to join the Conservative cabinet. They also appointed a party organizer to the Senate and into the Cabinet.
On the first day, the Liberals made some "more in sorrow than in anger" comments, while the Conservative base had a meltdown. Again, for Americans, the best comparison I can give is how the Republican wingnut base would have reacted Bush had tried to simultaneously appoint Miers and another similar candidate to the Supreme Court, although that comparison is not quite fair (it was actually the moderate end of the Conservative base that exploded).
(Courtesy of Sic Temper Tyrannis - a circa 1550 picture of the Prophet - from Persia)
Silence has become consent. I am not willing to repeal the Enlightenment by bowing down to fear driven blackmail to obey religious laws. The right wing rag which published the cartoon Mohammed is run by bigots, but I will stand with Voltaire and defend the right of people whom I disagree with to free speech.
Canadian cabinet appointments have been made. What they tell us is very simple - Harper has probably decided to move hard right. He is going to pull a George Bush and take a marginal victory and call it a mandate.
Why do I say this? Well, take the appointment to Finance of Jim Flaherty. Jim is a supply sider. He believes in the Laffer (Laughter) curve. That is, he believes that if you drop tax rates, tax receipts should rise. This proposition has been tested in the US, and it has never, ever, worked. But it's good "intellectual" cover for slashing taxes, becuase you can pretend that you can have your cake and eat it too.
I don't even know how to say it anymore. The American Republic is, effectively, dead.
Oh, the corpse shambles on, elections are still held, and lip service is copiously given to freedom.
But it's dead. When the president believes he can order someone on US soil killed because he thinks he's a terrorist, when the Senate refuses to censure administration officials who lie under oath to it, when the argument about spying on Americans without a court order is about "you didn't come to us to get permission first" - well, the corpse may be stumbling along, but it's a zombie.
Gonzales lied to the Senate during his confirmaiton hearings. He was under oath at the time.
Gonzales should be found to have perjured himself and be sent to jail.
But telling lies under oath is now apparently acceptable to all those Republicans who wanted Clinton impeached because they thought he lied under oath. And now they can't even be bothered to pretend.
Democratic Senators shouldn't play the game. They should walk out of the committee in protest, and refuse to listen to Gonzales lie even more.
And no one should believe a word Gonzales says, not even "and" and "but". He's already lied under oath once, and the fact that Republican senators won't put him under oath this time means they know he's going to do it again.
As Iran inches closer to a security council resolution and as the cry for war wafts from the usual neocon sewers like something long dead and rotting, I laugh and laugh and laugh. Bush struts like a popinjay, and makes his slurred threats. And I laugh.
Thou shalt reap as thy sow: If you allow yourself to be come dependent on anything supplied by outsiders, hooked, as it were, on oil - then you are vulnerable to those who control it. If the US or Israel makes a serious attack on Iran and 4 billion bbl goes off the market, well, I doubt oil would stop at $100 a barrel. And I doubt a gallon would cost less than $10 - assuming you could find one, and were willing to wait in line for a couple days.
Lebanon's Shiite Cabinet ministers announced an end to their government boycott Feb. 2 after Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora acceded to the ministers' demand to recognize the radical Islamist group Hezbollah as a national resistance group, not a militia.
You know, I always find the language in these things interesting. Stratfor calls Hezbollah a "radical Islamist group". Let's swing that about and think of it, not in geopolitical propaganda speak, but the way southern Lebanese Shiites probably look at it.
Perception, Reality and Canadian Provincial Healthcare
by Ian Welsh
The Conference Board of Canada has out a report comparing provincial healthcare metrics. It's an interesting report, and one I reccomend any in healthcare policy go read. It's a benchmarking study, where they rank performance in each metric as either a gold, silver or bronze performance, give points for various performances and then see how the provinces compare to each other.
Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.
All political ideologies have their diseases - illnesses of the spirit. Generally these illnesses result from attempts to avoid other problems. One of the problems that certain types of leftists are prone to (not all leftists, populists, for example, are generally immune) is an allergy to love of country. Or, to put it another way - they aren't patriotic, they think patriotism is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel and they believe that love of country is nothing but wishy washy sentimentality.
There are a couple things going on. The first is simple - they associate love of country with patriotism, patriotism with nationalism, and nationalism with either war or fascism. And it is true that very nationalistic societies are ones that are easy to whip up into war fever. Nor is this an abstraction or a historical oddity, we've just witnessed, in our neighbour to the south, how easy it is to whip up a witch's brew of militarism, propaganda and nationalism into unjustified and illegal war on the defenceless.
Is that he should have been an easy win for the Deocrats. However as everyone probably knows by now the Alito debate has been ended by Cloture. It wasn't even close - only 25 Senators voted against cloture.
Once again Democratic Senators have proved that they can't read polls. Polls show that the majority of Americans wanted them to stop any candidate who would overturn Roe vs. Wade, and Alito is very clearly dedicated to doing just that. The case could have been made against him. Yes, it would have required spending money and effort against him, but it would have been worth it for three reasons.
The first is that if Roe vs. Wade is taken away by Alito, as part of the gang of four (they only need one more) then the Democrats are going to lose that as a fundraising issue. You'll notice I didnt' say anything about principles, because it's clear that most of the Senators who voted for cloture are supposedly pro-choice, but I don't expect them to stand up for principle. There are few Senators who do, and those who do, did. I do, however, tend to hope that Senators at least understand fund raising. Apparently not. For years the Democratic party has raised funds by using the specter of supreme court changes and the loss of Roe vs. Wade. They may have just lost that tactic, and it was a major way they wrung money out of the electorate.
Although many are familiar with the story it's worth running a quick review of how Martin gained control of the Liberal party and became the Liberal leader.
He, and his "board" did it by gaining control of who could join the party. They then made sure that they controlled ridings by the simple expedient of signing up members who supported their candidates and not allowing opponents to sign up new members who supported them.
Over time, through this method, he gained control of the majority of riding associations, and through them the "support" of the Liberal caucus.
One of the problems of the current foreign policy regime is that it is fundamentally unserious and uninterested in doing the hard work or thinking about the hard problems. Stirling has tackled part of that - their inability to think properly about oil, in twoarticles. But another thing they are unable to do is manage nuclear deterrence properly. They may be mad, but they don't know how to get really MAD. And as a result they are more likely, rather than less likely, to trigger a real nucler exchange.
The 'graph that I want to start from is this paragraph from a Nelson Report:
Note that at least some PLA types have jibed...or is that threatened...that they doubt the US has the guts to "trade Los Angeles for Taipei". You cannot entirely discount that some future Chinese political leadership will make the same calculation...or mis-calculation. And none of us wants to find out the answer.
The Canadian Liberal Sense of Entitlement and the NDP
by Ian Welsh
As a blogger who endorsed the NDP I've received my fair share of nasty comments from various Liberal supporters along the lines of "how dare you help elect the Conservatives."
The NDP is not a wing of the Liberal party. It does not exist to support the Liberals whenever they are in trouble. It is a separate party. You would think these things were obvious, but it would appear that they aren't.
Further, the NDP does not believe in the same things as the Liberal party does. It is strongly against private supplying of health care, for example, which the Liberals have allowed for years while mouthing pieties. Its energy plan is different. Its pharmacare plan is different. Its commitment to PR makes it very different from the Liberals.
As someone who blogs about Canadian politics at a number of blogs I often get comments from right wingers about how horrible the media's anti-Conservative party bias is here in Canada.
It's a myth. There is no such thing.
I am willing to grant (though there are no studies proving it that I am aware of) that there was almost certainly a media bias against the Reform and Alliance parties. But there is no anti-Conservative party bias. Attempts to push the idea are either a holdover from the past or an attempt to intimidate the media in the same way the US media has been intimidated by conservative activists there.
Export-oriented Canadian companies complain they have been hit hard by a steep appreciation in the Canadian dollar, which is up 30 percent against other major currencies since 2002, helping to wipe out tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Industrial subsidies, long a point of contention for Canadian right-of-center parties, may be a necessary evil, he added, admitting that the Conservatives were coming round to the idea that firms sometimes needed subsidies.
I'm going to suggest everyone read this Stratfor analysis of the Canadian election and why they couldn't care less who won. A little hint to whet your appetitite:
When two states share a border, one of two situations inevitably occurs: They either fight, or they establish rules of the game whereby one clearly holds the upper hand and the weaker state agrees to not challenge the stronger state's interests. Both situations have come about in the course of U.S.-Canadian history. In the U.S. War for Independence and, later, the War of 1812, Canada functioned as a proxy of the British Empire. But by the end of the War of 1812, it was clear that Canada had a choice: Continue to resist American power and face the possibility of annexation, or steadily but permanently loosen ties to London and become an American "ally."
The only two party combination capable of passing bills is the Conservatives and BQ. At this point the main question for Canada is whether this is true:
Winners - the Conservatives, with their minority government and the NDP, who increased their seat total by almost 50%. Losers, the Bloc, who lost seats and failed to get the 50% of the vote required to set up "winning conditions" for the next referendum, and the Liberals, who managed to go from 39% support at the beginning of the campaign to 30% at the end.
Do vote Conservative if you believe in decentralization and a weak federal government which provincial interests can easily override. Do vote Conservative if you are rich and you want massive tax cuts, right now. If you are a moderate do vote Conservative if you believe Stephen Harper has, over the last 3 years, suddenly changed his mind about everything he worked for for his entire life. If you are an extreme winger do vote Conservative if you believe Stephen Harper, over the last three years, has not suddenly changed his mind about everything he worked for his entire life. Do vote Conservative if you are a social conservative who believes some Canadians don't deserve the same rights as other Canadians. Do vote Conservative if you believe that Ottawa, which spends 18% of its income on debt repayment, is somehow fiscally screwing the provinces, which spend 10% of their income on debt repayment. Do vote Conservative if you believe in tax cuts and spending promises before paying down the federal debt.
As predicted at the beginning of the campaign the end-game scary effect has now come into play, with the Conservatives losing points in Ontario and the Liberals gaining them. While the move is within the margin of error (barely) I'm inclined to think it is real. However, unlike last time (and unlike my prediction) this time it doesn't look like it's going to be enough to save the Liberals. Odds are that Harper is going to get a minority government.
Things are still in flux enough that I'm uncertain of the outcome. The Liberals last minute swing is concentrated in the greater Toronto area, though not just in the 416 core. In BC they are leading in both the interior and the Lower Mainland (which is mainly bad news for the NDP.)
Kevin has written a couple articles on the Canadian blogosphere, one on fund raising and one on its future in general. I've been writing for US blogs for some time, and I am much more deeply involved in the US blogosphere than the Canadian one. I think it's worth looking at what happened in the US.
I believe in a Canada that is strong and free from sea to shining sea.
A strong Canada is one that is wealthy. There is no freedom when you have debts to others you cannot easily handle. Anyone who has ever, personally, been badly in debt knows this – owe someone too much money, and suddenly you work for them and they call the shots. Your life is not your own. A wealthy Canada is one that keeps its deficit and debt under control. It is one that brings in surpluses whenever possible. It is a country that encourages all the different types of economic activities in Canada – manufacturing, resource based, financial and services and that encourages all of the regions to excel.
Let’s start by talking about the idea of national programs. Employment Insurance, health insurance, daycare – whatever… The Conservative party argument (not the conservative argument, necessarily) is that provinces should be free to opt in or out, and that the feds should just give them money if they opt out and say “we’ll do something along those lines.” Provinces should be free to experiment with delivery.
What this means, in practice, is that some provinces will have better programs, and others will have worse programs. Some provinces will take the money and use it to allow them to cut taxes, and skimp on programs, and others won’t. Some will run the programs privately, and others will run them publicly.
Ever since I have been writing at BOP, I have given the same advice to the Democratic core. I'm going to repeat it today.
There is no influence without clout. There is no influence without clout. There is no influence without clout.
If you want to have Democratic politicians who stand up and fight for you, and who are competent then you must make them fear you and want what you offer.
Think of it as approaching them with a wad of cash in one hand, and a club in the other one.
Let's take a brief look at what they're offering. I'm not going to hit everything, just some high points.
(Ok, I've finished reading it. I'm not going to even attempt a neutral tone on this, with a few exceptions this platform is a disaster waiting to happen and confirms all my worst expectations. If you're a Conservative supporter you won't like what I have to say, but you should read it anyway.)
I'm tired of writing about the election, so I'm going to take a break with a post on Canada that is only tangentially related, and hit a number of issues I intend to come back to, some in great depth, after the election is over.
The Canadian Economy
There is a myth out there (one Harper has endorsed) that the Canadian economy is less of a trade economy than the US. This is simply untrue. Not only is it untrue, but the Canadian economy is much more a trade economy than the US. We have less economic activity that is in protected sectors (the US has huge protected real estate, military and medical sectors) and just as a matter of straight numbers the proportion of our GDP which is based on exports is much larger. For that matter, proportional to our economy, our imports are larger as well. They just aren't as out of balance as the US export/import ratio is.
This is the first in a three part series making the case against each of the parties. Kevin has already made the case for the Conservatives and the NDP. In the next few days I will make the case against the NDP and the Liberals as well. (Do be sure to read Kevin's articles, they are works of beauty.)
The bottom line case against the Conservatives is simply that they can’t be trusted. Specifically Stephen Harper can’t be trusted. This is a man who spent his adult life trying to dismantle Medicare. A man who so disliked Canada that he wanted Alberta to erect a firewall around the province and disengage from the rest of Canada as much as possible.
In the last election, when the Conservatives surged I posted to say that the Liberals would still win, this time I am uncertain and my gut says Conservative victory. I honestly would not be surprised to see a slim Conservative majority, though I am hoping they are limited to a minority.
Sean-Paul at the Agonist has a post up questioning how effective Nancy Pelosi is. I love Sean-Paul and I agree with him on more things than not, but this time I'm going to have to respectfully demur. First, let's see what Sean-Paul has to say:
Then Nelson cites one of his readers, a genetic Republican not enamored of the current GOP:
"while I always guard my wallet when I read Novak, I think he is dead-on right. Pelosi is, first and foremost, a left-wing, `limousine liberal', San Francisco Democrat. Folks like that never make good Congressional leaders because the best leaders don't carry too much ideology [so they can manage coalitions without seeming to compromise strong personal political positions]. She does. And, when she instinctively embraced John Murtha's `pull out of Iraq' comments, it obviously was the tip of the iceberg with a lot of Dems who don't carry her brand of liberalism. And, it demonstrated her real weakness as a leader. She is sort of a Newt Gingrich of the Left. But at least Newt had a plan (the Contract With America).
Kevin Brennan (my co-blogger at Tilting at Windmills) and myself are planning on watching the election results at a local Toronto pub on Monday January 23rd. We'd like to invite our readers to join us as well. If you're interested please either comment to the post or drop me a line at ian_bop-at-sympatico-dot-ca so we have an idea how many to expect and can pick an appropriate pub. The pub will be near the subway line, and most likely somewhere in the downtown/uptown area.
If Senators are elected, Senators will have a mandate. If Senator's have a mandate they will stop rubber stamping bills from the House of Commons.
The powers of the Senate are rather significant - they can introduce all bills except those imposing taxes or appropriating public funds. Except when the Canadian Constitution is being amended, in which case the lower house can override them after six months, their approval is required for all bills to pass.
The Conference Board of Canada has issued a letter saying that based on the secret budget info that the Conservative party has given them, the Conservative budget will run surplusses.
What this means is that the Conservative party has learned from 2004, in 2004 they released their numbers early and got slagged for overpromising. This time they won't release their numbers until the end of this week, the election will then happen only slightly more than a weak later. It will be difficult, in that time, for either the other parties or independent bodies to determine whether or not their promises really add up (although the CBC will try). That's smart, but for all three parities, who have been promising the moon, I'd like proper independent costing - I don't trust them.
Stephen Harper is a right wing ideologue. He was for the Iraq War and even slagged Canada in the US press for not joining in Bush's illegal little war. He believes that Canada is a second rate socialist country. He wanted Alberta to divorce itself as much as it could from Canada.
Let's be generous to Harper. Let's assume that the boy was just wrong about Iraq - that he, like many Americans, really thought Saddam had WMD's. Let's assume his judgement was impaired enough that he thought that Iraq was some sort of imminent threat to the US. That's being generous, because in that case I'm assuming he merely has extremely bad judgement. How bad? Well, worse than the Canadian average, because the average Canadian was against the war. Imagine that, Harper has below average judgement on the most important decision any national leader will ever have to make - whether or not to go to war. And that's being generous...
New Orleans residents faced a standoff with demolition workers in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans on Thursday morning after city officials ordered the violation of a temporary restraining order against demolition. Community members and legal activists have been working to insure that all residents receive notification and give permission when their property becomes a target for demolition.
Stirling has often talked about the fact that if one nation in the modern world unilaterally conserves oil, all it means is that someone else will snap it up and get the growth from it. A similiar principle works in fisheries... (Economist article available by subscription only.)
Jennifer Devine and her colleagues at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, studied catch data on five deep-sea species. Two of them, the roundnose grenadier and the onion-eye grenadier, are commercially important. The other three, the blue hake, the spiny eel and the spinytail skate, are often trawled up at the same time. Using data from a series of research trawls conducted between 1978 and 1994, Dr Devine found that populations of all five had plummeted by between 87% and 98%, a decline that warrants classifying them as being critically endangered. The average size of individual fish also declined—in one case by as much as 57%. That is worrying independently of the question of numbers, because large fish tend to have more offspring than small ones....
Speaking in Windsor, Ont., Layton said he will introduce the national prescription drug plan in the next parliament. It would be worth $1 billion per year, and would cover 50 per cent of the cost of prescription drugs above $1,500 per year per person.
It’s not a bad plan as far as it goes, but it really begs the question (as do all drug plans).
The Federal government is, in fact, in a position to do something about drug costs. Of all the governments in Canada it is effectively the only which can. This may seem odd, because the Provincial governments have constitutional jurisdiction over health care, but the Federal government controls intellectual property laws and is the level of government which controls trade. These days trade often means the US demanding other countries follow the US’s intellectual property laws and that, specifically, often means their drug laws – as Australia has recently been experiencing.
However writing about the election remains as simple and boring as it was at the beginning, or indeed months ago. Because the real story isn't the Liberals or the Tories, it's the NDP. NDP support remains soft - about a third of NDP support is soft and will likely vote Liberal if the Conservatives look to win - nationally NDP support is about 18% right now, and if 6% swings Liberal, we will likely have a new Liberal minority government.
I thought about writing a year end post, and considered writing it about politics, in which case the story would have been Bush's mandate disintegrating throughout 2005 to the point where I would be astonished if he was not eventually impeached. Simply put Bush both overreached, assuming he had a mandate to dismantle Social Security and had the reality that he and his team are incompetent finally catch up to the BS macho man image the press had so desperately built for him after 9/11 due to a desire to have big strong man protect their quivering fear filled carcasses. It's amazing what the realization that senseless death can come to you to can do soft professionals who have never looked their mortality in the eye.
The last two weeks of December – from the week before Christmas till New Years is over, mark the half time, and time-out, of the Canadian election. As such it’s fitting to look back at what has happened in the first half of the campaign, and what the second half may hold.
The campaign started with the Liberals riding high, almost to 40% ratings, with the Conservatives down at about 25% and the NDP as low as an anemic 13%. Dire warnings of a possible Conservative collapse were uttered and Red Tories and soft-NDPers seemed to be turning to the Liberals. In Quebec the Liberal party was in disarray and the Bloc Quebecois looked likely to return a record crop of MPs.
I hope all our readers, as well as the other authors have a good Christmas today. I'm spending it doing little (reading and playing WOW), as my family is across the country, but that's fine, for many years now Christmas has been more commonly a rest day for me than a celebration.
Most crime is created by the government by choosing to outlaw something. Seem counterintuitive? It is, simply, true. All non-violent drug offenses are crimes that would not be considered crimes if the government hadn't made drugs illegal. And right there you've accounted for most of the growth in the prison population for the last thirty years.
This is not to deny that there are non-constructed crimes, there are, and you can figure out what they are by doing cross ethnographic surveys. What you'll find is that the big ones are murder, rape and assault. Even theft, as we understand it, is not universal, because there are societies where private property as we understand it doesn't exist. (Most hunter gatherer bands hold almost everything communally, the best bow, for example, is held by the best hunter, and once that's no longer you, you give it up.)
In my last post on the Transit strike I noted that Toussaint had done most things right, but he had done two things wrong. One was not securing his superiors or finding a new parent union if they could not be brought onside. The other, and more serious, was not dispersing his funds. The union fine is 1 million each day (to put this in context, they borrowed 5 million for the strike). This is a constant pattern, and is the current main way that strikes are broken, by fining unions into the ground. It is repeated wherever unions dare to strike and are legislated back to work (which is also something that happens so constantly that I no longer believe in obeying such legislation except in the case of emergency workers.)
What unions need to do goign forward is disperse a few months of strike wages on the first day of the strike, in cash. No records should be kept of this money, and members should be instructed NOT to deposit it at banks so that courts cannot fine it back from workers through orders to their banks.
Indeed, in general, members should be instructed to move the amount of money they'll need to live on out of the banks, so they cannot be fined (as was being threatened in New York) by courts having the banks go into their accounts.
In comments to my post on Harper's regional policies Jay Currie wrote something which deserves a detailed reply.
Ian, as you know I am an ardent decentralist largely because I do not believe for an instant that long term “sharing” does anything but re-inforce the poverty of the have-not provinces.
You and I both admire Jane Jacobs and she deals with this phenomena rather brilliantly in her book, The Question of Seperatism. Essentially, these ongoing transfers she calls “the transactions of decline”. What they do is shift resources from productive areas to unproductive ones. And for what? So that people in the unproductive areas can enjoy levels of service which their own efforts would not justify.
Digby's been in my top 10 list for blogs ever since I stumbled across him this year. Funny and sharper than fresh whetstone razor. Sounds like he could use some cash, and if you enjoy his writing - well, blogging takes time, sometimes lots of it. If you'd consider paying for a magazine, and you read Digby, please go on over. And if you haven't read Digby, head on over, read some of the best writing around (I was going to say "in the blogosphere" but Digby's better than most paid writers) and consider tossing him a sheckle.
Update: report that Justice Jones is ordering Toussaint and two other officials to his courthouse tomorrow for possible sentencing. The Location is: Supreme Court of the State of New York, 360 Adams Street, Brooklyn, New York. I'm sure they could use some moral support, since my guess is they are almost certainly going to jail.
On the final day of intense negotiations, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it turns out, greatly altered what it had called its final offer, to address many of the objections of the transit workers' union. The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.
Leader Stephen Harper said Monday that he would go further than the Liberals and allow Quebec to play a role in international institutions, such as UNESCO, when its cultural responsibilities are at stake.
He also pledged to recognize provincial autonomy "as well as the special cultural and institutional responsibilities of the Quebec government."
And he said a Tory government would correct the so-called fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces - a key gripe of Quebec, which feels it doesn't get its fair share of cash from federal coffers.
... is looking like almost a sure thing. And it could errupt into something very ugly, and very good. This is why:
A bus and subway strike would bring chaos to the city and ruinous fines to workers - but other unions plan to back the transit employees to the hilt
because they believe their own futures are at stake. They fear any concessions by Transport Workers Union Local 100 will be forced on municipal workers in coming years - slashing benefits for hundreds of thousands of middle-income New Yorkers, labor leaders and experts say.
"Any effort to change this [the benefits] is going to face fierce opposition from the other municipal unions," said Daniel Walkowitz, a labor historian at New York University. "This will become the new model, and it will be very hard to reverse it."
Is a man, who after Bush smeared his family in the most horrible way possible, after we knew torture was going on in US prisons at executive behest, hugged him in 2004, and campaigned for him. Because there is no one too despicable, no act too low, for McCain not to forgive if it means it might help him get into the White House.
I started this as a comment on Hale's excellent post, but it grew so long that I think it needs its own post. Hale notes that private investors are financing more of the current acount deficit than they were in the past, and that foreign central banks are financing less, just as they said they would.
Central banks are taking the opportunity to reduce the rate at which they increase their exposure to the dollar. Because of the dollar's relative strength based on interest rates and growth rates compared to the EU and elsehwere they can do so.
My life, as with many, could be told in books. The first books I read as a child… Green Eggs and Ham, to the Hardy Boys and The Great Brain; the year I spent reading every book on mythology in multiple libraries, the years of science fiction in my teens to the sweep of years in my mid twenties where I walked out of the university library every few days with a stack of sociology, philosophy, anthropology or cognitive science.
I would guess that from the time I was about 7, till I was 29, I read an average of a book of a day, and there were weeks I might have read twenty or more. I read fast, and the ordinary world falls away when I sink into a world of words.
Anyone who's read me for a long time knows that I believe there are lines that should never be crossed, and that one bottom line task for anyone who wants to be moral is to decide, for themselves, where those lines lie.
Now I think that Bush crossed those lines long ago - both when he decided to invade a country in a pre-emptive war based on lies, and when he had people tortured. There is simply no evil greater than unwarranted war, as Americans quite rightly asserted when they hung a bunch of Nazis at Nuremberg for nothing else but that. And anyone who supports torture, anyone, doesn't deserve to be compared even to pond scum.
But there's morality and there's violating the Constitution. In American terms knowingly and deliberately violating the Constitution should be one of the lines you don't tolerate anyone crossing.
... from 1997 has recently become an election issue in Canada. It's an interesting speech. There's a lot I don't agree with it, but it's worth reading. Harper, ultimately, is perhaps the most brilliant man in Canadian federal politics. Unfortunately he's also an ideologue with bad judgement. Nonetheless what he says when speaking candidly is worth reading even if you don't agree with all of it.
Full text of the speech and question and answer period, below the fold (hat tip to Kevin.)
In a hard-hitting speech in Ottawa, U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins lamented what he called relentless and incessant criticism of his country, which he speculated might begin to sow doubt about the strength of the binational relationship.
"Canada never has to tear the United States down to build itself up," Wilkins said.
"It may be smart election politics to thump your chest and constantly criticize your friend and your No. 1 trading partner. But it's a slippery slope and all of us should hope it doesn't have a long-term impact on our relationship."
The left in Canada has been for Proportional Representation for some time now. And for some time now I’ve ignored it. The reason I’ve ignored it is that NDP and Green supporters crying for a system that would benefit them just seems like the whining of sore losers.
But I think that’s unfair – irrespective of who supports it, or why, PR deserves an objective look, and to be matched against Canada’s needs. Because the question shouldn’t be “which party benefits?’ The question should be, ‘will Canada benefit?”
I’m going to take this up in three essays. This first essay lays out how to think about electoral systems in the Canadian context. I’m tackling this first because I think that that both those who are for and those who are against PR approach the argument as if it were a given. For the PR side it’s “of course being more democratic is good. How could you be against being more democratic!? Are you against puppies too?” For the anti-PR side the attitude is “we’re doing fine with our current system, and who wants endless coalition governments anyway?” Both have elements of truth to them, but both are, fundamentally, misguided.
The debate over child-care reflects, in important ways, different concepts of productivity.
Giving money directly to parents is like giving tax cuts to companies and individuals in the hope that their individual choices will make the economy more productive.
This is the constant refrain for most economists.
But, there is an alternative productivity strategy of investing in people — early child care, training, aboriginal peoples, the disabled, immigrants, lifelong learning — so that Canada will have the best quality workforce in the world. This is directed investment.
What the Wilkes-Wade-Cunningham larger story reveals is the vulnerability of the US government appropriations and contracting process -- even its most sensitive elements - to unscrupulous people, whose chief interests are not necessarily motivated by concern for the well being of the United States. It's really the story of a security breach, and how easily penetrated were two of the most national security-sensitive Congressional committees by those who targeted them and others for just that purpose. And they were targeted in the classic ways spies target recruits -- by first identifying who would be useful, and then identifying their weaknesses (money? alcohol? other ways?). In other words, it's a counter-intelligence story too.
Rebuilding New Orleans would require creating both barrier islands and wetlands between it and the winds of the next big hurricane. The bill for that is about 32 billion. That's less than half a single Iraq appropriation, but apparently the US just can't afford it. Apparently killing Iraqis is more important than rebuilding New Orleans. Tax cuts for the rich are more important than rebuilding New Orleans.
Thirty two billion dollars is, in fact, peanuts for the US. This isn't just shameful, it's pathetic. I'm willing to state, unequivocally, that if an equivalent disaster occured in Canada the Federal government would find 32 billion dollars, even if it had to borrow it. Given the 10/1 rule, that would be the same as 320 billion. But we'd find it, and we'd rebuild. (Maybe we should offer to buy New Orleans from the US. Seems you can't afford it anymore. It'd be a fixer-upper.)
Handguns are already severely restricted in Canada. It's very difficult to get one legally. It's dead easy to get one illegally. We have the longest undefended border in the world, with the world's largest gun producer, a nation where handguns are generally not only legal, but damn easy to get.
1) No parallell private system.
2) If someone slips below CMA waiting times then they must be shipped to a province where they can be given the procedure. The province that failed to meet their needs has to pay for this.
3) To increase production of doctors and nurses.
If the story of the Iraq war has three acts, then it looks like we're close to the end of the second. The first act was the invasion. The second act was the occupation, and it looks like the military is taking to steps to begin a draw down after the election. There are four basic Iraqi factions, and three main foreign factions, and it's worth looking at all of them.
The US: Militarily the most powerful of the factions, the US is also the most hated by the majority of Iraqis. Hamstrung by force overreach, by lack of intelligence (in both senses of the word) and by its political leadership the US has been forced back to fixed fortified points. It is subject to attacks at will by its opponents and while capable of local battlefield supremacy at any point it wants, it is incapable of holding any significant amount of ground. At this point the US military exists to make sure there is no open battlefield warfare against its Kurdish and Shia clients, and for no other reason.
The political calculus in the US is usually that if a social program isn't universal - if everyone doesn't get something from it, it's toast. Thus Social Security is the third rail of American politics (ask George Bush II about that), while Medicaid is constantly under assault, and welfare was all but eliminated under Bill Clinton.
Canadian NDP leader Jack Layton didn't have a good start to his campaign. First union leader Buzz Hargrove appeared with Liberal leader Paul Martin and said that voters should vote Liberal to stop the Conservatives, then this morning I saw the Toronto Star dissembling about Layton's position on private health care provision.
Let's deal with Buzz first - Buzz said that people should strategic vote to stop Harper from winning, and if that meant voting Liberal, they should do so. It's exactly this sort of fear driven calculation that keeps the NDP from breaking out from third place. Its natural supporters don't vote for it, because they think it can't win. Because they don't vote for it, the NDP doesn't get enough votes to look like it can win. Nice catch-22. If the NDP ever wants to have a shot at, oh, running the country, they need to put such voting to a stop. Especially since, in many cases, strategic voting doesn't work all that well, because most people don't have their finger on the pulse of their riding well enough to know if the NDP or the Liberals are the main threat to the Conservatives.
To someone like myself who follows US polititcs closely, sometimes more closely than I follow Canadian, the current Canadian election is deja vu all over again. It's American Republican policies being sold to Canadians - and not even fresh ones, but stale decades old ones mixed in with a 2000 special - "spend the surplus". In addition to an anti-gay Crusade all to familiar to south-of-the-border types, the Conservatives are proposing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, which as Jay Currie points out, flies in the face of not only what we now know about the harm of marijuana (some, but less than either alcohol or cigarettes); but will encourage plea bargaining; and what Jay doesn't note, is that it'll cram the prisons full of drug offenders and erode civil liberties.
(We don't have to guess about these things, we can see what happened in the US. Learning from other people's mistakes, as I've noted before, is one definition of wisdom. Not learning from other people's mistakes either makes you a fool or someone who admires the fact that the US has eroded its civil liberties, has more people locked up than Russia and has a court system so clogged up that almost everyone is pled out, thus making a mockery of people's right to a trial, let alone jury nullification and judicial discretion.)
The initial story was Harper reopening the same sex marriage debate. A lot of people were aghast, wondering what he's doing, but in fact I suspect Harper's feeling really smart about it. The key to realizing why is a recent survey showing that Liberal support amongst immigrant communities has dropped somewhat and Conservative support improved. Conservative strategists appear to have long believed that opposition to same-sex marriage is their key into immigrant communities, and this poll will have them feeling their oats and pushing for more of the same. Harper didn't push same sex marriage first day of the campaign to "get dirty laundry out of the way" as some have suggested, he did so because he thinks it's a winning issue - that it wins votes with immigrants, and that most Canadians who would ever vote for him don't care enough about gays for it to really matter. He's half right, and it's a gamble. In general both support and opposition to gay marriage in Canada is soft - but key swing voters in Ontario, especially amongs NDPers who wind up supporting Liberal to stop the Conservatives, and amongst Red Tories who consider doing the same thing do care about the issue, and it is one that makes the Liberals seem "safe". Also, while the same sex marriage issue isn't a key issue for most people, it is symbolic of what a lot of people fear about the Harper Conservatives, and combined with later gaffes, or a succesful demonization campaign from the Liberals, could cost them significantly. Harper's rolling the dice on this one, but right now he has to feel that the gamble is beginning to pay off.
Oldman and I both discussed what we termed alternately microlocal production or the design economy, as where we wanted to move the 1st world economies. This article from Salon talks about a part of it, but doesn't include a discussion of the tools to give modders the ability to create and upload their own designs, which could then be used by others, likely for a small fee.
It seems, at this time, appropriate to write a post about greatness and genius that I’ve been putting off for a long time. Genius isn’t the same thing as intelligence, there are plenty of intelligent mediocrities. The highest IQ on record (and yes, IQ is not everything, but it measures something important as well) is that of Dos Savant (Marilyn Jarvik). To the best of my knowledge she has no significant body of work in any field, nor any great accomplishments. Yet she is, unquestionably, so much smarter than someone like Napoleon that there is no comparison. Indeed even most composers and theoretical scientists have IQ’s that pale in comparison.
Intelligence is one factor in genius, and it is generally necessary to be hightly intelligent to be a genius. But it is not sufficient. Instead, genius is about obsession. It takes, on average, about 10 years of dedicated study to master a field. This has nothing to do with formal education – some people learn at school, just as many great geniuses have not. The time can be reduced by high intelligence, but not as much as one might think.
I never met Loan in person. We talked on the phone a couple times, and we e-mailed, usually in flurries with weeks or sometimes months between the flurries.
I remember the first time I followed a link back his personal blog. I spent the rest of the day reading his entries, most of which were long, detailed and brilliantly informative. I linked to him and we spent the next few days e-mailing back and forth - mainly about hedonic adjustments to GDP, although we touched on other subjects.
Oldman wasn't content to take the world at face value. He spent the time to investigate and to rip the numbers apart and find out what went into them. He was tireless and would read everything he could find on a subject, then run it through his own rigorous analysis. As an analyst he was first class and Stirling has done more justice to his technical work than I am capable of, though we hope to come back to it in the future.
But it's as a friend that I'll remember him.
[Earlier a short announcement brought a wide range of appreciation from other members of the bop community. You can read them here.]
So we have an election. In a sense there was no choice to it - Martin felt he couldn't give Layton the deference that determining the election date would have allowed. Harper has been rabid for an election for a long time and Layton had to show his independence from Martin: if Martin wouldn't give him something for support then continued support would imply that there is no difference between the parties. As for the Bloc, support is still high, and another election victory will help pump them up for the next referendum.
However it's hard not to see this election as a replay of the last one. The jobs of the parties remain essentially identical, going into this election, as they did in the last one.
My "favourite" part of the story is this (my emphasis):
A psychologist reviewed Westhusing’s e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the “most difficult and probably most painful stressor.”
She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
A number of years ago I read an enjoyable book called “The End of Work”, by Jeremy Rifkin. Unfortunately I still have to work for a living…
The supposition that we wouldn’t have to work unless we wanted to is an old one – born about the same time as the industrial revolution. Machinery and mass production techniques increased the amount of goods which could be produced by orders of magnitude. When people at the time looked at this, they quite logically assumed that given how much could be produced by so few people, that there would eventually simply not be enough work for everyone – that everything anyone could want would be produced by a percentage of the population.
In principle they were right; if I had been in their shoes I would probably have made the same prediction. Because their argument is the logical one, and yet it hasn’t happened, it’s important to think about why it didn’t.
Autumn in Toronto is almost over. Last Friday a fine white swirl of snow swept across the city, glistened briefly on wet asphalt, and drained away. Today Fall is back, crisply cool, but still weather that demands sweaters and windbreakers, not the bundled clothes of winter.
The winter I’ll always remember best is the one I spent as bike courier in Ottawa in the early nineties. It was a tempestuous one, mostly cold, but with brief thaws that turned the snow to water, followed by snap freezes that left the roads and sidewalks sleek with ice, soon concealed again under treacherous snow. After one of these treacherous warmings I counted my falls for the day, and ended with 18 for the day. Bruised, wet and tired, the dollars I earned that day were amongst the hardest I’ve ever eked out.
Since Koizumi has been in power, every year he has visited the Yasukuni shrine, where a number of war criminals from WWII are buried. And every year it causes a fire storm of protest from Korea and China. A slight majority of Japanese approve of his visits, and Koizumi has been very stubborn on keeping his pledge to visit every year.
Meanwhile, Koizumi has recently won a significant electoral victory and been congratulated by George Bush, while the US studiously downplays the shrine visits. Because while it is often denied by the government, the US needs Japan to rearm, and the visits to the shrine are part of an attempt to change Japanese opinion of the possibility of rearmament.
Mr. McCain issued a statement Friday explaining his vote in support of Mr. Graham's amendment as a way to rid federal courts of petitions from prisoners on everything from the delivery of mail to the type of food allowed. But he also hinted that he might support a compromise next week.
Can't torture them, but as long as DOD rules are followed we can lock 'em up forever with no civilian judicial review. And who determines DOD rules? Rumsfeld.
The human mind, we know, loves stories. We seek them out, we string them together: we take the random and weave it into a beautiful skein of meaning.
Nothing, nothing, has meaning by itself. Everything is part of the web or it is nothing. When I teach, the first thing I spin out to the students is the storyline. Perhaps we are doing an overview of Judaism and I will toss them a glittering thread, “The story of Judaism is the story of how Rabbinical Judaism came to be created and was used to bind Jews together throughout disaster, Diaspora and endless persecution.” Without that thread to tie together the captivity, the destruction of the Temple, the attempt of the Pharisees to have ordinary people live the lives of priests – none of that is anything but glittering stardust slipping through their fingers. They may, later, decide it’s not a good story, and choose another, but without a story they are lost.
There's an article today on Charles Peters in the Washington Post, which is really a must read. He speaks of an age when public service was considered good, when people tried not to be pretentious; and when politicians weren't crucified for personal pecadiolios (can you imagine Roosevelt being destroyed for his womanizing the way they tried to destroy Clinton and did destroy Hart?)
The perfect, it is said, is the enemy of the good. No man or woman is perfect - we all get angry or sad, or have drunk too much on occassion. We've all not acted as we shoud sometime in the past. We've all got our flaws, our regrets... our past.
I'm going to tell you a little secret that a lot of people give lip service to, but few really believe.
The right thing to do morally is usually the right thing to do pragmatically.
You will hear those who say "we can't afford universal healthcare" and yet I will tell you than when other nations have gone from private care to single payor healthcare their costs per person have dropped by a third and shown improvement in most health metrics. That means if the US went to universal healthcare it would actually save money and be more healthy.
You will hear those who say "we can't afford to send money to help those left homeless by the Pakistani earthquake. But I will tell you this, those people left homeless are your enemies - they are the ones who refused to turn al-Q'aeda over to you. Fought against your troops when you tried to nab them. And I will tell you this further, for 2 billion dollars, nothing really, you can save hundreds of thousands of their lives and by so doing you will make them your friends. And once they are your friends, not your enemies, they will be much more likely to turn over al-Q'aeda to you, or at least not to protect them.
Morality is one of those places where you can find a lot of gray if you go looking, especially when moral duties conflict. But colour me simple, in most of the great debates of the current time, I don't think there are a lot of shades of grey.
Torturing people is evil. I don't even want to get into the question of whether it works or not - it could be the best way of ascertaining truth since Solomon threatened to slice babies in half and it wouldn't make the least bit of difference. You know it's evil, I know it's evil and anyone who pretends otherwise is welcome to spend some time having their fingernails torn out and then come back and tell me how much he still supports torture.
You may also have heard that the area of Pakistan in question is an area where al-Q'aeda has often found refuge, and indeed, safety, with tribal fighers protecting them.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The European Union has a single market, but 25 tax authorities, each with its own interpretation of Colbert's dictum. Multinational companies, which hop from one jurisdiction to another, expose this muddle in its worst light. The companies bemoan the burden of complying with 25 different tax codes, and argue that their profits and losses transcend national boundaries anyway. Some governments complain that the taxes a corporation pays bear little relation to the publicly provided benefits (a sound legal system, an educated workforce, passable roads) it enjoys. And the European Commission worries that competing tax codes impede the single market, keeping Europe's companies penned in behind national boundaries, deprived of continental economies of scale.
It's worth taking a second both to debunk this load of claptrap and to acknowledge the extent to which it is valid.
Yahoo has been widely criticised for assisting the case against journalist Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years in April apparently for revealing information about government controls on the media. In an open letter to Yahoo, co-founder Jerry Yang, a leading Chinese advocate of internet freedoms, recently accused Yahoo of betraying its customers and supporting dictatorship.
So I'm at work, and swinging through the cubicles, and I run into a friend. Call him Fred. Fred's a member of the Canadian Liberal party, and a political type and when we sat close to each other we used to discuss politics. A lot.
So I ask him how things are going in the Liberal party.
- Dunno. I'm thinking about letting my membership lapse.
Remember when Arnie seemed impregnable? Calm, assured, smoking his cigar wherever he felt like, the grand man who was was going to run things his way and steamroll anyone who ever got in his way?
I love Japan (or rather, what I know of Japan, which is not the same thing). But if there's a worse offender for destroying the ocean ecosystem than Japan, I don't know who it is. Japanese love their seafood, of all varieties, and are notorious for their factory ships, which sail in international waters and use nets which reach right down to the sea floor and sweep up everything in their path. They don't miss anything, including the plants and animals on the sea floor, and they leave behind a devestated ecosystem.
The dead in Iraq, both Iraqi and American, were killed by that greatest of all killers: lying.
Call it denial, call it lying, call it "being mistaken", but when you insist the world is the way you want it to be, or the way that is convenient to you, people act on that, and some of them die. And others are killed.
There is an old maxim in sociology which runs as follows: "things believed real have real consquences."
Some lies kill and the only way to redeem those deaths starts with the truth.
Ed Broadbent has up the NDP’s set of “democratic and ethical” reforms. They’re an interesting set of reforms and I have to admit my first impression was negative. On further thought I overreacted – there are parts of the proposals that are very good and parts that are questionable but could be made to work.
Let’s start with the good:
(3) Set spending limits and transparency conditions on leadership contests within political parties: Parties are largely financed by the public and the same principles pertinent to the public good should apply to the internal affairs of parties as they do to electoral competition between parties.
Here's another, related connection. Empathy is NOT the same thing as sympathy.
Empathy is the power to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. It is a pragmatic tool that is needed by hunters, like tigers, who must try to think like their prey. Empathy is frightening when it is set in a fierce, zero sum game.
But in a surfeit? Amid positive-sum games? When appetites are satisfied and fear is low?
satiation + empathy => sympathy.
Your ancestors, upon hearing of dolphins stranded on a beach, would have run toward them. As YOU would, today, upon hearing the same news.
Only with very different intent. Think about that."
Mike Harris and Preston Manning: Bad American Policies Done Stupid
by Ian Welsh
Last year, in the Canadian election, I called the Canadian Conservative Party's platform American tax cut politics done smart. Which is to say, it was actually stupid, but it was a series of stupid ideas executed by some very smart people. They'd actually looked at the US experience and tried to learn from the things that had gone wrong.
How to Manage Predictable Disasters: The Cuban Example
by Ian Welsh
Excerpted from a La Jornada (Mexican) article by Peter Rosset on hurricane preparations in Cuba for Wilma:
Days before the awaited Wilma, I heard on the radio: "All the volunteer firefighters are requested to report to their posts to begin the evacuation of everybody who lives in lowlands." On going outside I saw teams reinforcing the light poles to prevent them from being knocked over.
Delphi and the Decline of the American Labor Movement
by Ian Welsh
When I heard that Delphi, having mismanaged itself into bankruptcy, while giving its executives millions of dollars of bonusses for the sort of incompetence that mere money can't buy, had decided to try and force its workers to take pay cuts of 1/2 to 2/3rds, while gutting pensions and medical benefits, I figured it was going to cause a union explosion.
Surely, I thought to myself, the union movement will rally behind Delphi's workers no matter what.
For those who don't know what it is, "double" taxation is the fact that corporate income is taxed, then personal income is taxed. Stock dividends are paid from after tax corporate tax money, then taxed at the individual level (usually as less than 100% income.)
I am disappointed in this choice for several reasons. First, unlike previous nominations, this one was not the product of consultation with Senate Democrats. Last Friday, Senator Leahy and I wrote to President Bush urging him to work with us to find a consensus nominee. The President has rejected that approach.
Call this part 2.5 of the "How the Economy Works" Series. A correspondent recently suggested to me that the point needs to be reinforced that a lot of people who voted for Bush aren't losing from Bush's policies. Not yet, anyway. So let's talk about who wins and who loses in this Bush administration.
Winners
Home Owners in most areas: If you own a house in most areas, you've seen its value appreciate substantially. Your net worth has gone up. And odds are, if you have a mortgage, its carrying cost has gone down (if you were able to refinance.)
Those who receive little respect give little respect.
Deference and respect are not the same thing.
Respect must be earned, it cannot be mandated.
The exception is respect due positions:
The greater the difference in the respect due the position and the person holding it the greater the contempt for the position holder
The Bernanke Fed and the Vicious Spiral of Monetary Easing
by Ian Welsh
Ben Bernanke on Bush’s tax cuts – “provided incentives for businesses to expand their capital investments and reduced the cost of capital by lowering tax rates on dividends and capital gains.”
Now the question about Bernanke is this: was he doing what he needed to do; saying what he needed to say in order to get the Fed Chairman position, or did he really believe it?
This is one of those situations where I hope someone is smart rather than honest.
In the past I discussed at length the GM business model - where they make their money off the loans customers use to buy their cars, rather than the cars proper. It's been that way for a long time and it has been one of the things that led GM towards its decline. So now that GM is talking about selling its financing arm you might think I'd be pleased. I'm not.
Three of every four Canadians believe Canada should restrict oil and gas exports to the United States if the U.S. does not repay the $5-billion in softwood lumber tariffs that were ruled a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a new poll suggests...
... The Ipsos Reid survey conducted last week for CanWest News Service discovered that a solid majority of Canadians -- 78% -- agreed Canada should look for alternative markets for energy and lumber exports, even though it could further damage trade relations with the U.S.
Oldman started the conversation, I thought I'd continue it. Like Oldman, my position vis-a-vis universities is an odd one. I don't have so much as a B.A. I've gone to two different universities (Carleton and York) and I've been involved with two others (University of Toronto and University of Ottawa.) For two years in the late nineties I made my living as a tutor for university students (a somewhat surreal experience, helping people get their BA's (and in a couple cases, Masters degrees) when I didn't have any myself.) I went to class for them, took notes for them, prepped them on exams and helped them learn how to write and study.
Now Canada isn't the US, but we are subject to much the same influences, including soaring tuition; grade inflation and credentialization. Here are some of the things that stood out, both as a student and a tutor.
I have no dog in the Brown vs. Hackett nomination fight. But it is fascinating to watch. For those who may not have been keeping track, Hackett is the Iraq war veteran who came back from the war and ran for the House of Representatives in a strongly Republican district. He was essentially written off by the Democratic establishment, but the netroots rallied behind him and provided most of his money, support and oppo-research. He very nearly won.
Now he's running for the Senate in Ohio. His Democratic opponent in the primaries is Sherrod Brown. Hackett went to Brown and asked if he were going to run, Brown said he wasn't, so Hackett stepped in. Brown then changed his mind, and now the race is on, since Hackett declined to back down after Brown's change of heart.
But they have three big advantages. When you don't need them you can lay them down much more easily than you can regular army. Historically this is one of the main reasons princes used them.
They can be used in places where you don't want to use regular military forces (Columbia is the prime example of this - US paid mercenaries have been in country for almost twenty years. And despite US denials there is evidence they haven't just been doing aeriel reconaisance and cadre work.) This is primarily a public relations matter - it allows the government, especially the administration, "plausible deniability".
When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division....
...A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate's second-in-command walked out of Langley last month and then told senators in a closed-door hearing that he had lost confidence in Goss's leadership.
Delphi, United, Bankruptcy and the End of the "Free" Trade Era
by Ian Welsh
You know something's gone a-kilter when Paul Krugman says that if the reason Delphi is going to have to slash wages by 2/3 or more and remove all benefits is because of overseas competition then American workers are entirely entitled to say that the competition should be gotten rid of.
For those who have drunk the kool-aid and think that Krugman is some sort of protectionist and always has been, nothing could be farther from the truth. While Krugman has always recognized that there are downsides as well as upsides to trade, unlike the simplistic slogans which so-called think tanks constantly bombard us with; he's also always been strongly in the liberal pro-free trade camp. I dare say he still is, and would agree when I say that free trade would be a great thing - if we had some.
When I was young the future was very different from the way it is today. It was spaceships, and jet packs and flying cars. And when I was a bit older it was cybertech and biotech, humanity reinventing itself and making itself stronger, smart, faster and perhaps immortal.
The future we received was an odd one. The sheer ubiquity of communication is something not predicted by most of the futurists and sci-fi authors of the pre-eighties world. My generation, Gen-X, as Stirling once noted, may be the last 1st world generation to ever truly know what it is to be alone (and thus, perhaps, an important part of what it is to be human.)
Power without responsibility leads to abuse.
Power and responsibility results in initiative.
Responsibility without power leads to resentment and surliness.
No responsibility or power results in indifference.
(This is the second in a series: the first, How the Economy Worked, was about the Clinton economy)
The Bush team came into office faced with basically the same problem that Clinton had – how to pay for foreign goods. The Clintonian solution had been to sell intellectual property; to keep the dollar high; to offer equity investment options; to use labor arbitrage and to use the IMF, World Bank, WTO and other such organizations to keep commodity prices low. (All of this is gone over in more detail in the first article).
When Bush took power the wheels were coming off. The NASDAQ crash has finally occurred and the price of oil had begun to rise (though the price was still relatively low). A recession was clearly on the way and neither could nor should be stopped, the question was what sort of economy should come out of that recession.
One of the most infuriating things about trying to discuss tax rationally is the way that the privileged and their proxies try and make "income tax" the same thing as tax.
Whenever you're looking at the tax burden you have to look at all taxes - fees, income tax, sales tax, VAT taxes, tariffs, property taxes and anything else the government levies.
The truth is that practically the only progressive tax in most countries is the income tax - that's the only tax where the rich (sometimes) pay more money than the poor and middle class. Almost every other tax is regressive - the less you have, the more tax you pay as a proportion of your income.
New Orleans public schools enrolled about 60,000 children before the hurricane. The school board president now estimates that no schools on the city?s east bank, where the overwhelming majority of people live, will reopen this academic school year. Every one of the 13 public schools on the mostly-dry west bank of New Orleans was changed into charter schools in an afternoon meeting a few days ago. A member of the Louisiana state board of education estimated that at most 10,000 students will attend public schools in New Orleans this academic year.
Get that? Lovely pulling together to make sure all or as many students as possible don't lose their year.
The Alberta provincial government stalled a planned strike by referring the matter to a dispute inquiry board. Last month, the board recommended a collective agreement, which the union agreed to but Tyson rejected.
Instead, Tyson offered a modified contract to workers, which the union rejected.>
So, Bush's numbers stink, and for the first time in a long time, Americans actually prefer Democrats to Republicans, although still not enough to break 50%. This is good news, and Thank God. The Poorman has a list of things the Dems should do if they manage not to blow this, and it's a good one, head on over. The main lesson is this, as Paul Krugman has said: no mercy. Do not let them go. Do not play nice, do not seek concensus. If you get the power, run them down like the dogs they are.
StatsCan charges for most statistics. This morning I sat down and decided to download some labor statistics for the Canadian market. To get the full tables would put me back over $1,000 dollars. To get a useful subset, without leaving out important series, would put me back almost $250.
Delphi's going bankrupt, and they want to slash employee pay by half to two thirds (how you would you like that pay cut?); and to abandon their pension plan so that pensioners get less and the taxpayer has to pay for Delphi's contractual obligations.
I’m not a big fan of the wilderness. My father was a forester, and as a child I was hauled along on enough unpleasant and uncomfortable trips to develop a distaste for jolting pickup truck rides and boring conversations about varieties of trees. The Boy Scouts didn’t improve things – I mainly remember the long nights of slow dripping torment in tents that never, ever, kept the rain out – no matter what you did.
Things have been basically pretty good in Canada for some time. The economy has grown smoothly, the deficit has been conquered and the debt has been paid down. Politically there have been some scandals, but despite loathing the corruption revealed, most Canadians seem to want “Liberal Government run by someone else.”
But the road is about to get very rocky and the governing concensus, the current standard way of running the country, will run us off the road if we don’t take into account how things are changing and will continue to change.
A couple years ago one of StatsCan's dailies (about the only thing you can get from them without forking money over, since your taxes aren't enough) discussed immigration in Canada - both internal movement, and external into Canada.
It's worth reviewing what they found. For external immigrants:
Two-thirds (66%) of the newcomers in the census metropolitan area of Toronto, and just over one-half (51%) of the newcomers in Vancouver came from outside the country. In contrast, only 43% in Montréal and 36% in Windsor did so.
If there is a figure in American politics who is my own personal Mephistophles it is Pat Buchannan.
Why? Because I agree with him on a lot of things. A devil whose whispers you think are nonsense, isn't a devil to be feared.
I've had Pat's magazine, The American Conservative, bookmarked since it first started publishing, and a few months ago I coughed up for a subscription (making it the only magazine I have a subscription to), so that I can read the articles which don't make it online.
I promised a while back to write at least an article a day, but today everything I’ve looked at has turned to ashes. I mean – I could talk about Miers, but what is there to say? She’s a crony being put on the Supreme Court because Bush knows he’s going to need friends there. It’s always good to own some judges. Certainly there are economic articles I could and should be writing, but eh, another day.
Instead let’s take a walk into the past.
In 1993 I was 25 years old. I had just returned to university, and I was sick as a dog, with an illness which would later leave me in the hospital for three months and would destroy my health and my ability to even light manual labor for years to come.
(Chart: Canadian Dollar v. US Dollar. Source: Bank of Canada.)
Nothing has the potential to destroy a person, or a country, like windfall wealth. Lottery winners are notorious for not handling their newfound wealth properly and the same principle applies to countries.
See, the problem is that when you have a resource that people really, really want to buy, which you can charge a premium for, your currency appreciates. As it appreciates, it makes exports less competitive. A 10% rise in the dollar, is a 10% cut in profit margins for exporters. They have to either eat that, or they if they don't they'll lose marginal customers. If you're selling something like oil, that people have to have, the difference won't be noticable - you just pass it on and they're happy to still be able to buy your black gold.
If there is a bedrock principle in common law, it is that you are presumed innocent. The Canadian parliament seems to have forgotten that. Yesterday I cheered Martin for his economic policies, but his continued distrust of his own citizens and contempt for their rights is one reason why, despite his excellent record as an economic manager, he won't be getting my vote.
Today, the Commons justice committee is expected to spend all of two hours on a bill to outlaw human trafficking. Soon, after only one or two committee meetings, Parliament will also pass a startling "reverse-onus" bill: If you're convicted of certain crimes, you will have to prove your car, boat, cottage and other assets were obtained with clean money, or the government can confiscate them all. (my emphasis)
What that means is that while the pundits, including myself, are still talking about what to do about NAFTA and trade in the wake of the US's refusal to live up to its NAFTA obligations Paul Martin has cast the die and taken the necessary steps to deal not only with that, but with the coming US economic meltdown.
See - we need to shift our trade away from the US. But we can't.
Your opponent is always wrong, even when he is right.
If he really is right about something, either shut up so he gets no free publicity, or claim responsibility yourself. If you liked Roberts for example, say Bush appointed him because of Democratic pressure and ridicule Bush for being weak. Contempt - "I'm glad the President did the right thing, too bad we had to force him." If you don't like Roberts, don't say anything that's good about him unless its' damning him with faint praise. "It's good that Roberts wasn't scared to release all of his records (beat) only about half of them."
This is puzzling. Standard growth theory says that sustained economic growth is not possible without technical progress. How does Canada do it?
I'll be coming back to this question more than once.
Now, I don't know the answer to this question. But I have some suspicions (leaving aside certain technical quibbles I have with the concept of productivity.)
If I were to look into the question (and, in a roundabout way, I will be), I'd suggest the first thing to do would be to look at the composition of Canada's trade and balance of payments. The second thing to do would be to ask just what sort of economy it is that we do have? Does it make sense to compare Canada with other so-called 1st world countries? If so, which ones and why?
All companies should be required to file two tax returns - one showing how much tax they would pay after only basic expenses, including normal depreciation, and another "real" one.
All medicaid, welfare and disability recipients should list who their employer(s) are and proporational to the percentage of a full work week they work, the amount of government medical care they are given should be noted.
I recently finished reading “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”. It’s a short book, and in many respects a light one. Bakan makes the case that corporations match the profile of human psychopaths. By law a corporation can only consider profit, if its officers do anything else they can be sued – it is their fiduciary duty to act only to maximize shareholder value. If being “good” does that, so be it. If not, then that’s fine too – many corporations make the famous lawsuit calculation – will it cost us less to get sued or fined than it will to do the right thing?
If a corporation does something good for society, and tells you it’s altruistic, if they aren’t lying, they’re breaking the law. It’s not their business to do the right thing – it’s their business to make money and nothing else. If doing the right thing happens to make money, great – but if it doesn’t, doing it breaks their legal duty to their shareholders (note that good will is worth something. There's a reason it's listed as an asset.)
Bakan makes his case well, and he’s on firm ground doing so. The law supports him, and he’s got many luminaries who are happy to tell him he’s right.
A man I respect a great deal once said that there were only about twenty honorable judges in the United States - those who refused to preside over mandatory sentencing cases. There is always one case that outrages the public, because someone they think deserves worse gets a light punishment at the hands of a judge. But there are many, many more where due to mandatory sentencing laws - especially the idiotic three strikes legislation, where someone who has committed a petty crime has been punished with much more than any rational person could consider just (one that comes to mind is someone whose third strike was stealing a bicycle.)
Cookie-cutter one size fits all justice is often touted as fair, because everyone is treated the same way. But fairness in the justice system (if we even dare conceive of such a thing) requires taking individual circumstances into consideration. If someone is a recreational marijuana user that deserves consideration; if it's their first time that deserves consideration; if the killing they are charged with was a mercy killing that deserves consideration, and so on.
The Economist notes that that's below market price, by international standards, but perhaps above market price for Russia - since it's not like Putin can't just take it if he wants to.
I have been told by American observers at the recent OPEC Vienna meeting and other recent meetings in the Gulf that the Iranian delegations at these meetings behaved with great arrrogance toward the Saudis, saying in private that they (Iran) will have Iraq and that the Saudis, and others, should adjust their positions accordingly.
We are going to reap the whirlwind. There are those among us who probably think that will be good. I do not.
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 28 - Many of the business elite of New Orleans seem preoccupied these days by what some here simply call The List - the chosen few Mayor C. Ray Nagin is expected to name on Friday to a high-profile commission to advise him on the rebuilding of the stricken city. Almost certain to make the grade is the real estate mogul Joseph C. Canizaro, the man best known for bringing highrises to the New Orleans skyline.
Mr. Canizaro has emerged as perhaps the single most influential business executive from New Orleans. One fellow business leader calls him the local Donald Trump. But Mr. Canizaro derives his influence far less from a flamboyant style than from his close ties to President Bush as well as to Mr. Nagin, and that combination could make him a pivotal figure in deciding how and where New Orleans will be resurrected.
So let's lay our cards on the line. I'm betting that Roberts is going to vote to overturn the right of privacy, including the right to legal abortions. He will also vote to vastly expand Presidential authority, as long as a Republican president is in charge.
Pierre Trudeau will always be the archetypal Prime Minister to me, even though I hated his guts as a kid. He was an arrogant ass and I felt, and still feel today, that his Canada ended at Thunder Bay. If you were a Westerner you meant nothing to Trudeau.
He was also a very admirable man in very many ways, and his answer to journalists in the FLQ crisis, when asked how far he'd go, "just watch me", as well as his maxims, "the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" and "I'll give you anything you're willing to pay for", are engrained in my political conciousness.
He was an ass, but he played his cards straight and he told it like it was. I can respect that.
Brian Mulroney was a very different man, similiar to Trudeau only in his towering ego.
Some questions you should always ask before legislating a policy. Sections one and two could be expanded significantly, to the point of each needing their own decision matrix and a fair bit of discussion. I may do so in the future if there is sufficient interest.
The Clinton economy of the 90's was the doppleganger of the Bush economy. It existed to solve the same problems that the Busheconomy attempted to solve. It's methods were similiar. The first was labor arbitrage, which was not invented in 2000. Labor arbitrage helped keep inflation under control - the US imported goods from low cost domiciles after shipping the production of those goods there. It paid for the goods with dollars and the rich of those nations promptly shipped those dollars back into the US - and then some.
They did so because the US offered two things - fantastic investment opportunities in the bleeding edge industries of the day; and a stable regime with a strong, indeed usually appreciating, currency. The Asian currency crisis taught everyone who didn't already know, why you didn't want to keep your money at home, even if you thought your economy was pretty strong. The money flooded back into the US but it was largely sterilized because it flowed into the equities and bonds and thus had much less effect on the economy than it would have otherwise (though it certainly had some, as those who lived in San Francisco at the time can attest.) Because it was going into largely paper assets, it didn't generate real world inflation and because it was going into paper assets it didn't generate much in the way of increased energy use. It was also necessary to have assets that foreign investors could buy, because Clinton wanted to work on the federal deficit - so foreign investors had to have some other way to park their money in the US.
David Wilkins is a former politician and recently appointed United States Ambassador to Canada. His public commentary on Canada has provided insight into his government's approach to issues of our sovereignty and the Bush administration's respect for the rule of law.
His government unilaterally ignores a clear ruling from the adjudicator of last resort in NAFTA trade disputes and Wilkins condescends to call us emotional. He suggests starting a third decade of trade negotiations is "the better path to go down." Twenty years of unresolved talks won't prompt most thinking people to get back on the trade negotiation treadmill.
Of course, it's long been true that the IMF's austerity programs were nearly exactly the wrong thing for a country in trouble to follow; especially as mixed up with so-called free market reforms which amounted to dropping import barriers and converting the country to industries which could generate foreign currency, no matter how much damage doing so did to the interal economy. The IMF witch's brew of policy prescriptions weakened countries and devestated indidgenous agriculture and industry in almost every country which followed it.
But what gutted the IMF wasn't so much that Argentina told them to bugger off and got away with it - rather it was that the IMF didn't make a good offer.
Back in 1995 then Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin ordered a Portuguese trawler seized on suspicion of illegal fishing. That seizure vaulted him to prominence, and earned him the nickname Captain Canada, but in the end the ship was returned. Turns out they weren't fishing illegally after all. Oops.
Fishing and the fisheries have long been a contentious issue in Canada - both between Canada and other nations and between Ottawa and the coastal provinces. The British North America Act made fisheries a federal responsibility and ever since then the Feds have underfunded it, generally refused to fight for it, and overall done an abysmal job at it. One of the results of their refusal to take it seriously was the near complete destruction of the Newfoundland cod fisheries - a fishery which will probably never recover.
In an emergency, a distributed piece of information calls for a central response. A disaster, the converse. Those best informed are in the field; those best equipped, in the field. The best disaster response system is the one in your hand when the disaster strikes.
That's good sense. Here's the deal - in an emergency you want central control because you don't want extraneous people getting in the way and possibly doing something stupid that makes it worse.
In a disaster there is too much going on - you can't take full central control because you can't control thousands of simultaneous actions or meet thousands or hundreds of thousands of tiny crises. The human mind can't do it, and neither can any centralized decision making body.
I woke today to the first fallen leaves of autumn. Fall has always been my favourite season. I love the vibrant reds, browns and yellows; the swirl of leaves around my legs on windy days and the slight bitter snap of cold that reminds of winter’s impending arrival. The way people come out on the warm days, determined to make the most of what few good days are left makes me smile and so do those who dress as if it’s warm on colder days – determined to make it summer by sheer will they bare arms and midriffs and legs as if it were high summer. As autumn moves on out will come the sweaters and the light jackets: crisp against the sharper cold and the cutting wind, but not yet the drab of full winter gear with its bulky practicality.
In Heinlein’s “Between Planets” one of the characters notes that his culture is decadent and corrupt, but that it’s his culture and his home and he loves it nonetheless. So it is with me. All my life I’ve read history and historical fiction and biographies and it’s always been very clear to me that I live in the satrapy of great, corrupt and decadent empire: an Empire in its long glorious Autumn.
A book with translations of twenty of Bin Laden's speeches and letters has been published. I haven't read it yet, but I will be doing so, and I urge others to do so as well. Since 9/11 I've read every translation of his writings and speeches I've been able to get a hand on and it's been essential to understanding not only what he's trying to accomplish but why he's trying to do it and how he intends to do it.
It's also been essential to understanding the appeal of Bin Laden and al-Q'aeda. In a very real sense al-Q'aeda is now much less important as an organization than as an idea and an ideal. If bin Laden was killed tomorrow it would have little or no effect on terrorism, I suspect, because at this point he's a symbol more than a day to day leader.
That’s good news, because what the last five years have taught us that there while the Democratic leadership isn’t all we’d like it to be, there is a huge difference between the two parties. It’s not as wide as we’d like it to be (*cough* Iraq War & Patriot Act), but it does exist. So holding your nose and voting Democratic is a smart thing to do. Who the President is, and who the majority party are, make a huge difference. A Democratic president certainly wouldn’t have nominated Roberts, for example, and Clinton didn’t gut FEMA.
So being a partisan Democrat is a good thing. But so is being angry at the Democratic leadership.
Over at the Advocate, by Laurie Smith Anderson. (Copied in full as their server seems to be down). Note the very first two paragraphs. I'd like to know the name of that federal official so that he can tried in criminal court if this is true. And if for some reason stopping someone from giving medical aid to someone who is dying is something that isn't a crime, perhaps it should be made so that the man who was willing to let a woman die to save his job and to stop from being sued, never, ever, works for anyone ever again. Ken Pease, an apologist for what amounts to murder, should be ashamed of himself and never dare give a press conference again. I'm sure he isn't.
In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn't registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In this particular case, we're referring to Prime Minister Paul Martin's warning to oil companies to start lowering gas prices at the pumps as the world price of crude falls.
"The first thing we have to do is to make sure, in fact, as oil prices come down, which I believe they are going to do, it is immediately reflected in prices at the pump," said the PM at a meeting of young Quebec Liberals.
It's going to be a boondoggle for security companies. By which you may feel free to read - mercenaries and strike busting security firms. Blackwater is there, for example. The truth is that there wasn't very much anarchy and what anarchy there was was caused by the lack of relief efforts. The mercs aren't doing much right now, because there still isn't much violence. But there's going to be, because unconnected locals are going to be mostly frozen out of the reconstruction.
What's already happening is that they're bringing in cheap outside labor (in the article linked above, Mexicans from Texas) rather than hiring New Orleans citizens from the various internment camps and shelters. It should be obvious that you would hire New Orleans citizens first, but as in Iraq it isn't happening.
They are the people who never seem to break free of poverty. Neither do their children, nor their grandchildren and their parents were poverty struck as well. They are born to poverty, and it seems like it is their heritage, one they can never shed; a curse unto seven generations.
The problem of the underclass is an old one. Victorian England dealt with it, and so, for that matter, did both Republican and Imperial Rome. It is a death spiral which seems impossible to escape.
Today it is with us as well and the old debates play out as they always have. The poor, it is said, deserve it. If only they had more discipline, if only they didn’t marry young, or do drugs, or have so many children, or have children out of wedlock. If only they stayed in school and got a better education. If only they did things the way the middle and upper classes did, if only, well, they wouldn’t be poor.
A US citizen. Arrested in the US. Held at executive behest. If this decision stands then anyone can be held at the President's order without ever receiving a trial, access to counsel or even without anybody ever knowing.
The only people who can overturn this decision are the Supreme Court justices.
If they don't overturn it, then you no longer live in a country where you are free from completely arbitrary detention. You live in a bannana republic where citizens can be seized arbitrarily at the whim of the government. That is not an exageration in any way, shape, or form.
Beyond pathetic. Not even despicable. Just pathetic.
She is slight and crisply grey suit clad, her hair pinned into a bun and her lip bitten. The office is large, with only one window letting in dusk’s strained light. Three walls are covered with maps and graphs, each pinned neatly in place. In one corner, a muted television changes channels each minute and the final wall is nothing but crisp LCD screens. Some display stock tickers, others charts, still others a blur of words or news tickers. The woman sits cross legged in her chair at the center of this, completely motionless. She is looking in the direction of a series of charts whose titles all relate to housing and credit risk derivatives, but her eyes are unfocused..
When the man says her name, “Libby”, she doesn’t so much as twitch until long seconds have gone by. Slowly, with a shift of her weight, she swivels the chair to face the silver haired man.
In the wake of Katrina this post seems particularly appropriate and has been swung back up to the top.
It’s said that the genius of the American system as created by the founders is that it can survive incompetent, venal or malign office holders. The system includes checks and balances precisely so that the actions of any one or a few individuals can’t capsize it. In this it is superior to either monarchical systems or parliamentary systems (which have less checks – Prime Ministers are often very close to elected dictators).
There’s a fair bit of truth to the statement – or there was.
One law so each person can be ignored or interfered with equally? Naw. The religious law was a good idea. Keeps government out of things it shouldn't be in. The sad thing is that with all the Muslim bashing by both the Right and the shreeking anti-Sharia law advocates, the truth that there is more than one school of Sharia law was bogged down in political bullshit. There is a liberal (modernized, human rights respecting) school of Muslim law, but since the MSM, the Right and the anti-Sharia people don't give a shit about truth, it never came to light.
Now I don't know enough about Islamic religious law to say if there are liberal schools of Sharia. But let's consider what would happen if government decided to allow Sharia.
Since World War II the US has performed a number of economic functions. One of those was to provide the consumer of last resort. America was where you could always export to, the rich consumers who would always buy more.
That's changing. The thirty year gutting of the middle class is finally about to come home to roost. As Hale has relentlessly noted, the last four years have seen wages stagnate with consumer spending fueled by borrowing: both consumer borrowing and borrowing against rising housing values.
"There will be no sharia law in Ontario. There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians."
The only thing wrong with this is is that it took so long. In a civil society there can be no place for religious law, not even as an "option". McGuinty deserves commendation for doing the right thing and for removing all government sanctioned religious arbitration. One law for everyone is indeed the right thing to do.
USA Today has an article on bankruptcies after Katrina. The new bankruptcy law takes effect October 17th. Needless to say, most victims aren’t going to be able to file by then. In fact, according to the article, Hurricane bankruptcies often take years to play out – people will be going bankrupt due to Katrina for some time to come.
What the article doesn’t mention, with it’s bland…
Under the new law, fewer individuals will qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which erases obligations. Many will have to file under Chapter 13, which will require them to pay back some debts.
As everyone knows by now, the three most likely disasters in the US were listed as a terrorist attack on New York (check), a hurricane hit on New Orleans (check) and a major earthquake in California.
What the New Orleans disaster taught is that in a perfectly predictable disaster with advance warning it still took this government days to achieve any measurable amount of relief.
A California disaster is unlikely to have any warning. And days are something that California residents may not have. The problem is simple - drinking water. California doesn't have a lot of natural water (nowhere near enough to supply its huge population) and much of the water is piped in right through the San Andreas fault line. Likewise railway links are vulnerable and the Rockies stand between California and most of the rest of the continental USA.
This is the human consequence of the distribution regime Stirling has discussed at length, which rewards those who control the pipes and a very few producers and ignores almost everyone else.
May Arthur find an angel where he's going, for only a rare grace of human kindness will save him now. And may all of us be spared from ever needing such grace.
So large amounts of a major city on a transportation hub, with a great deal of historical "capital" are effectively destroyed and will have to be bulldozed and rebuilt. Before they were occupied by poor blacks, but there will be an opportunity now to move in, buy then up at fire, er water-sale prices, and build nice houses and offices.. Too bad the poor people won't be able to afford them, but wow, what an opportunity to get into land at low, low prices.
And with the new bankruptcy bill it'll be easy. Wait for 'em to go bankrupt, see that houses aren't exempt anymore and snap 'em up at water-sale prices.
It's the opportunity of a lifetime! Where were you when the New Orleans gold rush was taking place? Why didn't you get rich from "rebuilding New Orleans" for the right sort of people? (The sort of people who can afford your prices.)
Gonna be a lot of people grabbing for pieces of this action. Better get moving.
Gingrich is making sense. He's saying that the governments have a performance problem which has been revealed by the current Katrina disaster. He's right. But he's a flaming hypocrite. You can't have a government which is able to perform at peak capacity and at the same time starve the beast. You can't treat the government as a pork factory and expect it to perform.
Gingrich has been out of power a long time now and he's hoping that he can reinvent himself as an outsider coming in to whip things into shape. He's a smart man and he's seizing the moment. If the Democrats don't watch out he's going to be the one wearing the Reform mantle - not them.
Carpe Diem. The Democratic party had better seize the day on this one or they're going to be outflanked and the party of Reform - reforming their own messes, is going to be Republican. The ticket will have a moderate Republican like Giuliani or McCain at the top and Gingrich will try and lead a new revolution in the House and they will wipe the floor with the Democrats.
The basic reality in Iraq is this: the insurgency knows exactly where US troops are and exactly what they are doing. They don't go on patrol, send out a convoy or make an attack of any significance without the insurgency knowing.
On the other hand the US has almost no idea what the insurgency is doing, who its leaders are, how many men it has or where they are located unless the insurgency decides to let them know.
The Katarina disaster has highlighted what happens when the primary goal of legislators is to use the government as a profit center. The Republican government was elected with a mandate to funnel money to their primary constituents. Here's how they did it.
Tax cuts for the rich were the first and most important method. Bush once noted that his base is the rich; the tax cuts were overwhelmingly aimed at the rich. Those tax cuts left the federal government with record deficits.
Politics is about how people organize themselves for collective action. When you see collective action failing to deal with a crisis, it is a failure of politics and it has to be dealt with polically. Not "politicizing" Katarina and New Orleans means allowing such a thing to happen again.
The most revealing thing about the New Orleans disaster has been the extent to which the government of the US - at all levels - does not trust its own people. Locals on the scene have not been allowed to feed refugees. Locals on the scene with boats were not allowed to try and rescue people. Refugees were not allowed to walk out of the city. Refugees on busses were not allowed to get off the busses prior to their transhipment points (in, say, a city where they knew people who could care for them.) The Red Cross was not allowed in. And so on.
Now there can often be good reasons for not allowed uncoordinated action, if you have enough resources to deal with a problem through centrally coordinated action the help of volunteers can get in the way. But if you don't, what needs to be done is to let volunteers help.
My friend Kevin and I, whenever we try and analyze what will happen in the future under the Bush administration, have three rules.
1) It's worse than you think.
2) No matter how bad a situation is, the Bush administration can make it worse.
3) Even if you take rules 1 and 2 into account, it will still be worse than you think and they will still mess it up in ways you would never have imagined possible.
Go read them. And if you aren't boiling mad at the end of it, you have no heart. People are dying because of the frank complete incompetence of the people in charge of both the run-up to the Hurricane and the pathetic undermanned rescue operations which are turning help back. A lot less people should have died in this - the city was set up to withstand only a category 3 hurricane and it was category 4. Worse than that, it was category 5 during the period when an evacuation should have been carried out.
Cuba deals with this stuff better than the US. Venezuela (who has offered to send a lot of equipment and men) deals with this better.
Let's take a bit of time and run through what's going to happen.
Near Term
Not only are we looking at the oil shock which Hale has been so ably discussing, but there will be a general supply shock, as the Information Clearing House notes (hat tip to Amos Anan). The New Orleans area is the major southern transport hub for the US. Supply shocks will ripple through most consumer goods, hitting major distributors like Walmart (who had a major distribution center there.) Expect shortages in a lot more than just oil, though most of the rest of it will be easier to live with.
Other ports will be called on to take up the slack and should be getting ready for expanded operations. Likewise railroads and trucking companies should expect a lot of extra orders, not just from the reconstruction efforts, but from those who will need to make new arrangements.
Pat Lang's blog is a must read. He has two recent posts on the future of Rumsfeld's army which are particularly important. The first is on the new lighter organization with smaller mobile light infantry formations and less and less organic, armor, air and artillery. Pat generally thinks this isn't too smart, and I'm inclined to think he's right. Don't get me wrong, infantry will always be needed, but as Pat points out, artillery does the killing and armor is needed for a great many maneuvers.. And the A-10 is the perhaps the perfect ground support airplane. The air force isn't as good at close support as they should be and reducing the army's own air support will mean less, worse, air support when grunts need it. Likewise this is an organization set up to fight colonial brushfire wars - it isn't an organization set up to take on a powerful state with a big army.
Pat's second article is on the culture change that will occur - from the current army of smiling family folk, to an army full of soldiers for whom soldiering is more important than family. That's probably a good thing - but as Pat intimates, it may not be an Army that is as photogenic and cuddly as the current one.
What's that old saying? The three most important things in real estate are location, location and location?
Location is about extracting value created by other people. You didn't make land in the center of Manhattan valuable - it's valuable because of all the people and business around that area. Smart money gets to an area before it becomes hot, snaps it up cheap, and sells once it becomes a place everyone wants to be. Even smarter money buys cheap and then make the area into somewhere people want to be.
I just finished reading the Nesbitt Burns Investors Guide to Avian Flu. It's a good report, but the advice to investors is limited (basically, expect a flight to safety such as gold and US treasuries and keep money on the side to buy up distressed properties after the pandemic). They do a very good job of detailing the history of flu pandemics, the current state of preparedness and the likely consequences. (They're essentially the same as the ones I discuss in my essay in the FluWiki, but Sherry Cooper and Donald Coxe run through them in much more detail and style.)
As I understand it, inflicting pain on an unresisting, restrained person is called torture. If the police officer thinks the woman somehow deserves the pain then he is aggrogating to himself the right of punishment, which is not his function. The other possibility is that he did it because he found it enjoyable, in which case the proper name is sadism. No matter what the reason it appears that he shouldn't be in a job where his personal weaknesses have such scope for play.
In the early days of the American occupation of Iraq I warned, emphatically and at length, that a vacuum had been created, that the US army was not filling it, and that other forces would do so. Today I read that it has become so obvious that even the Washington Post is reporting on it:
While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.
For most of this year, the story in Canadian politics has been the Conservative party meltdown. Handed a government in power involved in the largest corruption scandal in modern Canadian history they have not only not been able to take advantage, but in many provinces have had their support sink.
This is a story I've told elewhere, but basically it's because of their opposition to gay marriage. It's not so much that they're opposed to gay marriage, depending on how the question is asked, about 50% of Canadians are, and in a mulit-party nation that's not bad if you're the only party on one side of an issue. It's that they chose to make it their signature issue.
This article from the Washington Post (via the Bump), got me to thinking. It basically says that Democratic Senators aren't willing to expend political capital fighting Roberts.
At first I was going to write an article talking about how it would increase their capital, not decrease it. But as I thought about it I realized that they meant something different by political capital than I did.
But what may not be so fair is the way the scores are being used today. Many of the nation's leading insurance companies use the scores to set premiums for motorists and homeowners. Lower scores translate to higher bills. Employers use credit scores to make hiring decisions. What started as a simple number is fast becoming a scarlet letter that threatens to brand some Americans as losers.
The post-Hackett argument for funding challengers in every race is a well-intentioned, but not really convincing, bit of political strategy. Democrats have X dollars, to fund a challenger everywhere in the country will, unless we have some sort of federal finance reform, bankrupt the party and suck much-needed cash from close districts in order to fund longshot challenges in preordained races. Hackett was a hell of a test, but a candidate like him contesting an open seat during a special election simply creates a different dynamic than a local DA attacking a popular incumbent in an on-year. Most seats are not open. Most candidates are not Hackett. And most races don't get a news vacuum to fill.
Funding a race doesn't mean matching dollar for dollar what Republicans spend. It does mean you run in every single riding and that you make sure the candidate has enough money for a credible run. That money does not have to come from any one source - part of the job of local candidates is to raise some of their own money after all.
The conversation to Ezra's post on how there are all sorts of ways to win and populism is probably only one of them and that Sirota should sit down and STFU is... hilarious. Whether you agree with Sirota on populism or not, a party that can't even stay together to vote against something like the bankruptcy bill is simply not a party that is useful to working or middle class Americans. Being the lesser of two evils doen't cut it. And yeah, absolutely, people who can't be trusted to vote against things like the bankruptcy bill need to face well funded vicious nomination fights until they learn what side they're on or they get kicked out of the party.
I want to talk a bit about management measurement. I’ve spent a number of years now in a good sized multinational, and I’ve watched management trying to gain control through measurement. And mostly I’ve watched as they’ve gained the wrong sort of control; as they’ve crystallized behaviour in ways that loses more from employees than they gain.
When you’re dealing with small numbers of people, simple measurements are all you need, and indeed the time spent measuring can be a simple waste of time. For larger groups, and as management becomes disassociated from the actual work of the organization, measuring is necessary so that management knows what is happening and can modify it. The old saying (which I’m sick of) is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a statement with a lot of truth to it, but so is this – “you manage what you measure, so you’d better be sure you’re measuring what you want to manage.”
Interests in Common: How to think about Rural America
by Ian Welsh
In comments to my article about how America's rural population is a group Democrats can pick up, J Thomas repeatedly noted that although the rural population is around 20%, the number of farmers in the US is about 3% of the population. The implication is that doing well by farmers isn't going to do much for Democrats, since there are so few of them.
Non subsistence farmers (and there are very few subsistence farmers in the US) belong to the group of people who bring money into communities. Many rural communities exist to serve farmers. If the farmers go, so goes the community. Thus what is good for farmers, is good for the community. What is good for that 3% cascades beyond that three percent.
Just after the 2004 election loss, I spent a weekend in New York at the "Morning After" conference. It was great fun, I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot.
But one of the things I remember best about it is that I kept trying to suggest that the real way to make progress for the Democrats was to target rural America.
The Emery extradition attempt, which I discussed in the post "On Bended Knee" is continuing to cause controversy in Canada. Jay Currie (a conservative blogger) has gotten behind Pogge's proposal to extradite Fred Phelps. After all, he's a hate criminal under our laws, and we have an extradition treaty with the US.
Jay's also put out a very clean explanation of what's at stake in this issue, and I'm going to take the liberty to quote his entire comment:
...there is not much question that the American War on Drugs is politically motivated. And, as it is also failing to make any dent at all in American drug use, the ante is being upped regularily.
Today Canadian Citizen Mark Emery was arrested for selling marijuana seeds to Americans by mail-order. He was seized in Halifax, while his offices in Vancouver were raided simultaneously. Both the US DEA and Canadian police were involved in what was apparenly the end of an 18 month investigation. Emery has sold the seeds for years, under his own name, and is the head of the B.C. Marijuana party – what he’s been doing is not a secret. If extradited he will almost certainly receive life in US jail
Most cities are beautiful at night. The light from buildings and street lamps leaves the world a wash of grey and blue, the glass towers rise out of the darkness in spires of glimmering white light and on the street the world is shadow and gossamer, the hard rasp of ugly concrete fading into the glamour of the hours before dawn.
The man is slim and silvering, the motion of his stride across the quadrangle is that of a ghost; a swirl of long grey coat without the rise and fall of normal walking. He moves from darkness around a corner into soft light, the patio of a café in the long night, guttered candles and the sputtering back light of a neon sign. A few dark figures nurse bottles while a ghost grey waitress threads between them.
The man raises a finger to her and as he settles in a corner chair a brown bottle is placed in his hands. He cracks it open and sips as across the table the heavy man leans forward into the light, a huge face, broken and bloodshot looming out of the darkness.
Gilliard's on it, and Joe has tried to intimidate him off the story, without any sucess.
But what I found interesting was all the people in Gilliard's comments who said, in effect - we shouldn't do this: BDSM is legal and none of our business. The rebuttal to that is simply that hypocrisy is always a fair target in politics - Schmidt's a "family values" candidate and as such what her campaign manager does is fair game if it stands against his candidate's beliefs - which it appears to. (Although she's welcome to prove us wrong by coming out with a statement that BDSM is normal and no big deal.)
But the comment I liked best was about politeness. Still Working It Out wrote:
Via Melanie at Bump I see that the hagiography of Roberts wife is spinning up to 1,000 rpm's a second. Crispin Sartwell spends a lot of time saying how wonderful it is that Jane Roberts is a feminist, and how swell it is that feminism is such a big tent that it can include people who are anti abortion.
This is part of a two pronged attack. The first is the idea that Jane's views are irrelevant - she's only the man's wife and husband and wife can disagree on issues. Right?
A couple friends of mine have worked at the highest levels of the Canadian government. Both of them told me, that no question, the actual rulers of Canada are the Deputy Ministers of the various Canadian federal ministries. Not the Prime Minister. Not the Ministers. Not Parliament.
Now the US is different from Canada in that a larger number of people in the bureaucracy are appointed by the President. Each new President has more reach into the administrative apparatus of government that the Prime Minister does.
Corrente's been on our blogroll for as long as I've been with BOP. But, for some reason, I just never clicked through until recently. Now, however, Corrente's become a daily read. They have had probably the best coverage of Roberts I've seen (not the most comprehensive, but the coverage that tells you what you actually need to know) and in general seem to have what can only be called good news judgement - they hit the stories that should be talked about and tell you what you need to know about them.
Diane Feinstein: Let's just wave Roberts through, what a fine man!
by Ian Welsh
It always warms the cockles of my heart to see Democratic senators who do the Republicans work for them. From an AP story...
And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the memos, which require Roberts to argue the position of the administration, aren't likely to be very important "unless it relates to confirming something that becomes a major question."...
Laura Miller at Salon has up what amounts to a review of Pape's "Dying to Win", the book Pape wrote on suicide bombers. She's got some good points and some bad ones but there is one in particular I feel a need to deal with.
Pape insists that the rationality of a terrorist's grievance is irrelevant; if bin Laden believes that the U.S. is running Saudi Arabia, that makes his agenda one of national liberation, not religious animosity.
"We have to win about 60 percent of the moderates to break even," he said. "There has never been a time when there were more liberals than conservatives in the electorate."
Y'know, as Conason pointed out, the majority of American are pro-choice. The majority of Americans want universal health care. The majority of Americans support Social Security - a very liberal program. A plurality think that the rich don't pay enough taxes. The majority prefer spending to tax cuts. They support environment regulation. They support increasing the minimum wage.
Americans don't call themselves liberal, because years of propaganda from the right wing have made liberal a dirty word. But they support almost every major liberal policy.
The AP has an article out where a bunch of people, including our favourite right wing Senator, Hilary, argue for more cameras to prevent terrorism.
Let's be real clear about this - London has one of the most extensive camera networks in existence, and it didn't stop shit.
How exactly do they think cameras would stop anything anyway? Do they think it's some Warner Brothers(tm) cartoon, with someone walking onto the train or bus carrying a big cartoon bomb?
People are very strange in very many different ways. To me what is strangest about people is how many of them cannot see what is completely obvious. Let's take the Afghani elections. Some parties weren't allowed to run. More votes were cast than the entire population of the country, US money was funneled to certain parties, we had reliable reports that registration cards were for sale, we know that bribed power brokers controlled voter registration. So, when the election monitors came back and reported that the election had been free, everyone smiled and patted themselves on their idiot backs. But, of course, even assuming they were right that no ballot boxes had been stuffed in the few ridings they were in, the election was as free as any other election where a foreign power determines what parties are allowed to run, where more people vote than are alive and where regional bosses determine who votes.
Just to highlight what an Orwellian witch's brew the Patriot Act has turned into, consider that while the Cheney administration claims Section 215 has never been used to search or seize library records, a 2002 survey of librarians found that almost half of them reported being visited by federal or local law enforcement agents demanding access to patron records.
Melanie at the Flu Wiki asked me to write a starter article on the economic consequences of a pandemic. It's here below, but it's also here at the Wiki, and I encourage you to head to the Wiki, read it in general, and if have anything to add or change to this article (or any other where you know enough) to do so.
When I was approached to write about the economics of a flu pandemic, my first reaction was “what’s there to write about?” Because in the normal terms that people consider personal economics, such as how to diversify your portfolio, and so on, there isn’t a lot to talk about. Most of the obvious losers (medical insurance companies, hospitals, airlines, freight companies) and so on will either be bailed out by the government afterwards or aren’t quite as obvious losers as they seem. There is, perhaps, an argument for investing in drug companies and medical supply companies, on the assumption of an increase in demand, not so much during the pandemic, but after it. However even that sort of play is dubious, because the reaction to how the system performs in any pandemic situation may not rebound to the benefit of private companies.
But economics isn’t really about the stock market, it’s about how rare assets are allocated. And as such there’s a fair bit we can talk about when it comes to a pandemic.
There tends to be a lot of cynicism towards government. Government often does things we don’t agree with. It often forces us to do thing we don’t want to do, or doesn’t allow us to do things we want to do. It taxes us, it sends us to war and it often seems more remote than the stars, yet right in our face.
Yet of all the major institutions in society, government’s the only one that belongs to everyone. It’s the only one that, at least theoretically, exists to look after all our interests. Churches look after their parishioners, and perhaps a few poor people. Corporations look out after their owners and senior executives, and in most cases, no one else. Most hospitals are trying to make a buck these days, and so are most doctors – if you can’t pay, kiss your ass goodbye unless it’s just been shot off.
No, you’re on your own. Maybe your family or friends will try and help you, if they can. But otherwise most people can’t count on any powerful interests to look out for theirs on a regular basis. Those interests don’t exist to help normal people. Their job is to enrich the already well off and to make them more powerful. It certainly isn’t to make sure that regular people are healthier, live longer, make more money or have better lives in any way.
But here’s the deal. Of all the powers in your society, if you live in a democracy, only one is meant to try and help everyone. Only one was set up to do so.
Ian Welsh: "Time to find out if Congressional Dems still remember how to fight a war!" Prove me wrong. Fight!
Make Bork a footnote to Roberts. Bury Roberts so deep that Constitution in Exile archeologists are still hunting for his judicial bones a hundred years from now.
The nominee is John G. Roberts of the DC Circuit. As assistant solicitor general, he held that Roe was wrongly decided, and as appellate judge, his first opinion questioned the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act.
Now we find out if that piece of paper, with its weasel words, signed by the 14, was worth anything. The 14 can end John G. Roberts tomorrow, with one announcemnt. By doing so, they'd send a powerful message that they meant what they said, they're willing to back it up - and that the "moderates" now control the Senate. Fail to break this up and they will show that their deal was nothing but a pre-surrender.
I have my suspicions which it was and which it'll be. I hope to hell I'm wrong and that I'll be eating crow.
I surprised myself the other night while talking to a friend. I said, "they've done a couple smart things in Iraq". One of the first articles I wrote was an article about the things the US has done wrong in Iraq (shorter article: almost everything) but since then they managed to do two things right.
In a sense neither of those things are smart, they're blindingly obvious, and both of them are half-smart, with significant downsides. But given the administration's proven ability to botch even the obvious these actions are worthy of, if not exactly praise, then acknowledgement.
The press is allowed to keep the names of sources confidential because it is in the public interest to have the information which the press can get only from confidential sources.
It was not in the public interest to know that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. You are in no sense safer because you know, you are quite likely less safe now that you know.
One common reaction since 7/7, 9/11 and M11 has been the "kill em all, let God sort'em out" school. Bin Laden had something to say about that, though not directly...
I love DC Media Girl. Read her every day. And this isn't really about what she said, because she's only one of many who say some version of it, but I think it's time to deal with it.
On another note, I’ve noticed a distressing tendency among commenters here and around the blogosphere to encourage me to try to "understand" the "causes" of terrorism; to be more sympathetic to what may have motivated "desperate" people to set off explosions and kill innocent civilians riding London’s public transportation.
Big Three Automakers: Profit Margin? We don't need no stinkin' Profit Margin
by Ian Welsh
From the Economist business update e-mail:
General Motors said sales of new cars and trucks in the United States rose by 41% in June, compared with the same month in 2004. The increase is a response to marketing that offers buyers the same discounts that GM employees receive. GM said it would extend the plan until August. Chrysler and Ford promptly announced similar schemes.
I discussed the rather dubious "we're a finance company" nature of the Big Three's business model earlier...
Let's run through the logic of supporting a public policy.
Let's say you've got a ball team in your town, that is in danger of being bought out and moved to another town. Some locals get together and start raising money to keep it in your city. They come to you and say, 'do you support keeping the team here?"
You reply, "sure."
They say, "great, how much can you give!"
You say, "nothing".
They can be forgiven for thinking your support isn't worth much.
"Putting up vs. shutting up - Don Sensing shuts noted Chickenshit™ Hatrios (Duncan Black) up with a few pertinent questions: "My son is a lance corporal in the US Marine Corps. He will deploy to Iraq in two months. I myself am a retired US Army artillery officer. Do you, Mr. Black, agree that you are kept free and safe only because my son and others like him are risking their lives on your behalf? What gives you the justification to speak against the war? Why should non-serving supporters be silent while non-serving critics be heard? Do you agree that no one except veterans and presently-serving military members should ever decide when the nation shall go to war, and why?"(my emphasis)
Well, Duncan can speak for himself, but let me give you an answer as someone you'd probably consider "like him". No, I don't. Because, you see, I think that the war in Iraq made things less safe, not more. Your son is risking his life for an optional war, sold on the basis of lies, which has made the world and Americans specifically, less safe, both at home and overseas.
But even if they can show that the nominee has sharply held views on matters that divide many Americans, some of the 14 senators who crafted the May 23 compromise appear poised to prevent that strategy from blocking confirmation to the high court, according to numerous interviews.
History, they say, does not repeat – but it does echo. Looking back at other situations, other republics and empires, one is tempted to draw parallels between then and now. Here at BOP the one we draw most often is probably the end of the British Empire.
The least we must do is look upon the results of our actions and of those who act in our names. Cathie has up some pictures. Go see the rest. You'll wish you hadn't, as I do, but it is still something you must do.
Today is Canada Day. I'm working it, because I deal with US clients and it isn't an American holiday. Something about that feels vaguely ironic and symbolic of the entire US/Canada relationship.
One way of analyzing federal politics, and Canadian politics as a whole is along two axes. The first is centralizing/decentralizing. The Canadian provinces are extraordinarily powerful - much more so than the US States, and have control over huge swathes of legislative territory. But, with the sole exception of Alberta (and arguably Ontario), they don't have the cash to back up their theoretical power. Clyde Wells, when he was Premier of Newfoundland, once famously said something very close to, "I don't need more power, I need more money. I have plenty of power."
I am not sure what the "behavioral" exchange rate measures in the context of a country whose government is spending more than 10% of its GDP to manage its exchange rate.... We all know that they have fixed their exchange rate to the dollar, and have spent huge sums -- over $150 b in 2003, over $200 b in 2004, and probably over $250 b in 2005 -- to keep that peg....
Yeah, that's a free market.
Please, the next time someone tries to argue that currency markets over the last few years have been anything even approximating free, I am going to hit them with the rhetorical equivalent of a louisville slugger.
The last couple years of Canadian politics have been interesting times. It's been fairly clear that a political realignment was possible, and possibly occuring, but it wasn't clear exactly what that realignment would be. Through most of the 90's Canada was effectively a one party state, with the right wing split, the NDP lost in PC space and the Liberals occupying the new left space of corporate tax cuts, slow US integration, moderate social policy and downloading responsibility onto lower levels of government.
Two things changed that - the huge corruption scandal known as Adscam and the merger of the two right wing parties into one - the Canadian Conservative party.
Parliament has passed a bill allowing same sex marriage in Canada. All citizens are now being treated equally before the law. While there are political reasons that this occured, Paul Martin, Giles Duceppe and Jack Layton, and all MPs who voted for this bill, deserve praise and credit for doing the right thing, and, in the case of Paul Martin, for understanding that his public duties are different from his private beliefs.
And for those wrapping themselves in a religious cloak to disguise their bigotry; to those declaring they will target MPs who voted for same sex marriage; please. Please do. Nothing makes me happier than bigots outing themselves. Please rant on about how much you hate homosexuals.
Be sure that I'll be there, watching and listening. Be sure that I'll take the time to make sure that people know what you are and understand that you consider denying Canadians rights more important than anything else government does - that bigotry is your job number one.
Oddly, a somewhat interesting discussion on healthcare has occured in the comments, so I reccomend taking the time to click and read.
In my youth I played many war games. I don’t claim it taught me a great deal about the military, but it did teach me a few things, the most important of which was this: you have to always remember what your victory conditions are.
People get caught up in how many enemies they’re killing, or how much territory they control, or how rich they are or how much people like them. None of those things are bad, but they’re means to an end, not ends to themselves.
That’s why I’ve always said the US didn’t win the Afghani war.
That's the question every Democrat should be asking. Where is Osama Bin Laden? The response to this bullshit from Karl Rove et al isn't outrage, it's mockery. The Bush gang should be likened to the Keystone cops - the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
Seriously - smile. Mock them. Be derisive. Be contemptuous. Laugh at them. Laughter destroys people. Nothing annhialates a pol faster than people taking them as worth nothing but laughter.
It's not like it's hard - I mean this is the bunch of losers who invaded the WRONG COUNTRY and found nothing....
The United Airlines bankruptcy ruling, where United was allowed to dump its defined pension plan onto the government after deliberately underfunding it for years, has brought the question of corporate provided pension funds to the fore. Simply put, a great number of them are underfunded, and a great number of pension plans are probably insolvent.
Via Brad DeLong I recently came across this gem from Buttonwood (as she continues to exemplify the Economist's long slide from usefulness):
In my high school the teachers were called Mister, or, for the few women, Miss or Mrs., it being the days before Ms. became the norm. There are three main Misters who stand out; Mr. Newell, my running coach; Mr. Skinner, who taught history, economics and law; and, reigning over two solid years, Mr. Fraser.
Mr. Fraser was big, bearded, and probably gay, though it wasn’t till years later that I realized that. He taught English to every grade ten student, and if anyone graduated actually able to write it was because of him.
I met him first as at the boarding house, where he was one of the Masters. He was excessively fond of punishing infractions by hard exercise, executed on the spot. We lived in terror of being late to curfew, for example, because the standard punishment was push-ups equal to the number of minutes you were late, squared. It’s thanks to Mr. Fraser that I can say, for a fact, that in my teen years I could do over a hundred push ups. I’ve never been good at being on time for things I don’t want to do.
Do you actually believe that by my having the ability to purchase a higher level of service, I am somehow taking services away from someone else? "
Yes, actually Colino, if you are using a service then someone else can't be. You have skipped your place in the line by paying for it and since your doctor/nurse/surgeon can't be treating someone else at the same time as they are treating you, then you are making someone else wait longer by paying for service. The only way you can argue this is not the case is if you believe that because you are paying more you are receiving services that wouldn't have existed at a lower pay schedule. But that's an arguable assertion, because Canada doesn't have excess medical capacity - the best you can argue is that with for profit health care over time, because the price paid is higher, more supply will come on line.
But, in fact, that's dubious. Because the bottleneck's are of two types.
Via Majikthise I came across this list, from Refuge - a Christian program which attempts to re-program gays. It's really worth a read, and it's sparked some protests and actions (as it should.) But what's really interesting to me is what they're doing - or how they're doing it. They're essentially the same psychological tricks that cults use, that are used to brainwash people and that psychological interrogators use to make captives who are hostile to them eventually come to identify with their captors. For example:
1. All new Refuge clients will be placed into Safekeeping for the initial two to three days of their program. A client on safekeeping may not communicate verbally, or by using hand gestures or eye contact, with any other clients, staff members, or his/her parents or guardians. In case of a practical need, Safekeeping clients may write down their question or request and show it to another client, staff member, or their parent or guardian. Writing may only be used when absolutely necessary. Parents and guardians must enforce their child¹s safekeeping status at home or in their temporary lodging.
The news that Pat O'Brien has quit the Liberal caucus over gay marriage leaves me in a fey mood. I think it's a good thing. I hope he brings down the government over it. I want him to make a long speech about how he thought stopping gay marriage was worth bringing the government down.
And I hope the Conservative party stalwarts get right in there about how they're willing to bring the government down over their bigotry. Corruption and denying gays rights. That's the Conservative platform - if not the official one, then the one they're effectively running on.
I don’t remember arriving at my Grandmother’s for the first time. By counting down the years I know I was about five years old at the time, a tiny blond child with cornflower blue eyes. My Grandmother lived in a house on the shore. From the living room on the second floor one could look down past the sea wall, a concrete walkway about the height of a man, to the beach. It was white sand with a scattering of driftwood, framed to the east and west by black rocks glistening with seaweed, scrapey with barnacles and clusters of mussels, gleaming wet and hot rock dry. Those rocks were to become one of my favourite places. For a five year old child they were the perfect playground. The barnacles and the height made them seem dangerous and their secret valleys contained odd creatures left by the retreating tide: crabs, molluscs, strange eel like creatures, and tiny fish darting through pools of water cradled by stone.
""The gap risks widening, so that the danger of an adjustment crisis is growing bigger,'' Stern quoted the Finance Ministry document as saying. Germany's lower house of parliament has commissioned a legal opinion on a possible reversal of EMU and the right of one of its members to leave the currency, Stern said.
The introduction of the euro has cost Germany its former advantage of lower financing costs, which partially explains why it's lagging behind the other euro members, the ministry said in the report, according to Stern."
No really. They aren’t – they sell loans. Back in the nineties they realized that they could make more money from the loan payments on cars than on the cars themselves. They became finance companies. Oh sure, they lend you money to buy a car – but it’s the loan they make their money from.
Or rather it was the loan they made their money from. Because post 9/11 they slashed the rates they charged for financing to virtually nothing. I predicted at the time that doing so was going to cause a trainwreck – and so it has, with GM bonds now listed as junk bonds. Big Three bonds – junkbonds!
It’s the old story – you’ve got to know what business your in. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to remember what business you’re in, but in fact people forget all the time...
A little while ago Bernanke said something that had me scratching my head. He said that the problem that is causing the US twin deficits is that there’s too much savings in the world.
I first read it at DeLong’s site, and I literally had to ask other commenters what the hell he was trying to say. Because it didn’t make any sense on the face of it.
I didn’t quite get an answer that pleased me, but I’ve come to see that Bernanke had his hand on a part of the problem, but like a narrow little technocrat missed the real point entirely.
Is there a global savings glut? Well, yes and no. Is it causing the US twin deficits? Mostly no, with some caveats…
It is the moment when the storm driven tidal waters smash against the sea wall. In the Vatican, the papal fist clenches down upon unrest, forcing the greatest of the rebellious orders, the Soldiers of Christ, the Jesuits, to acknowledge that God's Vicar in this world is a despot whose word is God's word and to be obeyed as one would obey God.
I haven't written much about the filibuster because everyone else is, and they're doing a fine job. I do want to emphasize something, though - this is a precursor, a necessary precondtion, to the real work of creating Rove's Republic. It's not an accident that we've been hearing all this squealing about judigical activism from the right - they know that judges are the last group who will be able to derail the changes they want to make to the Constitution.
Yeah, that's right. The Constitution. The Constitution isn't just the document, or the amendments to it - it's really the interpretations of what they mean. The Republicans know, for all they deny it, that the Constitution is and always has been a living document - it means what people think it means and there are a lot of different ways you can read those venerable words. Having been on the losing side of a lot of those readings they are determined to make sure the next set will go their way.
So - they end the judicial filibuster, stack the federal courts and do what FDR only threatened to do - stack the Supreme Court. Then they pass a bunch of laws which can't be filibustered (because the nuclear option once used is always there and is the end of the filibuster no matter how much people whinge that it's just for judicial nominations). Those laws are unconstitional by current understandings of the Constitution. They work their way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court comes up with a rationale for why they are Constitutional.
So, a term that seems to be going around in some businesses is "peak performance" - by which they mean that employees should be working right at the edge of their ability to handle the workload at all time. Or at least, that's the way it's being sold to people in the trenches - perhaps it's a vulgar distillation of some business guru's book.
But, y'know, at one time I was a serious distance runner. Not a very good one, but I was on the school team and I trained seriously and I knew and trained with a couple guys who were national calibre. So let's talk about peak performance.
Andrew Spicer's got up a nice article on some of the things Canadian Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper wants to do. But, and Andrew's on my "must read" list, I think Andrew misses the point of a lot of it.
Let's start with this (Andrew's comments are in italics)
A ban on non-confidence motions except on budgets or if campaign pledges are broken -- I suppose this is meant for minority governments, but it is very weird. First, it would eliminate some of the tactics that Harper is using now. More oddly, it would seem to elevate a minority government to near-majorty status. After all, the government would be able to introduce anything they had promised in the campaign and demand it be passed
It's not about minority governments. It's about breaking the power of the Prime Minister. Remember when Martin had taken control of the Liberal caucus and Chretien brought them back in line by making bills confidence motions? Harper and the Reform crowd have always wanted a weaker federal government with much stronger MP's and thus stronger regional representation. Breaking the "Prime Minister is dictator" role is absolutely necessary to this.
Was the motto of my high school. I hated the place, but it left its' marks on me and one of them was those words. They mean you do what's right - not just when it's easy, but when you're frightened of what will happen if you do or when when doing so will harm those you care about or even your own interests.
Imagine two rape victims taken to the same hospital emergency room. Imagine them put in adjoining examination rooms.
Let's say they have identical injuries.
Presume everything about them is the same except for where they are in their menstrual cycles.
Do they deserve access to the same medical treatment?
At most Catholic hospitals in Colorado, they can't get it.
The protocol of six Catholic hospitals run by Centura calls for rape victims to undergo an ovulation test.
If they have not ovulated, said Centura corporate spokeswoman Dana Berry, doctors tell the victims about emergency contraception and write prescriptions for it if the patient asks.
If, however, the urine test suggests that a rape victim has ovulated, Berry continued, doctors at Centura's Catholic hospitals are not to mention emergency contraception. That means the victim can end up pregnant by her rapist.
Really - what can you say about something this morally depraved?
Does anyone really believe only the lowest ranked people in Abu Ghraib were responsible for what happened there? We all know it's not the case. We all know it flows right from the top - that the decision to "do whatever it takes" was ok'd by the President. Oh, I'm sure there was never an explicit order to have them bitten by dogs, or rape children while their mothers watched. Just as I'm sure that most wardens in US prisons maintain plausible deniability about the use of rape to punish and reward inmates.
BIDEN: I`m against the 100 hours because it is not enough for debate. If the Senate wants to block extreme -- even if they`re not extreme. If 40 senators want to block anybody for nomination, they have the right to do that. And the reason they have the right to do that, it`s the one bulwark against pure majoritarianism . . .
BIDEN: In their heart, they know this is not the thing to do. This is a fundamental change in our constitutional system that exceeds the issue of judges. And it is dangerous. We are not a parliament. We were never intended to be. The states were intended to be equal. This will change that dynamic, not just for judges, but across the board.
During the last primary season, I spent a fair bit of time bashing Edwards on the Patriot Act - and his willingness to defend his vote for it. Sure, almost everyone got stampeded into it, but not everyone defended it years later. Edwards did.
So Edwards came with a fair bit of baggage for me even though, like most everyone else, I liked his "Two Americas" speach, and even though I tend to agree with him on economic issues.
But Edwards is looking more and more appealing to me, and as one who was never swept deep into either of the competing internet camps of Clark/Dean, he's seeming even more attractive lately.
Joe Mason's one of my favourite commenters. Today, over at BlogsCanada, he said the following:
(Note: for the same reason I give above, I'm not too scared of the Conservatives. I believe that Harper, as has been extensively quoted this week, has beliefs that are deeply offensive to my vision of Canada and if he were to be elected on such a platform it would be awful. But I don't think he'll act on those beliefs because his top priority right now is to make the Conservative party viable, which means moderate, and if he starts acting highly right-wing once he's in office he'd scuttle the party again. Who cares what he believes, as long as he does the right thing?)
Note: not believing people who have spent their entire lives as ideologues agitating for specific policies will actually carry them through once in power is... unwise.
I want to comment on Oldman's post on China. Oldman thinks that the US wants to fix things by putting China through a period of much slower economic growth - or an outright recession.
Let's lay this out - political tension in China is high. Entire provinces simmer on the edge of violence. The implicit deal in China is, as Stirling has pointed out - economic growth instead of political freedom. What this means is very simple. If there isn't growth, or there is an outright recession, the Chinese leadership is at risk.
The venerable magazine, continuing its' descent into a rag, shills for flat tax:
Practical types who said that flat taxes cannot work offer a further instant objection, once they are shown such taxes working—namely, that they are unfair. Enlightened countries, it is argued, have “progressive” tax systems, requiring the rich to forfeit a bigger share of their incomes in tax than the poor are called upon to pay. A flat tax seems to rule this out in principle.
Not so. A flat tax on personal incomes combines a threshold (that is, an exempt amount) with a single rate of tax on all income above it. The progressivity of such a system can be varied within wide limits using just these two variables. Under systems such as America's, or those operating in most of western Europe, the incentives for the rich to avoid tax (legally or otherwise) are enormous; and the opportunities to do so, which arise from the very complexity of the codes, are commensurately large. So it is unsurprising to discover, as experience suggests, that the rich usually pay about as much tax under a flat-tax regime as they do under an orthodox code.
Well, it all depends who you call rich, doesn't it?
So the US House has repealed the "Death" tax. Or, as I like to call it, the Lucky Sperm Tax. Let's face facts, no one likes being taxed but there is no fairer tax than the Estate Tax.
Why? Let's think this through.
Q. Who earned the Money?
A. The Dead Person.
Q. If you're dead, do you need Money?
A. Last Time I checked, you can't take it with you.
Let's talk about how you wreck your economy. You're a third world country with an economy that doesn't do much of anything, where the majority of agriculture is either subsistence agriculture or growing goods for local consumption. Perhaps you produce a surplus of food sufficient that you can sell it to other local countries. Your agriculture is inefficient by Western standards, it uses a lot of people, few artificial fertilizers and very few machines. It's not, in other words, a machine energy intensive industry. Or, put another way - it's not oil intensive. Nobody's making much money selling these people machines, fertilizers, seed, advice or loans - although there are local providers and middlemen who do make a living doing providing services and goods.
But you've got a desire, or maybe a problem. You want hard currency. Now maybe you want it for the things it, and only it, can buy - industrial machinery, western know how, expensive swiss holidays, tanks and planes. Or maybe you want it becuase you borrowed money to build dams and roads and airports and contrary to the advice of western experts your economy didn't bloom and you can't make the payments and the IMF is breathing down your neck.
US/Canada Trade: Mutual Borders, or ending the special relationship
by Ian Welsh
This article from the Windsor Star (Windsor is on the US border and is a major crossing site between Canada and the US) is a must read.
First, the U.S. government announced Tuesday it will require anyone entering the United States by land from Canada or Mexico to flash a passport by Dec. 31, 2007. The same rules will take effect at air and seaports a year earlier. That means Canadians and Americans who currently cross the border with only a driver's license or birth certificate will have to obtain a passport or a NEXUS or FAST pass. Ottawa has indicated it will reciprocate. (Ed. Note. US citizens will also not be able to return to the US if they lose their passport.)
Second, it has been confirmed U.S. Homeland Security will install a mammoth gamma ray inspection device for freight trains in Windsor by summer's end. Called the VACIS system, it will force the premature closure of Walker Road near Grand Marais (the intersection would have been closed eventually anyway to construct a long-awaited underpass) and virtually slow traffic to a standstill on Howard Avenue at the crossing near Ypres Boulevard. Freight trains will have to crawl through the X-ray machine at eight to 10 km/h instead of their usual speeds of up to 50 km/h -- that means trains which normally take five minutes to cross Howard could take as long as 20 minutes.
The Blogging of the Prime Minister: To Have or Have Not
by Ian Welsh
I want to discuss something Western Redneck said the comments to this post:
It may be time for Ontario to get over it's fear of letting another region of Canada call the shots for a while.
It's very easy to see why Quebec has been disgruntled over the last number of decades. The same unrest is starting invade other regions of Canada.
The last thing I want to see is any part of Canada to leave but when you continually have no say in the running of your country, people naturally start to look for other options. (The Republic of Alberta has a nice ring once you get used to it.)
I'm not quite sure why people think Ontario (or Toronto) call the shots in ways that harm the rest of the country. Honestly. Both Ontario and Toronto give more money to Canada than they get back. They aren't net recipients of cash from the federal government, and in the case of Toronto the drain is so severe that I worry it'll kill the engine of economic growth there. Nor does Ontario get a lot of Federal pork - that goes to Quebec and the Maritimes much more than to Ontario.
The sponsorship scandal in Canada has been going on for some time. It was arguably the key issue in the last election and cost the Liberal party their majority. It has recently boiled over again with the imposition of a publication ban by Justice Gomery, the judge in charge of the hearings. The publication ban has been "broken" by Captain's Quarters, a US blog (which I will not link to as I am Canadian and subject to the publications ban.)
The Blogging of the Prime Minister: The Kyoto Election
by Ian Welsh
It looks like Martin might be willing to bring down the government over Kyoto. Some people are suggesting that this is a good idea - that it's time to wup the Conservatives. Now, I agree with the basic argument that the Conservative party is backing a lot of policies where they don't have majority support. But I don't agree that fighting an election on Kyoto is a good idea - especially this way. Why?
If there's one man I'd want in my cabinet, no matter what, it's Stephane Dion. When Dion was assigned to the environment ministry I took it to mean that the environment ministry was about to start getting exactly what it wanted because Dion's the man you put in charge when you don't just want results, you want to know with 100% certainty that you don't even have to ever look at the ministry ever again - you know it's going to be taken care of.
Economists like to talk about externalities. An externality is just a benefit or a negative which the originator either can't be paid for (if it's a positive externality) or whose cost they don't bear (if it's a negative externality). Pollution is a negative externality - the cost of air pollution in terms of asthma and deaths is not born by big air polluters like coal plants, for example. Public roads provide positive externalities - they enable commerce and industry to ship goods and gain profits and those who build the road don't directly receive a cut off the new business they make possible. Another example of a positive externality is good health care - the value of people not being sick does not go to health care providers, but to the employers of the healthy people.
are like honest crooks. They stay bought. During the recent DNC fight, the rallying cry for Dean's supporters was they they had bought the party, and now they wanted to collect. Dean got in, but you've still got people like Biden and Lieberman who are reliably able to stand against almost everything progressives believe in.
Recently Stirling wrote about the division between the technocratic left blogosphere and the activist left, following up on Chris Bowers. I want to touch on what it means to be a technocrat.
The technocrat operates within a rule set - and a good technocrat respects the rule set and the data underlaying it. "Follow the numbers" is the mantra of a technocrat at his finest - a man fulfilling his function, without fear or favour following the facts and theory no matter where they lead.
I crawled back into Toronto today, and I've never been so happy to be home - even if home is a room that is not quite as large, nor nearly as well appointed as the hotel room I slept in these past two weeks. It's not actually Boston's fault - but as of last friday I got hit by the most vicious viral infection I've had in a decade and spent the next six days with headache, fever and assorted other unpleasant symptoms.
The nomination of Wolfowitz to the top spot at the World Bank has had people speculating whether it's a promotion or demotion for Wolfowitz and others moaning about what a bad job he's likely to do. But in fact he'll do exactly what Bush needs him to do.
participants were asked to gather in advance in one of several bars and only then were handed a leaflet detailing the target - Macy's department store.
More than 100 people suddenly appeared on Macy's home furnishing floor and, as instructed by the leaflet, began discussing whether to purchase a 'love rug' for their fictitious commune. To the bewilderment of the sales staff, the crowd then melted away as quickly as it had formed.
Flash mobs provide an early example of a new way of organizing society.
I've been telling my Democrat brother for over a year now, "We're here--Bush voters who aren't social conservatives--and you could have had us for a song. We're on special, we're on markdown, we come cheap. But instead of wooing us, you sat around and complained that Kerry wasn't left enough. You put Howard Dean on the DNC. You defended people who said and did indefensible things, out of a much stronger sense of party loyalty than I've ever seen displayed on the right. You could have guaranteed your party would run this country for the next 16 years if you'd only moved to the middle, if you'd only been willing to concede that the noninterventionist policies America pursued in the decade leading up to 2001 did not work in her interests."
This weekend, a liberal American asked me if Canada opting out of the missile defense treaty and system was a question of the free rider problem. After all if a missile is heading across Canada, the US would have to shoot it down, so we get the benefits of missile defense without the cost?. So - is Canada free riding then?
"You dances with the one that brought you" - Brian Mulroney (possibly apocryphal)
A little while ago the Arron Burr Fan put out an article which alluded to an important point - you dances with those who brought you. When the shit hits the fan, who do you stand next to? The ones who have stood by you.
This isn't just a principle of legislative politics - it's not just about who has coughed up dough, or brought in votes. It's a principle of local politics. It's what binds the Taliban together, it's what makes Hezbollah more powerful than anyone else in Lebanon and it's what makes Chicago ward politics work.
We're taught, from a young age, that certain things are immoral and we ought not to do them. These are generally presented in absolute terms, "don't lie", "don't steal", and so on. As we get older we discover that lying is routine and we find that the question of what theft is is more complicated than we thought. And we compromise. Someone does something for us, and we do them a favour in return; something we wouldn't have done normally. We lie to spare people's feelings, or lie because we believe there's a greater good being served. Perhaps we go into politics genuinely expecting to do good - to be a champion of labor, or the poor, or minorities and to do what is best for the country.
But along the way we make compromises - and those compromises, well, compromise us.
Just last week, the answer looked clear. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Lebanese took to the streets to demand an end to Syrian meddling, the withdrawal of its troops and justice for the killers of Rafik Hariri, the political strongman whose assassination last month looked to many like Syria’s handiwork. The pro-Syrian government abruptly resigned. Shaken by the rare show of unity between Lebanon’s main Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze parties and isolated by international opprobrium, Syria grudgingly announced that it would pull back its forces. Lebanon, it seemed, was to be the next Ukraine. Freed from Syria’s yoke, it would return to its pre-civil-war status as a beacon of democratic light in a dim region.
That implies, doesn't it - that Syria's occupation caused the civil wars which destroyed Lebanon. That's not how I understand it, but maybe I'm reading the wrong history books. I'll have to give Condi a call and see if she can lend me the one whe's reading.
I explained earlier why I think the bill is a bad idea, but I want to briefly touch on something Abigail said in comments to my post - that in effect changing bankruptcy laws is essentially changing a contract mid-stream. When current debts were taken on, creditors knew that people could file for Chapter 7 bankruptcies - they should have been taking that into account. Just as a debtor has a responsibility to control how much debt he takes on, a creditor has a responsibility not to offer more debt to people than they can handle and has a responsibility to manage the risk of debt default - which will always occur and which is often caused by events beyond either creditor or debtor's control.
A Brave Man's Death I sometimes cry at movies, but I rarely cry at the tribulations of strangers in the news. Sometimes I get angry, but rarely am I saddened. The death of the Italian agent who took bullets meant for another - that moved me. Because in dying, he made a profound statement about what sort of man he was. He turned a senseless, random death into something much more profound.
Like all of us, I've been following the Lebanon situation with interest. And, I suspect like most of us, I've been very uncertain how to read the situation. Juan Cole has put up a decent history of Lebanon, which is much read, but doesn't answer the question - where next?
DKos has been covering the bankruptcy bill moving through Congress. In some ways this bill is almost as bad as SS privatization (it's only saved from being worse by the fact that, at least in theory, it's relatively easy to reverse if you get a decent legislature.)
We know that more than half of the bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical bills - but that's beside the point, really. There are two points I want to make.
Looks like I'm going to be in Boston from the middle of next week to the end of the month, on business. Not sure how much computer time I'll have (no laptop), but a reduction in posting wouldn't be surprising. Also I'll have two, maybe three weekends in Boston which won't be taken up by business, so I'm wondering if people have advice on things I should do, or places I should see, as this will be my first time there.
Location, Location, Location The Very Brief Introduction to Rent
by Ian Welsh
Rent's a term which is used a lot on these pages, but causes a great deal of confusion. Rent, as classical liberals use it, is not synonymous with "money you pay your landlord". Rather it is money received by someone primarily due to location rather than due to work. As such it is disctinct from capital even though many people subsume rent into capital.
The Economy The primary issue in the Canadian economy right now has to be the American economy. Even in a non-meltdown scenario we're looking at a loss of another 10 to 20% of the value of the US dollar. A meltdown could drop it 40%. This isn't far off - I'd guess, and many economists agree, that we're looking at 6 months to 2 years. So there's no real excuse to not start preparing for this now.
But then, last spring, Bush and the popular McCain began barnstorming the country together. It came out that their rapprochement had followed a meeting between Weaver and his arch-nemesis, Rove, whom he called "gracious" — perhaps the first time anyone had ever called Rove this. Weaver declared that the pair had "a very honest and very frank discussion, and let's just leave it at that."
Better not have any skeletons in your closet. Better have an independent income. Better not have any loved ones who are vulnerable. Better have a titanium spine. I hope one day we don't see Reid stumbling ashen faced out of a meeting with Bush.
why a lot of Democratic activists like Hilary Clinton. She is not particularly liberal, her voting record under pressure is awful and while her negatives are going down - her strategy to make them go down is to go right, rather than to actually sell liberal policies. I want people to think right now why they want to nominate someone in 2008 who is fundamentally not liberal and who did not stand up to Bush when she had the chance even though she wasn't up for reelection till 2006 and was in a safe district.
This is not the 1990's and you are not going to recapture the Clinton "magic" of winning the presidency while losing the legislature. Please don't try - and please remember what happened the last time you nominated someone who was "electable" over the candidates whom you actually believed in.
I want to run through some blogs I visit regularly. The only blogs I visit every day are the ones I write for and James Wolcott, but these are all blogs I hit at least once a week and usually more frequently, though they aren't all the blogs I hit regularly (I don't really feel compelled to say anything about Josh Marshall or Eschaton or Paperwright, for example.)
POGGE (Peace, Order and Good Government, Eh?) is the blogger who makes me mutter "damn, I wish I'd written that" most often. His posts and readership are split about evenly between Canadian and US issues and he consistently exhibits both hard common sense and compassion.
One of the things that SS has highlighted is the same thing that car insurance does - the government directing money towards specific industries, or even companies. This is generally pitched as "we tell you you have to buy it, but not who you have to buy it from".
Another way of looking at it is, "we tell you you have to buy it, and one of these companies will profit."
If we assume that the administration is faintly rational about means and ends and we assume that Ritter is correct then one assumption would be that the US wants an excuse to go to total war. Because the US can't win this sort of low intensity warfare - not to put too fine a line on it, but the US sucks at low intensity anti-insurgency warfare even if they had enough forces, which they don't. On the other hand, the US armed forces are built for total war - for flattening cities, open field warfare and for blowing things up. There are a lot of people who want total war with "Islamofascists".
The old male stands massive in the middle of the circling wolves. Blood stains his teeth, and under one massive paw a victim writhes. The old alpha is huge still, but his tendons stand out in clear relief, his limbs tremble and his eyes are mad with pain and rage. Old, weakened, he is still a dangerous foe, but his day as leader of the pack will soon be done.
And the other wolves smell blood.
It is the end of empire. The end of not just the Pax Americana – but the end of a dominion stretching from 1812 to the modern day – the Anglo American era. Oh, there were challengers, but for two centuries one of those two nations stood astride the world, a colossus.
The killing of Rafiq al-Hariri has occasioned withdrawing the US ambassador to Syria. To put this in perspective, in the language of diplomacy, the only greater rebuke would withdrawing the mission itself. It's a strong statement. Lebanese groups have clearly decided to blame Syria and so has France.
The U.S. economy grew at a brisk 4.4% clip last year, but it was not until last month that the number of jobs recovered to the levels of early 2001. The Labor Department pegs the unemployment rate at 5.2%, the lowest in four years, but the share of people who have stopped hunting for work is the largest it has been since 1988. Today's job growth is more than twice as slow as it was after the 1990-91 recession, and slower than during any recovery since World War II, analysts say.
The discrepancy is fueling a growing debate about whether such low employment growth is a harbinger of a world in which businesses can rake in increasing profits without much of it trickling down to workers.
There's an old joke in Latin America that runs as follows "why doesn't the US have coups? Because there's no US embassy in Washington."
Let's talk about the Venezuelan arms order from Russia. Here's the deal - there are a hundred thousand AK-47's in the order because Chavez wants to arm the peasantry. This is two-prong - it's aimed at Colombia, should they invade, but it's also aimed at Venezuela's land owners. A lot of peasants feel that land reform has moved too slowly and at this point it is Chavez's personal popularity which is holding back violence intended to take the land from the big landowners.
Let's say we have a death bet crash. Not just a hard landing, but a fireball on impact which leads fairly quickly to a huge dollar crash and very high inflation (say 30% a year, or higher), along with the Fed raising interest rates.
What is George Bush's reaction going to be?
Or let me put it another way - who is he going to blame - itemized list - and what is he going to do about it?
Let's say we have a death bet crash. Not just a hard landing, but a fireball on impact which leads fairly quickly to a huge dollar crash and very high inflation (say 30% a year, or higher), along with the Fed raising interest rates.
What is George Bush's reaction going to be?
Or let me put it another way - who is he going to blame - itemized list - and what is he going to do about it?
Burritoboy wrote in the comments to Ellen's post "I Need Help from BOP's MIB" an essay on the consequences of encouraging capital to flow towards public market securities.
The man is nut brown and rumpled, brown hair and unremarkable features, apparently noticed by no one as he slumps into the couch in the book lined Starbucks with a sigh and a styrofoam cup.
Softly, "John?" The man across from him looks up from stirring a frothy confection in porcelain.
"Hello Sam." He nods at the styrofoam cup. "That doesn't look like an ultra mucho expensive coffee to me."
Sam looks like he's going to spit, but takes a sip instead. " Grabbed one from the convenience store pot. Tastes awful, but at least it's cheap and awful." He leans forward slightly. "All right, let's get the business over with - we need to get drunk tonight, and this is holding things up." His gaze sweeps the room, but it is focussed a thousand miles out.
The Freeple’s Republic: The New American Republic:II
by Ian Welsh
If you’re going to fight a war – not a battle, or a campaign, or a series of campaigns, but a war – you need to know why you’re fighting. There are two parts to that. The first part is to know what you’re fighting against. The second part is to know what you’re fighting for. This article is about what we’re fighting against and, perhaps, just as importantly – what our foes are fighting for. Many of them may not see this as the whole picture and many are in denial about what they’re creating (libertarians, for example) but the outlines are clear at this point.
YOU come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.
This is the last time I intend to talk about this and it is here primarily so in the future I can point people to it. I am speaking for myself only, not the editors or the other authors.
There seems to be a fair bit of confusion about what an investment is. Let's talk about three types of games that are commonly referred to as investments.
Lending Money Whether it's bonds, debentures, treasures, mortgages or lending Fred $10 today if he'll give you back $11 tomorrow, being a creditor is as old as recorded civilization. The majority of risk in a loan is that the debtor will be unable to pay - after all, if he had the money he wouldn't be borrowing, now would he? So you're betting that sometime in the future he'll have the money to pay you back. Usually that's based on the fact that he has an income stream, but happens to be short right now. Just ask the leaches who make payday loans - they understand this principle very well, thanks.
Insurance vs. Investments: Social Security Edition
by Ian Welsh
I work in the US insurance industry and have done so for six years now. I am a Fellow of the Life Management Institute. Despite the name, the FLMI also covers annuities, pensions, medical insurance and disability insurance, among others.
Let's talk about what insurance is. In insurance a group of people get together and agree that if any of them suffer a large loss of a specific type they will all chip in. In its' modern form they chip in before the loss in question, the money goes into an account, which is invested, and the returns plus the original payments are used to make any payments. Operating expenses and, for stock companies, stockholder return are also taken from the accounts.
Every time Stirling, Oldman or myself write something related to the Death Bet and the current twilight zone the US economy finds itself in, one of the inevitable questions is "that's nice. What do I do to prepare myself?" This is that article. But let's caveat it. I'm not an investment professional, I don't know you or your specific circumstances, I'm not personally rich, I could be wrong, free advice may well be worth what you're paying for it and if you're reading this in a couple years - it's hopelessly out of date. Use your own common sense.
United Airlines' mechanics rejected a tentative contract agreement and voted to authorize a strike if the carrier persuades a bankruptcy judge to impose the labor cuts, union officials said Friday...
United is seeking to rewrite all its labor contracts to save costs for the second time in its 26-month bankruptcy. After slashing labor costs by $2.5 billion annually in 2003, the airline now says it needs another $725 million in yearly reductions.
So... they're in trouble and they need to slash costs. Any job is better than no job, and the union should give way, right?
Why is the right winning? Because they know not fear.
Really.
Because there are no consequences for a right winger unless you leave the reservation. Only apostacy or challenging the leadership and losing is unforgiveable. Everything else can be forgiven, everyone else can be redeemed. Lose an election - you'll be taken care of. Take the fall for someone bigger - you'll be taken care of. Get caught in a lie - go into exile at a nicely paid think tank job and in a couple years, we'll bring you back with a careful campaign to restore you.
Just for amusement I'm going to throw out some of my rules of thumb: these are the rules of judgement and research that I use to cut through the BS.
Don't trust liars Now someone isn't a liar because they once got something wrong, or made an honest mistake. But people who regularly bend facts to make their point shouldn't be trusted. Seems obvious, eh? Well then, why were so many people giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt in the run up to the Iraq war? Not only were they known liars who had lied repeatedly on taxation and economic issues during the 2000 campaign, they were caught out on lie after lie during the actual selling of the Iraq war. If they had a case, they would have made it honestly - they didn't and it was obvious. People who bought it bought it because they wanted to believe.
Accept the Obvious The number of people who can't accept the obvious always astounds me. Obviously people are not rational - why have we built an entire branch of economics around this BS? Obviously the Nasdaq was overvalued in 1999. Obviously Dow 36,000 was a pack of bullshit. Obviously options are an expense and if anyone tries to tell you they aren't, tell them that since they cost nothing you'd love to have a few million of them. Obviously people who are willing to die for their beliefs cannot be usefully classified as cowards.
I recently stumbled across this interview with J. T. Battenberg III, chairman and chief executive of Delphi. Read it and weep - this is the future of the US. I'm just going to excerpt three exchanges.
Q. What is the two-tier wage system that you've introduced at Delphi?
A. We recently signed a contract with the United Auto Workers to go from $65 an hour for current employees to $23 an hour for new hires. That's part of the transformation if we are to be competitive in the long term, and it is significant. The unions understand that you can't pay $130,000 any more if you are going to grow. You're going to have to take 65 percent less than that. Is that low enough? Probably not, to be competitive on a global basis, but it's a big move and will allow a significant number of jobs to stay in the U.S.
People often get "Great" and "Good" mixed up. To be great, you have to change the world in a significant way intentionally (being an incompetent who changes the world by screwing up doesn't count), but it doesn't have to be a good way. Hitler was a great man. He wasn't a good man.
Every year Time Magazine has their "person of the year" issue. They blinked when it came to choosing their 2001 person - it should have been Osama Bin Laden because he was the person who had changed the world the most - it doesn't matter that he changed it for what most would consider the worse - he changed it.
Osama Bin Laden is a great man. It doesn't matter that he's evil. It doesn't matter that he will probably wind up dead long before he sees the fruits of his actions. He has changed the world, and the forces he unleashed continue to remake the world.
Osama Bin Laden is the iconic figure who bridges the destruction of the 20th century's great Empires - Soviet and American. That is how he sees himself. He is correct. Aided by the boy Emperor, George Bush, Jr, he will bring the US to its knees. Or rather the forces unleashed by him will do so.
Here's the case. Of all muslim Middle Eastern countries Iranians consistently poll as having the most positive views towards the US. The majority of the population does want democracy and do not support the Mullahs, but the Mullahs control the people who have the guns. Within the last few years there have been huge pro-democracy demonstrations. Lately the mullahs have cracked down, the demonstrations have died down and things are looking worse - but most ordinary Iranians would still rather have democracy that theocracy.
Via Oldman I see the US is formally talking about death squads. It is to laugh - as I noted in April the appointment of Negraponte was a clear sign - and if there aren't already Iraqi "government" death squads operating in Iraq I would be astounded. This is just a formalizing of it, and a recognition that the current death squads aren't working.
There are two possibilities for the relationship of the Senate and the White House during this term. The first is that Democrats roll over and give Bush whatever he wants. The second is a huge fight over the filibuster.
The second is more likely - if the democrats have any spine left, it will happen. And that's why Gonzales will be AG.
Reap as you sow. So it is, so it always has been, so it always shall be.
by Ian Welsh
So, okay, the Al Gonzales confirmation hearings are bringing the cockroaches out in defense of Al "the Geneva convention is so yesterday", the man who thinks that if the President wants something, hey, it's legal.
It's real instructive; real instructive, to me how many people are willing to defend torture (see the comments in this thread). This is pathological beyond the "America is good, so I'm sure we don't torture people" social pathology of yesteryear, into the a pathology of "we do it, so it must be good because we are good."
I've been reading "Socrates Cafe", by Christopher Phillips, a philosopher who sets up discussion groups which attempt to answer questions using the Socratic method. It's not a bad little book, and Phillips and his participants do ask some good questions - and the model of Socrates is certainly one I've always admired. But the book got me thinking about the following question - "how do we know what we know?"
Over the past couple weeks I've been catching up on my reading. Below are some quick mini-reviews in no particular order of some of the books I've read.
The Hydrogen Economy, by Jeremy Rifkin
Oddly, this book is less about the hydrogen economy than it is about the fossil fuel economy. Rifkin sets the stage by discussing how the current economy works, how the coal economy worked, Hubbert curves, the laws of thermodynamics and so on. The actual sections on how a hydrogen economy might work aren't very strong at all, and the other information is very general. A decent introduction to the topic of energy, and the current crisis and opportunity, but if you've already been reading on the subject, you aren't going to find anything here worth bothering with. If you haven't, this might make a decent first book, though I don't think Rifkin deals very well with either non-conventional oil (like the oil sands) or with possbilities other than hydrogen energy (like biofuels). Lightweight, but not worthless.
I'm not Christian, so when I think Christmas, I think of gift-giving, feasting and spending time with family and friends. Ideally, for me, Christmas should involve at least twenty people and multiple generations (especially kids) - though it often doesn't. This year I'm playing WOW at home since my family is thousands of miles away and a I declined Kevin's kind offer to join him and his family. What is Christmas to you? How do you like to spend it? How are you spending it today?
It's bitter cold, and the two men are wearing grey trench coats, collars raised against the wind off the river. One, a slim gray haired man, stands loosely, while the other has one foot upon a bench and stares out at the grey river waters rushing past. Back a little way from them are men whose alert expressions and earpieces warn off other pedestrians, who flow around a small oasis of power. The grey haired man speaks first.
"Congratulations Mr. Secretary... for still being Secretary."
Trends, Power and the American Constitutional Crisis
by Ian Welsh
The reaction in comments to my recent post "The Fourteen Features of Fascism" was enlightening. I posted the signs without any commentary, but a number of posters immediately started arguing that, in essence, as we here at BOP and others of our ilk hadn't yet been rounded up, America wasn't fascist.
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
As Matt would say, so okay, is anyone surprised? The Republicans have manged to find a Democratic quisling co-sponsor for gutting Social Security. The majority of people don't support Social Security "reform" (the word reform has become officially meaningless), Social Security isn't in any meaningful sense in trouble except in the sense that the government is in trouble because of ridiculous debt and deficits and "privatizing" SS will make that worse, not better, since every dollar privatized will have to be borrowed. But if things continue as they are (and they will if Dems don't grow a spine) then SS "reform" is going to happen.
An interesting video from the Iraqi Resistance, as well as a transcript. It's worth your time to take a look. Whether it's from the resistance (and which group) is something we can't know, but the points it makes are interesting...
Regular readers of BOP probably associate my name with writing on economics. But I have very little formal training in economics, my academic background (such as it is) is mostly in sociology and philosophy.
My father ran his own business out of Malaysia for a number of years, then later worked for the United Nations in Bangladesh and my mother is one of the last children of the Raj - British, but she grew up in large part in India before the partition and still retains some Hindi. Throughout my childhood our house was the site of conversations about developing nations, development and aid work (and some of the stories would curl your hair - my father in particular still can't keep the contempt out of his voice when talking about how banks sold loans to third world countries in the 70's.)
The death bet, for those unfamiliar with the phrase, is the current situation with the US dollar, deficit and balance of payments. About 80% (or more) of the interest on all savings in the world is currently flowing into the US to sustain US spending, private and public. This includes private money, oil money and heavy purchasing by central banks (primarily Japan and China.) If any of these groups decide to stop buying, or worse, to sell - then it would probably set of a panic decline in the US dollar which would see a drop of at least twenty percent and possibly up to 50% (though 50% is unlikely and would probably be divided between inflation and decline.) The reason it's called a death bet is because the US is betting no one will stop buying or sell in large quantities because doing so would harm them a great deal as well. So let's run through the major players in turn.
Dear Mr Johnson, On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".
Early this year I wrote "The Perfect Economic Storm", in which I suggested that an economic meltdown of epic proportions was likely in 2005. I picked three main reasons - an oil shock (which is now occuring), the housing bubble bursting (which is looking likely) and a currency meltdown (likewise). But really, as usual I was tripped up by the second rule of Bush: Not only is it worse than you think, it's worse than you can possibly imagine. Which means even this post probably isn't pessimistic enough. Nonetheless, let's take a quick run through the US economy's prospects for 2005.
I'm beginning to get a gag reflex every time I see discussions of politics in terms of left and right, or liberal and conservative. All they do is shut down the options and confine thinking to train tracks that go only right - or left. They close down rather than open up conversation, political alliances and strategic thinking. Let's run through just a few brief examples:
On November 18th, David Graham, a scientist in the part of the FDA that oversees the safety of medicines after they have been approved, was called to testify before the Senate's powerful finance committee. The committee wanted to know the circumstances behind the sudden withdrawal by Merck in September of Vioxx, a painkiller that, according to some estimates, may have damaged the hearts of more than 100,000 Americans since the FDA approved its use in 1999.
Recently, Pogge, who remains at the top of my "must read" list for a reason, talked about the effort to push prescription psychoactive drugs onto people who haven't gone looking for help. Today I read, in the LA Times (unfortunately in their archives) an interview with Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Medical Jounal on new drugs, the FDA and how drug companies operate. I'm going to excerpt some bits, with commentary, because what she says is brutally important to medical care, not only in the US, but because of drug patent legislation pushed by the US government - everywhere in the world.
Canada had it's Thanksgiving last month, so today I'm mostly thankful that my US customers aren't calling me. May they have an excellent long weekend and come back satiated and easy to please. Nonetheless it's all to easy to forget the real blessings we do have in our lives. I'm grateful for good friends, for having enough food and a roof over my head. I'm thankful for the opportunity to write for BOP and la-mancha and honoured by the trust others have placed in me. The readers who regularly take the time to post insightful comments on my posts are likewise one of the genuine pleasures of writing for BOP. And most of all, having in the past suffered from very bad health, and having a friend who is currently experiencing bad health, I am grateful that I am healthy. The small things - good friends, good food, health and housing - are really the biggest things.
Technology and Standards of Living: Jacobean Economics Primer: III
by Ian Welsh
One of the reasons that the US has had an excellent standard of living for so long is technological. Specifically it has to do with leading technological revolutions. That doesn't necessarily mean being the first to invent something, it means being the first to exploit it on a wide scale - the first widespread adoption. For the US this has been occuring since the late 19th century.
At that time something interesting was happening - Britain was producing more patents, but British inventors were finding more and more that they had to go to the US to get their inventions adopted.
"Fierce clashes are underway in Jolan, Askari and Shuhadaa neighborhoods," witnesses told Xinhua.
It's sort of the reverse midas touch - everything Bush touches turns to shit. If the election results were real, then the US deserves this. Which is why the saying is "God save us from getting what we deserve." Just pathetic.
The first rule of warfare and the first rule of politics is the same – you need to know your enemy, and you must, even more than that, know yourself.
This knowledge must be real – it cannot merely be propaganda, though propaganda has its’ place. Rather your knowledge must have predictive utility as well as being inspirational for those who fight with you.
Those in American who want a better future for all Americans do not know either their enemies nor themselves. They do not understand the evangelicals, they do not understand the moneyed interests which fund the party of Empire – the party of hate and fear – the Republicans. The military is foreign to them, as is the countryside.
Nor do they understand themselves. The city dynamism that pulses beneath the great dreams of the future – broad shouldered Chicago and bustling New York. They do not understand prairie populism and progressivism and the great sweep of dreams of a better future for one’s children. They do not understand the love of land that unites both city and country into one nation. They have lost sight of the fact that what they fight for is nothing less than the American dream of a land where anyone can be a success, where position is earned not inherited and where the future is what one longs for – not the past.
Please expand on your reasoning. Based upon the military and intelligence asset deployments and maneuvers I have concluded that they are positioning for a full scale Iranian invasion. However such things are still subject to political over-ride. What is your analysis of the Bush Administration politics that would confirm such a "go-light" on Iran?
They're locking in the apparatus - not only are they purging and locking down the CIA, they are putting in place the cabinet members who can be guaranteed to be 100% on message. Moreover they are putting in place, or retaining in place the NeoCon hawks who believe in a war of civilizations and a forced democratization/consumerization of the middle east. Once the lock down of the government/message apparatus is complete, they will dive towards the decision point, hammering home the message that Iran is a rogue state, behind 911 etc... etc... and that anyone who says otherwise is a quisling traitor who isn't tough enough to do what is necessary to protect the United States.
I'd like to ask the BOP community for a little brainstorming help. I need a descriptive term for the nation the right is trying to create. Stirling has termed it "The Freeple's Republic", Oldman has called it "The New Feudalism", others have called it the "The New Theocracy" or "the Neoconomy". What I want is a simple phrase, preferably, but not necessarily with the word Republic or Nation in it, that encompasses both the idea of aristocracy and the idea of theocracy. Once I find a name I like I'm going to pound it home in a series of articles. Help appreciated, and will be acknowledged repeatedly.
There are three men in the cramped room with the narrow window and the old battered desk. Two are heavier men in silk suits, one mustachioed, the other balding, with the sleek shine of sweat on their faces. The third is an older man, slim and greying. He is standing with one foot on the desk, a sheaf of paper in one hand.
"You Fannie Mae types just don't listen do you? I warned R. and H. about this three years ago. Libby warned them six months ago." He glares at the larger of the two other men. "It's too late for them now. It may be too late for the two of you as well."
An opposition party has to pick its fights. It has to know when you go balls to the wall and when you make your objections vociferously but let the ruling party have its' way.
Power is the ability to enforce your will when the chips are down. The effects of power tend to be underestimated in traditional economics. It's not that economists don't talk about monopolies, ologopolies, the use of political power and so on - it's that most schools treat them as special cases to be dealt with after the basic theory of free markets, which is how things "normally" operate.
When a historian, sociologist or political scientist looks at economics the first reaction is often to blink and mutter something like "they don't understand how unusual these circumstances are."
Oldman's made a good case, not for peak oil, but for flat oil - which is to say oil hits its' maximum production, and then maintains that level of production. In a sense, it's only a modification of peak oil, because the key claim of peak oil which a lot of people didn't understand was that it wasn't so much that oil would decline, but that demand for oil would continue to grow after the point that supply could keep up with it.
The office is lit only by the blue backglow of three monitors. Across those monitors are spreadsheets with columns of figures. Trade figures. Deficit figures. Productivity figures. Oil prices. GDP. Housing starts. And charts. Many many charts. The man studying them doesn't notice as a slight figure slips in the door and walks behind him. The figure silently looks at the charts, watches as the man's fingers flash over the keyboard, plugging in new assumptions, and testing them. Again. And again. Finally she speaks.
"You've been here since 3am this morning John. Go home. The answers aren't going to change."
Iraq: Guerilla Warfare and the Continuation of Politics
by Ian Welsh
War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. - Clausewitz, "On War"
This is the first and most important point. Guerilla war, like any other kind of war occurs because people believe there are political goals that can be obtained through war more easily than through other means. If people feel that the occupation of their country won’t end peacefully – then war is inevitable. If certain groups wish to impose their religion and know that it will not be allowed then war is a route to their goal. If people want law and order and occupation forces are unable to provide it – then a new government is necessary and if one cannot be obtained through peaceful means then it must be obtained through violent ones.
The failure of politics leads to war. The failure to provide law and order. The failure to rebuild infrastructure. The failure to provide belief in a promising future. The failure to align the interests of the occupation with the interests of the population. All of this sets up the preconditions for guerilla warfare and rebellion…
Thrown back to the top, 7 months after it was written, because it is still timely.
The room is modern American office - a sweep of glossy desk, sheer clear windows sealed hermetically shut, and outside the black velvet and blazing light that is New York at night.
Two men are in the room. The one behind the desk is young, bulky with gym muscle, and frowning. Seated across from him is an older man, greying and thin almost to asceticism. Both are dressed in American armor - navy blue dress suits.
When you think about something you generally, because of human limitations, need to break it up into pieces, so that you can get a handle on it.
The key thing is to break it at the joints - at the natural joining points, and not in the middle of the bone. You can see this in economics, where everyone talks as if countries are basic economic units and compare Singapore and the US in the same breath, rather than realizing that countries are political units which have economic consequences, not economic units as primary identity.
Now in politics people talk left and right. If they're real sophisticated they talk divide those into social and economic and maybe even tack on foreign affairs.
The truth is, that at this point we don't know if machine fraud threw the election to Bush. We do know that voter suppression, a different thing, made a big difference. But when it comes to voter fraud it's worth thinking about how to think about the question, what questions to ask - and how we might be able to do the work to have them answered.
If I were to nominate a single great sociologist for the turn of the millenium, from the seventies to today, it would be Randall Collins. From his "The Credential Society" in 1975, to his magnificent doorstopper "The Sociology of Philosophies", in which he traces the major intellectual movements of Europe, India and China, Collins has written more books that are must reads - that few who aren't sociologists will ever read, than any other contemporary sociologist I am familiar with.
The two men, one Japanese, one American, have been sitting at the table in the cafe for some time. Each has asked after the other's children, family and friends and carefully discussed non political topical topics. Finally, the American says, "it is most unfortunate, but I must discuss business." The Japanese man nods and the American stares fixedly past him and says, "we need more time."
Assuming these graphs are accurate - it was stolen, no question. Exit polls only started getting this inaccurate in 2000. They worked before. And isn't it... an interesting coincidence that when they were significantly wrong they were significantly wrong for Bush...
Dark Blue=$0.5 to $0.69 returned per dollar paid in tax
Light Blue = $0.7 to $0.9 returned
White= $0.91 to $1.10 returned
Light Red= $1.11 to $1.50 in federal revenue returned
Dark Red= Over $1.50 in spending per dollar of tax
The tacks show which candidate the state voted for. Note that almost all Kerry states are net contributors, and many Bush states are net recipients. Only a few Kerry states and one Bush state (Colorado) break the pattern.
Right Wing Triumphalism and the appeal to the "Reasonable" Liberal
by Ian Welsh
This is beyond tiresome. You voted for a man who took the country to war based on lies, who will appoint reactionaries to the supreme court, who is completely financially irresponsible, whose campaign was based in part on vote suppression, who condoned torture - that's what you voted for. If you expect us to be nice about it - well, since I'm an author here I won't tell you where to stick it. You've spent 20 years calling Liberals evil and traitors and now you want to lecture us on "hate" (one of the stupidest memes of the right.)
There seems to be a reaction amongst many Dems that the problem with Kerry wasn't that he was Bush-lite, but that he wasn't right enough. Let me spell out, very simply, the choice facing the Democratic Party:
The problem is simple - people who reliably vote lean right. People who don't reliably vote lean left. You can either move right to try and get those who vote, or you can move left and try and get those who don't usually vote because they see no real difference between the parties, to vote. (I'll discuss how you get these people into the reliable voter category at a later date, it'll take more than just moving left, of course.)
Democrats have been trying the first strategy for 10 years now (arguably longer, but at least 10) and it hasn't worked. Yet, the same people who brought us this strategy keep telling us that the problem is we aren't doing it hard enough.
Enough - time to stop doing what has a track record of not working - and trying something else. Maybe it'll fail - but I guarantee being Bush lite will fail.
Moving Forward, or when the going gets tough - the tough get going
by Ian Welsh
Ok, we got our asses handed to us and we're still reeling and punch drunk. The trolls are coming out of the woodwork to taunt us while we're gasping for breath from the one-two combo of what appears to be both a popular mandate and a succesful dirty tricks campaign (though it remains to be seen exactly how they won - I'm not accepting these numbers till they've been properly investigated although the exit polls do match up). More importantly with Bush having an apparent mandate the next four years are going to be ugly. All the people who keep muttering that Bush will be able to do anything because he doesn't need to be reelected are missing the point - the Republican machine doesn't intend to be lose the Presidency in four years and they will continue to try and institutionalize Republican advantages so that Dems are at a structural disadvantage.
Does that mean the Democrats should get used to a generation in the doghouse - a generation of Republican dominance? Hardly. So let's talk about moving forward.
It's worth taking a second to think through what a second Bush term will involve if it occurs (which is by no means sure yet.)
Economics.
On the economic front there are two possibilities. The first is a continuation of current policies. The second is a huge entitlements cut followed by taxation "reform". What that would mean is that privatized social security accounts - which will lead to a huge boom in the stock market, but which will have the effect of both increasing the deficit and debt and, in the long term, ensuring that most Americans won't be able to count on Social Security. Meanwhile taxes would either move to a flat tax or to a universal sales tax, or something similiar (and regressive, bank on it.)
These are where we're going to need to find out exactly what happened in terms of vote supression, intimidation, differential precinct treatment in better neighbourhoods and any voting machine irregularities. In 2000 Hamilton had 585,985 registered voters. as of 2:13 AM Hamilton has 291,622 votes counted with 69.1% of the precincts reporting. Bush has 152,484 votes and Kerry 137,793. If anyone knows enough about the area to say if this is the split that they would expect, please weigh in.
Cuyahoga County had 1,010,764 registered voters in 2000. At 2:16 AM 87.26% of the precincts have reported, with 373,242 voting Kerry and 190,984 voting Bush. So turnout is probably going to be a little over 60% of 2000 registered voters. I'm not sure if this is typical - but it bears investigating. Anyone know how many voted in 2000? Anyone from the area want to weigh in?
I'm going to say it right now, and risk being accused of being part of the tinfoil hat crowd - the question in this election was always whether or not the fix was in.
It now appears that it may have been. There are two possibilities - one is that the youth vote didn't come out (Josh Marshall is suggesting this) and that it was enough to cost Kerry the election. The other possibility is that a combination of discouraging the vote and machine irregularities has given Bush the margin he needs.
A lot of people are claiming that this is the year that the base, the 527's, bloggers and the progressive left have arrived. The cry is "we gave them huge amounts of money, we're the ones who are running the field organization and the muscle - they owe us and they'll have to listen to us."
On October 7th the hard drives from two Indymedia servers in the UK were seized. They have since been returned but here's the interesting thing - to this day we don't know why they were seized. The company running the servers, Rackspace, has been forbidden by court order to say - and Indymedia has never been told. The UK government claims they had nothing to do with it - all that is known is that the FBI was behind it.
During the 2004 Canadian Election I probably wrote more about policy than any other Candian blogger - including taking apart each party's policy platform in detail. So come the US election endgame I look back on what I've written for the US election and I find that I've written little about the specific policies of the candidates - the only piece is a quick take on Kerry's health care program at the request of a reader. The reasons are telling - the first is that in a parliamentary democracy like Canada's you can reasonably expect that a good chunk of a policy platform will be passed, while in the US the President doesn't always have the ability to get his legislative platform passed. The second reason is that for anyone who is serious about policy, anyone who's a wonk, there's simply no question that Kerry's your candidate. The Bush policy team has been so incompetent that the last thing you'd want them to do is try and implement a policy you agree with - they'd mess it up so badly it'll be dead for a generation.
Dilyn: I bought and checked out books on Cambodia-- its history, its present struggles, its antiquities and anything I could get my hands on concerning the terrorism going on there...landmines, in particular. And those were the kinds of Web sites I surfed too...
Ellen discussed past insurance scandals and I discussed Eliot Spitzer's latest set of suits against the Insurance industry a while back and ended by noting that I wasn't sensing a lot of fear, despite the Economist saying there was.
That's changing. As the suits spread people are realizing Spitzer is serious and bemusement is swiftly chaning to "oh shit", though not quite yet to terror, as the leg the insurance industry as a whole is going to stand on is that the State regulators didn't tell them contingent comissions were wrong and that it's not as if they're anything new.
In the comments to Stirling's post "The Dead Hand" AT wrote:
Currently, it is entirely possible that the planet cannot allow, on the basis of the size of the resource pool, for all inhabitants to be served fully as consumers (at least at US levels), regardless of any nation's "potential growth". Add to that the suspicion that the rate of resource consumption might even be more of a limiting factor, and cannot be raised without consequences (polution, global warming, and shortages). The potential for growth will become more and more difficult to realize, as China will find out that its trip to economic nirvana is now becoming progressively more expensive.
Something has got to give. The fragile economic models and policies set in place by humans go first.
Better to change the models to allow for prosperity for everyone. It is possible...
There comes a time in most people’s lives when they realize they are overcommitted. If they’re wise, when they realize this, they assess their situation and they prioritize their commitments. This includes not only deciding what is important, but what is salvageable. You might want to do something, but decide that the situation is beyond saving.
In both foreign and domestic policy the US is at one of those times. Actually, it’s past that point and has been for some time, but push is coming to shove very soon and decisions will have to be made about how to move forward soon because in every way that matters the US is overextended.
However economic restructuring is politically difficult, because by definition it means that you have to stop favoring the protected industries and special interests. And the reason why those became protected in the first place was that it was easier to buy them off by favoring them then get a real electoral mandate and voter constituency for change.
Orson Scott Card is a great science fiction writer - and arguably a great author. I can't stand his politics, but he once said something very wise about America at the turn of the century, which ran approximately as follows - that America is doomed because Americans have lost the will to be well led.
I work in the insurance industry, and in fact my duties are partially compliance related and partially back office sales support. So I was very interested to read this editorial in the New York Times about Elliot Spitzer's latest crusade:
No matter what verdict is ultimately rendered in this particular suit, there seems little doubt that Mr. Spitzer has identified a conflict of interest that needs to be eliminated. Brokers are paid commissions by their clients for finding the best policies, and they also get various payments from the insurance companies that are awarded the business. Although these payments have been known to some extent in the business world and become standard practice, the insurance industry is now scrambling to eliminate them to quiet the growing furor.
Via Reuters and The Economist I see that the EU is taking Germany to court over a golden share provision which gives Lower Saxony disproportionate blocking control over the board:
In the midst of tricky negotiations over pay and job cuts with its unions, the company learnt this week that, after months of threatening to do so, the European Commission has decided to take the German government to court over a law that restricts the rights of the company’s shareholders...
For all that was proposed, however, remarkably little has been achieved. Many of the improvements in Florida, as in the rest of the nation, were cosmetic; lawmakers moved quickly to make changes, but their reforms were often quick fixes. In Florida, where the election mess had been blamed on punch-card voting machines, officials looked for a technological solution to the state's democratic woes. In 2001, lawmakers here banned punch-card voting machines. Many local officials then had a choice to make -- should they go with optical scan ballots (the fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots that are counted by machines), or should they install paperless electronic touch-screen machines? Officials in smaller counties chose optical scan, while most of the larger counties chose the electronic systems. In the upcoming election, slightly more than half of Florida's voters will find touch-screen machines at the polls, while the rest will vote on opti-scan.
There are two types of games. There are one time, winner take all games and there are games that are only one in a series. You treat the two of them differently. Because in cases where you're going to play again with the same people you have to consider reverbrations of actions. And that means not only protecting your reputation in terms of being honourable, it means getting horrible vengeance upon those who betray their word or otherwise wrong you. Wronging you doesn't mean that they beat you - it means they acted dishonourably - against whatever agreements you had made either specific to a deal or to the rules of the game as understood by both of you.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to.
They are used to the lies I tell,
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
Regular readers will know that Healh Care is one of the issues I follow closely. I'm a booster of single payor (which I consider the only rational plan on the facts) but I also understand it isn't what is being offered. One of my readers challenged me to take a look at John Kerry's plan, so let's do that.
The 24-year-old man, Yaser E. Hamdi, who holds joint Saudi-American citizenship, was freed after a decision by the Supreme Court in June that Americans held in the United States as "enemy combatants" must be able to contest their detention....
Under the terms of his release, Mr. Hamdi agreed to renounce his American citizenship, not to sue the United States government and not to leave Saudi Arabia for five years. Mr. Hamdi, who was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan is also forbidden ever to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan or Syria.
The First Brigade has been engaged in heavy fighting with members of the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr's zealous militia, since Mr. Sadr rallied his supporters in early August to battle Marines in the southern holy city of Najaf. The marines routed the Mahdi Army there and gained control of a central shrine, forcing many of the militiamen to flee back to their homes in Sadr City. It fell to the First Brigade to force Mr. Sadr to the negotiating table by keeping up attacks against the militia.
They did not gain control over the central shrine in question. Sistani did. There is a significant difference.
Max Weber famously posited that the role of the state was to monopolize violence and that a functional state was one which did so. I've discussed this, and it's relevance to Democracy, in the past. But the question we, in our generation, are going to have to deal with is slightly different. After the creation of the nuclear bomb the doctrine became known as MAD - mutually assured destruction. 50 years without a nuclear war has numbed us to it - numbed us to the fact that we have the ability to kill every human on earth.
Uh huh. Well, since more people were registered to vote than the eligible voting population of Afghanistan, there never were any questions about the election. We know it's fake and we've always known it was fake. We don't need to know anything more about the election. Let's face facts, for all intents and purposes, the New York Times, along with most of the US press, operates as a propaganda outlet most of the time and you simply can't use it to find out what is actually happening in the world.
The New York Times has an article on the question of whether prayer makes people more likely to recover from illness or have other favourable outcomes (for example, an uncomplicated pregnancy).
It contains some horrible howlers from scientists and pastors alike. For example:
"Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science," said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. "It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money."
My friend Kevin and I watched the debate tonight - twice. Once with sound on, once without and what came through very clearly was one thing - Bush, personally, is weak on foreign affairs and Kerry knows it.
Watch the debate and what you'll see is that Bush nearly cracked under Kerry's agressive attack on his handling of Iraq, Afghanistan and al-Q'aeda. He actually overrode the moderator, his body language became that of an aggressive lecturer.
He's weak on foreign affairs - because he really believes.
In the myth of Pandora's box, when Pandora opens the box all the ills in the world fly out - famine, pestilence, pain and so on. The last thing to fly out is a bright shining thing - hope. In my more cynical moods I'm inclined to say that hope was the worst thing to come out of the box, because it makes you continue on in the face of all the horrible things in the world. But that's only true if your hope is unrealistic - if you can't, in fact, expect a better world, or expect the better things in life in the future.
I worked hard for my health insurance. I don’t see why someone who didn’t work hard, save, and prioritize paying for health insurance, should get as good a health care as I do.
Let’s look at this. We’ll leave aside the assumption that people who don’t have health insurance aren’t hard workers, it’s bullshit, but let’s grant it. Let’s say it’s true. Then lets parse the morality of this statement. Let’s re-state it more clearly:
Lazy people don’t deserve good and timely health care. That means that some of them will die or suffer pain, nausea or debilitation that could otherwise be stopped, but since they’re lazy they deserve to die or suffer for their laziness.
Your Death: Why the Private Sector Should Not be Performing Public Duties
by Ian Welsh
One theme I've been hammering on for some time is that having the private sphere doing what should be done by the public sphere is foolish. The reverse is also true, but at least in the US and Canada, it's not the curse of our times (once, perhaps, it was - but once a dragon is slain dragon slayers work their way down the chain - till today they are killing geckos, all the while screaming "die, foul monster!")
Mike Davis at CommonDreams has up at an article on Avian Flu - it's made the leap from avians to humans. Those who study history will remember the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1919 - which killed more people than the Great War itself. That influenza had a mortality rate of about 2.5%. This new strain has a mortality rate of about 70%. The estimate of US infection is between fourty to a hundred million people. At 70% mortality, that's twenty-eight to seventy million. On the upside that's about a quarter of the US population. On the bottom it's still about one in ten.
The best piece of advice on election prognostication I ever read was that the person or party who seems likely to win before the campaign almost always does. Perhaps that seems like a trivial truth, but I've both found it to be true and I've found that people are constantly talking about how things change during political campaigns.
And, of course, sometimes they do. But most of the time they don't. Over a year ago I said that whoever won the Democratic nomination would be President in 2005 and I wrote the same thing in June, and I've seen nothing which has changed my mind since then.
Because while it's true that there are countries with partially privatized systems that have cheaper costs than Canada there aren't any that I'm aware of that aren't suffering from the same trends. That's not to say that we shouldn't look into what they're doing differently and try and learn from it, but even if we were to do that, it's not going to break the backs of the trends that are killing both us and the US - the ever upwards trend of health costs rising (which is also not quite as bad as people think, but that's another matter).
Throughout much of history, including in the West through Roman times, the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, violating guest rights was considered one of the most dishonourable things a person could do. Once a guest was accepted as a guest the hosts were required to feed the guest, protect the guest from violence, aid them in court and take care of them in case of illness. The guest, in turn, was required to protect his hosts as well and any violence between guest and host was strictly forbidden and looked upon with great horror.
If I were to nominate a must-read Canadian blogger, it would be the pseudonymous Pogge. Go take a look at his summary post on the new Great Lakes treaty, a treaty which opens to the doors to taking more water from the Great Lakes than the 1% they are capable of regenerating every year and has the potential to destroy them. (Laughing at the thought? The Soviets did exactly that to the Aral Sea - once the third largest lake in the world, now the site of rusting freighters in a toxic dust bowl.)
Are the rich just like us? In one sense they are – they eat, sleep and defecate just like everyone else. They love, cry and die – just like everyone else. But when you’re dealing with policy – no, they aren’t just like everyone else. It’s fashionable (one of those evergreen fashions) to argue that the policies that benefit the rich, benefit everyone. There are certainly policies that benefit everyone, but there are few policies which primarily benefit the rich which are to everyone’s interest. Let’s run through this in a bit more detail.
While large American companies have drawn the most attention for shifting jobs to cheaper overseas markets, the practice has quietly taken hold among start-ups as well. It's a trend that financiers of young technology companies say is inevitable. But they also admit it's controversial, and likely to rock a sector that Boston relies on for jobs and a vibrant economy.
Asbos - anti-social behaviour orders - are a cornerstone of Tony Blair's commitment to crack down on the sort of everyday nuisance acts that blight communities but, in the past, police have been largely powerless to act on.
Each Asbo is a civil order tailored by the courts against a named individual, forbidding him or her from repeating specific "anti-social" acts. Breaking the Asbo could land the offender in prison.
Insurance is socialization of risk. An insurer guarantees to pay out if you're hit with a loss, and each person generally pays much less than the amount that would be paid out. The theory is that as long as not too many people get hit the insurer can pay them and pocket any remains from the money paid by the group and any investment income.
If you want things from another country you have to pay for them. This is what people mean when they say that as a matter of accounting there may be trade surplusses or debts, but the books are always even. But how you pay for them is important. You can:
For example, recruits normally cannot have a serious criminal record, illegitimate children, more than two legitimate children, gang tattoos, or tattoos on their hands or faces. They must have a high-school diploma and be able to pass basic tests in English, maths and science. As of this year, wife-beaters are also barred.
Nathan Bedford Forrest famously summed up miltary strategy as "get there first with the most men." Today I read Colonel MacGregor's testimony to the Senate on the US army's transformation plans. I'm not in a position to be sure Colone McGregor knows what he's talking about - but a lot of what he says seems to makes sense - and what he seems to be saying is "Get there soon enough, with a force which will win the battle."
It looks like a ban on fox hunting will finally go through in Britain. I gotta say I'm on the side of fox hunting. My proposal for those who want to ban fox hunting is this - have a referendum. If you vote yes for banning it your name will be put down on a ballot and if it goes through a special draw is done. If your name comes up then you get one of the eighty thousand odd dogs who will no longer have any economic purpose. What you do with those dogs is your business: but there will be a center where you personally can show that you have the guts of your conviction by personally killing that dog if you chose to not take care of it.
Your choice, but I'm tired of city folks destroying country people's livelihood over symbolic issues. Enough already - have the courage of your convictions - kill a dog or take care of it for life to - and stop eating meat while you're at it, because if you think animals are killed humanely in slaughterhouses, you're living in a fantasy world.
Parameters, the US Army War College's quarterly magazine, has an article on the Canadian military. It's pretty accurate on the facts. Canada's army is undermanned and underequipped for real deployment overseas and is not capable of operating independently. How much we should integrate with the US, on the other hand, is another question - the article appears to assume that Canada should be building up its' army - so that we can help the US.
One of the sweet painful pleasures of the last year was watching a writer at a magazine constantly scooping the daily newspapers. That writer, of course, was Sy Hersch. Hersh has a new book coming out, Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib and the Guardian is excerpting it.
On my hard drive is the outline of an essay titled "The Beauty of Evil". The title was chosen to highlight what people want to forget - evil can be attractive. I call it the spiral into darkness, because once people start doing evil things - killing, raping, torturing - they often find they want to do more. Transgressing against strong cultural mores is very empowering to those who do it and few mores are stronger than those against such atrocities.
Flipped to the top as a posting problem had it debut 6 down.
Students of government often note something about Democracies. Democracies tend to come out of societies with widespread military service and they extend, often exactly, to the military base.
Kevin Brennan, my co-blogger at Tilting at Windmills, has up a post on Beshen where he effectively calls both sides moral monsters. It's worth reading just for the links, where Kevin has carefully catologued the torture, rape, ethnic cleansing and terror bombing that Russia has inflicted on the Chechens.
But Kevin's post seems to lead to a sort of "throw your hands up in the air because both sides are so bad" mentality - both sides are bad, but both sides don't have equal amounts of power in this situation and thus both sides are not equally culpable even though both sides may indeed be moral monsters.
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, a US President called Iran part of an Axis of Evil. Perhaps you remember that? Once upon a time, the United Nations, under the leadership of the United States and Britain, disarmed Iraq of all WMD - then invaded once they were disarmed. Perhaps you remember that?
If so you've got a better memory than The Economist.
Iraqi security officers stormed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices and sealed the newsroom with red wax at the weekend after the US-backed interim government banned the Arabic television station from broadcasting in the country.
The raid followed a decision by the prime minister, Ayad Allawi, to close the station temporarily in August because of its apparent failure to support the US occupation.
I'm going to write more about this at a later date - about how America is, while not there yet, turning into a police state. In the meantime, I would take it as a personal favour if you would go read this Salon article on how protestors were treated in in New York. Go through the ad, and read the article.
Matt Stoller's news that a dishonestly named Republican 527 group is going to, in effect, go nuclear on Kerry by suggesting that he freed a drug dealing cop-killer; agrees with everything that Al Sharpton ever said; and knowingly accepted money from the Cali drug cartel doesn't fill me with dismay - except in the sense that I fear Democrats will play nice and continue, as Sean Connery said in the Untouchables, "bring a knife to a gunfight".
Nietzche famously said, "Let those who fight monsters take care lest they themselves become monsters".
I walked into the office this morning to the news that fighting had broken out at a school held hostage by Chechen terrorists and during the ensuing conversation my voice cracked.
Thirty years ago the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth", an apocalyptic little book based on computer modeling of resource use. It basically said - we're in trouble, we're going to run out. And it made some very specific predictions.
They haven't come true yet and they included some flawed assumptions.
I still remember the day it really struck home to me that two people can say the same word and mean different things by it. It was an autumn day at York university and I was chatting with my residence tutor about a girl who had drunk so heavily that we had had to rush her to an emergency department. I said, “ so I heard you had to discipline her.”
The tutor responded, “oh no. We just had a conversation!”
This is tiresome. Perhaps Greenspan thinks we don't remeber that he was the one who provided ideological cover for Bush's disastrous tax cuts for the rich in 2001? Perhaps he thinks we don't understand that conflating Medicare and Social Security is bullshit, because one is not in much trouble (Social Security) and the other one is (Medicare)? Perhaps he thinks we can't add and subtract. Perhaps he thinks we don't remember that in the eighties he's the one who "fixed" Social Security - by raising payroll taxes only to then provide cover for the tax cuts without which "fixing" SS and Medicare would be a lot less painful?
The report is that Sistani has called for a huge march to the Shrine of Imam Ali, to end the fighting. As usual, the New York Times has missed the point. If he breaks up the fighting and takes possession of the shrine it's not a victory for America, or for Allawi, it's a victory for Sistani with a good possibility of a draw for Sadr. In the crowd the remaining Mehdi army fighters will slip away, and neither Allawi nor the Americans will be seen by Iraqis as having broken the Mehdi fighters (a hopeless brave fight against great odds is not something to be ashamed of, it is a rallying cry. Remember the Alamo?) The only real question is whether Sadr himself gets away, but it doesn't really matter, imprison or kill him and it won't stop his men, in a sense it will give them much more freedom and make them more dangerous.
Andrew Greeley is best known for his romance/detective novels in which Catholics of various varieties fall in love with each other - and God. But he's also a priest, a sociologist and a columnist for a newspaper in his beloved Chicago, the Sun-Times.
It's in the Sun-Times that I read an article where he calls America's disease greed. I wouldn't say it's the only disease, but I believe he's right that it's the core of the problem. More than that, it's the core of the reason the economy in the US has long term structural problems.
Oldman has up two must-read posts today. One is on Hedonic pricing and its' effects on productivity (shorter Oldman: without Hedonic pricing there is basically no productivity growh in the US in the late 90's.) Go read the details, it's important.
Oldman has up a post examing what has happened to California over the past 10 years, the current situation (costs are too high compared to neighbouring states, Arnold's band aid solutions and the likely future outlook.) It's a good article and I think his forecast is fundamentally sound - that California's in for a decade or two of decline before things turn around and that the US may be heading into the world of hurt that California is alweady in.
But Oldman does say something I don't entirely agree with.
In June, Clint Dunford, the minister of human resources and employment, predicted that within five years the province would have laws to define an employer's right to test employees for drug and alcohol use. The province needs to act, Dunford said, to deal with the increasing problem of people showing up for work drunk or drugged, a health and safety issue, especially on construction and industrial sites.
Iraq: Learning the wrong lessons from the wrong people
by Ian Welsh
On edit: Go read Eric Margolis' latest column - it's the best introcuction to the New American Empire that you're likely to find.
One of the themes of Iraq since the war has been the extent to which the US has used Israeli anti-Palestinian tactics. They used the Israeli tactics of bulldozing houses and destroying groves: collective punishment; and they seized Iraqis for torture, albeit going further than Israeli torture regulations allow.
The Problem with Currency Unions and the ForEx Trade Jacobean Economics Primer: II
by Ian Welsh
If you pick up an older economics textbook you’ll find a model of currency values that claims they’re based on trade flows. If your economy, as a whole, is exporting more goods than are coming in, your currency should appreciate in value. If your economy, as a whole, is importing more goods than it is exporting, your currency should depreciate in value.
That ideal world is indeed an ideal world, because there are significant benefits to an economy which operates that way. When you’re exporting more than your importing the rise in your currency makes goods produced by other economies cheaper – encouraging you to import. Since the first step in import replacement is to, well, import something – that’s good. When you’re importing more than you’re exporting your currency will devalue making your goods more competitive on the market – hopefully selling more.
Greg Palast has up an article that everyone who wants to try and understand what's going on in Venezuela should read. He states the obvious truths that everyone from the Economist to the New York times has been dancing around.
Al-Sadr gives up shrine
Aide to radical cleric says he was told to give mosque keys to religious authorities
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NAJAF, Iraq - Radical Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his fighters today to hand control of a revered Najaf shrine to top Shiite religious authorities, hours after U.S. forces bombed militant positions and Iraq's prime minister made a "final call" for the cleric's militia to surrender.
Now, that rather implies that the Sadrists have left the shrine, doesn't it?
This column in the Toronto Star will tell you most of what you need to know about why oil demand is soaring.
Revved up by years of supercharged foreign investment, China's economic engine is sputtering from lack of power this summer.
An acute energy shortage has idled the nation's factories three days a week, forced workers to take leaves and dimmed streetlights in the big cities...
Dark is the night, and darkest before dawn – or so the saying runs. But what is blackest? How do we know that it will not get darker? Light – a hundred years ago, had there been a satellite photograph of the earth most of it would have been black. Perhaps a few sprinkles of light in Europe and the East Coast of North America – and little elsewhere.
The first is import replacement. Let's say you're a new mining community. You earn money by digging up ore and shipping it - and in exchange you get paid. Everything in that community is imported in - the food, the clothes, the booze - in many cases even laundry is sent away to be done. So if the community is earning 1 million dollars for it's gold, maybe 900,000 of that is leaving the community.
Kerry is campaigning as the competent Bush. As Matt notes, he now effectively says "I would have gone to war against Iraq even though they had no WMD, I just would have done it more competently."
There are two problems with this. The first is that if he's running as Republican lite - why shouldn't people just vote Bush? But hey, maybe "anybody but Bush" will carry him to victory anyway. Certainly Bush is doing an excellent job of defeating himself and simply getting out of the way and letting him finish himself off could very well work.
Fighting insurrections is dirty business and crushing them is dirtier. Expect the night falling on images out of Iraq to grow darker. Meanwhile those of us not on the ground in Iraq are going to have to rely on the few sources we have left to try and understand what's happening. Triangulate, read Robert Fisk, read Juan Cole and the various Iraqi blogs, listen to official US news releases and read the Iraqi reisistance site.
Iraqi police ordered all journalists to leave the holy city of Najaf on Sunday, just as a new U.S. offensive against militants hiding out in a revered shrine there began.
In 1817 David Ricardo formalized the Law of Comparative Advantage. Since then it has stood the test of time as one of the very few laws that an economist can point to and say, "this is indisputably true." It's because of this law that you can only rarely find an economist who doesn't believe in unrestricted free trade. But Ricardo added an important caveat when he discussed free trade and comparative advantage and it's one that most modern economists seem to have forgotten...
Seriously. Are you cracked, off your rocker or otherwise a nutter? Ever wondered? What about your kids and their teachers? Well, soon you may get to find out and have your child medicated, at government expense, with only the most expensive drugs. The President's New Freedom Comission on Mental Health is proposing the following:
Via The New York Times I read that in order to receive money to treat aliens, Hospitals in the US would be required to determine that they were aliens. Specificially they would have to ask the following questions, document them and turn the answers over to federal authorities. Knowingly providing the wrong information would be a criminal offense:
When an industry matures you can move it out to the hinterland. That's what is happening in the US - that's outsourcing. All these industries are mature - they don't need to be located in the US anymore - you can stick'em elsewhere. Being in Silicon valley isn't necessary in semis and tech anymore, the information you gain, the speed and access to the brightest minds in concentration, as well as the small custom suppliers - they aren't necessary.
If you're going to crush the Iraqi resistance you're going to have to kill a lot of people fairly indiscriminately. That means, in this media age, that you don't want witnesses - especially not witnesses with cameras. In Iraq the veil of darkness has been inexorably falling for months now, as the Western media, most of whom were always unwilling to leave guarded areas, have been coralled through terror, threats and killings. Really, Robert Fisk and a couple others aside, there is only on media source left operating in Iraq. Al-Jazeera.
We knew Bush knew he was lying about WMD, al-Q'aeda and Iraq and so on - but putting it all together in one place hadn't been done, making each refutal of claims they honestly believed their own claims, and had good reason to do so, a tiresome exercise of sticking your finger in the dike only to have another lie spring out elsewhere. Today, in a brilliant and immacuately sourced article David Sirota and Christy Harvey have rebutted all of the major claims. Next time some NeoCon apologist or right winger in denial tries to claim otherwise, just point them to it.
I spent the better part of yesterday at The Public Journalism Network'sExploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism Conference. As the schedule makes clear it was definitely meant more for journalists and academics than bloggers, but I still found it made me think a little bit more about what we're doing as bloggers, what the similarities between bloggers and jounrnalists are - what the differences are, and gave me some insights into the world of working journalists. I'm just going to run through my thoughts and impressions, so expect a fairly disconnected jumble. There were a lot of presentations and good points made which I'm not going to comment on - these are the things that struck me enough to make me scrawl a note on them on my clipboard (no laptop for Ian.)
I spent the day at the PJNET conference on Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism and I'll have quite a bit more on it later. Right now I want to pick out one interesting point - Warren Kinsella and Jay Rosen gave very different advice on how to run a blog. Warren, a man who comes from a political background, talked about keeping your message simple, repeating it and punching it up (not his exact words). He calls blogging punk rock journalism. Jay Rosen talked about his blog, PressThink and how he's got the audience he wants - about 5,000 people who want to read longer thoughful essays and think and talk about them.
What's going on in Sudan is a type of guerilla warfare. There is only one way to defeat an insurgency - you have to destroy the support of the population for the insurgents. You can do that in three ways - you can convince the population to support you through good government; you can make the population so fearful of you that they refuse to support the insurgents; or you can destroy the population's ability to support the insurgents.
Methods two and three are often used together and one and two are often used in conjunction as well. What we have in Sudan is a combination of fear and destruction of the civilian population's ability to support the insurgents.
The Patriot Act is unpopular with a lot of people. Patriot II wouldn't be able to pass Congress. A good thing, right?
Well no, it would be, except that what's been done is that the provisions that the people who want to protect you by taking away your civil liberties - who want to protect you by taking away the freedoms the terrorists supposedly hate, have simply been broken out and are being moved through piecemeal.
Edwards' most famous speech is his Two Americas speech. I listen to Edwards and it echoes through me and sets of resonances. My life is not his life - my parents were rich, then poor, then middle class during my life - my father both made and lost a fortune in his thirties and fourties. I went, paid for partially by the UN, to an elite private school - then spent my twenties poor, often ill and frequently just a penny from the streets.
Yeah, we're supposed to be over it. Still, go take a look at this flash site - the best basic explanation of what happened with the voter purge list in 2000 that I've seen. A similiar purge was stalled this time, but that doesn't mean there aren't other, similiar, initiatives underway which we don't know about.
Via Carltone at C101 I came across the rumour is that Jerry Falwell may have a speaking spot at the Republican Convention. If true, what it tells me is that Bush's internal polling must be showing some weakness in the base that needs shoring up, even at the risk of alienating more moderate voters.
It's called the "rush to the bottom". In the eighties it was the States playing it - each one trying to outdo the other in cutting taxes on businesses in order to entice them to relocate to their state. Countries have played the game as well - offering low wages and low or no taxes in exchange for investment, factories and jobs. It's one of those activities that can be smart for the individual company, state or country but has disastrous consequences if everyone pursues it - because at the end of the day almost everyone is collecting less taxes and has workers earning less money (and thus spending less money.)
Jay Currie writes, after accepting DenBeste's dubious idea that the right believes in trusting people to make their own decisions, that:
The other half is the implicit humility a conservative feels in the face of having to make a decision on behalf of the rest of society. The roots of conservatism lie in the fact conservatives are very sceptical about the possibility of having enough knowledge to justify abridging human liberty.
The problem with both these assertions is that they treat the right as monolithic...
I recently ran across a web site, "The Iraqi Resistance" which covers the Iraq insurgency with an unabashedly pro-insurgent bias. It's worth your while to take a look. Every few days they post a long wrapup of the fighting. I confess I find some of it dubious - but be clear that I find most of what comes out of US military PR flacks as dubious. Somewhere between the two (where is unclear) lies the truth.
The site includes a huge gallery of pictures, some movies and an archive of reports which unfailing portray the US as either brutes or losing and the resistance as heroic freedom fighters. It's unquestionably a propoganda site; there is little pretense otherwise, but that doesn't make it worthless any more than the fact that US military reports are dubious makes them worthless. In a world of imperfect information you have to triangulate on the truth. This site is one of the triangulation points.
None of us can be an expert on everything. There are always areas where you're not going to know enough to have a worthwhile opinion. That doesn't mean you can't have a good idea what's happening - or likely to happen, in those areas, however. The key is to know who get's it right more often than wrong. The key is to know who to trust, when to trust them, what their weaknesses are and what is outside their sphere of competence.
Eric Margolis is one of the people who is on my "trust" list. He's not always right, but he knows his beat - foreign affairs in Eurasia - and he knows it well. He has a slight tendency to be too alarmist, but his alarms are always based on factual knowledge. Before the Iraq war he came out and said, both in writing and on TV that Iraq had no WMD of any significance. He spoke and is speaking of the pressure the CIA was under to provide intelligence they knew was fake (why has everyone forgotten that the CIA provided many leaks against the "intelligence" before the war?)
It's one of the most scandalous practices you've probably never though much about - the use of tax shelters to create paper losses to avoid paying taxes. PBS's Frontline had a show on it, and the webpage is still up for those who want to view it.
"Anything that's not being paid that should be paid, that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up," asserts Charles Rossotti, a Republican businessman who became commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1997 and spent five years battling bogus shelters. Rossotti estimates that because the government is not collecting all that is owed -- the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters -- everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should.
It's not that hard to do - for example, Wachovia, the US's fifth largest bank at the time, has engaged in a number of lease back agreements.
One of the things a lot of people don't realize is how much of what they do is recorded. Let's say you drive to work and stop at a gas station, a convenience store and an ATM. You've just been recorded three times. Depending where you live, you may have been photographed by suvveillance cameras on the streets and when you walk into work there's a good chance your workplace has a taped surveillance system.
When Oklahoma was hit by domestic terrorists the FBI was able to find multiple tapes of the suspects from their stops at various locations (not very bright of them, but then they weren't very bright.) In fact, it's probably safe to say that most privately owned businesses beyond a certain size have some surveillance - certainly most stores, malls and office buildings do.
But still, we don't expect to be under constant surveillance all the time - especially not when we're in public places. So I found this story about Boston's plans to watch the convention through over 100 surveillance cameras interesting. Of course, the intent is to keep down violence, protect against terrorism... etc...
Every month the Federal Reserve releases consumer debt figures. The figures are widely reported but without context they don't mean much. Consumer debt is debt used to finance consumption - it includes, among other things, credit cards, car loans, and those "no money down, no payment for 12 months, oac" that you see on TV all the time. It's debt used to finance consumption - in other words - to live higher than your current finances will allow. There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation - almost no one keeps enough money around to buy a car, for example.
A good way to consider the effect of debt is measure it against income. Since consumer debt is short term debt, with monthly payments and rarely has a duration longer than five years (and usually much shorter) the appropriate figure to measure it against is monthly income. The chart below does just that, the ratio is the number of months of income the average person's debt principal makes up.
BOP's Jay Rosen asks, in a beautiful post that pinwheels ideas like sparks, "If a religion writer covered the presidential campaign, would campaign coverage be any different?"
Yes. Because as Jay notes, things like Party conventions are about ritual - and ritual is about symbols.
I know you're never supposed to make Nazi comparisons, but the first thing that came to mind was Herman Goering's "Shoot first and ask questions later, and don't worry, no matter what happens, I will protect you."
It's not an exact analogy, but it has the same flavour - the dogs are being let loose...
Russil Wvong at BlogsCanada has up a post on health care, specifically based on a new study by the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The article isn't large but in his comments Russil quotes from Paul Krugman (who I have the greatest respect for) on drug costs and health care costs. Paul wrote (in the age of Diminished Expectations):
"... can eliminating profiteering be a significant part of the answer to our health care problems? No: there isn't that much excess profit, and we can't do much about what there is.
It's common wisdom amongst a certain set that private companies are always better and provide better and cheaper services and goods than publicly run companies. The evidence in support of that is mixed but the supposition continues nonetheless.
In Canada auto insurance is one of the areas where the evidence isn't particularly mixed - and the Insurance Company of British Columbia is one of the points for the side that public companies can be very effective at providing cheaper services than private ones.
As a result, sources tell NEWSWEEK, Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election." Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack. "We are reviewing the issue to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election," says Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland spokesman.
Jay Currie's a reasonable man and someone I read to keep touch with what the right is thinking. So I was disturbed to read what he's writing about Michael Moore.
In the end Moore really does not need to be taken on. He pretty much does the job himself. However, denBeste draws the comparison between the Shi'ite fanatics who supported al-Sadr and the looney lefties who are so bereft of leadership they have no choice but to rally round Moore.
Moore has mastered the art of the half truth and the telling edit. In this he is using the tools of his culture much as al-Sadr rallied his milita to their deaths using the tools of the Shi'ite martyr cult. Both prey on ignorance. Moore's run is likely to last longer than al-Sadr's. Which denBeste sees as a good thing,
It's our constant companion - and one most don't want to acknowledge. Especially most Americans. Through most of history, and today in much of the world, random senseless death is a bad bounce away, but we like to deny it and in the West we can do so. It's kept away from us - a person can go decades without seeing someone die, or, thanks to closed casket burials - seeing a dead person.
But for a lot of people in a lot of countries, death is something that just happens, for no good reason, to people who did nothing to deserve it.
I've lived in some of those countries. Countries where civil war is a living memory, where a policeman or soldier could kill you and nothing much will happen, where disease claims many and no one cares. Countries where 30 can be old.
Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn’t be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president.
Have Americans become so blase about this sort of suppression of free speech that it doesn't lead - that it is less important than some bolerplate speech by a politician? These two "Bush opponents" weren't even disrupting the event - it's not as if they were trying to heckle Bush (and even then their removal would be questionable.)
Free Speach "zones" (I thought the entire US was a free speach zone) are an an abomination in any democracy, but especially in the United States, the nation which enshrined free speach in it's constitution - but this goes beyond that into a weird twilight zone where even silent criticism is forbidden.
Lately with all the problems of the Bush administration it has become difficult to remember why non-Americans loved America. Especially as a Canadian I grew up on American TV, read American books, listened to American music, read American history and watched American movies.
I believe in America. Perhaps I believe in it in a way that most Americans don't, since my love is mostly from afar. America the strong and the free. Where all men are created equal, the nation that took the wretched masses of other countries and gave them a new home, hope and freedom. America, the country that had free speech in it's constitutional amendments. America, whose industrial might helped turn World War II. America, whose Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. America, where anyone could make it rich with a little luck and a lot of hard work.
And Americans - I believe that in terms of national character, Americans are basically good people who want to do the right thing - kind hearted, brave and, as a people, dedicated to principles like equality, justice and fairness.
In an exercise codenamed Operation Summer Pulse 04, it is expected to arrange for an unprecedented seven aircraft carrier strike groups (CSGs) to rendezvous in waters a safe distance away from the Chinese coastline - but still within striking distance - after mid-July.
Such forces would also be in position to blockade North Korea if the US so chose - and one suspects they might. There is also word of naval activity by the British, Russians and French and a possibility of an Iranian blockade.
The June Employment Situation Job Release (PDF) is out. On a seasonally adjusted basis the economy picked up about 112,000 jobs. The working age population increased by 229,000 last month. Gains were mainly in business services, health and social services, and transportation. Construction was flat (expect it to get worse soon) and manufacturing was down slightly. The household survey added substantially more jobs than the Establishment survey, which is a bad sign as during periods when the job situation is improving the difference shrinks rather than grows as self employment and unpaid employment drops in favour of payroll employment. Overall this is a thoroughly mediocre report, but better than actual job losses.
Update (10:35 pm) Vote projections are showing that the Liberals will probably win a strong minority government. The key was Ontario, where voters decided not to take a chance on the Conservatives and appear to be voting about 40% to 30% Liberal/Conservative. Assuming it plays out as expected the question will be whether the Liberals can make a deal with the NDP for the support needed to run a government. Layton's demand of a referendum on PR is a non-starter, Liberal Leader Paul Martin can't grant it without going down as the Liberal Party's greatest traitor of all time - so we'll see if a deal can be made regardless, or if the Liberals turn to the Bloc Quebecois (unlikely, but not impossible.) (CBC Election Coverage)
It's election day in Canada. The campaign has been an interesting one. The Liberals have run a primarily negative campaign, painting the Conservatives as irresponsible radicals who would plunge the country into deficits and threaten abortion rights, gay marriage and health care. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have tried to appear as non-threatening as possible while chaining the Liberals to the corruption scandals which have plagued their administration.
Lewis MacKenzie on the Canadian Afghanistan Withdrawal
by Ian Welsh
Retired General Lewis MacKenzie has an article on the disgraceful excuse offered by the DND for why our troops wouldn't be staying in Afghanistan to act as a rapid reaction force during the elections.
If you don't recall, the excuse was as follows:
What the Americans are looking for is not exactly what our troops are trained for.
Actually, as it happens, it's exactly what they're trained for.
This is the fourth in a series making a case for the various parties. The Liberal case is here, the Conservative one here and the NDP one is here. As with the other articles there is no attempt to be balanced within this article.
Let's face facts, all three of the major parties are broken. The Liberals are corrupt, the Conservatives are irresponsbile radicals who want to remake Canada in a way that most Canadians don't support and the NDP are a guttered promise built on class warfare which has never had success at the Federal level. If you vote for any of them you're voting for the lesser of three evils. But there is another choice - another way: a place where your vote can build something new that points the way to a better future for Canada.
The Blogging of the Prime Minister: My Conservative Journey
by Ian Welsh
I came into the election as an ex-member of the now dead Progressive Conservative Party(PC). I attended the Conservative Toronto Center nomination meeting (though as a non-member I didn't vote.) My father is a long time Conservative of the Reform stripe and I have defended the Reform Party and the Alliance in the past. In short, I started off favouring the Conservatives and expecting to vote for them.
Moreover I grew up in B.C. I'm sensitive to the very real slights and injuries that the West has endured at the hands of successive governments - issues such forcing oil to be sold at below market prices; giving bids to Quebec companies that were underbid by western companies; and allowing west coast fish to be sold before processing. I think Western alienation is entirely justified on the facts.
Like many Canadians I was disgusted by Liberal corruption. I've been talking about it for years - although the sheer brazenness of AdScam was something of a shock, the actual corruption wasn't. I knew there was a sense of entitlement amongst certain members of the party - a complacency born of too many years in power and too much assurance of continued power - a feeling that they were our rulers, not our servants and that it was their money, not ours.
The election remains in play and the winner is not yet determined, despite some premature calls on behalf of the Conservatives. Although Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is generally seen as having "won" the English language debate, the SES tracking poll (pdf) shows no effect. This shouldn't come as a surprise, as less than 10% of Canadians watched the entire debate and, in any case, there was no "knockout" blow delivered to or by any leader.
The pseudonymous Oldman is a regular commenter her at BOP. He also has a blog of his own, "Oldman1787's Blog". The name isn't very inspiring, but the commentary is excellent, especially on economic matters. People pay a lot of money for economic analysis much worse than what Oldman is handing out for free on his blog. Notable recent posts include an explanation of quality adjustments in inflation indices, a post on the oil crisis that is approaching, and a quick hit on the possibility of stagflation. If this sort of thing interests you in the least, you owe it to yourself to wander over and take a look - and probably to slap a bookmark down. If one of the identifying features of age is wisdom, Oldman more than lives up to his name - albeit he's often an wise man frustrated by the stupidity of young and old alike.
This time I'm going to tell a story about the debt. Once upon a time, about 30 years ago, we had a relatively small debt, that sat at about 12% of GDP and had servicing charges on gross debt of a little over 5.3%. That was 1973. Oddly the year before servicing charges had been 5%, with a slightly higher debt - and the year after servicing charges were to rise to 5.6%. Those servicing charges would keep rising, reaching a height of 10.7% in 1981. That rise more than doubled actual debt costs - and since debt itself began to rise, there was a classic vicious cycle. Although there would be dips, a long term decline would not begin until 1991.
The argument (from Linda Leatherdale of Sun Media) is essentially that the Tories did the hard work getting things (almost) under control, then the Liberals reaped the benefits.
Let's just look at some basic charts:
Here's the first one: Net Federal Debt from 69 to present.
There's a pretty clear huge rise in the debt, really starting to take off in 1975.
This is one of those long times before decision when you rush headlong towards the time which will matter; a long twilight moment, and as in a long dive even though you are rushing with great velocity it seems as if you’re just hanging in air. It’s not the election, which is already won for Kerry, which will be the time of decision. The time I speak of is the first few months of a Kerry administration. It is then that Kerry will decide on a new direction for America and it is then that America’s fate – and that of the world, will be determined.
Melodramatic? Not at all. Kerry will inherit a host of problems that if not dealt with effectively could either destroy or cripple America. The most obvious is what we call terrorism, but which is more than that – a giant game of Empire with oil and nuclear weapons as the prizes. From Afghanistan to Morocco, but centering in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (not in Iraq or Afghanistan) this game will determine who controls the most important resource in the world. Oil. And the US isn’t winning this war, it’s losing it. Saudi Arabia is increasingly unstable; it’s armed forces are unreliable; it’s strongest allies are ideologically wedded to the House of Saud’s greatest enemy and it’s greatest resource (oil) is exposed to strikes whenever it’s opponents choose.
This is the third part of a series making the case for each of the parties. You can read the case for the Liberals here and for the Conservatives here.
You should vote for the NDP because the NDP will be a government that actually tries to solves problems rather than just hoping they go away or shrugging and saying “that’s not a Federal responsibility – let the provinces handle it.” Layton’s NDP has laid out concrete plans for dealing with the coming energy crisis (if you think oil prices are high now, wait 10 years and get back to me), homelessness, health care and trade issues. Unlike the Conservatives the NDP aren’t pretending that privatization is a magic bullet for curing Medicare – they’re going after root causes of illness like pollution and poisoners and tackling the key drivers of rising health costs like drug costs by changing patent legislation - something neither of the other parties would dare to do.
Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Modern Republicans, Taxation and Deficits
by Ian Welsh
I read in the New York Times today that rather than agree to either cut spending or increase taxes in order to pay for tax cuts Senate Republicans, stymied by Democrats and some of their own number, are considering not passing a budget at all.
Embarrassing as that would be for the party that controls both houses of Congress, many Republicans are concluding they would be better off with no budget plan than with one that would require them to pay the cost of permanently extending last year's tax cuts.
Health Care Spending and Results in Perspective: The US, the OECD and Canada
by Ian Welsh
I recently re-discovered that there are a lot of misconceptions amongst certain segments of the population as to how much money the US spends on health care and how much it receives in return. Let's get spending out of the way first - as the above chart from the OECD shows the US spends more money per capita than Canada or a number of countries (in fact the US spends more per capita than any OECD country.)
Making the Case for Voting for the Canadian Conservative Party
by Ian Welsh
This is the second of a three part series making the case for voting for each of the three major parties. You can read the case for voting Liberal here.
You should vote Conservative because the Conservatives have a bold, forward looking plan for Canada, and neither of the other two parties can be trusted to run Canada. The Liberals are irredeemably corrupt and the NDP is so driven by ideology that their program is impractical.
If you vote Conservative you’ll get the biggest tax cut in Canadian history. Twenty-five percent for individuals earning less than $70,000 a year and an EI cut. Don’t let the scaremongers tell you Canada can’t afford it – Paul Martin’s Liberals have been hiding surpluses for years. Almost every year they’ve underestimated the surplus and they’ve done their best to hide it in Trusts that the Auditor General and Parliament can’t audit. That extra money is your money, and you should be free to spend it as you choose, rather than the government choosing for you. Nor is this a tax cut like the Bush cuts - it's targetted at the middle class and the poor. It isn't intended to make the rich richer.
This is the first of a three part series in which I will make the strongest case I can for each of the three parties. There will be no attempt to be balanced within each essay, this is the case that I think each of the party leaders should be making, not an attempt to weigh and judge between them.
You should vote for the Liberals because they’ve done an amazing job and there is no reason to believe they won’t continue to do so. There’s an old saying that “when the US gets a cold, Canada gets the flu.” What that means is that when the US has an economic downturn Canada generally has an even worse one. That didn’t happen the last time – for over two years Canada’s economy outperformed the US economy on a broad range of metrics. That’s practically unheard of. The reason it outperformed the US is that we now have better economic fundamentals than the US. Our cost of business is lower. Our corporate taxes are lower. Our deficit is under better control. Those are all policies that were put in place primarily while Paul Martin was finance minister.
So, let's say that who won wasn't something you had a stake in, but you could place a bet. What odds would you put on al-Q'aeda and what odds would you put on the US?
Because that's the game, a giant Go board that is the world. For those who haven't played Go, in Go if you surround pieces they turn to your colour. It's a game of stunning reversals, where territory assumed safe can suddenly switch sides. Unlike chess, computers suck at Go, but like chess a good player can give a bad player a lot of extra pieces and still win.
The US has a lot more pieces than al-Q'aeda. Aircraft carriers, nuclear missiles, piles of money and excellent troops. The American economy thrums with money and activity, the US army uses the most sophisticated technology in the world and the US has more power than any empire in hundreds of years.
Against this juggernaut how can al-Q'aeda succeed?
I've just finished reading the NDP policy platform, which means I've now gone over all of the three major party's platforms. I'll have more on both the Conservative and NDP platforms over the next week or so, but before I go into detailed analyses I want to talk about my first impression of the three platforms.
The Liberal platform is business as usual. A little bit more money for this, a promise to investigate that. Basically, aside from some governance issues the Liberals think they've been doing a good job and they want your vote on that basis.
Extremists win because moderates fail. If moderates succeed extremists are driven out. If moderates fail to solve problems then people gravitate to extremists to solve them.
When Sistani calls for peace and calls for democracy and America announces plans for a government that involve no sovereignty for Iraqis, give Kurds a veto over any rewrite of the constitution and will leave American troops in charge of Iraq then Sistani fails. When al-Sadr then launches revolution and the US is unable to stop him or the insurgents in Fallujah; when his revolution leads to the US admitting it will have to flee; when these things happen al-Sadr becomes more powerful and Sistani loses power and influence. Al-Sadr was a fairly minor figure before the invasion, now in post US Iraq he will be an influential and important man – a man who believes in destroying villages for immorality. Sistani, a Quietist who believes in the separation of church and state, one of the most enlightened Mullah’s in that part of the world will not have the power he would have had – if his calls for peace and democracy had worked and violence had not been necessary. How do extremists win? Because moderatism fails…
The Canadian New Democratic Party Health Care Platform
by Ian Welsh
Over the last few weeks I've spent a lot of time going over the Conservative platform so I thought I should take a look at that of the NDP. Medicare is a good place to start, as it's something that Canadians care a great deal about - and a place where the NDP offers a very different vision than that of the Conservatives and Liberals.
Conservatives and Liberals seem to want to reduce costs by inviting the private sector into Medicare. I've discussed in the past the doubts I have about this (and under what circumstances I think it might be useful), but to summarize - I don't see it as a panacea. Private health care isn't automatically less expensive than public - especially as private investors expect profits. The NDP have pledged to keep the system public, and that means they are offering a clear alternative to the other major parties.
I’ve only seen Jack Layton once. It was budget time in Toronto and I thought I’d go watch city council in session. I arrived late in the day, after work, to one of those interminable sessions where citizens give depositions to the city government. Each person had five minutes to talk, then the rest of their testimony was read into the record (ie. the rest of their written notes were made part of the written record of proceedings, as if everyone had heard it. But not one had and no one would ever hear it or even read it except the poor clerk who had to type it in.)
Today Prime Minister Paul Martin will drop the writ, visiting the Governor General to call a Canadian Federal election which will occur June 28th. It's the first election in over a decade where the outcome is in doubt. The Liberals ride higher in the most recent poll than their nearest opposition, the Conservatives, at 39% to 31%. But, much as is the case in the US - Canada has a first past the post system and those numbers conceal significant problems for the Liberals. The West is strongly Conservative with some NDP strength; in the key province of Ontario their lead is only 42% to 39% (statistically insignificant); and in Quebec the separatist Bloc Quebecois is outpolling them 42% to 34%, leaving them with a solid lead only in the Maritimes.
The beheading of Nick Berg is purported to have been done by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the Ansar al-Islam group. Or rather, in all the news reports, it's supposed to have been done by al-Zarqawi, al-Q'aeda leader.
Reading this immediately had me wondering, because I remember a few months ago a letter intercepted from al-Zarqawi to bin Laden asking for help in commiting sectarian attacks on Iraqi Shia.
The most active terrorist network inside Iraq appears to be operating mostly apart from Al Qaeda, senior American officials say.
Most significantly, the officials said, American intelligence had picked up signs that Qaeda members outside Iraq had refused a request from the group, Ansar al-Islam, for help in attacking Shiite Muslims in Iraq.
The request was made by Ansar's leader, a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and intercepted by the United States last month. The apparent refusal is being described by some American intelligence analysts as an indication of a significant divide between the groups.
It’s often said that the problems of the modern world, and of the US in particular, are complicated. People who say this are intimating, in fact, that there are no known solutions and that the US will just have to muddle through with business as usual.
Or perhaps they have a solution – a bill – that will partially help solve the problem. Maybe that bill is sold as a prescription drug benefit for seniors, which upon examination seems to give more aid to drug companies than drugs to seniors.
But really I don’t think the US has a lot of complicated problems. I think in most cases great progress can be made with very simple solutions. The solutions are widely known, but honest discussion of them is somehow beyond the pale.
The core of it is a proposed tax cut of approximately 25%:
The income-tax cut would effectively create a single 16-per-cent tax bracket for incomes of up to $70,000, recalling previous Canadian Alliance proposals for a modified flat-tax. Rates in high-income brackets would remain unchanged. The document claims that a taxpayer earning $50,000 annually would receive a rebate of about $1,000.
Unlike US tax cuts this is aimed squarely at the middle class. There is a little loving for the affluent as well. A new tax deductible "registered life time savings plan" would allow $5000 of after tax money to go into an account whose proceeds would not afterwards be taxed. It's fair to say that this would mainly benefit those who are already maxing out their RRSP's - though it's not the same thing as an RRSP since it's funded with after tax dollars (as opposed to before tax) and since proceeds are not taxed - rather than tax deffered.
The Blogging of the Prime Minister: Running away from Iraq
by Ian Welsh
I read today in The Toronto Star (a solidly Liberal Party newspaper) that the Canadian Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, is trying to deny that he would have taken Canada to war with Iraq. He is trying to claim that he merely wished the Canadian government would support those soldiers who were on exchanges with the American and British Governments.
Unfortunately for Harper, the record doesn't support his version of events.
I'm a Canadian and for years I've been participating in US political forums. On occasion someone will attack me by saying, in effect, "you're Canadian, what business is it of yours what we do in America?" My standard response has been as follows, "there's a joke in Canada that we have a Prime Minister - and a President. But we only get to vote for the Prime Minister."
The point I'm making, of course, is that what you do in the US effects us in Canada a great deal. But it isn't just Canadians who are effected - it's everyone everywhere in the world. The US is the hegemonic power in the world and nowhere in the world where humans live is unaffected by its sway and policies. AIDS crisis in Africa? Effected by US drug patent legislation. Famine in any third world country? Affected by the destruction of third world agriculture fomented by the IMF, US and Europe. Global warming? More emissions from the US than any other country. Boom in India? A large component is US outsourcing.
Despite living in Canada, I work in the US life insurance industry, and every day I receive a list of news stories related to life insurance. Today I received a story that is tangentially related to a theme I often talk about.
Major insurers routinely refuse to issue life insurance policies to Americans who have traveled to Israel or plan to do so in the future, a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court charges.
The suit accuses 14 insurance companies of unfair business practices under California law and seeks an injunction to forbid companies from denying insurance to travelers to Israel.
Brad DeLong has up two related posts worth reading and commenting on. The first is "Doesn't Anyone Read Max Weber Anymore?", in which starts with Weber's thesis that the primary measure of an effective government is how well it controls the use of force in its domain and the second is "Indirect Rule", a long excerpt on the deal that Marines made for Fallujah to be ruled by a unit led by ex-Baathist generals and staffed by ex-insurgents.
It does seem that very few people read their Weber any more - which is a pity, because of the late 19th century social theorists Weber was arguably the best and certainly is the one whose books still reward the 21st century reader the most.
DeLong's point, riffing off of Weber, is that there's no one in Iraq who's in effective control - Bremer isn't really a Proconsul because he doesn't have the ability to make many decisions. Concerned about Abu Ghraib, for example, all he could do is whine to Washington - he couldn't sack the commander of the prison and send in a new commander and picked men to clean it up before it blew.
Josh Marshall is one of my must read blogs. He's intelligent, humane, often has the scoop and is, moreover, a good writer. So imagine my dismay when I read this, today:
Our moral superiority to mass murderers and people who desecrate people's bodies in town squares is, while thankfully true, simply not relevant to this issue.
This is the first of what will be a series of articles on the Canadian healthcare system. It's being posted at BOP as well as the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog because healthcare is an issue in both elections - and whenever Americans talk healthcare options they tend to look North. (Even as Canadians look south).
Study after study, from Roy Romanow's royal commission to Don Mazankowski's health panel in Alberta, have concluded that two-tier medicine is not the way to go; that a national, universal health-care system is both cheaper and better than the alternative; that structural health reforms are essential, but that Canadians should be prepared to pay more — one way or another — to improve the system.
This is all right, except one thing - it's not clear that Canadians have to pay more, or, at least, it's not clear we have to pay a lot more...
Really, why should Iraqi prisoners be treated better than American prisoners?
Update (edited again May2/04): some much worse pictures have come out, including ones that appear to show the rape of Iraqi women. It seems most likely the rape pictures are fake, but I will leave the link up as these pictures are floating around Iraq. Don't click on this link if you've got a weak stomach or you're squeamish.
I read an article today in Salon which brough back unpleasant memories. Brave New Jobs by Claudia O'Keefe, in which she recounts her experience working at an upscale Washington resort. Highlights include being called a gamma (a Brave New World reference for semi-sentient menial workers); being handed blood and scab encrusted bandages; being given only a 10 minute break in a twelve hours shift - and much, much more.
And it makes me remember - it brings back the rage.
The indispensable Pogge has up an article on NAFTA – specifically on Chapter 11, which provides for binding tribunals. A foreign company which has been harmed by government action or regulation, may sue for damages under Chapter 11. A panel of three arbitrators determines if harm was done, and if it was, they are empowered to award unlimited compensatory damages. These tribunals override national law. They can, in fact, override the highest courts of the US, Canada and Mexico, including the Supreme Court.
These cases are secret. There is no right for legislative bodies or the public of any of the three countries to be given notice and the disputes take place in front of World Bank or UN tribunals. Nor are the proceeds chicken feedings...
As everyone has probably heard by now, last week a tape from bin Laden offered reconciliation with Europe. The condition was simple, any government that agrees to not attack Muslims and to not interfere in Muslim affairs will, in turn, not be attacked.
I’ve talked about what the US should do in Iraq here and here. But there was never any real chance that the Bush administration would follow proposals that suggest actually giving Iraqis enough sovereignty to kick American troops out, nor allowing Iraqis, rather than Bush donors, to actually rebuild Iraq (or, rather, to profit from it.)
So, let’s talk about what the Bush strategy actually is, as best I can tell.
In a word: Iraqification. In a phrase: let Iraqis kill Iraqis.
Attention is now focused on the Sadrist rebellion, and that’s the way it must be, because until it’s defeated there is no way to move forward. But, although I have little doubt this particular rebellion will be put down, without a new plan for moving forward, it won’t be enough. So let’s try and sketch out a way to go forward ...
Above the 49th parallel political talk is dominated by two issues – Adscam and the question of when Prime Minister Paul Martin will call an election, or as Canadians say, when he’ll drop the writ.
Almost every political event is viewed through that lens. Martin to meet with Bush? Not only does that means he probably won’t drop the writ until after the meeting but it occasions immediate analysis of why he would meet with Bush – a man who is loathed by the vast majority of Canadians. What is Bush going to grant Martin and what is Martin going to have to give up to Bush? Anything substantial, like Canadian troops for Iraq, would mean Martin’s defeat in any upcoming election so in all probability it will be some sort of agreement to tighten borders and crack down on terrorist suspects in Canada, a motherhood issue. From Bush, probably some sort of promise to help with either softwood lumber tariffs or the embargo on Canadian beef caused by mad cow disease. Canadians may not like Bush, but we’re pragmatic, we know that the US and Canada have more trade with each other than any other country and we know that loathe Bush or not, we need to have a working relationship. But we don’t have to like it, and Martin cannot afford to look like he won’t stand up to the US. Especially not if he’ll be dropping the writ anytime soon, and especially not with a reborn Conservative party, out of power for over a decade and hungry.
I first became interested in how governments measure unemployment back in the early 90’s recession. I was unemployed and I couldn’t find a job and the same was true of many of my friends. Those who were able to find jobs were generally working farm below the level they had been in the past. And I’d read the unemployment rate numbers and it seemed to me they didn’t really reflect what I was seeing around me. So I decided to investigate. What I found out was that the unemployment rate didn’t measure exactly what I had thought it did.
Politics is theater. Every politician should understand how to set up circumstances, how to use gestures, how to use language and be able to align himself with the correct symbols to make his or her point. The “symbolic” gesture, done right, is far from empty – it is the only way to crystallize your stand in the iconic language necessary to move the debate in your direction.
(Canada/US Exchange Rate)
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