Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

Take a Tour Through Airport Security Theatre

Here is a bit from an article in Vanity Fair in which the reporter takes a walk through Reagan National Airport with security critic Bruce Schneier who points out the security weaknesses and the incredible expense to achieve this "security":

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

...

Two months after 9/11, the Bush administration created the Transportation Security Agency, ordering it to hire and train enough security officers to staff the nation’s 450 airports within a year. Six months after that, the government vastly expanded the federal sky-marshal program, sending thousands of armed lawmen to ride planes undercover. Meanwhile, the T.S.A. steadily ratcheted up the existing baggage-screening program, banning cigarette lighters from carry-on bags, then all liquids (even, briefly, breast milk from some nursing mothers). Signs were put up in airports warning passengers about specifically prohibited items: snow globes, printer cartridges. A color-coded alert system was devised; the nation was placed on “orange alert” for five consecutive years. Washington assembled a list of potential terror targets that soon swelled to 80,000 places, including local libraries and miniature-golf courses. Accompanying the target list was a watch list of potential suspects that had grown to 1.1 million names by 2008, the most recent date for which figures are available. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed the T.S.A. in 2003, began deploying full-body scanners, which peer through clothing to produce nearly nude images of air passengers.

Bruce Schneier’s exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”

...

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets—shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

The article is well worth reading. Go read the whole thing.

Saving Your Honour by Committing Suicide

The Europeans have painted themselves into a corner. They have created a European bank that has no tools to deal with the current mess. Worse, the elite of Europe refuse to admit the mess they are in. They refuse to think creatively about a solution. It is as if the crew over a sinking ship is fighting for control of the pilot's wheel. But steering isn't the problem. The ship has a big hole and is taking water and now quickly sinking. But the crew is too busy trying to "take charge" of the situation of "piloting" to bother with "sinking".

Here are key bits from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

If it weren’t so tragic, the current European crisis would be funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way. For as one rescue plan after another falls flat, Europe’s Very Serious People — who are, if such a thing is possible, even more pompous and self-regarding than their American counterparts — just keep looking more and more ridiculous.

...

Think about countries like Britain, Japan and the United States, which have large debts and deficits yet remain able to borrow at low interest rates. What’s their secret? The answer, in large part, is that they retain their own currencies, and investors know that in a pinch they could finance their deficits by printing more of those currencies. If the European Central Bank were to similarly stand behind European debts, the crisis would ease dramatically.

Wouldn’t that cause inflation? Probably not: whatever the likes of Ron Paul may believe, money creation isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy. Furthermore, Europe actually needs modestly higher overall inflation: too low an overall inflation rate would condemn southern Europe to years of grinding deflation, virtually guaranteeing both continued high unemployment and a string of defaults.

But such action, we keep being told, is off the table. The statutes under which the central bank was established supposedly prohibit this kind of thing, although one suspects that clever lawyers could find a way to make it happen. The broader problem, however, is that the whole euro system was designed to fight the last economic war. It’s a Maginot Line built to prevent a replay of the 1970s, which is worse than useless when the real danger is a replay of the 1930s.

And this turn of events is, as I said, tragic.

The story of postwar Europe is deeply inspiring. Out of the ruins of war, Europeans built a system of peace and democracy, constructing along the way societies that, while imperfect — what society isn’t? — are arguably the most decent in human history.

Yet that achievement is under threat because the European elite, in its arrogance, locked the Continent into a monetary system that recreated the rigidities of the gold standard, and — like the gold standard in the 1930s — has turned into a deadly trap.

Now maybe European leaders will come up with a truly credible rescue plan. I hope so, but I don’t expect it.

The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be better off if it collapses sooner rather than later.

This is the kind of blindness you get from ideology. An ideologue doesn't look outside to see if it is sunny. He consults his horoscope because he "knows" that the horoscope captures everything essential about his future. You can't convince the fool that the horoscope was written days or weeks ago, that an astrologer has no knowledge of the future, and that the easiest way to check the weather is to look out the window. Europe is going down and it will take the whole world just like the US took the world down when it refused to rescue the Lehman investment house in September 2008. What an incredibly stupid world.

I foolishly thought that humanity was slowly getting "smarter" as we got wealthier and better educated. I failed to realize that if you can't fix the idiocy of ideology, then the craziness of people who "know" things because their ideology tells them it is so will destroy the world. I've always puzzled how powerful civilization in the past could commit suicide. I now realize it comes about by the elite of those societies getting deeply committed to their ideology and refuse to peek out the window to see whether the sun is shining or not. Incredible!

Sadly nobody will win this prize:

“Lord Wolfson, a prominent eurosceptic . . . is offering £250,000 to the person who comes up with the best plan for winding up the euro in an orderly way. The Wolfson Economics Prize . . . will be the second-largest cash prize for an academic economics after the Nobel Prize.” – Financial Times, October 19

Why? Because the ideologues in Europe refuse to accept that there is a problem with the euro, with deficits, and with the European bank. Sure they will admit to "problems" but not enough to actually address the oncoming catastrophe. This big prize won't be won because you can't "solve" a problem when the problem is stupid people blind to their own stupidy and refusing to even listen to the voice of reason!

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

The Bogeyman the Republicans Refuse to See

Most normal people are scared of the bogeyman their imaginations conjure up, but tell themselves it isn't real and use various techniques calm themselves down and make it go away.

Republicans refuse to believe that a very real disaster could possibly happen when the debt ceiling is hit. By refusing to see this very real "reality", they are ensuring that the US will truly stumble into this financial disaster. And when this does happen these Republicans will truly be scared silly by the very bogeyman created by their witless refusal to face facts. But by this time, it will be too late for everyone because by then the US economy will have tanked and a "night of the living dead" horror story will be unleashed on the whole nation.

Here's a post by Jeff Frankel, a Harvard professor of Capital Formation and Growth, and who directs the Program in International Finance and Macroeconomics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is also on the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which officially declared the 2001 recession that explains just precisely how this horror story works:

In the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean and a teenage rival race two cars to the edge of a cliff in a game of chicken. Both intend to jump out at the last moment. But the other guy miscalculates, and goes over the cliff with the car.

This is the game that is being played out in Washington this month over the debt ceiling. The chance is at least 1/4 that the result will be similarly disastrous.

It is amazing that the financial markets continue to view the standoff with equanimity. Interest rates on US treasury bonds remain very low, barely above 3% at the ten-year maturity. Evidently it is still considered a sign of sophistication to say “This is just politics as usual. They will come to an agreement in the end.” Probably they will. But maybe not. (I’d put a ½ probability on an agreement that raises the debt limit, but just muddles through in terms of the genuine long term fiscal problem. That leaves at most a ¼ probability of a genuine long-term solution of the sort that President Obama apparently proposed last week - described as worth $4 trillion over ten years.)

My advice to investors is to shift immediately out of US treasuries and into high-rated corporate bonds. If the worst happens, you will probably save yourself from a big capital loss within the next month. If not, there is no harm done.

The game is not symmetric. The Republicans are the ones who are miscalculating. Evidently they are confident of prevailing: they rejected the President’s offer, even though he was willing to cut entitlement programs.

The situation is complicated because there are a number of different people crammed into the Republican car. There is one guy who is obsessed with the theory that, come August 3, the federal government could retain its top credit rating if it continued to service its debt by ceasing payment on its other bills. But this would mean failing to honor legal obligations that have already been incurred (paying suppliers for paper clips that have already been bought, paying soldiers their wages for last month’s service, sending social security recipients their checks, etc.). This is like observing that the cliff is not a 90 degree drop-off, but only 110 degrees. It doesn’t matter: the car would still go crashing into the ocean far below. The government’s credit would still be downgraded and global investors would still demand higher interest rates to hold US treasuries, probably on a long-term basis.

There are other guys (and gals) in the car who are even more delusional. They are dead set on a policy of immediately eliminating the budget deficit (e.g., those opposed to raising the debt ceiling no matter what, or those campaigning for a balanced budget amendment), and doing it primarily by cutting nondefense discretionary spending. This is literally impossible, arithmetically. But they honestly don’t know this. It is as if they were insisting that the car can fly. Sometimes it can be a good bargaining position to adopt a very extreme position. But if you are demanding that the car flies, you are not going to get your way no matter how determined you are.

It seems likely that the man in the driver’s seat - House Speaker John Boehner - does realize that his fellow passengers don’t have the facts quite right. But there is also a game of chicken going on within the Republican car. The crazies have said they will oppose in the next Republican primary election any congressman who votes to raise the debt ceiling or to raise tax revenues. (Yes, they think they would support someone who would eliminate the budget deficit primarily by cutting non-defense discretionary spending; but remember, this is arithmetically impossible.) The guy who is riding shot-gun in the car - the one who believes the car can fly — is trying to put his foot on top of Boehner’s on the accelerator pedal.

It seems to me that Boehner, too, is miscalculating. Given that the car can’t fly, the crazy guy is probably going to oppose him in the primaries no matter what he does. So I don’t see what his plan is. But whatever it is, he has made it clear that he doesn’t plan to agree to any increase in tax revenues.

As a result the Republican leadership is in the remarkable situation of refusing to agree to Obama’s offer to solve the problem so long as the solution includes raising tax revenue, even if it is via such measures as ending distortionary subsidies for ethanol, oil companies, and corporate jets.

If I had to guess: The financial markets will wake up just before August 3. US bond prices will finally fall. The market reaction will shock the Republican leadership into action. (Precedents include the delayed congressional passage of the unpopular TARP legislation in the fall of 2008 and the delayed passage of an unpopular IMF quota increase 10 years earlier.) They will finally make the small but necessary concessions on tax revenues. But by then it might be too late.

Of course the Republicans don't believe a word of this. They are "experts" and Frankel is just a "pointy-headed intellectual" as ex-Vice President Spiro Agnew (who went to jail for his crimes) loved to tell the American people. Why believe somebody who worked hard to earn a degree and teaches at one of the premier universities in the world when you can listen to an ignorant ex-con who finagled his way to high political office using extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy?

Why believe a Harvard professor when you can believe a previous low-level IRS employee like Michele Bachmann who uses her previous debt-collecting skills at the IRS to plumb the depth of this issue and come up with the conclusion:

After Obama's speech, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), a presidential contender who is currently at the top of the polls in Iowa, issued a statement reiterating that she wouldn't vote to raise the debt ceiling. She said Obama "has wrongly assumed that everyone agrees that we need to raise the debt ceiling... I disagree."

Getting the Dirt on Bachmann

Here is a bit from Matt Taibbi dishing out the dirt on Michele Bachmann. From his Rolling Stone blog:

Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign is running exactly according to plan. She kicked off the festivities Monday with one of her all-time Zucker-Brothers-style whoppers, confusing John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy...

...reports surfaced that the therapy clinic belonging to Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus – whom she married after the couple experienced simultaneous visions from God – has received over $100,000 in Medicaid funds. This is sort of the typical progression of Tea Party politicians; they come out blasting any sort of government “welfare,” and then it comes out later that they themselves a) have collected farm subsidies b) are doctors with a 50% Medicare-supported patient base who also oppose cuts in such doctor payments c) are strident opponents of government health care who themselves are insured by government health care programs (this is nearly universal among TP candidates, but my favorite example is Sharron Angle and her husband). Bachmann, of course, added her own unique twist to the Tea-Party-hypocrisy meme, being an antitax advocate who once worked as an attorney collecting taxes for the IRS.

So this news about Marcus Bachmann collecting state aid is not so surprising, but what is interesting is that he got these state funds and used them for, among other things, counseling gays to abandon their orientation. I hadn’t seen this quote before, but I’m sure it will repeated quite a lot in the upcoming months (emphasis mine):

“We have to understand that barbarians need to be educated, need to be disciplined,” Bachmann said. “And just because someone thinks [they're gay] or feels it doesn’t mean we need to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature.”

We can pretty much count out the gay vote for this candidate, I think.

Lastly, Bachmann in her Stephanopoulos interview unveiled what I think (I haven’t heard it before, at least) was a new take on her “the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery” comment. Her new thing is to say that John Quincy Adams, who was a founding father, worked tirelessly to end slavery. Therefore, apparently, the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery. When Stephanopoulos asked her if she was standing by her original statement, she repeated the Quincy Adams answer. So that’s fantastic – rather than own the mistake, she’s just plowing ahead.

Go to the original article to get the embedded links.

The Philosophy of Government, Supposedly

Here is a nice post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that ridicules the idea that the difference between the Republicans and Democrats is "just a difference in philosophy":

The Wall Street Journal Tells Us It's All About Philosophy

The news media keeps trying to tell us not to worry about who gets the money, the issue is one of philosophy. The WSJ picks up the task today telling readers that the difference between conservative and liberal budget plans:

"The big takeaway is this: The debate over how to reduce the deficit is truly a philosophical one about the size of government."

Is that so? The Congressional Budget Office tells us that it will cost $34 trillion (5 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall) more to provide Medicare equivalent policies through private insurers than through the traditional government Medicare program. This would be additional money paid by taxpayers and beneficiaries to insurers and providers. Is the desire to hand this money over to these groups a question of philosophy?

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I suppose that whether you are a billionaire or a beggar is just "philosophical". One obviously interested in "higher things" (like bigger numbers) while the other can't get his mind out of the gutter (or the cardboard box in which he resides). Yes, it is all "just philosophy".

Getting It Wrong in a Really Big Way

Here is a bit from an excellent post by Robert Reich that points out that the big shots at the top of the economy are reading the wrong tea leaves. They are getting it wrong. They are reading the opposite of what is really there:

Much of Wall Street thinks inflation is now the biggest threat to the US economy. As has been the case in the past, the Street is dead wrong. The biggest threat is falling into another recession.

The most significant economic news from the first quarter of 2011 is the decline in real wages. That’s unusual in a recovery, to say the least. But it’s easily explained this time around. In order to keep the jobs they have, millions of Americans are accepting shrinking paychecks. If they’ve been fired, the only way they can land a new job is to accept even smaller ones.

The wage squeeze is putting most households in a double bind. Before the recession, they’d been able to pay the bills because they had two paychecks. Now, they’re likely to have one-and-a half, or just one, and it’s shrinking.

Add to this the continuing decline in the value of the biggest asset most people own – their homes – and what do you get? Consumers who won’t and can’t buy enough to keep the economy going. That spells recession.

Why doesn’t Wall Street get it? For one thing, because lenders always worry more about inflation than borrowers – and, in general, the wealthier members of a society tend to lend their money to people who are poorer than they are.

But Wall Street’s inflation fears are also being stoked by several specifics.

First are price upswings in food and energy. The Street doesn’t seem to understand that when most peoples’ wages are dropping, additional dollars they spend on groceries and at the gas pump means fewer dollars they have left to spend in the rest of the economy. Rather than cause inflation, this is likely to lead to more job losses.

The Street is also worried that the Fed’s easy money policies are pushing the dollar down and thereby fueling inflation – as everything we buy abroad becomes more expensive. But if wages are stuck in the mud and everything we buy abroad costs more, Americans have even fewer dollars to spend. This also spells recession, not inflation.

Finally, the Street worries that if Democrats and Republicans fail to agree to a plan to cut the budget deficit, the credit-worthiness of the United States as a whole will be in jeopardy – causing interest rates to rocket and inflation to explode. Standard & Poors, the erstwhile credit-rating agency, has already sounded the alarm.

The Street has it backwards. Over the long term, the deficit does have to be tackled. But not now. When job growth remains tepid, when wages are dropping, and when the value of most households’ major asset is declining, government has to step in to maintain overall demand.

This is the worst possible time to cut public spending or reduce the money supply.

The biggest irony is that the Street is doing wonderfully well right now, in contrast to most Americans. Corporate profits for the first quarter of the year are way up. That’s largely because corporate payrolls are down.

Payrolls are down because big companies have been shifting much of their work abroad where business is booming. The Commerce Department recently reported that over the last decade American multinationals (essentially all large American corporations) eliminated 2.9 million American jobs while adding 2.4 million abroad.

What the Commerce Department didn’t say is the pace is picking up.

This pig-headed refusal to look at reality and see it for what it is makes life miserable for the bottom 90% of society. Reich sums it up nicely:

America’s jobless recovery is becoming a wageless recovery. That puts the odds of another recession greater than the risk of inflation. Wall Street and its representatives in Washington don’t understand – or don’t want to.

Sadly Obama doesn't "get it". He has never acknowledged that his economic policies are always a dollar short and a day late.

On Being Wrong

There are some useful thoughts in this talk. Being open to our own limited views and appreciating other viewpoints is the main message I take away.

Ezra Klein Nails the Idiocy of the Barack Obama "Compromise"

From Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog:

The substance of this deal is bad. But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse.

The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left.

But you would’ve never known it from President Obama’s encomium to the agreement. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” It fell to Boehner to give a clipped, businesslike statement on the deal. If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery.

...

So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

And policy defeats are what will matter. The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy. The late ‘90s were a boom time like few others -- and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration’s economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.

Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator.

And here is Paul Krugman's viewpoint on this Obama "victory"...

Ezra Klein gets this right, I think: it’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did. More than that, he has now completely accepted the Republican frame that spending cuts right now are what America needs.

It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which he gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts. The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.

I also think that Ezra is right that the Obama people are counting on a growing economy to pull them through. In fact, I think that’s been their strategy since the January 2010 State of the Union, when Obama shifted his focus from any effort to boost the economy and started talking about spending freezes. The judgment was apparently that it was OK to move policy in the wrong direction, because the economy was strong enough to weather the shock, and that it was more important to look centrist than to defend good policy.

Of course, that didn’t work out too well last year, did it?

Tragic.

You Are Only as Good as Your Sources

When you plan a trillion dollar war, you really should spend the time and money to make sure that your know what you are doing. You need to check your sources. When somebody tells you something that is too good to be true, but won't let you look at the source (i.e., German intelligence refusing to allow access to "Curveball") then you should be very, very cautious. But apparently in "the big leagues" these aren't the rules you play by. In the big leagues you saunter into the casino and put all your money on one bet and spin the wheel to see if you can "win big"!



You can thank Bush and the neo-cons for the disaster of the Iraq "policy". Yes, the 2 month war that was going to be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues brought instead a 7 year war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and the waste of much, much money. For that disaster, Bush gets to retire with dignity and his henchmen can write memoirs and make million dollar advances. Yes, virtue is rewarded and vice punished, but not in this world.

Cults

Here is a bit from a New Yorker magazine article about Paul Haggis, a Hollywood director who rose high in the Scientology cult. These bits show how bizarrely seductive these cults can be...

First, they suck the blood out of you by operating on your pocketbook:

David S. Touretzky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has done extensive research on Scientology. (He is not a defector.) He estimates that the coursework alone now costs nearly three hundred thousand dollars, and, with the additional auditing and contributions expected of upper-level members, the cumulative cost of the coursework may exceed half a million dollars. (The church says that there are no fixed fees, adding, “Donations requested for ‘courses’ at Church of Scientology begin at $50 and could never possibly reach the amount suggested.”)

Second, they sell your the idea that they are going to give you something wonderful. These claims can be ludicrous as, for example, this:

Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.

All these cults have their mumbo-jumbo:

Haggis was spending much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being audited, which involved the use of an electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device, often compared in the press to a polygraph, measures the bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. (“Thoughts have a small amount of mass,” the church contends in a statement. “These are the changes measured.”) In 1952, Hubbard said of the E-Meter, “It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows.” The Food and Drug Administration has compelled the church to declare that the instrument has no curative powers and is ineffective in diagnosing or treating disease.

During auditing, Haggis grasped a cylindrical electrode in each hand; when he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty soup cans. An imperceptible electrical charge ran from the meter through his body. The auditor asked systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of “spiritual distress.” Whenever Haggis gave an answer that prompted the E-Meter’s needle to jump, that subject became an area of concentration until the auditor was satisfied that Haggis was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience.

Haggis found the E-Meter surprisingly responsive. It seemed to gauge the kinds of thoughts he was having—whether they were angry or happy, or if he was hiding something. The auditor often probed for what Scientologists call “earlier similars.” Haggis explained, “If you’re having a fight with your girlfriend, the auditor will ask, ‘Can you remember an earlier time when something like this happened?’ And if you do then he’ll ask, ‘What about a time before that? And a time before that?’ ” Often, the process leads participants to recall past lives. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one’s behavior.

Although Haggis never believed in reincarnation, he says, “I did experience gains. I would feel relief from arguments I’d had with my dad, things I’d done as a teen-ager that I didn’t feel good about. I think I did, in some ways, become a better person. I did develop more empathy for others.” Then again, he admitted, “I tried to find ways to be a better husband, but I never really did. I was still the selfish bastard I always was.”

And here is the real heart of the cult, the "stickum" that turns a sane person into a devotee:

“The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince yourself of the truth of some of these things that don’t make sense,” Haggis told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of O.T. materials, on the ground that it offended Scientologists, he said, “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.

In short: they seduce you in small steps, that require you to commit time & money, they snare you into relationships, and they suck your friends and family in with you. They feed you outrageous beliefs that will separate you from normal humans but they do it slowly so that you aren't scared away before you have committed too deeply to easily abandon your sunk costs in this "religion".

The article has an interesting review of L. Ron Hubbard's life and the development of his "religion" of Scientology. From an outsider's perspective, it is all madness purpose-built by a con man to milk people for his own benefit. In short, it is a cult. And here is their innermost "secret" belief:

“A major cause of mankind’s problems began 75 million years ago,” the Times wrote, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. “Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation.” Xenu decided “to take radical measures.” The documents explained that surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth. “The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on these volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spirits—called thetans—which attached themselves to one another in clusters.” Those spirits were “trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol,” then “implanted” with “the seed of aberrant behavior.” The Times account concluded, “When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves.”

And the final "revelation" of their Dear Leader through his last mortal act:

In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke, in his motor home. He was seventy-four. Two weeks later, Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special announcement. A young man, David Miscavige, stepped onto the stage. Short, trim, and muscular, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that, for the past six years, Hubbard had been investigating new, higher O.T. levels. “He has now moved on to the next level,” Miscavige said. “It’s a level beyond anything any of us ever imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. Thus, at twenty-hundred hours, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36”—that is, thirty-six years after the publication of “Dianetics”—“L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime.” Miscavige began clapping, and led the crowd in an ovation, shouting, “Hip hip hooray!”

Totally wacko stuff.

The article is very long and covers lots of people beyond Paul Haggis. It is full of wretched details about brutal treatment and the awful submission that many undergo in hopes of some "spiritual" experience or validation or redemption. It is all very nutty. Tragically nutty.

The article closes by letting Paul Haggis reflect on his life in a cult:

I asked him if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. “I feel much more myself, but there’s a sadness,” he admitted. “If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space.” He went on, “It’s not really the sense of a loss of community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends.” He understood how they felt about him, and why. “In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, then you get to Enemy, and, finally, near the bottom, there is Treason. What I did was a treasonous act.”

I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. “These people have long memories,” he told me. “My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.”

Update 2011feb14: There is an interesting Masters thesis on Scientology and its roots in science fiction that is available from Canada's McMaster University at this site. It is a 1981 thesis in anthropolgy by Hugh A.D. Spencer and is entitled The Transcendental Engineers: The Fictional Origins of a Modern Religion.

Also, here is an example of a billion year contract for Scientology adepts to sign as a "religious commitment" in order to get into the Sea Organization. This is posted by Cory Doctorow on the BoingBoing blog along with other posts about Scientology.

Seeing Complexity in National Economies

Here's a very nice post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog pointing out that the world isn't black or white. It is complex and drawn in shades of gray, with good and bad bits at the same time. Things improving while other bits are regressing. Real life is complex, but the ideologues want to dress everything as "all good" or "all bad":

One thing I tend to see in comments — especially from our resident troll, but from others as well — is an insistence that economies must be either all good or all bad. They seem to think that you can’t say good things about European employment performance and technology, on one side, and talk about the monetary and fiscal mess, on the other.

But as I often find myself saying, economics is not a morality play. America in the early 1930s was a nation of great dynamism, by far at the forefront of technology; that didn’t prevent it from having a worse Great Depression than most other advanced countries. America from 1973 to 1995 was a nation with remarkably poor productivity performance and stagnant median income; but it was also quite successful at job creation (as was Britain from 1950 to 1970, even as it was in relative economic decline.) And so on. Just as an individual can be good at some things and bad at others, economies can have strong and weak points.

So, about Europe: the continent has made great strides in overcoming Eurosclerosis, the persistent failure of job creation that afflicted Europe from the early 70s into the mid 90s. Here’s prime-age employment — the percentage of adults aged 25-54 with jobs — for the 15 “old” members of the EU versus the United States, this time brought up to 2010 3rd quarter:

I focus on prime-age employment because the generosity of retirement programs is a separate issue from the functioning of the job market. But if you want to look at the population 15-64, Eurostat has a table; same trend, but Europe still slightly below US.

There’s no contradiction between noting these good signs and pointing out that the euro is functioning badly.

And my gripe about American attitudes is that many people have an outmoded view of Europe’s condition — they still think that Eurosclerosis is in full force — and assume that the monetary woes of the present must be connected to the old ailment. Not so.

In the above Krugman tries to give you a taste of the complexity. It is not all "US great, Europe is a mess" nor is it "US is hopeless, Europe is going to outperform". It is more complex. Some things are good in Europe and some others are good in the US. Meanwhile some things are bad in Europe while yet other things are bad in the US.

Sitting and watching this from Canada, it is easy to understand this complexity. A big chunk of Canada's economy is beyond its control. We are driven remote-control by the US. But there is still a sizeable chunk that our governments here can run to try to keep us from crashing when the US topples. There is lots that we do to make sure everybody get a fair shake that the rabid "government is bad" US doesn't do. We pay a price for "socializing" our economy and making sure the underdog isn't thrown to the wolves. This built-in complexity of Canada's situation means it is easy to live here and understand that the world is complex.

But Americans aren't curious about the outside world and their media doesn't talk much about the rest of the world, so American tend to see a simplified version of the world: "noble America" versus the "digusting, incompetent, corrupt rest of the world". That's a cartoon caricature, but sadly that is the simplistic version carried around in most Americans' heads. It was fine for the most of the 20th Century when the US was dominant. But the dominance of the US is coming to an end, and Americans need to "sharpen up" and look around and appreciate the complexity of the world around them.

Religious Sleaze

The following is the crudest, sleaziest example of hucksters "selling religion" to line their pockets.



The above makes obvious the old saying that "religion is the opium of the masses". The idea that "God" is just waiting to shower wealth on you is nutty. But people will end up shelling out money to religious quacks like Peter Popoff. From the guy who is telling you that God will shower you with money (from Wikipedia):

At Popoff's peak in 1987, according to his comptroller, he took in $4.3 million a month.[21] After his exposure on the Tonight show he declared bankruptcy in 1987.[7]

According to Charity Navigator, in FY2004, Peter Popoff received $548,167 as president of his organization and the Peter Popoff Ministries raised $16,220,066 in revenue in FYE 2004.[22] Then in FY2005, Popoff received $628,732, his wife Elizabeth received $203,029, his son received $182,166, and daughter received $176,290 with $23,556,469 in revenue.[22] These figures are from IRS documents, which "only outline the millions of dollars people give Popoff's organization in the US." [15]

When the guy telling you that his "miracle water" will allow God to shower you with wealth is himself declaring bankruptcy despite receiving tens of millions of dollars, you should be skeptical. But fools rush to embrace religion for the very fact that it rejects reason in favour of "faith". They have the audacity to claim that religion is all the more powerful because it requires a "leap of faith" and the more outrageous the gap between reason and the idiocy they sell, the more "powerful" the religious claim!

For me, the real icing on the cupcake is the Madison Avenue touch selling the miracle packet of spring water "now in a larger size"! Funny. If this packet truly provides a miracle. Why would you need a bigger packet? To get a bigger miracle? Since when are miracles sized by the "packets" the come inside of? Nutty!

Buying Friends

Here's a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Maureen Dowd that points out that it is pretty darn hard to buy "friends". Usually you end up buying ingrates and sometimes (as with the US and its unaccounted for billions in Iraq and the payments -- bribes -- it hands out in Afghanistan) you end up buying enemies:

The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding on Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.

Washington gave the Wall Street banks billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, handing out a fortune in bonuses to the grifters who almost wrecked our economy.

Washington gave the Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the militants.

We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.

Robert Gibbs recalled that President Obama said last year that “we will not and cannot provide a blank check” to Pakistan.

But only last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to hand over a juicy check: $500 million in aid to the country that’s been getting a billion a year for most of this decade and in 2009 was pledged another $7.5 billion for the next five. She vowed to banish the “legacy of suspicion” and show that “there is so much we can accomplish together as partners joined in common cause.”

The US strikes me as a "shopaholic" on a wild binge for the last 65 years and is getting less and less for the money spent while the kids at home go shoeless and hungry.

What bothers me is that officials (US and especially here in Canada) don't learn any lessons from the quagmire:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing. And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work. Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

But whenever America tries to train security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so that we can leave behind a somewhat stable country, it’s positively Sisyphean. It takes eons longer than our officials predict. The forces we train turn against us or go over to the other side or cut and run. If we give them a maximum security prison, as we recently did in Iraq, making a big show of handing over the key, the imprisoned Al Qaeda militants are suddenly allowed to escape.

The British Empire prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side? Then they’re untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force, dubbed “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.

Sadly, Obama didn't take advantage of the change of leadership to close down this mistake. Instead he has upped the ante. What a tragedy!

Krugman on Craziness in High Places

Here is a bit from Paul Krugman's blog in the NY Times:

Rereading my post on the folly of the G20, it seems to me that I didn’t fully convey just how crazy the demand for fiscal austerity now now now really is.

The key thing you need to realize is that eliminating stimulus spending, while it would inflict severe economic harm, would do almost nothing to reduce future debt problems. Here’s the IMF’s estimate of sources of the growth in debt over the next few years:

And even this figure conveys a misleading impression of the importance of stimulus spending. First, since cutting stimulus would weaken the economy, it would reduce revenues — that is, a substantial part of the debt growth the IMF attributes to stimulus would have happened even without stimulus, through lower revenue. Second, for the US at least the core reason for long-run budget concern is rising health care costs — in fact, health cost control is the sine qua non of long-run solvency — which has nothing whatever to do with how much we spend on job creation now.

...

So wise policy, as defined by the G20 and like-minded others, consists of destroying economic recovery in order to satisfy hypothetical irrational demands from the markets — demands that economies suffer pointless pain to show their determination, demands that markets aren’t actually making, but which serious people, in their wisdom, believe that the markets will make one of these days.

This is the craziness of the Hoover era all over again. It is the same crazed raving as that of Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who cried out: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate . . . purge the rottenness out of the system." The result was the Great Depression. Leaders today are showing signs of letting loose their "inner Mellon" which will bring in tow the horrors of the 1930s. Who would have thought it possible? Sadly, we are probably going to live to see another lost decade like the 1930s or the 1990s to 2000s of Japan!

Multicultural Masochism

I'm big on multiculturalism. I see it as a way of answering the famous Rodney King plea of "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?".

Here is a bit from an article by Christopher Hitchens that looks at how multiculturalism has been taken too far. He takes aim at the a self-loathing multiculturalism that points at one's own culture and sees only evil and wrongs while turning a blind eye to the evil and wrongs of another culture:

"The Fort Hood shooting," says Wright, "is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism—or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan." I know that contributors to the New York Times op-ed page are not necessarily responsible for the headlines that appear over their work, but the title of this one—"Who Created Major Hasan?"—really does demand an answer, and the only one to be located anywhere in the ensuing text is "We did."

Everything in me revolts at this conclusion, which is echoed and underlined in another paragraph of the article. Why, six months ago, did "a 24-year-old-American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam—fatally shoot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.? ABC News reported, "It was not known what path Muhammad … had followed to radicalization." Well, here's a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." Wright describes this clue-based deduction of his as an illustration of the way that "an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope." Though I can't find much beauty in his prose there, I want to agree with him.
For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what "killing" of which "Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan" they had in mind? There isn't a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that's not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because "the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious." Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

Life is a struggle to keep balance as opposing forces tug and pull you in various directions. It is too easy to give in and declare that one side wears white hats and the other black. In reality, all cultures are a mix of good and bad. And usually the excuses offered up are arbitrary half-truths that need to be investigated. Christopher Hitchens is doing everybody a favour by pointing out that "bleeding heart liberals" have gone too far in identifying with some disreputable killers.

I saw the same back in the late 1960s when rich people lined up to hold soirees for the Black Panthers. Tom Wolfe made fun of this idiotic bending over too far in his book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.

Michael Specter on Science Denialism

Here's a video of Michael Specter giving a talk at a TED conference:



Watch for this comment "we don't believe a bunch of documents giving us government data". This is in the context of the autism & vaccination controversy. People denying the research that states that the vaccines are safe. He is talking about Jenny McCarthy selling her pseudo-science prejudice.

I love his attack on those crazy people who fear GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms).

Warren Buffett on Derelict CEOs

American corporations have become bloated at the top with incompetent and overpaid executives. The Wall Street crowd wrecked the economy but then handed out record-breaking bonuses this year for their "sterling performance" in 2009 while the rest of the US economy tanked.

Warren Buffett, the best investor in the US, has come out with a scathing attack on these CEOs in his annual letter to stockholders (see page 15):

In my view a board of directors of a huge financial institution is derelict if it does not insist that its CEO bear full responsibility for risk control. If he’s incapable of handling that job, he should look for other employment. And if he fails at it – with the government thereupon required to step in with funds or guarantees – the financial consequences for him and his board should be severe.

It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial institutions. Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been “bailed-out” is to make a mockery of the term.

The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these
CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price – one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance. CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.

The US would be more prosperous and on better financial footing if it followed Warren Buffett's business philosophy. There wouldn't be a runaway rich class turning America into a third world country with a walled-in elite living jet set lives while the majority watch as the promise of a better future drifts away.

The odd thing about America is its inability to see itself and recognize its blemishes. I'm reading John Keegan's The American Civil War and was struck by this paragraph in a section where he remarks on America's ability to compromise over slavery for 50+ years, but then let the compromise fail spectacularly:

The political leaders of the South correctly recognized that the tide of opinion in a country in which they represented a minority was running against them. They might have moderated their position and sought common ground. It would have been difficult to find. Not only was the South indeed different from the North, with the difference founded on an institution that could not be disguised or easily altered; as the dispute with the North dragged on, Southerners had begun to make a virtue of the difference, by inventing a creed of Southern nationalism which eventually committed them to confrontation. Mid-century Southerners proclaimed themselves to be a superior breed to Northerners, preserving the agrarian way of life on which the republic had been founded at the Revolution and led by a breed of cultivated gentlemen who better resembled the Founding Fathers than the money-grubbing capitalists who dominated public life in the North. The South's poorer classes, too, sons of the soil and outdoorsmen, were held to be superior to their equivalents in the North, whose lives were confined by factory walls and who were often not native-born but immigrants, sometimes not English-speaking, and Catholic rather than Protestant. Southern nationalism had impressive ideologues as its own founding fathers, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, and it even had its own lyceum, the University of the South, founded at Sewanee, Tennessee, to train Southern scholars who could debate on equal terms with men from Harvard. The North took it seriously enough to destroy its buildings, down to the foundation stone, soon after the Civil War began.

I find the echo of today in the above. After Nixon adopted the "Southern strategy" the Republicans have founded their own "peculiar system" with inverted values and perverted ideology. The Right in the US doesn't promote itself through argument and reason. Instead it uses propaganda and deceit. Like the Civil War which mobilized poor Southern whites to defend the privileges of the rich plantation class, the modern Republicans use the socially inferior Christian fundamentalists as their shock troops to win the war to cut taxes for the top 0.1% of the population and to pursue a pro-business that in fact destroys the country as Warren Buffett is trying valiantly to make known. Buffett is well known for admitting that he is shamed by the fact that as the second richest man in America he pays a lower tax rate on his income than the office staff in his company. That is profoundly wrong. The rich of today, like the planter class of mid-19th century America, are using proxies to fight their wars. They are a blight on America. Sadly the citizens have not woken up to the evil that has been perpetrated upon them.

Worshiping the God of War

Here is a bit from an interesting article by William J. Astore on TomDispatch:

No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or “Vulcans” to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.

This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot’s gushing tribute to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush’s self-congratulatory and self-adulatory “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003. For Boot, America’s victory in Iraq had to “rank as one of the signal achievements in military history.” In his words:

"Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of ‘only’ 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.”

How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the “incompetent” Rommel and Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was absurd.

The whole article is well worth reading. It looks at the misguided belief that the US can be so good at war that it will win. The author points out that this ignores luck and changeable facts. Worst, it igores the hard truth of how the effectiveness of the military since 2001 has going steadily downhill as Tom Englehardt's preface makes very clear:

Remember the 100 hours of combat that made up the first Gulf War, the mere weeks it took for Kabul to fall in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, or the “shock and awe” wave of air attacks that led off the 2003 invasion of Iraq, followed by the 20-day blitzkrieg-like campaign that left American troops occupying Baghdad? Those were the days when, as retired lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore reminds us, the civilians in the Bush Pentagon thought they were the masters of lightning war. Now, skip almost seven years, and in Afghanistan the U.S. military has just launched the largest campaign since the invasion of 2001. Fifteen thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops have been dispatched to take Marja, a single, modest-sized, Taliban-controlled city of 80,000 in one of more than 700 districts in Afghanistan, many under some degree of Taliban control or influence. How the time frame for success has changed.