Krugman on the Republican Presidential Candidates

Here is a bit from an excellent NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that nails the deep flaws in the Republican campaign for the White House:

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.

Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts — but that doesn’t stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn’t stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama’s “massive defense cuts.”

Mr. Romney’s strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn’t a stupid man — but he seems to play one on TV.

Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party’s nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

And that’s why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness. Think in particular of Rick Perry, a conservative true believer who seemingly had everything it took to clinch the nomination — until he opened his mouth.

It is tragic that America has sunk to the depths of idiocy that it has in its politics. Buffoons run the show. Fanatics and crazies manage the "politics". Insane.

Krugman on the New Romanticism

The Romantic movement of the early 19th century created a lot of poetry, art, and "new sensitive feelings". But by the late 1930s that romanticism had corrupted itself in to the cruel "romantic" vision of the Nazis.

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed piece in which Paul Krugman takes the "new romantics" to task for the cruelties they are forcing upon the poor and powerless:

There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals.

For more details, go read the full article.

The powerless and poor are always the ones made to pay for the "visions" of lunatics and mad kings:

So why did those “technocrats” push so hard for the euro, disregarding many warnings from economists? Partly it was the dream of European unification, which the Continent’s elite found so alluring that its members waved away practical objections. And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope — driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary — that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.

Sad to say, things did not work out as promised. But rather than adjusting to reality, those supposed technocrats just doubled down — insisting, for example, that Greece could avoid default through savage austerity, when anyone who actually did the math knew better.

...

Just to be clear, this is not an anti-European rant, since we have our own pseudo-technocrats warping the policy debate. In particular, allegedly nonpartisan groups of “experts” — the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Concord Coalition, and so on — have been all too successful at hijacking the economic policy debate, shifting its focus from jobs to deficits.

Real technocrats would have asked why this makes sense at a time when the unemployment rate is 9 percent and the interest rate on U.S. debt is only 2 percent. But like the E.C.B., our fiscal scolds have their story about what’s important, and they’re sticking to it no matter what the data say.

So am I against technocrats? Not at all. I like technocrats — technocrats are friends of mine. And we need technical expertise to deal with our economic woes.

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.

History is a long litany of the poor and disenfranchised having to pick up the pieces after the mad elites have utterly ruined a country through war or mad schemes. The ultra-rich don't suffer. They simply move to the "next opportunity". It is the poor and powerless who are rooted to their soil and have the burden of reconstructing a society after a disaster. Think of Germany in 1945. Think of the American Deep South in 1866. And think of the children and grandchildren of the current generation of Americans. Tragic.

How the Natural World Really Works

Everybody "just knows" that what is natural is better than the artificial man-made stuff. Everybody "knows" that before Western society brought their brutal colonizing ways to the rest of the world, the primitives and other cultures lived in a natural harmony because nature is good and kind. Like the Bible says: in the natural world the lion lies down with the lamb.

But scientists didn't get the memo. They go out and look at the "natural" world and bring back some real horror stories. Here's a blog post by Robert Lamb on Tor.com that helps dissolve the illusion that "natural is better, natural is good, natural is beautiful"...

To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

To recap, parasitism runs big in the wasp world. As I explain in How Wasps Work, the ancient wasps of the Cretaceous period were predatory and carnivorous. They ate arachnids and other insects and they LOVED it. But then the rise of the angiosperms introduced an even better food source: nectar and pollen. So the wasps of old largely abandoned their flesh-eating ways, except for the carnivorous feasts required by their squirming young. Some wasps abandoned this practice all together (and became bees), but you’ll still find countless varieties of wasps that either deposit their eggs inside a living host (that’s what the stinger evolved for) or who fill larval chambers in their nest with stunned meals.

So the fact that that Dinocampus coccinellae hatches inside the belly of a host bug following some makeshift, catastrophic surgery by its parent is nothing out of the ordinary. But when it celebrates its Chest-Burst Mitzvah, that’s when it gets all weird and noteworthy. Normally, the host organism mercifully dies at this point, but DC’s ladybug is not so lucky. Not only does it live, but a little behavior modification forces it to hang around and “guard” its parasite-baby as it grows into adulthood beneath its protective bulk. Scientists believe that secretions left by the larva when it bursts out might play a role in reprograming the host.

But then the ladybug dies right? Surely once the wasp reaches adulthood, our long-suffering host can at last rest in peace. No such luck. This is the insect world, after all. The researchers found that 25 percent of the manipulated ladybugs recovered normal behavior following their ordeal.

I’m really hoping this makes it into the next PIXAR A Bug’s Life movie.

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that "natural" cures are better than scientifically developed drugs. They are so deluded. But the joke is on me. This kind of anti-science and looney thinking is spreading. A hundred and fifty years ago you could have destroyed science and the world would have trudged on to miserable future compared to what we live in, but it would have struggled on without a mass die off. But if you removed science today, something like 80% of the population would die within a few years. We can't feed or clothe ourselves without modern science. Despite this, a rising majority shun science and hold tight to a warm-and-fuzzy lie that "natural is best".

People buy "organic" groceries not realizing that (1) everything is "organic" unless you redefine it from its original meaning of "from organisms" and (2) all plants are loaded with poisons to try to protect themselves from grazers and modern chemicals are really just more of the same (sure some of them are really bad for you, but that's why we have government and regulations to protect us from bad stuff like that).

Nothing is more "natural" than to be parasitized (or at least co-habited by other organisms). Right now I'm host to 100 trillion bacteria and only 10 trillion human cells. I'm ten times more bacteria than I am "human". Bacteria are only one of a range of "natural" organisms that live in and on me. This includes fungi and arachnea. This is the human microbiome.

Plotting Political Strategy

Robert Reich has nailed the Republican "strategy" for 2012. Here is the opening bit in this article on his blog:

Why Washington Isn't Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?

Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit — and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.

Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.

But there’s a third reason for Washington’s inaction. It’s not being talked about — which is itself evidence of the problem.

The unemployed are politically invisible. They don’t make major campaign donations. They don’t lobby Congress. There’s no National Association of Unemployed People.

Their ranks are filled with women who had been public employees, single mothers, minorities, young people trying to enter the labor force, and middle-aged men who have been out of work for longer than six months. You couldn’t find a collection of people with less political clout.

What I can't believe is that Americans don't realize how they are being manipulated. Instead of focusing of the real issues, a big minority (majority?) is enthralled with the media manipulation of Sarah Palin, an idiot who couldn't find her way out of a wet paper bag, who is lecturing Americans on their "Constitution" and "history" (at least the version that this dim-wit can conjure up in front of cameras). Pathetic.

NATO Incompetence and Intransigence

When you make a mistake, apologize. It is the easiest thing in the world. It is only words. To be a prig and say you "regret" something but refuse to "apologize" and then aid insult to injury by blaming the victim seems to be the "standard operating procedure" for NATO. Ridiculous!



From CNN, here is a bit about this insane situation:

British Royal Navy Rear Adm. Russell Harding said NATO forces may have hit rebel tanks near the eastern oil town of al-Brega on Thursday.

...

It was the second time NATO has been blamed for civilian deaths, Last week, opposition leaders said NATO airstrikes killed 13 civilians in the al-Brega area. NATO is investigating that strike as well.

"I'm not apologizing," Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said of the latest incident. "The situation on the ground is fluid, and we had no information the opposition forces were using tanks."
Harding said NATO had only recently learned that opposition forces had tanks. In the past, it was Gadhafi's tanks that had taken aim at civilians, he said.
"There's a lot of vehicles going back and forth," he said. "It is very difficult to distinguish who is operating the vehicles."
The airstrikes also injured 14 people, and an additional six are missing, said Gen. Abdul Fattah Yunis, a commander of the rebel forces.

...

After the aerial attack Thursday morning, Gadhafi's troops pushed the rebels back, retaking territory and moving the front line farther east, Yunis said.
He said the rebels notified NATO of their tank movement and of their presence.

"There is no tension between us and NATO; this is a war situation, and we understand that mistakes are made," Yunis said.

Let me see how this NATO stance works...

You find out that kids playing road hockey were run over by a driver. The driver said "There were a lot of kids on the street one day, off the street the next day, besides, nobody told me that these were local kids playing road hockey. I wasn't properly informed. So I simply floored the car and flattened them. Just like NATO! And I'm really 'sorry' about killing those kids, but I'm not going to apologize."

A criminal in for sentencing told the judge "You guys arrest me once in a while when I commit a crime, but there are lots of times when you don't arrest me. Nobody has told me when your cops are going to be out arresting, so I just broke in and raped and robbed because nobody informed me. Just like NATO! Sure I'm sorry that I got arrested, but I'm not going to apologize because how was I supposed to know that this time you would catch me?"

I just don't get the "attitude" of NATO. Are they trying hard to be hated more by the eastern rebels than is Gaddafi? Just why puff up and make this idiotic statement about "sorry, but no apology"? NATO made a mistake. They should have said "we apologize and we will work harder to coordinate with the eastern rebels so this doesn't happen again!" Instead, they get all puffy and prideful and want to blame the victims for "confusing" the trigger happy pilots.

I bet the rebels would have been happier to overlook this killing, but NATO has been very slow to shoot at Gadaffi's forces and seems more than trigger happy to shoot at the rebels. If I were a rebel I would wonder just whose "side" NATO is on. There is night-and-day difference between the aggressive help the US gave, and this tepid, reluctant to bomb Gadaffi, but quick to bomb the rebels NATO "mission". This just plain stinks! Whoever is heading the NATO mission should be canned. He is more of a problem than a help.

How Do You Spell "Lucky"?

Some very close calls in the Japanese tsunami...

Robert Fisk on Gadaffi, the Monster

Here is a bit from the UK's Independent newspaper article by Robert Fisk:

Cruel. Vainglorious. Steeped in blood. And now, surely, after more than four decades of terror and oppression, on his way out?

Robert Fisk on Muammar Gaddafi, tyrant of Tripoli

So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.

...

And if what we are witnessing is a true revolution in Libya, then we shall soon be able – unless the Western embassy flunkies get there first for a spot of serious, desperate looting – to rifle through the Tripoli files and read the Libyan version of Lockerbie and the 1989 UTA Flight 722 plane bombing; and of the Berlin disco bombings, for which a host of Arab civilians and Gaddafi's own adopted daughter were killed in America's 1986 revenge raids; and of his IRA arms supplies and of his assassination of opponents at home and abroad, and of the murder of a British policewoman, and of his invasion of Chad and the deals with British oil magnates; and (woe betide us all at this point) of the truth behind the grotesque deportation of the soon-to-expire al-Megrahi, the supposed Lockerbie bomber too ill to die, who may, even now, reveal some secrets which the Fox of Libya – along with Gordon Brown and the Attorney General for Scotland, for all are equal on the Gaddafi world stage – would rather we didn't know about.

There is much more. Go read the whole article.

Egypt Has Selected an Interim Leader

He is Mohamed ElBaradei. All of the major parties in Egypt have agreed to let his lead a unity government.

So who opposes him? Well there are two parties. One is the intransigent Mubarak. The other is the brain dead, heel dragging, support the dictator until the people hate you American government. In other words, Obama.

So, yet again, Obama has allowed a historic opportunity to slip through his fingers. Tragic. I remember reading stories of Obama studying his Lincoln biographies because he felt he was called to be a great leader of America, a leader at a turning point leader like Lincoln. Well, Obama is no Lincoln. Lincoln had a plan. And Lincoln was willing to act swiftly and decisively including firing a highly popular general -- McClellan -- who failed to win the war. Obama dithers. Obama hides in the back room talking to his "advisors" while history bypasses him.

Here is a NY Times article that points out that the Egyptian have decided their future. It now looks like it will be bloodshed in the street, enough blood flowing until significant army units defect and the tide turns. It will be bloody but it didn't have to be. Obama will have blood on his hands.

Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition banded together Sunday around a prominent government critic to negotiate for forces seeking the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, as the army struggled to hold a capital seized by fears of chaos and buoyed by euphoria that three decades of Mr. Mubarak’s rule may be coming to an end.

The announcement that the critic, Mohamed ElBaradei, would represent a loosely unified opposition reconfigured the struggle between Mr. Mubarak’s government and a six-day-old uprising bent on driving him and his party from power.

Though lacking deep support on his own, Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and diplomat, could serve as a consensus figure for a movement that has struggled to articulate a program for a potential transition. It suggested, too, that the opposition was aware of the uprising’s image abroad, putting forth a candidate who might be more acceptable to the West than beloved in Egypt.

In scenes as tumultuous as any since the uprising began, Dr. ElBaradei defied a government curfew and joined thousands of protesters in Liberation Square, a downtown landmark that has become the epicenter of the uprising and a platform, writ small, for the frustrations, ambitions and resurgent pride of a generation claiming the country’s mantle.

...

Dr. ElBaradei also criticized the Obama administration, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the message via Sunday news programs in Washington that Mr. Mubarak should create an “orderly transition” to a more politically open Egypt, while she refrained from calling on him to resign. That approach, Dr. ElBaradei said, was “a failed policy” eroding American credibility.

“It’s better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, it’s time for you to go,” Dr. ElBaradei said.

...

In a collapse of authority, the police withdrew from major cities on Saturday, giving free rein to gangs that stole and burned cars, looted shops and ransacked a fashionable mall, where dismembered mannequins for conservative Islamic dress were strewn over broken glass and puddles of water. Thousands of inmates poured out of four prisons, including the country’s most notorious, Abu Zaabal and Wadi Natroun. Checkpoints run by the military and neighborhood groups, sometimes spaced just a block apart, proliferated across Cairo and other cities.

Many have darkly suggested that the government was behind the collapse of authority as a way to justify a crackdown or discredit protesters’ calls for change.

“Egypt challenges anarchy,” a government-owned newspaper declared Sunday.

“A Conspiracy by Security to Support the Scenario of Chaos,” replied an independent newspaper in a headline that shared space at a downtown kiosk.

I am thoroughly disenchanted with Obama. He is a sold-out politician, a lackey for the big corporate interests. He has no vision. He is not a leader. He dithers. He has not courage. He is smart but only in a kind of rousing speech giver way. Beyond giving good speeches, he hasn't snow any real brilliance. He is an empty suit.

• Obama has continued the Bush policy of torture.


• Obama continues to do warrantless wiretaps of all Americans.


• Obama chose to widen the unwinnable war in Afghanistan by doing a "Bush" surge that has failed.


• Obama "gave" Americans a health care bill but it is a windfall for insurance companies and will do nothing to reduce the 20% extra cost that Americans pay because the US system is deeply burdened by insurance companies that spend all their energies trying to refuse coverage to those with a policy.


• He kept in place the same financial "team" that caused the Great Recession by their unwillingness to regulate. His team has had no problem throwing trillions of dollars at Wall Street banks but has given almost nothing to help either Main Street or the honest homeowners who are being foreclosed either by trickery from their banks or because they had a personal tragedy that has temporarily cut their income so they can't afford their mortgage.


• He lied to the American people with his political slogan "change you can believe in". He is no change. He is another centrist politician but one who dressed himself up as a left-of-centre people's candidate when in fact he was a corporate sell-out.

This policy disaster in Egypt is the last straw. I give up on Obama. He is useless.

Secrecy and Military Misconduct

I had previously posted the video of the killing of Reuters correspondents in Iraq but I can no longer find it, so I'm re-posting:



What is disturbing about the above video:

• Reuters tried to find out how & why their correspondents were killed by the US military. But the US slapped the incident with a "secret" label and said that releasing that information would "endanger" US troops. It wouldn't. It would simply show how cavalier US troops were about Iraqi lives. It would show how "rules of engagement" were simply lip service that allowed trigger-happy "soldiers" to play shoot-em-up and kill innocent civilians.


• This video was the one released by Wikileaks in its battle with the US about using "secrecy" to allow the US government to hide facts from its own citizens. If your war crimes are labelled "secret" then nobody will find out how mismanaged your war is and what crimes are being committed by your government without your knowledge.


• This kind of cavalier killing happens far more than US citizens know. The classic case for Canadians were the 4 Canadian soldiers killed and 8 injured near Kandahar on April 18, 2002 while they were in a properly defined "training area". A couple of trigger happen US pilots saw flashes from that area and proceeded to bomb it thinking they were going after "the terrorists". The US resisted all Canadian efforts for a full and proper inquiry into the "mistake". From a CBC news article:
  

  U.S. air force Maj. Harry Schmidt, one of the pilots involved in the "friendly fire" incident that killed four Canadians in Afghanistan, was found guilty of dereliction of duty on July 6, 2004, in what the U.S. military calls a "non-judicial hearing" before a senior officer. The maximum penalty he had faced was 30 days of house arrest.
  
  He was reprimanded and forfeited more than $5,000 US in pay. The air force agreed to allow Schmidt to remain in the Illinois Air National Guard, but not as a pilot. Schmidt later appealed the verdict, but the appeal was rejected. He also filed a lawsuit against the air force, saying it released his letter of reprimand to the media, in violation of his privacy.
  
  Schmidt had made a deal in June 2004 so he could avoid a full court martial.
  
  Legal wrangling had delayed the case again and again. In late March 2004, the U.S. Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals refused to supply classified information to Schmidt's legal team, who had argued the data was crucial to the defence.
  
  In a statement released by Gittins in the summer of 2003, Schmidt said: "It is clear that I cannot and will not receive a full and fair hearing" in a non-judicial proceeding which is heard by a senior U. S. Air Force officer.
  
  Schmidt faced two counts of dereliction of duty for not making sure he was dropping a bomb on the enemy and for disobeying air controllers' instructions to "standby" while information was verified. The formal counts allege that he "failed to comply with the applicable rules of engagement" and "willfully failed to exercise appropriate flight discipline over his aircraft."
  
  Schmidt was originally charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of assault. Schmidt's wingman, Maj. William Umbach was originally charged with four counts of aiding and abetting manslaughter, and eight counts of aiding and abetting assault.
  
  Umbach agreed to accept a reprimand and retire from the Air Force.
  
  When it decided to proceed with the dereliction of duty charges on June 30, 2003, the Air Force dropped the original charges of involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault against Schmidt.
  
  On June 19, 2003, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the U.S. 8th Air Force, who reviewed the case, decided that both pilots should receive non-judicial punishment. That meant the Air Force had decided not to court martial the two National Guard pilots who were charged in the incident outside Kandahar, Afghanistan on April 18, 2002. As well as the four Canadian soldiers who were killed, eight others were wounded when Schmidt dropped a 250-kilogram laser-guided bomb from his F-16 on the night-time live-fire military exercise.
  

The fact that the US marks "secret", covers up, and excuses war crimes means that these kind of "mistakes" happen again and again. Nobody and no organization will "learn" if it doesn't first admit it made a mistake. Wikileaks has done a service for the people of the US by shining a light on misconduct by the US military. Nobody expects perfection, but people do expect accountability and learning from one's mistakes. This is what they are not getting. This is why Wikileaks is so important.

Krugman Dumps on Bernanke

Here's a bit from the latest Paul Krugman op-ed in the NY Times. Krugman isn't buying the "we are in a recovery" theme song that the Obama administration wants to sing, particularly Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve:

But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are right now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?

The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.

All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.

From this, Krugman deduces the grim reality. I've bolded the key bit:

Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.

In the case of the Fed, admitting that the economy isn’t recovering would put the institution under pressure to do more. And so far, at least, the Fed seems more afraid of the possible loss of face if it tries to help the economy and fails than it is of the costs to the American people if it does nothing, and settles for a recovery that isn’t.

In the case of the Obama administration, officials seem loath to admit that the original stimulus was too small. True, it was enough to limit the depth of the slump — a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office says unemployment would probably be well into double digits now without the stimulus — but it wasn’t big enough to bring unemployment down significantly.

Now, it’s arguable that even in early 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, he couldn’t have gotten a bigger plan through the Senate. And he certainly couldn’t pass a supplemental stimulus now. So officials could, with considerable justification, place the onus for the non-recovery on Republican obstructionism. But they’ve chosen, instead, to draw smiley faces on a grim picture, convincing nobody. And the likely result in November — big gains for the obstructionists — will paralyze policy for years to come.

That is tragic! Read the whole op-ed to get all the gory details.

Krugman list a number of things that need to be done. But then summarizes with this sad realization. Again I bolded the key bit:

Which of these options should policy makers pursue? If I had my way, all of them.

I know what some players both at the Fed and in the administration will say: they’ll warn about the risks of doing anything unconventional. But we’ve already seen the consequences of playing it safe, and waiting for recovery to happen all by itself: it’s landed us in what looks increasingly like a permanent state of stagnation and high unemployment. It’s time to admit that what we have now isn’t a recovery, and do whatever we can to change that situation.

It is beyond tragic when "leaders" don't lead. It is pathetic, destructive, and will take generations to recover.

When George Bush was elected I told everyone "it will take a generation for America to recover from this mistake". Now, with Obama compounding the errors I am saying "it will take generations to recover from the last 10 years of mistake and bad policies. In fact, the US will probably never recover. Bush, and now Obama, have greased the skids for the US to plummet from world leadership to something slightly above third world status, i.e. burdened by huge debts, caught up in vicious political infighting, and with an upper class interested only in extracting as much as they can before they flee to other countries leaving a stinking cesspool behind.

The Lapidary Revelations of BP

BP is a slippery organization. As Robert X. Cringely points out:

BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil companies — Amoco and Sohio. BP has a lot of America in it but remains in many ways a very British concern, which is to say plodding and bound by bureaucracy.

This history of naming and renaming reminds me of the slippery BP history of sizing and resizing the Gulf oil leak: 1000 barrels a day, no... make that 5000, but experts said 20,000 and a Purdue expert said 70,000 a day.

Cringely is as much of an expert as I need on the oil spill. In this short bit he hits the nail on the head:

Remember at Three Mile Island the reactor operators were taught how to pass the license test, not how the reactor actually worked, so when they were faced with unknown conditions they made uninformed — and bad — choices. The same sort of behavior seems to be happening in the current oil spill. We have already in this accident a record of people guessing too often when they should have known. Much of this is an artifact of bureaucracy.

Cringely teaches by anecdote. Here's the bit where he skewer's the idiotic bureaucracy of BP:

Did you know that oil was discovered in 1943 in Sherwood Forest? The prospect of even a small domestic source of oil was a big deal in wartime England so drilling crews from Anglo-Persian were quickly set to work. But the drilling itself was slow — so slow that replacement drillers were eventually brought in from Oklahoma. The Americans quickly finished the wells while apparently also making quite an impression on the local girls.

There’s a lesson here, so stick with me.

The British drillers followed company rules that said a drill bit was good for a certain number of feet then needed to be replaced. Each drill bit replacement required pulling hundreds — later thousands — of feet of drilling pipe out of the well then replacing it along with the new drill bit. Drilling went slowly because most of the time was spent not drilling but pulling or pushing pipe.

The drillers from Oklahoma, in contrast, used one drill bit until it stopped being effective no matter how many feet that took. In Sherwood Forest they could go 15-20 times as far with each bit as the British crews had, which means the well was finished 15-20 times faster. There’s more to this story than just nationalism; it shows a generally poor approach to both resource utilization and problem solving on the part of BP.

What I like about Cringely is that he doesn't play favourites. He is more than willing to discover that both the pot and kettle are black. He doesn't need the pot the call the kettle black to make this deduction:

Remember BP had a catastrophic Texas refinery accident back in 2005 that led then to a change in company leadership. The old CEO was lax on safety to the point of embarrassing the company so he was let go a year before his normal retirement. The new guy, Tony Hayward, whom we keep seeing on the TV news, took over at the start of 2007 but not enough at BP appears to have changed. Three years isn’t much in the oil business and this new accident proves it. There were plenty of warning signs about this well and BP ignored them all. You would think BP had learned their lesson after Texas City, but apparently not.

There is plenty of bad behavior in this current crisis to go around, not all of it coming from BP. Right from the start, for example, the Obama administration took an optimistic approach. Why? BP was downplaying the problems to save its share value, but why was the White House doing so, too? Among the coverups were the underwater oil plumes which BP still denies exist. Evidence says they are massive yet the head of NOAA said initially that they were very low in concentration. Why?

My guess it is because Obama thinks it is more important to appear cool than to be correct. We can hope he’s unlearning that lesson now, though there is as yet little proof of that.

Cringely has the cojones to tell the truth. Here's the bit where he wants the reader's attention. He even uses bold to catch your attention:

We all — BP, the government, and the American people — are looking at this accident far too narrowly. Looking at the number of failed attempts to cap or slow this well hardly inspires confidence. Yet at heart we’re always told those two safety wells being drilled will save the day, though they will take two months to do so. Eventually plugging the well with concrete is a sure theng, we’re told.

Or is it? What about the safety wells and their drilling platforms? Are they in better shape than the platform that exploded and sank?

No.

According to people who should know what they are talking about, BP’s rig currently drilling the first relief well has worse safety violations than did the BP rig that exploded killing 11, creating this enormous mess. Why aren’t we reading or hearing about this? I mean anywhere other than here? (If you are a reporter, this paragraph contains the real news. Yes, I am telling you how to do your job.)

How could BP ignore all the warning signs before the blowout? They simply didn’t expect it to happen. Thirty years had passed since the Ixtoc-I accident that was the last to happen in the Gulf. Good luck and several changes of BP management bred complacence and ignorance. I suspect the people involved with the well did not even realize how close they were to losing it since they had personally never lost one before.

Today I saw Robert Reich call for BP to be put into receivership to ensure that all the bills of the cleanup are paid. As Reich pointed out, BP is a corporation whose purpose is to provide profit to shareholders. They are in the business of minimizing costs. The only way to ensure that the costs are covered is for Obama to take over the company and ensure that the costs to the American people come first until this disaster is stopped and cleaned up.

Cringely puts his own twist to this point:

The offshore oil industry will never be the same again, which is probably good. As the oil slick grows, this could be the end of the deepwater industry in the US. Or maybe this will be the straw that finally gets us an energy policy. I’m hoping for that at the least.

For now BP is trying to cope, doing whatever they can think to do, but no real lessons will be learned until this is all over… if then. The CEO of BP, Tony Hayward — he’s history. He was promoted specifically to create a safer corporate culture and couldn’t do it in three years. Maybe nobody could. But certainly BP wasn’t — and probably isn’t — prepared for tomorrow.

The one good thing that comes out of a real disaster: a new mindset. I like the call for a new energy policy. I like the call for a new orientation of the industry toward safety. Something good will come out of this mess.

Krugman on the Gulf Spill

Here is the key bit of a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that reviews why things have gone so badly in this oil spill:

... there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.

For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

That's the real story, but I doubt whether 80% of the American population knows this. The reporting is of "oil leaking" and "birds coated" and "wetlands threatened" but no real reporting on why this catastrophe happened. But as George Santayana pointed out "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The media is meant to be the collective memory, but it does darn little analysis of what has happened to lead up to this. It is too busy showing pictures of oil slicks and interviewing worried people.

The newspaper industry is dying. The reporting on this oil spill is an excellent reason why. The media is all froth and no substance. Its real job is to inform but they don't put the effort into analysis and explication. Instead they are good on getting "reactions" and showing pain and worry. No facts. Just emotion.

Krugman does some digging and is willing to apportion blame fairly:

Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.

But Krugman is willing to dig deeper and point to Bush's failings, and dig even deeper to find a root cause:

Yet anti-government ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.

If Krugman, an academic and a part-time analyst, can do this analysis, then why the heck can't the full time staff on the newspaper and other media do something similar?

Time Doesn't Heal All Wounds

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State killings:



It is hard for later generations to know what this means to those who lived through this time. As you watch the above video there is mention that the killed and the paralyzed were "full time students". Why mention that? Because those who hated the anti-war protests stated over and over that these were "outside agitators" who purposely came to this (and all the other protests) to provoke police (and national guardsmen) into violence. In other words, the same techniques today that are used to sell right wing nonsense were used back then: the big lie technique.

The media at the time were the handmaidens of the state authorities, the governor who called in the national guard and painted targets on them by calling them "un-American" (oh yes, just like those un-America original tea partiers, and those un-American colonists who took up arms against an oppressive and indifferent government). The media and the authorities goosed up the level of hatred, just like Nixon and Agnew did in their speeches, and it led to violence.

And of the ones killed as "protestors". Some weren't even protesting. They were simply walking across campus and got hit by stray bullets:

Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths.

At the time all those in authority placed the blame on the students. But here's the truth 40 years later (from Wikipedia):

The Adjutant General of the Ohio National Guard told reporters that a sniper had fired on the guardsmen, which itself remains a debated allegation. Many guardsmen later testified that they were in fear for their lives, which was questioned partly because of the distance between them and the students killed or wounded. Time magazine later concluded that "triggers were not pulled accidentally at Kent State". The President's Commission on Campus Unrest avoided probing the question regarding why the shootings happened. Instead, it harshly criticized both the protesters and the Guardsmen, but it concluded that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

There was nobody shooting at the National Guard. The National Guard was not "in fear for their lives". They were ordered to turn and shoot. Some obeyed, most didn't. The deaths and injuries were the result of some fanatic who was in the line of command that day. But "the code" meant that nobody squealed, so nobody officially admitted to giving the order. It was murder. Sure the students were yelling, throwing back tear gas cannisters, and pelting the troops, but the students were unarmed and the soldiers were in no eminent danger. They executed a maneuver, turned, and fired. It was a clear failure in command in that some commander ordered them to fire. It was a tragedy. It was a crime, a crime never punished.

This was not an isolated event. There were dozens of incidents like these throughout the 1960s. It was an era where those in power disliked the fact that youngsters were rebelling. And this wasn't isolated to the 1960s. This kind of killing runs through American history. The one I always point to is the Ludlow Massacre.

When I watch or hear the rantings of right wing nuts in the US, I always wonder whether these people realize the mayhem they can cause. They may feel "good" about venting, but it poisons the atmosphere and it gives license to the less stable and the petty crazies out there to act on the emotionally charged words. The 1960s was filled with this rhetoric. You watched poor black and white demonstrators beaten, run over by police of horses, attacked by police dogs, knocked off their feet by high pressure fire hoses, beaten by police batons, and you watched as the white racists joined in on "the game" and beat freedom riders with tire irons and baseball bats. You watch people like Medgar Evers shot by KKK hiding in the woods. You watched a little black kids were killed as racists blew up churches. These violence easily flowed over as police and military roughed up anti-war demonstrators. It was a horrible time where at the very highest levels of government you had people like Nixon and Agnew effectively calling on their minions and the broader public to join in roughing up anybody who refused to "accept" government policy when that policy was a mindless war killing millions, a policy that was utterly future as demonstrated by the fall of Saigon. But policy makers like Lyndon Johnson preferred to feed young men into the meat-grinder of war rather than to be "the first president to lose a war". In short, his petty "reputation" was worth more than blood and treasure. You had vicious political operatives like Nixon who, as a hatchet man, made a career of red-baiting to rise to the top, and as president -- elected on the lie of having a "secret plan" to end the war -- used the same ugly tactics on all of his "enemies", not just student protestors, but the Democratic party, and those like Daniel Elsberg who became disaffected and released the whole sordid story of Vietnam as the Pentagon Papers. It was a truly ugly time. And sadly, there are similar right wing nuts out today who would love to go right back to those times.

Back to the point of this post... Here is a video from Alan Canfora, one of the students shot that day:



Update 2010may7: Here is a relevant bit from a blog by Jeff Kisseloff:

Forty years ago today, four students at Kent State University — Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder — were murdered by agents of the US government. It was maybe the signature event of my generation in terms of demonstrating how far the government would go to stifle dissent. None of the students were armed, and none presented even the remotest threat to the National Guardsmen on campus. Yet, no soldier was ever prosecuted for the crime.

A few days after the killings, protesters at my high school in East Meadow, New York, were set upon by right-wing students shouting anti-Semitic slogans. It was no Kent State, but it was an indication that the roots of Kent State were deeply embedded in our soil. When African-American Congressmen are spat upon by tea party members in Washington DC, we are reminded yet again that the poison continues to spread.

And here is a chapter he wrote on Allison Krause, one of the victims.

Your Sins Will Come Back to Haunt You

Here is an interesting report on ABC News:

BP, the company that owned the Louisiana oil rig that exploded last week, spent years battling federal regulators over how many layers of safeguards would be needed to prevent a deepwater well from this type of accident.

One area of immediate concern, industry experts said, was the lack of a remote system that would have allowed workers to clamp shut Deepwater Horizon's wellhead so it would not continue to gush oil. The rig is now spilling 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

In a letter sent last year to the Department of the Interior, BP objected to what it called "extensive, prescriptive regulations" proposed in new rules to toughen safety standards. "We believe industry's current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs…continue to be very successful."

Doesn't this sound oddly similar to Wall Street that spent tens of millions (hundreds?) on lobbying to get the Glass-Steagall Act rescinded? You know, the one that kept the banking system sound for 70 years after the Great Depression and which, once rescinded, resulted within 10 years in The Great Recession as the banking system imploded!

I sure hope there isn't a BP "TARP" bill rushed through Congress to save BP. (I'm joking.)

But I do hope that the cleanup costs bankrupt BP. That's the kind of scare that will make the other energy companies sit up and pay attention to investing in the level of redundancy and the amount of safe guards needed to ensure this kind of disaster doesn't occur again.

More Stories of Police Stupidity

This is an incomprehensible story of police brutality. What makes it special is that the judicial system backs the police. Here's a bit from the story on Wired:

A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

The lawyer representing Malaika Brooks said Monday that the court’s 2-1 decision sanctioned “pain compliance” tactics through a modern-day version of the cattle prod.

“To inflict pain on a person if that person is not doing what the police want that person to do is simply outrageous,” said Eric Zubel, the woman’s attorney. “I cannot say that loud enough.”

Zubel said he would ask the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear Friday’s 2-1 decision that drew a sharp dissent from Judge Marsha Berzon:

“Refusing to sign a speeding ticket was at the time a nonarrestable misdemeanor; now, in Washington, it is not even that. Brooks had no weapons and had not harmed or threatened to harm a soul,” (.pdf) Berzon wrote. “Although she had told the officers she was seven months pregnant, they proceeded to use a Taser on her, not once but three times, causing her to scream with pain and leaving burn marks and permanent scars.”

Why do I find this so egregious? Because of the senseless, stupid, cruel murder of Robert Dziekanski by RCMP using tasers at the Vancouver airport. Here's a video that shows the cruel indifference of the police as they taser a guy who is no danger to anyone simply because he didn't jump when they said "jump" (he spoke only Polish so "jump" was meaningless to him, but why would the police bother with that petty fact?)...

Playing Haiti

I am so annoyed at watching the big shots fly into Haiti for a few hours to get themselves in front of a camera and use the devastation of Haiti as a "backdrop" for their photo op.

All the big shot "anchors" (multi-million per year salaried people standing knee deep in suffering and talking about the need for others to "give"). Hillary Clinton flown in with an entourage of 50 to supposedly "hold consultations" with the government of Haiti. All the big shot heads of aid agencies who fly in to "get a feel" for the problem. All the soldiers sent in to tromp around (and consume big supplies of water and food).

Where's the aid? Where's the water, the food, the medicines, the medical staff? Oh... that's an after thought. That doesn't make for good media. Instead stories of "rescue" while tens of thousands go without food and water gets centre stage in the media. It is absolutely nutty.

There is no thoughtful reporting. The world is cruel and indifferent to us. An earthquake is an example. The best humans can do is triage. But the fantasy media in the US nevers admits to this. Instead, the myth of "if only it helps one person, then this multi-million dollar expenditure was worth it" mentality goes on. People are dying because of $10, not $10 million. So while high tech rescue teams are flown in, people are without water or food, minor injuries lead to gangrene and amputation. Oh... but don't worry, we'll get that heart warming shot of the friend of a friend who was rescued after huge effort from under the rubble. Even the Haitians are tiring of the unseemly sight of big efforts put in to saving the handful of rich interlopers while the natives are left to rot and die.

Instead of the Hollywood headlines and fake heart-wrenching reporting, there needs to be something sensible. The reason why the American Civil War "only" resulted in 2% casualties (650,000 dead and injuried) instead of 3% or 4% was that triage was implemented. This appears cruel, but it is a rational process whereby you divide the victims into those who can be saved from those who can't. And you focus your efforts on those who can best benefit from the assistance. Yes, this is a cold calculation. But it is the rational approach that gives the best benefit. Anything else is sloppy sentimentality and wasted effort.

I'm outraged with every story of some victim in critical condition who is "rescued" by a team of 50 or 100 "rescuers" and then rushed to the airport and put on a plane to be sent to the US to spend weeks in a critical care hospital in the US at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. All this while the walking wounded and homeless look on silently seeking water and a bit of food. Where is the sense of proportion? Where is the sensibleness of a system that throws away scare resources on hopeless cases while the many who could flourish on a little aid are left to fend for themselves?

Oh... and one last thought. Again we are seeing "charities" go into overdrive with urgent appeals for assistance. While I'm all for assisting. I'm appalled that so few are aware of the scandals and theft that go under the umbrella of "charitable giving". The Red Cross was notorious during Katrina and Sept 11. The United Way which has a cozy relationship with many instutitions to facilitate charity wasted large sums of first class lifestyles for those who supposedly dedicated their lives to "assisting those in need" (see here and here). Be careful with your charity. Give where you get the "biggest bang for the buck". Give where the money will go to help sensibly and not into "rescue drama" stories that wastefully lavish funds on the few while the many are left unaided.

A final thought... I get bugged by the "outpouring" of aid to Haiti when I think of how little in the way of assistance and emergency rescue was offered to the victims of Katrina. Americans like to think that tragedy only happens elsewhere. But the huge mobs showing up for Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps which has taken to showing up in inner city areas to meet the desperate medical needs of the poor within the US. It is nice to see Americans offer aid to Haiti, but it is a bit bizarre to see a failure to response to the need for charity at home. Watch this:



I offer this as a foreign observer sitting in Canada.