Selling Social Darwinism

Robert Reich has a blog that is well worth following. He is a knowledgeable person with the facts and the social empathy to present an honest account of the situation that the 99% find themselves in.

Here is his latest post:

The Republican Myth of Obama's "Entitlement Society"

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

They have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years, including over a third of families with young children.

One scandal, for example, is that only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. But it still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights — hospitals won’t refuse them — but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years — promoting Social Darwinism.

Go read his blog.

The manipulation of statistics to sell their Social Darwinism is utterly cynical. The political right knows that it is lying. It isn't naive. But it trusts in the big lie technique. They know that if they repeat their right wing lies long enough and through enough media, most people will assume it is true because the message is so prevalent.

I remember being incredulous when I matured and discovered that my father believed that if something was printed it had to be true. In his mind, nobody would go to the expense of printing something unless it was true. I could never change his mind. He proved to me just how effective a propaganda campaign could be. He lived a life believing falsehoods simply because "they were printed" and I could never change his mind because my arguments were "just words" and he refused to look at the printed material I presented to him. Propaganda can be very, very effective.

Painting a False Reality

Here is an excellent example of how the right wing media in the US (especially Fox "News") uses its power to rant and lie to plant false ideas to manipulate the population into holding views that allow right wing politicians to mobilize the public to control elections:



If you watch the video you can see Bill O'Reilly frustrated by being caught in his lies and says in exasperation that he doesn't care what the facts are, he just "knows" that it is bad there and that this evil is coming to get America. In short, despite the facts, he continues to sell his right wing scare story. He isn't a "news" reporter. He is a propagandist selling a story to prop up a political viewpoint.

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.

America, Land of the Freely Arrested

From an article in the NY Times:

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.

The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.

...

The study did not look at racial or regional differences, but other research has found higher arrest rates for black men and for youths living in poor urban areas.

I have to laugh. Americans love to beat their chest and proclaim their "love of liberty" but they arrest and incarcerate at a rate far beyond almost every other country in the world except for the handful of despot dictatorships. You would think this report would force Americans to look in the mirror. Their myth of "freedom loving" doesn't match up with their eagerness to jail. It is much like the Founding Fathers prating on about "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. while being one of the worse slavery-based societies on the face of the earth.

Media Analysis of the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Here is a bit from an excellent article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists. That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it's going to provoke.

Nor is it surprising that much of the most vocal criticisms of the Wall Street protests has come from some self-identified progressives, who one might think would be instinctively sympathetic to the substantive message of the protesters. In an excellent analysis entitled "Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street," Kevin Gosztola chronicles how many of the most scornful criticisms have come from Democratic partisans who -- like the politicians to whom they devote their fealty -- feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain.

Some of this anti-protest posturing is just the all-too-familiar New-Republic-ish eagerness to prove one's own Seriousness by castigating anyone to the left of, say, Dianne Feinstein or John Kerry; for such individuals, multi-term, pro-Iraq-War Democratic Senator-plutocrats define the outermost left-wing limit of respectability. Also at play is the jingoistic notion that street protests are valid in Those Bad Countries but not in free, democratic America.

A siginificant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal. Indeed, the loyalists of both parties have an interest in marginalizing anything that might serve as a vehicle for activism outside of fealty to one of the two parties (Fox News' firing of Glenn Beck was almost certainly motivated by his frequent deviation from the GOP party-line orthodoxy which Fox exists to foster).

The very idea that one can effectively battle Wall Street's corruption and control by working for the Democratic Party is absurd on its face: Wall Street's favorite candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, whose administration -- led by a Wall Street White House Chief of Staff and Wall-Street-subservient Treasury Secretary and filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs officials -- is now working hard to protect bankers from meaningful accountability (and though he's behind Wall Street's own Mitt Romney in the Wall Street cash sweepstakes this year, Obama is still doing well); one of Wall Street's most faithful servants is Chuck Schumer, the money man of the Democratic Party; and the second-ranking Senate Democrat acknowledged -- when Democrats controlled the Congress -- that the owners of Congress are bankers. There are individuals who impressively rail against the crony capitalism and corporatism that sustains Wall Street's power, but they're no match for the party apparatus that remains fully owned and controlled by it.

There is much more good material. Go read the whole article by Glenn Greenwald.

Given the costs and risks one incurs from participating in protests like this -- to say nothing of the widespread mockery one receives -- it's natural that most of the participants will be young and not yet desperate to cling to institutional stability. It's also natural that this cohort won't be well-versed (or even interested) in the high arts of media messaging and leadership structures. Democratic Party precinct captains, MBA students in management theory and corporate communications, and campaign media strategists aren't the ones who will fuel protests like this; it takes a mindset of passionate dissent and a willingness to remove oneself from the safe confines of institutional respectability.

So, yes, the people willing to engage in protests like these at the start may lack (or reject the need for) media strategies, organizational hierarchies, and messaging theories. But they're among the very few people trying to channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation, and thus deserve support and encouragement -- and help -- from anyone claiming to be sympathetic to their underlying message.

The media is an institution that lies in the hands of the elite, so they will always echo the prejudices of the top 1% and distort the reality of the bottom 99%. That is the nature of political power. How else can thuggish dictators or corrupted political parties cling to power? Look at the extent that Gaddafi has gone to hang on to power. Those on top won't cede power willingly.

Mitt Romney Catering to the Anti-Intellecutalism of America's Right Wing Politics

This post is funny because the author has caught to pot calling the kettle black... oh so apropos for Romney criticizing Obama...

Harvard-supported Harvard Grad Mitt Romney Criticizes Obama for being a Harvard-supported Harvard Grad

by Wilfred Chan | September 28, 2011 at 8:25 am

Good ol’ scrappy Republican “man of the people” Mitt Romney has been using Barack Obama’s elitist, Ivy-League pedigree as a punchline in recent campaign speeches, deriding the president’s foreign policy as no more than a ill-advised surrender scheme cooked up by effete snobs in the “Harvard faculty lounge,” out of touch with “what they know on the battlefield”.

Ignoring the laughable notion that Mitt Romney ever even got close to a real battlefield, we find a lot of reasons why this most recent spat of Harvard-bashing fails the giggle test (and miserably so).

• Mitt Romney holds not one, but two degrees from Harvard: a JD and an MBA earned in 1975, when he graduated in the top 5% of his class.


• Harvard international relations professor and former Bush aide Meghan O’Sullivan is one of Romney’s foreign policy advisers.


• Harvard economics professor, daddy of the Bush tax cuts — and author of many a textbook – N. Gregory Mankiw is Romney’s chief economic adviser. (Like Romney, Mankiw is also a pretty bad actor.)


• Three of Romney’s sons graduated from Harvard Business School (and also none have served in the armed forces).


• Mitt Romney gave $50,000 to Harvard Business School in 2003.


• The “Harvard faculty lounge” is quite cozy with Mitt: since 2002, Romney has received more than $56,000 from people who are either current Harvard professors or married to one.


• Fuck Mitt Romney.

I have no love for either of them. They are both "plastic people". Obama has shown no concern for the bottom 90% who are suffering through a deep recession. Instead he is busy keeping Wall Street happy. Meanwhile, Romney is a complete bimbo who, like Bush, probably couldn't find his way out of a toilet if he didn't have one of his "staff" to advise him on where to go and how to open and close those complicated things called "door handles".

To refresh your memory, here is a previous Harvard (and Yale) graduate showing some of the smarts he learned from America's Ivy League colleges...

Maureen Dowd Skewers Obama

Dowd compares Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and poor Obama just doesn't measure up. Read her opinion piece in the NY Times. It is enlightening and funny.

Here's the bottom line:

Obama concedes that he has lost the narrative that brought him to the White House against all odds: his vision for making America great. Suskind’s book suggests he went astray in the sway of Wall Street pal Tim Geithner, going too easy on the gluttonous bankers, demanding no important concessions from them and throwing the equitable balance of society out of whack.

Now the president is trapped in two damaging story lines. Is he too weak and immature to do the job? Or is he too cool and distant to do the job?

I would say that Obama is a snake oil salesman. He learned to say what people wanted to hear, but he never developed a soul. There is no centre. Deep inside he doesn't really care for anything other than climbing to the top of the heap. He has happily manipulated people all his life telling them what ever story line he sensed that they wanted to hear. That worked for him. But not that he is on top of the mountain, he finally realized the buck stops with him and he is coming up $1.10 short.

How the Political Right Attacks Workers

Here is another post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that demonstrates how the political right uses "facts" to attack workers by giving the false impression that their pensions are an immense burden:

The Washington Post used a front page story to scare readers about public sector pensions, implying that they faced an enormous unfunded liability. It refers to "states facing, by one estimate, a combined $3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities."

It is unlikely that readers are able to assess the meaning of this $3 trillion figure in any meaningful way. It is worth noting first that it assumes that the stock market will provide a return that is approximately half of its historic average over the next three decades. If the economy and profits grow as projected, it would be necessary for stock prices to fall so much that they would have to be negative before the end of the 30-year period over which pensions are typically evaluated.

If we take the more typical figure of $1 trillion and compare it to future GDP, it is equal to approximately 0.2 percent of projected GDP over the 30 year planning period. By comparison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have added approximately 1.6 percentage points of GDP to the military budget. This means that the unfunded liability of state and local pensions is approximately one eighth as large as the costs of these wars. This sort of context might have been helpful to readers.

In reporting the size of Rhode Island's pensions it would have been helpful to remind readers that many of these workers do not collect Social Security. That means their pensions are often their entire retirement income.

The top 1% owns the media, so they can get their propaganda out and repeat it and repeat it using the "big lie" technique that works very effectively to convince people of a falsehood. Meanwhile, the bottom 90% has no mechanism to get out a message to defend their interests.

Do What I Say, Not What I Do

The US government loves to lecture other people around the world, but seem constitutionally unable to apply the most basic concepts of "rule of law" to themselves. Here is a bit from a post by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine:

Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized. As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes ...

That's what happens when the Government -- marching under the deceitful Orwellian banner of Look Forward, Not Backward -- demands that its citizens avert their eyes from the crimes of their leaders so that all can be forgotten: the crimes become non-crimes, legitimate acts of political choice, and the criminals become instantly rehabilitated by the message that nothing they did warrants punishment. That's the same reason people like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are defending their torture and illegal spying actions not in a courtroom but in a lush conference of elites in Aspen.

The U.S. Government loves to demand that other countries hold their political leaders accountable for serious crimes, dispensing lectures on the imperatives of the rule of law. Numerous states bar ordinary convicts from profiting from their crimes with books. David Hicks, an Australian citizen imprisoned without charges for six years at Cheney's Guantanamo, just had $10,000 seized by the Australian government in revenue from his book about his time in that prison camp on the ground that he is barred from profiting from his uncharged, unproven crimes.

By rather stark contrast, Dick Cheney will prance around the next several weeks in the nation's largest media venues, engaging in civil, Serious debates about whether he was right to invade other countries, torture, and illegally spy on Americans, and will profit greatly by doing so. There are many factors accounting for his good fortune, the most important of which are the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration and the more generalized American principle that criminal accountability is only for ordinary citizens and other nations' (unfriendly) rulers.

Go read the rest of the article at Salon.

Here's an interview with Glenn Greenwald. He comes in at 2:50 into the video:



I get the heebie-jeebies when I watch Dick Cheney. He now takes his place in the depressing line of never-punished US war criminals, e.g. Nixon, Kissinger, Oliver North, Reagan, etc.

It is truly amazing to watch the dysfunctional American political system and at the same time hear Americans pat themselves on the back for their "wonderful democracy" and boast about being a "city on the hill" for the rest of the world. Lordy, lordy... are they ever delusional!

A Worrisome Fact about the Financial State of US Companies

Brett Arends is a financial journalist with good credentials. He is raising a hue and cry against the common belief that US companies are is sound financial shape. This comes as a surprise to me but Arends is a credible source.

Here are some bits from an article in Yahoo! News:

American companies are not in robust financial shape. Federal Reserve data show that their debts have been rising, not falling. By some measures, they are now more leveraged than at any time since the Great Depression.

You'd think someone might have noticed something amiss. After all, we were simultaneously being told that companies (a) had more money than they know what to do with; (b) had even more money coming in due to a surge in profits; yet (c) they have been out in the bond market borrowing as fast as they can.

Does that sound a little odd to you?

A look at the facts shows that companies only have "record amounts of cash" in the way that Subprime Suzy was flush with cash after that big refi back in 2005. So long as you don't look at the liabilities, the picture looks great. Hey, why not buy a Jacuzzi?

According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That's up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it's twice the level seen in the late 1990s.

...

Central bank and Commerce Department data reveal that gross domestic debts of nonfinancial corporations now amount to 50% of GDP. That's a postwar record. In 1945, it was just 20%. Even at the credit-bubble peaks in the late 1980s and 2005-06, it was only around 45%.

The Fed data "underline the poor state of the U.S. private sector's balance sheets," reports financial analyst Andrew Smithers, who's also the author of "Wall Street Revalued: Imperfect Markets and Inept Central Bankers," and chairman of Smithers & Co. in London.

"While this is generally recognized for households," he said, "it is often denied with regard to corporations. These denials are without merit and depend on looking at cash assets and ignoring liabilities. Cash assets have risen recently, in response to the fall in inventories, but nonfinancials' corporate debt, whether measured gross or after netting off bank deposits and other interest-bearing assets, is at peak levels."

...

But why is this line being spun about healthy balance sheets? For the same reason we're told other lies, myths and half-truths: Too many people have a vested interest in spinning, and too few have an interest in the actual picture.

Journalists, for example, seek safety in numbers; there's a herd mentality. Once a line starts to get repeated, others just assume it's correct and join in.

Wall Street? It's a hustle. This healthy balance-sheet myth helps sell stocks and bonds. How many bonuses do you think get paid for telling customers the stark facts, and how many get paid for making the sale?

You can also blame our partisan age too. Right now, people on the right have a vested interest in claiming businesses are in healthy shape. That makes the saintly private sector look good, and demonizes President Barack Obama and Big Government for scaring away investment. Vote Republican! Meanwhile, people on the left have an interest in making businesses sound really healthy too: If greedy companies are hoarding cash instead of hiring people, they can cry "Shame on them! Vote Democratic!"

As ever, the truth is someone else's problem and no one's responsibility.

I sure hope the above article is wrong, but I fear Brett Arends is the one journalist out shaking the bushes for the real story while the rest of the media is standing around repeating the "good news" stories put out by press releases and political spin doctors.

How to Destroy a Country

Simple, follow blind ideology and ignore reality.

Here is a bit from an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper pointing out that the UK is well on its way to transforming itself from a post-industrial country to a de-industrialized impoverished country:

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

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Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

You can't compete economically if you spend far more on energy than your neighbors. You can't compete if you layer huge debts on the population in order to meet a "green" ideology.

The children and grandchildren of this generation will be working to pay off debts of this ideological "splurge". And the cruelest joke will be that those generations will realize that the "global warming" craze was built on an exaggerated threat. People have been stampeded by ideologues and their children and grandchildren will be left picking up the pieces. Sad.

This insanity might be bearable if the cost actually bought the proposed "benefit", but it doesn't:

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.

Only an ideologue would celebrate buildling a megawatt of wind power and then having to back it up with a megawatt of gas-fired turbine to handle the fact that the wind power isn't sufficiently reliable to be left alone to provide the power. Rather than just building the gas-fired turbine and using it, the green fanatics end up building both and running the gas-fired turbine as "back up"!

Galbraith's Battle Cry

Here is a bit from an interesting article in The New Republic by James K. Galbraith arguing that the debate of deficits & debts is a ploy to achieve the dream of the right wing: destroy entitlements in order to provide yet more tax cuts for the ultra-rich:

This is not a moment to describe policies that would, for example, create jobs, build infrastructure, or deal with energy or climate change. Nothing like that can happen now until ideas change. And the first change must be to challenge and reject all the nonsense about long-term budget deficits, national bankruptcy or insolvency, and even “fiscal responsibility” that we are hearing. The entire object of this propaganda campaign is to cripple government—including regulation and the courts—and to roll back Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The defense of those successful, effective—and yes, sustainable—programs just became far more difficult, and perhaps impossible. But it needs to be carried on to the last ditch.

And here is a bit where he points out that the political left, under Obama, has shot itself in its foot by playing the deficits & debt game with the political right:

The other force is the political liberals who were desperate to get a short-term stimulus package through Congress two years ago and who were therefore prepared to concede the case for “long-term deficit reduction.” What that case is—crowding out? Inflation? High long-term interest rates?—they rarely, if ever, say, because none of those things is remotely plausible given the 9 percent unemployment, debt-deflation, and rock-bottom long-term interest rates we see now. But having made the concession, mainly for political and rhetorical balance, they are trapped. Paul Krugman is a key example; as recently as August 6, he wrote on his blog:

America does have a long-run fiscal problem, driven by the combination of rising health costs, an aging population, and the unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the programs we already have. If we don’t come to grips with that problem, bad things will happen.

Notice two things here: First, Krugman doesn’t say what the “bad things” are. Second, he does not mention the interest rate and never discusses what happens to the debt/GDP ratio if rates stay put. (Answer: It stabilizes eventually and nothing else happens, as I have shown in a paper linked here.) And thus he lends his great weight to the pressure that will build, later this year, for the cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that were deferred in August—and which Krugman surely opposes.

The article is worth a read.

Wikipedia Dissects the US Debt

Wikipedia is a surprisingly good source of analysis about the US economy and what government policies and spending are causing the decline in the financial health of the federal government:

Cause of decline in U.S. financial position

Both economic conditions and policy decisions significantly worsened the debt outlook since 2001, when large surpluses were forecast for the following decade by the CBO. The Pew Center reported in April 2011 the cause of a $12.7 trillion shift in the debt situation, from a 2001 CBO forecast of $2.3 trillion cumulative surplus by 2011 versus the estimated $10.4 trillion public debt in 2011. The major drivers were:

• Revenue declines due to two recessions, separate from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003: 28%


• Defense spending increases: 15%


• Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003: 13%


• Increases in net interest: 11%


• Other non-defense spending: 10%


• Other tax cuts: 8%


• Obama Stimulus: 6%


• Medicare Part D: 2%


• Other reasons: 7%

...

The extent to which the deficit and debt increases are a cause or effect of wider systemic problems is frequently debated. For example, in January 2008, then GAO Director David Walker pointed to four types of "deficits" that cause the overall fiscal problem: budget, trade, savings and leadership.

The Republicans just finished nearly trashing the US economy because they were upset with "Obama's reckless spending". Hmm. The above sure looks like Bush, Bush, Bush to me.

Dowd on Debt and Doom

The "debt ceiling" crisis is a self-inflicted wound for the US. Here's a bit from a Maureen Dowd NY Times op-ed showing how crazy it is:

The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.

Amid the chilling anarchy, there’s not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn’t want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved.

The citizens of this country tremble at the thought that these are the people governing them. Should we stick our money under our mattresses? It’s not only the economy that gets nourished by confidence; it’s also politics.

The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it.

Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes. (Many are worried about primary races with even more dogmatic challengers, which is a truly scary thought.) If they can drag President Obama off his pedestal, even better. They think he looks down on them and sneers at their values.

Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

If you want to measure how crazy US politics have become, this pretty well summarizes it:

The Gingrich revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Reagan revolution and the Tea Party revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Gingrich revolution. The difference, though, is existentially striking: The Reagan and Gingrich forces wanted a leaner government, but they still believed in government.

...

The laconic president emerges from the sidelines periodically to warn about economic default, but we’re already in political default.

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the “hobbits,” as The Wall Street Journal and John McCain called them.

What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?

I blame Obama. He was elected to lead but he has failed and this isn't his first failure. His biggest failure was the big lie he told the electorate in 2008: "change you can believe in". He's delivered 4 more years of Bush "Republicanism". Meanwhile, the crazy Republican party has gotten even more insane. This is a race to the bottom and Obama is only slightly being outdone by the crazy Tea Party as they plunge downward.

The Joys of Technological Progress

I enjoy creator of the Dilbert cartoon Scott Adam's blog site. He loves to put out off-the-wall controversial stuff to see what reaction he gets. I must admit I go ballistic on some of his stuff. But on things like the following, I simply bask in the joy of reading material that is dead on in its critique but sly and humourous at the same time. He has nailed the joke that is "technological advance":

I remember when my only communication device was a phone connected to the wall. I'm old! Then came wireless handsets. They seemed so space age. I was untethered! I could wander all over the entire living room without dropping a call. The bedroom was too far for the signal to travel, but hey, you can't have everything.

Time passed.

Then along came the brick-sized cell phone. I thought of it as more of an emergency device. I kept it in the car and tried to use it as little as possible.

Then came the Blackberry. OMG. It was like a little miracle in my hand. Not only could I walk around (anywhere!) and talk on the phone, but I could do email like a demon thanks to its nifty keyboard. I was talking and typing all day long. I was addicted. I was a communicating fiend.

Then came the iPhone. In theory, it would do all that the Blackberry did plus apps! In practice, it dropped every call that lasted more than a minute. That has more to do with the AT&T network where I live and how the iPhone works with it, I'm told. No problem. I weaned myself off of voice calls. I don't like talking on the phone anyway. I trained my friends to use email to contact me.

But I couldn't do email anymore either. At least not much of it. The iPhone keyboard was too frustrating. Every message came out like xmopoi aljsdo vooe. I could go back and fix each word, but it wasn't worth the time. Instead, I used the iPhone to check incoming mail, but I waited until I was back at my computer to respond with more than a sentence.

Then came the Android phone. I just got one. I can make phone calls again! It's just like the 1970s! I sound like I'm underwater in a barrel, but you can usually tell what I'm saying, unless I call another cell phone, in which case the call is largely unintelligible. And that's not counting the dumbass things I actually say that don't make much sense even if you hear me perfectly. I'm just saying you should email me. Don't call.

To make things worse, a call between cell phones creates just enough of a transmission delay that I can't interrupt the other person. And if you happen to get a talker on the other end, you're in for a long ride. You can't break in.

By the way, if you're one of the people who owns a cell phone and doesn't understand that you have to use it like a CB radio, meaning you say your part and then pause a second to see if there is a response, let me be the first to say everyone hates talking to you on the phone. Talk briefly, pause at least a second, and listen for a response. That's the rule. The talk-until-you-get-interrupted model is something that only works in person and on landlines.

Anyway, my Android phone works most of the time for voice calls. But I'm afraid to actually use it because the battery life is about an hour and it's no good to me with no power.

Now I only think of my phone as an emergency device, like my first brick-sized cell phone. I wouldn't use it to make a social phone call. My battery wouldn't last. And I wouldn't often use it for email because the keyboard sucks and the battery drains then as well.

Yes, I have researched all the many ways to save battery life. I have apps that kill other apps. I turn off Wi-Fi and 4G and Bluetooth until I need them. Nothing seems to keep my battery from draining like a frat boy's bladder on a Saturday night. Result: I leave my Android plugged in all the time, whether I am at my desk, near my bed, or in the car.

Thank you Google for inventing a corded phone. I can't wait for your next innovation: the butter churn.

I confess I'm an old fuddy-duddy who hasn't had anything other than the old fashion corded phone. I worked in the high tech industry. I learned the hard way that most of the "advances" were painful and costly and really didn't provide any functionality that you need. But the stuff was exciting. I did jump onto the personal computer bandwagen and of course wasted money on devices that quickly became orphaned and unsupported. I became bitter. So I refused to join the parade with the succession of cordless phones. The above warms my heart. I feel rewarded for holding back and missing out on all that pain.

Sure I made phone calls to guys with mobile phones, but half the time they would wander in and out of cell phone range and I would strain to make sense of the static-filled, on-and-off voice. Sure it sounded grand and exciting as a concept, but I just couldn't see the point of having a device with such crappy service.

So I'm off the tech train to the future. I feel no need for a 3D TV (or 3D movies). I'm not interested in smart phones with cameras that let you do videophone calls (that was technology tried back 30 or 40 years ago and people didn't want it and they still don't) or run apps that make you squint at a 3 inch screen. I'm at the age where a 14 font is getting hard to see and I need at least a 30" screen to give me the footprint to see the "big picture".

I love it when tech companies create stuff that is useful like spreadsheets and word processors, but I hate it when they foist techie crap and hype it and convince millions to throw good money after an ephemeral vision of a "tech future".

Putting Libertarians in their Place

Here is a wonderful post by Matthew Yglesias on his blog at ThinkProgress:

Thomas Jefferson is not my favorite among the founding fathers, but this 1785 letter to James Madison quoted by Daniel Kuehn is another good example of the non-libertarianism of classical liberalism:

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

As with John Locke you see this concern about concentrated appropriation of finite resources. In practical terms, Jefferson and other leaders of the early Republic were able to sidestep inequality within the white community by redistributing land from Native Americans to white people.

This post is a double delight. Not only does it punch libertarianism in the nose, it tweaks the tail of the "virtuous founding fathers" by pointing out that their ethics was more that of mountebanks than of saints.

(I watched ABC News' This Week and saw a segment where George Will presented the Tea Party hagiography that "the founders" carved in stone in the hallowed Constitutional documents Truth-with-a-capital-T and that for the millenia that come all that we can expect is to teach the young to mouth the words and worship at the feet of that document. I wanted to puke. Sure the US founders struck it rich and hit on a pretty good formula for building a society, but they got it wrong first time out the gate -- the Articles of Confederation -- and even in the the "sacred" Constitution they did despicable things like counting slave as both "property" but also have an electoral punch of 3/5 of a person that would be exercised by their "master", i.e. the worst kind of back room hack political deal you can imagine.)

How the Iraq War was Won... sort of

I was reading this post by Tim Harford where he mentioned Travis Patriquin who came up with the strategy in Al Anbar province which turned the tide of war and finally subdued the insurgents. I've bolded the key bits:

My military case study was the turnaround in the War in Iraq. I didn’t want to go over the post-invasion fiasco, the mysteriously elusive weapons of mass destruction, or the timing of the withdrawal: that’s for other writers and other books. But I was horribly fascinated by the initial refusal to learn from what was going on, and later at the military’s ability to learn and to adapt.

The key lesson is that this adaptation was a bottom-up phenomenon. (Perhaps it’s more accurate to call it “middle-management”: some of the key actors were colonels.)

At the time Donald Rumsfeld, then Defense Secretary, was holding press conferences and announcing that he didn’t even want to hear the word “insurgent” being used, troops on the ground were fighting a vicious three-sided insurgency. (To pick one horrifying incident amongst many, police recruits in the town of Tal Afar were murdered when somebody with explosives strapped all over their body walked into their midst. It wasn’t a suicide bomber, but a mentally disabled 13-year old girl, accompanied by a toddler whose hand she had been asked to hold as she walked towards the line of recruits.)

The soldiers on the front line had to figure out their response without calling their superiors’ attention to the fact that they were doing anything of note. Tips were circulated via email or even PowerPoint presentations, such as the wonderful “How to win the war in Al Anbar by CPT. Trav.” which used stick-figure drawings to convey vital information that the men at the top seemed to be ignoring.

All this, of course, was decision-making at far higher stakes than those we economists usually study. The creator of the “CPT. Trav.” slide deck, Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed in 2006 three weeks before Christmas, leaving behind his wife and three children. He was so respected in Al Anbar that the local sheiks turned out in force at his funeral.

So this is partly a story about how quickly good ideas spread when they have to: one British general told me, with an air of resignation, that the junior ranks quickly adapted to new challenges and new lessons because doing so saved lives, but the most senior officers tended to learn very slowly.

It is also a story about the role of technology in decision-making. The U.S. military placed increasing emphasis on the use of “effects based analysis of operations” – using massive amounts of data and computing power to allow commanders at headquarters to absorb information and react quickly, moving units around like chess pieces. Such techniques are hugely useful in some circumstances – a “shock and awe” campaign – but even then they do not always perform as advertised. We’re now discovering that in many campaigns, it is the decision maker on the ground – a captain or even a regular soldier – who has the information that counts and the ability to use it.

We’re also discovering that communications technology can be more effective at distributing information than at collating and centralizing it. This isn’t just a lesson for counterinsurgency campaigns but for businesses. The economists Julie Wulf and Raghuram Rajan have found evidence that businesses are increasingly decentralising their decision making, while Lorin Hitt and Erik Brynjolfsson showed a decade ago that information technology worked much better when combined with this kind of decentralisation.

Meeting some of the soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan was a sobering experience for me. It was fascinating to discover how the U.S. military adapts. It was awful to read and hear about some of the atrocities committed in Iraq, and wonder about how things might have gone differently. And it was hard to forget the conversations with these soldiers. Experimenting, learning, and adapting is inescapable in a complex world. But rarely has it mattered so much to find the right answers as quickly as possible.

Click here to read Travis Patriquin's PDF containing the PowerPoint slide show with stick figures that explaining how to win the Iraq war. It truly is wonderful. Please read it.

Of course, everybody knows that the wonderful lessons learned by Travis Patriquin were lost when American officials handed over control of Al Anbar to the central government in Iraq and these Shiites didn't like the fact that the sheiks with their local Sunni "policemen" were a threat to their central power, so that was all disbanded and chaos has again returned to Al Anbar. So much for "progress". So much for the illusion that rational people control government or that humans are fundamentally "rational".

Sadly, the Wikipedia account doesn't present it this way. It presents it as a "successful" handover to central authority... and everybody lived happily ever after... amen.

An Analysis of Republican Ryan's "Budget"

Here is an analysis by "Invictus" at Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture blog of Rep. Ryan's proposed "budget" for the US. What I find most amusing is the "update" that Invictus has to put on his analysis because the Republicans are busy changing the goalposts and doing a 1984-style rewrite of history as problems pop up in this "budget"...

UPDATE: Apparently, in one document that can be found here, Heritage has simply disappeared the line item in which the unemployment rate falls to 2.8 percent by 2021. The document states: ”Updated as of April 6, 2011 at 11:04 a.m. EST,” which update was presumably the removal of the unemployment rate projections. At this moment (13:30 Eastern), it still appears — for now – in this document (which I have saved in multiple spots). It is, frankly, remarkable to me that they would take such an action. Apparently when one’s analysis does not stand up to even the most cursory examination, the solution is simple: Delete the offending data.

Invictus here, folks. Filling in a bit for our traveling host with a side-by-side glimpse of our competing budget plans.

Paul Krugman has very recently written here and here about some improbable aspects of the Ryan budget proposal. In that vein, I thought it might be instructive to take a look at some of the similarities and differences of forecasts in Obama’s projections versus those being offered by Ryan.

What I have done in each case is as follows: I downloaded the appropriate series from the St. Louis Fed (or in one case BEA.gov), always on an annual basis. In almost all cases I made what I believe is a reasonable assumption for 2011 to bridge me from known 2010 (and prior) historical data to 2012 and beyond forecasts. Those assumptions are noted. I then simply took forecast numbers from the Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the two plans (the forecasts are in Appendix 3).

Go read the original article to see the many graphs where Invictus shows quantitatively the (usually) meagre differences between Ryan's projection and those of Obama's budget.

The one graph where there is a big difference between Obama and Ryan -- unemployment -- is pure speculation and wild-assed guessing by Ryan. I do not believe there is any credible method to extrapolate employment changes meaningfully from the Ryan budget. But that is purely my humble opinion. What I do know is that claims by Republicans in the past have all turned out to be outrageous lies. Remember how Bush promised that his tax cuts would "unleash entrepreneurial power" and grow the economy? Instead he got a very weak recovery from the 2001 recession. The Reagan tax cuts promised to deliver a booming economy. They didn't. The real boom in the economy came during the Clinton years where he took the harsh measures to balance the budget and impose tax increases on the rich. The Republicans have no credibility in their "projections".

FMEA and Evolution

I was not aware of the use of genetic algorithms to come up with FMEA analysis. This is an interesting thought. Right now it isn't clear to me how the software can be built to evolve new failures for an engineered system, but the following video claims at 3:11 that it is be used by the US Navy with great success:



One thing I learned from working in high tech industry: don't trust any claim until you've had time to investigate it, understand it, and see it in work with your own eyes. Too many times I've been told about "gee whiz" capabilities of software only to discover that it was merely a gleam in the "inventor's eye" and not really present in the software. The software industry is probably the worst at making unsubstantiated claims for its products.

One thing that makes me suspicious about the above claims at 4:40 about medicinal chemistry using this genetic algorithm approach to "evolve new drugs" is the very fact that I don't see any major drug company successfully using this technology. I do know that big drug companies are desperate for new drugs and pay billions to their labs to develop new drugs. If a multi-million dollar software package could obviate the need to invest billions, drug companies would be beating down the door of Eric Bonabeau's Icosystem Corporation. This company is over ten years old and isn't a billion dollar company and on everybody's lips. That says to me it doesn't do the gee whiz developments that the above video claims.

The fact that the company web site names Nymbler as a "product" says to me that the gap between the claimed capabilities and the actual delivery is an awesome unbridgeable chasm:

The ominous panda generator and the addictive baby-naming site Nymbler are two examples of what we, at Icosystem, call the "hunch engine."

To claim that you can discover new drugs and test complex engineered system but cite as your "products" a baby naming algorithm and panda expression generator apprears to me to be a monumental "bait-and-switch" con. You claim to be able to generate billion dollar values with new drugs and sophisticated testing, but you point me at rinky-dink applications like baby name generators and panda expression generators!

This article in The Atlantic doesn't change my mind.