Political Strategy

The Republicans are some wily politicians... only they can shoot themselves in the foot and then puzzle over how the accident happened. This is from a post by Amanda Terkel on the Think Progress web site:

Last month, 30 Republican senators voted against Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) amendment that would punish defense contractors “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” His amendment was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad in 2005, and then had to fight her employer for justice.

The GOP senators who sided with defense contractors at the expense of women — such as John Thune (SD) — have been facing an intense backlash. David Vitter (LA) refused to give a rape victim a straight answer when she confronted him about his vote, claiming that he is “absolutely supportive of any [rape] case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.”

Politico reports that Republicans are now scratching their heads at why the public is so incensed about their “no” votes.

Here is a bit from a review by Jacob Heilbrunn of the book "Ground Truth" written by John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission:

When Sept. 11, 2001, dawned, the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., went on full alert — to prepare for a training exercise that envisioned a sneak attack by Russian planes flying over the North Pole to bomb the United States, a prospect that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had dismissed as outdated in 1966. Later that morning, after American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 had hit the World Trade Center and American Airlines Flight 77 the Pentagon, three F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base to form a combat air patrol over Washington. But degraded radio transmission quality meant that the pilots were left clueless about the nature of their mission. On seeing the Pentagon in flames, the lead fighter pilot later explained, “I reverted to the Russian threat. . . . I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know, you look down and see the Pentagon burning, and I thought the bastards snuck one by us. . . . You couldn’t see any airplanes, and no one told us anything.”

For all the trillions of dollars lavished on it, for all the talk about confronting new security threats, for all the exhortations to reinvent government, America’s defense establishment, as John Farmer reminds us in “The Ground Truth,” continued to fight the cold war more than a decade after it had ended. Preoccupied with building a costly missile defense system to counter a spurious menace from Russia and with maintaining “full spectrum dominance” over the rest of the globe, most Bush administration officials blithely ignored the danger emanating from the caves of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his acolytes plotted against America. Confronted by a small group of mostly Saudi nationals armed with box cutters, the central nervous system of the country’s defense agencies went into a state of cataleptic shock. The only decisive action taken on 9/11 came not from the military, but from the courageous passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, leading the hijackers to crash the plane over Pennsylvania farmland before it could reach its intended target in Washington.

...

Perhaps nothing perturbs Farmer more than the contention that high-ranking officials responded quickly and effectively to the revelation that Qaeda attacks were taking place. Nothing, Farmer indicates, could be further from the truth: President George W. Bush and other officials were mostly irrelevant during the hijackings; instead, it was the ground-level commanders who made operational decisions in an ad hoc fashion. The memoirs of the White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke, which Farmer credits with good faith, make it sound as though a dramatic video­conference that Clarke led played a crucial role in organizing a response to the hijackings, but Farmer says that “this account does not square in any significant respect with what occurred that morning.”

To bolster such contentions, Farmer focuses minutely on newly available transcripts from the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad). He shows that, perversely enough, the one defense agency that had suffered draconian budget cuts was Norad, which had seen its alert sites reduced from about two dozen to a pitiful seven and, in any case, was unable to view large areas of the continental United States owing to its antiquated radar system.

In addition, local commanders bypassed established protocols for reporting and requesting assistance for a hijacking, in part because they had so little time in which to act. Farmer superbly renders the knuckle-biting tension and confusion engendered by the hijackings, and says the leadership of the F.A.A. and the Defense Department “would remain largely irrelevant to the critical decision making and unaware of the evolving situation ‘on the ground’ until the attacks were completed” — thereby making it close to impossible for the military to inter­cept any aircraft.

Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed. Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad rec­ords to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”

...

It doesn’t require scouring the archives to notice that 9/11 was relentlessly exploited by the Bush administration to serve as the founding myth for the war on terror, which was seamlessly expanded from Afghanistan to Iraq. In retrospect, the administration’s public portrayal of itself and the armed forces as acting heroically on 9/11 can be seen as an integral part of the selling of the Iraq war.

This is seriously bad. Not only was the US incompetent at defending itself. The highest officials lied to make it look like they were responding to the situation when in fact they were out of the loop. Pitiful.

The problem with all militaries is that they prepare to fight the last war. The Pentagon wasted hundreds of trillions on a Cold War long after it was no longer a threat and was not prepared for the real threats. Sad.

The Legacy of Reagan

In his blog, Brad DeLong attempts a calculation of the effects of Reagan's policies on the average American worker:

Run an extra 4% of GDP deficit and--if you push the social marginal product of investment up to 15% via taxes, labor rents, and spillovers--you can say that Reaganomics costs you 0.6% per year in economic growth, which over 15 years leaves you with a country 9% poorer than it would otherwise have been.

If you want to supercharge it, you can then say that the infotech revolution required that everybody have invested a certain amount in high-tech in order for Intel and company to learn-by-doing, and get bigger numbers.

And you can super-supercharge it by pointing to income and wealth inequality as well--where Reagan does leave a bunch of fingerprints--and take median wages rather than productivity as your principal outcome variable.

Take these together, and add the appropriate grains of salt, and I am happy saying that Reagan and George W. Bush cost the average worker somewhere between 5 and 10% of his or her wages as of 1994 or so.

The 'feel good' Morning-in-America Reagan left a legacy: poorer Americans. You don't hear Republicans admitting this. But oddly, you don't hear Democrats pointing this out. Reagan has had some kind of voodoo spell on America and it still hasn't be dispelled.

Dowd Takes Down Goldman Sachs

Here's a bit from Maureen Dowd's op-ed in the NY Times about Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs:

Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”

When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”

Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.

Blankfein’s trickle-down catechism isn’t working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.

Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.

Personally, I think they should bring back the punishment of burning people alive at the stake. That's where I would put Blankfein and his "colleagues" from Wall Street. Not only did they destroy the economy, they have bought Congress, and are now busy enriching themselves directly from the US treasury. Where I come from that counts as theft.

Breathless Green Reporting

I get very annoyed with people who fly around the world demanding that people cut down on their use of carbon-based fuels. Here's a bit from Thomas L. Friedman in an NY Times article:

Without a new system for economic development in the timber-rich tropics, you can kiss the rainforests goodbye. The old model of economic growth will devour them. The only Amazon your grandchildren will ever relate to is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.

To better understand this issue, I’m visiting the Tapajós National Forest in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon on a trip organized by Conservation International and the Brazilian government. Flying in here by prop plane from Manaus, you can understand why the Amazon rainforest is considered one of the lungs of the world. Even from 20,000 feet, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse of rainforest treetops that, from the air, looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.

His one trip put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than I do in a year, but he doesn't worry about that. He's on a crusade to change others, not himself. So he picks up perks like a free trip to the Amazon paid for by a "green" non-profit as a bribe to get him to write the article ranting that others need to limit greenhouse gases. This is like a priest who's banging several of his females parishioners while getting into the pulpit every Sunday to berate his congregation for this lust and licentiousness. I hate hypocrites. Friedman is a hypocrite. He didn't need to be flown to the Amazon to "discover" the facts he so breathlessly reports.

Krugman on the New Deficit Hawks

Here a Paul Krugman blog entry at the NY Times. I've bolded the key bit:

Fiscal perspective

It’s truly amazing, and depressing, how completely deficit-phobia has swept the field in Washington. The economy remains in deeply dire straits: here’s long-term unemployment:


Yet the respectable thing, all of a sudden, is to claim that we can’t possibly afford to spend any more money on job creation.

History says differently. Here’s a comparison of debt/GDP levels, actual levels for several countries (OECD for Belgium, IMF for the rest), and projected levels (from the IMF) for the United States. (Note that these are for general government, i.e., including state and local, so they’re higher than the numbers you usually read).


Yes, we’re going fairly deep into debt. No, it’s not unprecedented. Other advanced countries have been substantially deeper in debt without either defaulting or having runaway inflation — and some of those countries have historically had weak governments (Belgium because of the linguistic divide, and Italy because it’s Italy).

I’d be a little more forgiving of the nonsense if all the people screaming about the deficit were sincere. And some are. But many, if not most, are perfectly happy to incur huge unfunded liabilities for the wars they want to fight, and/or to eliminate inheritance taxes for the heirs of multimillionaires. It’s only deficits incurred to help working Americans that get them all moralistic.

Anyway, the point is that the economy desperately needs more help — and yes, we can afford to provide it.

I find it amazing. Paul Krugman is the most sensible and knowledgeable commentator on economics/politics, but he is marginalized. You have to go looking for him to get his sound perspective.

Meanwhile, the media is filled with fools and their economically illiterate ideas. They blanket the media. No wonder people are so badly misled.

All my life I've seen the same thing. The cranks and fools manage to shove their way to the front and get the attention while the solid citizens who work hard to make the civil society function are left doing the necessary drudgery in the dark. The limelight goes to idiots.

No wonder political and economic policies are so bad.

How the World Has Changed

From an article in the Economist, this is worth pondering:

Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

The article doesn't draw the same conclusion about climate change that I do. They see this as evidence that policies and laws can "contain carbon emissions". I see the lesson as alarmists get it wrong.

It wasn't policies and laws that constrained population growth. It was people and education. I think the global warming thing is overdone because of two facts:

1. the science of global warming is about as flakey as the "science" of Malthus and his dire warnings, and


2. educaton and technology change the equation and prognosticators never get those right.

I foresee technology moving away from carbon because cheaper non-polluting energy will come along in the nick of time as carbon-based fuels get more and more expensive due to resource depletion and increasing demand as the poor get richer and demand an energy-intensive lifestyle. The "green" fanatics don't foresee that. Instead, they are like the population fanatics mentioned in this article, these population fanatics want to "thin the herd" but they never volunteer to leave planet Earth. Instead they make ridiculous calls for a "smaller population" and implicitly rely on making life intolerable for the poor to "thin" them out.

The greens do the same thing. The greens aren't going to cut back on their energy intensive lifestyle. They just want to make sure the poor don't get to enjoy the same benefits. Nutty. This won't work for the same reason that the Paul Ehrlich's of this world alarmist "population bomb" doom-and-gloom incantations did no good.

The real positive change came through rising living standards, better education, and more technology. I never heard any "zero population growth" fanatic call for these things and you wan't hear any "green" global warming fanatic call for these as well. These fanatics are anti-people. They are fanatics. Like all fanatics their solutions are simplistic and inhuman.