here's your recourse

State capitalism, and general decline

2010-09-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

the U.S.-led unipolar order, Western political and economic dominance, and consensus among the world’s power players in favor of free-market democracy are all gone. And they’re not coming back.

Another major reason that international politics won’t return to a pre–financial crisis status quo is the rise of state capitalism. A generation ago, as command economies imploded in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, faith that governments could mandate lasting prosperity seemed dead. Western power — fueled by private wealth, private investment and private enterprise — seemed to have established the final victory of liberal free-market economics. Over the past decade, however, public wealth, public investment and public enterprise have made a stunning comeback. An era of state-driven capitalism has dawned, one in which governments inject political calculation into the performance of markets.

In a free-market system, markets exist to serve those who participate in them. In a state capitalist system, governments dominate markets to maximize the political power of the state and its leadership’s chances of survival...But though state capitalist companies may thrive in the short run, there is a risk of a race to the bottom, with greater interference in markets even in market capitalist economies...More broadly, state capitalism will produce a reversal in the trade and capital account liberalization of the past several years as protectionism breeds more protectionism.

I wrote about this just over a year ago in the Daily Collegian. I'm not exactly Captain Optimism, but these predictions are particularly negative, perhaps overboard. The rise of state capitalism - here and elsewhere - will inevitably slow broader economic growth, and has the potential to generate a concentration of governmental power and control in many other realms. But, there's hope, aint there?

I do wonder what this might mean for America's over-involved, over-stretched, interventionist economic and military empire. One might assume a gradual drawdown could take place in tandem, but given that empire is beneficial to the ruling class in the state capitalist system, it may be less than likely.

What is the role of the state?

2010-09-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

Hey, at least the mainstream is talking about it...

It is summer - a good time to ask a big question. So I intend to ask the biggest question in political economy: what is the role of the state?

There exists a strand in classical liberal or, in contemporary US parlance, libertarian thought which believes the answer is to define the role of the state so narrowly and the rights of individuals so broadly that many political choices (the income tax or universal health care, for example) would be ruled out a priori. In other words, it seeks to abolish much of politics through constitutional restraints.

I view this as a hopeless strategy, both intellectually and politically.

Read the whole link.

My anarchist friends will have a field day, I'm sure..

Client states in America's dominion: Yemen cracking down

2010-09-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

This Amnesty International release illustrates how modern US empire works for US client states.

The government authorities in Yemen are rolling back human rights gains over the years in the name of security.

Challenged by growing calls for secession in the south, and intermittent conflict with the Huthis movement in the north and the presence of al-Qa’ida in the country, the Yemeni government has increasingly resorted to repressive and illegal methods.

Yemeni government is under pressure from other governments, particularly the USA, Europe and the Gulf states, who want the Yemeni government to take tough action to combat al-Qa’ida and to prevent Yemen fracturing or imploding into a failed state. The international pressure on Yemen intensified after December 25 2009 when a Nigerian man, said to have been trained by al-Qa’ida in Yemen apparently tried to blow up a US airliner bounded for Detroit. The US government quickly expanded military and intelligence co-operation with the Yemeni authorities, and in early 2010 announced a $155 million security package for Yemen with $35 million earmarked for the country Special Operations Forces to carry out counter-terrorism operations. Yet there was little evidence of concern about the impact of security operations that might have on human rights.

Despite government allegations, there appears to be no evidence linking the Huthis or the loose coalition of individuals and groups known as the Southern Movement to al-Qa’ida...Hundreds if not thousands of people suspected of links to al-Qa’ida or armed Islamist groups have been arrested and subjected to a wide range of abuses, including enforced disappearances, prolonged detention without charge, torture and unfair trials...In the south, security forces have allegedly targeted for killing people prominent in the Southern Movement and have killed or injured hundreds of protesters during peaceful demonstrations...Those speaking out against government policies or human rights violations have been targeted, among them journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers. Legislation and specialized courts created to counter terrorism have been used to imprison even those who merely discuss what is happening in Sa’dah or the south.

This is how it works with dozens upon dozens of repressive regimes around the world. The US funds the government and military to address a perceived threat or take a desired position on the international stage, and these dictatorships end up increasing their authoritarian impulses.

See my previous post on the developing US relationship with Yemen.

The supposed end of combat operations, and Obama's empire

2010-09-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

Anyone with a head on their shoulders knew that Obama's gallivanting speech about the drawdown of US troops and the "end of combat operations in Iraq" could grasp that it was as full of bullshit as when Bush and his famous banner did it. A remainder of 50,000 troops - plus the contractors the governing elite don't like to harp on - is no more an end to combat operations than it is an end to US occupation. But to have it thrown in his face so soon after seems like Christmas came early this year:

American soldiers helped Iraqi troops battle insurgents in downtown Baghdad on Sunday, repelling a major attack in the heart of the capital five days after President Obama declared an end to U.S. combat operations.

At least 18 people were killed and 39 injured in the midday attack in which a group of suicide bombers and gunmen attempted to storm the Iraqi army's east Baghdad headquarters, located in a former Ministry of Defense building in a busy market district alongside the Tigris River.

No Americans were among the casualties, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom. But U.S. soldiers did join in the fighting alongside Iraqis to repel the assailants, two of whom managed to enter the army compound.

I submitted an excerpt here on this blog in a post called Imperial plans of the Obama era a few months back from Chomsky's Hopes and Prospects:

In Iraq, there is virtually no information about the fate of the huge U.S. military bases. Reports from the contractors in charge - effectively mercenary forces - indicate that they are still under construction despite formal commitments to withdraw. The immense city-within-a-city in Baghdad not only remains, but its cost is also to rise under Obama to $1.8 million a year, from an estimated $1.5 billion in Bush's last year. The Obama administration is also constructing mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan that are completely without precedent. Throughout the Gulf region, billions of dollars are being spent to develop "critical base and port facilities," along with military training and arms shipments expanding the U.S. global systems of militarization.

Sticking with Iraq, back in 2007 Bush administration had drafted the first Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) which detailed a prolonged and continued US troop presence in Iraq with no specified limits and called for "facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments" and for US forces to work indefinitely to "deter foreign aggression against Iraq." This is neo-colonial empire-building at its best. There were reports in the following months about the impasse that had been reached due to the Iraqi government being uncomfortable with the SOFA, citing some major revisions like adding a firm withdrawal date of all US forces and rejections of "long-term US military bases on its soil." In what has been reported as a major victory for Iraq, revisions eventually produced an agreed upon SOFA, with a total withdrawal date in December 2011.

So, will US forces be completely out of Iraq in a little over a year? Obama will say so, but we'd be wise to be skeptical. It certainly looks as if the US base the size of the Vatican is there to stay for some time; or that continuing violence will be used as an excuse to remain longer-term. The US rarely draws down its empire, especially in a country as strategically important as Iraq.

See my previous musings on the future of US forces in Iraq:

Staying in Iraq

We're So Proud of Our Newborn Client State!

Books I've Been Reading

2010-09-06T21:59:00.001-07:00

I did a lot of reading this summer, but here are some of the books for a highlight:

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (just started this one)

The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings. This is recommended. This "forgotten war" has much more importance (and brutality) than is usually thought in post-war US history.

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang. Essentially an argument for infant industry protectionism. It has some holes in it, but it's still persuasive and well worth the read for anyone under the false impression that the US had the most economic growth during a time of laissez-faire capitalism.

The Crimes of Empire: The History and Politics of an Outlaw Nation by Carl Boggs.

How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity by Michael Mandel.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini. Given Roubini's reputation as a forecaster, I expected more predictions I could consider counting on and more emphasis on potential future inflation. This is more of an overview of the downturn and the economic schools which contribute to the understanding of it.

Long Time No Blog...

2010-09-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Hi people. Wow, I haven't blogged in forever. Let me bring you up to speed for any new readers I probably haven't picked up...

At the very beginning of June I placed this blog, which had been running almost daily since November 2009, on hiatus for the summer. The reason for this decision was so that I could focus on the oh-so-coveted internship program I'd been accepted to, the Institute for Humane Studies Koch Summer Fellowship Program (mouthful). It was one of the best experiences of my life and it helped me get my next gig as an intern at the Cato Institute, which I'm giddily excited about.

Anyways, I figured restarting the blog (or at least attempting to) would be helpful in not being unemployed come December (when the Cato internship concludes). So here goes...

There may be no more apt subject to post on than Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece on the billionaire Koch brothers and their considerable money wielding for supposedly "right-wing, conservative" causes. I'm about a week late on this, and there's already been sufficient discussion in the blogosphere about it, so I won't say much. Nick Gillespie at Reason has probably the best response to it, but there are many others.

As you'll note, the internship program I recently completed bears the same name as the evil-doers in their brown leather thrones, secretly funding a radical right movement in America. I invite you to read the article and perhaps do some of your own research to find out where else the Koch brothers put their money, but I'll focus on my program as I've experienced it first hand.

First of all, my program was anything but right-wing or conservative. The people pedaling the line about the Koch brothers funding conservative movements for their own self-interest would have a hard time explaining that one to the unequivocally committed anarchists in the program, or the various anti-war types, or the open borders advocates, etc. We spent an entire summer learning and talking about the tyrannies of rent-seeking corporate behavior, and Mayer and Co. want people to believe that Koch Industries is out to covertly guide the strings in the marionette show that is America.

I'm not out to endorse or exonerate or bash the Kochs. They may have some questionable views on global warming and insofar as they have funded the Tea Party movement, I think, in that case, they are fomenting a confused, populist movement based largely on jingoism, xenophobia, and hypocrisy. I'm extremely thankful I was given an educational and occupational opportunity by their scholarship program though, and their caricature a la Mayer is unwarranted and incorrect in many ways.

Good to be back. Let's hope I can keep this up like I used to.

2010-07-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in forever, but I'm at my work computer and so this was the best way to stow away this excerpt and these links.

Via Glenn Greenwald, this passage from The Nuremberg Diary by GM Gilbert:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don’t want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Accountability for drones, following protocol

2010-06-01T15:00:00.001-07:00

Democracy Now:

The US military has faulted a group of officers for a February drone attack that killed twenty-three Afghan civilians and wounded a dozen more. The victims were traveling in three vehicles when a Predator drone hit them with rockets and missiles. The drone operators launched the attack from the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where the drones are controlled. A Pentagon review found the operators ignored warnings from intelligence analysts that children were inside the vehicles. The military says four US officers have been reprimanded and two junior officers have been disciplined.

Some more here.

This is protocol for US crimes: the government makes a mild public announcement lightly condemning the wrongdoing and promising retribution to the few bad apples that acted out of sync with normal procedures. Usually very light sentences or punishments (discharge) are put upon those directly involved. The same thing happened at My Lai and at the first exposure of the crimes at Guantanamo. This as opposed to admitting that the crimes are frequent occurrences which are the intended result of systemic application of standard operation.

Click the "drones" label in the bubble to the left for more.

Assorted Links

2010-06-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

Obama doctrine rehabilitates empire.

Arresting people for capturing cell phone video of abusive police.

Eric Margolis on Korea.

US demands civilian trials...except in the US.

The cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Massachusetts health care model a success?

Are sports like religious cults?

2010-05-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

The similarities between sport fandom and organized religion are striking.

...If ritual may be entertaining, then entertainment, as experienced in a sports stadium, may be ritualistic. Fans wear the team colors and carry its flags, icons, and mascots. Then there is repetitive chanting of team encouragement, hand-clapping, booing the other team, doing the wave, and so forth. The singing of an anthem at a sporting event likely has similar psychological effects as the singing of a hymn in church.

...Some scholars believe that fans are highly committed to their favored stars and teams in a way that gives focus and meaning to their daily lives. In addition, sports spectatorship is a transformative experience through which fans escape their humdrum lives, just as religious experiences help the faithful to transcend their everyday existence.
From that perspective, the face painting, hair tinting, and distinctive costumes are thought to satisfy specific religious goals including identification with the team, escape from everyday limitations and disappointments, and establishing a community of fans.
So far, the transformative aspects of fandom are quite close to those associated with religion.

The rest of the post is interesting. It's written by Nigel Barber, a popular author and scientist with a Ph. D. in Biopsychology.

Sports in general are something I've barely been able to hold an interest in for most of my life. I've looked upon it for the most part as some strange outsider or anthropologist viewing a unique ritual of some indigenous tribe. I can and do sometimes enjoy watching individual games, but that's the extent of it. Getting invested in the personalities of the people on the favored team, memorizing this or that set of arbitrary statistics, wearing the garb or paint of the team always seemed odd to me. (disclaimer: I did act as the high school football mascot - or something like that - for one season when I was in high school, but looking back my reasons for doing so were mainly social in nature, not for the love of the game. My behavior in that respect is regrettable in retrospect.) My initial point of departure from the cultural zeitgeist of sport fever is its arbitrary nature: by some accident of the universe I was born near Boston, so I'm supposed to root for the Sox and Celtics and Patriots and Bruins...not because they're particularly superior in away way (especially since their players and rankings change with some frequency), but because of regional allegiances.

While I agree with the thrust of the post, I think comparing zealous fervor and blind loyalty of sporting fans with religious fundamentalism does bring problems (despite its accuracy). First, I don't think you're ever going to get sports fans to think critically about the strange sacrosanct behavior they're engaging in if you provoke them with comparisons to religious fundamentalists. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this human phenomenon of collective, almost inconscient allegiance to region, tribe (or team), colors (or flag), warriors (or athletes), etc. etc. manifest themselves in many ways other than just religion. This same arbitrary allegiance also, perhaps most commonly, can be likened to patriotism, nationalism, and the sort of blind adherence to and faith in ones own nation, or government.

This simple broadening of the diagnosis, if I may call it that, to a widespread human tendency to conform to rituals and conventionality when in groups, reveals a clearer alternative approach to life whether it's religion, sports, politics, or whatever else: arbitrary allegiances are not only without intellectual justification, but they can also be very dangerous (this can be seen from a post-soccer game brawl all the way up to war between nations); only ideas and the merits therein deserve that kind of commitment. Thinking for oneself and avoiding the very strong pressures to conform should also be considered for remedy.

There is also this bit (a Marxist interpretation):

Shaped by the needs of capitalist systems, spectator sports serve vested interests as a type of "cultural anesthesia," a form of "spiritual masturbation," or "opiate" that distracts, diverts, and deflects attention from the pressing social problems and issues of the day [Wann, pp 201-202].

I do wonder at the extensive amount of mental effort, time commitment, and financial designation of sports fans towards sporting events and teams. I think its probably an enormous distraction from much more important issues we all face. What if all that mental effort, time, and money were put towards constructive applications of serious societal issues?

Israel's attack on humanitarians...

2010-05-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

Not even the most intense propaganda systems can prettify a lethal military attack on ships carrying civilians and humanitarian aid to people living in some of the most wretched and tragic conditions anywhere in the world.

Read the rest.

Hierarchy, submission, and regimentation in the workpace

2010-05-28T15:59:00.000-07:00

In Adam Smith's hypothetical pin factory, the work was divided and specialized - and hence much more productive. That perception (and a dozen other converging circumstances) became the basis for the industrialized era. Another element drew less attention: the method used to coordinate the efforts of these specialized workers was borrowed from the army, the principal previous undertaking that had involved substantial numbers of specialized participants. The necessary coordination was accomplished by regimentation, some people giving orders and others taking them. This primitive message survives in the modern corporation along with its military vocabulary: officers, rank and file, line, staff, chain of command, and the like.

When freemen went to work in factories, their status was not unlike that of the iron-collared serfs who had preceded them. Their employment was a kind of voluntary indenture, tacitly renewed each day, in which the worker agreed to submit to supervision for a certain number of hours for an agreed-upon amount of pay. Workers were free in one sense but painfully unfree in another. Feudalism had only moved indoors. The movement to civilize this relationship began immediately and has been more or less continuous. Workplaces have been made safer, lighter, warmer, and more agreeable. Wages are higher, hours shorter, and an accumulation of law and custom has elaborated the rights of employees and put limits on the prerogatives of employers. But the system has never been altered elementally. Working people are far, far freer than slaves or indentured servants, but they are not as free as their bosses and not nearly as free as they might be.

The economic consequences of regimentation are enormous: productivity is undoubtedly much lower than it could be, and the need to translate work, which is boundless, into jobs, which are finite, is a primal cause of unemployment. But the most serious consequences are more urgently human ones. A nation of employees, subordinated to a hierarchy, however restrained and benign, is politicized in the sense that much of employees' effort must be spent pleasing the power that be in ways that are entirely unrelated to the work itself. In a society that is forever boasting of its dedication to democratic ideals, employees are, however affluent they may have become, members of a subordinate, unmistakably lower, class.

That's an excerpt from Richard Cornuelle's "The Power of Libertarian Thought". It was written in 1991, but of course given it's breadth is still glaringly relevant. It was refreshing to read, especially from a follower of Mises and Hayek, because there is a significant deficit of such sentiment within libertarian circles, but for years I've felt this way and been strongly averse, repulsively so, to post-industrial workplace drudgery.

One hears this kind of sentiment mostly from left libertarians or socialist anarchists and the like. But to hear it from an avowed capitalist is important. This ideological overlap shouldn't be surprising though; it happens with the vast majority of political issues of today. While the narrow spectrum of so-called opposing sides of mainstream politics feign fundamental difference, they wholeheartedly agree on most things. Meanwhile, the marginalized "fringe" of either side reject the mainstream consensus and largely agree themselves. A perfect example is the Ron Paul - Dennis Kucinich alliance, among others.

Anyways, I think it is important that we hear this from more right-leaning, free market libertarians. The notion that corporate hierarchies are not an inherent or even essential facet of free market capitalism - that there is another way - is encouraging in and of itself, but also lends hope for further compatibility and solidarity between the two traditionally opposing "fringes".

Furthermore, the urgency of making fundamental changes in this area, as Cornuelle explains, goes beyond the economic and human afflictions it presents. The broader cultural, societal, and political ramifications - creating a culture of submission, hierarchy, passivity, etc - are themselves defeating the potential for change. However, there is widespread discontent, even if people aren't aware there may be another way. Cult classics like the movie Office Space, which largely was an outright rejection of this worker's culture of submission to hierarchy, regimented passivity, and loss of individuality as well as the consumerist culture which drives it. Chuck Palaunick's Fight Club (and the movie after it) was quite similar and actually much more radical. Even the TV show the Office, particularly the British version, had its start in exploring the hopelessness and feeling of permanent indenture that mundane cubicle work can elicit.

It's hard to harp on this kind of thing though, given how vastly off the radar it is in the political culture. More left-right libertarian alliance, though, could be a saving grace.

"High school politics: deviating from the popular cliques

2010-05-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

The reason this is so significant -- the reason I'm writing about it again -- is because forced adherence to the two parties' orthodoxies, forced allegiance to the two parties' establishments, is the most potent weapon in status quo preservation. That's how our political debates remain suffocatingly narrow, the permanent power factions in Washington remain firmly in control, the central political orthodoxies remain largely unchallenged. Neither party nor its loyalists are really willing to undermine the prevailing political system because that's the source of their power. And neither parties' loyalists are really willing to oppose serious expansions or abuses of government power when their side is in control, and no serious challenge is therefore ever mounted; the only ones who are willing to do so are the Crazies.

More on the torture files...

2010-05-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Detainees murdered at Guantanamo, interview on Fox via antiwar.com.

Keep in mind the fact that at least 72% of detainees who have finally been brought before judicial review have been found to be innocent.

Also this from Greenwald:

The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg reports that, this week, yet another federal judge has ordered the Obama administration to release yet another Guantanamo detainee on the ground that there is no persuasive evidence to justify his detention. The latest detainee to win his habeas hearing, Mohammed Hassen, is a 27-year old Yemeni imprisoned by the U.S. without charges for 8 years, since he was 19 years old. He has "long claimed he was captured in Pakistan studying the Quran and had no ties to al Qaida," and that "he had been unjustly rounded up in a March 2002 dragnet by Pakistani security forces in the city of Faisalabad that targeted Arabs." Hassen is now the third consecutive detainee ordered freed who was rounded up in that same raid. The Obama DOJ opposed his petition even though the Bush administration had cleared him for release in 2007. He has now spent roughly 30% of his life in a cage at Guantanamo.

...And despite knowing how many people we are innocently imprisoning, the Obama administration continues to demand the power to imprison people with no judicial review: by indefinitely detaining them without charges, by insisting that Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan have no habeas rights, by refusing to release any Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, including those whom the administration itself knows are being wrongfully detained.

Read it in full.

...ch-ch-ch-changes!

Assorted Links

2010-05-28T12:23:00.001-07:00

Will Obamacare harm small business?

The European fiscal crisis in two and a half minutes.

ICC Review: Governments ignore human rights abuses.

Is the SEC still working for Wall Street?

BP oil spill: the view from space.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!!!

2010-05-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

This from Al-Jazeera:

All in all, over the sixty years, Washington, guided by special national security doctrines, has grown into the most important Middle East power.

The US has been changing regimes, making key alliances, sponsoring diplomatic processes, intervening in internal state affairs, invading countries and deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the name of US national security.

And despite all his rhetoric to the contrary, President Obama has so far been as implicated in the region has his predecessors. In fact, even more so in certain areas as Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Some even go as far as describing Obama's presidency as Bush II!

Regional commentators and analysts see Obama's policies starting by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, issuing ultimatums to Iran, expanding US covert operations in the Middle East - as revealed in the New York Times last week - through his new rapprochement with the unrepentant Netanyahu government, as signs of more of the same aggressive (read interventionist) US strategy in the region.

Yes, ok...I'm beating a dead horse. And yes, ok, you've probably caught on that when I write that I "hate to say I told you so"....I really don't hate it.

All I want is just one single person, one Obama supporter, one of those blind-faith know-nothings sticking "Change You Can Believe In" circular adhesives everywhere, one of those weeping "tears of joy" hope monsters who melted at the news of Obama's victory to come up to me and say "I know that I was lied to and that I fell for it, and I'm dedicated to never letting it happen again." Is that so much to ask?

Until then, I'll just sulk with David Bowie.

See my other recent post on Bush-Obama consistencies.

The new terrorists?

2010-05-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've written a lot about the brutal American Empire on this blog (too much to link to; click the label to the left for examples). The reality of it is something most Americans remain totally ignorant about, or are so wedded to the idea of state benevolence and US moral superiority that they're incapable of seeing whats wrong with it.

But another aspect of the imperial mindset, which has become a cultural past time for us, is that the perception Americans have of their country's vast complex of global military engagements is wildly different from the perception the indigenous peoples of wherever hold. The reason is quite obvious: they're the ones on the receiving end of our military engagements; they're the ones under our boot. Furthermore, the media readily ignore and downplay the most egregious transgressions of our military. So whether it's the Blackwater Nisour Square Massacre (and here), US soliders explaining how shooting innocent civilians was an army-wide encouragement, slaughtering civilians (and children) and journalists from the air, raiding the homes of the innocent and then murdering the inhabitants (including pregnant women), or just the simple terror of daily military occupation...they know how it is, we are kept in the dark (or refuse to understand it for what it is).

Which brings me to this:

Buried within the new Department of Defense Inspector General's report, "Contingency Contracting: A Framework for Reform," is the eye-opening revelation that the Defense Criminal Investigative Service has nine open investigations into alleged "Terrorism-Related Acts" by "U.S. contractor personnel, U.S. Military, Government personnel." No other details are provided. DCIS is the criminal investigative agency working for the DoD's Inspector General.

The "terrorism-related" investigations are part of more than 220 open investigations in DCIS's "Global War on Terror Investigations." Many of these relate to bribery, false claims, theft and export violations. DCIS agents have federal law enforcement authority and have authority to make arrests.

This is how it works, from My Lai to Nisour Square. Occupation is ugly. But this is maybe the first time I'm aware of that our own government's secret investigations into US crimes have referred to those crimes as "terrorism".

Omar Khadr (15 years old at the time) threw a grenade at invading American soldiers and ended up killing one. He was taken to Guantanamo and tortured for being a terrorist. What will be the fate of those so-called "terrorists" who are party to the American military?

Thoughts on EU bailout

2010-05-24T22:14:00.000-07:00

The ECB-EU approach will not of course return countries to reasonable levels of growth – the debt overhang is simply too large. The southern and western periphery of the eurozone cannot grow out of their debts under these arrangements, and so will stumble from stabilization program to stabilization program – just like Latin America did during the 1980s. This is bound to be acrimonious, leading to hostile politics, social unrest, and more economic crises.

That's Simon Johnson on the ECB/Euro-zone problem. While I find it a little too easy and perhaps trite to declare that the Greece bailout and other potential bailouts in the future are patch=ups temporarily alleviating only the most immediate problems, as opposed to full reforms which resolve the underlying problems...that's exactly what this is.

I don't know that it'll lead to chaos and political upheaval, but Tyler Cowen similarly rejects that "patches" will be effective, while he's characteristically less pessimistic overall, saying he doesn't "see any reason why a narrower Eurozone has to collapse".

See my initial post on this.

"Most of the people there, are there by mistake..."

2010-05-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."
But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely."

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates' ruling. As the NYT put it about that appeal: "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight." Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).
So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.

Also:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama's stubborn persistance in a lost war

2010-05-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

Speaking before about 1,000 cadets — many of whom will be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan — Obama cited continuing threats to the U.S. by violent extremists while proclaiming that American intervention has “brought hope” to the Afghan people.

No, this is not from The Onion. Obama again spoke before West Point graduates, just as he did when he first announced the surge in Afghanistan, and in order to deliver the speech that he wanted to deliver, and one which fits well with the above quote's indoctrination, he was forced to propagate shopworn lies about American military endeavors and to ignore the very real facts on the ground.

So-called "continuing threats" are mainly facing us only because of our presence there. As I've written about before, the Taliban (unlike al Qaeda) do not have international ambitions; they have a domestic agenda which rests primarily on ousting foreign invaders. The Taliban have offered to peacefully negotiate at least twice formally, and high ranking members have been saying things like "We will sit back and give up our weapons [if the Americans leave]".

Furthermore, it is well known that, not only are the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda very separate organizations in very crucial ways (which I wrote a bit about here), but al Qaeda is headquartered mainly in Pakistan and is loosely networked around the world. This is a characteristic which renders military occupation of a sovereign state quite impotent indeed.

It's also vitally important to remember that our presence there is terrifyingly brutal and real serious crimes are committed regularly. This has serious effects particularly on the civilian population, who suffer the most. One effect is obviously that it translates into a real humanitarian concern for an already suffering Afghan population, but another is that it creates more enemies, and increases violent insurgent response and revenge-seeking attitudes of the population.

Lastly, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Taliban will have some part in Afghan governance long term and that the US may have to deal with them as a political force in a diplomatic way. If these things become a more proximate reality, Obama's stated efforts in Afghanistan are drastically eviscerated and will either be revealed as an embarrassing failure or dramatically revised (essentially reversed) as a matter of policy. In which case, American soldiers and Afghan civilians are being killed needlessly and hundreds of billions of US dollars are being wasted despite our federal debt being almost 100% of GDP.

Breaking up the banks

2010-05-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

I've written previously about the policy suggestion, which seems to be gaining popularity, of breaking up the big banks in order to mitigate systemic risk and ostensibly eliminate the "too big to fail" paradigm. For the most part, the dialogue has been between people advocating this kind of reform and other people emphasizing other reforms instead. I've heard very little, if any, direct advocating for large banks (the bloated size they are now, more or less). Until now.

Here is the conclusion (full piece here) from a group of economists fulfilling this new role in the debate (via Tyler Cowen):

Contrary to popular belief, our results show that a world with only small and domestic banks is no safer. Rather, we show that the size and the global extensions of the activities of multinational banks positively contributed to hedging the downturns of the crisis, even in transition economies.

I think the piece is basically arguing that having very large banks as we do now can assist in international liquidity in times of economic crisis and so they serve a legitimate social purpose. Other than ignoring the various contingencies of an overly monopolized mega-banking system that seem to present negative outcomes (or just externalities), the argument seems to miss an important point. I don't see the piece arguing that this big bank status quo is more stable overall, but rather that it can help mitigate disaster in "hedging the downturns of a crisis". It doesn't say much about how much more common those downturns and crises are with this status quo.

You can check out what I've previously written on breaking up the banks and too big to fail for more.

Outlawry is a two-party consensus

2010-05-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Observing the continuing conservative rhetoric about "following the Constitution" and the Tea Party and their self-appointed spokeswoman Sarah Palin's constant haranguing about a government limited only to what the Constitution sanctions, Satyam Khanna writes (guestbloggin for Yglesias) that:

After eight years of sitting on their hands while Bush shredded the Constitution, the right wing’s new fealty to the document is particularly meaningless.

Satyam is quite right, of course. Conservative rhetoric about the constitution has always been vacuous and nit-picky, arising only at their argumentative convenience and almost always with direct omission of their own party-wide disregard for the Constitution's libertarian safeguards. Furthermore, the provisions of the Constitution were probably under more threat under Bush than under any other administration since at least WWII.

But this phenomenon comes from both sides. The left, and the Obama administration more specifically, employ at least as much rhetoric about abiding by the Constitution and following long-standing legal constraints on the power of government as do conservatives. And they're pretty much as horrible at staying true to that rhetoric. See this excerpt from Glenn Greenwald, who associates with the left-wing, but is the exception instead of the rule in terms of criticism of either party (this whole excerpt is basically a bundle of hyperlinks, so be sure to explore those for fuller understanding):

We get -- from the current Government -- presidential assassination programs, detention with no charges, senseless demands for further reductions of core rights when arrested, ongoing secret prisons filled with abuse, military commissions, warrantless surveillance of emails, and presidential secrecy claims to block courts from reviewing claims of government crimes. The Democratic-led Congress takes still new steps to block the closing of Guantanamo. Democratic leaders push for biometric, national ID cards. The most minimal surveillance safeguards are ignored. Even the miniscule limits on eavesdropping powers are transgressed.

That is a lot of constitutional transgressions for one paragraph, but even this is only a splice of the vast list of similarities, consistencies, and outright mutual embrace between this administration and the last and the two parties in general (war and broader approaches to international relations, domestic economic policy, education, etc. etc.... I write about them constantly here). Yet we still hear most people on each side of the political spectrum criticizing the other for empty rhetoric about their own reverence for the Constitution.

Assorted Links

2010-05-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

Detroit police murder 7 year old girl in a raid while she was sleeping in her home.

A real Goldman Sachs scandal.

Obama politicking for Israel's war chest.

US social welfare expenditures not much different from Nordic countries.

The disadvantages to an elite education.

Imperial plans of the Obama era...

2010-05-19T14:47:00.000-07:00

In Iraq, there is virtually no information about the fate of the huge U.S. military bases. Reports from the contractors in charge - effectively mercenary forces - indicate that they are still under construction despite formal commitments to withdraw. The immense city-within-a-city in Baghdad not only remains, but its cost is also to rise under Obama to $1.8 million a year, from an estimated $1.5 billion in Bush's last year. The Obama administration is also constructing mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan that are completely without precedent. Throughout the Gulf region, billions of dollars are being spent to develop "critical base and port facilities," along with military training and arms shipments expanding the U.S. global systems of militarization.

Excerpt (p 63) of Hopes and Prospects.

Of course, I'm tempted to expand on this, but I'm cautious of sounding like a broken record.

A generational economic anomaly?

2010-05-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

I must say, of all the musings arising from all the economic turmoil starting in 2008, I haven't heard enough on this potentiality...

Felix Salmon:

My feeling is that people like to invest in stocks because they like knowing that there's a chance that the stock market will solve all their financial problems when it rises. Think of it as a three-pronged strategy: buy a house, invest in stocks, and work hard. Any one of these three things can pay off with lots of money at retirement, in the way that investing in TIPS won't.

What's more, an entire generation of Americans started working and saving and buying a house in the early 1970s -- and millions of them hit the trifecta, becoming successful in their careers even as their stocks rose and the value of their real-estate soared. I doubt that particular combination is going to happen again in the U.S., but the experience of that generation is so powerful as to give a lot of people a lot of hope. Even if that hope isn't particularly rational.

Megan McArdle:

If you're saving a little bit in the expectation that your 401(k) will boom, your house will appreciate, and Social Security will support you, you may well end up in big trouble. Modern retirement planning should probably focus more on putting away an unreasonably large chunk of your income.

Could this whole era of economic norms and apparent certainties have been a fluke? I'm pretty sure those rather simple norms and customary financial set-ups never before in history had equal probabilities for prosperity with such widespread distribution. Those norms - the trifecta, as Salmon calls it - were followed by millions of Americans for a generation or two, and it led to a "middle class" that was only middle in relative terms, but on their own lived like royalty compared the so-called middle class from a generation earlier. I think that is due to many other factors (technological innovation, for example) than just the trifecta, but still, it had its significant effects on individual and family wealth.

Could Salmon and McArdle be right?

I don't know. But if they are, I'm inclined to mitigate the fears of future stagnation and hardship such predictions induce. Absent some kind of full cataclysmic breakdown of our entire economic system or some largely unexpected collapse of the dollar while it's still the reserve currency, I don't expect stagnation and hardship long term. Of course, I'm sort of basing that on the unprecedented trends from the 1970s-present, but not entirely. US per capita GDP growth looks pretty steady over time, even before the period in question (via).

Maybe we'll just have to work under a new paradigm that isn't worse or even better, just different, but with the potential for similar outcomes for those types of people who abided by the trifecta norms. It's not something anyone can likely predict with any accuracy.

I will say that I truly believe this crisis of ours is not over. I've written about it many times and many brilliant economists have influenced my opinion on that. Many of them are the same ones who nobody was listening to before the crash when they warned of a collapse. But even now, possibilities of a double dip (a big one!) is not heresy, and is gaining more adherents. However, it will hit its bottom at some point, and it might be worth it to consider other, more positive trends.

Educational attainment, for example, which has long been correlated with economic progress, has been on an amazingly consistent world-wide trend upwards for at least three quarters of a century (although our public schools desperately need reform). The Internet has already begun to revolutionize the way we think about education, with its ease of use, widespread accessibility, and almost bewildering ability to disperse available information. This has implications for the declining costs of education as well. Entire course lectures from the world's most prestigious universities are already widely available for free on the web through sites like Academic Earth, YouTube EDU, iTunesU, Open Culture, and others, not to mention free periodicals from all over the world, NGOs and the free information they provide, freely accessible daily blogs from some of the most intelligent people on earth, Wikipedia, for christ's sake, has been shown to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, on and on and on. Couple that with the always evolving, always innovating technological sector of the economy which is relatively cheap considering its place at the very forefront of human civilization, which is helping to 1) make every daily task more efficient and more convenient and 2) allowing us to use that extra time to focus on our increasingly free education. Furthermore, the environment of constant innovation and evolution creates very high levels of competition, which keeps prices declining and availability increasingly widespread. These trends, and others, could all contribute to a new paradigm of economic norms for the next generation, and for the better.

I started this post scared and pessimistic. I guess we have a lot to be optimistic about though. Cautiously optimistic, that is (I'm leaving out a lot of the scary stuff).

Progress in Afghanistan?

2010-05-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Here's how the report summarizes the situation in straight prose: "Some individual islands of security exist in the sea of instability or insecurity." The authors muster only two islands: the town of Mazur-i-Sharif in the north and "small contiguous areas" near the Ring Road in the south. The level of security, they add, is "significantly related to the presence of well-led and non-corrupt" units of Afghan soldiers or police.
The problem is that "well-led and non-corrupt" Afghan security forces are, as yet, rare commodities. The Afghan army and national police force are making "slow progress" toward its manpower targets because of "high attrition and low retention." Between 60 percent and 70 percent of uniformed police are "hired and deployed with no formal training." By this August, NATO troops will be mentoring Afghan police in 45 of the 80 most important districts. Yet the report notes that even well-trained police units "have regressed" after a mentoring team is reassigned elsewhere.

That's Fred Kaplan on a recent Defense Department report on progress (or lack thereof) in Afghanistan. Check em out.

Just say no..

2010-05-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

_ $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses....

Via Hit&Run.

Crimes, denial, and Obama continues

2010-05-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Two weeks’ worth of testimony in a pre-trial hearing for the military commission of Omar Khadr, a 23-year old Canadian detained by the U.S. for nearly eight years, ended Thursday with two major declaratory statements. One was from the first man ever to interrogate Khadr, who testified that he threatened then-15 year old detainee in 2002 with rape and even death. The second was from the chief prosecutor in both Khadr’s case and the military commissions, who told reporters that the commissions “produce justice” and “produce fairness.”

Spencer Ackerman. Read it in full.

I mentioned this the other day, but I've known about this case for a long time. It's amazing the amount of denial on the part of the government and participants.

I've gone through the criminalities of this stuff. No need to again, but this administrations gang of criminals and excusers, as damnable as the last, needs to hear it from regular people.

Afghanistan-Iraq news...

2010-05-12T03:43:00.000-07:00

The Red Cross says a U.S. air base in Afghanistan has established a separate facility from its main prison that is being used for detainees.

The International Committee for the Red Cross says since August 2009 U.S. authorities have been providing the names of prisoners in a separate facility at Bagram Air Base, the BBC reports.

I wrote about this a month ago in a post called Obama lied, secret torture prisons still open.

Meanwhile, things are peachy in the new US colony of Iraq:

A dead body laced with explosives killed three people in Baghdad early Wednesday morning, according to the Interior Ministry, the latest in a series of attacks this week targeting seemingly innocent passers-by.
On Monday, nearly 30 bombs and shootings throughout the country left more than 100 dead—including dozens killed when bombs went off near a textile factory in central Iraq at quitting time.
Late Tuesday night, a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad's Daura neighborhood, followed by another roadside bomb that detonated after police responded to the scene. Five police officers were killed and 14 people injured.
The series of attacks this week has unfolded as Iraq's politicians remain locked in negotiations to form the next government, following inconclusive March 7 elections. Iraqi and U.S. officials have blamed the attacks on insurgents aiming to disrupt the political process and destabilize the country ahead of a big drawdown of forces this summer.

Running an empire has its hardships. But despite all this, things have gone pretty well for the powerful.

Me:

The US government has succeeded in disposing of a brutal regime which had become a nuisance and installing a new brutal regime which does what we say with less of a fight and is friendlier to our oil companies.

One time Fed audit

2010-05-12T03:24:00.000-07:00

So Ron Paul's triumphant stampede through Congress about auditing the Fed regularly failed. But, thanks to a sell out by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Fed would be subject to a one-time audit on trillions of dollars worth of emergency lending in which it partook.

Read about it here.

While this is a disappointment, I think it's still a significant step in the right direction even though this is a one time audit and a limited one at that. I'm probably kidding myself if I think the Fed and the federal government will allow itself to be exposed of any wrong-doing with this limited audit, but the chance is there. And if they do become exposed to questionable activity, it could open the door to more support for fuller, repeated audits of the Federal Reserve.

Here's one of my previous posts on the audit

This has not gone through both houses yet. And:

The Paul-Grayson [House] proposal would allow audits by the Government Accountability Office of every item on the Fed’s balance sheet, including all credit facilities and all securities purchase programs, but would allow an exemption for unreleased transcripts and minutes of closed-door meetings. It also would establish a 180-day time lag before details of the Fed’s market actions could be released.

Making Palestinian life unlivable

2010-05-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

We all know about the ways in which the Israeli occupation of Palestine effects Palestinians; checkpoints make travel (even to get food or go to the hospital) incredibly difficult and time consuming, regulation of everything that enters (food, clothes, hygiene products, home appliances, construction material, etc), access to water, infrastructure upkeep, permits for everything, curfews, denial of the right of return, and of course bulldozing homes for settlement construction, among many many other things. See this UN report on how electricity cuts are effecting the humanitarian situation there.

But now there's a new law:

Thousands of Palestinians could be deported under a new and highly controversial order put in place in April by the Israeli army, human rights groups in Israel say.

The new rule defines anyone not holding an Israeli-issued permit to reside in the West Bank as an "infiltrator." Violators could face up to seven years in prison or deportation.

The point of this occupation, and of the extraordinary level of control and domination inherent in it, is simply to make life unlivable for the population. And as Americans we are responsible, given our government's relationship with Israel.

Everything Israel does in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - like, say, the military assault last year which killed about 1,400 or settlements which destroy Palestinian property or blocking humanitarian assistance in the miserable areas of rubble and devastation or more walls or whatever else - is made possible because of US support.

Good thing Obama doesn't seem to give a hoot.

Not to mention Israel's domain of control and domination as been expanding over time (both territorially and otherwise.

For those of you insufficiently familiar with this issue, a decent book that I read a year or two back was Palestine Inside Out by Saree Makdisi was enlightening, if on the rather muted side. Occupation 101 is a good documentary.

Military reports show unbroken insurgent momentum

2010-05-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

Oh, and we’re killing more civilians, too. Oh, and Marja is crumbling under NATO’s feet.

Here

Dont tread on me

2010-05-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

Today’s Tea Party movement, like so many of its “populist” predecessors, is a house of contradiction, a bewildering network of crosscutting political emotions, ideas, and institutions. What connects it powerfully to a populist past stretching all the way back to Boston Harbor is, however, a sense of violation: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Here.

Scary stuff from the mercenary files...

2010-05-10T15:24:00.000-07:00

From Jeremy Scahill, the real kind of journalist:

In the speech, [Erik] Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight "terrorists" in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence.

...Prince painted a global picture in which Iran is "at the absolute dead center... of badness." The Iranians, he said, "want that nuke so that it is again a Persian Gulf and they very much have an attitude of when Darius ran most of the Middle East back in 1000 BC. That's very much what the Iranians are after." [NOTE: Darius of Persia actually ruled from 522 BC-486 BC]. Iran, Prince charged, has a "master plan to stir up and organize a Shia revolt through the whole region." Prince proposed that armed private soldiers from companies like Blackwater be deployed in countries throughout the region to target Iranian influence, specifically in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. "The Iranians have a very sinister hand in these places," Prince said. "You're not going to solve it by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in all these countries. It's way too politically sensitive. The private sector can operate there with a very, very small, very light footprint." In addition to concerns of political expediency, Prince suggested that using private contractors to conduct such operations would be cost-effective. "The overall defense budget is going to have to be cut and they're going to look for ways, they're going to have to have ways to become more efficient," he said. "And there's a lot of ways that the private sector can operate with a much smaller, much lighter footprint."

Prince also proposed using private armed contractors in the oil-rich African nation of Nigeria. Prince said that guerilla groups in the country are dramatically slowing oil production and extraction and stealing oil. "There's more than a half million barrels a day stolen there, which is stolen and organized by very large criminal syndicates. There's even some evidence it's going to fund terrorist organizations," Prince alleged. "These guerilla groups attack the pipeline, attack the pump house to knock it offline, which makes the pressure of the pipeline go soft. they cut that pipeline and they weld in their own patch with their own valves and they back a barge up into it. Ten thousand barrels at a time, take that oil, drive that 10,000 barrels out to sea and at $80 a barrel, that's $800,000. That's not a bad take for organized crime." Prince made no mention of the nonviolent indigenous opposition to oil extraction and pollution, nor did he mention the notorious human rights abuses connected to multinational oil corporations in Nigeria that have sparked much of the resistance.

Obama and the rights of man

2010-05-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

NYT:

The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights...

Not that this is anything new (I've been talking about it a lot since his inauguration, and here's just one of the latest posts), but I'll ask the pointed and obvious question yet again: Who among the Obama supporters can remain convinced of the lies which led them to the voting booths? Who among them can remain supportive?

We do not derive our rights from the government. Our rights are not a privilege bestowed upon us. We own them as human beings (hence inalienable). And any power system which explicitly denies them is immoral and illegitimate.

See here for what I gather is the government's true template for the rights of accused terrorists.

Inherent biases

2010-05-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice NYT article exemplifying media propaganda towards American military empire. It opens by poetically representing US soldiers patrolling the Iraq/Iran border as unencumbered mediators in a "peculiar role" (how innocuous!) with no real dog in this fight between near east nation states except for the benevolence of their helping hands. Needless to say, this is not how Iraqis or Iranians see it. They're interpretation, according to polling, seems to be closer to the truth: that the US political and military elite waged an aggressive, unnecessary, illegal war in what coincidentally happened to be the most strategically significant part of the world, probably to further their own interests.

The article goes on to emphasize mainly Iranian aggression and tension-inducing "cold-war-style gamesmanship" while quoting American military spokesmen as only being concerned with border security for the sake of Iraqi "sovereignty and international recognition".

Since the 2003 American-led invasion, the American military has repeatedly accused Iran of fueling Iraq’s continuing violence and instability; and it is in this portion of Iraq’s 910-mile frontier with Iran that American intelligence officials say explosives capable of penetrating armor, trigger devices for roadside bombs, 240-millimeter Katyusha-style rockets and sniper rifles, among other weaponry, have been smuggled.

This has been consistently pointed to as one of the many Iranian crimes and provocations. OK, was it provocative and criminal when we "fueled continuing violence and instability" by "smuggling" arms and training to Afghan insurgents to fight against the Soviet invaders in the 80s? We're not supposed to mention that. We're only supposed to consider the crimes of others, not our own.

And this:

Whereas American and Iraqi soldiers had treated the midpoint of the Shalamcheh Canal as the border, Iranian border guards during the past several months have gradually nudged the line westward by a few dozen yards.

No need to mention though that the US military, rather than the Iranian, is the one who apparently considers borders irrelevant given that they continue to illegally occupy foreign lands, not just in Iraq, but globally. Which is the greater offense?

Our press core suffers from inherent biases - like, for example, that we own the world and that the law doesn't apply to us - that I think really pollute the minds of Americans who consume the news media either daily or occasionally.

Who called it phony at the height of the bubble?

2010-05-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias:

One consequence of the widespread adoption of the mixed economy—regulated capitalism plus welfare state—is that people who identify themselves as free marketers or classical liberals end up playing both sides of the coin. When times are good, the United States and the West more generally count as capitalist success stories and nobody is wandering around in 2006-2007 talking about how apparent prosperity is merely an illusion. But when things take a dark turn and events appear to justify dramatic government policy interventions, suddenly the story changes. Now instead of robust market economies the world is suddenly full of fragile socialist wrecks that’s can’t grow as fast in the future as they did in the past, and indeed couldn’t even grow that fast in the past. Prosperity is and was an illusion, and the only effective policy interventions would be dramatic, politically toxic reforms.
I don’t buy it. I can’t prove it’s wrong, but I don’t buy it. I think growth trends are robust but macroeconomic stability requires active policy management. Recessions reflect failures of macroeconomic stabilization policy. Big recessions reflects big failures. Look at the incredible stability of US per capita GDP growth when plotted on a log scale.

Really Matt? Nobody was vocal in the early naughts about a phony economy, an illusory economy, moving towards a crash? Nobody?

I agree with him that a lot of self-proclaimed free marketers bandwagon this narrative and, as he says, play both sides of the coin only after the fact. Confirmation bias probably leads a lot of them to play up what they consider real prosperity as resulting from market capitalism and blame what they conveniently consider phony prosperity on government intrusion. I don't doubt this in the least.

But to say nobody (and even to italicize it for emphasis!) was ringing these bells in the apparent good old days at the height of the bubble is just wrong. The lowly "Peter Schiff was right" claim to fame should make that obvious. He was not alone though. Matt says that in down times people revert back to Hayek/Schumpeter-like economic views, but what about the Austrian school of economics - disciples of Hayek and Schumpeter mainly associated with those coming out of the Mises Institute - that never had to revert back because they've been saying all along that we have a bubble economy based on phony credit and false illusions about prosperity. We even had a politician, Ron Paul, say exactly these things in 2007 in the presidential campaign. Furthermore, other non-Austrian economists like Nouriel Roubini expounded similar ideas.

Matt is in a camp with most of the rest of the mainstream punditry which explicitly marginalizes the Austrian School. I'm not saying they've been right about everything. They haven't. But what's the point in ignoring where they seem to have been not only correct, but unwaveringly consistent, which is exactly what Matt says "free marketers" fail to be?

The chart Matt offers is quite convincing though, there seems to have been rather consistent "robust" economic growth even before the era of funny money and overly cheap credit. It's hard to differentiate real wealth from phony wealth in a dynamic economy. So maybe that's where Matt finds his frustration.

European bailout: a round-up of smart people's comments

2010-05-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

For those of you not following it, here's an overview.

When both Arnold Kling and Paul Krugman agree on something, it should certainly carry a lot of weight. Kling says "My take is that this is like TARP in that it treats the European debt crisis as a liquidity problem, when at least in part it is a solvency problem." Krugman says "When the first announcement came, my reaction was to say that the EU was making the classic mistake, treating a solvency problem as if it were a liquidity problem." Kling goes as far as to say that the benefits of this for taxpayers could be nonexistent, while Krugman remains thankful for the initiative, but unsatisfied with its size (I mean, that's his consistent M.O.).

Kid Dynamite also agrees, but seems a world more hawkish about the plan's effectiveness and potential inflationary risks:

It's like TARP for Europe, only their problem is that the "toxic assets" are not complicated synthetic structured mortgage bonds - it's their own currency and the debt of their constituent countries!

Solving debt problems by printing more money... Again... As if that will solve the problem - which, remember, is INSOLVENCY... I guess we (the U.S.A.) can't complain, though - after all, we wrote the book on Ponzi bailouts. (related: see FNM's earnings from last night). The Fed and Helicopter Ben originally created this plan and implemented right here on our home soil, buying mortgage backed securities and treasury bonds, and then, when they finally called it quits on that program, simply using Fannie and Freddie to overpay for mortgage loans in a relentless attempt to prop up the housing market.

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone are likewise skeptical:

This is a whole new level of global moral hazard – the result of an alliance of convenience between troubled governments in the south of Europe and the north European banks (and implicitly, north American banks) who enabled their debt habit. The Europeans promise to unveil a mechanism this week that will “prevent abuse” by borrowing countries, but it is hard to see how this would really work in Europe today.

...This can now go two ways: either they tighten fiscal policy across the eurozone, and introduce much more rigorous and enforced rules on deficits and profligate credit through banks, or, they let a system persist which is another “doomsday machine” that will live again to grow, and could one day topple them.

Even Tyler Cowen, master of cool and optimism, is lightly ringing bells of doom with a list of "simple thoughts":

...many major European banks are highly leveraged. The mechanics of the so-called "shadow banking system" -- namely the ability of short-term creditors to flee on a moment's notice -- remain in place.

The major European powers would not have come up with a nearly $1 trillion bailout, also involving de facto loss of ECB independence, unless they were scared ****less.

Basically the ECB is monetizing bad government debt claims.

This doesn't solve any of the basic fiscal problems, so ultimately it raises the stakes and creates a chance of even greater financial failure.

The most optimistic view of this I could find was Krugman (linked above) and Kevin Drum, who says this could either work well or be terrible (thanks Kev..).

My area of expertise is not economics, and to be confident in my own analysis will take many more months and considering this is brand new news, decided on early this morning, I defer to my intellectual superiors and...well, actual economists. Everyone is on top of it though, so it should be clear this is huge news.

I guess my emphasis would lie in the fact that we can't be thinking of this as a European problem. I don't mean this in the sense that the economy is more globalized and interconnected and so we too should watch out for how this affects us. I mean much more literally that, this is a big problem of ours, as well as being an EU problem. Ultimately on the hook for the bailout, which we know is likely to include not just Greece but Spain and Portugal and maybe Ireland, maybe Italy, is the IMF (which means us) and the Federal Reserve (which means double us). This is heavy. Considering US debt is just about 100% of GDP (we have a solvency problem of our own looming ahead) and considering the Federal Reserve already has conducted massive bailouts of financial institutions, monetized over a trillion dollars of US debt, and pumped unprecedented amounts of liquidity into markets, I have to caution over-extended institutions, currency manipulation that will probably lead to high inflation, and/or serious potential for defaults.

Other than that, everything is peachy.

Kagan nomination

2010-05-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

It's anything but surprising that President Obama has chosen Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Nothing is a better fit for this White House than a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration's lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.

That's Glenn Greenwald.

This is your War On Drugs

2010-05-09T22:59:00.001-07:00

This was for misdemeanor pot possession....

More here.

Assorted Links

2010-05-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

A tabulation of the human, financial, and strategic costs of the Iraq War (note: I haven't read through this yet).

Ask Kissinger.

What Iron Man is supposed to be about.

Volatility returns and Why volatility means you should sell stocks.

Re-introducing hyper-liquidity operations? Oh boy..

On Obama's Israeli-Palestinian approach.

The taint of torture

2010-05-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, pretrial hearings continued in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, who has spent a third of his life in U.S. detention since he was captured at age 15. Though the Obama administration has claimed it intends to erase the taint of torture and abuse from the Bush-era Guantánamo military commissions, the government is trying to use evidence coerced out of the teenage boy in an illegitimate trial eight years later.

The rest of the post goes into some revealing details that one of Khadr's interrogators testified to in the court hearings. Very interesting indeed. Check out some of my previous posts on Obama's policies on torture and interrogations.

Control and "allowables" in the world's biggest prison

2010-05-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what foods and supplies Israel allows into the Gaza Strip?

A new court case in Israel is challenging the military to reveal what items are allowed into Gaza, why it has prohibited certain items, and what the overall objective is of the siege that many have described as "collective punishment".

Here.

Hypocrite in Chief

2010-05-09T21:32:00.000-07:00

"Those who would slaughter innocent men, women, and children must know that the United States will do more than simply strengthen our defenses. … Around the world and here at home there are those who would attack our citizens and who would slaughter innocent men, women, and children in pursuit of their murderous agenda." –U.S. President Barak Obama, 2009 & 2010

Yet we know that he and his Administration have stepped- up use of drone assassinations —

We also know that drone and air strikes are notoriously inaccurate, regularly resulting in so-called "collateral damage" — and that government officials traditionally lie.

Drone attacks have been known to kill about 70 civilians for every targeted enemy. Read the post here. Please do explore the hyperlinks.

Shahzad investigation...

2010-05-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

They're saying now that there is mounting evidence that the attempted Times Square car bombing was orchestrated by the Pakistani Taliban. They don't offer any evidence beyond Shahzad's recent travels to Pakistan. But let's stipulate that they're on the right track. First of all, it's important to distinguish between the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. While related, the two groups are distinct in their goals and differ greatly in their associations with other terrorist groups and the broader anti-US jihadi movements. See Barbara Elias in Foreign Affairs for more on their distinctions.

The distinctions are important because the Pakistani Taliban are more interrelated with al-Qaeda and so if this attack in truth was orchestrated by them, it wouldn't be such a new development, since al-Qaeda and their affiliates have done this many times. But the fact that the media isn't always qualifying the headlines as Pakistani Taliban (sometimes just saying Taliban) is troubling. I recoiled when I first heard it, because I knew it didn't match up. The Pakistani Taliban has broader goals and international enemies. The Afghan Taliban basically does not. Their only goal is to oust the occupier, as they did the Soviets. Their recent offers of negotiation, as well as lots of documentary evidence that they will lay down their arms once the occupiers leave, support this.

One other note: deeply embedded into the Times article on this - way past the point that general perusers read - was the following:

There is no doubt among intelligence officials that the barrage of attacks by C.I.A. drones over the past year has made Pakistan’s Taliban, which goes by the name Tehrik-i-Taliban, increasingly determined to seek revenge by finding any way possible to strike at the United States.
The C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan, which was accelerated in 2008 and expanded by President Obama last year, has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Washington in part because it was perceived as eliminating dangerous militants while keeping Americans safe.
But the attack in December on a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan, and now possibly the failed S.U.V. attack in Manhattan, are reminders that the drones’ very success may be provoking a costly response.

I've been saying this for quite a while. Check here (and please do explore the links inside that post).

The farcical NPT

2010-05-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

The farcical NPT conference drags on: the US and Israel, both nuclear powers, the former actually noncompliant, the latter not even a signatory, point their trigger fingers at Iran; Iran, with not even a nuclear power plant, complains the world doesn’t care that the US basically threatens to nuke it every couple of weeks and wants to “crush” it with sanctions with no evidence of its evil intentions.

Read the rest here. Here are my previous posts on the issue. Ahmadinejad said as much here.

Behind Taliban Lines

2010-05-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

This Frontline episode about the Taliban is extraordinarily uncommon in its access. It's a must watch.

One exchange between the interviewer and the Taliban members which repeats itself over and over again throughout is this:

Q: And what will happen if the Americans leave?

Taliban: We will sit back and give up our weapons.

And from the extended interview done by Frontline with the Afghan reporter who was embedded with the Taliban, there's this:

Q: Did they have orders not to harm civilians?

A: One thing which I saw with them, they never, ever harm local people.

One day I asked one of the elders from a village, I said, "Why you guys supporting them?" They said, "Because they really care about civilians, about local people. And NATO, government and American, they don't care. They just put a bomb on civilians, they don't care and they just killing everyone." And I think this is the point [behind] the people's support for them. Even their operation, they didn't remove the bomb, because of civilians. So I think that's why local people support them.

His characterization of the NATO and American forces is, unfortunately, more accurate than not. I've written about it extensively here.

Nouriel Roubini says...

2010-05-04T19:53:00.001-07:00

63 members of Congress want out

2010-05-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

...of Afghanistan. According to this:

Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern introduced H.R. 5015 to “require a plan for the safe, orderly, and expeditious redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan.”

Government is not "us"

2010-05-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

A great Arnold Kling post that your should read in full:

Yesterday, President Obama said,

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people -- (applause.) We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny.

Government is not "us." Government is a relatively small handful of people with far too much power. Their exercise of vast powers is neither moral, Constitutional, nor effective. The power of the people does not include the power to stop bailouts or to stop health care reform. The power to elect our leaders is a very weak power. Our laws are passed by a Congress that, rather than enjoying the support of the vast majority of Americans, is according to polls opposed by the vast majority of Americans.

2010-04-28T13:49:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the lack of posts this past week. Sometimes a piece of good news leads to busier days. I'll get back to it soon.

Terhan Times on Chomsky

2010-04-22T23:26:00.001-07:00

A wonderful introduction of Chomsky:

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.”

The last sentence I would augment slightly, but here it is nonetheless:

And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

The excerpt is from an article in the Tehran Times on a recent talk/interview with him. The discussion is based on what I wrote about here. I'd love to be intelligent enough to provide some commentary and unquoted content, but I'm afraid that is not the case. After reading my hyperlink, here is another notable excerpt:

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.

Read it in full. It's insightful and provocative.

Most of all:

genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive

More on military contractors...

2010-04-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Scahill:

The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier.

The post is about an ex-Israeli firm vying for contracts from the US government for assignments in Jerusalem, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I posted about contractors previously, here and here.

Does Goldman welcome regulation?

2010-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

A powerful alumni network plus bundles of campaign cash mean Goldman will get what it wants -- and contrary to the media narrative, what Goldman wants is not laissez-faire.

...So, just as drug companies and insurers used Republicans to kill the public option before using Democrats to mandate insurance and subsidize drugs, big banks are using Republicans to kill a bank tax while using Democrats to erect barriers to entry, to institutionalize bailouts, and to restore confidence in Wall Street.

Read the whole thing here. I do see very real potential for exactly the kind of government-market cooperation that we saw in health care. That is how it typically works; we are the model of state capitalism.

One potential focus of the reform is reinstating the kind of Depression era regulation which separated commercial and investment banking. I think that's pretty much Goldman's whole gig. I don't think they'd like that kind of provision in any reform bill. Other than that I think the above analysis generally holds.

Our saviors, boom and bust

2010-04-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

Via Tim Cavanaugh, an interview with Robert Shiller:

Shiller: ...Home prices have been going up for nearly a year now, according to our data, the S&P/Case-Shiller indices ... Normally we could extrapolate that kind of upward trend because historically home prices have shown a lot of momentum. But I think we're in a very unusual circumstance because of the massive bailouts, the homebuyer tax credits, the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities -- and these things are coming to an end. So it's an unusual period. So I don't trust the trend that we have. I'm worried that it might get reversed....
Schonberger: What are the chances for a double dip in the housing market now?
Shiller: It's hard to quote probability because people who do that rely on statistical analysis and past data ... If you just looked at the trend of home prices you might conclude the probability is very low. We're less than a year into this boom, and booms have lasted much longer than that. That's why it's very hard to compute probabilities. But I think that it doesn't look real. It doesn't look like this is really another boom like the one that we had in the 2000s.

I'll note two things on this. One is that, as I've written about before, the efforts Obama has pushed for and implemented to avoid or postpone foreclosures and sustain high housing prices may result in temporary (or at least the appearance of) stability in real estate. But first of all, the artificial propping up has to come to an end at some point and second, I think these efforts distort the market and set the stage for a bust; a double dip, as it were. The second thing is that, as one can infer from the above discussion, it seems that the men in Washington pulling the strings, in conjunction with major market actors, have become reliant on the boom-bust cycle (artificial stimulus, harsh restructuring) for their political livelihood and keeping things afloat. It's intentionally induced volatility masquerading as a path to sustainable recovery/stability. They put to use all these tools - low interest rates by the Fed, stimulus from Congress, efforts at price support and control - all in order to wrestle us back into a phony boom, even though they must know it will be followed by a bust of similar and opposite proportions.

Another excerpt:

Schonberger: Thomas Hoeing, president of the Kansas City Fed, is worried about a new asset-price bubble, given low rates. Do you agree, or will rates go up without the Fed's doing because of deficit concerns?
Shiller: We have had kind of a mini-bubble in the stock market and the housing market. It wasn't just because of rate cuts. It was also because of government stimulus and bailouts. So the question is: Are we at risk for even more price increases, and another bubble? I think we are at risk, but I'm not predicting it. I think it's more likely we don't do so well from here.

And Cavanaugh's comment:

Real estate market interventions certainly don't help home buyers who would be better off with a natural drop in prices. They don't help homeowners who would be better off having some idea when the value of their house bottoms out. They might provide a brief advantage to home sellers who are looking to unload an asset they know is about to take another swan dive; but you know, Goldman Sachs is getting sued for that kind of thing right now.

Premiums may rise?

2010-04-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

Via Tyler Cowen, this in the NYT:

Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.

Excuse me?

Assorted Links

2010-04-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

Michael Greenberger on derivatives.

How often does the government request information from Google about Americans?

Robert Higgs on "defense" planners.

Is there a shift in US policy towards Israel Palestine? Or not?

Taibbi on what's wrong with the reform bill.

At least 72% are innocent...

2010-04-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, antiwar.com:

The amazing thing is that 34 out of 47 prisoners — that’s 72 percent — have contested their detentions by the federal government in court and won. According to Worthington, their cases were bolstered by the fact that much of the evidence against them was so flimsy: “primarily, confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries,” Worthington writes.

These and other curious and damning revelations have come out through judges’ individual rulings, he adds. For example, Worthington makes the point that we now know that “the majority of the prisoners” at Guantanamo Bay “were not, for the most part, seized by US forces ‘on the battlefield,’ as senior Bush administration officials claimed, but were, instead, mainly rounded up by the US military’s allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a time when bounty payments were widespread, and were never adequately screened at the time of capture to determine whether or not they had ever been engaged in any kind of combat.”

I've written a lot about this before (here, here, here, and you can use the search engine on to the left for more if you like). At this point it has become so substantially clear that the Bush/Obama torture, rendition, and detention regime is a sham that I'm starting to look for different reasons for the political elite's denial and insistence that it's otherwise. The reasons they give (for example), that these are the most dangerous people in the war on terror, etc. are just so obviously false given the evidence that I really do doubt these reasons are genuine. I don't know if it's just downright racism (a term I almost never use to allege motivations) or if they're still scraping for any chance to keep the public terrified and obedient and passive in the face of usurpation of power in the name of the national security state. I don't know. But it simply can't be the case that they really believe, after all of this, that these people are terrorists and that's why they've been captured and detained and tortured.

Somebody tell me I'm off base.

Levers of control: the chicken or the egg

2010-04-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen has a very interesting post up about Johnson and Kwak's 13 Bankers, which I spoke briefly about here.

There's a different way to think about the bailouts, namely that the U.S. government stands at the center of a giant nexus of money raising, most of all to finance the U.S. government budget deficit and keep the whole show up and running. The perception at least is that our country requires the dollar as a reserve currency, requires New York City as a major banking center with major banks, and requires fully credible governmental guarantees behind every Treasury auction and requires liquid financial markets more generally. Furthermore the international trade presence of the United States (supposedly) requires the federal government to strongly ally with major commercial interests, just as our government sides with Hollywood in trade and intellectual property disputes. To abandon banks is to send a broader message that we are in commercial and political decline and disarray, and that is hardly an acceptable way to proceed, at least not according to the standards of the real Washington consensus.

In other words, it's our government deciding to assemble a cooperative ruling coalition - which includes banks -- at the heart of its fiscal core. It's our government deciding who belongs to this coalition and who does not, mostly for reasons of political expediency and also a perception - correct or not -- of what is best for the welfare of American voters. If we don't in this year "get tough" with banking regulation, it's because our government itself doesn't want to, not because of some stubborn recalcitrant Republicans.

Ask yourself the simple question: who has both the guns and the money, including the ability to print new money at zero cost? It's Washington, not the private banks.

The point he's making is a push back on one of Johnson and Kwak's main points. In 13 Bankers, they try to illustrate how the concentration of money and power into only a few large financial institutions have led those institutions to grab a stranglehold on government via campaign contributions, lobbying, and embedded politicians and policy wonks. Tyler is saying that what is behind Washington's faithful commitment to the interests of billionaire bankers and giant financial institutions is the concentration of their own political power. Government has an interest in this sort of status quo, not just because the commitment and support helps keep individual politicians in office, but because government is an institution acting as a major lever of power and control in our society and must cooperate with this other lever of power to, as Tyler says, "keep the whole show up and running."

This is definitely interesting, especially given how popularly accepted the Johnson and Kwak narrative has become. But I'm actually not sure this is a game changing distinction. As Arnold Kling says, "concentrated power is bad both in banking and in government, and it is particularly bad when that power is used in combination." In both Cowen's preferred narrative and Johnson and Kwak's, this problem is still unchanged.

Furthermore, the truth is likely to be more complex and diffuse than either narrative lets on; an amalgam of historical peculiarities and resulting effects of unintended economic booms and busts have led us to where we are, so pin pointing the chicken or the egg, or which lever of power has their puppet hand up which ass is difficult and possibly misleading. For example, Johnson and Kwak in 13 Bankers point to a set of post-Depression legislation which, they argue, did for some time effectively inhibit financial industry excess and protect the economy from systemic risk and recession, but a lot of it also had to do with why the federal government continues to redistribute wealth upwards with things like agricultural subsidies to big industrial farming corporations and the like. Also, when talking specifically about this boom and bust cycle we're currently experiencing, it was partly America's cultural obsession with home-ownership that led to legislation which irresponsibly incentivized ordinary people to act frivolously and to Washington's welcoming affectation towards the risk spreading "benefits" of derivatives trading. So, this story is interspersed and not well understood through simple narratives.

However, these narratives do have a place in helping us understand. The Cowen argument and the Johnson and Kwak argument seem to me to be in the same category (in the sense that Kling sees it). But the two could have quite divergent policy prescriptions about where to start and end. Cowen says Johnson and Kwak's suggestion of breaking up the banks in order to dissolve their unprecedented (and apparently quite dangerous) concentration of power and wealth would be striking at the symptoms rather than the root causes, namely "the ongoing growth of political power and the reliance of that power upon an ongoing inflow of capital." I imagine a reform of government (its size, power, control, influence, organization, structure, etc.) is where he might prefer to start, rather than with banking reform. I think I'd favor any reform which aims at decentralizing institutional levers of power and control, especially where that power and control is largely arbitrary (which does, I think, characterize some of the excesses resulting from the "financialization of the economy" in recent decades).

Join the world, cut spending

2010-04-19T08:07:00.001-07:00

The macroeconomic evidence also suggests the wisdom of emphasizing spending cuts. In a recent paper, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, economics professors at Harvard, found that in developed countries, spending cuts were the key to successful fiscal adjustments — and were generally better for the economy than tax increases. Their conclusion was based on data since 1970 from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed.

That's Tyler Cowen in his latest NYT piece. Do read it.

Contrary to popular dogma and conventions, one might think this kind of suggestion is in line with conservatives. And one would be wrong.

Taliban offers peace talks

2010-04-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

“All the mujaheddin seek is to expel the foreigners, these invaders, from our country and then to repair the country’s constitution. We are not interested in running the country as long as these things are achieved.”

That's a quote from the Taliban's spokesman. It makes you wonder why we're there in the first place. But perhaps more importantly, this news:

The supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has indicated that he and his followers may be willing to hold peace talks with western politicians.

Now, this is sort of an addendum to the militants' offers last month about negotiations, which were made in a way that was less clear that the more extreme elements (like supreme leader Mullah Omar) were on board, but either way they were rejected outright by the US. It remains unclear as of yet whether or not the US will respond positively and cooperatively to this:

The Taliban’s position emerged as an American official said colleagues in Washington were discussing whether President Barack Obama could reverse a long-standing US policy and permit direct American talks with the Taliban.

...But I have my doubts.

Goldman, Abacus, Too Big To....

2010-04-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

This S.E.C. case against Goldman is (and hopefully will successfully remain) a very big deal. It seems the lawsuit could be more comprehensive than I initially thought, given the news that these John Paulson mortgage securities (on Paulson's instruments: James Kwak, Felix Salmon, Ezra Klein) which were designed to fail and which Goldman intentionally bet against was a program in the firm that was overseen by executives up to and including [CEO] Lloyd Blankfein.

The markets show that many investors are jumping ship as Goldman's shares sink, so that is at least one sign that this thing is huge. But as these Washington-Wall Street inside swipes sometimes go, this thing petering out and not amounting to much is a possibility (unfortunately). I still don't get, though, why Paulson hasn't been even named by the SEC.

In a lot of ways I think major lawsuits like this one are better than financial reform. Financial reform often has more likelihood of screwing things up for us in the future than effectively eliminating the financial activities in the cross-hairs. Either that or it ends up working in favor of Wall Street's top tier:

"Given that much of the financial contagion was fueled by uncertainty about counterparties' balance sheets," Goldman Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and President Gary Cohn wrote in a letter at the beginning of the annual report, "we support measures that would require higher capital and liquidity levels, as well as the use of clearinghouses for standardized derivative transactions."

Goldman's executives are calling for two regulations here. First, they want the federal government to restrict free-wheeling, heavily leveraged, high-stakes financial risk taking. Second, they want government to set more rules of the road for trading derivatives -- financial products that are often complex.
...What's in it for Goldman?
If you take Blankfein and Cohn's word, stricter federal liquidity and capital requirements would amount to regulators doing Goldman's work for Goldman. They want Uncle Sam to mitigate "uncertainty about counterparties' balance sheets." That is, they want the government to reduce the risk that Goldman's debtors or insurers will run into trouble.

This is an odd function of government: Making Goldman Sachs feel safer in its business dealings. Blogger Ira Stoll, at his Web site The Future of Capitalism, put it well:

"It's one thing for some elderly retail depositor to ask the FDIC to protect her from risk by guaranteeing bank deposits. But the idea that the government needs to run around setting capital requirements to protect Blankfein and Cohn from the risk that their counterparties might go under or get in a liquidity crunch seems a bit odd. Let them protect themselves."

Suits like this though, I think, have the potential to serve as a real warning sign, a disincentive, for financial institutions to behave in the way Goldman has with these doomed one-way-benefit assets.

But Simon Johnson offers troubling commentary:

But as the White House surveys the battlefield this morning and considers how best to press home the advantage, one major fact dominates. Any pursuit of Goldman and others through our legal system increases uncertainty and could even cause a political run on the bank – through politicians and class action lawsuits piling on.

And, as no doubt Jamie Dimon (the articulate and very well connected head of JP Morgan Chase) already told Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner over the weekend, if we “demonize” our big banks in this fashion, it will undermine our economic recovery and could weaken financial stability around the world.
Dimon’s points are valid, given our financial structure – this is exactly what makes him so very dangerous. Our biggest banks, in effect, have become too big to be held accountable before the law.

It's troubling on the one hand, but illustrative on the other. Johnson thinks the best direction on reform is to break up the banks into smaller units, and it does seem that the "too big to ____" is the source of many of our problems.

Encouraging others to proliferate

2010-04-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

"Unfortunately, the American government has both used nuclear weapons and has also officially threatened to use nuclear weapons," Ahmadinejad told delegates gathered at the conference center of the state broadcaster IRIB.
"When those who possess nuclear weapons and use those weapons have the unequal veto right in the highest body responsible for international security, does this not mean encouraging others to proliferate nuclear weapons in order to provide their national security?" he asked.

Read the rest here. I just dread saying I told you so.

Assorted Links

2010-04-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

The bureaucracy of secret-keeping.

How not to run an empire.

SEC sues Goldman Sachs. Also check out Baseline Scenario commentary.

Winscape. I don't even think I get this...but I'm sure it's amazing.

"I have the dread sense of...fascism gathering"

2010-04-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

When the Tea Partiers rally we often see posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache or others that say "socialist, fascist takeover" of the government, and many can be seen in interviews expressing concern that we're precipitously heading to outright totalitarianism thanks to the Obama administration.

This may be counter-intuitive, but Noam Chomsky, world renowned linguist, political scientist and activist for the left, who has been famously called "arguably the most important intellectual alive", seems to agree with the Tea Party on that count.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

That's right, scary huh? The thing is, in the actual speech in which he said this, he meant something quite different than what the Tea Party generally believes. It's not that he believes the Tea Party's targeted opposition (Obama administration, Democrats) will take the country over in a fascist seizure, but rather that the tone of the discontent of the Tea Party and also many Americans not associating themselves with the movement, is what creates the opportunity for a Hitler.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.

He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.

...He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”

...“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.

And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.

“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”

He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.”

When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.

No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said.

Obama lied, secret torture prisons still open

2010-04-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

Afghan prisoners are being abused in a "secret jail" at Bagram airbase, according to nine witnesses whose stories the BBC has documented.

The abuses are all said to have taken place since US President Barack Obama was elected, promising to end torture.

That's from the BBC. Continue reading here.

Update: Oh yeah, and Petraeus and McChrystal lied too. Their stated policy was that if Karzai couldn't get 'go ahead' approval from local tribal elders, operations against Kandahar wouldn't take place. Petraeus put it this way:

"The elected leader of a sovereign country and the commander in chief of his armed forces is the one who will give the go-ahead, the direction for any operation. None of these operations are unilateral; obviously it is a partnership. Neither side can move without the other," Petraeus says.

But it looks like they're going back on their word:

The U.S. military has now officially backtracked from its earlier suggestion that it would seek the consent of local shuras, or consultative conferences with those elders, to carry out the coming military occupation of Kandahar city and nearby districts – contradicting a pledge by Afghan President Hamid Karzai not to carry out the operation without such consent.

"Collateral Murder" veterans write open letter of apology to victims

2010-04-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Via antiwar.com, two soldiers from Bravo Company 2-16, the company acting in the recently leaked video of the massacre of innocent civilians and journalists in Iraq, which has been titled Collateral Murder, have written an open letter of apology to the people who were injured or lost loved ones in that event.

You can read the full text of the letter in the above hyperlink. And I suggest you do.

One of the ways the Pentagon reacted to the publication of this video was to marginalize it as an aberration, a rare mistake in a difficult war environment. But what's interesting about this letter of apology is that the soldiers involved don't agree with that line:

From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

This should make it clear to anyone who reads it that "support our troops" is often the same as standing in opposition to the rampages of the leaders residing in offices with their hair parted, teeth whitened, and rhetoric carefully practiced for all Americans to be lulled into stupid tranquility with its camouflage of banality and candor. The truth cannot be heard from their lips. Instead, look for truth in the innocent victims of these U.S.-led wars, and in the sincere apology of those who were asked to fight in them.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the value of our nation’s leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won’t lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation’s importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

...Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

The soldiers are asking Americans to co-sign the letter at this website.

The Imperial Presidency, George W. Obama

2010-04-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

Eli Lake, of the Washington Post and The New Republic, wrote a piece recently for Reason Magazine. Now, I've been sporadically reading Lake and listening to his public statements for years now and I must say that, while some of the comments in his piece are typical (coming from him, I mean), this piece as a whole is very out of the ordinary. First of all, although it was published in Reason Magazine, Lake is by no means a libertarian (he doesn't even "lean" that way). He is a neo-conservative and is generally hawkish on issues of national security.

That said, the piece focuses on the consistencies between Obama and Bush on national security/foreign policy/terrorism issues; a consistency I've been emphasizing here on this blog for months. Lake calls it a difference in style which "masks a sameness in substance" but even that I think is charitable. He goes on:

But these differences in style mask a sameness in substance that should worry civil libertarians. When it comes to the legal framework for confronting terrorism, President Obama is acting in no meaningful sense any different than President Bush after 2006, when the Supreme Court overturned the view that the president’s war time powers were effectively unlimited.

Lake also notes something I've been writing about as well: that both sides of the political spectrum seem to be blind to this consistency. Republican politicians, conservative voters, and even Tea Partiers have been hammering the administration and Democratic leadership for being soft on terror, for giving too many rights to accused terrorists, for employing a leniency that is now heightening our vulnerability. Likewise, liberals are praising Obama for transparency on national security and intelligence tactics (he's egregiously continuing blatantly illegal policies of warrantless eavesdropping), for pushing for civilian trials (now taking it back) for top terrorists like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for using softer langauge about Iraq and Afghanistan, for eliminating the war on terror maxim, etc. Both are way off though, surprisingly enough. Both see a change, one side likes it, one doesn't. Partisanship has blinded them to the fact that for the most part Obama has been Bush's third term with regards to national security/foreign policy/terrorism. Lake continues:

The Justice Department, for example, has urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to throw out a civil suit brought on behalf of Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian national. Mohammed was first arrested in Pakistan, and likely tortured there, then sent to Morocco, Afghanistan, and finally the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Last February, he was released from Guantanamo with no charges filed against him. To keep details of the case from coming out, the Obama administration went so far as to threaten the British Foreign Office, saying the U.S. might withhold future intelligence cooperation if a British court released to the public a U.S. document confirming some of Mohammed’s poor treatment...

...The U.S. still reserves the right to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charge, try them via military tribunal, keep them imprisoned even if they are acquitted, and kill them in foreign countries with which America is not formally at war (including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan). When Obama closed the secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” he specifically allowed for temporary detention facilities where a suspect could be taken before being sent to a foreign or domestic prison, a practice known as “rendition.” And even where the Obama White House has made a show of how it has broken with the Bush administration, such as outlawing enhanced interrogation techniques, it has done so through executive order, which can be reversed at any time by the sitting president.

One note on this last point though, is that Obama and his DOJ have explicitly disregarded calls for there to be accountability applied to the previous administration's criminal activity, so how far we can take this executive order against torture as an improvement is less than clear to say the least.

Lake goes on to chronicle certain executive orders, Congressional resolution authorities, etc. authored by or granted to Bush, which Obama has enthusiastically embraced and kept in place for his own use. Also, Obama has embraced one of the key Bush-isms on foreign policy. According to a speech made by his State Department's legal advisor, the administration is recycling Bush/Cheney excuses for perpetual war that takes place without regard to national boundaries, which is global in scope and is to be executed with impunity from Washington, D.C., namely that this is a "new kind of war" and so the rules have to change.

Update: With regards to the above mentioned "closure" of CIA black sites by Obama, the BBC has recently reported that Afghans are "being abused at secret prison at Bagram airbase."

Illegal NSA spying

2010-04-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush's NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA). That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense. The law really does say that. Just click on that link and you'll see. It's been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law -- committed felonies -- in spying on Americans without warrants. Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal. If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing. But since we're not such a country, it isn't and it doesn't.

All of the court's condemnations of the DOJ's pretense to imperial power were directed at the Obama DOJ's "state secrets" argument (which is exactly the same radical and lawless version, as TPM compellingly documented, used by the Bush DOJ to such controversy). From the start, the Obama DOJ has engaged in one extraordinary maneuver after the next to shield this criminal surveillance program from judicial scrutiny. Indeed, their stonewalling at one point became so extreme that the court actually threatened the Obama DOJ with sanctions. And what TPM calls the Obama DOJ's "Bush-mimicking state secrets defense" has been used by them in one case after the next to conceal and shield from judicial review a wide range of Bush crimes -- including torture, renditions and surveillance. As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation put it: "In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's."

Also, see the ACLU on what could have prevented these crimes.

Mortgage modification program failure

2010-04-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

The Times reported today that mortgage defaults continue to rise even in the cases where Obama's assistance plan has been employed:

The number of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages even after securing cheaper terms through the government’s modification program nearly doubled in March, continuing a trend that could undermine the entire program. \
Data released Wednesday by the Treasury Department and the Housing and Urban Development Department showed that 2,879 modified loans had been ended since the program’s inception in the fall, up from 1,499 in February and 1,005 in January.
The Treasury Department said it could not explain the growing number of what it called cancellations, almost all of which were apparently prompted by the borrower’s being unable to make the new payment. A scant number — 37 — were because the loan had been paid off, presumably because the borrower sold the house.
About seven million households are behind on their mortgage payments.

I was talking about the imminent/continuing failure of this program to either succeed in its stated goals or to avoid having other unintended consequences months ago (also see here):

This Peter Boone and Simon Johnson article, with the title "The Next Financial Crisis: It's coming - and we just made it worse" is concerning enough. But add to that, say, the fact that the FHA, which is conducting exactly the types of mortgage policies which were derided as the trigger of this precipitous downfall, will more than likely become insolvent.

First of all, I think it's unlikely that the administration or congressional leadership will respond to the clear results from this wasteful and failing program; our government is far too unresponsive for something like that. It will likely remain in place or be appended. Furthermore, I don't see this program as having very much chance at success; if we try to bolster the mortgage security of those homes underwater or almost underwater - especially before home prices have had a chance to fall and fully restructure - I'm betting additional defaults and speculation will continue to be the result.

Check out Arnold Kling on this. Also Megan McCardle.

More on 13 Bankers

2010-04-15T13:33:00.001-07:00

So this book is very satisfying so far. I briefly posted on it before here. The first half seems to be mostly about the lethality of having a big government so closely intertwined with the top tier of the financial and business elite. This is one essential ingredient in creating the conditions of a crash and subsequent deep recession (emphasis mine):

Financial crises, at least in emerging markets, have political roots. Although severe crises are generally preceded by a large buildup of debt, that appetite for debt is the product of political factors, most often including close relationships between the economic and political elite (p 48).

One of the authors of this book, Simon Johnson, whose blog is here and who's widely read article in the Atlantic about a year ago is something you should definitely check out. I actually wrote a column with that article in mind for the Daily Collegian. They've since restructured the website and have thus taken down the column's URL, so I can't link to it, but here's an excerpt:

The public-private partnerships, the corrupt, tightly bonded brotherhood between big business and government, helped lead to this current economic crisis in that these corporations and financiers did their bidding and reckless gambles with the implicit backing of government.

The increase in government involvement in the economy has been a fact for a long time now, but recent events have upsurged the abandonment of market forces for an all encompassing government. Governments, not private actors, already own the world’s largest oil companies, and most of the largest private corporations enjoy the kind of special treatment that ensures economic preeminence regardless of performance. State-owned investment portfolios account for one-eighth of global investment, and this figure is increasing.

Ian Bremmer, in Foreign Affairs magazine, wrote that in place of the free market “has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain.” This is systemic, says Bremmer, and has introduced massive inefficiencies into global markets as “economic power and influence [increasingly transfers] to the central authority of the state.

So if these kinds of tit-for-tat, interconnected relationships between the political elite and the financial elite are what have a hand in causing economic crises, what about when the implicit backing of government in case of dire circumstances as the solution becomes reality? Well, according to the Johnson and Kwak it can compound the problem:

Growth can come back without any real fundamental reforms. Foreign lenders learn exactly the wrong lessons from a crisis: they learn that when push comes to shove, the IMF [or domestic government in the case of the US] will protect them against the consequences of their bad investments; and they learn that it's always best to invest in the firms with the most political power (and hence the most assurance of being bailed out in a crisis), perpetuating the pattern of crony capitalism. As a result, foreign capital flows back, and emerging markets can repeat the boom-bust cycle for a long time, perhaps indefinitely (p 51).

It's still early on in the book (I've been slacking on my reading lately), and so these chapters still have emerging markets as the focus, but the book is proving to be accessible and enlightening. I know where its going too, because the end of the book contains policy prescriptions for financial reform and such. Simon and Kwak I believe would ideally like to break up the over-leveraged, over-fed, over-monopolized size of the banks and financial institutions. I have yet to examine that type of reform enough to comment just yet, but I will.

here's your optimism

2010-04-15T12:24:00.001-07:00

African poverty is falling:

We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic.

Also, fewer women around the world are dying from childbirth:

On Monday April 12th, the Lancet published new research showing a dramatic decline in the number of women dying from pregnancy complications each year around the world -- thereby proving that investments to improve maternal health are indeed working.

Assorted Links

2010-04-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

Pension crisis: debt bomb.

Obama's surge: continuing to rally Afghan hearts and minds...against America.

Who owns the first amendment?

The trouble with COIN.

The derivatives dealers' club.

The "loose nuke" problem

2010-04-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

This is a more serious problem than I've emphasized:

how much loose nuke material is out there? A lot. The nations of the world together have about 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and about 500,000 kilograms of plutonium, according to data compiled by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Security.
Simple division shows the magnitude of the threat this stuff portends. It takes only about 25 kilograms of HEU or eight kilograms of plutonium to make a crude nuclear bomb.
Fissile material is held at hundreds of locations, with varying levels of security. There are more than 130 research reactors alone that are powered by HEU, some of them in developing or transitional countries, notes the Belfer Center.
Vietnam, for instance, has at least 5 kilograms of HEU, according to a list compiled by the Institute for Science and International Security. Jamaica has a kilogram. So does Ghana.
Worldwide, many of these locations need better security. Would it be difficult for terrorists to break in and get their hands on fissile material? Not difficult enough.

The question is, can an appropriate system be devised to address this "loose nuke" problem. What Obama has suggested is in its seminal stages, but has potential to be an effective approach. This is one of the few positive things I have to say about Obama. Of course, further development of the approach, and certainly implementation, will inevitably accrue heavy and legitimate criticisms. So, we'll see.

Politicians lie?

2010-04-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama on the campaign trail: "If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year, you will not see a single dime of your taxes go up. If you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down."
Sounds good, right? Except that according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this is the opposite of true.

That's a post from Peter Suderman. Raise your hand if your surprised.

Iran's not invited, nah nah nah boo boo

2010-04-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

I know the official line (read: propaganda) has recently been that Iran defiantly rejected Obama's gracious treatment and engagement and so now we're beginning the process of isolation and sanctions (I wrote about it here), but what harm, really, could inviting Ahmadinejad to the summit have had? Can you think of benefits?

Additionally, just for fun, let's see how many cynical ironies and and direct contradictions we can find in this there paragraph excerpt:

For its part, Tehran this week charged the United States of issuing a nuclear “threat” against it in new nuclear policy guidelines published last week.
The Islamic Republic – which has made steady advances in nuclear technology that it says will produce energy, not weapons – has for many years called for a nuclear-free Middle East. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is known to have nuclear weapons.
“The outcome of the Washington conference is already known. Any decision taken at the meeting is not binding on those countries … not represented at the conference,” said Iran’s envoy to the Vienna-based United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, on Monday. “The new US [nuclear] policy proves Islamic Republic of Iran’s argument that the US is not committed to any global rules and regulations.”

The lingering legitimacy of drones

2010-04-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

I've written extensively about our drone policy in Af-Pak, Yemen, and beyond. But today's piece from Robert Wright is a must read.

You see, it's been clear for some time that the drone policy of the US, which Obama increased markedly, is one of the most egregious and controversial given the high ratio of civilians it kills, given its questionable (at best) legality in doing it across borders in countries we're not at war with, etc. Given that it is so egregious and controversial, US officials have had to strongly assure us, to lock down the program's continuance, that it is the most effective policy we have against terrorists.

Predictably, an uncomfortable amount of Americans accepted this excuse and the drone programs have continued unabated. But now there seems to be evidence that the programs are not only horrible, wrong, and illegal, but also ineffective. There has been a study done and data compiled:

They were compiled by Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago, who published her findings last year in the journal Security Studies. She studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through “leadership decapitation” — eliminating people in senior positions.
Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.

Particularly ominous are Jordan’s findings about groups that, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, are religious. The chances that a religious terrorist group will collapse in the wake of a decapitation strategy are 17 percent. Of course, that’s better than zero, but it turns out that the chances of such a group fading away when there’s no decapitation are 33 percent. In other words, killing leaders of a religious terrorist group seems to increase the group’s chances of survival from 67 percent to 83 percent.

Robert goes on to explain something I've also written extensively about (you can find some of it in my above hyperlinks), namely that the more civilian casualties our bludgeon produces, the more recruiting potential exists for terrorist organizations. After all, the motivation is for the most part political and military injustice.

Obama's duck on nuclear Israel question

2010-04-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

US President Barack Obama on Tuesday said his administration wanted to see all countries sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including Israel.At the end of a 47-nation nuclear summit that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to attend, Obama was asked about Israel's refusal to join the NPT even as Washington works to bolster enforcement of the treaty.
"As far as Israel goes, I'm not going to comment about their program," Obama told a news conference.

That's from an AP story about Obama's nuclear summit. Obama's reluctance to comment on Israel's nuclear program is understandable of course, considering the program is in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Like pretty much everything else, their program would not have been possible without steadfast, unconditional American support (I wrote about similar things here and here and here). Israel is not a signatory of the NPT, is not susceptible to regular inspections, is estimated to have several hundred nukes, and is the only one in the region this status is granted to (on demand of the US of course). His comment (or non-comment) is the same gutless, service to power, status quo regurgitation every president has offered for decades.

But oh yeah, it's also change we can believe in.

here's your optimism

2010-04-14T13:03:00.001-07:00

I'm going to try to institute a new feature on this blog. Due to the negative, depressing, pessimistic drudgery in which I typically delve (at least that's how it seems to come off to many people), at least once a day I'll offer up a wholly optimistic post.

Let me say though, that there is a reason I usually deal in the drudgery on this blog. Focusing on what I think needs the most improvement is intentional. But I actually am a very optimistic lad when it comes to many different aspects of life.

So here's today's hit of optimism:

Political segregation on the internet

2010-04-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

For all the complaints you hear, internet reading is much less segregated than the networks of our work, family, and friends...

Tyler Cowen.

Really interesting post by Cowen. And it makes perfect sense too. The broad amalgam of material I read, watch, and listen to online far surpasses the level of diversity of ideas, perspectives, and contributions I get anywhere else I think. Sort of goes without saying perhaps, but not for everyone. Not everyone uses the internet like I and perhaps some of you do.

This is part of why I get really defensive when people shit on the legitimacy of the internet as a learning tool. It's getting harder and harder to do (thank god), so I hear much less of it.

Check out this post from Open Culture on Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital.

Assorted Links

2010-04-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

Karen Kwiatkowski on war.

Krugman, Cowen on Austrian business cycle theory.

Against libertarian nostalgia. Bruce Barlett similarly rejects sky-is-falling, good-old-days mindset.

War and your taxes.

Raise income taxes by 40%???\

Data on the Massachusetts Uninsurance Rate.

Detainee released...

2010-04-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Today a D.C. federal court released the opinion that orders the release of Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Salahi (also spelled “Slahi”), a citizen of Mauritania. The decision was issued on March 22, but wasn't made public until today, upon completion of a classification review. Some of the decision is still classified.

Salahi has been in U.S. custody for more than eight years. He was arrested in Mauritania on suspicion of ties to al Qaeda. The U.S. government then illegally rendered him to Jordan, where he was detained, interrogated and abused for eight months. He was then rendered to Bagram, Afghanistan, and finally to Guantánamo, where he has been held since August 2002.

While at Guantánamo, Salahi was subjected to an array of horrifying treatment, including being held in total isolation for months, kept in a freezing cold cell, shackled to the floor, and subjected to the “frequent flyer” program, during which he was awakened every few hours to deprive him of sleep. These abuses wereconfirmed and documented in a 2009 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF) that investigated allegations of detainee mistreatment at Guantánamo.

Here is the link.

Nuclear Policy: Kings, Vassals, and Fiefdoms

2010-04-13T15:01:00.001-07:00

This past Sunday on Meet The Press, David Gregory sat down with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to talk on nuclear policy. It was indicative of what most (all?) episodes of Meet The Press indicate: (1) the profound commitment on the part of our political elite to the sustenance of US imperial hegemony and (2) the sheer subservience on the part of the media elite to this mindset to buttress those ideas of control and domination.

Let me show you what I mean...

First of all, that lapdog host David Gregory introduced this segment on nuclear policy with this penetrating question to the viewers:

MR. GREGORY: Why are so many friends and foes alike defying the Untied States? A conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

What's remarkable is that the framing of this question and it's foundational presumptions aren't questioned at all in the entire episode. This is how he poses the same question to Clinton and Gates, twice:

MR. GREGORY: We've been talking about our foes. I want to talk about our friends because I think a lot of Americans are troubled by some of our relationships with our friends in the world right now. Hamid Karzai, who is the leader of Afghanistan, has done some things recently. He's tried to establish control over what was supposed to be an independent election commission. He invited the Iranian leader to Afghanistan in a move that seemed to try to embarrass the U.S. He talked about the U.S. trying to dominate Afghanistan. And now he made threats, apparently, to join the Taliban. I think a lot of people are, are, are fair in wondering why the American forces should fight and die for people represented by a guy like this.

MR. GREGORY: So if there's a--if there's--people who get worried about our allies, frankly, not listening to the United States, take Israel for example. Was the United States blindsided by the fact that the Israeli prime minister abruptly decided not to come to this nuclear conference?

He calls them our allies, "why aren't our allies listening to us?" What is obvious is that he means something quite different; namely "why aren't our clients obeying the commands of their masters in the US government?" Gregory is addressing a grievance about those who are supposed to shut up and do as we say, but aren't, at least to his satisfaction. How dare Karzai invite the president of his neighboring country for a visit? How dare he talk about the US trying to dominate Afghanistan? He's not supposed to say such things. The US has been occupying Afghanistan for almost a decade now, wreaking constant havoc that has recently become much more pronounced due to Obama's Bush-like surge. Civilian deaths are an every day occurrence, the number of refugees and displaced people in this already poverty-stricken land is increasing by leaps and bounds (and frequent house raids of innocent people aren't helping that situation), drone attacks have been increasing, and the US military domination of that country shows no signs of dwindling for the foreseeable future. But, you see, Karzai, who after all is "our guy", our client, our minion, and he's not supposed to exhibit such ungrateful defiance.

These presumptions about the rightful place of power and domination of the US in world affairs isn't even questioned. The implication is that we own the world. It is just accepted as fact, and the interview continues on as if the people involved aren't insane.

Here is another question from Gregory, also containing presumptions on which I'll comment:

Gregory: But, Secretary Gates, this is not about the U.S. and the USSR anymore. It's not about the U.S. and Russia anymore. And critics, what they've seized on is this idea that American nuclear power, muscle, is ultimately what has deterred aggressors in the past. So, as you look at this posture review, disarmament decision, how does this deter a country like Iran or North Korea from, you know, a -- going away from their nuclear ambitions?

While it may be true that the USSR was deterred from attacking the US during the Cold War because of its possession of vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons which could have disintegrated practically the whole nation in a matter of hours, the fact is we don't live in that world anymore. Now we live in a world where the US is nowhere close to being outmatched militarily by anyone. The US outspends the next 50 countries combined on defense and military. Furthermore, with well over 700 military bases in over 130 countries, the US military has the ability to attack and strategically implement military operations to any point on the globe with unmatched speed and preparedness by way of our proxy installations and our extensive network of client states. So yes, David Gregory, there is such a thing as deterrence, but (1) you're right, we don't live in that world anymore and (2) it's not even relevant to bring up in order to characterize Obama's recent deal with Russia as somehow depleting our dominance in this arena at all. That superiority has not been jeopardized, contrary to his framing of the question.

Secondly, notice how Gregory presupposes the nuclear ambitions of Iran, despite the fact that reports vary widely, and despite the fact that for about 20 years we've been consistently over-estimating Iran's nuclear capabilities. Clinton comes back at Gregory that, actually, reports do vary and Gates tells him they are not nuclear capable, but still the consistent mistakes in the underlying assumptions of each of Gregory's questions, the false mindset behind them, goes unaddressed.

Here's Gates's response to that question:

GATES: Well, first of all, we have still a very powerful nuclear arsenal. The Nuclear Posture Review sets forth a process by which we will be able to modernize our nuclear stockpile to make it more reliable, safer, more secure and effective. We have, in addition to the nuclear deterrent today, a couple of things we didn't have in the Soviet days. We have missile defense now, and that's growing by leaps and bounds every year; significant budget increase for that this year both regional and the ground-based interceptors. And we have prompt global strike affording us some conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn't have before. So, believe me, the chiefs and I wouldn't -- the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I would not have wholeheartedly embraced not only the nuclear posture review but also the START agreement if we didn't think, at the end of the day, it made the United States stronger, not weaker.

Read: Don't fret Mr. Gregory, we can still pummel the entire world with weapons. We can garrison the surroundings of our defectors, don't you worry your little ugly head.

Lastly, on sanctions:

Gates: At the end of the day, what, what has to happen is the Iranian government has to decide that its own security is better served by not having nuclear weapons than by having them.

Yeah, this is what US officials say, but the affect of their policies and positions, as they so often do, have been having the reverse outcome. As I wrote about here and here, the policies of the US towards Iran for decades is exactly what has been pressuring Iran towards seeking nuclear weapons capabilities, if in fact that is their intention. If it is, then it would certainly make sense. Read that link and find out why. But furthermore, as I said in the post, "as proof that the US's hard-line, fastidious, adherence to UN security council resolutions with regards to Iran's nuclear capabilities is not due to strict adherence to the rule of law, but rather because of its vested interest in keeping Iran inside all three qualifiers, consider this: Israel, India, and Pakistan are all official allies of the US and all three have received nuclear technology from the US and have become nuclear states with political help from the US in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and security council resolutions." This was but a few years ago. There has been no great change.

Gates continues:

Gates: And it's a combination of economic pressures, it's a combination of more missile defense and cooperation in the Gulf to show them that any attack would--we can defend against and react against. So I think it's a combination of, of all of these different options in terms of trying to convince the Iranians that, that they're headed down the wrong path.

By "economic pressures" Gates means to deliberately enfeeble Iran's economy further in a way that largely makes the people suffer and the leadership maintain it's position. By "more missile defense" he means a more elaborate empire of military installations all over the world. By "cooperation in the Gulf" he means our client states will likely do as their told. And finally by Iranians being "headed down the wrong path" he means not doing what we say.

This interview is a handy little case study in the way in which our diplomatic leaders approach international policy (like kings approach the vassal's fiefdom) and how the media works very hard to prop up that system of control.

Watch the segment if you like:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Apathy is tyranny's greatest ally

2010-04-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

NYT:

American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort.

...More than 30 people have been killed and 80 wounded in convoy and checkpoint shootings since last summer, but not one of the people killed was found to have been a threat, military officials say.

I'm running out of ways to bitch about this kind of thing (probably because it's too common). There is so little debate about the legitimacy of the Afghan war and the way in which it's being fought that even I, a constant news-consumer, have trouble finding it at all. The obvious reason is that there is a bipartisan consensus about it. The policy in Afghanistan is virtually identical to Bush's surge policy in Iraq - and it's just as reckless - and so the Republicans aren't about to criticize the Democratic leadership for adopting their own preferred foreign policy. And without that partisan disagreement, our "independent" media surely won't be critical enough to create a policy debate on their own, so here we are...left with utter silence and passivity.

Without relying on partisanship to constipate Washington's policy implementation, or at least raise questions about it's legitimacy, and without the media helping to facilitate critical dialogue that even approaches suitable skepticism, what are we left with? I guess then it's up to the people to do the extra work to become knowledgeable and active against these abuses of power and brutality against innocents abroad. But, as I wrote about here, most people basically just don't care. As I described, they either engage in impressive amounts of confirmation bias, or excuse the abuses as minor, aberrational, and justifiable, or they just don't give a shit.

There was a recent leak of a classified CIA document with the title "Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-Led Mission – Why Counting on Apathy Might Not be Enough".

Apathy is tyranny's greatest ally.

Assorted Links

2010-04-06T17:21:00.000-07:00

CIA Deputy Director helped cover up detainee death.

Gaming the mandate system. Also here.

The new paternalism?

Adam Curtis, of the BBC, on Waziristan.

"The woman who just might save the planet and our pocketbooks."

Taliban: Karzai is our brother.

Staying in Iraq

2010-04-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

There has been a new stream of violence in Iraq due to the recent elections in which opposition candidate Allawi and his party beat out current Prime Minister Maliki. Maliki wants a recount and there has been confusion and "impasse".

[As a side note, it should be mentioned that Allawi seems to be the preferred candidate for US officials. He is much more hawkish towards Iran compared to Maliki (the US of course hates the notion of major Middle Eastern alliances) and he also secretly worked with the US in regime change attempts against Saddam in the 90s. I'll elaborate further in a later post.]

Anyways, there has been a sharp rise in violence recently. Here is a taste of today's violence. Here's a previous post on the recent elections. Here are some thoughts on Iraq more generally.

The White House has said publicly that the current withdrawal plans are still in place. I still say, as I've been saying for a long time, we'll be there for in a relatively large capacity the foreseeable future, just as 47,000 troops remain in Japan and pretty much the rest of the world.

To help illustrate how entrenched our military presence is in Iraq, Tom Engelhardt offers some numbers:

Here, for instance, are some figures offeredin a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”: “There are… more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.”

...When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years — like a compulsive shopper without a 12-step recovery program in sight. Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

Most of the rest of his post focuses on the cost of the war currently and the cost of the "post-war" implementations.

So couple the increase in violence and political instability with the absurdly difficult logistical obstacles to withdrawal and finally consider the internal pressure the political elite are receiving to stay in Iraq much longer. General Odierno has already made specific requests for a postponement of withdrawal and laid out plans for staying longer ("Plan B he calls it). Engelhardt also reported:

As 2009 ended, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was suggesting that new negotiations might extend the U.S. position into the post-2011 years. (“I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a train, equip, and advise role beyond the end of 2011.”) Centcom commander General David Petraeus agrees. More recently, Gates added that a “pretty considerable deterioration” in the country’s security situation might lead to a delay in withdrawal plans (and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has agreed that this is a possibility). Vice President Joe Biden is already talking about re-labeling “combat troops” not sent home in August because, as he put it in an interview with Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times, “we’re not leaving behind cooks and quartermasters.” The bulk of the troops remaining, he insisted, “will still be guys who can shoot straight and go get bad guys.”
And a chorus of the usual suspects, Washington’s warrior-pundits and “warrior journalists” (as Tom Hayden calls them), are singing ever louder versions of a song warning of that greatest of all dangers: premature withdrawal. Ricks, for instance, recommended in the Times that, having scuttled the “grandiose original vision” of the Bush invasion, the Obama administration should still “find a way” to keep a “relatively small, tailored force” of 30,000-50,000 troops in Iraq “for many years to come.” (Those numbers, oddly enough, bring to mind the 34,000 U.S. troops that, according to Ricks in his 2006 bestseller Fiasco, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz projected as the future U.S. garrison in Iraq in the weeks before the invasion of 2003.)
Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion, is now wary of removing “the cast” -- his metaphor for the U.S. military presence -- on the “broken arm” of Iraq too soon since states that have “undergone a major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying rate of recidivism.” For Kimberley and Frederick Kagan, drumbeatersextraordinaires, writing for the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. must start discussing “a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011,” especially since that country will not be able to defend itself by then.

Dear readers, you and the rest of America ought to get used to staying in Iraq for years to come, and to get used to a much more obvious state of imperialism (if it could be any more obvious, that is).

Most surprising sentence of the day...

2010-04-06T12:22:00.000-07:00

The panel established by Congress to investigate the causes of the financial crisis has been hobbled by delays and internal disagreements and a lack of focus...

...not. Article here.

A "magnanimous" policy, from the world's biggest bully

2010-04-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

There's news today about President Obama officially altering policy by narrowing the conditions under which the US would use a nuclear weapon. But note the second paragraph of this Times article on the news:

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

First of all, this kind of provocative rhetoric about the use of the most deadly device known to man is pretty much nonexistent outside the United States. Frequent readers will know that the US acting outside the norms and laws to which the rest of the world abide because it is the imperial hegemon is a common theme on this blog. Public announcements like saying our now more restrained nuclear policy does not apply to Iran or North Korea, or the ever-present, ever so subtle "we're keeping all options on the table (that is, including the military option)" are just not accepted as tolerable behavior unless it's done by the US. And as I wrote here, it's dangerously counterproductive, especially when such rhetoric is coupled with actions of the same provocative nature.

The article goes on to lay out explicitly how the US would react in the case of any attack with something other than nuclear weapons. It regurgitates the propaganda Obama desires to be broadcast to the nation and the world, explaining that we could use "a series of graded tools" (in splendid Orwellian terminology).

Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.
White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.
...“We are going to want to make sure that we can continue to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons,” and, he [Obama] added, to “make sure that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

The United States spends more on defense than the next fifty countries' defense budgets combined; it has the most elaborate military empire and the most sophisticated weaponry and personnel in the entire world; it is completely unrivaled and there is no other state which stands a chance in a military situation with the US. Given this, why in the world do we feel the need to tense up the entire world and parade our strength and superiority through highly provocative rhetoric? Why is it necessary, and how does it increase global security, by announcing to the world basically that "we'll pummel you into the ground with our amazing weaponry in a split second if you attack us"?? What does that accomplish beyond ensuring the consistency with which we have always painted ourselves as a bully?

13 Bankers Teaser

2010-04-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

"The conditions that created the financial crisis and global recession of 2007-2009 will bring about another crisis sooner or later. Like the last crisis the next one will cause millions of people to lose their jobs houses or educational opportunities; it will require a large transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the financial sector and it will increase government debt requiring higher taxes in the future. The effects of the next meltdown could be milder than the last one; but with a banking system that is even more highly concentrated and that has a rock-solid government guarantee in place they could also be worse."

That's from Simon Johnson and James Kwak's new book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Much more on it later.

Fed/Bubble Oblivion

2010-04-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias writes:

I have no opinion on how much monetary policy influenced the bubble or could have counteracted it.

I've been reading Matt for years, and I don't think I've ever heard him just simply say he had no opinion on something. I'll further qualify that by saying that I definitely have never heard him say that about an issue of such importance and such great consequence. I'm finding it rather annoying, given what an expert he is believed to be and what a central issue this monetary policy/bubble debate is.

Check out my previous posts on this debate here and here and here and here.

Additionally, Matt says that the "biggest influence policy makers had on the bubble was" what they said about it. I mean, sure, it's true that when you have the Chairman of the house Financial Services Committee Barney Frank saying things are fine and there's no bubble, and when you have Chairman of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee (and also the biggest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie) saying everything is fine and there's no bubble, that has an affect on what the media report and what people generally believe about the state of the economy and the real estate sector. And when you have Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, not only going on national TV to dispel worries about a bubble, but also writing a report to the President doing it as well, yes this does have an affect on perceptions.

But this almost certainly can't be the biggest influence policymakers had, can it? This sort of thinking comes from what I believe to be a popular caricature of Keynesianism, which emphasizes "animal spirits" as the main cause of the business cycle. In any explanation of the business cycle or any old recession, there has to be a major focus on real (in the economic sense) things, concrete analysis of actual economic resources. And when it comes what individual policymakers - separate from monetary policy at the Fed - did to influence the bubble...well, that's a much longer discussion (but here is a small part of it).

More US Crimes, More American Subservience

2010-04-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.
Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women.

This situation, which I blogged about a few days ago here, illustrates well what needs to change about the average American's welcoming trustworthiness of what their government and media say as well as people's almost instinctual belief in the goodness of US militarism abroad. To even mention that the US military has committed crimes of the gravest nature in Afghanistan is appalling to most average Americans (former US soldier and State Department official Matthew Hoh has admitted as much), never mind that the US is the world's leading international criminal; they've either never heard such drivel or they reject the notion as hateful and psychotic. One must not speak so disrespectfully of US international endeavors and speaking ill of the military is plainly out of the question. But to comply with these conventions is to simply ignore the facts.

If the average American was told that reports have just been released of Taliban insurgents murdering two American male civilians and three American female civilians (two of whom were pregnant), he or she would be repulsed at the backwards barbarism and brutality of such people. But when the American military does it, proceeds to lie about it, and then is forced to admit it, but says it's really sorry, most Americans choose to focus on the vagaries of war, that mistakes are made, that we're there for honorable reasons and thus these kinds of slip ups are understandable and forgivable.

Why is this? Why does this seemingly unbreakable inclination to presume the honor or moral superiority of the government and its military persist?. Well, civilian praise of the native military goes back to ancient Greece and it's a part of what political scientist Benedict Anderson famously called imagined communities. But, what about more immediate causes? I think it's because of how subservient the media are to these structures of power and force. Here's more Greenwald:

What is clear -- yet again -- is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly "reports" on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact

The title of the article from CNN.com before the Pentagon ended up admitting they were the culprits was "Bodies found gagged, bound after Afghan 'honor killing'". And, Greenwald continues, this is in no way an isolated incident, but rather a continuous facet in war reporting in general:

All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically. Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad. The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers' claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity: until a video emerged proving the villagers' claims were true and the Pentagon's false. Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points: "to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here,not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.

Until a majority of Americans are willing to release themselves from these conventions of trust, praise, and a total lack of skepticism and self-criticism, the US military will continue to be able to commit crimes and the media will continue to be a vehicle for the impunity with which those crimes are committed.

Check out information from Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan project here and here. Also see Scott Horton's post about similar US behavior and media subservience here.

"Party Discipline" Code for Bullying and Conformity

2010-04-02T17:47:00.001-07:00

The news that GOP members of congress may lose their committee seats for defying the party’s one year earmark ban is an interesting window into the mechanisms of party discipline. Simply put, Democrats virtually never do this stuff. There are some real advantages to lax discipline—a “big tent” can win more seats—but ultimately a party that’s serious about achieving policy objectives will find that it’s much easier to do this if its members are willing to tolerate efforts to enforce discipline. And by and large you find a lot more of that on the Republican side, while Democrats are more invested in the idea of members as autonomous actors who are free to do as they see fit.

I'm kind of appalled at how comfortable Matt Yglesias is with this kind of thing. I think so-called "party discipline" is one of the most poisonous things about contemporary American politics. Notice how what Matt frames this as what is in the interest of the party...what may help deliver the party's objectives. What ought to be in the interest of members of Congress is their constituents and the founding document they swore to uphold, not what the party leadership is bullying them into doing. All "party discipline" does is encourage conformity and eliminate independent thinking. To think that you may lose support for your propositions, or lose your committee seats, or whatever else, simply because you didn't shut your mouth, close your mind, and obey THE PARTY is just horrible and is one of those aspects inherent in our system that seems like it belongs in a dystopian movie or an Orwell novel or something.

Additionally, I'm pretty sure Matt's notion that this is mainly a Republican thing, while Democrats are invested in the autonomy of members, is pure fantasy. I'd love to see him come up with some evidence in support of that view.

I'll do some research, and come back with evidence against that argument. So, stay tuned I guess.

Authoritarian Proclivities, Engendering Terrorists

2010-04-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

"Obama [gave] the people hope. And they [lived] one year with this hope," Anisi says. "Now, the people start to think this is not [a] Bush problem or [a] Bush administration mistake, it is the mistake [of] all American people," Anisi says.
As a result, he says, Yemenis have become increasingly angry at all Americans.
"They said ... all of them [are] the same. Democrat people or Republican people — all of them are [the] enemy," he says.

The person quoted is Khaled al-Anisi, a Yemeni who heads a legal group in Yemen called the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedom. If his statement truly does reflect Yemenis' perspective generally, then it's amazing that Yemenis can identify the lack of distinction between the two parties in American politics, while most Americans only lend nods in that direction (but never, of course, during election time).

The context of the conversation (read it here) was the remaining Guantanamo Bay detainees, half of whom are Yemeni, and their continuing detention despite many having already been approved for release. In other words, it has been decided upon by legal experts that the detention of these people is illegitimate, unjustified, and - well - illegal. But since the "underwear" bomber had connections to al Qaeda groups in Yemen, Obama put a hold on all those release approvals.

Due to years overwhelming indoctrination by politicians and the media on this issue, it can be difficult to view this for what it is. Imagine this situation in another context. For example, there are currently five American men (of Middle Eastern descent, but from the DC area) about to be tried in Pakistan with terrorism charges. Imagine if Pakistani courts found them to be innocent and concluded that their release was in order, but then took that back and insisted that these young American men remain in jail despite their innocence. That's the definition of tyranny. When governments have the power to jail people, who are admitted to be innocent even by their captors, it signifies a disintegration of the legal system, and authoritarian proclivities.

Notably, Anisi doesn't just say, as he does in the above quote, that this kind of thing makes Yemenis angry, but...

Anisi and many others say that the danger with this anti-American sentiment is it makes it easier for al-Qaida to recruit new members

The most consistent policy of our government since 9/11 has been to engender additional hatred against the US and to increase by leaps and bounds the number of terrorists determined to attack us. Obama has been carrying on that legacy pretty consistently. And that's something people abroad are understanding quite well. Why can't we?

Educate With Non-Fiction

2010-04-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test known as "the nation's report card," only one-third of American kids can read at the "proficient" level. Over the past two years, no national gains have been made in closing the achievement gaps between rich and poor, white and black, white and Hispanic, or girls and boys. And though some individual states did better than others on the assessment, the overall picture of literacy in America is bleak—a decades-long achievement plateau that leaves most young adults unprepared for higher-level work.

... That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.

...But for the most part, kids aren't reading this kind of material. "One of my big gripes is the imperialism of literature, of trivial fictions and poetry," says E.D. Hirsch, a literature professor and advocate of "cultural literacy." Hirsch rejects the idea that storybooks are the only books that appeal to children. "Fiction doesn't have a monopoly on narrative," he says. "Take, for example, biographies. They have the form of fiction. It isn't whether kids can read it or not, it's whether it is taught or not. And boys tend to be more interested in nonfiction than fiction. It's one of the reasons… that boys do less well and are turned off from reading."

That's Dana Goldstein at the Daily Beast.

The problems and deficiencies with our educational system are endless, but this is an under-emphasized (unemphasized?) aspect of those. Having spent pretty much my entire educational career in public schools, I know full well how it all works. I also know that the reading selection is pretty horrible. I read a lot of nonfiction and that habit over the past four or five years has been more beneficial to my education and my understanding of the world than probably all the years of schooling I've had. And when you think of it, why in the world would schools not be emphasizing current events and real-world understanding through periodicals and new nonfiction? It seems a ridiculous question, but alas it is pretty far from being even a marginal part of the curriculum.

I often wonder, what if I had had a jump start on all this when I was just a young chap, instead of having to play catch up after I had turned 18 and was nearing high school graduation. 'Tis a pity.

The Right's Acceptance of Welfare (Corporate)

2010-04-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Jacob Levy:

Back in the days of the Savings and Loan crisis, and again in the days of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we saw lots of commentary from the right that the problems couldn't be blamed on the free market. After all, in both cases massive moral hazard had been created by federal guarantees underwriting the debts, eliminating market discipline. Pains were taken to piously distinguish the free market from corporatism and corporate welfare (a distinction I take very seriously, I might add).

In the last two weeks, I haven't seen any Republican official or Republican-leaning intellectual make the slightest reference to the problems with a system in which private lenders make risk-free profits by lending on the back of a federal guarantee. The indictment of corporate welfare has been nowhere to be found. The view that there's something distinctively unproblematic about private lenders with public guarantees has been completely lost. And the (misleading) headline, the reference to a Soviet-style takeover, crystallized this for me. Since there's been no crisis in student lending, no collapse of the system, the status quo ante has been naturalized; there are people on the right who think that the subsidized revenue streams to which lenders had become accustomed were a kind of property that has now been seized. The ex post commentaries on FSLIC and Franny and Freddie have been forgotten.

On the one hand, he is quite right about complaints of corporate welfare being totally absent from conservative dogma and rhetoric these days. However, there must be a qualification added: it is the establishment right wing - those in government and in media - who have eliminated this kind of grievance...not ordinary people. There are a whole host of people who have been quite vocal about the corporatism and corporate welfare of late, including many people who consider themselves conservative or right-leaning, but also people who explicitly sidestep association with either party. In fact, this has been a staple of the Tea Party movement. So, such criticisms have not been totally absent. But once we make that qualification - that it is only the establishment right who have failed to criticize it - where's the revelation in that? This is how the establishment has been for decades.

One might think that the establishment right would jump on this opportunity to capitalize on and placate to the grievances of the many masses of people with regards to corporate welfare. In a sense, this would make sense politically. But there are two things to consider: (1) even the Republican Party has enough scruples to avoid being that hypocritical to bash on the very sort of thing they've been explicitly supporting for as long as anyone can remember and (2) much more importantly, they have a stake in maintaining the status quo corporate welfare environment; it helps them get re-elected, it provides them with a job if they fail to be re-elected or want to "retire". Why would they dare threaten that system with dissenting rhetoric?

Assorted Links

2010-03-31T11:59:00.001-07:00

What totalitarianism and fascism really look like.

For a tiny instant, physicists broke a law of nature.

Nature by numbers.

Taxes per person.

How many veterans have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Is the mandate penalty large enough?

Quite an admission...

2010-03-31T11:41:00.000-07:00

From ReThink Afghanistan:

Quite an admission from General McChrystal:
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.

There's more to read in this New York Times article titled Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints. It's odd how cavalier the discussion of innocent people being murdered is. Especially since it happens much more often than is reported:

Voice of the Powerless, US Militarism, Journalism

2010-03-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

You have this nexus of the iron fist of U.S. militarism that is backing up the so-called "hidden hand" of the free market. And so what we see is that the United States will economically target countries, then have that targeting of them with economic neo-liberalism backed up by brute military force -- by supporting military dictatorships, by interfering in elections.

One strain that has tied together the people that live on the other side of the barrel of the gun that is U.S. foreign and economic policy is that they always, out of the rubble, seem to emerge in some form of resistance. We've seen that in Iraq, and we're seeing it in Afghanistan. We've certainly seen it throughout Latin America.

Another thing that's important for people to remember: If we fail to stop the United States from targeting communities across the globe, we don't choose the kind of resistance that people offer up to wars that we should have stopped.

We in this country have an obligation to hold our leaders responsible, because if we don't, then in one way or another, we're responsible for the consequences -- either in terms of attacks on civilians there, or in opposition that rises up violently to the policies we had a moral obligation to try to confront and expose.

That's Jeremy Scahill, of Blackwater expose and Nation reporting, in an interview for the Izzy Award. Do read it in full.

An excerpt which is also of note:

the Obama administration has denied FOIA requests 70,779 times in its first year
JS: One of the unfortunate but predictable realities of the political moment that we're living in right now is that the Obama administration has continued some of the most atrocious policies of the Bush administration -- and unfortunately has implemented policies that, in some cases, are worse than those of the Bush administration. If you look at the Obama administration's position on prisoner rights issues, on civil liberties issues, on domestic spying issues, on issues of war and peace, the Obama administration in some ways is worse than the Bush administration.

Past Crimes, Obama Hypocrite

2010-03-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald:

President Obama gavean interview earlier this week to an Indonesian television station in lieu of the scheduled trip to that country which was canceled due to the health care vote. In 2008, Indonesiaempowered a national commission to investigate human rights abuses committed by its own government under the U.S.-backed Suharto regime "in an attempt to finally bring the perpetrators to justice," and Obama was asked in this interview: "Is your administration satisfied with the resolution of the past human rights abuses in Indonesia?" He replied:
We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed. We can't go forward without looking backwards . . . .
When asked last year about whether the United States should use similar tribunals to investigate its own human rights abuses, as well his view of other countries' efforts (such as Spain) to investigate those abuses, Obama said:
I'm a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there.
That "Look-Forward/Not-Backward" formulation is one which Obamaand his top aides have frequently repeated to argue against any investigations in the U.S. Why, as Obama sermonized, must Indonesians first look backward before being able to move forward, whereas exactly the opposite is true of Americans? If a leader is going to demand that other countries adhere to the very "principles" which he insists on violating himself, it's probably best not to use antithetical clichés when issuing decrees, for the sake of appearances if nothing else.

I wrote about similar issues here. Do read them.