"They Don't Call it Bribery in This Country When They Give You the Money Post Factum" (Now With Monday Edit!)

Matt Taibbi's blistering take on Bob Rubin:

The irony of Bob Rubin: He's an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.

As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi's board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.

Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year's crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.

Taibbi piece, "Obama's Big Sellout", is a blistering piece of journalism, not that that's new for Taibbi.

What is newsworthy is Taibbi's reconstruction of the moments just after Obama's election as president. He looks at the people that Obama retained and whom he let go, and the pattern is clear: the progressives and populists that drove the campaign (like Austan Goolsbee and Karen Kornbluh) were all out on their ears, to be replaced with a series of Rubins' Wall Street sycophants and hacks. They were the ones that created the crisis that threw millions of Americans out of work, and the very sort of people that Obama's supporters were voting against. That didn't matter. It was all Rubin, all the time. The appointees ended up being people like Geithner, Larry Summers, Gary Gensler, Jason Furman, and a guy named Jason Furman who liked trade an awful lot:

The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. "The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement," U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.

The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so."

And it might well be...for the "right" Americans.

Yes, the destructive influence of Goldman Sachs is Taibbi's hobbyhorse right now. But he has a point. It's hard to argue that GS isn't running the show these days, and that their alumni aren't being handled the keys to power no matter who is "elected" into executive office.

Choosing a Republican or a Democrat just doesn't matter: GS will be at the reins no matter what. If only they weren't so bad at it.

Edit: Tim Fernholz responds by saying "nuh uh! They were Clintonians, not Rubinians!" He also complains that some of the progressives are more powerful than advertised, and some of the powerful are more progressive than advertised. Perhaps, but he cites as the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board as proof of progressives' power, since a progressive chairs it.

Sorry, but Taibbi addressed that. A top Democrat called it "Siberia". Being on a committee doesn't mean you're going to get listened to, Tim, any more than a late conversion to reform is going to change the fact that you were anti-reform when they chose you.

In any case, Tim gave away the game by acknowledging "the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street" in the Obama administration. Noblesse Oblige from Wall Street is nothing to build regulatations on. They're the ones that ruined everything to begin with.

Monday Edit: Taibbi absolutely demolished Fernholz. Things like the latter-day conversion of Gary Gensler to financial regulation, he said, do not change the fact that Gensler was a massive regulation opponent when Obama appointed him. He goes on to explain himself a bit better:

It is my job to point out that many of the same people who bear direct responsibility for the financial crisis were given positions of great power in the Obama White House, and that in many important ways the Obama appointments represented a resounding reaffirmation of the status quo (I didn’t even mention the renomination of Ben Bernanke), and the exact opposite of “change.” One can argue about the extent to which this is true, but I don’t think the facts are really in question.

The Prospect writer argues that “the problems Taibbi tries to describe aren’t some ridiculous cabal” but instead “come from group-think and structural influences.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was exactly the point of the article. The issue with the modern Democratic party is that its leaders all share a world view that’s extremely narrow. They genuinely believe in Rubinite ideas, have grown accustomed to an incestuous relationship with Wall Street, and they probably think that the right people were put in charge. Their failure to look beyond their own “group-think” for solutions to economic problems is exactly the issue.

Fernholz's response really was weak, and makes me wonder exactly how panicked that RS article has made the White House and its various apologists. Taibbi's right. They don't get it. And because they don't get it, they stand a serious chance of losing all their electoral gains to the crazed modern Republican party. The public is angry, and they're in charge.

It'd be pathetic if it wasn't so horrifying.

Give 'em Hell, Raul

The head of the House progressive caucus, Rep. Raul Grijalva, says he probably won't back the Senate bill. Here's his take:

An influential progressive in the House of Representatives says that the public option compromise taking shape in the Senate might not survive the lower chamber--particularly if the Senate tries to jam its health care bill through the House.

In an interview this afternoon, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said he met with the Congressional Progressive Caucus' health care task force yesterday and they all agreed. "There is consensus within the progressive caucus," Grijalva said. "Personally I'm in agreement with them. I don't think very much of it."

"We're questioning whether you can define [what's coming out of the Senate] as a robust PO, and we don't think you can," he told me.

"There's rumors that we will skip conference--that we won't do conference--and bring their bill directly to the floor, and we are very, very opposed to that," Grijalva said.

He does admit that it's possible that he might back the thing, depending on what the Congressional Budget Office says. I think that that's a mistake: he needs to take a strong stand now, since Washington will take any flexibility as a sign that he's going to fold.

He should not fold. The Senate must learn that its own problems with corporatist "centrists" are matched by the House's need to keep progressive votes. Any compromise must be from those two positions: America's flexible House and inflexible Senate has a lot to do with how broken the Congress is right now.

Raul must make it clear that progressives...no, liberals, cannot and will not be taken for granted.

Then Again... (Followup to Last Post)

Edit Follows

For all the anger over health care, after Obama adopted a Bush/LBJ position on Afghanistan, why on earth should anybody have expected anything else?

The only negative part about kicking the Dems out is that the Republicans might get back in. But, honestly, both parties seem to get all of their direction from the far-right anyway. It's just that the Republicans acknowledge it, whereas the Democrats simply "triangulate" into doing whatever the wingnuts want them to do. It doesn't help progressives at all.

In fact, it's the entire reason for the word "progressive", since their pants-wetting terror at being called "liberal" is part and parcel with their craven cowering in the face of angry white wingers.

The worst part is that it won't help them, either. The Republicans are still going to oppose, the wingers are still going to hate, and the word "liberal" is still going to be poison. They're still going to lose seats thanks to their dispirited base. And because they either don't know, or don't care, they won't change their tune when they do.

Then again, perhaps they don't care. Perhaps all the cynics are right, and the Dems never really did care about anything but playing toady to whichever corporation promises them the greatest riches when they leave office. It's certainly how the Republicans play the game, and I suppose it was a mistake to believe that the Dems, in power, would be any different, even if the fate of the Union were at stake.

If you'll excuse me. I have to brush up on my Mandarin.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware that they're planning on extending Medicare to people 55+. That isn't going to help anybody who gets ill before the age of 55, it's only going to inflate the profits of the health insurance companies, and it's a ploy. It neatly cracks apart the interests of boomers—who are either 55+ or will be when this is is implemented—and younger Americans. It ensures that everybody over a certain age who was in this to benefit America will be forced to choose between their own interests and that of their country.

It's a crafty ploy. But that is all it is.

To Hell With the Democrats' "Health Care Reform"

So much for the public option. They traded it away, and the Dems are going to suffer for it.

They're going to suffer in the eyes of history, since this will ultimately be recorded as the biggest give-away to the very corporations that created the problem since, well, a year ago. They're going to suffer in the election booth, since Democrats have proven that they couldn't give a damn about their base if they tried, and independents do not carry mid-term elections.

But, mostly, they're going to suffer because they're Americans, and all of America is going to suffer for this.

On the bright side, now that the Republicans know that they can get away with whatever they want as long as they're oppositional, action on climate change is probably dead too. So health care may not be an issue, since catastrophic climate change may make the whole point moot. Goodie.

In any case, obviously, the "work for primary opponents and don't donate a damn dime" rule is very much in effect. It's high time to bring the temple down on their heads. They couldn't care less about you, so it's only fair to pay them back in kind.

ClimateBoating

Thinkprogress has a nice timeline on how the "ClimateGate" faux-scandal was manufactured, and how the climate science community essentially got Swiftboated.

Proving, once again, that truth is entirely irrelevant if your lie is convenient enough. And if there's enough money in it.

(Though, naturally, there is no possible way that these hackers were bought-and-paid-for. Hackers don't do that, and certainly nobody would even think of hiring them if they did.)

Ben Bernanke is an ASS

See title.

Sure, he's an ass with big brass balls attached to it. (Somehow). You have to have big brass balls to follow up a massive bailout of the wealthiest with calls for medicare and social security cuts. You have to have GIGANTIC stones to do so when the unemployment/underemployment rate is north of 17%. But, well, according to him "that's where the money is".

No, really. Read for yourself.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he's seeking re-appointment as the Fed's chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: "That's where the money is."

I'm not even angry. This defies anger. It's so horribly brazen that it's almost impressive. It's useful, too: this bastard and his ilk stand tall as absolutely everything that is wrong with the United States of America, if not the entire First World. It is the Robber Baron mentality of the people that OWN YOU given life, and form, and sent out squalling into the world to make said world even more of a disaster.

But, hey, let's let him elaborate:

"I think you can't tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care."

Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.

"It's only mandatory until Congress says it's not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation," said Bernanke.

Story continues below

But there are several other obvious options that could make the situation sustainable -- including a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation or a slight tax hike on the wealthiest Americans.

Bernanke talks as if increasing taxes on the wealthy simply isn't an option.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) followed Bennett and pointed out that "there's only really two ways you can deflect this deficit, and that's either by cutting expenditures or raising income taxes or other forms of taxes."

Reed asked him if he could think of other ways, but Bernanke returned to entitlement money as the way to balance the budget.

"Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money is, as he put it," Bernanke said. "The money in this case is in entitlements."

There's also money at the very top of the income ladder. Reed asked if Congress would be wise to tax some of it. Full of suggestions when it came to cutting entitlements, Bernanke was suddenly overtaken by a bout of policy modesty.

"Would you take taxes off the table?" Reed asked.

"Those decisions are up to Congress," Bernanke said.

"Well, your predecessor signaled very strongly that the tax cuts in 2000 were appropriate," Reed reminded him.

"I have not done that. I've done my best to leave that authority where it belongs, with the Congress," Bernanke said, just moments after telling Congress to cut entitlement spending.

Incredible. They're going to use the crisis that their buddies created and profited from, the buddies that are paying asshats like Beck and Limbaugh to distract you, to make your life even worse.

They know that if you cut away the safety nets that help protect people their employers can squeeze you even harder, with the knowledge that the only option is starvation, homelessness, sickness and death. Lower labor costs, higher prices, fatter margins, bigger bonuses.

Yep, it takes big brass balls to say shit like this. I guess Bernanke and Co. just figure the reward is worth it.

Edit: Just in case it wasn't clear, Bernanke needs to be shown the door. Sanders' hold shows that it's certainly possible, and any Dem decision to ignore Sanders' lead and confirm Bernanke will end up blowing up in their faces.

Let me be perfectly clear: if things do not improve, the Democrats will be facing a popular revolt by election day next year. If they STILL don't improve, that revolt could turn nasty, and possiby become a threat to national stability and security. Whinging about the deficit is ludicrous when stacked up against that threat.

Charles Johnson Bails Out on Hate-Wingers

I wouldn't believe it if I didn't read it, though there have been noises coming out of his section of the internet for a while now, but Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs "fame" has repudiated the Right.

I'm not going to link to it. I don't link to LGF, and one tolerable post won't change that. I will, however, quote the post.

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

Sorry, but unlike AmericaBlog, I'm not feeling particularly forgiving.

Charles, you need to come to terms with your own complicity in this. You led them to the cliff. You beckoned them on at every turn. You ruthlessly attacked anybody who questioned the road they were following. You were a standard-bearer for this whole idiot hate-filled army. The xenophobic hatred you fostered on your own site alone is sickening at best. YOU are partially responsible for this, in a very real sense.

No, Charles doesn't deserve forgiveness. He doesn't deserve redemption. He doesn't deserve a place with the people who have been fighting this crap since the beginning.

He may, perhaps, earn it.

But not today.

Happy Thanksgiving

This isn't a time where people easily find things to be thankful for, and a lot of people have less to be thankful for than they did less than two years prior.

That said, I am thankful for those of you who choose to read this humble website.

And I'm still thankful that such an odd, interesting medium as the Internet ended up flourishing in the fashion that it has.

The Climate Email Hack and Your Future

My first thought, of course, was "the world is doomed". And it may be, because politically motivated (shurely not well-paid??) hackers have selectively released emails that will help those also-politically-motivated (ibid) politicians and lobbyists who are denying climate change to convince people that they don't need to do anything.

(Which is pretty easy. People don't want to do anything. That's one of the reasons so many bastards are conservatives, because they want easy power and there's no easier route to power than playing to the fears of the poor and the greed of the rich.)

This is only going to make meaningful change that much harder, if not impossible, and a lot of people may die because of it.

My second thought, though, was "this changes the rules". Previously, hackers were seen as jokers, teenagers, or maybe anarchists. But let's be honest: this didn't come from that group. This was politically motivated. This was a deliberate attack. This proves that the politicization of science goes far beyond who publishes where, and for what. This is a clarion call to every scientist that those crazies out there can reach into their own lives—into their own private correspondence—and selectively misinterpret everything that they say. Maybe not today, but in the future.

But it's not just scientists. What happened to these climate guys can happen to everybody. That conversation you had about politics with a friend of yours, where you expressed annoyance with the government? It may get out there. That misuse of a phrase that you made in an email to a different friend? It may get out there. That argument you had on an instant messenger? It can get out there.

The law can't help you. Rest assured, if it's politically relevant, nobody's going to give a damn if it's legal or not. They just don't. Even if the hackers are tried and found guilt, even if they were thrown in jail and the key thrown away, even if they were executed, that wouldn't change the impact on the world of this sordid event one whit. That's even assuming the hackers are in your jurisdiction. They won't be. STRONGER LAWS WILL NOT HELP.

No, people need to start taking security more seriously. They need to start taking encryption more seriously. They need to start taking pseudonymity and anonymity more seriously. they need to take all of this more seriously. The only alternative is watching what you say, even in private. You HAVE no privacy.

It's not just about potential employers seeing you get drunk on Facebook any more. It's about your hacked and misinterpreted correspondence emails ruining lives. Nothing less than that.

Edit: Of course, the logical response is "what about the naysayers? What if they get hacked?"

But that's the thing, isn't it? For all the blather about a supposed global warming "faith", it's the opponents that are the zealots. They're far more likely to go to such extreme lengths to defend their faith than the scientists and thinkers that have demonstrated the reality of climate change.

They probably deserve the same treatment, though I cannot counsel it, as it is of course illegal and (in a broader sense) immoral. I don't expect that they'll get it, and I expect that many are so incredibly deluded as to be utterly consistent in their zealotry and obsession. Emails might reveal that obsession, but it wouldn't make much difference. The modern media—which lauds a consistent villain and punishes even the most slightly doubtful hero—just isn't wired that way.

As is so often the case, the villains inevitably come out ahead.

Galbraith on "Old Mistake" (Edit: And sociopathic jounalism)

James K. Galbraith talks about "Old Mistakes Die Hard".

I'm tempted to say that the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way...

Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate. There could have been prompt corrective action to resolve, instead of coddle, the worst of the banks.

I mostly don't blame President Obama; he and his team went as far as they felt they could. I blame the head-in-the-sand politicians in Congress, the over-optimistic forecasters, the half-educated press, and the power of the financial lobby. I blame the avatars of fiscal virtue, the public debt scare-mongerers, the astrologers for whom thirteen significant digits (a trillion) for the stimulus package was just too much. I blame the Senate, which hands the balance of power to small states at the expense of disaster areas like California, Florida and New York. I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that "credit would flow again" if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn't.

The Bretton Woods point deserves another word. According to the system established in 1944, the U.S. current account deficit -- and by extension our public budget deficit -- was limited by an obligation to exchange foreign-held dollars for gold. Richard Nixon abolished that arrangement. Since the early 1980s, the world has held the Treasury bonds that the U.S. chose to issue. The system is fragile. But so long as it lasts, it doesn't discipline our budget (and if it broke, we could replace it). Low interest rates prove this: despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: the same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won't be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other "good signs." So we'll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don't buy what we can't afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger -- perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone's guess.

There's been a lot of sturm und drang about the deficit, and about debt, but the fact remains that joblessness is a greater threat to the American way of life and to the Democrats' chances in 2010 and 2012 than any amount of debt is. To be blunt, the people who are railing against deficits in the press have jobs. They have income. And (crucially) they have assets that deflation would increase the value of. Deflation and joblessness isn't their problem, and if it becomes their problem, they'll have lost their bully pulpit and nobody will be listening to them anyway. They'll be replaced by the guys who, again, have jobs.

Of course, the only way that makes sense is if the press and the politicians are so incredibly short-sighted that they can't even think about their personal futures, let alone the future of their nation. Fortunately for the Republicans...

In any case, as both Digby and Paul Krugman pointed out, doing something about the deficit is absolutely useless. That class of voter that values deficits over employment will think there's a deficit no matter what you do. If you tell them otherwise, they won't believe you, either because they're Republican drones who are just using deficits as a handy stick to bludgeon you with, or paranoiac nutbars who think that everybody from the Fed Reserve to the White House to the lowly statisticians are all lying to them, and that we can only trust in Almighty Gold (The Holies Of Holies! The One True Metal!) in the first place. Neither of which are worth trying to win.

So, honestly, Obama et al might as well do the right thing, since there's no way they can appease those who are counselling them to do the wrong thing. I know it may be a bit scary and unfamiliar—doing the right thing, that is—but it's certainly worth a shot.

Edit: Huh. I had read that ridiculous piece on American public debt in the NYT, and noticed that the name of the writer sounded familiar.

Then I realized. He's the guy who wrote the long confessional about how he had spent way too much money on his house and gone far beyond his means.

Figures. Let's leave aside that he's the worst person in the world to be judging whether or not America's public debt is unsustainable, since he's staked himself out as someone who both couldn't handle debt, and who now has a deep emotional aversion to it. I realize he's on the debt/deficit beat at the NYT. It's just that he shouldn't be.

No, instead, let us ponder empathy for a moment. What kind of near-sociopath do you have to be to go through all that crap and then—implicitly or explicitly—tell everybody who lost their job and have it worse that they can go screw? Andrews should know better: one of the reasons his family went into such disastrous debt is that his wife lost her job.

And yet, with unemployment beating 10% with no end in sight, he barely spares a word on why government spending might be necessary to prop up America's broken economy! Does someone being unemployed not matter unless they're sleeping in someone else's bed? Are they just statistics to Andrews? Do they even exist?

I swear, the only thing that's worse than "fuck you, got mine" is "fuck you, don't got mine". To be unable to envision that the pain you suffer might be shared by others, and to act on that understanding. To be so swallowed up in your own miseries that you can't see how they affect your perception of the world or your effect on the people around you. To be so deliberately ignorant about how shared action can help everybody—because you're too busy with your own obsessions—that you end up tearing down everything that might have made your situation better. Andrews shouldn't even be on this beat, but to write a story like THIS is unforgivable. I'm honestly amazed that it exist.

That's one of the worst things that may come from this Great Recession when it ends. IF it ends. "FUDGM" may become the law of the land, and will only further ensure that the people who put you there through their own ignorance and sociopathy laugh all the way to the bank.

THEIR bank.

Iran's Last Supreme Leader?

Color me skeptical, of course, but what Newsweek reported makes sense. Even if the clerics did not want to invalidate their own authority by removing Khameinei, he—and his subordinate Ahmadinejad—has clearly hurt Iran's interests and reputation, enough so that Montazeri's anti-Supreme Leader rhetoric is finally getting traction.

Things may change, of course, if the memory of what happened this year fades. But I suspect it won't.

"Well, Maybe Congress Will Fix ACTA"

Not so much! Apparently it's going to be an "Executive Agreement" in the United States, rather than an actual "treaty" per se, so Congress won't even get a gander at it.

[A] major concern with ACTA’s very nature is that it is being designed as an “executive agreement,” rather than as a “treaty.” Executive agreements do not require Congressional approval before they may take effect. As a result, there is little to keep the signatories accountable to the public, especially in an election year that will see the departure of the current executive.

Lovely. Not that Congress has a good track record on this sort of thing, but the public scrutiny that comes with Congressional oversight might not be the worst idea in the world. Hopefully some of the other democracies involved will have a bit more openness, though I'm doubtful.

In any case, Cory Doctorow put up a very nice presentation on exactly why you should be running around and shouting about this thing. Enjoy.

A Great Load of Horses**t

Elizabeth Kolbert's takedown of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's execrable Superfreakonomics is one of the most elegant and devastating critiques I've read since Matt Taibbi carved up Tom Friedman with that immortal line "Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one."

In the review, she repeats the old story about how New York was, at the turn of the century, threatened by literal mountains of horseshit:

The problem just kept piling up until, in the eighteen-nineties, it seemed virtually insurmountable. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. New York’s troubles were not New York’s alone; in 1894, the Times of London forecast that by the middle of the following century every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure. It was understood that flies were a transmission vector for disease, and a public-health crisis seemed imminent. When the world’s first international urban-planning conference was held, in 1898, it was dominated by discussion of the manure situation. Unable to agree upon any solutions—or to imagine cities without horses—the delegates broke up the meeting, which had been scheduled to last a week and a half, after just three days.

Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed. This was not brought about by regulation or by government policy. Instead, it was technological innovation that made the difference. With electrification and the development of the internal-combustion engine, there were new ways to move people and goods around. By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.

SuperFreakonomics (yecch, what a title) brings it up as an analogy to the importance of technological innovation. Kolbert repeats it as an analogy of the book itself, considering that it appears to be, well, a mountain of horseshit.

Leave aside their touching faith in Matrix-style atmospheric reengineering. I enjoy science fiction, but even I don't have much faith in [i]that[/i] rot. No, what is really galling is the spectacle of economists who haven't done the math:

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

“The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them,” he observes. “The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking.” Pierrehumbert carefully dissects one of the arguments that Levitt and Dubner seem to subscribe to—that solar cells, because they are dark, actually contribute to global warming—and shows it to be fallacious. “Really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you,” he writes, that this claim “is complete and utter nonsense."

Kolbert's position? They're just trying to be clever and contrarian. They don't really care about climate change per se, they're just trying to be cute and sell books. Paul Krugman (who also linked to this piece) noted that this was a big problem with a certain breed of economists:

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.

It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.

And why does this sort of thing tend to be aimed at liberals? Well:

I have a theory here, although it may not be the whole story: it’s about careerism. Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended.

Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing (as Dubner and Levitt are in the process of finding out), but it’s been that way for a long time.

The “tell”, I’d suggest, is that once you get beyond those for whom the decision about whom to laugh at is a career move, people don’t, in fact, seem to find mocking liberals funnier than mocking conservatives. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are barreling along, while right-wing attempts to produce counterpart shows have bombed.

Anyway, say this for Dubner and Levitt — they’ve provoked an interesting discussion, although probably not the one they hoped for.

Kolbert compares them to Al Gore, who is roundly castigated by The Usual Suspects but appears to be honestly, truly interested in helping the world. From her discussion of his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

Like Levitt and Dubner, Gore argues that if people simply put their minds to it they could figure out a way to deal with global warming. “We have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve three or four climate crises—and we only need to solve one,” he writes. But the similarities end there.

Where Levitt and Dubner avoid climate scientists, Gore appears to have talked to just about every one of them. (The acknowledgments for “Our Choice” run to four single-spaced pages of tiny type.) If you’re curious about the relative contribution each of the major greenhouse gases makes to climate change, Gore has it. (CO2 is the largest contributor, followed by methane.) If you want to know how a photovoltaic cell works, or a solar thermal tower, or where the ten largest wind farms in the United States are, you can find that in the book as well. Gore runs through the difficulties of feeding power from intermittent sources, like the sun and the wind, into the electrical grid, and describes how these difficulties might be overcome. He discusses carbon capture and sequestration, nuclear energy, agricultural policy, and conservation.

Just about the only strategy for coping with climate change that Gore isn’t interested in is geoengineering. Indeed, the very idea strikes him as delusional. “We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment,” he writes. “We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.”

From what I've read in other sources, this is how most real climate scientists thing of geoengineering. Even if it were feasible, the global climate system is such a fiendishly complex beast that we stand to do more harm than good. We may well kill ourselves trying to do it.

But Levitt and Dubner don't care. Like too many writers and journalists, they clearly don't give a tinker's damn about what they're arguing. Their job isn't to be right. Their job is to, apparently, keep shovelling that horseshit. Kudos to Kolbert for calling it what it is.

The US Government Wants to Kill YouTube and Cut Off Your Internet

Have you heard about ACTA? The so-called "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement"? If you haven't, and you like this whole "Internet" thing, you damned well better start paying attention.

ACTA is a secret anti-"piracy" treaty that has been negotiated over the past few years, most recently in Korea. That's "secret" as in "you aren't supposed to know what's in it until it's too late". In fact, when pressed on the contents, the Obama administration has said that they can't talk about it because of "national security".

Fortunately, it's been leaked. And here's a nice brief summary from Cory Doctorow of why they were so desperate for you not to find out what's in it:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

So your kid watches a few YouTube videos, and all of a sudden you have lost access to the Internet for a year. You don't even get the benefit of the presumption of innocence: they are ordered to cut off ACCUSED INFRINGERS, not convicted infringers.

(How this could be constitutional is beyond me.)

And, hey, here's hoping you aren't blind! Use the wrong reader and all of a sudden you're in the pokey, sucker!

Wired had a good name for all this: "Policy laundering". The White House knows that it can't push this through, so it's going to do it indirectly:

Obama hasn’t asked Congress to implement a three-strike policy, which could anger consumers and watchdog groups. But if the administration gets three strikes written into ACTA, and the United States signs and ratifies the treaty, Congress would be obliged to change the DMCA to comply with it, while the administration throws its hands in the air and says, “It wasn’t our idea! It’s that damn treaty!”

That practice is common enough to have a name: policy laundering.

Language in the leaked text throws open the door to ISP filtering for unauthorized content, though there’s no way for filters to know whether the material constitutes fair use. That plan is similar to a proposal by the Motion Picture Association of America, which wants ISPs to filter for unauthorized motion pictures.

The three-strikes language would be gold to companies like MediaSentry, which browse peer-to-peer networks for infringing content, and identify a user’s IP address and ISP. MediaSentry’s work was crucial in the RIAA’s 6-year-long litigation campaign that amounted to about 30,000 copyright lawsuits against individual file sharers using Kazaa, Limewire and other services.

Until today, the most alarming thing in the proposed ACTA treaty has been the secrecy surrounding it. But now the threat level is higher. It seems the executive branch would rather negotiate with other nations, instead of its own elected officials, about the future of a free and open internet.

Well put. This is a problem with the whole process of treaty-making in general: countries will too often use it as a way of dealing with domestic goals that they know the public won't support. It's a Democratic trick that's a lot like their constant reaches for "bipartisanship": They don't want to wear the policy, they want opponents to just get mad at "Washington", or "The System": or, in this case, the international community.

And, usually, it's the sort of policy that doesn't benefit anybody but their buddies, donors, fundraisers, and future employers/fellow board-members. It's the stuff they know is going to harm ordinary consumers and ordinary workers, like free trade agreements with countries whose "union protection" boils down to "do what we say and maybe we won't liquidate your shop steward". Or, in this case, exploitative and one-sided trademark, copyright and patent treaties.

Fortunately the attempts to keep it secret have not worked. The text is available. You can find it at Michael Geist's site, both as an embedded text and as a linked PDF. (Download the PDF of the text here.)

This is disgusting mischief, and will only harm the public and the cause of online innovation and creativity.The fall of YouTube and other media hosting sites would be an absolute disaster. Families will be cut off from the backbone of modern communications because their kid may or may not have visited the wrong website. ISPs will fear, quite rightly, that the next step is being held responsible for transmitted content. And none of this will dissuade the real pirates in the least, who are already quite adept at evading the privacy-destroying organizations that will be profiting from the adoption of this travesty.

They wanted it to be quiet. They wanted it to be secret. It's not secret anymore, and we clearly shouldn't be quiet about it.

Make a stink, folks.

Health Care BIll Passes House

Great. But that's the House, and even there they needed to pass an odious anti-abortion bill as a sop to the idea of conservative dominance. Digby:

I knew that after all the sturm and drang over the past few months over the public option, the number one liberal priority in the health care debate, there would be a price for its success. The ruling elite could never allow an unambiguous liberal victory. It would endanger their narrative that says fealty to business, religion, military and other authoritarian structures is democratically inspired. They have to maintain the fiction that the people prefer to be subjects. If politicians aren't convinced that there will be a price for being liberals, they might get the idea that they can actually govern liberally...

...Any legislation such as health care reform must therefore be tempered by a liberal sacrifice, something real, a principle that will make them hate themselves and loathe each other for having done it. It cannot be a clean victory, lest they come to believe they can do more. In the end, the "moral" must always be that you cannot go too far left.

The Stupak amendment was designed to do just that, a power move easily predicted by anyone who has watched the way policy victories are managed over the last couple of decades. The one consistent characteristic is that they are never unambiguously positive for the left. The arguments are always self-servingly pragmatic --- "blue dogs have to vote their district" --- but the real purpose is to drive home the absolute certainty that liberals are never really in charge. That is why there is never any desire among the ruling elite to sell the idea that liberalism itself -- its philosophy, its values, its ideology --- is something positive with which a majority of people, including Blue Dogs, can identify. If the public ever came to believe that, who knows what might happen?

There are a lot of issues with how this has worked out, and a lot of issues with what other tradeoffs will happen going forward. The astonishingly terrible Senate Finance Committee bill still looms large, and the public option still looks like a fragile, wan victim of compromise. The House will almost certainly have to stand firm in favor of what it just passed, and it's doubtful that Dems will "stand firm" for much of anything.

(Certainly the Obama Administration hasn't made a habit of it.)

This is a step forward. But a step forward can easily launch you into a pitfall. Don't relax.

Abdullah Pulls Out, Karzai "Wins"

Ah, yes. This will certainly calm the fears of official corruptions.

Liberals Have Compromised Enough

Ezra Klein lays it out:

Was out of the office for a few hours at C-SPAN world headquarters, but early reports were accurate and Sen. Reid will include a national public option that states could choose to offer to their residents -- or not! -- in his bill. In the Senate, this is about to become the "liberal" half of the debate. But it's not very liberal at all. It is a compromise, and a conservative one at that.

For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can "opt out" of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy.

In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It's only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level. Philosophically, these are major compromises liberals have made on this plan. They should get credit for that.

They won't. They never do. That's not the game. The game is to exploit the "reasonableness" of too many liberals—their naive (yet oddly touching) belief that everybody is reasonable. They're willing to "meet half-way" with those who have openly declared themselves as unreasonable, unwilling to compromise, and completely hostile to everything that liberalism stands for.

So those enemies of Liberalism just "compromise" long enough to set up a new far-right position, then conveniently forget about the old "compromise" as anything but a starting point for a new "compromise" between their old position and their new one. Then, when they hit THAT point, they just go 'round again.

And if someone questions wingers on this little game? Well, then they rant, and rave, and scream about how the questioner is being "unfair", because they know that at least some will be uncomfortable with the "unreasonable" people in their midst. The liberals are divided against themselves. That is part of the game too.

All that's left is for people like Ezra to tally up the compromises, sorrowfully opine on what might have been, and then ignore it all over again when it happens the next time 'round.

Oh, Hey, Looks Like the "Veal Pen" Broke

MoveOn is running a nice little ad (with Heather Graham in, no less!) that advocates the public option:



I had thought they were still quaking at the thought of taking shots at Dems—they're the ones who will be instrumental in getting a public option, after all—but I suppose the polls have stiffened their spines a bit.

Must be pretty frustrating in the "anonymous senior official" wing of the White House.

Democracy Corps' Terrible Study

Dear Democracy Corps:

Do you really think that even the most ardent Republican is going to use out and out racist language in a research setting?

ARE YOU HIGH?

Seriously, guys, aside from everything else, your methodology sucks. So does your analysis: they spent (as you yourselves put it) an absolute ton of time saying that "I'm not racist but they'll label me as racist if I criticize him", and you don't stop to think that maybe, just maybe, they're being unbelievably defensive for a reason?

Look at this one quote:

You can’t openly criticize Obama. If you do, you’ll be labeled as a racist.

Whatever we say about Obama, no matter what we say about him, it is a racial comment so you know, we can’t say anything, we personally do not like him. I don’t care if he is purple, but whatever we say we’re racist.

As far as a person goes, I don’t want to say I hate him. I don’t like what he stands for… and I don’t like what he is doing and the choices he is making, but I mean I don’t know him as a gentleman so… You would be called a racist. You would not like him because he is black. That is what the media is saying...

...The things that we’ve said have nothing to do with race. They have to do with policy and… an agenda, his agenda… Right… Manipulation.

I think basically we have a lot of the same views of Clinton as we do about Obama but most of us are freer to express it because we are not going to be accused of being racists...

...Actually that is a good thing that he has done. In all the charges of it being racial he has defended, he has come out and said, no I don’t think that comment was meant that way and that was the one thing that I think he has done that you know.

I don’t think he thinks it, but I think other people think it. You know the ones that are really supportive of him. If we don’t like him, and we have something against him, then we’re a racist...

...I think he’s got a hidden agenda… and I’m worried that we won’t be able to undo what he has done in such a short time

I mean that is when you start questioning, what is the agenda? Because they are weakening us as a country to where we cannot afford so we are going to cry out or we are going to take what has been offered to us....

...I just think that Obama was molded and I think that he is being fed what he can and cannot do and what to do next and it seems like he is a puppet in this whole game. I don’t know who the people are behind him really but I don’t think it is him. I think it is somebody, I think he is just the figurehead… I think it is George Soros… I do too… Is he the guy with money?… Yes… They say follow the money.

I think he has a money person behind him that has planned this long before because he has gotten pushed into a position that is unbelievable for a community organizer…I come from Chicago so I know how he got there and I don’t like his tentacles into ACORN and everything else that are subsidiaries and it all goes back… He couldn’t do it by himself.

The parts that were stripped out were generally the DC comments. The quotes are verbatim.

To you or me, what that says is pretty goddamned clear: "There's no way a lazy n----- like that could become president alone, he's got to be a puppet of those big rich j---s". Yet Democracy Corps doesn't even consider that there might be a subtext there. They just blithely repeat what they're told, as if Republicans haven't been using dog-whistle language for years and ratcheted it up against Obama during 2008.

No, racism isn't all of it. There's also the mad fantasies about how he's a big ol' socialist, and the psychotic paranoia about the gigantic liberal media conspiracy that simultaneously grants that "a lot of conservatives have platforms on the radio or television." (Though that last one could easily be tied to the j--- thing if you push a little and mention the word "Soros".)

There's also the creepy personality cult that's coalescing around Glenn Beck, which is honestly worse than anything that ever attached itself to Limbaugh's meaty frame. I won't reproduce the comments here, but it's starting to look like a good ol' fashioned "Uncle Joe" personality cult. At best.

But to discount racism based on what I'm seeing here is ludicrous, and a complete mockery of proper social science technique. There's simply no way that this sort of methodology is going to bring out taboo opinions on race, any more than it would bring out any other taboo. At best you'll find it by reading between the lines, but it's more likely that you could just say "we failed to elicit racist language, but cannot be sure whether racism is or isn't a motivating factor." After all, to believe that there is no racist opposition to Obama doesn't pass the laugh test. That means that either their focus group selection methodology didn't find them, or their survey methodology didn't elicit it. Either way, they didn't acknowledge that.

Very, very disappointing. Whether or not it's an attempt by Carville et al to change the tone of the debate by deliberately trying to take racism out of it, I cannot say. They didn't publish the interviews, only their interpretation. But as it is, all this shows is that dogwhistle politics are alive and well in the Republican party...

...and that I'm starting to become very, very worried about Glenn Beck's fans.

You Have Got to Be Kiddng Me

Forget that nasty Darfur stuff! Let's play with Sudan!

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has formulated a new policy for Sudan that proposes working with that country’s government, rather than isolating it as President Obama had pledged to do during his campaign.

In an interview on Friday, President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, retired, said the policy, to be announced Monday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, would make use of a mix of “incentives and pressure” to seek an end to the human rights abuses that have left millions of people dead or displaced while burning Darfur into the American conscience.

General Gration said the administration would set strict time lines for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to fulfill the conditions of a 2005 peace agreement that his government signed with rebels in southern Sudan.

Under that agreement, independence for southern Sudan is to be put to a vote in 2011.

“To advance peace and security in Sudan, we must engage with allies and with those with whom we disagree,” said a statement of the policy that was obtained by The New York Times.

General Gration said the administration’s new approach was also intended to prevent Sudan, which once provided refuge to Osama bin Laden, from again serving as a terrorist haven.

During his campaign, Mr. Obama criticized the Bush administration for doing too little to stop the killing.

So that's it. It looks like the realists have been whispering in a few ears, judging by that section I bolded. They want Sudan on the inside, because a few dead people in Darfur (okay, hundreds of thousands) are less important than another "ally" in the we-won't-call-it-a-War-on-Terror.

The justification they've pulled out is that things are getting better, and maybe the Sudanese government should be brought into the fold. But they're getting better because the Darfur people are thoroughly repressed, and the rehabilitation of the Sudanese government is only going to encourage other governments to murder even more minorities.

(But, hey, it's not really genocide as long as they're nobody I know, right?)

Obviously, people are ticked:

But the new administration policy is likely to inflame an already vociferous chorus of criticism.

In advertisements and letters to the White House, legislators, activist groups and Sudanese rebel leaders have accused Mr. Obama of abandoning his promises to make Sudan a priority from his first day in office and to stand tough against President Bashir, whom the International Criminal Court indicted this year for crimes against humanity.

Some critics have expressed outrage over earlier statements by General Gration in which he raised questions about the effectiveness of imposing sanctions and suggested that a series of rewards might work better at getting Mr. Bashir’s government in Khartoum to cooperate.

In the interview, General Gration disagreed with the critics.

Summing up the administration’s approach, he cited what he described as an old African proverb. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, you have to go with someone,” he said.

“We want to go far,” General Gration said, “and to do that we are going to have to go with Khartoum.”

Why, yes, I'm sure you do want to go far, Mister General Sir. All the way into Darfur.

Mind the bodies.

Economists Acting LIke Blithering Idiots About Climate Change?

Is it Wednesday already?

Seriously, when economists wonder why the rest of us think they're clueless muttonheads with a dangerous entitlement complex, I think they can rest assured that we're talking about things like this:

“Rogue” is a good word for Levitt, but I think “contrarian” is more apt. Sadly, for Levitt’s readers and reputation, he decided to adopt the contrarian view of global warming, which takes him far outside of his expertise. As is common among smart people who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions and get it so very wrong, he relies on other smart contrarians who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions. In particular, he leans heavily on Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who has a reputation for brilliance, which he and the Superfreaks utterly shred in this book:

“A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming.”

Impressive — three and a half major howlers in one tiny paragraph (p 187). California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this “patent nonsense,” when I read it to him. And Myhrvold is the guy, according to the Superfreaks, of which Bill Gates once said, “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan.” This should be the definitive proof that smarts in one area do not necessarily translate at all.

I trust you to realize why the quoted bit is absolute blithering idiocy. ClimateProgress goes into great detail if you're wondering, but I doubt you would be, since most people would just respond to this with a hearty "WTF?"

So what's gone wrong here? Well...

The reason I’m calling Levitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five of SuperFreakonomics, the “Global Cooling” chapter — aka “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” — has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong. So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks. [Note: Most of the book is searchable online. At the request of the publisher, I have taken down the PDF of the chapter.]

The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo’s eruption both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.

Yes, the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the “high” ground.

But by embracing aeresols and rejecting mitigation, they have adopted the identical view of that rogue, thoroughly debunked, non-economist Bjorn Lomborg. Unlike the Superfreaks, CP readers know that Ken Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.”

And yet Caldeira is the primary practicing climate scientist the Superfreaks rely on in the chapter! He has responded to many e-mail queries of mine over the weekend so I could characterize his views accurately. He simply doesn’t believe what the Superfreaks make it seem like he believes. He writes me:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.

This is classic, classic economist behavior, where they move into another science and start babbling whatever crap comes to mind as long as it sounds good and fits their axiomatic dogma. A lot of people have already asked a lot of questions about Levitt's methodology. But as we see here, the methodology doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it, because the damned thing didn't have methodology worth the name to begin with!

It used to be that this sort of thing only happened in the social sciences and in historiography, where economists would barge in, brandishing whatever model happened to to be at hand, and proclaim that they have a solution that all the "little people" that came beforehand should just shut up and accept. Never mind that they removed all the evidence that didn't fit with all the surgical skill of a medieval barber. What was worst about this sort of dilletantism was that their statements were inevitably wrong, and did tremendous damage.

That's what we saw with Lomborg. Everybody who knows a damned thing about climate change knows that Bjorn Lomborg was completely off his rocker, and smacked him down multiple times: first when he tried to dismiss global warming, and then again when he tried to pull some sleight of hand by claiming that what he was really advocating was lovely things like malaria nets and childhood innoculation...as if it were climate change that were the problem there. But because he's an economist and therefore part of the "proper" tribe, he gets his sounding board whether he's right or not. Sure, there are other scientists who carry water for the polluters, but they're usually in fields that at least have something vaguely to do with ecology and meteorology. Lomborg is (when you get right down to it) a glorified sociologist! He has absolutely no business even discussing this field! But he does, because he gets the pass. So does Levitt.

And when these people misuse this power, as they inevitably do, it's the real scientists (and the rest of us) that inevitably have to clean up the messes. Except that with climate change, there may not be a "rest of us" to do it. But, hey, as long as it sells books, right?

The hat tip goes to Krugman. I'm a bit uncomfortable about his positioning on this one, though. I remember his old "dismal science" column, where he used to play this card with gusto. He's since recovered from his own bout of economists' entitlement. That's a good thing.

It's still important to remember that this is a serious, serious problem with social science that goes back years, not a "right wing vs. left wing" or "Krugman vs. Levitt" issue. (Privileging economists like that is the entire problem.)

It won't be solved by ideological wrangling. It'll be solved by economists rediscovering a bit of humility, and other scientists rediscovering their ability to tell that obnoxious economist to,

well,

"sit the hell down and shut the hell up".

"But Rae Has Gained Our Trust"

So, hey, here's a story:

One of Michael Ignatieff’s close caucus supporters said to me the other day, “We’re still supporting Michael, but Bob Rae has gained our trust.”

He went on to list some of the reasons he and others now have more faith in Rae than Iggy. At the Sudbury party meeting last month, Rae got it right. He was saying, behind the scenes, that Iggy should not be pushing for an election because it would make him look just as the Conservative attack ads were depicting him — an opportunist. Iggy didn’t take Rae’s advice.

He vowed to bring down the government as soon as possible. But the gambit has done more to bring him down than the prime minister. Caucus members now say they will undercut any order by Iggy to defeat the government by conveniently being absent on voting day.

In June, Ignatieff’s team was pressing for a summer election. Rae cautioned against such a move, saying the party wasn’t ready and summer wasn’t the time. But the leader came out sounding hawkish, ready to go. Then he suddenly pulled back when told his party wasn’t financially ready. In so doing, he looked feckless.

The far more experienced Rae has told associates he is not happy with Ignatieff’s handling of the job. A participant at morning meetings with the leader and some MPs says Rae’s performance there has been noticeably less enthusiastic in recent times.

Former prime minister Jean Chrétien, whose old team is replete with Rae supporters, complained recently that he hasn’t been hearing much from the Liberal leader. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he said, calls him more often.

On the weekend, Rae had to come forward to deny he orchestrated a move by a group of Liberal senators to amend a crime bill, a bill that Ignatieff was supporting.

As common sense would suggest, Rae, who fell short in a couple of runs for the crown, still has leadership ambitions. He can protest that he is being loyal, that he is doing nothing to encourage his supporters. But with the party in a free fall, disgruntled caucus members are going to talk and journalists are going to listen.

The last thing the Liberals need at this point is a new outbreak of leadership feuding. But unless Ignatieff reverses his slide, that’s what they’ll get.

Absolutely true. But, to be fair, it is somewhat of a "what goes around, comes around" situation. Stephane Dion is probably howling with laughter right now.

In any case, at least he'll be having that "thinker's conference". Certainly the "wait out the Tory collapse" and "erect a personality cult" strategies haven't took off. Might as well try policy.

No, Richard Cohen, You Did Not Win a Nobel

I know you'd like to pretend that you did, but as one of the greatest apologists for the previous administration and one of the worst "even the liberal" enablers out there, you are everything that the Nobel committee was trying to punish.

Whether you voted for Obama or not is immaterial. You've long since forfeited any claim to this.

Nobel Prize in...Political Economy?

Seems odd, but take a look:

American economists Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, who study the way economic decisions are made outside markets, were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday.

Ms. Ostrom, who teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., is the first woman to win the economics prize, which had been awarded to 62 men since its launch in 1969. The judges cited her analysis of what happens when natural resources are shared commonly.

Mr. Williamson, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, was cited for explaining why some decisions are made more efficiently inside corporations rather than at arm's length in markets.

Within the economics profession, neither was seen as a likely choice for the award, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Ms. Ostrom's doctorate is in political science, though she considers herself a political economist. Ms. Ostrom, 76 years old, said that when the phone rang at 6:30 a.m. Monday, she thought it might be a telemarketer. Mr. Williamson's work, meanwhile, has been highly influential on fields outside of economics. The 77-year-old has been described as the economist most cited by noneconomists.

Both have highlighted areas where standard approaches of economics are inadequate at explaining what actually occurs. "They both pay incredible attention to what happens in the real world," said Wharton School economist Witold Henisz, a former student of Mr. Williamson's.

Ms. Ostrom's work challenged the view that when people share a finite resource, they will end up destroying it -- what is known as the tragedy of the commons. That view argues that resources that are important for the common good need to be highly regulated or privatized.

As a graduate student in the early 1960s at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ms. Ostrom researched the way water was being managed in Southern California. Groundwater levels were falling, and saltwater was seeping into the system. But rather than collapsing into a tragedy of the commons, communities and water producers hashed out a solution. That led her to explore situations throughout the world where resources were commonly held, and she found that people often developed institutions, networks and other ways of interacting that solved problems.

Economists had largely ignored the importance of such networks, said Yale University environmental economist Matthew Kotchen, in part, because they couldn't come up with elegant models to describe them.

First Krugman, now this. Something very, very interesting is happening with the Sveriges Riksban.

Going on...

[Williamson] found that many economic decisions that standard theory said would be more efficiently left to the marketplace were actually better left within a firm. "Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent," the Nobel judges said. "But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets."

This is a more profound insight than you'd think. A firm is essentially a bureaucracy, just one in a condition of competition with other bureaucracies. The practical upshot here is that markets are not always the best mode of economic organization, which is an astounding idea to even consider.

But what's even more astounding is the fact that thse two people got the award in the first place. A political economist getting the Nobel Prize in economics? Only a few years ago, that would be seen as something like sacrilege. Yet here we are.

That point about a lack of elegant models is important, too. Nobel prizes in the past have been all about elegant models. In fact, your model was probably the fastest and most predictable way to earn a Nobel. Economic history and (until now) Political Economy were nonstarters compared to things like Econometrics and Economic modelling. Yet, again, here we are, where a model-resistant theory takes the prize.

I'm not sure why, exactly, attitudes seem to have shifted. But they have. And good on' em.

An Obama Admin Reality Check:

If one of their people gets caught saying "those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult”, what do you expect them to do, exactly?

Do you expect them to say "hell yeah, that's absolutely where we stand, SCREW the bloggers and the swivel chairs they rode in on"? Hell no.

You're going to expect them to say "that doesn't reflect White House thinking." Which they did say. Because they aren't idiots. That's why they're going anonymous in the first place!

So if you do expect to say that, don't assume that that somehow excuses everything. It doesn't signify that they didn't mean it. It doesn't signify that they've seen the error of their ways. It just signifies that they know enough to deny it on the record. But if you look at their history, like Aravosis does, the attitude becomes perfectly clear:

this isn't the first time the White House has "reportedly" criticized bloggers, or progressives. In August, they dismissed anyone who had concerns about how health care reform as "the left of the left" - which is awfully similar to the current accusation that we're "the Internet left fringe." Then a few weeks later, the president said that blogs don't fact check, and are all "people shouting at each other."

And the fact that the White House holds conference calls with bloggers is nice. But let's not exaggerate here. Those calls are as much, if not more, for the White House's benefit than for ours.

Bloggers are the only key members of the Democratic noise machine who have been shunned by the president. He met with liberal talk radio, with the partisan pundits on TV (Rachel and Keith), and even invited a conservative blogger (Andrew Sullivan) and conservative writer/activists Bill Kristol and David Brooks. But no such meeting has ever been scheduled with the liberal political blogs.

There is a pattern of disdain for, and distrust of, the blogs that started with the Obama campaign two years ago, and now has extended into the Obama White House. Privately, both the campaign and the White House have been happy to ask the Netroots for help when the going gets tough (Joe and I alone, via this blog, raised $50,000 for Barack Obama - and I suspect Jane and Markos and Duncan and others have raised a lot more than that). And in spite of our differences with Barack Obama, the Netroots have been happy to help the President when called upon. But publicly, Team Obama keeps us, like much of the core Democratic constituencies, at arm's length.

He doesn't pay enough attention to his base because he takes them for granted. Fine. We knew that.

But the bigger story here is that they really, really don't like blogs, or bloggers, or independent, not-for-profit online journalism and commentary in general. They're fine with the Washington Press, since they love their empty little stories about horse racing, parrot the conventional wisdom, and are people that you can intimidate or reward with access to the administration and its officials. They don't even mind the hard right, I suspect, since they're a known quantity and are expected to be the opposition. But loud, unpredictable, passionate, dissatisfied liberals and progressives with a megaphone and an attitude are just dangerous. They write inconvenient things. They either don't know or don't care about what is or isn't "out of bounds" to believe. They don't care about access, and they despise lobbyists as much as the Admin once pretended to.

They aren't playing the game. They aren't to be trusted. So anonymous "pyjamas" it is.

Goddamned Well Took Long Enough, Barry

So apparently the Prez is going to finally get rid of DADT:

President Barack Obama told the largest U.S. gay-rights group that he’ll work with Congress and the Pentagon to end the policy that forbids openly gay men and women from serving in the military.

“I will end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Obama said in an address last night to at the Human Rights Campaign national dinner. “That’s my commitment to you.”

The president gave no timetable for acting and said he realized many in the audience “don’t believe progress has come fast enough.” He said they would look back at his time in office and be able to say that “we put a stop against discrimination whether in the office or in the battlefield.”

Obama spoke the night before the National Equality March, which may draw thousands of people to the National Mall in Washington demanding “equal protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states,” according to the Web site for the event.

Obama promised during his presidential campaign to support equal rights for gays and lesbians, including ending the policy on gays in the military. As a Democratic senator from Illinois, he supported legislation expanding health benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. He supports civil unions for gays, though not same-sex marriages.

Not exactly my favored position, though if it opens the door for federal recognition of same-sex marriages in pro-SSM states as "civil unions" under the law federally, I could get behind that.

Anyway...

“Many of us had hung our hats on major legislation including repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and we recognize those are heavy lifts, but the president had very powerful and strong rhetoric during the campaign and we think his administration has really been uneven,” Darlene Nipper, 44, deputy executive director of the Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said before the speech.

Nipper said the gay and lesbian community “expects concrete policy changes, including the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and an executive order to stop the inappropriate release of gays and lesbians from the military.”

In his speech, Obama said progress will be made.

“Do not doubt the direction we are heading and the destination we will reach,” he said.

The president also said that there’s not “a single issue” his administration deals with “that does not touch on the lives” of the lesbian and gay community, citing his efforts to revive the economy, pass health-care legislation and manage the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In June Obama signed a presidential memorandum allowing domestic partners of civil service employees to be added to the long-term care insurance program and allowing employees to use sick leave to take care of domestic partners and adopted children.

Well, Mr. President, there's a bit of a problem. The progressives out there are a wee bit more skeptical than they used to be. You see, promises are all well and good—but promises aren't enough for them. They want to see results. They want to see policy. They want to see legislation on the table. They want a commitment, one that says "while I may be the President of all of America, I'm going to recognize the beliefs of those that made me President in the first place". They want to know that you're on their side, and that must include ending the ridiculous farce that is DADT.

Don't tarry, Barry.

America Cares About That

Oh HELL yes, Go Grayson Go.



Transcript from DK:

"Madame Speaker, I have words for Democrats and Republicans tonight."

"Let's start with the Democrats"

"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population."

"What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets 51 votes in the Senate or 60 votes in the Senate or 83 votes in the Senate, in fact America doesn't even care about that, it doesn't care about that at all. What America cares about is this; there are over 1 million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bills. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are 44,780 Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care, that's 122 every day. America sure cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition, even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot. But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities, America doesn't care about that at all."

"So we have to remember that as Democrats, we have to remember that what's at stake here is life and death, enormous amounts of money, and people are counting upon us to move ahead. America understands what's good for America. America cares about health care, America cares about jobs, America cares about education, about energy independance, America does not care about processes politicians or personalities or anything like that."

"And I have a few words for my Republican friends tonight as well. I guess I do have some Republican friends."

"Let me say this; last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there are 44,789 Americans that die every year according to this Harvard report published in this peer reviewed journal because they have no health insurance. That's an extra 44,789 Americans who die who's lives could be saved, and their response was to ask me for an apology."

"To ask me for an apology?"

"That's right. To ask ME for an apology!"

"Well, I'm telling you this; I will not apologize. I will not apologize. I will not apologize for a simple reason; America doesn't care about your feelings. I violated no rules by pulling this report to America's attention, I think a lot of people didn't know about it beforehand. But America DOES care about health care in America."

"And if you're against it, then get out of the way. Just get out of the way. You can lead, you can follow or you can get out of the way. And I'm telling you now to get out of the way."
"American understands that there is one party in this country that is favor of health care reform and one party that is against it, and they know why."

"They understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation"

"They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry."

"In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwhich tommorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon."

"But that's not what America wants, America wants solutions to it's problems and that begins with health care, and that's what I'm speaking for tonight."

"I yield back the balance of my time"

There's not much to add. Except that "if Barack Obama solved world human, the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation" is hilarious.

Here's the Actblue link if you want to pony up. Can't say he hasn't earned it.

"It's the Retirement, Stupid"

Edit: Added some inexplicably missing links.

There's an excellent exchange between "Mike the Biologist" and digby going on about political corruption.

First, Mike:

I think Krugman, in an otherwise excellent column, misstates the motivations behind the 'centrist' Democrats opposition to the public option for healthcare:

Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex -- but who in politics doesn't? If I had to guess, I'd say that what's really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.

I think he's right in that it's not about the campaign contributions. If their reluctance to support a public option were based solely on the electoral calculus of campaign donations versus popular support--that is, votes--the votes win hands down. Any Democratic senator in a swing state who needs independent and Republican votes can't afford to piss off the ~50% of Republicans and ~70% of independents who support a public option. To the extent that an Evan Bayh is supported by independents and Republicans, does he really think that these crossover voters are the ones who oppose a public option? (Actually, Bayh just might think so, since he's dumber than a fucking sack of hammers). So, if this is simple electoral politics, the obvious move is to screw your donors (of course, we are talking about 'new Democrats' who are the most inept politicians in recorded history, so who knows?).

So, Mad Biologist, how is this about money? It's simple: it's about life after politics. One of the dirty secrets about many, if not most, congressmen and senators is that they like Washington, D.C., rhetoric notwithstanding. They want to stay in town after they leave (or lose) office. Once you've tasted the Capital of the Free World, do you really want to go back to Pierre, South Dakota? (Tom Daschle comes to mind...). It's funny how many politicians, having made a career out of bashing War-Shing-Tun, don't...seem...to...ever...leave.

I can't blame them: I moved to Boston, and would be very happy to stay here. Places do grow on you. The problem comes, for politicians, when they have to find a job. For an ex-politician, there aren't that many 'straight paths' to getting your next job: lobbyist and corporate board member are the easiest and the most lucrative.

But if you get a reputation as someone who opposes large business interests, what chance do you have of getting either of these types of jobs? Sometimes, the quid pro quo is very crude and direct (e.g., Billy Tauzin), but the Village's political culture makes it clear what is acceptable. One should not be 'populist', or, heaven forbid, liberal.

The narcissistic motivation is far more subtle. Many ex-politicians are invited to join think tanks or, at least, be participants on panels and round tables (which often pay a decent stipend for 'marquee' names, such as an ex-senator). This allows them to, once again, for a brief, shining moment, walk into a room and have everyone treat them as a Very Important Person. And you get to blather on about policy without having to the heavy lifting of politics and politicking. Yet if you're tagged as the 'wrong sort', you won't get these perks either.

So, I think we're missing the big picture on corruption: it's the retirement, stupid.

Here's digby:

Dick Gephardt as a former majority leader with more than 20 years under his belt makes 80% of his highest salary which was about $195,000 in pension. Plus a 401k, social security and the congressional health care system. They were given these generous benefits for a reason:

S.Rept. 79-1400 (May 31, 1946) stated that a retirement plan for
Congress:

"would contribute to independence of thought and action, [be] an
inducement for retirement for those of retiring age or with other
infirmities, [and] bring into the legislative service a larger number of
younger Members with fresh energy and new viewpoints concerning the
economic, social, and political problems of the Nation".

Yeah, that worked out.

And apparently that and everything that's come since is such a pittance that a man just has no choice but to whore himself out to Goldman Sachs.

I agree with Mike, but I think it's more than money. It's about staying in the game, being a player. And in American culture, being a real player means being paid huge sums of money. How can anyone possibly be respected otherwise?

It's the culture of power in general in this country that creates these incentives. And I'm still not sure what to do about it except pick up a pitchfork and get busy.

I don't think either are wrong, but I think Mike actually addressed digby's point when talking about the "Very Important Person" angle. There are two things that drive people to Washington: money and power. Power, of the two, is actually the least objectionable, since anybody who wants to make a positive difference needs to recognize that they need to gain the power to do so.

But once you get power, you don't want to give it up, especially if you believe that you're actually "doing good things". (A lot of these guys do, brainwashed as they are by lobbyists 24/7.) So, as Mike said, you start seeking out ways of staying in Washington, where the power is. Yes, there's also money involved, but to a great extent money is power, so there's no incompatibility there, and I suspect that most of them would choose more power over more money in a heartbeat. They already did; the private sector is more lucrative.

This is an old, old problem. It's the one that brought down Japan from its heights of the 1970s and 1980s and is still plaguing them today. It is at the heart of small-scale third-world corruption. It's also why you can't pay politicians a pittance, because the corruption would only get worse.

And, honestly, outside of more progressive and liberal "institutes" and whatnot to soak these guys up, the solution is difficult to foresee. As long as there are lobbyists and corporate board members, politicans will want to become them.