Frankly, Congressman, I am Shocked and Appalled

To risk thrice redundancy on the blog, I'd like to re-re-make Dave (and certain segments of Dan's) point--with a video. Let me set the scene first: Florida Congressman Alan Grayson faces off against about as diverse a round-table as the Situation Room can muster: Wolf Former AIPAC Employee and Jeopardy Failure Blitzer, an readily and sensibly offended Gloria Borger, an innocuous Joe Johns, the Good Kind of Mexican (Cuban) Alex Castellanos, and straight over the tubes of this modern internet, the dessicated corpse that was once James Carville. Grayson yesterday made the point in a speech before Congress that, for all the allowances the Republicans ceded on the health-care front, they have basically adopted the stance that it would be better for America's sick to die and die quickly.

The following 10 minutes feature two separate arguments: the first forwarded by Grayson who points out that the Republicans have offered nothing substantive over the course of this unnecessarily protracted debate, and the second put forth by every other mindless idiot on the program, who continously marvel with poorly suppressed giddiness and much mock indignation as to whether Grayson ought to apologize to the Republicans, and isn't he just as bad as Joe Wilson, and shouldn't we all be ashamed that America has come to a point where people can be so mean to one another when arguing about who gets to go to the doctor in this country. Would you say those nasty things to Eric Cantor's face, Congressman? Would you say that to his weeping mother?

On display are many of familiar embarrassments characteristic of CNN specifically and TV News in general: the obsession with political neutrality, the constant drawing of false equivalencies, the masturbatory infatuation with scandal and, as Carville himself ejaculates across the airwaves, "Good TV" over substantive debate. And then once again, like we may all be tired of reading and writing about by now, that infuriating show of disappointment at the debasement of our national discourse.

Can you all imagine? Grayson called the deliberate heel-grinding of the Republicans tantamount of criminal negligence! But hey, at least he hasn't brained any members of the opposition with a walking cane yet. We've come a long way, baby.

And now, the video:

Get ready for some Raccoon City shit

Back at the beginning of the summer, Time had an article about Hardin, Montana, and its quest to transform itself into the next Guantanamo Bay. Hardin, recognizing that all those freedom-hating terrorists and very unlucky Uighurs were going to need a new place to go when the fiesta ended in Cuba, lobbied to become that new place and soak up whatever federal funds would come with them. They even had an empty prison, the Two Rivers Detention Facility, all ready to go. While the political argument at the time was the usual not-in-my-backyard nonsense, it seemed like a novel way to kill two birds with one stone and that was the last I heard of it.

... Until today. In one of the creepiest possible turns, the Two Rivers Detention Facility was instead purchased by a company calling itself American Police Force. Here's the good stuff:

A shadowy private security company that has no known clients but claims to have helped foreign governments combat terrorism and will protect anything from cruise ships to Pakistani convoys has taken over a jail in a small Montana town, with plans to build a law enforcement training facility on the property.

The state legislature is looking into the matter and residents of Hardin, MT, were alarmed last week when executives from the firm, American Police Force, showed up in the town, which does not have its own police department, with Mercedes SUVs bearing "City Of Hardin Police Department" decals.

And the town has had to tamp down reports on conspiracy Web sites that APF plans to impose experimental H1N1 vaccines on residents under threat of quarantine in the jail.

And if you're wondering about the coat of arms, it belongs to one Aleksandar Pavlov Karageorgevich, a Serbian prince, whose facebook page helpfully points out that "On 17 February 2008, Alexander issued a statement condemning the declaration of independence by Kosovo."

Anyway, who knows where this is going. Half of me feels it's just a group of recently retired banking types with lots of money and not a lot to do, looking for an excuse to wear shades and shoot guns. But there's that other half of me, and I know that those of us who got more out of Resident Evil than a chance to look up the president's daughter's skirt (i.e. not Dan) are feeling exactly how I'm feeling on this with that H1N1 rumour:


Time to stock up on herbs and cat's eye gems, that's all I'm saying.

Slander

Whatever happened to duels?

I was stunned that in the midst of all the kerfuffle surrounding Joe Wilson's now-infamous outburst that no one mentioned "slander." Lion's somewhat tounge-in-cheek comment to Sol's post on the matter holds real water - the words said more than "that statement is a lie "or "your current action is lying." Wilson said Obama is "one who lies." I applaud him for leaving aside any further notes about the inflammability of the president's knickers. I guess he was trying to be civil.

The debate about "civility" itself seems to channel conversation away from traditional defamation, or at least serves to illuminate who may decry it. A short Google search for "Joe Wilson" and "slander" yields a stream of bloggers and forum-writers coming to the defense of Joe Wilson against people slandering him. Of course, it also brings up an article slandering him.

The problem with refocusing the debate on "civility," as Dave rightly points out, is that civility has nothing to do with the content or factual basis of a given proposition (or outburst). No one, from Obama himself to the blogosphere, asked Joe Wilson to prove that Obama would support healthcare for illegal immigrants. If people did want to make him look like a douchebag in a productive way, they would force him to demonstrate the merit of his point, which would undoubtedly shed a bright light on Obama's health care plan. And if the glow from that light were disproportionate to the importance of the point that Wilson contested, well that's what you get, fibber.

Much more worrisome than the extremely public outbursts like Wilson's are smaller episodes of more ridiculous behavior. Since 1964 (NY Times vs. Sullivan), the laws against slander of public figures have required stringent proof of "actual malice," and because of reasonable accommodations for parody, persons like the President are likely almost incapable of pursuing legal suit, even setting aside the myriad practical reasons against it. However, I naively maintain that such a damning word as "slander," if uttered with gravity and with reason by the president, could strike some more violent public offenders into a willingness to temper their words. Therefore, I hoped for a reaction when I read a short AP feed in The Philadelphia Inquirer today reporting that a representative of Representative Trent Franks (R, Arizona of "birthers" fame) attempted to clarify his claim that President Obama was an "enemy of humanity" by remarking that the statement referred particularly to "unborn humanity," i.e. abortion. The president has shown grace in the face of his more outrageous opponents, and indeed, even Bush usually fumbled out of these sorts of situations without blowing up. One could easily say that the president must, that he can't sweat the small stuff. However, if there is a hope of moving towards a more cerebral debate in this country, to correspond with a president who considers his words, perhaps this is worth some sweat. Only by bringing slander back into the national debate and outing those on both sides who use it as a substitute for criticism will we ensure a truly civil debate - one that is concerned with nation more than image, and policy more than persona.

Sometimes it takes the old guns to change deeply ingrained habits. In fact, a mayor in Vineland, NJ, a retired policeman, took his piece to a press conference yesterday to stand up to the NRA. The NRA have launched a “smear campaign” against Mayors Against Illegal Handguns, who support legislation prosecuting individuals who do not report lost or stolen handguns. However, it wasn’t the “smear” that rang out, but the saliency of the issue. The mayor of Ellport Borough in western PA said to an Inquirer columnist.

" 'Please don't take this the wrong way…but we don't want our small community to end up like Philadelphia...Then I got this postcard saying I'd joined an elite antigun group," a still-disgusted [Joe] Cisco said. "It just slandered us up and down.’ ” (Full story)

And if I do take that the wrong way, Mr. Cisco, will it be pistols at dawn?

In fact, the mayor visited houses of people who disagreed with him, and explained his position. Bang.

We're movin' on up

Feels like forever since I've done this. So what's shakin' on this day of days? First, good news, if you're into that sort of thing: the IMF thinks the global economy is set for stronger growth in the coming year, and predicts only -1.1% growth this year, instead of -1.4%. Whoopie.

On the other hand, the IMF expects write-downs by banks to total $1.5 trillion next year. Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism points out that tier 1 capital--stock options, reported reserves and retained earnings--is about $4 trillion, right now, and that most of that came from public bail-outs. Compare that to $3.4 trillion in total write-downs since the crisis began, and we fast begin to leave 'whoopie', heading straight for the hills of 'whoono.' But what else is new?

Oh, that the public option got shot in the stomach.

The first proposal, by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, was rejected 15 to 8, as five Democrats joined all Republicans on the panel in voting no. The second proposal, by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, was defeated 13 to 10, with three Democrats voting no.

The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. Mr. Baucus voted against both proposals, which were offered as amendments to his bill to expand coverage and rein in health costs.

“There’s a lot to like about a public option,” Mr. Baucus said, but he asserted that the idea could not get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster on the Senate floor.

You're right, Mr. Baucus, there is a lot to like about the public option. Unfortunately, there's almost nothing to like about you, and that's my cross-to-bear in this gnarly little scenario. I'll take socialism over your Montanan ass any day of the week.

And speaking of socialism,

The 'flexibility' explanation of unemployment is wrong.

...

In a recent article, Howell et al (2007) econometrically examined the impact of these
rigidity variables, or what they call Protective Labor Market Institutions (PLMIs), and concluded that: “while significant impacts for employment protection, benefit generosity, and union strength have been reported, the clear conclusion from our review of these studies is that the effects for the PLMIs is distinctly unrobust, with widely divergent coefficients and levels of significance.” Indeed, in his published comments on the Howell et al. article, Jim Heckman (2007) argues that the authors “…are convincing in showing the fragility of the evidence on the role of labour market institutions in explaining the pattern of European unemployment, using standard econometric methodology.” Freeman (2007) also finds the evidence for the impact of these institutional variables less than convincing “despite considerable effort, researchers have not pinned down the effects, if any, of institutions on other aggregate economic outcomes, such as unemployment and employment”.

Source: Bell and Blanchflower, "What Should Be Done about Rising Unemployment in the UK?" February 2009, p. 15

If only I had had these papers in eleventh-grade AP Economics, I could have saved myself a lot of capitalist fist-pumping. So what does this all mean? The standard explanation in (conservative) neo-classical economics for long-run employment is that it is most highly correlated with labor market interference. Since wage subsidies and employment protections distort the price of labor, there will be a deadweight loss in labor markets representing the gap between labor supplied and labor demanded. That's why socialism doesn't work, and why all European countries at all times always have higher unemployment rates than the United States (9.7%), except for Norway (3.0%), Denmark (3.7%), Switzerland (3.8%), the Netherlands (4.4%), Italy (7.4%), the UK (7.9%), Sweden (8%), Germany (8%), Belgium (8%), and France (8.2%).

That's not fair comparison, of course, because I'm looking at the employment picture during a recession. Rates of unemployment in Europe are on the rise (except in Norway, where an effective stimulus caused them to drop in June), just like in the United States. What matters is the time series--but that's exactly the point of the paper above:

There is no evidence in the UK that over the last year or so that union density, benefits, the tax wedge or employment protection has risen. Interestingly, both Spain and Ireland, which have seen big changes in unemployment over the past twenty years (Appendix 1), always had low levels of all of these rigidity variables and these have not increased over time. What is true is that unemployment in Europe is higher than it is in the United States and Western Europe has more job protection, higher unemployment benefits, more union power, and a more generous welfare state. But that is a cross-section correlation and it tells us little or nothing about time series changes.

As Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands prove, even the contention that unemployment is across-the-board more robust in Europe is faulty. And, as we know, all of these states have an exceptionally activist public presence in labor markets.

But wait! I forgot a few Europeans, didn't I? What about Spain (17.9%) and Ireland (12.6%)? They're looking awful. Maybe if they hadn't aggressively pursued labor and financial market deregulation, and then encouraged a false boom in construction and real estate-backed asset prices (familiar, huh?), things would be better.

I read, what now seems like years ago, an article in the FT by Paul de Grauwe, an economist at the University of Leiden, which asserted that labor market regulation acted simply to slow down market forces regardless of economic climate. In a boom, this is seen as a downside, since everyone wants to hire everyone else--at the lowest price, of course--so that they can make more money. In a bust, however, wage and employment controls prevent the kind of downwards spiral in demand and unemployment that is currently wreaking havoc in a United States made impotent by its own commitment to free markets. Every person who is fired is one less person who will spend money, which in turn squeezes businesses, who then ramp up firings, etc etc al the way to the bread lines. Intervention in labor markets through wage-subsidies and other schemes plug a hole in this leak; witness the success, recently, of one such program in Germany, a scheme known as kurzarbeit, for which the German government paid private employees 60% of their wages to work less. The reasoning behind it is that slashing a day or two off of one person's workweek and giving it to another person distribute employment, even if only part-time, more evenly. It's also more efficient than simply increasing unemployment benefits, because employees remain productive, and can wait for a global recovery in demand to restore them to full hours.

Would that we would do these things in America, but we won't, not with bold and spirited defenders of liberty like Orin Hatch and Jim De Mint on our side. I'm so happy to be an American, I could scream.

cooking made us human

Here is the transcript and audio to a very interesting NPR show Science Friday hosted by Paul Raeburn. His guest Richard Wrangham argues for the crucial importance of cooked food in our evolution.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112334465

I though some people here would have valuable knowledge and input.
So check it out and let me know what you think.

About Time

Found buried half way down yesterday's TIME story:

Several liberal Senate Democrats such as Sen. Russ Reingold of Wisconsin and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, along with Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have proposed a bill known as the Justice Act, which would curb many of the sweeping powers of the Patriot Act. The bill would reauthorize the expiring Patriot Act provisions, but would add new limits: roving wiretaps could no longer target John Doe suspects and would require identification of the target. It would also leave in place the ability of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to compel document disclosure, but would limit that power to the records of people connected to terrorism or espionage. It would make numerous other changes, such as limiting use of National Security Letters — a power the FBI has misused in the past, according to the Inspector General of the Justice Department — to force document disclosure and lifting telecommunication companies' immunity from civil claims arising from the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretaps.

It is amazing that this has taken so long. The PATRIOT Act, and the handful of other similarly rationalized legal and extralegal precedents set over the course of the last nine years, are likely some of the most poisonous and potentially long-lasting remnants of the Bush administration's legacy. What's more amazing is the failure of even the progressives, both within the administration and within Congress, to get behind the reform.

Holder...laid out the new guidelines in a four-page memo specifying that state secrecy would only be invoked when genuine or significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake.

In other words, the Obama administration is taking the bold step of upholding most of the more odious practices of the previous administration--but pinky-swearing that they'll only act upon them when it's super-duper important. I imagine this is just the kind of binding resolution the founding fathers had in mind when they thought to provide checks and balances between the branches.

And then more surprising:

One thing is conspicuously missing from Feingold's bill: The sponsorship of Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Leahy has proposed a different bill, which does not go as far as Feingold’s.

I like Patrick Leahy. I want him to be in the right. But on this particular issue, Feingold is the only Senator with any degree of established credibility. Here is the grand legislative opposition that raised up against the 2001 Patriot Act:

NAYs ---1 Feingold (D-WI)

(Source: US Senate)

Personally, I have hope for Bernie Sanders too. That makes two Senators who are in most cases politically palatable.

Given the still embryonic stage of what may very well eventually be called the JUSTICE Act, maybe it isn't quite fair to start criticizing the Obama administration for its lack of--or otherwise uselessly tepid--support. But here's a hint:

Assistant Attorney General David Kris, chief of the Department of Justice's National Security Division, said the Administration had not fully reviewed or taken a stance on either [the Feingold or the Leahy] bill. Justice officials say they're willing to discuss added protections for civil liberties and privacy, but only so long as they don't dilute the government's authority to exercise its powers.

A solid, well-intentioned point, Mr. Kris. Except that diluting the powers of the government is the entire fucking point. If only the administration were willing to offer such bullshit compromises to the real opposition, we might actually have a reasonably functional healthcare system.

So as things stand now, if reform is going to come at all, it's going to have to come slowly. In the meantime, here's an appetizer:

Civility

Lanny Davis, who you may recall from his brilliant work with the Clinton campaign in 2008, has come out with a "Civility Pledge" that he would really like everyone to sign. While I couldn't give a shit about Lanny Davis, who is so far removed from relevancy at the moment that this is the first I've heard about him this year, I do think the very idea of a civility pledge demonstrates one of the most frustrating and confusing aspects of American political discourse that I'm aware of.

The topic was admirably and thoroughly laid out here a few years back, which you should all read, but if the purple prose turns you off the summary is simple: in all sorts of discussions on all sorts of topics political, there is an element that attacks incivility on a verbal level while ignoring immorality on a much more concrete level. There are a number of reasons for it, the biggest in my mind is that because we are evolved to respond negatively to hostile social cues, it's easy to attack or delegitimize someone because they're talking shit. There's also a DC social element to all this. A lot of the people who run and cover Washington for a living know each other, spend time with each other, and for personal and professional reasons don't want to offend or be affiliated with an offense, so they strive to keep everything "civil". When protesters said mean things about Bush, they may have been right, but they weren't being civil, and so still to this day the anti-war voices of 2002-2003 are looked at like kooks, as this Politico article on right-wing antics aptly points out:

Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chockablock with traitorous radicals.

Of course, that was an entirely accurate prediction on McDermott's part, but who cares? He was being uncivil.

Now, I fully understand that uncivil speech can, especially towards the extremes, lead to uncivil actions, and those actions are precisely not the goal of this argument. I'm not saying that violent or excessively hyperbolic speech should be given equal weighting with calmer and cooler prose. My problem here is just that accusations of rudeness are very effective tools at marginalizing unpleasant facts in American political debate. Bush was and still is as far as I know an asshole, and saying that about him shouldn't disqualify other points I'm trying to make. And it runs both ways. I think Joe Wilson's a southern-fried idiot and all but I was much more interested in genuine dissections of the wrongness of his statement than the wrongness of the way he stated it. This civility pledge nonsense and the larger losing-the-monocle act of the last few weeks is all reminiscent of asking someone to wear a frilly glove while they're slapping you.

What's your score?

According to this , I have 6 God Hatred Points. You?

Via Shakesville and God Hates Protesters.

You Say "Tomato," I say "Hyper-Inflation"

There's no reason to panic yet, says Bloomberg:

International investors are increasing purchases of Treasuries on a bet U.S. inflation will remain subdued, even as the dollar falls to the lowest levels of the year and the budget deficit tops $1 trillion. Investors outside the U.S. bought 43.1 percent of the $1.41 trillion of notes and bonds sold by the Treasury Department this year, compared with 27.1 percent of the $527 billion issued at this point in 2008, government figures show. (Source)

The long-time concern amongst those few of moral fiber who have the courage to stand against Socialism is that the government's nearly pornographic predilection to stimulate can only last as long as U.S. savers (we're up to about seven now) and exchange-bearing foreigners continue to lend to us. But that willingness will diminish as soon as confidence returns to financial markets around the world and the U.S. dollar starts to fall. Or least so goes the argument.

And so despite the news as reported by Bloomberg, there are still those who have found in this recent round of economic data from the Fed reason to despair.

The degree of intermediation by the Federal Reserve in the issuance of US Treasuries hit a record in Q2, accounting for just under 50% of all net UST issuance absorption. This is a startling number, as the Fed's $164 billion in Q2 Treasury purchases dwarfs* the combined foreign/household UST purchases of $101 billion and $29 billion, respectively, over the same time period. (Source)

So on the one hand, international investors are remaining relatively steady in their commitment to our commitment to spending money that we don't have. In fact one might argue that an increase in treasury purchases of roughly half a trillion dollars from one year to the next isn't something to sneeze at. But on the shakier hand, the Treasury is issuing debt faster than any private or international actor can keep up with, the Federal Reserve is gobbling up an ever-increasing amount of the government's budgetary shortfall and, from the first to second quarter...

Foreign purchasers...have in fact been aggressively lowering their purchases of Treasuries (from $159 billion in Q1 to $101 billion in Q2, an almost 40% decline in appetite!)

While you might be swayed by the audacious combination of bold and exclamation, speaking from the convenient position of almost 100% ignorance, I would speculate first that $101 billion is still a hefty order (it only seems "dwarfed" in comparison to purchases during Q1 of 2009, when the treasury market played the over-valued black hole to all cash in the solar system) and, second, that certain lenders don't have a whole lot say in the matter. As the Bloomberg article points out, those countries aren't operating with a lot of short term wiggle room.

Foreign governments have little choice than to buy Treasuries because they hold so many dollars. The U.S. dollar accounts for 65 percent for world currency reserves, up from 62.8 percent in mid-2008, according to the International Monetary Fund in Washington.

Once upon a time, currency and asset values were propped up by the domestic central bank. But at least for now we're all in this one together.

*164 does not dwarf 130. That is not what that word means. I know that I'm nitpicking, but this is almost as aggravating as when people use the word "literally" when what they really should say is "the opposite of literally." No, you were not so embarrassed you literally died and 164 is only moderately larger than 130.

Post-traumatic stress disorder

This article, whether it intended to be or not, is very, very funny.

It's public transportation day chez Sarah

There was a blog post up at Feministing about women-only commuter trains that have begun to run in four of India's largest cities.

Unlike the ongoing debate in Israel about buses running into Orthodox neighbourhoods that force women to sit at the back and men at the front, the Indian commuter trains were offered as an option after women complained about harassment - physical and verbal - on the train on their way to work.

Like any public place, public transportation offers plenty of opportunities for inappropriate and unwanted attention, and the very anonymity of these spaces can contribute to the sense that such actions will go unpunished. I remember arriving in tears to work one morning in Brussels because a man had grabbed my breast while walking past me. It's not really a nice way to start your day.

The blogger that posted about these trains on Feministing made an interesting point, which is as follows:

But still, to stop men harassing women, the police removed the women instead of educating those who harass. Perhaps this is a first-world concern about a developing nation, but the message sent is that the presence of women causes harassment, rather than the idea that those who prefer to objectify women and project their sexual desires onto strangers cause harassment.

I have to admit that even though these trains provide freedom of choice for women (they're an option, not a requirement) my initial reaction was also that the onus should not have to be on women to go to a separate train car, but rather on the men to stop being huge dongs.

Still, just the fact that the problem is being acknowledged is a huge step. Similar to the policies on both Montreal and Ottawa's bus systems of asking the driver to stop the bus between stops to lessen the walk home in the dark, simple consideration for people's basic safety and security is a good start.

I know it's Rush Limbaugh

But I will scream next time I read the words "post-racial" in referring to present-day America.

Seriously? Also, I kind of object to Raw Story's calling the remark "extraordinary by the standards of..," because it doesn't really speak to and do justice to the fact that he actually said it, and therefore has lowered his standards to a new level.

Send in the Accountants

Quick, before this either dissipates into a non-issue or, less likely, explodes into a very big one, let me get in my two cents.

According to the financial blog and sometimes forum for raving right-wing lunacy Zero Hedge, HR 1207, the House bill that would mandate an immediate audit of the Federal Reserve, has garnered 290 supporters. With 2/3rds of the chamber now game for some serious number crunching, this just about guarantees its passage there. And while the proposal's markedly meeker reception in the Senate likely dooms it to a slow death between the wings of the Capitol building, political momentum can be an unexpectedly revitalizing force.

Regardless of its prospects, what's interests me is the Coalition of Cognitive Dissonance that has rallied around this particular issue. HR 1207 was initially sponsored by Ron Paul. With his and Michelle Bachmann's name attached, alongside a who's-who list of D.C. crypto-fascists, you might feel temptation to stop reading.

But then dropping in from the far other side of the aisle are people like Alan Grayson and Dennis Kucinich. In the Senate, Russ Feingold has joined a Yay-team of otherwise staunchly conservative Republicans. Even Barney Frank has graced the bill with his tentative approval. It seems the financial crisis has managed to weld the outrage, if not the policy prescriptions, of the teabagginest fringes of Right to the Populist Left, to the extent that one actually exists.

On its face, the bill seems innocuous and apolitical enough:

(a) In General- Subsection (b) of section 714 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking all after ‘shall audit an agency’ and inserting a period.

(b) Audit- Section 714 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:

‘(e) Audit and Report of the Federal Reserve System-

‘(1) IN GENERAL- The audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks under subsection (b) shall be completed before the end of 2010.

‘(2) REPORT-

‘(A) REQUIRED- A report on the audit referred to in paragraph (1) shall be submitted by the Comptroller General to the Congress before the end of the 90-day period beginning on the date on which such audit is completed and made available to the Speaker of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the committee and each subcommittee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and any other Member of Congress who requests it.

‘(B) CONTENTS- The report under subparagraph (A) shall include a detailed description of the findings and conclusion of the Comptroller General with respect to the audit that is the subject of the report, together with such recommendations for legislative or administrative action as the Comptroller General may determine to be appropriate.’. (source: GovTrack)

By the way, I have no idea where sections "c" and "d" went.

Sounds sensible enough. Except that the Federal Reserve is already audited at least annually by the Comptroller General. What Paul's bill attempts to do is to strike from current law the stipulation, as written in Section 714 of title 31, that...

Audits of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal reserve banks may not include—

(1) transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;

(2) deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations;

(3) transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or

(4) a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)–(3) of this subsection. (source: Cornell Law)

The entire philosophy behind the Federal Reserve System is embodied in that caveat. If a legislative body, the GAO, is able to audit, for the purpose of "legislative or administrative action," Fed decisions as they pertain to monetary policy, you've potentially given Congress veto power over those decisions. This is generally assumed to be a bad move, policy-wise, given the temptation to keep money persistently cheap.

It's perfectly possible that the audit proposed here will leave that issue alone, and in fact, as I understand it Barney Frank made his support conditional on that fact. But then I wonder what the point of it all it. As far as I can tell, at best the bill does nothing at all. It provides an easy way for otherwise disinterested representatives to pretend to hold someone somewhere to account. Or even more productive, maybe this is a way for Congress to reign in the Fed's policy of admittedly radical quantitative easing.

But given Paul's clearly articulated feelings on the Federal Reserve System (namely, that it should be abolished), I can't help but wonder what the dominant underlying motive is.

SURPRISE

The Senate's healthcare bill has been released, and guess what it doesn't contain? If you said a provision mandating health insurance for all Americans, you're completely wrong! You wish it was that! No, the Senate Finance Committee has, beating absolutely nobody's expectations, refused to include the public option. And now that Obama's made it clear that he's not gonna spend political capital on forcing it through, it looks like the government plan's goose is cooked. SURPRISE.

YAY DEMOCRACY. YAY FREEDOM. YAY AMERICA.

Should have considered option 6

My second-least-favourite party props up my least-favourite party and an election is averted for the next week or so.

Domestic Violence a "pre-existing condition"

This is a little old but I still wanted to post it. According to insurance companies in 8 states and Washington DC, being a survivor of domestic violence is a "pre-existing condition." that will affect an individual's insurance coverage.

The original story comes from the Service Employees International Union website, whose report is here.

One commenter on the SEIU blog pointed out that the data used in one of the studies upon which the report is based is over 10 years old, which, for the purpose of statistical rigour, is a fair point to make. However, there is no evidence to suggest that DV has been on the decline, and this particular story sheds light on just how fucked up and unaccountable the U.S. private insurance system really is.

Africa's World War

So, as some of you know, I am home to help my mother fundraise for the NGO that she's been in the process of starting for nine months. It's built on a small yoga program in Rwanda, one which is sponsored by another NGO, WE-ACTx, aimed at orphans and genocide victims. The philosophy is to use yoga to do both physical and mental therapy for women who were (savagely) raped during the genocide and their children. It works very, very well. My mother's idea is to globalize it so that the program can reach women similarly affected by sexual violence all over the world. The first place she chose to go is quite possibly the worst place in the world to be a woman: the Congo.

It's a spectacularly brutal conflict, the war in Congo. It's also one that has hitherto received barely a whisper in public discourse over here. A few basic facts should serve to illustrate how absurd that is. Fighting began in 1996. As of today, five and a half million are dead. Tens of thousands of women are raped every year--27,000 in a single province alone in 2006--and then mutilated with bayonets and machetes. Every possible sadism one could imagine is practiced regularly and with impunity: cannibalism is regularly used to torture victims, as when a woman is forced to eat her own children before being raped within an inch of her life.

That is called Africa's World War is apt, because every nation that borders Congo has blood on its hand. The conflict was patently international from the start: it began when some two million Hutus fled Rwanda for Eastern Congo after Tutsi leader Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda with the ostensible aim of ending the 1994 genocide. Kagame, using the Hutus as a pretext, armed local ethnic-Tutsi Congolese warlords and set them to work conquering the region for him. He did this for an age-old reason: Congo is resource-rich, Rwanda, small and poor. Congo, at the time known as Zaire and still in the grips of an unabashed kleptocrat, Mobuto Sese Seko, was already wracked by civil conflict. Laurent-Desire Kabila, a former militarist in the service of CIA-assassinated Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, had already begun and insurrection against Mobutu. With Rwandan aid, Kabila forced Mobutu out and had himself declared President in 1997 in Kinshasa.

Kabila was not only aided by the Rwandan Tutsis. His army was largely comprised of Tutsis from the Great Lakes region. These Tutsis despised the Hutus in Eastern Congo far more than Mobutu. When Kabila had gotten what he wanted, they set out to get theirs. Unfortunately, Kablia wasn't playing ball; in '98, he threw the Rwandans out, hoping to solidify his position by appointing new, Congolese advisers. The Tutsis were very unhappy with this change. A group known as the Banyamungle, based in Eastern Congo, immediately rose up against the Kabila regime. Thus the string of massacres that had followed Kabila along the Congo River turned into a veritable Stalingrad-like terror of bloodshed.

The back and forth is too intricate to go into in this post. Suffice it to say that no African nation is not in some way involved in the Congo: first came those nations that bordered it, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola; eventually even far-off Chad and Sudan had their claws sunk in. The Congo is perhaps the single most important region in Africa today, if only for all of the attention that African regimes are paying it. And yet we hear nothing, or only scraps and fragments, their paucity suggesting nothing more important there than "the usual African state of affairs." Rwanda will undoubtedly invade (again) very soon. Congo may even spark the next genocide, there, an ironic, if not loathsome, turnabout. Kagame's hold on power in Rwanda relies on the Tutsis' ongoing power-monopoly. Comprising less than 18% of the population, and in what seems an interminable conflict with ethnic-Hutu militias in Eastern Congo, the Rwandan Tutsis are in a position of overreach from which they may not recover. Having distributed the fruits of economic progress with a typical sense of dictatorial largesse--that is, in the style of a pyramid stood on its head--they've struck a wellspring of resentment. The Hutus and the Tutsis have a long and established history of massacring one another. Unfortunately, the numbers are against the Tutsis. If Congo spills into Rwanda, 800,000 may be no more than a footnote to the worst slaughter in African history.

These are things that development simply can't touch, and they show the international system for the paper tiger that it is. With 17,000 UN peacekeepers in Congo, not a single life has been saved or rape prevented. In fact, the peacekeepers are themselves implicated in numerous sexual assaults. What is required in the Congo is what was wasted in Iraq: a swift and powerful military invasion that would break the backs of the largest militias, allowing enough time to disarm and pacify the rest and block gun suppliers from entering the area.

Unfortunately, the rules of international diplomacy work against exactly that sort of strategy. This is a sovereignty issue; unfortunately, sovereignty is massively antiquated, conceptually, in modern warfare. Congo is not a sovereign nation. It is not ruled by anyone. Its borders are not merely porous: they don't really exist. The government in Kinshasa is a fiction. It barely has authority in the west, let alone over the fiefdoms of the east. Besides, it would be an unforgivable mistake to treat Kabila as some sort of bonafide head-of-state, as Mobutu was. Kabila is a thug. You have to be a thug to conquer the Congo.

What to do about Congo? It is fascinating, in an admittedly morbid way, because it pushes the international system to its limits. Where does a place like that--or Somalia, or Afghanistan--fit into our schema of nation-states? Ethnically heterogeneous, ruled, historically, through violence, ambiguous in shape and border (if those concepts have any meaning at all, given local social arrangements), do we nevertheless treat them as a Germany or England? And is it not a lack of innovation in international thought that allows tragedies such as the Congo to repeat themselves indefinitely and at an ungodly cost of human lives and livelihoods? But what, if anything, could replace the rules, or modify them to fit these exceptions?

The dance continues, and Sarah muses on electoral systems

If anything, this sums up pretty well how despite all the squawking about not wanting another election, very few of the current party leaders actually want to work to avoid one in the coming weeks.

The article details how Jack Layton (head of the New Democratic Party) broached the topic of working with the Cons to keep them in power in the face of increasing hostility from the Liberals and Bloc, only to be shot down by the PM. It illustrates pretty well for me the fact that Harper is not going to stop until he gets a majority.

More interestingly, and less surprisingly, is the fact that nobody seems to have figured out that while minority government may actually be the most democratic way to run the country, it only works when all parties are willing to accept the results of an election for more than a year and settle down into actually working out policy, rather than engaging in neverending smear campaigns. Unfortunately, given the vast ideological differences between the Conservatives and the other parties, and the fact that this incarnation of the party is the first time there have even been such large differences between the major players in the Canadian political scene, it doesn't look to me as though minority government will be a workable option. Which, as far as I can see, leaves a few options, none of them attractive:

1) Harper wins a majority, declares women second-class citizens, apocalyptic predictions, bloo bloo blah.
2) The Conservatives win a minority government, refuses to cooperate with anyone else, and the same ridiculous charade is repeated ad nauseum (or ad bankruptium, whichever comes first).
3) The Liberals win a minority, manage to work with the NDP and Bloc. We are subjected to Ignatieff's pompous narcissism, which is (marginally) better than Harper's creepy, soulless narcissism.
4) The Liberals win a majority and hell freezes over.
5) The NDP win a majority and the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup.

Options 1, 4 and 5 notwithstanding, I believe that there is a fundamental problem with the Canadian political system in that the institutions no longer match the reality. It is becoming increasingly clear that no one party is popular enough to win a majority government. That, combined with the inherently unfair and biased nature of the electoral system seem like two very good reasons to scrap our current system and look more closely at proportional representation, or at the very least an MMP system to more accurately reflect the views people across the country.

Joe Wilson is idiot, Gandalf

Interesting point on the Joe Wilson matter from Language Log, a very good linguistics blog I read. A significant fact is that Wilson yelled out "You lie!" instead of what almost every other English speaker today would yell in the same situation, "You're lying!"

However many Americans were moved to tax the President with dishonesty as they listend to the speech, it's a safe bet they expressed themselves the way Limbaugh did, in the present progressive — "You're lying." Whereas what Wilson said was "you lie," revisting a use of the simple present that parted ways with ordinary conversational English a couple of centuries ago.

I don't mean to suggest that Wilson's effusion was planned, but it's hard to believe it was unrehearsed: it has the sound of something he had imagined himself saying to the President in numerous idle reveries, maybe as he struck a heroic pose drawn from his recreational reading.

And it's true, that's actually exactly what I thought when I heard about the outburst - he has probably stood in front of a mirror in his underwear or worse, fantasizing about the time he gets to accuse that uppity negro, preferably in a very dramatic-sounding way.

What a douche.

Monday Roundup

What happens when the quantity of interesting articles becomes vaster than my ability to write about them intelligently? Why, a roundup, of course!

- Michael Scherer ties the current and confusing czar hysteria among conservatives to the "Balkanization" of the news media. This connects nicely with a fantastic piece in the Atlantic by Mark Bowden on the increasing role of partisanship in journalism.

- Daily Mail article on creepy ghost fleet moored off the coast of Singapore.

- The beginnings of a full-blown trade war?

- And, last and least, Christopher Hitchens on why Jon Stewart sucks. There doesn't seem to be any actual explanation, other than that he's a liberal and makes poop jokes too often, but damned if that's going to stop Hitchens from an unfocused rant!

Finally, Bill Kristol is given the respect he deserves

2 million of one, a half a dozen of the other

As usual, Nate Silver rides in to save the day and provide some much needed context and criticism of the various figures being banded about for yesterday's Tea-Party Protest in Washington. I've been waiting desperately for a post of this sort to get published, largely because a) he's dead right that 2,000,000 was an absurd, city-destroying figure and b) crowd size estimates are simultaneously the most effective and the most bullshit metrics protesters will draw upon to support themselves. They are, simply put, very difficult to gather accurately, and as Silver notes, very easy to manipulate. The combination of these two qualities creates a situation in which over-estimates can be quickly accepted and then reinforced within the media environment - the 2 million figure, for example, was originally spread by FreedomWorks, falsely attributing it to ABC News, wound up in a report by the Daily Mail, and then circled back again to the blogosphere, using the Daily Mail as the source of the number.

The really interesting thing about this particular numbers game was the degree to which the figure expanded - thirtyfold, from ~70,000 to 2,000,000 - and how quickly. It really is a catastrophically, embarrassingly high overreach, the kind that shows either how desperate conservative organizers were to make a splash or how deep into their own kool-aid they've gotten. I hope against hope that it injects a little skepticism into media coverage of protests in the future.

Saturday Night Damned-if-you-do Blogging

In a post titled "2,000,000 March on Washington (?)", congratulating the swarms of teabaggers who descended upon DC for 9/12, Red State blogger Erick Erickson adds this caveat:

*I’ve been talking all night to people who are there and involved. The 2 million number was generated by the media, but truly seems to be a gross inflation of what is there. I’m told that at best it was 500,000, but most realistically in the 200,000 person range. Still pretty damn impressive.

Damn Liberal Media!

The first comment on the post:

I just checked A.P. and a story by Nafeesa Sayeed uses the phrase “tens of thousands.”

As many predicted, if thousands showed up, it would be a few hundred.

Millions become thousands for the MSM.

Damn Liberal Me- wait, what?

fashion and the french revolution

that's a real book. it was spyed by a passenger on a bus my mother was taking, who relayed the title to her during a failed attempt to be charming.

my first reaction was disbelief. i quickly transitioned to skepticism of my own shock. why should i be so surprised? asininity and capitalism go hand in hand. i decided that, handed a batch of such exquisitely rotted lemons, it was time to make some very offensive lemonade.

if we can study fashion during the time of the guillotine, then why can't the same concept be applied elsewhere? what about fashion under the khmer rouge? i hear that they did some excellent things with blood-stained rags and bone shavings. like the fireman orgy of old, i see a goldmine, and buncha toothless cretins ready to pounce on it.

And, as a warning

While the guy who maintains The Market Watch can be a total loon, his intense paranoia pays off, sometimes. I tip my hat to him for pointing out this insane bit of fraud on the part of banks. In an effort to apply the maximum possible interest rate to their clients, banks are now looking for any and all ways to force penalties on them. As my dad and stepmother found out very recently, one of their favorite tricks is to tell you that your credit card payments were received after the deadline. Your interest rate immediately soars, and you get a strike on your credit report.

Denninger at The Market Watch received two photographs from one of his readers of a payment coupon from Citigroup, photographs which held a clue as to why so many people are suddenly late paying their credit cards. Citigroup has apparently changed a few of the digits on the mailing address of the second coupon. As Denninger points out, the same post office will receive the letter, but because of the 'mix-up' it'll take that much longer to get to Citigroup. For the x percent of their customers who pay relatively close to the deadline, that means a guaranteed rate hike and even a possible penalty fee.

I can't say this enough. America is so, so very fucked.

How to run a country that doesn't like you

Great article in yesterday's Globe and Mail about Angela Merkel and the upcoming German election:

She told her audience, plainly, that the German military air strike that killed an unknown number of Afghan civilians last week was one of the necessary consequences of a just war.

She was met with a chorus of boos.

Then the German Chancellor told her fellow East Germans that she, like them, had lived through communism and that they should work harder and appreciate the gains they have made and the freedoms they have earned.

Again, boos.

And they're expecting her to win this!

Awesome rhetorical skills aside, it seems that Angela Merkel's key to success is her uncanny knack for doing the precise opposite of what she says she will:

In her first years in office after her surprise 2005 election victory, Ms. Merkel angered party supporters and the media by failing to institute the sort of aggressive, Margaret Thatcher-style economic reforms she had advocated to open up the economy.

Instead, she adopted the rhetoric, and some of the policies, of her former opponents on the left: a reversal of her party's long-held view that Germany is “not a country of immigration,” an aggressive embrace of women-friendly policies on child care and maternity leaves, both novelties in Germany; and a bailout in which the state subsidized the payrolls of 1.5 million workers.

Among Germans, Ms. Merkel's more or less charisma-free, managerial style of politics is winning the day precisely because she has made it seem so similar to that of her opponents, a mirror the Social Democrats have so far failed to shatter.

Say what you will about multiparty parliamentary democracy and the general crappiness of minority governments, but it is impressive how much leaders in these situations are forced to compromise and dilute their own goals. Merkel is a right-wing leader, like Harper, who cannot, for fear of being fired, govern like a right-wing leader. In the United States, where one can receive a mandate from netting, let's say, 50.7% of the vote, a leader who abandoned that many of their original goals and policies would be seen as a flip-flopper. In Canada or Germany, they can stick around as long as they please, trapped in an airless purgatory where they struggle to please or soothe everyone who isn't safely locked into their base. We have yet another election coming up this fall (the fourth in... five years), which I will sagely predict will result in yet another conservative minority, more or less unchanged from where it is now. As much as I dislike Harper, my expectation is that his Merkel-style balancing act over the last few years, combined with Ignatieff's over-ambitious, oddly timed power grab, guarantees he'll get one last, relatively ineffectual term in office before he steps down and the Conservatives replace him. Democracy, man, what a beautiful thing.

heaaaalth caaaaaaare

Did you see Obama's speech to Congress? Did you? I heard that it reinvigorated America and brought fresh life to the cause of health care reform. It was apparently as if "a real grownup was finally speaking on the issues." Americans now agree that he's better on healthcare than ever. He "sounded like a winner." And a girl that I took to a really good Indian restaurant last night said "He just, like, stared them [the Republican Opposition] down."

I'll admit that I did not intend to watch the speech, or pay it much attention. I don't think Obama's a great speaker. All of things he's praised for--honesty, consistency, sounding intelligent--are only so exalted because recent precedent has been so debased. Obama's no RFK, and RFK was no Martin Luther King, etc etc to the time of Moses and Yahweh and the guys who really knew how to get the fear of God into you. Also, while speeches can have a significant upward or downward effect on the polls, I look rather toward performance over the long-term for a gauge of how well a politician can capture the public imagination.

Two things prompted me to change my ways. Both come from my favorite blog, naked capitalism. The first was a link to an article entitled "Tactical Error: Health Care vs Finance Regulatory Reform," by someone named Barry Ritholtz on a blog called The Big Picture. The title is not at all opaque.

There was a narrow window to effect a full regulatory reform of Wall Street, the Banking Industry and other causes of the collapse. Instead, the White House tacked in a different direction, pursuing health care reform.

This was an enormous miscalculation.

[...]

This was a colossal blunder. Passing reform legislation successfully would have fulfilled the campaign promise of “Change;” it would have created legislative momentum. It could have provided a healthy outlet for the Tea Party anger and the raucous Town Hall meetings. It might have even led to a “throw the Bums out” attitude in the mid-term elections, forcing the most radical de-regulators from office.

It was a bizarre move to shut down financial reregulation completely in the early part of the year. I use the word 'bizarre' not because I don't understand why it happened--we can ask Summers and Geithner about that--but because it was an unbelievably stupid move, politically. Ritholtz is right; and the substance of the reform legislation wouldn't even have been important. Naturally, a good bill would have been the best of all possible worlds. A bad bill, however, would have at least bought Obama credit as the punisher of Wall Street, and would still have made it very difficult for Republicans to pin responsibility for the poor state of the economy on him.

Instead, the Democrats let the Republicans beat their chests and call for a witch hunt against the bankers, effectively severing any link between themselves and finance in the public imagination. Then, the Democrats let the whole thing slide. Stock market not about to collapse anymore? Good, let's move on.

And where did we move onto? It wasn't some small Democratic pet project that could buy some short-term public support in advance of bigger schemes. No, it was the mother of them all, the Clinton-killer: health care reform. I think the results speak for themselves. Health care is a fiasco. You can even hear that in Obama's speech, and this is where the second reason to pay attention to it, a post on naked capitalism by Martin Auerbach, comes in.

Auerbach wasn't too impressed.

Yet Obama is not prepared to grasp the nettle. His speech was even weaker than the spin preceding the joint address to Congress suggested. I thought the Obama people were lowering expectations with a view toward a big positive surprise and they managed to go even lower than the bar they set. He took caricatured positions on single payer in order to create a false “centrist” option. The President has basically has[sic] reduced the public option to a marginal welfare style program for 5% of the population, rather than seeing it as a way to break the monopoly of the private health insurance companies, thereby helping to reduce costs. He’s basically forcing everybody into a private health insurance run program

For those of who you are wondering, this is the part of the speech he's talking about:

Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business. They provide a legitimate service, and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors. I just want to hold them accountable. (Applause.) And the insurance reforms that I've already mentioned would do just that. But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. (Applause.) Now, let me be clear. Let me be clear. It would only be an option for those who don't have insurance. No one would be forced to choose it, and it would not impact those of you who already have insurance. In fact, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, we believe that less than 5 percent of Americans would sign up.

I'd quote more about the public option, but in a speech of 7500 words, it's mentioned in something like three paragraphs. The rest is about how the program won't cost a lot of money, cutting waste and inefficiency in Medicare, Ted Kennedy, and meeting the challenges of the day. I was under the impression that the public option was the main thrust of reform, and for the very good reason that it's the only real way to tackle the unbelievably high price of health care here. It's only intended to cover 5% of the population?

It's the cost of healthcare, not the availability of insurance, that is at issue. That's Auerbach's point, and it's a damn good one. What good is insurance to anyone if it's gotta be $15,000 a year? No one in my family could afford that. If the government subsidized us, great, but there's no way that that could be sustainable, not with premiums shooting up by 20% a year. Our problem is that nobody in a prominent public position has told the truth, which is that we are being massively gouged by the healthcare sector. They expect enormous rents--doctors being the best paid profession in America--and they do not have any intention of giving them up. The fact of the matter is that healthcare can be provided universally in other countries, whether publicly or privately, because healthcare simply isn't as expensive, unit for unit. The Netherlands does not have a single-payer system, and yet a health care policy averages 400 euros a year per person. Seeing a doctor in New York for ten minutes is $400. Therein lies the problem.

Healthcare reform will be accomplished only as a macro goal, by a sectoral redistribution of capital and rents. The same is true of finance. What is wrong is that income shares have become so distorted by thirty years of Reaganomics that powerful interests have not only crystallized around these distortions, but have acquired the resources to defend them. And if you think that they aren't perfectly aware of what they're doing, consider this investment report, written by Citigroup, which outlines the 'new' state of affairs:

We will posit that: 1) the world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy?
Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.
2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.

[...]

The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats, like it, or not.

Or not, indeed. Plutonomists don't give up plutonomy easy. As long as it stands, however, healthcare reform will go down in flames, and, from the looks of it, this whole Democratic coup with it.

Carrier pigeon faster than South African broadband

No, seriously. A South African IT company attached a 4GB memory stick to a carrier pigeon and pitted it in a race against a data transfer of the same size over ADSL service provided by SA's largest web provider. It took the pigeon less time to go from point A to point B than it took the data to transfer.

It's one of those goofy stories that the BBC always seems to have on its sidebar so that I can read those before my brain warms up in the morning, but this one caught my attention because of the piss-poor state of internet penetration in Africa. internetworldstats.com has (no shit) data on internet usage worldwide, and the level of net access and use in Africa - and specifically Sub-Saharan Africa - is woeful.

I would imagine that for many people, basic amenities and human security are significantly more important than reliable internet access - that I understand. That being said, the easiest means to participate in economic and social life worldwide has got to be a computer with a reliable internet connection. According to the BBC article,

South Africa is one of the countries hoping to benefit from three new fibre optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet connections.

When I was still in high school, I volunteered with a project that sent computers and computer equipment, along with other education materials, to a youth community centre in Kinshasa. It's a pretty big city, so I imagine that broadband access is more or less reliable, if not speedy. Still, given the rate at which technology becomes "obsolete" to our Western points of view, and the number of projects of which I've heard that send second-hand computer equipment to schools and community centres in the developing world - not to mention the continued desire to create something like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, it seems to me as though making an investment in broadband cable as part of ongoing economic development projects would be a worthwhile endeavor.

Comments? Or is this post just really patronizing in a way that I definitely did not intend it to be?

balls and brass tacks: calling all chorographers

what does everyone think about giving this place a little more class? i put the idea to dave today, and he seemed passively resigned to it. i took that as a yes. what i'm thinking is to put together our own layout, one that's a little more accessible, maybe organized topically. my thinking is that this will make it a lot easier for any potential readers other than ourselves to navigate it, and to take it seriously.

and that brings me to the more important point, which is that i'd like to get other readers. this is a good thing to point future employers to, especially for those of us with an interest in journalism. we've managed to keep it going for a while, now, with a fairly consistent rate of contributions. what does everyone think? should we go, if not the big, then mid-size time?

i'm no designer, and no web programmer, but i am willing to learn all these skills. if people agree with me that this is not an unworthy undertaking, i would appreciate any and all input on what the thing should look like. i was thinking that we have a few simple topic headings, a la a newspaper: economy, politics, fiction, the things ben puts into his butt, etc. underneath these could be the titles of recent posts and maybe a sentence or two from each. on the right or left side, we could keep a list of contributors; the archive, rss links and everything else would read right-to-left next to the blog's title.

the aesthetics are still dim in my mind. dave and i made the profound decision that white would be good for the background. i'm thinking, as i mentioned earlier, of a newspaper-y vibe. keep the layout simple; use as few colors as possible.

que piensan, chorographicos?

spilled milk

last september introduced a lot of prefab rhetoric into political and economic discussions. it's common these days to hear people talk about the hubris of mathematicizing risk, for instance, or the (apparently unexpected) danger of deregulation. even as i write that, though, i'm aware that policymakers have paid the issue of oversight almost no mind. still, for the rest of us it's more or less common wisdom, again.

another theme that i see emerging is the economics profession's mea culpa. as usual, there are dissenters; men like mankiw and, oh, the entire neoclassical wing of the chicago school, don't believe that anything went wrong with macro at all. but whodunnits and whyitduns sell well in gloomy times, and it's the economists who beat their chests the loudest that get the most attention. even non-economists like richard posner have jumped on the bandwagon, loudly proclaiming the failure of capitalism, the wailing of doomsday, fire, brimstone, etc.

the race is on to write the history books. paul krugman, with this piece in the times, appears in the lead. for the most part, it's an institutional history of the economics profession since the Second World War. there's some interesting terminology there--the distinction between 'freshwater' and 'saltwater' economists, referring to individuals tenured at inland and coastal universities--but it's really the first page that counts. in the opening section of his article, entitled "I. Mistaking Beauty For Truth," krugman trots out what is now the standard line among reformist economists: economists like math, or, more specifically, static, two-dimensional math, too much.

now, you've heard this same criticism from me since we started this thing up, so i've no beef with it. my problem with that line is that it's an economist's way of thinking. it masks the effect of individual personalities by assuming everyone's behavior to be more-or-less identical and consistent. no single people become any more responsible for the propagation of silly general equilibrium models than anyone else. my eleventh-grade economics teacher is just as culpable as john cochrane. krugman is a bit better than this. he, at least, lists the sides in the debate, tags their world views, and lets you know what their take on the last thirty years of economic history is. still, other than dropping a few names next to telling quotes, his piece, like all others, focuses on a generalized, systemic problem. personality is largely absent.

the wrong kind of math is the problem. it is somehow the belief of economists that because a large part of what they deal with is quantified under a price system, they are closer to physics than to other social sciences. we all know why that is stupid, and it is stupid, and it is good to know that there will be a literature born out of this fiasco of a year that makes that plain. to forget the key players in the debate is, however, to commit what i like to call the network news fallacy. this is the supposition that all issues must have two sides, or else coverage of them won't be objective. if you leave the people involved untouched, ascribing no fault to them or their actions, then you imply that their views, however much they have inspired economic crisis, are still to be respected. blame the message, not the messenger, etc. what the wrongheaded individuals take away from that is that there is no punishment for their wrongheaded actions. they'll continue to flog their line as if it deserved as much respect as anyone else's. and, indeed, the chicago school has proved unrelenting in this regard; there hasn't been so much as a peep of regret or an admission of failure on their part. for a department that has largely set the tone for the modern economic discipline--a department that, in other words, taught everybody that deregulation was best, that markets are perfect, that public services are wasteful and evil--that is a display of truly remarkable, and dangerous, dogmatism. and unless someone within the profession takes them head on, this opportunity will go to waste, and within no time at all as the loudest voices in the debate, they'll be leading it again.

Granny Default Swaps

"Credit default swap" is one of those readily retrievable terms that has come to stand-in with four or five other acronyms for everything that was and likely continues to be wrong with modern finance. Always reaching for the same grab-back of sufficiently complicated sounding instruments, paragraphs like this one from Saturday's New York Times read to most of us like nursery rhymes that we only later find out are actually about the bubonic plague or infanticide or a compulsively masturbating rodent. We all know the words but only have a vague idea of what those words really mean.

In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, exotic investments dreamed up by Wall Street got much of the blame. It was not just subprime mortgage securities but an array of products — credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations — that proved far riskier than anticipated.

I don't know which newsroom first started stapling the word "exotic" to every other noun in their business section, but somewhere along the way a term that otherwise suggests miniature umbrellas dropped into rum filled coconut halves became the descriptor of choice applied to every poorly understood financial product that made our national job market go away. But regardless of the adjectives employed, unlike most generally accepted simplifications you might read in your morning paper, the one which holds that credit-default swaps deserve if not the lion's than some lesser feline's share of the blame for the financial crisis part of the financial crisis is largely true. This is one lesson that most of us non-bankers can accept. CDSs didn't work so well and it would probably be best if we put them in a very small cage where they can be accessed only under very specific circumstances, if at all.

Consider how bad this sounds: I'll give you some money this month and the next and the next as long as my friend pays off his mortgage. If he doesn't you have to pay me 110% of the 2005 level value of my friend's house. Neither of us have any direct financial interest in the mortgage. You are an investment bank (soon to be bankrupt) and I am hoping that my friend turns out to be even more of a dead-beat than I am.

This is the rationale behind a credit default swap: we should figure out a way to benefit when someone loses their home. So you might ask yourself, if we continue to regulate Wall Street with kid's gloves, what's next? Are we going to sit back and watch as some Armani-sporting succubus with an M.B.A. devises a way to make bets on the life expectancy of elderly cancer patients and welfare-recipients?

...What? Why is everyone looking at me like that?

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

I want them all arrested.

But first, let me back up. I do not think this is the financial equivalent of Soylent Green. I do not think the SEC will permit investment banks to start assassinating the elderly in order to collect on their life insurance policies. Not during a President's first-term anyway. The argument has been made that naked CDS are especially dangerous because buyers have no so-called "insurable interest" in the value of the underlying asset. That argument is not illogical and is based on the empirically validated theory that very powerful people are willing to do very illegal things for money. But applying the same argument to life insurance policies requires a whole new degree of conspiratorial thinking.

But it does raise the question: what the fuck are these people doing? On both a practical and a philosophical level, how is it that securitized life insurance policies will pave the way to a better society? How does tempting the desperate with short-term cash flows and depriving their loved ones of a financial safety cushion in the event of a death in the family make for a more efficient economic system? What and whose purpose does it serve to have a secondary market for a product the fundamental purpose of which is to give holders peace of mind that their family is taken care of in the event of their unfortunate demise? The ideal purpose of finance is to take current savings and to reallocate it towards the production of future consumption goods. That is, to take what we aren't using to make ourselves better off today and use it to make ourselves better off tomorrow.

Instead we have banks putting money on which of this country's geriatrics will drop dead first. Imaginatively speaking, Marx had nothing on these people.

History repeats

A couple weeks back I finished up reading Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which I recommend as heartily as I recommended Nixonland, Perlstein's other more recent book. Before the Storm is a close look at the earliest days of the conservative revolution, back when Reagan was still a celebrity and American mid-century consensus liberalism was at its peak. Perlstein is, as I'm sure I've mentioned several times to you guys, a very talented writer and researcher, and has a knack for recognizing important political events in history that we overlook when we try to understand the American scene as it stands today. In particular, he argues that the 1960s have been widely misinterpreted as a time of leftward social movement, when in reality a much stronger rightwards backlash was developing, one that would have a huge effect on American politics for the next 40+ years. Listening to the health care debates right now, it's hard to disagree with him.

Another great thing about his research is that it is very, very difficult to read Perlstein and not see direct contemporary parallels. The conservative movement in particular is a rich yet troubling source of deja vu - the perpetual allusions to communists or subversives, the fears of indoctrination, the hypocritical acceptance of and contempt towards government funding, and so on. Many have argued that the extreme and increasingly hostile tilt of the conservative base in America today is a product of a movement that has run out of ideas and out of gas, and that it is somehow a distortion of what true conservatism really is or was. Reading Perlstein, however, casts some cold water on this idea. Unfortunately, it also casts cold water on the idea that tea-baggers and Birthers and dittoheads and Glenn Beck are suggestive of an endangered mode of thinking, rather than one that is simply on the outs waiting for its way back in.

The latest deja vu moment for me came earlier today, as I read this post at a site called The Next Right. In short summary, the author, Jon Henke, more or less demanded a boycott on WorldNetDaily, a site that combines far-right outrage with more crassly commercial forms of snake-oil ("Secrets most men will never know about self-defense. Discover what martial artists and the military don’t want you to be aware of" shares page space with "Obama under massive fire for speech to students. Florida GOP: Attempt to 'indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda'"). In response, Henke's fellow conservatives offered their sincerest thanks:

Jon,I hope you get a triple case of AIDS the next time you take it up the a**, you f*****g homo. You and your putrid ilk put that Comie n****r in the White House and accidently woke up the silent majority of white, Christain, tax-paying Americans. No longer will the soul of this great nation be intimidated by political correctness. You f****d up buddy and now you have a front row seat to see the newly awakened vanquish the cancer of fascism from this land. Oh, by the by, I do hope to meet you in person some day for a bit of attitude adjustment.Semper Fi, Motherf****r.

Now, I read the follow-up post before reading the original, but apparently my mind strayed immediately to the same historical comparison Henke did, as he pointed out that "in the 1960's, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being "so far removed from common sense" and later said "We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner."" The Birchers, much like today's Birthers, were a fairly active and surprisingly well-connected group of right-wing conspiracy theorists who, in a troubling paradox for the nascent conservative movement, were both an embarrassment and an excellent source of cash. Buckley, who had only just started up National Review, took it upon himself to throw them overboard, starting a decades-long and still-present split between the activist right and the slightly more moderate conservative elite.

Now, while Henke favourably casts himself as Buckley in this scenario, I'm interpreting this in a slightly different light. In short, the Birchers may have been tossed out by Buckley, but they remained an active and integral part of the Republican machine nonetheless. The process of expunging them only really served to reassure a moderate public that being a conservative wasn't such a horrible thing. Meanwhile, just as today, a significant portion of the movement remained nutso, and that significant portion kept voting and rallying and raising money. So while I wish Henke all the best in his endeavour, history suggests it just won't happen. Whether that means anything in terms of the Republican party's long-term health is the real question.

Kicking while she's down

Vanity Fair has a BIG SCOOP coming out in the next few days in the form of a lengthy piece "written" by Levi Johnston on his former-almost-mother-in-law. I have nothing but disdain for the entire thing, including the gossipy tidbits that Vanity Fair has leaked so far, and I think Michael Scherer hits the nail on the head here:

He paints the Palin family in a withering light, one that appears based in fact, but is of questionable public value. Does it matter that the Palins may have slept in different beds, or that Sarah Palin did not make dinner, or asked her children to rent her videos from the store, or that she proposed adopting Johnston's child, or that she seemed depressed after the election and talked about the need to make more money?

You know, if this were ten months ago, and Vanity Fair was publishing this kind of nonsense, I think I would've been okay with it. You know, politics is beanbag, and all that. Sarah Palin is an unqualified nutcase, and if marginalizing her to the status of tabloid superstar would have been enough to push her away from the White House, then marginalize away. With some distance between me and the more hysterical 2008 incarnation of myself, however, it leaves me profoundly uncomfortable. What, precisely, is the point here? If you watch the video attached to the Vanity Fair teaser, which I only managed to get a couple minutes in to, you get long, unedited shots of Levi, looking confused and unhappy as a number of photographers and make-up artists prepare for him to walk off the edge of a building. Is that the point? To permanently drive a stake through the Palin family, at the expense of Levi's son? To ruin Levi's life by drowning him in an ungodly sum of money that he is too young to spend wisely and too young to refuse?

Palin is doing a perfectly cromulent job ruining her own 2012 chances, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone could make the argument that more dirt needs to be dug up or mud slung at her. There is no political value in continuing to rip into her family like this; if anything, it has backlash potential written all over it. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would pay Levi to give some tell-all love to them, and it will undoubtedly sell millions of copies, but it is appalling that Vanity Fair, which has already devoted so so much ink over the last year to tearing Palin apart in much better ways, would drum this thing up. This is a political hit piece with no political purpose, just malice.