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Political Books
Religious Books -- Not Fundamentalist!
The Fundamentalist Xtians should not be allowed to hijack the language of Christianity. They are at least as much heretics to Christianity as the Arians and Gnostics of early Christian days.
Biblical inerrancy is not possible.
The books both above and below show the limitations of language and the impossibility of Biblical Inerrancy.
How can language be misused? Using General Semantics, this book was Written to explain Nazi propaganda and still used as a textbook
Books - Popular Math, Post Enlightenment & Science
This book explains why the above books on Christian Fundamentalism are politically important in America today.
Modern Society measures risk & predicts possible futures. The book below is a higly readable history of insurance, statistics and modern financial instruments.
Compare this to religion, in which it is presumed that the perfect society was known in the past and all that is necessary to do is to return to that perfect society.
Fascinating, highly readable and fun book on modern mathematics and its limitations. If you are interested in ideas, this is your book!
This is a collection of Hofstader's Scientific American articles. Again, a very fascinationg and highly readable book, requiring no mathematical background. (Buy it used - it is one of the books that will keep disappearing.)
Older, very fascinating book on mathematical ideas. Did you know there are three kinds of infinity?
Now that the House Democrats have passed a health care reform bill, it is going to resonate with the majority of Americans who want both health care reform and the public option. Even if the Senate were to successfully kill the bill now, the majority of American voters have a clear idea of what health care reform can look like, and who is for and against the reform.
This will carry over to the 2010 election, either as proof that the Democrats are taking action against America's problems or that the Republican's refuse to act against America's problems.
The other 2010 election problem for the Democrats is the economy. They have nearly a year now to position themselves as being in support of the American people and to further paint the Republican Party as the Party of No.
I'd say that last night Nancy Pelosi pulled out a really big win for both America and for the Democratic Party. All the Republicans have left is bluster and some ability to tie up the Senate. Neither of those are going to go over too well in an economy that isn't doing well, as is almost certainly going to be the case in November 2010.
Lieberman is also in a weaker position now. How would you like to be a Democratic Senator how could be blamed for killing the HCR bill now? And if Joe were to block a vote and kill the Senate bill, do you think the real Democratic Senators would look on his actions kindly?
The rest of the Senators in the Democratic Caucus would gain a lot of street cred by getting rid of Joe. And at that point, his only choice would be to become a Republican when the Republicans are a powerless minority. And how much seniority are the Republican Senators going to give up to donate to a traitor Democrat? Would he even become a ranking member on some committee?
Yesterday's House vote has a lot of resonance. This is going to be even more interesting from here on out, and I'd say that health care reform is in a good position to be passed. We watched history being made last night.
I don't think there is much doubt now that Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US soldiers and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood Thursday. There have clearly been a lot of reports about the event in the news since then, many inaccurate. But it is not at all clear what happened yet.
I am a retired Army Reserve Major who has spent quite a bit of time at Fort Hood. I also love the Army. It is my family, as much as is my real family. Major Hassan killed my brothers-in-arms. The emphasis is on brothers (or sisters.) But Major Hasan was also one of us. How could he do this? I know he is only a doctor and not a real soldier, but I'm an Ordnance officer and a REMF. Neither of us are (were) combat arms. We were both technicians supporting the guys at the tip of the spear. It's still my family. I need to know what the fuck happened.
The LA Times offers an early report that seems to me to get to some of the answers. But first we need to look at how he got where he is. Major Hasan was a graduate of Virginia Tech. The reports I have seen say that he graduated in 1997. He must have been a damned good student, because he convinced the Army to send him to Medical School. It's one of the Army programs designed to train Army Doctors. He obtained a degree in Osteopathic Medicine and was further trained as a psychiatrist. The training required a commitment to serve in the Army for a number of years. I think it is very important that the commitment was made well before 9/11.
There appears to be no question that Major Hasan was born in the U.S. He is a native born American. He is also a devout Muslim. Is he an eldest child? I'd bet he is. His parents are Muslim, so he has to be in order to please them. And since he is native born American, he is especially devout. He is pleasing his parents. (OK. Pop psychology. But I'll bet it is true.)But it makes him very different from his peers and it makes it very difficult for him to find a wife. He is very demanding that she be devout and practicing Muslim. The important thing is that it means that at age 39 he is still alone and without anyone to support him emotionally. He is a lonely man. Since Muslims consider dogs unclean, he probably doesn't even have a dog.
9/11 was clearly a major event in Major Hasan's life. He was a devout Muslim in the Army after Muslims had attacked America in a big way. Many "Americans" have considered the battles since then to be wars between Christian America and Islam. Then Captain Hasan clearly was questioned regarding his loyalty, even if not officially.
He as already a loner. The questions regarding his loyalty would have driven him even further into distrust of those around him. It doesn't really matter if the questions come from only one in fifty of those around him, the questions are what he would have taken to bed with him at night before falling asleep. It sounds like his profession was his social life.
But his profession was psychiatrist in the Army when the Army was at war with Muslims. And he was a Muslim. Major Hasan's job since the invasion of Iraq has been to listen to and deal with the confessions of American soldiers who very often were confessing war crimes against Muslims.
Major Hasan's identity seems to have been very much wrapped up in his religion. He is at his core a Muslim. How does he feel listening to people who have killed Muslims, often for no better reason than the fact that they were Muslim?
There is a known psychological disorder called Compassion Fatigue. It is common among individuals that work directly with victims of trauma. as they hear more from the victims they themselves literally shut down.
So here we have a man whose profession is to help the enemies of his people deal with the stresses of killing his people. He is also a man who is a loner, one who cannot find a wife who is sufficiently devout.
But he is committed to serving in the Army because they sent him to Medical School and to the advanced training. He asked to leave, but was denied. Then they tell him he is not doing his job satisfactorily because (apparently) he was professing his religion. Then they reassign him and inform him that he is going to be sent to Afghanistan, a war he does not believe should be fought.
So he broke. And he committed a violent suicide, by killing others and expecting to be killed in the process.
He was defending both himself and his religion. His experiences listening to individual American who came back from Iraq will have clearly demonstrated both that Muslims were being killed, war crimes were being committed, and that for many of the American soldiers it was considered a war between Christianity and Islam - a crusade. This would have built into a case of Compassion Fatigue.at the very least. But it would have been more for Major Hasan, since it was his coreligionists who were being killed.
The fact that Major Hasan broke is, in retrospect, no real surprise. The failure to predict is was a clear failure in the Army Medical system. Every psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker should have a personal counselor to help the individual deal with their job, and major Hasan either had none or the individual was too influenced by the needs of the Army to deal properly with the Major.
Why was Major Hasan pushed into this position? The current military was never designed to fight a war this long without calling up the reserves or a draft. The American military has been pushed to the breaking point, and this is another of the cracks it has demonstrated. It is a surprise and a credit to the American military that this kind of event has not happened more often. As it is, the increase in suicides, murders and PTSD demonstrates just how much we Americans are demanding from our military. It is too much and long past too much.
Major Hasan is only another example of the idiocy of the Bush administration. The invasion of Iraq should never have been undertaken unless the Reserves were called up and then the draft were activated. But that was not something the Bush administration felt they could have sold to the America people. They knew how obviously idiotic it was. Iraq is not a war that should have been fought. Then, Afghanistan may have been reasonable, but it simply has not been fought. The resources it required were sent to Iraq, and there was no rational strategy for winning there. Again, it is an example of Bush administration incompetence. Afghanistan couldn't be fought with Iraq and without the draft. The result has been that the American ground military has been destroyed. Major Hasan's actions in Fort Hood are merely one more example of a broken military.
This evaluation of what Major Hasan did is, of course, speculation based on news reports. Someone familiar with Major Hasan's career and file might find a very different time line and situation. But I'll bet based on what I have seen in the last two days this is pretty close.
ABC News has a good story on Sgt. Kimberly Munley who was the civilian police officer who stopped Major Hasan. She saved a lot of lives.
Rep. Joe Wilson (R - SC) has told WorldNetDaily radio that he agrees with Dick Cheney's complaint that Obama is dithering on the decision about how to deal with failed Bush/Cheney war in Afghanistan. Here's what Wilson admitted:
You know, I’m really disappointed, and I actually agree with Vice President Cheney that the President is dithering. And I actually had to look up what “dithering” meant, and it’s “indecisive.” And that’s what the President is being.
Someone with a modicum of education should know what "dithering" means, but at least he bothered to look it up or had a staffer explain it to him. That's only ignorant. But stupid?
What kind of intelligent Congressman admits on radio that he had to look up the word "dithering" in the first place?
Here's the radio statement:
According to Wikipedia this ignorant fool is an attorney and a Colonel in the South Carolina National Guard. This is not a man who favorably represents his constituents. But I guess that's what what the hillbillies of South Carolina think they deserve.
Wall Street got it wrong and very nearly threw the world into Great Depression II
Now we are traveling through the Great Bush Recession with no real economic road map to get us out of it. The free market in investment banking failed and there is no alternative yet. To compound the problem the media is spreading happy talk again about how the recession is over, and the economists have been touting the fact that for the first time in a year the GDP increased rather than decreased. The stock market went up Thursday based on the happy talk.
Then we got the news that consumer confidence is down badly. Today the stock market lost all the phantom gains it made yesterday. Why is consumer confidence down? Consider this.
Cities in California, Florida and Nevada accounted for the 10 highest foreclosure rates in Q309 among metro areas with more than 200,000 people. However, five of those cities reported decreasing foreclosure activity from Q308, offset by many other markets reporting spikes in foreclosures, according to the report.
Sharga sees the foreclosure crisis coming in three waves, and with this new data, the market is showing signs of the second one.
“That first wave of foreclosures cratered the economy, which created job losses, which created the second wave. Now, we’re seeing prime rate loans affected by unemployment. And the third wave will be really a repeat of wave one, except this time we’re going to see a switch of Option ARM and Alt-A loans out for the subprime loans. It will probably be as big but somewhat shorter lived,” Sharga said.
Sharga said that he expects a peak in foreclosures in 2010, only a marginal improvement in 2011 and a return to normal monthly foreclosure activity sometime in 2012.
“Rising unemployment and a new variety of mortgage resets continued to gradually shift the nation’s foreclosure epicenters in the third quarter away from the hot spots of the last two years and toward some metro areas that had avoided the brunt of the first foreclosure wave,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “While toxic subprime mortgages drove much of that first wave of foreclosures, high unemployment and exotic Alt-A Option ARMs are spreading the foreclosure flood to more metro areas in 2009.”
Those increased foreclosures are caused by the increase in unemployment.
But wait! Hasn't the media happy talk been saying that unemployment isn't that bad? No, what they have been doing is spinning the fact that unemployment is no longer falling off a cliff as it was early in 2009. The stimulus money has slowed job loss, but not stopped it. Happy talk means the media is taking not-so-bad news and spinning it as good news.
Want an example? So-and-so stock beat analyst's expectations, so it rose in the market. That just means the analysts thought it would lose more money than they actually did, but they still lost money. That's taking not-so-bad news and spinning it as good news. Don't forget that consumer spending makes up 70% of the total GDP, and investment spending is not going to increase until the consumer markets are growing for the investors to plan to sell to.
Just a quick note on the GDP report. Obviously, 3.5 percent growth is a lot better than shrinkage. But it’s not enough — not remotely enough — to make any real headway against the unemployment problem.
[...]
Basically, we’d be lucky if growth at this rate brought unemployment down by half a percentage point per year. At this rate, we wouldn’t reach anything that feels like full employment until well into the second Palin administration.
So the only solution is Keynesian stimulation of the economy, and the stimulus pushed by both Paulson and by the Obama administration simply wasn't big enough. Krugman told us so, and he was right. The problem is, the economists don't have any real idea how to deal with this, and until they do, the government is not going to be able to get its act together and get something through Congress that will provide any more help than the current inadequate stimulus. (Inadequate for recovery, but thank god for what there is. Otherwise we would be deep in the first year of Great Depression II. Instead we are only in the Great Bush Recession, also brought to us by Alan Greenspan.)
More ideas from economists are badly needed. George Soros is planning on setting up a foundation for dissident economists who ignored the free market boys who got it wrong. Michael Hirsh in Newsweek describes the state of the community of Macro Economists right now.
[W]ith no rules of the road, we have entered a Mad Max world of economics in which even the most eminent of our top regulators and central bankers can't seem to agree on the fundamental nature of financial markets. One clash of titans is occurring between Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke. Volcker, the former Fed chief, wants commercial banks barred from heavy proprietary trading. "I don't want them to be Goldman Sachs, running a zillion proprietary operations," he told me recently. Bernanke, the current Fed chairman, doesn't want to tamper nearly as much with the structure of the Street; instead, he wants to restrain the big banks through changed incentives, such as by tying compensation to long-term performance, and through increased capital requirements. Across the Atlantic, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, is engaged in a fierce debate with Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, over breaking up big banks. King says breaking them up is the only way to prevent another catastrophe; Darling says King doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Even Alan Greenspan appears to be engaged in a fierce argument ... with his own younger self. "U.S. regulators should consider breaking up large financial institutions considered 'too big to fail,' " he said earlier this month. But for most of his life, Greenspan was an Ayn Rand libertarian who abhorred the idea that government should break up anything; he once wrote that "the entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance." Bigger was better, he said, and that way of thinking largely governed his stewardship of the Fed from 1987 to 2005. "The control by Standard Oil, at the turn of the century, of more than eighty percent of refining capacity made economic sense and accelerated the growth of the American economy," Greenspan wrote in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal in 1961. But Greenspan now has this to say about banks: "If they're too big to fail, they're too big. In 1911, we broke up Standard Oil—so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we need to do."
So we don't know what to do, but anyone with a background in Macroeconomics 101 will know when we are finally coming out of the craptitude. It will be when consumer sentiment starts up, and then when consumer spending starts up. And that will not happen until at least half a year after employment starts climbing again.
Personally I think that will require a return to Glass-Stegall and the hard separation of consumer banks and investment banks. The current talk out of Treasury of making the big Wall Street Banks plan for how the government will take them over when they fail is a start. But anti-Trust should also be considered. As Greenspan said - "Too big to fail is just too big."
The New York Times offers an interesting speculation on the evolution of the human body.
The scientific evidence supports the notion that humans evolved to be runners. In a 2007 paper in the journal Sports Medicine, Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, wrote that several characteristics unique to humans suggested endurance running played an important role in our evolution.
Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.
Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.
Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.
“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.
There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.
“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”
Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.
And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”
This makes a good case, and it is well-known in medical circles that a human in training can run down a horse given several days. The horse can always sprint away at first, but the human continues to run and catches up when the horse stops to rest. After a day or so, the horse will simply stop running away and the human catches it. The human, if trained, is capable of greater long term endurance than the horse does.
Most of the recent news has been on the movement of health care reform through the Senate where the Blue Dogs have been building on the intransigent refusal to deal on health care in any way to shift the bill to the right and kill or water down the public option. What is beginning to happen now, though, is that Nancy Pelosi is beginning to set up the health care reform bill in the House so that it becomes a stronger platform to negotiate with the Senate when committees from the two houses get together to reconcile the different bills before sending the joint bill to the President for signature.
The public option has recovered from the days in August when it appeared nearly dead. It is now a lot more likely that it will be included in the final bill.go read the two articles. Start with the one on health care reform in the House.
When anyone is going to be totally out of touch with modern times, the Republicans will demonstrate the greatest degree of "out of touchness" and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele will be there to show them the way.
Stan Greenberg, James Carville & Karl Agne conducted some very interesting focus group studies with groups of conservatives and independents. This is the Executive Summary of their report of findings:
The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barak Obama to be sure - which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush - but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. They overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail
A major conclusion they drew from this study is that the press is focused on racist explanations for the voter's beliefs, but there are indications that racism is not the main driver of conservative attitudes and behavior. What they did find, though, is that conservative beliefs are very different from those of even the more conservative independents. The independents tend to just blow off the more extreme statements from the conservatives, considering such extreme rhetoric as efforts to influence people politically but not really representing what the conservatives actually believe themselves. Here are the findings regarding what the extreme conservatives do actually believe:
...[T]hese conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.
This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country - a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites.
They also believe they possess a level of knowledge and understanding when it comes to politics and current events, one gained from a rejection of the mainstream media and an embrace of conservative media and pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which sets them apart even more.
[I have taken the liberty of adding numbered grouping what was a single paragraph to emphasize the three points.]
So that's the essence of what the report states.
Remember, this is a report of what the Republican base believes, not necessarily what their leaders believe. The right wing political leaders have to cater to this base to maintain their leadership positions, but I think that some believe this stuff and a lot do not.
The evangelicals like Sens. Ensign, Coburn, Enhofe and I suspect, Demint, are true believers. There is no doubt that the more extreme Representives such as Bachman believe this. I'm not sure whether to put Sarah Palin into the group of true believers or the group who manipulates them. A lot of the conservative leaders are their for their own advantage, not because they buy into the full core conservative base agenda. That's probably why the base is so ready to kick out any backsliders like Specter and Lindsay Graham. They don't trust them. They can't trust even other conservatives. Only the members of the oppressed conservative group can be trusted.
Then there are the Wall Street Republicans (big business, big banks, and big oil especially) who are ready to capitalize on this group of isolated and disaffected conservatives. By feeding propaganda to the Republican base directly and by buying off the evangelical leaders, they can manipulate the right-wing politicla leaders into handing them control of the American economy. The entire TV business news system is under their control because they control the advertising revenue that makes the business news possible. The wealthy ultra-conservatives like the oil tycoons, Amway people (i.e. Eric Prince of Blackwater fame), the Walton family (Walmart), the news tycoons (Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch) etc. are a noticeable subset of this group. So are the Libertarians and the Neocons. They are also members of minorities who feel oppressed by the mainstream and they also practice manipulating the Republican core base to the extent that they can.
The Democracy Corps report gives an intriguing look at the nature of the Republican core base. It is a major population group that a number of politicians and economically powerful groups and individuals manipulate to get what they want from the government. That base and its vulnerability to being manipulated politically appears to me to be at the core of America's currently largely dysfunctional politics.
Right on the heels of the disaster the health insurance industry suffered when AHIP released it's attack report propaganda piece right before the Senate Finance Committee vote on the health care bill, they now have a second PR disaster. Greg Sargent reports:
CNN has acknowledged in a statement to me that a high-profile Republican commentator who frequently discusses health care on the air is also the media buyer for one of the ad campaigns bankrolled by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the major industry trade group currently waging war against the White House and Dem reform proposals.
CNN tells me his ties to the industry will be disclosed in the future.
The CNN contributor, well-known GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, is best known for producing the racially-charged “Hands” ad, has repeatedly appeared on the network attacking Dem health care plans and the public option, which is strongly opposed by AHIP.
Castellanos’s consulting firm, National Media, also recently placed over $1 million of TV advertising for AHIP, according to info obtained by Media Matters. AHIP’s most recent $1 million ad buy attacks the health care plan as a threat to Medicare.
This connection, you’d think, should be disclosed whenever Castellanos appears on CNN discussing health care. Asked for comment, CNN spokesperson Edie Emery acknowledged the tie and promised full disclosure in the future.
The insurance industry is rapidly digging a hole that leaves them a laughing stock instead of a credible source of information. This is at a time when the entire health insurance industry is set up to be restructured.
The health care industry fired its big guns yesterday. They published a Price Waterhouse Coopers report that predicted large, immediate increases in the price of health insurance very soon if the health care bills pass. Today PWC took much of the sting out of the report by admitting that no cost savings resulting from the proposed health insurance changes were included in the report Gee. Report on all possible price increases with no possible cost savings. And we should be surprised that the report predicts (wait for it) PRICE INCREASES! (Ta Daa!) The health insurance industry is afraid that if the health care imitative passes they will be less able to gouge sick and potentially sick people for unconscionably high premiums for alleged insurance that as often as not does not actually pay off. It's the best argument yet for single payer health insurance (or failing that, at least a strong public option) that removes the private insurance parasites from the system.
There have been a lot of people who have questioned why, after only nine months in office, Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. It's interesting that until now, no sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A lot of people are asking "Why now? Why Obama?"
Steve Clemons gives the answer. Keep in mind that the Nobel Peace Prize is for actions on the world stage. Since most Americans do not think about anything outside the U.S., they tend to be quite oblivious to what is happening on the world stage. By focusing on domestic U.S. events they have missed what Obama has done already in the globalized world. Here's Steve's explanation.
The world has been mesmerized by Obama since he started to run for the presidency. The battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination did more to educate the rest of the world about real political choice -- and about a system in which no candidates had an automatic lock on victory -- than any USAID program could have achieved.
Obama's decision to make the ulcerous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations one of the first foreign policy challenges of his administration, rather than the last, defied most seasoned analysts' expectations. His message to Iran's citizens, marking the Persian new year holiday of Nowruz, and his powerful and captivating speech in Cairo, Egypt, communicated to Muslims all around the world that their lives and their faith and their expectations for a better world were vital and as valid as any others.
From his perch in the White House, Barack Obama affirmed the humanity of Muslims and told them that America does value Muslim lives.
Obama's posture and rhetoric have reversed the collapse of hope and trust that the world's citizens had in America and stopped the degradation of America's image during the tenure of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.
Should a U.S. president get the Nobel Peace Prize if he's about to send more U.S. troops, armed drones, bombs, tanks and other military hardware into the war-ripped zones in Afghanistan?
Or should Obama get the prize if he hasn't even succeeded in getting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations going? Or if he hasn't gotten Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions and to re-enter the international system on constructive terms?
The answer is yes.
[...]
What is brilliant about Obama and why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that he is a global leader who clearly saw the gains that could be made in changing "the optics" of the global order, upgrading the level of respect between the United States and other nations, making a point of listening to other leaders.
Obama saw that before the world could move to a more stable and better global equilibrium, it had to believe it could -- and this is what Obama has done in ways that no other leader has in memory.
[...]
...the Nobel Prize Committee has shrewdly given a key down payment for a kind of leadership it wants to see from the U.S. for many more years and given Obama another tool to help craft a new global social contract between the United States and other responsible stakeholders in the international system.
So that's why Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize now, even though he has only been in office a very short time. The next question is why the American right-wingers have reacted in such a negative and unpatriotic way to the award from Oslo.
The answer to that is reasonably clear, also. It comes from the nature of conservatives and from their frustration as Obama has slipped their grasp. They "know" that Obama is wrong as President. The President should always be one of their own. They thought that after this summer they were winning. They were returning America to the "proper" balance and were constraining Obama's ability to act. The Nobel Foundation's award of the Peace Prize to Obama threatens all of their progress. And that threat comes from outside the United States, which makes the conservatives even angrier.
Conservatives are by definition traditionalists. They dislike social change and they have a strong sense that there is a given social order, one they belong at the top of. For Obama to become President upsets the social order as they see it and represents the threat of change. Their reaction to that threat is to be viscerally upset, and they are reacting with anger and frustration. They have been escalating the anger since Obama won the election last November and they clearly thought that they were succeeding in limiting what Obama could accomplish in office. That was their message last week when they reacted in such delight when they watched the Olympic committee reject Obama's pitch to give the Olympics to Chicago. The reaction of the right-wing talk show hosts and the Republican political leaders clearly showed that they thought their team had one a big one in Copenhagen. They were on the hunt, and they had their rabbit cornered.
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee snatched away their prey.
Not only did Obama slip their grasp, the Peace Prize gives him a position that will provide protection from their attacks from now on. It's what the Nobel Committee did for Martin Luther King, Lech Wałęsa, Desmond Tutu and for Aung San Suu Kyi. The conservatives thought they had Obama and they were going to return America to what they know is the way it should be. The Nobel Committee has yanked that away from them in a way they never expected possible.
It was a brilliant decision by the Nobel Foundation.
The award of the Noble Peace Prize to Obama yesterday was surprising, but the reactions have been illuminating. Here are some international reactions:
Mohamed Elbaradei, [director of the International Atomic Energy Agency] for example, said, "I cannot think of anyone today more deserving of this honor. In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself." Mandela, Tutu, and Gorbachev, among others, also praised the announcement.
Those who have spoken out against the award all have very similar characteristics and appear to feel threatened by it. They include both the Taliban and the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh expresses surprise that he agrees with the Taliban. Here's the Media Matters utube that collects the Republican reactions recently.
Josh Marshal explains what the rationale for the award appears to be:
This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.
The Noble Peace Prize award was clearly a surprise to a lot of people, but it has also crystallized a lot of opinions today and demonstrated both how very bad the Bush Presidency was and also how surprisingly good the Obama Presidency already is. It's pretty clear that the prize was awarded to Obama to aid him in his efforts to improve America and the world. It was a good move.
If you have felt that the conservatives have lost all reason, you are in good company. Steve Benen explains how American Enterprise Institute conservative writer Steven F. Hayward, explains the extremes of the right wing intellectual collapse but misses a great deal of it.
On Meet the Press, Rachal Madow, David Brooks and E.J. Dionne all pointed to the nasty anti-American reaction of the right-wing to Obama's effort to get the Olympics for 2016.
Rachel Maddow "The unseemly cheering on the right for America losing its Olympic bid I think is going to be the taste that lingers a long time after this failure," Rachel said. "Certainly the president tried to get something and he didn't get it, and people who hate the president feel like that's a cause for celebration. But to see, for example, the Weekly Standard post 'Chicago loses, Chicago loses, cheers erupt at Weekly Standard headquarters' I think says a lot more about the Weekly Standard, it says a lot more about the right right now than it does about this loss."
Noting the larger context, Rachel added, "In 2012, London got the Olympics after Blair tried for them; in 2014, Russian got them -- Russia got them after Putin tried for them; and in 2016 all four finalists had their head of government or head of state to make the argument. Obama did nothing unreasonable. And it would've been a shock if Chicago won. For them to be cheering America's loss here on the right I think is sort of disgusting."
David Brooks largely agreed, at least to the extent that the president's efforts were entirely reasonable. "He took a risk for his country," Brooks said. "He put the country ahead of his own personal prestige. He lost one. I actually don't mind it. I think, I think he was all right on this."
E.J. Dionne added, "John McCain's slogan was 'country first,' and in this case it was 'Obama hatred first' on the right, not the country."
What happens to the people left behind when someone dies? In the U.S. 2.5 million people die each year and on average four other people are affected. The death of a loved one can be painful and lasting but most people get over it in time. However for roughly 15% of the survivors the effects persist for 2 to 20 years to the extent that the person can barely get out of bed in the morning.
This extreme form of grieving is called complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder. For over a million people a year
...becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function. “It takes a person away from humanity,” she said of their suffering, “and has no redemptive value.”
Research has shown that such grief can become a mental disorder quite as debilitating as Depression or PTSD. Research shows that it can. For susceptible people such prolonged grief can predict sociality, a higher level of substance abuse, cigarette and alcohol consumption better than can a diagnosis of depression can.
The New York Times science section has an interesting report on this disorder. It apparently is likely to appear in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) scheduled to be issued in 2012.
The drought that afflicted the the Southeastern U.S. from 2005 to 2007 was a result of population growth, not of global warming. At least this is what Richard Seager, a climate expert at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led a study of that drought told interviewers when asked. The drought was apparently no different from others in the same region over the last century, so the only significant factor that changed was the population increase in that region.
The researchers said rainfall patterns in the Southeast were linked only weakly to weather patterns like La Niña and El Niño, the oscillating warm and cold conditions in the eastern Pacific linked to precipitation rates in the Southwestern United States.
Instead, they wrote, any variation in rainfall in the Southeast commonly “arises from internal atmospheric processes and is essentially unpredictable.”
Idiots who fantasize that somehow this proves that there is no global warming should remember that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is enough other proof of global warming to guarantee that it is a real phenomenon.
The New York Times has a really scary story on the dangers of getting E. Coli from hamburger.
It's a long story, but the short summary is that every time you eat hamburger you are risking your health and your life. There is little or no possibility that the meat packers can or will guarantee their product is free from contamination. The FDA will not permit the information to be released because the meat packing companies treat the systems of hamburger safety as trade secrets, and by law the FDA must protect trade secrets. So the problem starts with the meat packers and runs directly back to Congress.
Excerpt from 11 January 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
source:The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Samuel Rosenman, ed.), Vol XIII (NY: Harper, 1950), 40-42
12 How. 152: “Necessitous men,” says the Lord Chancellor, in Vernon v Bethell, 2 Eden 113 (1762), “are not, truly speaking, free men; but, to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms that the crafty may impose on them.”
How likely is it that Strategic Vision LLC has just been making up the numbers it reports? The New York Times reports:
news organizations are rethinking their use of Strategic Vision’s numbers after the company was reprimanded [* See below] last week by a professional association of pollsters for failing to disclose “essential facts” about its methods. [...] Strategic Vision was founded by Mr. Johnson and his wife, Laura Ward, as a Republican-leaning mom-and-pop public relations company in 2002. In 2004, the company branched out into polling, focusing on Senate and presidential races. One of its clients is the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, based in Indiana, which supports the use of government vouchers to send children to private schools.
Like many of its competitors, Strategic Vision issued polls it said were self-financed, as a way of attracting attention and clients. The company was successful in part because its polling was prolific and was often among the earliest on a given race, like the one in which Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 2006.
Early on, questions were raised about how such a small firm could conduct so many self-financed polls, but Mr. Johnson, a frequent commentator on Fox News, said they accounted for the company’s entire marketing budget. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution repeatedly requested supporting documentation for the poll results but never received any, said James A. Mallory, senior managing editor. A spokeswoman for CNN said it had declined for years to use Strategic Vision’s polls. [...] The reprimand, by [*] the American Association for Public Opinion Research, stemmed from an investigation it conducted after many polls showed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton trailing in the run-up to the 2008 Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, where she went on to win. The association requested minimal information from 21 polling companies that, according to its professional guidelines, all polls should disclose, including sample size, response rate and polling dates.
Strategic Vision was the only company that did not provide the information, prompting a complaint filed with the association.
Let's see. New company. No track record. Based on a lot of publicity by the owner. Right-wing oriented. Refuses to provide sample size, response rate and polling dates which are minimal data for evaluating a sample poll.
That's a company to disbelieve whenever its name is associated with any poll.
They'll do something about this report quickly. My bet is that they will soon change the name of their company.
Here is a graph with an estimate of the impact of the preliminary estimate of the annual benchmark revision. (ht John)
Click on graph for larger image.
The dashed line is an estimate of the impact of the large benchmark revision (824 thousand more jobs lost).
The graph compares the job losses from the start of the employment recession in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost).
Instead of 7.2 million net jobs lost since December 2007, the preliminary benchmark estimate suggests the U.S. has lost over 8.0 million net jobs during that period.
But it's not just Calculated Risk. The following is from yesterday's Paul Krugman editorial.
Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.
No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.
Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.
But while not having another depression is a good thing, all indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come.
Indeed, the administration’s own economic projection — a projection that takes into account the extra jobs the administration says its policies will create — is that the unemployment rate, which was below 5 percent just two years ago, will average 9.8 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2011, and 7.7 percent in 2012.
This should not be considered an acceptable outlook. For one thing, it implies an enormous amount of suffering over the next few years. Moreover, unemployment that remains that high, that long, will cast long shadows over America’s future.
Krugman goes on to point to a recent study that shows that after prolonged periods of greater than normal unemployment, the economy itself has a much harder time recovering. Then he adds:
Wait. It gets worse. A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”
The same report, however, suggests that this isn’t inevitable: “We find that a stronger short-term fiscal policy response” — by which they mean a temporary increase in government spending — “is significantly associated with smaller medium-term output losses.”
So the problem is that the stimulus has been inadequate and that while it has stopped us from sliding into a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930's, it is not enough to keep our economy from being crippled by the financial recession for many years, even for decades.
Why don't we hear just how "iffy" the economy is? The news media and the politicians can't sell bad news. If they try they'll quickly be replaced by alternatives that say when most of the public wants to hear.
The news media cannot sell advertisers to buy ads on shows or in papers that report mostly bad news. So the business news the public gets is all about "Economic Happy Talk" or as we in the Army used to call it, "Happy, Happy Bullshit." What passes for economic news is primarily salesmen standing up and trying to sell the financial products.
The politicians in charge have exactly the same problem. If they provide realistic but negative evaluations of the economy to the public they will quickly be replaced by someone who promises a quick turnaround. So we can[t expect Ben Bernanke or Tim Geithner to level with the public.
Then there is the "Loyal" Opposition. They have committed themselves to a strategy of total obstructionism. This is a non-violent method of making the nation ungovernable unless they are called in to govern. (Terrorism is the violent form of the same strategy. The anti-abortion groups, the more radical militia and the Neo-Nazi groups are waiting in the wings to conduct this strategy.) But they are after power. Economics is secondary to their desire to gain political power.
So there it is. The American economy is in the worst shape it has been since the 1930's because of macroeconomic mismanagement by the conservative government and the right-wing politicians. Because of political constraints the government cannot take many of the actions needed to prevent the economic situation from continuing to get worse, or even to tell the public that recovery will not automatically start in the near future. And the right-wing and libertarian politicians who have created the mess will not let the government actively fix the mess they created because are waiting for the economic failure that will return them to power. This will allow them to loot the economy for their own benefit.
Forget the stock market. It is being propped up by government stimulus money. Just watch the unemployment rate to see what is really happening. And don't feel to happy about a one or two month improvement. Until workers start taking home more money the consumption sector will not improve on its own, and until that happens, the economy will remain on government life support or it will be falling.
The Vatican's Archbishop Silvano Tomasi (Vatican's permanent observer to the U.N.) offered a statement responding to allegations that Vatican officials have done too little to deal with sex abuse within the Catholic Church.
He said that “available research” estimated that between 1.5 per cent and five per cent of clergy had been involved in abuse, the Guardian reported.
Children were more likely to suffer at the hands of relatives, family friends or babysitters than clerics, he argued.
The Archbishop also quoted research published in the Christian Science Monitor newspaper which suggested that most congregations affected by child sex allegations in the US were protestant churches while the problem was also common in the Jewish community.
Yeah, Right. The Archbishop testily says "Get off our back! The Protestants and Jews have clergy who sexually abuse children, also. We're not the only ones!"
The Archbishop is being defensive and entirely misses the point regarding what the Catholic Church is being blamed for. The Catholic Church is not the only institution that has pedophiles who join them, gain power over children and use that power to sexually abuse those children. The Catholic church is not being blamed for the existence of pedophiles. They are being blamed for accepting them into the organization, putting them in positions of power, trust and authority where they can abuse children, and then for defending those pedophiles and hiding them instead of stopping them and exposing them. How many of the other denominations have an organizational culture that makes defending the pedophiles in their midst more important than protecting children from such predators who use their positions in the church?
The Catholic Church is not being blamed for the existence of Pedophiles. It is being blamed for providing pedophiles positions of power and trust over children and for hiding the pedophiles after they have committed their crimes and protecting them from punishment for their horrible deeds. Such criminals should have been rejected in the process of selection as Priests, and when the selection procedures failed, they should be removed, punished, and exposed to the public for what they are and what they have done.
The Archbishop and his fellow Catholic leaders are not protecting the Church by concealing and protecting the pedophiles who join them. They are instead making those pedophiles representatives of the Catholic institution.
Gore Vidal has fought through WW II, written hit movies and written great books. He also grew up with John F. Kennedy and traveled in those social circles. He's got the background to know America. So he says:
"Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How's Obama doing? "Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we've had in that position for a long time. But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism." America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up", Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."
His voice strengthens. "One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don't demand honour, that can be lies too. I don't say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media." The media is too supine? "Would that it was. They're busy preparing us for an Iranian war." He retains some optimism about Obama "because he doesn't lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive."
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in "a black city" (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama's intelligence. "But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred - religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists."
Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. "He f***ed it up. I don't know how because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen." As for his wider vision: "Maybe he doesn't have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it'. That's what Obama needs - a bit of Lincoln's chill." Has he met Obama? "No," he says quietly, "I've had my time with presidents." Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: "Bang bang." He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. "Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital," he says in a wry, dreamy way.
Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. "Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they're good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to."The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. "Remember the coup d'etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush."
Vidal says forcefully that he wished he'd never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime's-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.
He observes presidential office-holders balefully. "The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn't impress me as a good president. It's like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?' It's complicated. I'd known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him - that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot."
Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say ‘They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush."
Vidal adds menacingly: "Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."
Cynical? Or just able to see what is really happening quite clearly?
Let's hope he's missed something important. I wouldn't bet he is missing that much.
Following Palin's speech in China recently her speakers bureau is find that she is hard to sell. It seems that $100,000 per speech is a bit too high to get someone who might or might not show up and even if she does, is a blithering idiot who "can't even describe what she reads." Unsurprising, really.
RNC Chairman Michael Steele claims to seriously doubt that Obama is facing racism or that Obama has received 400% more death threats that Bush did. NO surprise, really. Steele has his current job as an African-American public face for a conservative party that would be channeling the KKK if it weren't such a bad brand at the voting booth these days. It's natural that since Steele is employed to pretend the Republican conservatives are not racist that he would refuse to admit that Obama is being threatened by racists.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is now famous for standing up in Congress and stating that "...the Republican health care plan is 'don’t get sick,' and if you do get sick, 'die quickly.' " He is, of course, basing this statement on the recent study that shows that 44,789 Americans die each year as a direct result of not having health insurance that allows them to get timely access to health care. The Republicans hit the roof in their normal unconstrained manner and demanded an apology. So Grayson did apologize.
“I would like to apologize,” he said. “I would like to apologize to the dead.” [...] Then further along in his speech, Grayson apologized one last time "I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner,” he said.
We need more Democrats defending the health care reform. Grayson is completely right and his reply to the right-wing Party of NO! is the correct response.
MOSCOW — After a lengthy inquiry, investigators commissioned by the European Union are expected to conclude that Georgia ignited last year’s war with Russia by attacking separatists in South Ossetia, rejecting the Georgian government’s explanation that the attack was defensive, according to an official familiar with the investigators’ work.
But the report is expected to balance this conclusion with an equally weighty one: If Georgia fired the first shot, Russia created and exploited the conditions that led to war, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not yet been made public.
In the years preceding the conflict, Russia encouraged separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories in Georgia, training their military forces and distributing Russian passports.
It's an interesting article, but it does not address the admittedly parochial American issue of whether the Bush administration failed to adequately restrain Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili.
World Bank President Bob Zoellick is no anti-globalism Casandra, so when he says the greatest danger to the continuation of the Dollar as the world's reserve currency is those central bankers and Congresspersons who should be defending it, it's time to look at the issue carefully. Here is an article about what Zoellick said,
The international economic system will evolve with our cooperation or without it. Currently the biggest threat to the dollar is not those who seek alternatives but the U.S. policies that are pushing them in that direction.
Mr. Zoellick said central banks around the world fell down as regulators -- and that the Treasury, which is more accountable to Congress, should be given the authority to regulate big financial institutions, not the Fed.
"It will be difficult to vest the independent and powerful technocrats at the Federal Reserve with more authority," he said. "My reading of recent crisis management is that the Treasury Department needed greater authority to pull together a bevy of different regulators. Moreover, the Treasury is an executive department, and therefore Congress and the public can more directly oversee how it uses any added authority."
Mr. Zoellick, among other positions in the U.S. government, served in various posts in the Treasury from 1985 to 1993.
"Central banks failed to address risks building in the new economy," Mr. Zoellick said. "They seemingly mastered product price inflation in the 1980s, but most decided that asset price bubbles were difficult to identify and to restrain with monetary policy. They argued that damage to the 'real economy' of jobs, production, savings, and consumption could be contained once bubbles burst, through aggressive easing of interest rates. They turned out to be wrong."
The idea that somehow the solution to America's economic problems can be solved by piling more and more power onto the (bank-controlled) Federal Reserve is reaching the level of pure silliness. The Fed already has too much power and too little accountability for the good of the American economy.
The mayor of Mount Vernon, WA gave hometown boy Glenn Beck the key to the city. The city council and a lot of residents disagreed. TPM offers pictures.
Lane Wallace reports on a study by a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College into the problem of Motivated Reasoning. How often have we liberals complained that the right-wing knows the outcome they want and tailor the collection of facts and analysis to achieve the outcome desired before they started? This seems to be the explanation.
How is it that people can cling to an opinion or view of a person, event, issue of the world, despite being presented with clear or mounting data that contradicts that position? The easy answer, of course, is simply that people are irrational. But a closer look at some of the particular ways and reasons we're irrational offers some interesting food for thought.
In a recently published study, a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College found that people often employ an approach the researchers called "motivated reasoning" when sorting through new information or arguments, especially on controversial issues. Motivated reasoning is, as UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman put it, the equivalent of policy-driven data, instead of data-driven policy.
In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.
That's not a news flash to anyone who's paid attention to any recent national debate--although the researchers pointed out that this finding, itself, runs counter to the idea that the reason people continue to hold positions counter to all evidence is because of misinformation or lack of access to the correct data. Even when presented with compelling, factual data from sources they trusted, many of the subjects still found ways to dismiss it. But the most interesting (or disturbing) aspect of the Northwestern study was the finding that providing additional counter-evidence, facts, or arguments actually intensified this reaction. Additional countering data, it seems, increases the cognitive dissonance, and therefore the need for subjects to alleviate that discomfort by retreating into more rigidly selective hearing and entrenched positions.
Needless to say, these findings do not bode well for anyone with hopes of changing anyone else's mind with facts or rational discussion, especially on "hot button" issues. But why do we cling so fiercely to positions when they don't even involve us directly? Why do we care who got to the North Pole first? Or whether a particular bill has provision X versus provision Y in it? Why don't we care more about simply finding out the truth--especially in cases where one "right" answer actually exists?
Part of the reason, according to Kleiman, is "the brute fact that people identify their opinions with themselves; to admit having been wrong is to have lost the argument, and (as Vince Lombardi said), every time you lose, you die a little." And, he adds, "there is no more destructive force in human affairs--not greed, not hatred--than the desire to have been right."
So, what do we do about that? If overcoming "the desire to have been right" is half as challenging as overcoming hate or greed, the outlook doesn't seem promising. But Kleiman, who specializes in crime control policy and alternative solutions to very sticky problems (his latest book is "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment"), thinks all is not lost. He points to the philosopher Karl Popper, who, he says, believed fiercely in the discipline and teaching of critical thinking, because "it allows us to offer up our opinions as a sacrifice, so that they die in our stead."
A liberal education, Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.
Mark Kleiman describes what a liberal education should do to counter the logical problems caused by motivated reasoning. How do we deal with evangelical religious and ideological political institutions that exist to teach their students to practice motivated reasoning? Because that's exactly what Regent University, Liberty University, the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute and other cults all do.
The death of Bill Sparkman in Eastern Kentucky has been national news for a week or so, but the authorities have been quite sparing on the details. But now the CBS and the Associated Press have published some of the details that the authorities were holding back.
A man who said he was among those who found the body told tells the Associated Press that Sparkman was naked, bound at the hands and feet with duct tape and gagged - details that have not yet been confirmed by authorities.
Jerry Weaver of Ohio told the Associated Press he was visiting a cemetery in rural Kentucky with family members on Sept. 12 when he, his wife and daughter saw the body.
"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something.
"He was murdered," Weaver said. "There's no doubt."
Weaver said the body was about 50 yards from a 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck.
Two people briefed on the investigation said various details of Weaver's account matched the details of the crime scene, though both people said they were not informed who found the body. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
Authorities have said a preliminary cause of death was asphyxiation, pending a full medical examination. According to a Kentucky State Police statement, the body was hanging from a tree with a rope around the neck, yet it was in contact with the ground.
"And they even had duct tape around his neck," Weaver said. "And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder."
Both of the people briefed on the investigation confirmed that Sparkman's Census Bureau ID was found taped to his head and shoulder area. Weaver said he couldn't tell if the tag was a Census ID because he didn't get close enough to read it. He could see writing on Sparkman's chest, but could not read that it said "fed."
With both hands and feet duct tapped this was clearly murder. The fact that the body was naked and the federal ID was duct taped to the body is a clear statement of why. Is there an alternative explanation?
Although anti-government sentiment was one possibility in the death, some in law enforcement also cited the prevalence of drug activity in the area - including meth labs and marijuana fields - although they had no reason to believe there was a link to Sparkman's death.
Why would drug dealers display the body they way these killers did? Especially with the census taker ID taped to the naked body? That just attracts police. Having Sparkman simply disappear would have been much more reasonable for drug dealers protecting their operation. This was designed to attract the media.
Then consider this.
A retired state trooper who worked with Sparkman at Johnson Elementary School, some 30 miles from where the body was found, said he warned Sparkman that some people in the rural area are hostile.
"I said, 'Bill you be careful when you go over to eastern Kentucky to do your census work. Some of the people over there may not understand that you're just collecting statistics,'" friend Gilbert Acciardo told CBS News.
Both Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachman have been encouraging people to refuse to cooperate with the Census because it is "an intrusive government program" by an authoritarian federal government. Of course, I doubt that either has told anyone directly on the record to kill census takers the way Glenn Beck told his viewer to kill Dr. Tillman because he provided late term (legal) abortions. But there are crazies out there just looking for excuses and targets to kill. Those two certainly have been stoking the fires under the crazies.
There is no difference between what Bachman and Beck have been saying and yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. They did not target him specifically but they got Bill Sparkman killed.
The Massachusetts legislature passed a bill authorizing the governor to appoint an interim Senator to fill the seat which became vacant when Sen. Ted Kennedy died. The election to fill the seat permanently will still occur in the Spring of 2010. The GOP immediately brought suit saying that since the legislature did not declare that the interim appointment was an emergency appointment with a two-thirds vote, then the MA governor was required to wait 90 days to make the appointment.
State Court Judge Tom Connolly disagreed and threw out the GOP lawsuit as being without basis. This was Judge Connolly's argument:
Lawmakers passed a law this week giving Patrick the power to appoint an interim replacement for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy until a special election can be held Jan. 19. Laws usually take 90 days to go into effect, but Patrick signed an emergency letter which made it effective immediately.
In a court filing, Assistant Attorney General Peter Sacks countered that the Supreme Judicial Court in a 1975 ruling had made it clear that a governor does not need legislative approval to invoke an emergency. He also said that the judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to directly block a governor's executive appointment.
On Thursday, Secretary of State William F. Galvin, a Democrat, said the emergency letter is "very clearly available to the governor under the Constitution. I don't know how you suggest this is something novel. It's not."
Former Republican governor Mitt Romney used the emergency provision 14 times, Galvin added, including to increase the boating speed limit in Charlton and to change the office of town moderator in Milton. [...] "the Party [The GOP] does not cite any case law in support of its argument."
So the precedent is that the Governor has the power to declare the law an emergency on his own and previous governors have frequently used that power. There is no case law that establishes that the governor does NOT have the power to make the immediate appointment. If there were then the GOP would have cited it in their lawsuit.
It looks to me as though the GOP was bringing a frivolous lawsuit hoping to get it heard by a lawless conservative judge who does what he wants instead of what the law requires. Now that Judge Connolly has done what the law and precedent required, the GOP is going to complain loudly in the media for a while. They were just playing for more time to kill health care reform.
Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest--building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare--the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck's vision of what's wrong with America--one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street--the social contagion of the interregnum's morbid symptoms will continue to spread.
This is the conclusion that Jon Taplin has come to. It's very interesting how he gets there.
I had identified the problem of the culture clash myself, but I had not put the rest of it all together they way he has. His book should be very interesting.
What went wrong with macro economics and financial economics
I have previously written about Paul Krugman's article in the NY Magazine about how the economics profession got a real black eye out of the current Recession-and-almost-Depression. Here's some more writings on the same subject:
They all tell pretty much the same story. Financial economists and Macro economists essentially overlooked the warnings that the economy was coming off its rails.
The articles are all quite good, and each takes a mildly different look at the issues so reading them all helps in understanding what has been happening to us. My earlier blog can be found at The US economy is surprisingly dysfunctional. . It contains links to other writings, as do many of the articles in the list above.
One important point to remember, though. Even though the economists got some important points wrong, the politicians have been consistently much worse and should not be trusted.
This is funny. The protesters want the government services and they want them to work right. They just refuse to plan for or pay for it.
Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.
Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.
Seriously.
The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.”
Apparently, Brady heard complaints from some of his constituents who traveled to D.C. to protest "big government." They were disappointed to discover, however, that the government had done more to satisfy their public-transportation expectations, and now want other government officials to address the problem.
In some instances, Brady said constituents relied on private enterprise -- taxi cabs -- rather than the (ahem) public option. The conservative lawmaker described this as a bad thing. Local officials, Brady said, should have made "a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit" to the public.
Read that sentence again and replace "transit" with "health care coverage."
Is it any wonder that the Bush administration, which was administered to suit the demands of conservatives like these teabaggers, failed utterly to function even adequately? It's irrationalism in action.
Sen. Baucus is presenting his committee's health care bill proposal today. He has negotiated for months, delaying the entire health care process to the point that Republicans think they can kill what last summer seemed inevitable to pass, and what has Sen. Baucus achieved?
It is truly amazing that such a long term experienced Senator, one who is intelligent and well-thought of, should fail to understand that what he was trying to do was politically impossible and that the Republican Party was playing him. Baucus has simply been insulated in the 100 rich man's club (the US Senate) for much too long to understand the political reality of the health cared debate.
I hope the damage Baucus has caused and permitted can be repaired. That's more likely than repairing Baucus' reputation as an effective politician who works for the good of the American public.
The ability of humans to think about what they are thinking about (Metacognition)has long been considered by many as a uniquely human behavior. Maybe not. Maybe it's just easier to test for in humans because humans can talk about what they are thinking about, while similar tests in animals require observing the animal behavior and inferring what they are thinking about. This from Live Science at Yahoo News:
Some animals are more thoughtful than others, according to a comparative psychologist who says evidence is mounting that dolphins, macaque monkeys and other animals share our ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.
J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo notes that humans are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. "Humans can feel uncertainty. They know when they do not know or remember, and they respond well to uncertainty by deferring response and seeking information," Smith writes in the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
And accumulating research, he says, suggests metacognition is not unique to humans.
"The idea is that some minds have a cognitive executive that can look in on the human's or the animal's thoughts and problem-solving and look at how its going and see if there are ways to guide it or if behavior needs to pause while more information is obtained," Smith told LiveScience.
So what, you say?
Metacognition is a critical part of what it means to be conscious. If we can understand metacognition, then we are further down the road to understanding what consciousness is.
Teddy Kennedy's memoir has come out today, and talking Points Memo has just published what Kennedy wrote about the way the Bush/Cheney administration lied America into invading Iraq for American domestic political purposes. America has lost all the lives and treasure, and Iraq has been devastated to advance the political fortunes of the American conservatives.
Here is Kennedy on the lack of justification for the war:
My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:
• A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question; • It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people; • It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, self-interested motives; • It must be a last resort; • It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and • It must have a reasonable chance of success.
There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.
As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.
Besides being a fraud, the War in Iraq caused the Bush/Cheney administration to take the resources away from Afghanistan where they were actually needed. The result is that America did nothing to improve Afghanistan at a time when the population was a lot more prepared to accept what we had to offer. Because of the Bush/Cheney blindness and self-centered conservative, the Taliban has been reconstructed and now threatens the nuclear-capable Pakistan and al Qaeda is becoming a new and more dangerous entity world wide.
In every way the Bush/Cheney administration failed to provide for American security and failed to adequately protect the American people.
South Carolina has a real history as the home of resistance to the federal government. Currently it houses Governor Mark Sanford and House Representative Joe Wilson. Politico has this interesting article.
Just under nine months into the president's term, the state has emerged as a beachhead for the president's most aggressive conservative critics, a secure launching point for some of the harshest attacks on the administration’s policy initiatives.
[...]
The state has a long history of stridency in national politics, having produced legendary opposition figures from Vice President John C. Calhoun, who helped pave the way for the Civil War, to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered historic civil rights legislation. By comparison, DeMint, Sanford and Wilson are a tame bunch.
"South Carolina is a state that's always loved having characters for politicians," said Bruce Haynes, a political consultant who served as an aide to Campbell. "There's been no shortage of South Carolina politicians over the past 50 years who have said some interesting and outrageous things. And they tend to be reelected by large margins."
Several reasons why America is in an economic crisis.
First, is an excellent article by Anna Burger in Huffington post that describes how the US Chamber of Commerce has orchestrated the uncompetitive structure of large corporations and the way top executives control their corporations even when the shareholders object. Here's a sample
To find the "whodunnit" of our current economic crisis, look no further than the corporate boardroom.
Far from serving as checks-and-balances, today's corporate directors are under thumbs of the CEOs who selected them. With unquestioned power and ever increasing arrogance, CEOs can take unnecessary risks, hide details of bad investments, and pay out excessive bonuses to themselves and top executives regardless of their job performance.
That's how subprime mortgages and credit default swaps were hatched. That's how Bank of America's Ken Lewis kept details of Merrill Lynch's poor health and plans of multi-billion dollar bonuses from shareholders. That's how the initial nine banks that got TARP money could pay out $32.6 billion in bonuses last year despite getting a $175 billion dollar bailout from taxpayers.
Then, also in the Huffington Post is an article by Ryan Grim that shows how the Economics profession is dominated by the Federal Reserve.
The Fed belongs to the banks, and all three work in close coordination to make sure that everyone is speaking on the same sheet of music as they propagandize about the economy.
Then there is Paul Krugman's article in the Sunday New York Times describing just how badly the Economics profession got its recommendations in the run up to the 2008 collapse of the American (and then the world) banking system which nearly threw the world into Great Depression II. (I blogged about Krugman's article last Saturday.)
Then there is the fiction that the economy is somehow self-sufficient and self-regulating. It's not. Power structures determine where and how economic transactions occur, but since power cannot be measured in dollars it gets forgotten when we talk about economics. There was a reason why the discipline used to be called Political-economics before Economics itself became a branch of statistics.
Consider how big business organizations are structured. America's economy is largely controlled by large businesses and those businesses act largely at the behest of wealthy conservative oligarchs. Here is how it works.
Big businesses are controlled by the self-defensive conservative wealthy elite whose main purpose is to protect their social position and the wealth that assures they keep that position. The businesses themselves are controlled by the Iron Law of Oligarchy. To a large extent all the resources are controlled by the top managers, and those top managers determine what their employees do professionally.
Robert Michels explained the iron law of oligarchy. The control and wealth of the corporate organizations are centralized in a few individuals at the very top. The recent extreme pay checks to CEO's is the way the conservative wealthy have manipulated the owners and top managers of large business organizations, especially the centralized media corporations.The media are important, because objections to the way the overall system is organized has to be communicated to the masses if it is going to be changed for the benefit of the rest of us. With control of the big media the oligarchs are able to get out the propaganda that justifies the existing system that works to their benefit and objections to that system are not spread widely.
If there were social justice, the CEO's would only be paid what they are worth - which is not the multimillion dollar pay checks they have increasingly been getting, especially over the last three decades. Those paychecks are designed to align the desires and actions of the top managers of the MSM with the wealthy conservative oligarchs.
This is just a sample of the dysfunctional structure of the American economy, and the super-wealthy like it this way. Since they control the TV networks, the large newspaper chains and the most influential elements of the rest of the media, the rest of us don't hear much about just how dysfunctional the economy and society really is.
...the greatest risk with reconciliation is that the process produces a weak bill, an incomplete one, or, in the very worst case, a counter-productive one--not that it fails to produce any bill at all. The Democratic Party isn’t necessarily the bravest. (If it was, it’d have passed reform already.) But it’s also not the dumbest. Failing to pass a bill when they have the numbers would be politically suicidal, just like it was in the 1990s. Having committed themselves to passing legislation, they now must follow through. They knew that before August. Knock on wood, they still know it today.
This is an alternative to the possibility of passing a "bipartisan" bill the gets approval by Maine's Sen. Olympia Snowe, still the preferred route by The White House and Sen. Harry Reid.
But Jonathon points out that either case passed a bill. Neither is a sure thing, but the net evaluation he presents is that we get health care reform that can be improved in the future as its flaws become more apparent.
This is a report by an interview on Pakistani TV conducted with Dr. Abdul Khan who is the father of the Pakistani nuclear program.
It was started because of the Indian nuclear weapons test and because Pakistan was especially concerned about their security after East Pakistan revolted in 1971 and became Bangladesh. It was sped up because Pakistan was supporting the military activities of the Americans in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet takeover.Khan also discusses the relationship between Pakistan and both North Korea and Iran. He would not discuss nuclear technology transfer to either of those countries, however.
The existence of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program is a major reason why the American military is currently in Afghanistan.
Dr. Khan's interview is quite illuminating. It's only about 10 pages.
If you want to read General McChrystal's plan, here it is in pdf format. It is dated August 10 and signed by both U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and by commander of U.S. forces Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is a combined Civil-Military plan.
Want to bet that the Bush administration under Cheney and Rumsfeld would never had presented a plan that covered both the military AND the Civilian aspects of the war?
It has long been clear that private and for profit health insurers cannot and will not provide quality reliable health insurance for everyone. The best and lowest cost solution is the single payer government financed system actual delivery of health care in the hands of a mixture of private and public institutions.
That's been off the table because the Obama administration compromised before even starting the health care debate. Jeff Neffinger explains why that was the wrong strategy.
This is the best rational for single payer I have seen yet.
Here is a description of what has happened since Massachusetts has implemented their universal health care plan. It's a mixed bag, mostly better and nothing really bad.
The Macroeconomics profession had essentially concluded by the end of the century that they knew enough so that another Great Depression was now impossible. Not that if it started economists and policymakers could head it off, but that it was impossible for it to even start. That conclusion was based on the assumption that the price valuations set my markets were perfect, given the available information at the time along with a great deal of very complex mathematical models and a lot of high-level statistics.
The assumptions that financial markets provide perfect prices and that people are perfectly rational were the same assumptions made by the Classical Economists before the Great Depression. It became the new assumption when Keynesian explanations of Depressions being caused by a lack of adequate demand were rejected in a flurry of new mathematical models and a flash of computer monitors. Unfortunately the models were essentially based on what Krugman calls ketchup economics.
Ketchup economics means the "...because a two-quart bottle of ketchup costs twice as much as a one-quart bottle, finance theorists declare that the price of ketchup must be right." It ignores the underlying factors that establish the true value. So if you compare home prices at a given point of time and the price of two comparable homes is roughly the same, then the price is right. There is no consideration of whether the income of the homeowners can support the mortgage required to meet that price. Those fancy mathematical models threw out answers that just don't match up with reality in the long run.
Financial markets, unfortunately, are well known to be based on short term considerations and to not consider long term factors.
The economic and financial experiences world wide of the last two years has left economies world wide in much worse shape than previously and also it has left the profession of Macroeconomics strongly questioning where they went wrong. Bankers are beginning to speak publicly about the need to put human beings back into the lending decisions and not depend on the mathematical models.
Paul Krugman has presented a fascinating overview of the questions the Macroeconomic profession are now grappling with The generally accepted new assumption goes back to Keynes' conclusion that recessions, even the depression, are caused by lack of adequate demand. But the beauty of the neo-classical models holds a powerful attraction. The recognition of what went wrong is not yet there.
Go read Krugman's article. It is lengthy, but written in language a layman with some understanding of Macroeconomics can handle.
OK. I want to quote Krugman on why the government has to be spending so much right now.
During a normal recession, the Fed responds by buying Treasury bills — short-term government debt — from banks. This drives interest rates on government debt down; investors seeking a higher rate of return move into other assets, driving other interest rates down as well; and normally these lower interest rates eventually lead to an economic bounceback. The Fed dealt with the recession that began in 1990 by driving short-term interest rates from 9 percent down to 3 percent. It dealt with the recession that began in 2001 by driving rates from 6.5 percent to 1 percent. And it tried to deal with the current recession by driving rates down from 5.25 percent to zero.
But zero, it turned out, isn’t low enough to end this recession. And the Fed can’t push rates below zero, since at near-zero rates investors simply hoard cash rather than lending it out. So by late 2008, with interest rates basically at what macroeconomists call the “zero lower bound” even as the recession continued to deepen, conventional monetary policy had lost all traction.
Now what? This is the second time America has been up against the zero lower bound, the previous occasion being the Great Depression. And it was precisely the observation that there’s a lower bound to interest rates that led Keynes to advocate higher government spending: when monetary policy is ineffective and the private sector can’t be persuaded to spend more, the public sector must take its place in supporting the economy. Fiscal stimulus is the Keynesian answer to the kind of depression-type economic situation we’re currently in.
This observation was at the core of Krugman's book "Depression Economics." It also explains why attempting to balance the federal budget anytime soon is likely to cause a second economic downturn.
At the end of his article Krugman lays out where he thinks the profession has to go next, with his reasons for thinking so. anyone interested in macroeconomics or in investing needs to read this article carefully.
Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida Jim Greer has responded to President Obama's proposal to broadcast a live address on education to schools that choose to air it with a hysterical tirade that makes it sound like Greer is horribly frightened.This is a surprise since as Eric Kleefeld notes, Greer is "seen as one of the more sensible, mainstream Republicans, as he is a long-time ally of moderate Gov. Charlie Crist." What's happened to make mainstream GOP leaders react like scalded cats to the most innocuous actions from President Barack Obama?
Thomas B. Edsal points out that the GOP seems to have two groups looking towards the future. They are 'Ideologues who are inciting the base with wild rhetoric and banking on a "great American awakening" that will sweep conservatives back into power. On the other: Strategists, who see the party's growing intolerance as a prescription for minority status.'
Jim Greer should be aware of this split. It looks like he thinks the votes will be with the ideologues, so he is playing his cards to be one of them.
Greer's hysterical statement proves once again that Republicans, especially the leadership, are all about personal self-interest rather that working for the long term good of the organizations they belong to - in this case the Republican Party.
CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo demonstrates the combination of partisanship and ignorance that ideological conservatives have brought to the discussion of the American health care system.
She thinks a public option would undermine quality care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks Medicare somehow offers sub-standard care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks 44 year olds who like Medicare should sign up for it, unaware of eligibility restrictions. She thinks Weiner should choose to opt into Medicare, while simultaneously arguing argument against giving American consumers the choice of a public option.
This is not thought. It is pure reflexive obstructionism.
The absence of an organized American health care system fails a sizable percentage of the American public by not letting them get the health care they need. It has damaged the American economy and made it less competitive in international trade. And it has done all of this while costing a great deal more per person than does the next most expensive national health care system in the industrialized world. And what do the American ideological conservatives offer to improve the American health care system?
A combination of "head in the sand" refusal to even address the problems of the overall system and reflexive obstructionism trying to prevent others from working on the problem. That's what. Nothing else. The conservative ideology is even more bankrupt than is the American health care system.
