Krugman on Ryan's non-serious budget proposal

This is what Paul Krugman wrote last week. He must have had an advance copy of Paul Ryan's speculative fiction budget proposal.

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later.

But one thing is clear: Mellon-style liquidationism is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P.

Here's what Krugman wrote today in his blog:

Paul Ryan’s Multiple Unicorns
Gosh. For a plan that supposedly sets a new standard of seriousness, Paul Ryan’s vision (pdf) depends an awful lot on unicorn sightings — belief in the impossible. Let me review the top three unicorns.

First, the plan assumes that tax cuts will set off a literally unprecedented boom. Here’s again, is what is assumed about unemployment:

House budget proposal

So Ryan is claiming that unemployment will plunge right away; that by 2015 it will be down to the levels at the peak of the 1990s boom (and far below anything achieved under the sainted Ronald Reagan); and that by 2021 it will be below 3 percent, a level we haven’t seen in more than half a century. Right.

Then there’s the Medicare business. According to the CBO analysis, a typical senior would end up spending more than twice as much of his or her own income on health care as under current law. As Dean Baker points out, this means that seniors would end up paying most of their income for health care. Again, right.

But in a way, the worst part isn’t the Medicare plan: it’s the fact — which so far has not penetrated the debate — that the biggest source of supposed savings in the plan isn’t actually health care, it’s an assumption that federal spending on everything except health and Social Security can somehow be squeezed, as a percent of GDP, to a small fraction of current levels"

Here’s the table, from Ryan’s own report:

""

Notice the marked area at the bottom: Ryan is assuming that everything aside from health and SS can be squeezed from 12 percent of GDP now to 3 1/2 percent of GDP. That’s bigger than the assumed cut in health care spending relative to baseline; it accounts for all of the projected deficit reduction, since the alleged health savings are all used to finance tax cuts. And how is this supposed to be accomplished? Not explained.

This isn’t a serious proposal; it’s a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.

From an economic theory point of view it's as though Ryan is rejecting all of the understanding of economics that has grown up since the 1920's. But worse, Ryan is not only rejecting the theory of economics. He is rejecting the data that has been collected since 1932 that proves he is wrong.

Krugman is quite correct. The Republicans are practicing unicorn-based "economics."

"Fix" Medicare? Nah, Ryan just wants it abolished.

Medical costs are climbing sustainably. No question. But America pays more than twice as much per person for health care as any other industrial nation while NOT getting as good results for what is bought as those other nations get! So what is the Republican solution as presented today by Rep. Ryan? Abolish Medicare.

Here's an excellent description of what was offered written by Josh Marshall,.

What the Republicans are proposing are not cuts. Some level of cuts and/or cost containment in Medicare are necessary because medical inflation is growing so quickly. But these aren't cuts. They're using a temporary budget crisis and the need to slow the rate of Medicare costs over long run simply to abolish the program. That's a bait and switch. It's the medical side equivalent of the "private accounts" bamboozle that President Bush used in 2005 to try to phase out Social Security.

Medicare is a federally-backed health insurance program for seniors. Why seniors? Because seniors as a group are just too sick for the private health care insurance sector to adequately provide coverage for. To rein in costs you can reduce benefits that the program provides or place more cost containment measures in place. Real pain is involved in both. But that's a legitimate area for debate. Medicare is a long term budget problem, unlike Social Security which isn't.

Or you can decide just to abolish the program altogether. Just eliminate Medicare in its entirety. This is what Rep. Ryan (R-WI) calls "fixing" Medicare, i.e., getting rid of it. Getting rid of it means abolishing the program and pushing seniors back into the private health insurance system and providing a subsidy to help pay the costs of your average 75 year old's health care. If costs go up? Well, start saving now.

This piece of Republican bamboozlement is going to get a lot of media blather in the next few weeks - even as the tea baggers shut down the federal government. But what it should get is total rejection. There is simply nothing here except a conservative primal scream shouting "We hate government except for Wars!! Government exists to Kill - kill - Kill and nothing else!!"

What no one today remembers is that when Medicare was passed in 1965 there was no insurance for anyone after age 65. If you had insurance and turned age 65 that health insurance was cancelled and there was no company in the market which would sell you a policy. People over age 65 were simply uninsurable.

This is the nature of the market that Paul Ryan wants to throw medicare beneficiaries back into.

Second dip of the economy coming soon

Gee. The newscasters are touting the improved unemployment figures and claiming that the Great Recession is over. Economic happy talk fills the media again. Want to know why? They all desperately want you to buy whatever they are selling and you won't if you have guessed that the economy will shortly turn around and head down again.

Which it will. Very soon, in fact. Why? Robert Reich lays out the situation.

Consumers are 70 percent of the American economy, and consumer confidence is plummeting. It's weaker today on average than at the lowest point of the Great Recession.

The Reuters/University of Michigan survey shows a 10 point decline in March -- the tenth largest drop on record. Part of that drop is attributable to rising fuel and food prices. A separate Conference Board's index of consumer confidence, just released, shows consumer confidence at a five-month low -- and a large part is due to expectations of fewer jobs and lower wages in the months ahead.

[...]

...isn't the economy growing again -- by an estimated 2.5 to 2.9 percent this year? Yes, but that's even less than peanuts. The deeper the economic hole, the faster the growth needed to get back on track. By this point in the so-called recovery we'd expect growth of 4 to 6 percent.

Consider that back in 1934, when it was emerging from the deepest hole of the Great Depression, the economy grew 7.7 percent. The next year it grew over 8 percent. In 1936 it grew a whopping 14.1 percent.

Add two other ominous signs: Real hourly wages continue to fall, and housing prices continue to drop. Hourly wages are falling because with unemployment so high, most people have no bargaining power and will take whatever they can get. Housing is dropping because of the ever-larger number of homes people have walked away from because they can't pay their mortgages. But because homes the biggest asset most Americans own, as home prices drop most Americans feel even poorer.

There's no possibility government will make up for the coming shortfall in consumer spending. To the contrary, government is worsening the situation. State and local governments are slashing their budgets by roughly $110 billion this year. The federal stimulus is ending, and the federal government will end up cutting some $30 billion from this year's budget.

So what about the reported improvement in the economy?

Wall Street is buoyant -- and most financial news you hear comes from the Street. Wall Street profits soared to $426.5 billion last quarter, according to the Commerce Department. (That gain more than offset a drop in the profits of non-financial domestic companies.) Anyone who believes the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill put a stop to the Street's creativity hasn't been watching.

To the extent non-financial companies are doing well, they're making most of their money abroad. Since 1992, for example, G.E.'s offshore profits have risen $92 billion, from $15 billion (which is one reason it pays no U.S. taxes). In fact, the only group that's optimistic about the future are CEOs of big American companies. The Business Roundtable's economic outlook index, which surveys 142 CEOs, is now at its highest point since it began in 2002.

So this is the story. The economy is too weak to continue to improve, state and local governments are right now in the process of laying off thousands of people and consumers are feeling too threatened to spend anything.

Then the stated improvement in the economy is largely by big firms that are operating outside the U.S. where profits are possible.

The top 1000 American firms have had $2 trillion in cash on their books since early 2008 and they haven't spent it. They see what Bob Reich sees, and they do not see any reason to think that the consumers (who make up 70% of the American economy) are going to increase spending. The fact is that with the second downturn, spending will drop even more. There is no profit for a large company to make by investing right now. (The exceptions are miniscule and can change nothing.)

T%he only thing that could keep the economy out of the second dip of a double-dip recession would be increased government spending (there's no other source) and our idiots in Washington, D.C are currently fighting to see how much they can cut out of the government budget.

So don't buy a new house or new car right now. Do not borrow to buy any big ticket items unless bankruptcy is an option when your income disappears. Don't put your savings all in one place. Make your plans based on a second major decline in the economy occurring soon.

Because it is coming.

A band of stupid criminals has taken control of the House and is looting America

The Republicans in the US Congress have proposed H.R. 1255, a bill which states that once it is passed, if the Senate does not also pass it then the bill becomes law without Senate passage and without the President's signature. Since the Republican House Majority established the rule that every bill proposed in the House had to include a clear statement of what part of the US Constitution permits the House to pass such legislation, naturally they will have included the statement in H.R. 1255. I wonder where? I seem to have missed it.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) Stood on the House floor yesterday and congratulated the GOP on its April Fool's day joke. Boehner, Cantor and the tea baggers have stated very clearly in this matter what utter fools they are. Whoever is pulling their strings should be quite proud of how his underlings will abase themselves in public for a few dollars under the table.

Include Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) in the list of fools currently pretending to act like legislators in the U.S. Congress. He's the idiot who, upon being awakened and made aware that Obama had established a no-fly zone in Libya responded by wondering if that action means America might even go into Africa next. Jay Leno pointed out that it is clear why Marino is not on the Intelligence committee.

To add to the stupidity, the Republican-dominated House has passed a bill that permits Agribusiness polluters to dump pesticides into public waterways. No doubt those Representatives have enough bottled water available so they don't have to drink any of the polluted water - and they are probably too crazy to bother bathing.

They have also just passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) which will gut the regulations designed to ensure that pilots have enough sleep to safely fly their aircraft. The amendment tailors rules applying to a variety of segments of the aviation industry and exempts other segments. Those rules are the direct result of lessons learned after crashes caused by pilot fatigue. No doubt an idiot Congressman from Pennsylvania has no need to get on a plane to travel, so what does he care?

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)is a crook. Here's more proof. In the same Republican dominated House that raised such an objection to the budget-busting nature of ear-marks, brother Darrell has earmarked some $2 million in taxpayer funds to provide street improvements and parking for a commercial building he owns.

But it's not all at the federal level.

An idiot Montana State Representative who runs a bar in Basin, Montana, is complaining that the DUI laws are damaging small businesses. "They are destroying a way of life that his been in Montana for years and years." Yeah, just because drunks on the highway kill people we certainly don't want to make it more difficult for bar owners to sell liquor to drunks, do we? We don't want to damage the "way of life" of people like Louis Nieves, do we?

Louis Nieves, 23, the driver of a 1996 red Ford pickup that slammed into the fully loaded fuel tanker while headed the wrong way on I-30, is under arrest on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and intoxication manslaughter, Fort Worth police said.

I'm sure the bar-owner who sold Louis his drinks before Louis went the wrong way down the freeway, struck a loaded fuel truck and killed the driver wouldn't want to interfere with Louis' way of life. It has been around for a long time in both Montana and in Texas.

And as "ways of life" we wouldn't want to interfere with, in Maine the Republicans don't want to interfere with sending children out to work at a young age. Not only is it important to get children in the work force and out of school at a very young age, the Maine Republicans also want the children paid sub-minimum wages so that they can take jobs away from adult workers. Naturally the sub-minimum wages will stop when the children become 18 so that their employers will fire them and replace them with more low-cost children.

It's not just paying workers the lowest possible wage and working them the longest hours possible. The Republicans also don't want corporations to pay any taxes. GOP Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA) responded to a caller who complained that Exxon paid no income taxes with the statement 'We need the lowest corporate tax rate we can get.' Gee. That means that when the US sends American troops into the Middle East to defend the exploitation of American oil companies then the companies themselves want to shift all the taxes to pay for the wars there to the America middle class and the workers. No doubt that is why they are trying to get the entry age for Social Security retirement jacked up to age 69. The FICA tax can then be siphoned off to pay for the Pentagon the corporations are using around the world and the workers will pay for it. Mind you, the Social Security Retirement system is in no danger of running short of money until at least 2037 and that estimate it a worst case prediction. The Social Security System has never met the worst case estimate in its 7 decades of existence.

The Republicans aren't just stealing the money from American working people. They also want to force radical religion down our throats. This is what Mike Huckabee is trying to sell.

While many of the GOP 2012 presidential hopefuls graced both stages, only at Rediscover God in America did they offer Americans two revealing facts: “America should be governed by biblical law,” and that discredited historian David Barton is a genius.

A former Texas GOP official, David Barton is a “Christian historical revisionist” who contends that “the United States of America is a Christian nation” and the separation of church and state is a “liberal myth.” He is also one of the most radical Tenthers in the country who believes the federal highway system is unconstitutional. So radical was his view that even the Tenth Amendment Center disavowed his federal highway theory.

Though he “holds no advanced degrees and does not teach at any legitimate institution,” Barton is no small figure in conservative politics. He was invited by Fox News host Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to teach as a “scholar” on American history. At the conference, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that “every time he hears Barton speak, he learns something new.” But Right Wing Watch’s Kyle Mantyla captured the most outrageous endorsement yet. Introduced by Barton, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) insisted that children need to be “under his tutelage” and said that every American should be forced “at gun point” to “listen to every David Barton message”:

HUCKABEE: I don’t know anyone in America who is a more effective communicator [than David Barton.] I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced — at gun point no less — to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.

So America has a band of thieves, bankers and radically ignorant preachers taking over the governments at both the state and federal levels. They want our money and our children working their mines and businesses. And they are allied with the most repressive and backwards-looking types of religious fools (Terry Jones, anyone? to take control of America while they loot the money and ship America's jobs to China.

If there is anything positive about the conservatives (who also caused the Great Recession and forced Americans to bail our the Wall Street banks) I don't see it. These are people whose ideas and attitudes were rejected during the Great Depression in the 1930's. They need to be forced back into their caves and buried there.

Rightwing "Investigative" Journalism is a failure

National Public Radio has recently fired its President as a direct result of the fraudulently edited so-called expose by the conservative provocateur James O'Keefe. O'Keefe is attempting to duplicate his earlierdestruction of the community organization ACORN with a video edited to the point of outright lies. But this is not just an individual with a desire to get personal publicity. This is a well-funded propaganda operation by the extreme right-wing, following in the Republican tradition of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Steve Benen writes about the right-wing attempts at investigative journalism.

Looking back over the last several decades, most of the time, quality investigative journalism has come from mainstream news organizations and left-leaning outlets like The Nation and Mother Jones. The right, historically, has avoided this kind of work, preferring to create outlets like Fox News, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.

Whether you find those conservative outlets valuable or not, it's fair to say investigative journalism isn't part of their m.o. The Republican-friendly outlets just don't do in-depth, shoe-leather journalism to break major news stories.

Over the last couple of years, conservatives have begun taking steps to change this, bolstered by far-right financial backing. What's wrong with this? In theory, nothing. Investigative journalism can play a valuable role in holding officials accountable and ensuring transparency. If folks on the right want to do some digging and turn up malfeasance, more power to them.

The problem isn't that conservatives are doing investigative journalism. The problem is that conservatives haven't figured out how to do investigative journalism especially well.

Laura McGann had a great piece on this in the Monthly last year, noting that "conservative investigative journalism tends to produce reports that are wrong," a problem compounded by the fact that while their efforts are ostensibly about improving transparency, the far-right activism is nearly always shrouded in secrecy.

This is bound to continue, but there's no reason for the mainstream to take it seriously.

So to call what the right-wing does investigative journalism is to mistake form for actual fact. Simply to go underground and take videos is not investigative journalism. That is especially true when the raw material is edited into an outright lie.

What is most telling about the O'Keefe efforts is that they expose the fact that conservativism is based on a series of lies. It cannot stand in the face of honest inquiry and real questions, so it resorts to make up propaganda spread by its own limited lying propagand outlets such as FOX News, the American Standard, the Washington Times, and others.

So why do the mainstream news outlets buy O'Keefe's crap? Anything sourced to O'Keefe is clearly a lie. Treating it as legitimate news is to simply debase the news profession as a whole.

David Brooks with a really informative and inspiring talk on what people really are

I am always suspicious of David Brooks. His main function seems to be to put a positive face on the indefensible from conservatives and then explain them to the rest of us. So I was quite surprised to listen to this talk, both funny and very, very informative. Obviously it has nothing to do with conservative political ideology.

Some Republican leaders know perfectly well the legislation they are being paid to pass is destructive to the public

We get this interesting by-play in front of a microphone the Republican politicians don't know is turned on:

Republican Iowa State Rep. Jeff Kaufmann, speaker pro tem of the Iowa State House, was caught joking on a hot mic that a proposal which would allow state residents to carry weapons in public without permission from a sheriff and without any training or a background check might better be called the "give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic-bill."

The Des Moines Register reports that the comment was caught on video during a discussion of House Study bill 219, the so-called "Alaska carry" legislation after a similar law in Alaska.

As the members discuss pulling Rep. Ron Jorgenson from leading debate on a controversial union collective bargaining bill, Rep. Erik Helland, jokes that he's going to get stuck carrying the bill because he's the "dirty hatchet man for the caucus" because he's "expendable."

When another lawmaker asks what the "Alaska carry" bill is, Kaufmann helpfully explains that it is "the crazy, give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic bill" before someone informs them that the microphone is on.

That's the thing about Republican politicians. They are bought by special interests, in this case the NRA. The guys making those statements know perfectly well they would not be doing the jobs they are presently doing if they did not have the NRA money and support. So they give the NRA what it demands no matter who gets hurt.

How can you tell a Republican politician is lying? He's a Republican, his lips are moving, and he knows the microphone is turned on so that the public can hear what he says.

The Social Structure of Language - in video

This is a truly fascinating video by Deb Roy from Ted. Early in the video Deb Roy traces his infant son's process of learning the word "water" in the adult version from his original effort "gaga." Then he goes on to use some of the same video capture and display techniques on the social media conversations connected to an event - the President's State of the Union Speech.



Deb Roy's computers catch the social structures and display them from the event to the myriad responses.

My first response to that is that the social structures and responses seem to be a very close analog to the kinds of structures the human brain creates in laying down memories, connecting them and reacting to and talking about events the person has undergone. Symbolic Interactionism describes the manner in which people react, not to stimuli directly, but rather to mental models they maintain in their mind of how events they perceive are expected to interact. The theory suffers in comparison to psychological theories because SI has been impossible to directly research scientifically. This media technique could well change that.

My second response was that the Sociologist Randall Collins published a second edition to his fascinating and very readable book "Sociological Insight: and Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology" which included a new^* fifth chapter on what it will take to create an artificial intelligence. His statement is that it is more than computer technology or even psychology. It demands a large sociological element. Deb Roy's graphics of social structures of the connections between events and the comments about those events is exactly what Dr. Collins was writing.

---

^*The chapter on artificial intelligence does not appear in the first edition of the book.

The Republicans are acting to suppress every anti-Republican voter in America

Since January the Republicans across the nation have been working to destroy Democratic Party institutions and to suppress the vote of anyone likely to vote Democratic. Digby has taken note and writes about it.

"I'm sure by now that everyone has noticed that since taking power across the country in November, the Republicans have concentrated on one specific thing, nearly across the board: defunding and dismantling any institutional support for Democrats from systematically attacking voting rights to specific constituencies to their most essential organizing institutions. This isn't Tea Party politics or social conservatism or even a direct result of plutocratic economics although they will all certainly benefit. This is a hard core partisan attack on the organizing and funding functions of the left.

They've never been shy about trying to do this before. Certainly vote suppression is a very old right wing tactic. But they seem to have taken all this to the next level in the last couple of years. The question is whether or not they launch a coordinated attack on every constituency but their own base and expect to continue to win elections. It looks like we're going to fund out."

It's been two months since the politicians elected last November took office, and I have never seen as much effort to suppress opposition vote. I did grow up in Texas and slowly grew aware of the many, many tricks used by Texas and Southern politicians to repress the African-American vote, but I have never seen anything like what is going on now. The effort by Scott Walker in Madison Wisconsin only highlights the issue.

There will be a backlash. Mark my words. There will be a backlash. And very properly so.

What kind of government can Egypt expect to establish now?

With all the revolutionary activity and removal of current governments going on in North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the question naturally arises about what kind of government will follow. Bruce Ackerman has addressed that question and provided some interesting insights. His teaser at Balkinization lays the basic issue out very clearly. A presidential system like that in France or the U.S. flows directly from the nature of the revolution it came from. That revolution produced clear leaders who became a charismatic head of state. Either that head of state "constitutionalizes his charisma" into a Presidential system or that a charismatic dictatorship is the likely outcome. But in either case, there had to be a known opposition leader to take the position of leader.

In Egypt there has been a leaderless revolution. Mubarak's dictatorship successfully repressed the opposition until it collapsed. There is no organized opposition to take over from Mubarak. Ackerman says that in this case:

a parliamentary system provides a far more promising constitutional transition to democracy than its presidential counterpart. The presidential form requires the revolutionaries to anoint a single leader prematurely -- thereby preempting a desirable period of democratic contestation, in which rival leaders compete for power. In contrast, a parliamentary system allows a number of political parties to project a number of different leaders onto the stage under conditions of relative equality, allowing them to present a set of competing options in a series of coalition governments.

Then he points out one major problem in the Egyptian situation:

The case for parliamentarianism is especially compelling in Egypt, since the Mubarak regime was selectively repressive – crushing secular dissent but allowing the Moslem Brotherhood to survive as the only organized opposition group.

This appears to be a good argument for Egypt to establish a parliamentarian system rather than a Presidential system. But whatever the case, the fact of the revolution having removed Mubarak does not in any way guarantee that Egypt will become the democracy the Egyptians really want. Egypt has a long way to go.

Best Walker phone-call-from-Koch parody yet!

This is a really, really good parody. It skewers so many at once and does so quite beautifully.

Divid Koch will hate it. Walker will too, but he is too dull to understand it.



[H/T to Josh Marshall at TPM.]

Cyberwar just jumped from the of rock-throwing level to the level of machine guns and barbed wire

What does cyberwar look like in the 21st century? Remember the anonymously-sourced denial of service attacks on the entire Internet in Georgia a few years ago that accompanied the Russian military attack on that nation? Today that's as primitive as throwing rocks. Vanity Fair has an excellent article describing the Stuxnet worm attack on the hidden Iranian nuclear program. Stuxnet is the most sophisticated piece of computer malware ever written. It has a unique delivery system put together with an extremely sophisticated attack payload and it is much too large and sophisticated to have been assembled by a single hacker or even a small independent team. The events first appeared in public in July 2009. Here's what happened :

A self-replicating computer virus, called a worm, was making its way through thousands of computers around the world, searching for small gray plastic boxes called programmable-logic controllers—tiny computers about the size of a pack of crayons, which regulate the machinery in factories, power plants, and construction and engineering projects. These controllers, or P.L.C.’s, perform the critical scut work of modern life. They open and shut valves in water pipes, speed and slow the spinning of uranium centrifuges, mete out the dollop of cream in each Oreo cookie, and time the change of traffic lights from red to green.

Although controllers are ubiquitous, knowledge of them is so rare that many top government officials did not even know they existed until that week in July. Several major Western powers initially feared the worm might represent a generalized attack on all controllers. If the factories shut down, if the power plants went dark, how long could social order be maintained? Who would write a program that could potentially do such things? And why?

[...]

One month before that midnight summons—on June 17—Sergey Ulasen, the head of the Anti-Virus Kernel department of VirusBlokAda, a small information-technology security company in Minsk, Belarus, sat in his office reading an e-mail report: a client’s computer in Iran just would not stop rebooting. Ulasen got a copy of the virus that was causing the problem and passed it along to a colleague, Oleg Kupreev, who put it into a “debugger”—a software program that examines the code of other programs, including viruses. The men realized that the virus was infecting Microsoft’s Windows operating systems using a vulnerability that had never been detected before. A vulnerability that has not been detected before, and that a program’s creator does not know exists, is called a “zero day.” In the world of computer security, a Windows zero-day vulnerability signals that the author is a pro, and discovering one is a big event. Such flaws can be exploited for a variety of nefarious purposes, and they can sell on the black market for as much as $100,000.

The virus discovered by Ulasen was especially exotic, because it had a previously unknown way of spreading. Stick a flash drive with the virus into a laptop and it enters the machine surreptitiously, uploading two files: a rootkit dropper (which lets the virus do whatever it wants on the computer—as one hacker explains, “ ‘Root’ means you’re God”) and an injector for a payload of malicious code that was so heavily encrypted as to be, to Ulasen, inscrutable. The most unsettling thing about the virus was that its components hid themselves as soon as they got into the host. To do this, the virus used a digital signature, an encrypted string of bits that legitimate software programs carry to show that they come in peace. Digital signatures are like passports for software: proof of identity for programs crossing the border between one machine and the next. Viruses sometimes use forged digital signatures to get access to computers, like teenagers using fake IDs to get into bars. Security consultants have for several years expected malware writers to make the leap from forged signatures to genuine, stolen ones. This was the first time it was known to have actually happened, and it was a doozy of a job. With a signature somehow obtained from Realtek, one of the most trusted names in the business, the new virus Ulasen was looking at might as well have been carrying a cop’s badge.

[...]

Ulasen couldn’t figure that part out—what the payload was for. What he did understand was the basic injection system—how the virus propagated itself—which alone demanded an alert. Ulasen and Kupreev wrote up their findings, and on July 5, through a colleague in Germany, they sent a warning to the Microsoft Security Response Center, in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft first acknowledged the vulnerability the next day. Ulasen also wrote to Realtek, in Taiwan, to let them know about the stolen digital signature. Finally, on July 12, Ulasen posted a report on the malware to a security message board. Within 48 hours, Frank Boldewin, an independent security analyst in Muenster, Germany, had decrypted almost all of the virus’s payload and discovered what the target was: P.L.C.’s. Boldewin posted his findings to the same security message board, triggering the all-points bulletin among Western governments.

The next day, July 15, a tech reporter named Brian Krebs broke the news of the virus on his blog. The day after that, Microsoft, having analyzed the malware with the help of outside researchers, issued the first of several defenses against the virus. At this point it had been detected in only a few sites in Europe and the U.S. The largest number of infections by far—more than 15,000, and growing fast—was found in Asia, primarily in India, Indonesia, and, significantly, Iran.

[...]

Kaspersky [founder of the computer security company called Kaspersky] is a 1987 graduate of the Soviet Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science, which had been set up as a joint project of the K.G.B. and the Russian Ministry of Defense.

[...]

Analysts at Kaspersky and Symantec quickly found that Stuxnet exploited not a single zero-day flaw but in fact four of them, which was unprecedented—one of the great technical blockbusters in malware history.

As the zero days piled up, Kaspersky says, he suspected that a government had written Stuxnet, because it would be so difficult and time-consuming for an outsider to find all these flaws without access to the Windows source code.

[...]

Stuxnet appears to be the product of a more sophisticated and expensive development process than any other piece of malware that has become publicly known. A Symantec strategist estimated that as many as 30 different people helped write it. Programmers’ coding styles are as distinctive as writers’ prose styles. One expert estimated that the worm’s development took at least six months. Once Stuxnet was released into the wild, other technicians would have maintained the command-and-control servers in Denmark and Malaysia to which Stuxnet phoned home to report its current locations and seek updates.

Most curious, there were two major variants of the worm. The earliest versions of it, which appear to have been released in the summer of 2009, were extremely sophisticated in some ways but fairly primitive in others, compared with the newer version, which seems to have first circulated in March 2010. A third variant, containing minor improvements, appeared in April. In Schouwenberg’s view, this may mean that the authors thought Stuxnet wasn’t moving fast enough, or had not hit its target, so they created a more aggressive delivery mechanism. The authors, he thinks, weighed the risk of discovery against the risk of a mission failure and chose the former.

[...]

Langner [His Hamburg-based company is a big name in the small world of industrial-control-systems security] had been reverse engineering the payload of Stuxnet throughout August, and he was the first analyst to announce that it contained two components that he called “warheads.” Langner had come to believe that Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has been suspected of trying to build a nuclear bomb for several years, and in 2003 it failed to disclose details regarding uranium-enrichment centrifuges to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Western governments have been trying to stop Iran’s nuclear program ever since, using diplomatic pressure, trade embargoes, and covert operations.

Stuxnet had initially grabbed the tech world’s attention as a hack of the Windows operating system—a virus that exploited an unknown vulnerability. This was like learning that someone had found his way into your house, and figuring out how they got inside. Next, Frank Boldewin had discovered what valuables the intruder was after—programmable-logic controllers. Specifically, the target was P.L.C.’s made by the German engineering conglomerate Siemens. Finally, Langner figured out the rudiments of what Stuxnet’s payload did—that is, how the intruder went about his work. When Stuxnet moves into a computer, it attempts to spread to every machine on that computer’s network and to find out whether any are running Siemens software. If the answer is no, Stuxnet becomes a useless, inert feature on the network. If the answer is yes, the worm checks to see whether the machine is connected to a P.L.C. or waits until it is. Then it fingerprints the P.L.C. and the physical components connected to the controller, looking for a particular kind of machinery. If Stuxnet finds the piece of machinery it is looking for, it checks to see if that component is operating under certain conditions. If it is, Stuxnet injects its own rogue code into the controller, to change the way the machinery works. And even as it sabotages its target system, it fools the machine’s digital safety system into reading as if everything were normal.

Industrial-control systems have been sabotaged before. But never have they been remotely programmed to be physically altered without someone’s fingers on a keyboard somewhere, pulling the virtual trigger. Stuxnet is like a self-directed stealth drone: the first known virus that, released into the wild, can seek out a specific target, sabotage it, and hide both its existence and its effects until after the damage is done. This is revolutionary. Langner’s technical analysis of the payload would elicit widespread admiration from his peers. Yet he also found himself inexorably drawn to speculation about the source of the malware, leading him to build a detailed theory about who had created it and where it was aimed.

[...]

There is a marked difference in design style between Stuxnet’s injector and its payload. Tom Parker, a Washington, D.C.- based security researcher, argues from this fact that two nations were involved in the worm’s creation, implying that a major Western power, such as the U.S., may have developed the sleek warheads and that another nation, such as Israel, was responsible for the injector program.

We have a unique attack delivery system that appears to have required knowledge of the confidential code in the Microsoft operating system. The program is extremely complex certainly too much so to have been the product of any single individual. In fact, the program is so complex that it, requiring a very elaborate team, and the style of different segments rather clearly indicates that not only were there multiple teams,they were probably from different nations. Finally, the payload that does the damage is written to exploit the characteristics of a very narrowly defined target which is almost certainly the Iranian nuclear program.

There is a lot more in this very interesting article from Vanity Fair. the lengthy segment of the article which compares the development of Stuxnet to the published political events related to Iran and the rest of the world is worth the whole article. There will be a lot more to come out about Stuxnet. But what really matters is that cyberwar has stepped up to new levels, far above those of merely distributed denial of services. Stuxnet is a team-based (meaning national) approach to targeted malware specifically released on the Internet, very probably in coordination with other military and diplomatic efforts to stop the Iranians from achieving a nuclear weapon. The future arrived back in Summer of 2009 and we are now way off into unknown territory.

One more thing. The target, pretty clearly the Iranian nuclear program, is something the Iranians do not admit exists. So they cannot admit that it was effectively trashed by the Stuxnet worm. Nothing in the media on this subject can be trusted. It is part of the cyberwar and its associated diplomatic and psychological warfare attacks and counterattacks.

This Vanity Fair story is a report from the field about a very new form of combat. The technology of the worm itself is fascinating, but what is really important is that a whole new battlefield has now been opened up.

Finally, like targets of blackmail, the apparent target/victim remains silent because do do otherwise is to admit to committing a larger crime. They are building a nuclear weapon and they are lying to the world about that. So there's a lot left to this story.

Where is the national Democratic Party when it is needed to battle national Republican overreach?

Those of us who feel that the national Democratic Party seems unled and unmanaged in the face of the massive Republican attacks on the government and on unions probably have good reason to feel that way. We may have felt that with a Democratic President there should be some Democratic (if not progressive) push-back to the current Republican overreach at a national level. The New York Time has a good article today on the new management process in the White House since Rham Emmanuel and David Alexrod have been replaced by William M. Daley and Jay Carney. There's a lot interesting in the article about the different type of management style the White House feels in currently required, but the following provides a reason for me to feel the national Democratic Party is unled.

Frustrated Democratic lawmakers and interest groups have been railing to White House aides that Mr. Obama is forfeiting opportunities to draw the public’s attention to what the Republicans’ cuts would mean for programs popular with most voters, including the coveted independents. The aides respond that the time will come for Mr. Obama to join the attack, should Republicans press their agenda and refuse to compromise.

“One of the lessons of the last two years is that if the president weighs in all the time, it’s less impactful,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who remains as the communications director. “But if he weighs in at a moment of his choosing when the public is paying attention, it will be more influential.”

Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

It is clear that the Obama White House sees its job as reelecting Obama in 2012, not leading the national democratic party -- and definitely not leading a progressive counterrevolution against the massive Republican overreach that is currently going on. The may be right to believe that.

The problem is that the White House squashed efforts by the DNC to join the fray. The White House sees the DNC as an institution that belongs to them to be used for Obama's reelection. The problem is, this leaves the Democratic Party with NO institutions that have the job of coordinating the national party in the clearly needed national response to the present current attacks on America and its workers.

This is a big problem. The Republicans seem to have national party coordinating institutions, the Democrats do not. An organized and led organization will almost always defeat a larger but unled force. I see no immediate solution to it.