Month: August 2011

The Real Victims

by digby

I think Glenn Beck speaks for more Americans than we might imagine when he complains about the fact that he is made to feel bad for calling people by names they consider to be racist and insulting:

Truly, the white person who is publicly embarrassed for perpetuating racism is much more of a victim than the object of said racism could ever be.

Of course Glenn Beck is of the school that says the 3/5th compromise was proof that the founders were all abolitionists, so I wouldn’t expect him to think otherwise. In his view, white supremacists have always been unfairly maligned.

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What’s wrong with our media?

by digby

Jay Rosen has written an important piece synthesizing his various observations about our broken political press. It comes from a presentation he gave in Australia, where the situation is apparently just as bad:

So this is my theme tonight: how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as “the insiders?” Don’t you think that’s a little strange? I do. Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate…. this is a clue to what’s broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s how I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be.

I think it’s even worse. My personal belief is that most high level Washington political reporters and editors are not only incestuous “insiders”, they also carry the absurd conceit that they are nonetheless the personification of the average Real American. So they insist that the concerns of the top 1%, which many of them are in (or anticipate being in) must, therefore, be the concerns of the average American. Talk about being out of alignment.

Rosen identifies three specific areas of concern:

1. Politics as an inside game.

2. The cult of savviness.

3. The production of innocence.

As to number one, I’ll let Rosen speak for himself. But I would add that the “politics as an inside game” infects the political press in another way as well. Their inside view of the process leads them to believe that politics itself is only a matter of insider maneuvering, as if it all happens in a vacuum with the consent of the governed not even an afterthought. The people are an abstraction and the process is what’s real. It leads to fatalism and lack of imagination, as if politics is just a static set of numbers that are accounted for in advance without any possibility that the citizenry or the politicians themselves are human beings with agency.

Number two, I’m sure you’re all aware of. I think about it every day — and battle the temptation to join that cult (or the “reformed” version of it in the blogosphere.)

Number three is a formulation of the he said/she said critique that’s very enlightening:

By the production of innocence I mean ways of reporting the news that try to advertise or “prove” to us that the press is neutral in its descriptions, a non-partisan presenter of facts, a non-factor and non-actor in events. Innocence means reporters are mere recorders, without stake or interest in the matter at hand. They aren’t responsible for what happens, only for telling you about it. When you hear, “don’t shoot the messenger” you are hearing a journalist declare his or innocence.

This basic message—we’re innocent because we’re uninvolved—isn’t something to be stated once, in a professional code of conduct or an “about” page. It has to be said many times a day in the course of writing and reporting the news. The genre known as He said, she said journalism is perhaps the most familiar example. But so is horse race journalism, in which the master narrative for covering an election is: who’s ahead? Journalists will tend to favor descriptions of political life that are a.) true, in that verifiable facts support the story; and b.) convenient for the continuous production of their own innocence.

That explains a lot. The vapidity is a result of timidity — the fear of being biased. I would say that this one is the result of years of hardcore right wing public relations. They spent decades relentlessly attacking the media for being liberally biased and the result has been an aversion to any kind of reporting that might betray a point of view. Liberals have failed to properly combat this and the press is now so thoroughly indoctrinated that it might not work anyway.But this one is, in my view, the consequence of a concerted propaganda effort. Lessons learned.

I urge you to read the whole thing. Rosen’s thesis is very well developed and an important tool with which to evaluate the political press — and, by extension, the proper operation of our democracy. At this moment, it’s not looking good.

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Epistomological Crapshoot

by digby

I keep coming back to the Iraq war and how it played out in American politics over the course of several years. That sense of surreality, the helplessness, the fact that there were people out there telling the truth and expressing their reservations and nobody listened. The blogospheric trope Very Serious People was born from this odd phenomenon of a large number of the smartest people in the world getting everything so very wrong — while systematically marginalizing those who got it right. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had said it would happen again in just a few years, but it did.

Today, John Aravosis is featuring an interesting interview he did with Joseph Stiglitz that is relevant to this topic:

“The way I would put it is, the hopes of the ‘green shoots’ that were expressed in March, 2009 that then turned to brown later in that year, and again woke up earlier this year, have again been dashed. So that the administration’s, and the Fed’s, constant referral to the economy ‘on the road to recovery’ is another demonstration of their inability to make economic judgments. Just like the Fed totally misjudged the economy in the period leading up to the recession, totally — even after the bubble broke, they said the crisis was contained. Once again the Fed has shown that its ability to make judgments about the economy leaves something to be desired.”

Now there are many (among them myself on odd numbered days)who think this is less an issue of competence and more an issue of intent. It’s hard to believe that such smart people can be so wrong — perhaps they simply have another agenda. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence of corruption, regulatory capture and all the rest to merit the suspicion. But then I see something like this Bill Gross apologia, and think there is something more mysterious going on.

Bill Gross, who runs the biggest bond trading firm in the world, is considered by many to be the smartest financial mind on the planet. In fact, among financial types, the bond traders of his caliber are often thought of as the Mandarins,as opposed to the cowboys in the stock market or the egomaniacs in the hedge fund world. This is supposed to be where the really smart guys go. And yet Bill Gross made a huge bet this past year — the same bet the Obama administration did — that went very wrong:

PIMCO’s Bill Gross admitted his mistake over US bond call

In January 2011, Gross told CNBC that US Treasurys were “the most overvalued bond in the universe,” arguing one should stay away from it, but not necessary from all kind of bonds.

“Don’t stay out of bonds… stay out of Treasury bonds,” he said then.

A few months later, he was the first to admit that his predictions did not come true.

“When you’re underperforming the index, you go home at night and cry in your beer,” Gross said, according to the FT, adding: “It’s not fun, but who said this business should be fun. We’re too well paid to hang our heads and say boo hoo.”

Reactions were soon to follow.

“Obviously, it’s a bit of a mistake,” Guy Lebas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott, told CNBC on Tuesday. “Treasurys make up roughly a quarter of the US bond markets, so saying we’re going to completely abandon them in a fund as large as the one Bill Gross runs is a huge bet, and it’s a huge bullish bet on the credit market, it’s a huge bearish bet on the bonds,” he said.

Gross’s expectations have clearly not gone through, Lebas added, “but economic conditions have deteriorated far faster than PIMCO, or even we ever anticipated.”

Gross wasn’t a politico making some kind of ideological point. He lost a lot of money for his rich clients on that bet. And it was a bet that a fair number of people said at the time (including dumb old me, who has the financial savvy of a spider mite)was inexplicable. But he believed the hype, and in doing so, he convinced a whole bunch of other people that it must be right. After all, he’s one of the oracles — a Very Serious Person of the highest order.

So, I’m not convinced that this phenomenon is all about corruption. Sure, there’s a lot of it. The government and Wall Street is a revolving door and the dependence on big donors is corrupting in and of itself. But I don’t believe Bill Gross made that bet in some corrupt bargain to weaken the American political system at the behest of his fellow elites. There was just too much money involved. He screwed up. And he screwed up because he believed something that wasn’t true despite a whole lot of evidence that it wasn’t.

Gamblers make bad bets. Nobody wins every hand. But this one had huge ramifications to government policy because the person who was making it is such a revered person in the field. And because there has been so much of this over the past few years, among so many different members of our elite world leadership, I’ve finally concluded that it must have as much to do with epistemology as psychology or character. There is a systemic flaw in the way our elites are processing information and understanding the world around them. They may be hampered by their cramped social caste and worldview, and corruption is not a negligible factor, but the problem is obviously bigger than that. And I haven’t got a clue about what it is.

Here’s hoping that it’s self-correcting, because one thing is clear — the people in charge don’t know how to fix anything and refuse to listen to those who do.

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Our post-racial society

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Rush Limbaugh, de facto leader of the Republican Party:

When it comes down to it, the “titular head of the Republican party, the ideal model Republican” will vote for the Democrat, says Limbaugh, because “melanin is thicker than water, folks. And that’s what’ll happen.”

Of course, it’s not about race with Republicans. Herman Cain is totally one of their best friends.

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It’s a dirty job

by digby

… and nobody should have to do it:

Reporter Gives Update Covered In Sea Foam: MyFoxNY.com

Tucker Barnes of the Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C. made what is destined to be one of the most famous live shots in history Saturday standing in Ocean, Md. as Hurricane Irene covered him what he thought was “plankton or something.”

“I don’t know what it is, it has a sort of sandy consistency,” Barnes told Fox’s New York viewers, covered head to tow in what looked like frothy pancake batter.

“It doesn’t taste great,” he said.

Back in his warm and dry station, the MyFoxNY anchor mused, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Barnes, struggling to hold onto a boardwalk bench, said he hadn’t either.

“Our chief meterologist back at the station said that it’s some sort of organic matter. I guess it’s plankton or something mixed in with sand and salt,” he said.

“I can tell you first hand that it doesn’t smell great. It feels kind of soapy.”

“Be careful with that weird stuff, okay?” the anchor told him as the WTTG-TV reporter signed off. “That is a bizarre wild substance that is about to bury you.”

MyFoxNY reported later that the mystery foam was raw sewage pouring into the sea and being whipped into a froth by the hurricane’s winds.

Oh dear lord.

Ponzi Schemer

by digby

I find it very hard to believe that Rick Perry can get elected president with this crude of a message on Social Security and Medicare. It’s bad enough that it’s derisive toward the older people who are in the room and depend on the program.(Bunch ‘o swindlers!) There’s just nobody but wingnut extremists that don’t support the program. Certainly, not the young people he says he’s “protecting.”

It’s not surprising that Americans over age 65 are virtually unanimous in seeing Social Security as an important government program. As a group, they rely on it as the single greatest source of income in retirement.

But a poll commissioned by AARP to mark Social Security’s 75th anniversary (President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the transformational legislation on August 14, 1935) has found something even more interesting: young people line up solidly behind Social Security, too.

In a national phone survey of 1,200 adults by the GfK Roper consulting firm (margin of error: plus or minus 3 percent), 90 percent of those ages 18 to 29 deemed Social Security important. In fact, almost half of them agreed with the statement that it is “one of the very most important government programs,” an opinion held by nearly 80 percent of those over 65.

And nearly three-quarters of these youngest respondents strongly agreed that while they may not need the program when they retire, a time that probably seems infinitely far away, “I definitely want to know that it’s there, just in case I do.” Sixty-two percent said they will rely on Social Security payments in some way. By a wide margin, they opposed cutting benefits to reduce the federal deficit.

George W. Bush was not the brightest light the GOP ever produced. But he wasn’t dumb enough to attack the most popular program in history as a con job. This guy is just an aggressive thug. I’m beginning to think they let him in there to make Mitt Romney look better.

Update: Mojo has a nice piece up about the differences between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme. Let’s put it this way: is Social Security turns out have been a decades long Ponzi scheme, it means that the US Government will no longer be in existence when these young people get old. In which case, I think they might have bigger problems.

Ride the Real Estate Roller Coaster

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Remember all the pundits who said back in 2006 that we were in a different kind of economy, one where housing prices might continue to rise indefinitely, or at least never fall? Many of you will already have seen this, but below is a graphical depiction of the Case-Shiller index of home prices from 1890-2006, plotted as a rollercoaster:

See that death drop at the end? The one that never comes? Someone will have to explain why anyone in public policy listens to the morons who insisted that the inevitable would never happen. Back in 2005, I told anyone who would listen that real estate was coming down, but most people around me trusted the financial experts who said it wasn’t. And yet the same fools who inflated the bubble and then maintained the bubble didn’t exist, still run our economic policy no matter whether Democrats or Republicans get elected.

A year ago, someone uploaded another real estate rollercoaster video, but this time updated to mid-2010:

You’ll notice how much farther it still has to come down to reach pre-bubble levels. That decline has happened somewhat in the year since the video was made, but the fact is that housing is still overvalued.

Trying to force this rollercoaster to move higher again in this context is a fool’s errand, and bad public policy anyway. And yet that’s exactly what the Administration is trying to do by giving the banks indemnification for mortgage underwriting fraud. Crazy.

These days it’s not the real estate rollercoaster that scares me anymore. It’s the public policy insanity coaster. Let me know when it stops and we can get off, because I’m going to be sick.

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Conservationist Conservatism

by digby

Huh?

“The United States needs to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy and more dependent upon American resourcefulness. Whether that is in the Everglades, or whether that is in the eastern Gulf region, or whether that’s in North Dakota, we need to go where the energy is,” she said. “Of course it needs to be done responsibly. If we can’t responsibly access energy in the Everglades then we shouldn’t do it.”

In 2002, the federal government at the urging of President George W. Bush bought back oil and gas drilling rights in the Everglades for $120 million. Bachmann, who wants to get rid of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said she would rely on experts to determine whether drilling can be done without harming the environment.

“No one wants to hurt or contaminate the earth. … We don’t want to harm our water, our ecosystems or the air. That is a minimum bar,” she said.

“From there, though, that doesn’t mean that the two have to be mutually exclusive. We can protect the environment and do so responsibly, but we can also protect the environment and not kill jobs in America and not deny ourselves access to the energy resources that America’s been so blessed with.”

The Minnesota congresswoman, who is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012, is on a four-day swing through Florida, ending Monday in Miami.

“We do have EPA’s in each of the 50 states and I think that it’s up to the states,” she said. “The states have the right to develop their own environmental protections and regulations, as they all have.”

She said she recognizes there is a federal role when environmental issues cross borders, but she added that a big problem with the EPA now is that it does not consider job creation or job losses as part of its role in enforcing regulations. She said the regulations it does have prevent businesses from being able to reasonably create a profit.

“If we create a new department that is focused on conservation and get rid of the EPA, that would send a strong signal about what our priorities are. We believe in conservation, but I also believe at the same time that the EPA has overstepped its bounds,” Bachmann said.

Well ok then. Does anyone think that Bachman has a clue about, much less an interest in, this issue? I’m guessing she was told that Floridians quite value the Everglades and that she needs to be sensitive to that when she’s campaigning down there. Unfortunately, she doesn’t really value environmentalism and so can’t make a coherent case for it. No Republicans can (and most Democrats just lie about it.)

If there is a way to drill that guarantees there is no danger to these sensitive environments, I suppose a lot of people might be persuaded. The problem is, there isn’t. But then I’m quite sure that Bachman can dig up many “experts” who say there is. In fact, there are a bunch of them working for BP and the government right now, who guaranteed that there was no danger to the gulf if they were unable to cap a well for months on end. In fact, they said that couldn’t ever happen. But it did.

And look what’s happening in the gulf today:

The fear is palpable on the docks from Galveston to Panama City. Commercial fishermen working the waters hardest hit by the BP oil spill are worried sick about their future. It keeps them up at night. Many are convinced the 200 million gallons of crude that spewed into the Gulf last year have done irreparable damage to the fragile fisheries that provide their livelihood. According to a new CBS News segment, Gulf fishermen “have started catching fish with sores, fin rot, and infections at a greater frequency than ever before.”

It would seem BP’s oil is coming home to roost in an epidemic of sick fish and devastated lives. An Aug. 15 CBS News video – that’s going viral as we speak – captures the uncertainty of tens of thousands of commercial Gulf fishermen: “I don’t think we’ll be fishing in five years,” says Lucky Russell. “My opinion. …Everybody is worried.”

Everybody includes LSU oceanography Professor Jim Cowan, who has been studying the Gulf ecosystem for years:

“When one of these things comes on deck, it’s sort of horrifying,” Cowan said. “I mean, there these large dark lesions and eroded fins and areas on the body where scales have been removed. I’d imagine I’ve seen 30 or 40,000 red snapper in my career, and I’ve never seen anything like this. At all. Ever.”

I’m sure that the new GOP “conservation” department, along with the EPAs in 50 states will ensure that doesn’t happen again, right?

But then maybe it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge:

The State Department gave a crucial green light on Friday to a proposed 1,711-mile pipeline that would carry heavy oil from oil sands in Canada across the Great Plains to terminals in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast.

The project, which would be the longest oil pipeline outside of Russia and China, has become a potent symbol in a growing fight that pits energy security against environmental risk, a struggle highlighted by last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

By concluding that the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline would have minimal effect on the environment, President Obama would risk alienating environmental activists, who gave him important support in the 2008 election and were already upset by his recent decisions to expand domestic oil drilling and delay clean air rules. Pipeline opponents have protested in front of the White House for a week, resulting in nearly 400 arrests.

At the same time, rising concerns about the weak economy and high gas prices have made it difficult for the administration to oppose a project that would greatly expand the nation’s access to oil from a friendly neighbor and create tens of thousands of jobs.

If I were a cynic, I’d be inclined to think that certain interests were happy to keep unemployment high so as to ensure that this sort of reckless project passes muster.

But, hey, nothing to worry about. We’ll have a new and improved GOP “conservation” department that will factor in the fact that 10 years after the big oil pipeline is built, many of the same people will be called back to work to clean up whatever horrific environmental disaster happens as a result. That’s how it worked in Alaska, anyway. It’s win-win.

h/t to iamdave

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Public public

by digby

Hey, the good guys win one:

A court ruled Friday that the 2007 arrest of a Boston lawyer for recording police officers with his cellphone violated the man’s First and Fourth Amendment rights. The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston allows Simon Glik to continue his lawsuit against the city and the police officers who arrested him. He was charged with violating a state law that bars audio recordings without the consent of both parties. The court affirmed that Glik’s actions had been legal and denied the officers’ claim that they had “qualified immunity’’ because they were doing their jobs as public officials.

The idea that police officers cannot be filmed or taped in the course of their public duties is so bizarre to me that I can’t even follow the logic. But it’s happening in many jurisdictions, with many different legal theories being used to support it. In fact, this notion of removing citizens from public forums for questioning their political representatives works along the same lines.

There is a truly pernicious meme beginning to bubble up in American public life that says the government has the right to operate in secret in virtually any way it chooses. It’s not a free country if you are not allowed to document the activities of the police in the course of their duties. It just isn’t. And if you can’t question your representatives it’s not a real democracy either.

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Shaky foundation

by digby

New AP poll:

Whites and women are a re-election problem for President Barack Obama. Younger voters and liberals, too, but to a lesser extent.

All are important Democratic constituencies that helped him win the White House in 2008 and whose support he’ll need to keep it next year.

I’d say so. It’s his base. Unless the Democratic Party is composed of older, non-white moderate and conservative males these days, he’s going to need a whole lot of those voters.

The Dems have had problems with a majority of white voters for some time. But they desperately need to keep women, especially young single women, on board as well as keep the enthusiasm of the young and liberal of all races and ethnicities.

In the latest AP-GfK survey, less than half of all women and less than half of all men approve of the job Obama is doing. Just 50 percent of women said Obama deserves re-election.

Still, women are more likely than men to see Obama as empathetic or a strong leader, and they give him sharply higher positive ratings on his handling of the economy. Forty-three percent of women approve, compared with 29 percent of men.

-Younger voters and liberals are showing doubts about him, too.

Obama won younger voters in 2008 by a bigger margin than Democrat Bill Clinton in his victories in 1992 and 1996. But younger Democrats are no more apt to say the president deserves re-election than are older Democrats.

The Satan Sandwich really hurt him with the base:

Twenty-seven percent of Democrats under age 45 say Obama is not a strong leader, compared with 11 percent in June.

While a majority of liberals continue to say they view Obama as a strong leader, the strength of those opinions dropped sharply this summer. The share of liberals who say “strong leader” describes Obama “very well” has fallen from 53 percent to 29 percent in the aftermath of the debt-ceiling debate.

I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that if he goes out on the trail with more of this Grand Bargain bullshit, this state of affairs is going to get worse. Democrats aren’t buying it — and they aren’t impressed with the excuse that the President of the United States has no power and must accede to whatever the looniest teabagger decides is his bottom line. It’s just not the way Americans have experienced their government up until now and unless somebody is able to adequately explain what’s happened, this framing of “not a strong leader” is the only way they have of understanding it.

As Rick Perlstein puts it so well — people don’t really care about everyone getting along when times are tough. It unites people if politicians pick the right fight. They want leaders who will “lay down on the tracks for them.” They’ll wait to bind up the nation’s wounds after the battle is done.

Moreover, it’s important for the politicians to recognize tjhat Democrats are suffering right along with everyone else — more so considering that the Democrats represent poor people. Blind loyalty only gets you so far when the country is in this much trouble. All you have to do is look at this to know that this economic downturn is shaking the political foundations of both parties in ways that are very unpredictable. Unless things magically get better before November 2012 (the apparent Democratic strategy) there’s no telling how this might go. These aren’t normal political times and counting on the old “where are the gonna go” strategy is pretty risky.

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