Month: September 2012

It’s a species problem

by digby

I had just finished reading Michael Lewis’ piece in Vanity Fair when David’s post below popped up. And the difference in our reactions to it are so startling that I figured I should write about it.

First, the whole piece is so hagiographic, I felt it was more like a religious tract than a magazine profile. This:

His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his stat­us needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established stat­us structures. After all, he became president.

Oh boy. This came after the basketball story, which was almost too much to take:

He used to focus on personal achievement, but as he can no longer achieve so much personally, he’s switched to trying to figure out how to make his team win. In his decline he’s maintaining his relevance and sense of purpose.

Anyway, suffice to say that I found it to be an extremely flattering profile, so flattering that I ended up not believing the conclusions about central story in the piece — the Libya decision that made David so proud to be a millenial. I have no doubt that some of the advisors said they had the ghosts of 800,000 Tustsi’s on their minds. We all did. And that’s because people in foreign policy circles and the press were all making the same comparison. The idea that Obama was moved in this meeting by some young Turks who broke out of the conventional paradigm and spoke up for human rights strikes me as very far fetched. That conversation was happening everywhere.

I have no doubt that preventing mass murders was an element of the decision. But I can prove that it is not the determining factor in the Obama administration’s foreign policy with one word: Syria. That country has been embroiled in a very similar situation for months and the US has not made any moves to intervene. Activists claim that the regime has killed nearly 30,000 of its citizens, 5,000 in August alone. There are daily reports of torture, mass killings and constant terror. And yet there is zero talk of American intervention. Now, whether or not you think that’s good or bad, you simply cannot say that the United States is in the business of using it’s mighty forces to stop potential genocides or mass murders. It has made no moves to do it here — we’re watching tens of thousands of Syrian civilians being massacred and nothing is being done.

The United States government is in the business of maintaining its power and military hegemony, period, and even if the ghosts of dead Tutsis haunt some of the policy makers, those apparitions do not change that basic equation. If some people happen to get saved, that’s all to the good. But it is not the point and President Obama is hardly an avatar of human rights simply because that was a serendipitous effect of a certain military decision.

And this, finally, is why I think this whole piece is bullshit. I’m sure all those people said what Lewis said they said. But I do not believe that the President made his decision based upon those embattled younger staffers who were arguing for humanitarian intervention. The President wanted to intervene for reasons the article doesn’t spell out. It does however, discuss his decision making process, in which he takes on the various arguments as his own. As one observers says:

Even when he’s made up his mind he wants to cherry-pick the best arguments to justify what he wants to do.

So color me skeptical about the real motivations for the intervention, particularly considering the coolness with which this president dispatches deadly force in other areas for inscrutable reasons.

But I do want to say that I get David’s idealistic enthusiasm for international interventionism. Some of the most painful political spectacles of my life have been watching horrible human rights offenses all over the world and feeling impotent to stop them. (Some of them perpetrated by the United States itself.) But as David identifies Rwanda as the seminal human rights horror of his life while those of us who are older were tainted by our youthful experience with Vietnam, there’s a big lesson to be learned from that that I hope is not forgotten by idealists of the younger generation.

Vietnam became Vietnam under a very serious liberal belief that America was helping the South Vietnamese fight off the communists and staving off a monstrous regime from taking over many more countries. And we found out then that we don’t do that very well. Estimates are that around a million civilians were killed there, some say twice that. And that’s not counting the regular military of both sides along with the United States and other countries’ participating forces.

The Best and the Brightest who perpetrated the escalation of that war were all liberal interventionists who believed in using America’s power to advance freedom and democracy and save those who were too weak to help themselves. And that way, for any powerful nation, lies hubris.

It certainly seems that one should be able to use whatever power one has to stop wrongs being perpetrated against the weak. But I’m afraid that the messiness of human nature makes that a very dicey proposition when it comes to military violence. In my view, the laws of unintended consequences, the perfidy of our leaders, the inadequacy of our institutions all combine to make liberal style humanitarian interventionism a generally bad idea.

Like David, I hope that humans are able to evolve to a point at which they can manage some global institutions that will react effectively when the dark side emerges. But we aren’t there yet. So I think we’re stuck with self-defense as the only military doctrine we can rely upon — and even that is so often fraught with manipulation and propaganda that it’s nearly useless. We are not dealing with an American problem or even a nation state problem. It’s a species problem. Until that changes, I’m going to be skeptical of all military adventures. There’s just too much evidence that these things are never what they seem.

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“The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room”

by David Atkins

If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Michael Lewis’ transfixing profile of President Obama. Love him or hate him, the profile provides a very personal, nuanced view of an imperfect but thoughtful man in the crucible of some very difficult decisions. This bit on the decision to save the city of Benghazi from Qaddafi was particularly engrossing:

By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two weeks from getting to Ben­gha­zi. On that day the French announced they were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan planes from flying. A “no-fly zone” this was called, and it forced Obama’s hand. The president had to decide whether to support the no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. “Here is what we knew,” recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. “We knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people. We knew we didn’t have a lot of time—somewhere between two days and two weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated. We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone.”

That much had been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. “We knew that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Ben­gha­zi,” says Obama. “The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn’t real­ly do anything.” European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn’t flying. His army was racing across the North African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn’t know if they knew that a no-fly zone was pointless, but if they’d talked to any military leader for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. “The last thing we knew,” he adds, “is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the operation. Because we had the capacity.”

Lewis then describes how the President held a meeting of the principals in the military, intelligence and diplomatic communities to decide how to proceed. He was basically given two options: do nothing, or agree to a face-saving but ultimately pointless no-fly zone. Unsatisfied, he turned to his junior advisers. What happened next sends a chill of generational pride up my spine, as the President’s younger advisers took a more progressive stand that their realpolitik elders, apparently more concerned with comparative lack of “national interests” (read, oil) in Libya, or the damage intervention might do to the President politically:

“The funny thing is the system worked,” says one person who witnessed the meeting. “Everyone was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Gates was right to insist that we had no core national-security issue. Biden was right to say it was politically stupid. He’d be putting his presidency on the line.”

Public opinion at the fringes of the room, as it turned out, was different. Several people sitting there had been deeply affected by the genocide in Rwanda. (“The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room,” as one puts it.) Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president—people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. They aren’t political people so much as Obama people. One was Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell, about the moral and political costs the U.S. has paid for largely ignoring modern genocides. Another was Ben Rhodes, who had been a struggling novelist when he went to work as a speechwriter back in 2007 on the first Obama campaign. Whatever Obama decided, Rhodes would have to write the speech explaining the decision, and he said in the meeting that he preferred to explain why the United States had prevented a massacre over why it hadn’t. An N.S.C. staffer named Denis McDonough came out for intervention, as did Antony Blinken, who had been on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the Rwandan genocide, but now, awkwardly, worked for Joe Biden. “I have to disagree with my boss on this one,” said Blinken. As a group, the junior staff made the case for saving the Ben­gha­zis. But how?

The president may not have been surprised that the Pentagon hadn’t sought to answer that question. He was nevertheless visibly annoyed. “I don’t know why we are even having this meeting,” he said, or words to that effect. “You’re telling me a no-fly zone doesn’t solve the problem, but the only option you’re giving me is a no-fly zone.” He gave his generals two hours to come up with another solution for him to consider, then left to attend the next event on his schedule, a ceremonial White House dinner.

And two hours later, the generals came back with an option of stopping Qaddafi’s imvading force from the air. But the President only wanted to do it if it could be done 1) multilaterally with a U.N. resolution; 2) with the understanding that Europe would be mostly on the hook for cleaning up the aftermath; and 3) there would be a minimum danger of American casualties. Most of his advisers disagreed with the plan; Secretary Clinton would probably have decided on a simple no-fly zone, leaving the people of Benghazi to their fate.

But the hard and narrow third path won the day and was ultimately more or less successful.

Many progressives will disagree, emphasizing the idea that nation-state territorial integrity trumps all other moral concerns in the name of a misguided understanding of anti-imperialism.

But I think that difference in perception is often a generational one. Those of us who had politically interested yearnings as children and teenagers at the time were usually shocked to the core by the Rwandan massacre. I cannot begin to describe the impact it had on my worldview at the time. We didn’t grow up in the shadow of Vietnam and Grenada, but in the shadow of Rwanda. Having learned about the Holocaust and having heard the phrase “Never again” repeated, to know that it had in fact happened again and that the world had stood by even as nearly a million people were indiscriminately slaughtered often with little more than machetes and farm implements, was a deeply disturbing and traumatic experience. And I was deeply ashamed that President Clinton, a man whom I had largely admired to that point, had not led the world to act.

And while many liberals take a firm stance against the invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya for purportedly the same reasons, many of my generation see the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide as a foreign policy failure on equal footing with the disastrous, illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq resulting in at least 100,000 deaths in its own right.

Either way, Lewis paints a picture of a president who was faced with a very difficult dilemma with potentially hundreds of thousands of lives in the balance. A decision that only the sturdiest souls should ever have to consider. And it’s my opinion that he made the right call. I am glad that I won’t have to explain to my own children why the world stood aside, its decision allayed by an American President whom I supported, and allowed a mass genocidal massacre for the second time in almost as many decades.

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Teaching by example

by digby

I highly recommend this piece in TNR about the Chicago teacher strike by Richard Kahlenberg,senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy:

Applying business school principles to the education of young children, Emanuel and his wealthy supporters favor firing teachers based heavily on student test score results and deregulating education by expanding the number of charter schools. But while much of the press equates standing up to unions with education reform, key reforms that unions opposed have not worked out as planned. Although 88 percent of charters are nonunion, giving principals in those schools the flexibility that reformers prize, the most comprehensive study of charter schools (backed by pro-charter foundations), concluded that charters are about twice as likely to underperform regular public schools as to outperform them. During the strike, nonunion charter schools have bragged that they remained open, but the lack of teacher voice in these schools helps explain why charters nationally have extremely high rates of teacher turnover.

The theory that a nonunion environment, which allows for policies like merit pay, would make all the difference in promoting educational achievement never held much water. After all, teachers unions are weak-to-nonexistent throughout much of the American South, yet the region hardly distinguishes itself educationally. Indeed, the highest performing states, such as Massachusetts and New Jersey—and the highest performing nations, such as Finland—have heavily unionized teaching forces.

To some teachers union skeptics, like the New York Times editorial page, the very fact that Chicago teachers decided to go on strike was itself evidence that they did not care sufficiently about children. “Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea,” the Times opined. But this attitude displays a stunning ignorance of the way collective bargaining works: If teachers unilaterally disarmed, saying they would never go on strike, they would lose all leverage and go back to collective begging rather than collective bargaining.
Of course, teacher strikes should be a last resort—extended strikes do harm the children’s learning—but sometimes teachers must assert themselves, particularly as they fight for greater resources and reduced class size for themselves and students. Moreover, a brief strike can have its own educational value for children. As labor attorney Moshe Marvit told me, “In Chicago, 350,000 public school students are experiencing, first-hand, how workers can band together and demand a voice in the workplace.” Noting the many children present on picket lines, Marvit suggests, “These teachers are teaching their students, through action, the power of collective action and solidarity.” And according to Reuters, a poll earlier this week found that 66 percent of parents with children in the Chicago Public Schools supported the strike.

I urge you to read the whole piece. It’s not long, but it addresses all this elite nonsense over the “highly paid” teachers and questions the premises of these market based reforms in education.

Kahlenberg offers a different approach (peer assistance and review) which works better and which you can read about in the piece. It won’t offer Democrats and elite liberals the chance to rhetorically beat up on Kindergarten teachers to prove they are “tough enough” to take on a union — and politically stab themselves in the back in the bargain. But as Kahlenberg points out, this strike and the previous protests in Wisconsin may end up saving the Democratic party from itself.

People are always saying that we need a mass movement. Maybe we have one.

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Obama’s army of dead voters and welfare queens

The lavish cribs of he greedy, chalk-dusted succubi

by digby

Reading around the web this week about the outrageous salaries of the spoiled, spoiled American teachers I was reminded by this Daily Show piece from the Wisconsin teacher showdown in which Samantha Bee checks out the lavish lifestyle of a couple of average teachers’ super cribs:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

It’s shocking that more of the liberal elite aren’t clamoring to get in on this action considering all the money and the perks.

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Whistling past the climate change graveyard

by David Atkins

There’s a big new academic paper by Bernie, Gohar and Lowe on behalf of a number of academic organizations providing advice to the British government on the subject. The result?

Two of the results presented here may stimulate media interest in this report. The first is that the lowest feasible temperature target, achievable under current understanding of emissions reductions, for 2100 is 1.6°C. The second concerns a delay in the timing of peak emissions and the effect this has on either overshooting the 2°C target, or meeting it by deploying stringent emissions reductions (for example with BECCS which will effect land use and agriculture).

In short, there is basically no way to avoid the 2 degree Celsius threshold, which is already incredibly dangerous.

The details:

This study develops over 150,000 plausible mitigation pathways and assesses their climate outcomes to examine the potential flexibility of emissions pathways leading to climate targets from 1.5 to 3°C above preindustrial levels. As well as a much fuller coverage and analysis of possible emission pathways than was available previously, the report’s analysis includes the possibility of large scale negative emissions technology later in the century, in line with the estimates of the land available for bio-energy from Committee on Climate Change’s 2011 report on Bio-energy and DECC’s estimates of potential efficiency of bio-energy carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Probabilistic impacts projections for 2050 and 2100 are also presented from a new modelling framework developed under AVOID, to aid interpretation of the relative climate impacts at different levels of climate change.

The main finding of the report are;
The lowest median 2100 temperature target found to be possible in this study was 1.6°C. This was only found possible with a peak in global emissions in 2014, and emissions reductions rates and long-term negative emissions at the very limit of what is currently understood to be feasible.

In other words, even if we basically stopped emitting all reasonable carbon right now, we’d still see a 1.6 degree mininum in warming.

More:

Without negative emissions in the longer term, a 2°C target by 2100 was the lowest found to be possible in the current framework. This requires the highest emissions reduction rates currently considered feasible (3.5% /yr) and a peak in global emissions before 2016. Less than 1% of the scenarios that lead to 2°C of warming by 2100 and which do not include net negative emissions have reached their maximum global average temperature and started to cool by 2100. Of those scenarios meeting 2°C in 2100 which do include negative emissions, over 90% have reached their peak warming and started to cool by 2100.

Temperature targets a few tenths of a degree above 2°C in 2100 introduce significant flexibility in the range of emissions pathways that are consistent with a given target, allowing lower reductions rates of emissions, later peaks in global emissions and a larger long-term minimum of global emissions.

Future historians are going to look back at us and declare us collectively insane. We have:
1) The worst financial crisis in 70 years, with mass unemployment across the world, caused by a parasitic and near useless casino financial sector;

2) A global climate change crisis that quite literally affects humanity and the fate of civilization as we know it; and

3) Energy and efficiency technologies that can help curb carbon emissions while putting millions of people to work.

All it would require is just a little cooperation from the countries around the world so very busy protecting their own “national” interests, and the subordination of the temporary interests of the global jet set plutocrats to the future of the species. It’s not even that the billionaires wouldn’t still be billionaires. They’d just have a little less, in exchange for a decent middle class and protecting our collective future.

But no. Instead, we’re going to spend this generation bluffing over which nation-state can put up the most pointlessly aggressive geopolitical stance against the other, aided and abetted by a global network of insecure plutocrats afraid they might have to give up their 3rd yachts.

It’s sickening, and I have no idea what to do about it except holler as loudly as I can. The system is totally broken. Conservatives think that Jesus/Moshiach/Madhi is coming to save them, or figure they’ll be dead and therefore don’t care. And way too many liberals want to revert to the sort of nation-state protectionism and environmental localism that will only accelerate the problem.

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Why won’t they fix the economy? They’re doing God’s work.

by digby

Krugman asks an important question today:

[D]epressions do end, eventually, even without government policies to get the economy out of this trap. Why? Long ago, John Maynard Keynes suggested that the answer was “use, decay, and obsolescence”: even in a depressed economy, at some point businesses will start replacing equipment, either because the stuff they have has worn out, or because much better stuff has come along; and, once they start doing that, the economy perks up. Sure enough, that’s what Apple is doing. It’s bringing on the obsolescence. Good.

But why suffer through years of depressed output and high unemployment while waiting for enough obsolescence to accumulate? Why not have the government step in and spend more, say on education and infrastructure, to help the economy through its rough patch?

Why? I don’t know that there’s one reason. As Krugman says it’s a combination of ideology, exaggerated deficit fears and Republican obstructionism, which is true. But I also think opportunism plays a big role. Powerful people sense a moment in which to restructure American life more to its benefit. The Pete Petersons of the world have been working for a very long time to destroy the New Deal programs and business would dearly love to break unions and lower wages and benefits all around. As Rahm Emmanuel famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

There’s also the ole Andrew Mellon morality tale:

“liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”

Or the sexy John Galt version:

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

Some of us think that making people suffer needlessly is cruel and that condemning an entire generation to lowered expectations for not good reason is immoral. But people who buy into the notion that capitalism itself is not an economic system but rather some sort of moral force that keeps the “bad people” in line don’t have a problem with it at all. Indeed, it’s a means to an end. If they can use this crisis to end any notions that the parasites, looters and moochers don’t have to accept the Hobbesian jungle the people in charge believe they deserve for failing to get rich — the highest level of mortal achievement — they will have succeeded. As Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein memorably said, they’re “doing God’s work.”

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A hostile takeover of the Republican Party

by digby

I’m pretty sure that already happened, but Bryan Fischer swears that they really mean it this time!

“If Barack Obama wins this election the Republican Party as we know it is finished, it is dead, it is toast — you can stick a fork in it,” he told TPM Friday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. “And conservatives, grassroots conservatives, are either going to start a third party or they are going to launch a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Fischer said he believed Romney would be leading national polls by double digits at this point if he had followed Paul Ryan’s lead and offered more detailed conservative positions on the budget and social issues.

“The biggest mistake is they put a bag over Paul Ryan’s head,” he said. Fischer said he was “deeply disturbed” that Ryan didn’t mention the campaign’s opposition to gay marriage in his speech to the summit on Friday.

“I got to believe that there was some kind of directive from the top of the campaign: We don’t want you to deal with this issue,” he said.

Well you know what that means, don’t you? I knew that you did.

Pay particular attention to Fischer’s delusion that Romney has hobbled Ryan against his will. The same Ryan who whipped for the TARP and the every other Bush initiative these right wingers purport to hate. They’re saving him for later.

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David Gregory dances again …

by digby

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news,

world news, and news about the economy

Go to about 3 minutes in …

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think he missed his calling. He would have been great as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.

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Things you learn from Mitt Romney:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income?

MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.

What a funny out of touch rich man:

Regionally, in 2010, the Northeast reached a median household income of $53,283, the West, $53,142, the South, $45,492, and the Midwest, $48,445.[47]

Another common measurement of personal income is the mean household income. Unlike the median household income, which divides all households in two halves, the mean income is the average income earned by American households. In the case of mean income, the income of all households is divided by the number of all households.[50] The mean income is usually more affected by the relatively unequal distribution of income which tilts towards the top. As a result, the mean tends to be higher than the median income, with the top earning households boosting it. Overall, the mean household income in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau 2004 Economic Survey, was $60,528