Month: April 2013

Unraveling propaganda, hippie style


by digby

I’m so enjoying watching “even-the-liberal” pundits being wildly applauded and feted for their courage by the liberal cognoscenti for righteously railing against right wing extremism these days. It makes me feel nostalgic for the days when bloggers were writing exactly those sorts of screeds and being admonished for our shrillness and hysteria by these same mainstream pundits.

Here’s an example  I was reminded of today when I read Greg Mitchell’s re-cap of the famous Jessica Lynch propaganda coup 10 years ago.  In this post from 2005, I was talking about how the right manufactured the illusion of the liberal fifth column. Those were the days …

Witnessing History 

by digby 

Kevin Drum nicely deconstructs this tiresome Ward Churchill witch hunt. I realize that we soulless, decaying leftists are supposed to step up and repudiate him (or maybe tie him up and throw him in water to see if he floats) but I’m just too tired. Since I’d never heard of the guy before the right raised him to the status of left-wing icon I don’t really feel like I have much of a stake in his allegedly treasonous three year old book. Anyway, I’m still busy disavowing Jane Fonda and and Joseph Stalin, my personal role models. 


Kevin ran a lexis search on the story and concludes that it really took off when the NY Times picked up the story after the right wing noise machine had slavered over it like a bunch of Atkins dieters with a big bowl of bacon grease. It has been blazing since January 27th when Drudge first trumpeted the story and the next day when Rush and O’Reilly both held forth on the topic. By the time the NY Times wrote its piece, it was already known and believed by tens of millions of people — which means they had to write about it; “it was out there!” 


Kevin thinks it’s fascinating how an obscure story like this finds it’s way into the mainstream, but it’s much more than fascinating. It’s pernicious. This is also how lies and smears are spread and validated and there is almost no way to tell the difference anymore between a valid story and a right wing feeding frenzy. It’s supremely ironic that the minute the “liberal” NY Times decides to engage, even if it refutes the allegations and sets the record straight, it helps spreads the story everywhere because of its massive influence. Its mere entry into the discourse helps turn a contrived right wing smear job into a national scandal and puts one more nail in the coffin of truth and objective reality. Once people hear what they want to hear, it doesn’t matter if it’s been debunked as a total fraud. They’ll continue to believe it: 

People Believe a ‘Fact’That Fits Their Views Even if It’s Clearly False

Funny thing, memory. With the second anniversary next month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it’s only natural that supporters as well as opponents of the war will be reliving the many searing moments of those first weeks of battle.

The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. U.S. troops firing at a van approaching a Baghdad checkpoint and killing seven women and children. A suicide bomber nearing a Najaf checkpoint and blowing up U.S. soldiers. The execution of coalition POWs by Iraqis. The civilian uprising in Basra against Saddam’s Baathist party.

If you remember it well, then we have grist for another verse for Lerner and Loewe (“We met at nine,” “We met at eight,” “I was on time,” “No, you were late.” “Ah yes, I remember it well!”). The first three events occurred. The second two were products of the fog of war: After being reported by the media, both were quickly retracted by coalition authorities as erroneous.

Yet retracting a report isn’t the same as erasing it from people’s memories. According to an international study to be published next month, Americans tend to believe that the last two events occurred — even when they recall the retraction or correction.[emphasis added] In contrast, Germans and Australians who recall the retraction discount the misinformation. It isn’t that Germans and Australians are smarter. Instead, it’s further evidence that what we remember depends on what we believe.

“People build mental models,” explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, Crawley, who led the study that will be published in Psychological Science. “By the time they receive a retraction, the original misinformation has already become an integral part of that mental model, or world view, and disregarding it would leave the world view a shambles.” Therefore, he and his colleagues conclude in their paper, “People continue to rely on misinformation even if they demonstrably remember and understand a subsequent retraction.”

[…]

“People who were not suspicious of the motives behind the war continued to rely on misinformation,” Prof. Lewandowsky said, “believing in things they know to have been retracted.” They held fast to what they had originally heard “because it fits with their mental model,” which people seek to retain “whatever it takes.”

This is where the right wing noise machine is really powerful. They create the “mental model” and then hammer it home day after day after day. People exposed to this mental model are told that the MSM is biased and that liberals are traitors and cowards. You have respected bloggers like Instapundit saying things like: 

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

while radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh says: 

I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?

And then there is something like this coming from a mainstream opinion writer and television pundit Fred Barnes: 

At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their [Democrats] vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what’s permissible and what’s out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.

These statements are not made on rare occasions. This is the ongoing “mental model” that is being promulgated day after day after day by highly successful opinion makers in media both new and old. Bloggers like Instapundit are considered mainstream and thoughtful, not bomb throwing partisans. He is linked approvingly by many establishment web sites and works for MSBNC. After all, he’s not saying anything unusual. 


Neither is Limbaugh. MSM media critic Howard Kurtz said, “Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.” 


So when these mainstream voices say that Ward Churchill represents the left with his obscure unknown thesis that the 9/11 victims were complicit in their own deaths, the view that the left is soulless is not difficult to accept. See how that works? 


And, of course, the true irony is that all this breast beating and calls for dismissal and censorship comes on the heels of years of braying about political correctness in academia squelching free speech and dissenting points of view. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading conservative intellectuals like Walter Williams saying universities are “the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement” and Paul Hollander calling it “the most widespread form of institutionalized intolerance in American higher education.” (I won’t even mention that champion of intellectual diversity David Horowitz.) Well now, it would appear that “political correctness vs academic freedom” comes in all flavors. 


And it’s always a-ok for mainstream, influential intellectuals like Frank “cakewalk” Gaffney to say things like “The U.N. is a hateful and anti-Semitic mobocracy” or Michael Ledeen to publicly float a theory that 9/11 was the result of a “Franco-German strategy …based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.” These inflammatory statements at a time of great global unease are not repudiated by anyone. Indeed, such dangerous rabble rousing is completely accepted and in some cases endorsed by the Republican establishment. No one questinos whether such statements might endanger American security or its stated foreign policy. Indeed, one is left to ponder whether it might actually be American foreign policy, considering the fact that those who write these screeds are welcome in the White House. 


And that brings us to the crucial difference between Ward Churchill’s politically incorrect ravings and Gaffney, Ledeen and Williams’ politically incorrect ravings — the latter are powerful, well known intellectuals in the conservative movement who are on the inside of government policymaking at the highest reaches. Churchill, on the other hand, is a nobody. 


Liberals have nothing to apologise for. Indeed, intellectual honesty requires that we do not. These conservative critics’ facts are wrong and their analysis is self-serving. They have concocted a “mental model” that is designed to marginalize and intimidate those who speak out against them. I’m not talking about obscure college professors with eccentric views. I’m talking about average Americans with mainstream views that don’t hew exactly to the Republican party line who are now viewed with suspicion as UnAmerican by association with this leftist chimera that sides with terrorists. 


There has been some very interesting thinking on this the last week in the blogosphere. If you haven’t read it already, I especially recommend Max Sawicky’s pithy analysis: 

…the Right doesn’t cast slurs on people because they are communist, anti-American, or cross some line of non-radical, patriotic acceptability. It casts slurs indiscriminately as a routine task of political warfare. That’s why they lump people like Ward Churchill with for god’s sakes Teddy Kennedy or Howard Zinn. They’re not using a faulty litmus test. They are trying to destroy political criticism.

This is absolutely correct. Someone asked me if I believe that conservatives are acting in good faith when they say things like this: 

The Belmont Club: “One could hardly expect that the end of the Cold War, the decline of Europe, the ascendancy of India and China, the collapse of the UN and the advent of terrorism would leave political relations between Left and Right unchanged. But it was the declining vigor of Marxist thought coupled with new conservative ideas that poured the most fuel on the flames. Discourse between Left and Right could only remain civil for so long as Conservatives remained meek or had no counter-pulpit. . . The weakening of the traditional media and the stresses caused by war have created a kind of ‘play’ in the system which now allow unchained weights to crash about. What has changed is that, with the decline of the MSM, there is nothing which prevents incivility from becoming a two-way street. And I’m not sure either the Left or the total system can contain the stress.”

I have no way of knowing if this person sincerely believes that the decline of civil discourse in our politics can be pegged to world events and their supposed galvanizing effect on the right to finally defend itself against a failing Marxist left. I do know that it does not square with the facts or history. The Republicans have been throwing rhetorical nuclear bombs our way and getting away with it for decades. This harsh, no holds barred rhetorical style was ushered into the modern era by Newt Gingrich and other movement conservatives in the 1980’s. It was a conscious, tactical decision designed to intimidate. 


From a 1989 article about Gingrich in Vanity Fair: 

Gingrich, the new face, quickly recognized an opportunity. The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders –permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority.

At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House. When, in 1984, he escalated his attack on Democrats to the point of questioning their patriotism– accusing them of being “blind to Communism” –Speaker O’Neill lost his cool. In a legendary head-to-head encounter on the floor of the House, the Speaker blasted Gingrich : “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”

That was 21 years ago. These incendiary insults to Democrats’ patriotism did not begin on 9/11. Gingrich went on to institutionalize the demonization of liberals as a political tactic with his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” 


If some people are unaware of that or have salved their consciences by creating a myth that today’s harsh political climate was the result of external events, is no excuse. This scorched earth style of politics was quite deliberately put into play for political gain. If these true believers have convinced themselves that the right wing has been meek and mild until it had to bravely step foward and defend the country against terrorists, a little google trip through the 90’s would surely cure that misapprehension. 


And I frankly do not see why they should be given any consideration for their sincere belief in a toxic political strategy that wants to see people like me silenced and this country changed in ways that will make it unrecognizable. Shame on them for their unwillingness to step in and take responsibility for what they’ve wrought. 


Shame on anyone who says that this is not the history of the last 25 years. I was a witness. 

Let’s just say that for a very long time anyone pointing out such phenomena were relegated to fringe dweller status and tarred as radicals by the liberal Villagers and Goldilocks pundits who all sought to distance themselves from such ungracious observations of the loyal opposition. The Republicans haven’t really changed, but it appears that the times have. And those of us who toiled in obscurity trying to get this into the ether have now moved on to a deeper critique of the system itself. I think that’s progress.

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Forcing me to have healthcare? Tyranny. Forcing me to have a gun? Freedom.

by David Atkins

Ah, the joys of local control.

Late Monday, Nelson, Georgia passed a law called the “Family Protection Ordinance” that requires every adult in the 1,300-person town to own a gun “for purposes of emergency management and general safety of the city.”

The town’s Police Chief, Heath Mitchell, told the AP that he hopes “having a gun would help residents take their protection into their own hands,” since the town has an understaffed police department and slow response time to 911 calls.

One councilman even used the National Rifle Association’s call for arming all Americans to defend the law, saying “I really felt like this ordinance was a security sign for our city. Basically it was a deterrent ordinance to tell potential criminals they might want to go on down the road a little bit.” Overall, the measure signals that government officials believe residents, not police departments, should be responsible for their own protection and rejects state and federal governments’ efforts to reduce gun violence through increased regulation of firearms.

This little town of 1300 already has a low crime rate, so more power to them if their pistols can help prevent heart attacks and strokes when the 911 response is slow. A bullet can solve any problem, or so they say.

The town is also overwhelmingly conservative, so I’m sure the Affordable Care Act’s mandate isn’t terribly popular. Government tyranny, you know. Requiring someone to buy health insurance is just the sort of federal imposition on freedom that a local ordinance requiring someone to buy a gun is designed to protect against.

Wolverines!

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Start yammering Mr President

by digby

Jonathan Bernstein wants the president to start jaw-boning the public on climate change:

Media Matters has noticed something important: Climate was almost completely absent on the national broadcast network news last year. Only twelve stories, combined, on the CBS, ABC, and NBC news shows, were devoted to the topic — which certainly has a legitimate claim as the single most important policy problem facing the United States right now.

There’s nothing at all wrong with the response that Media Matters is urging, which is for people to write the networks and demand more coverage. However, the real way to get the networks talking climate is to get the political parties and their politicians to talk about it — and especially the president. The evidence is pretty strong that presidents can’t change voters’ minds very well, but they can definitely change what voters think about. That’s because if the president talks about something, the press will cover it.

And politicians, the president included, will talk about things which their parties — including party activists — tell them are high priorities. So the way to get results here is to press politicians to talk about climate change. In particular, activists could make clear to candidates seeking Democratic nominations in 2014 (when candidates are particularly responsive to party pressure) that detailed, vocal positions on climate are a top priority.

I had thought the bully pulpit is not only useless, but often counter-productive, so this is a surprise to me. Ezra Klein explained it to us all in this New Yorker piece from 2012, wherein he outlined all the political science numbers-crunching that proves public opinion is fairly irrelevant to public policy and presidential rhetoric even more so. Indeed, the thesis says that while the president coming out publicly for a particular policy may be able to harden his own troops’ resolve from time to time, he also hardens the opposition against him, so government basically can only be effective through the use of backroom deals and inside the beltway politicking:

Edwards’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion isn’t effective with the public. Lee’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress. And, because our system of government usually requires at least some members of the opposition to work with the President if anything is to get done, that suggests that the President’s attempts at persuasion might have the perverse effect of making it harder for him to govern.
[…]
There is no reason to believe that F.D.R.’s storytelling faltered for a single midterm election, or that Reagan lost his persuasive ability in 1982, then managed to regain it two years later. Rather, the causality appears to work the other way around: Presidents win victories because ordinary Americans feel that their lives are going well, and we call those Presidents great communicators, because their public persona is the part of them we know.

After three years in Washington, David Axelrod, who served as the chief strategist for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, agrees. “Some folks in politics believe this is all just a rhetorical game, but when you’re governing it’s not,” he says. “People are viewing their lives through the lens of their own experience, not waiting for you to describe to them what they’re seeing or feeling.” Paul Begala, who helped set the message in the Clinton White House, puts it more piquantly: “The Titanic had an iceberg problem. It did not have a communications problem. Right now, the President has a jobs problem. If Obama had four-per-cent unemployment, he would be on Mt. Rushmore already and people would look at Nancy Pelosi like Lady Gaga.”

The question, Begala says, is: What is the alternative to Presidential persuasion? “If you don’t try it at all, it guarantees you won’t persuade anybody,” he says. “And, to put it simply, your people in Congress and in the country will hate you if you don’t.” That’s the real dilemma for the modern White House. Aggressive, public leadership is typically ineffective and, during periods of divided government, can actually make matters worse. But passivity is even more dangerous. In that case, you’re not getting anything done and you look like you’re not even trying.

If that’s true then the president talking a lot about climate change would persuade no one and merely appease some people who think he needs to “look like he’s trying.” I am not persuaded by this argument. I think Bernstein is right that while the president may not be able to change minds, he can certainly put issues on the agenda. Why do I believe this? Because of this recent poll:

The poll showed that 45 percent of Democratic voters think “balancing … the federal budget would significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs.” A sky-high 61 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans agree.

I think it’s fair to say that many of those people have been persuaded of this by the president, who has been relentlessly pushing for his balanced approach to deficit reduction for at least two years, often in the same breath that he talks about improving the economy After all, they weren’t always quite so concerned:

Yes, Republicans quite suddenly became strong deficit hawks when the presidency changed hands.  Go figure. But look at the Democrats.  Instead of being the other side of that coin and becoming less concerned when the Democrat came into power, they became more concerned. I’m just guessing, and maybe it’s because Democrats just really, really care about deficits on the merits, but I think the White House’s choice to rhetorically support the idea that deficit reduction is a top priority played heavily into that result. (That applies to terrorism policy too, for that matter…)

As I wrote the other day, at this point the only thing dividing the two parties on this issue is whether the deficit must be dealt with by cutting programs alone or with a “balanced approach” of cutting programs and “asking the rich to pay a little bit more.” Virtually nobody argues that we needn’t do deficit reduction at the moment at all. Normal people who don’t pay close attention can be forgiven for thinking that deficit reduction must be very important — and that it will create jobs and improve the economy. They simply can’t imagine that virtually everyone in the government would insist on doing something that wouldn’t accomplish those things at a time like this.

So, considering how well the obsession wit the deficit has worked to make it a top priority issue,  I totally agree that the president should talk a lot about climate change.  I do think it makes a difference and I think the very act of doing it repeatedly puts it on the agenda and gives it an urgency.  Will he change climate change deniers minds?  Doubtful.  In fact, I agree that it may very well harden their opposition to any policies designed to prevent it, although it’s hard to see how they could be more hardened than they already are.  But it could help persuade Democrats and Independents that this is something to which they need to pay attention and that’s a necessary first step. So start yammering Mr President!

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Are women entitled to individual liberty? Apparently not.

by digby

I will never in a million years understand how libertarians can use this logic:

A libertarian-leaning Republican congressman from Michigan who has been billed as the “new Ron Paul” says that he would ban “abortion-causing” birth control and a woman’s right to choose abortion more than three days after conception.

In an interview published on Monday, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) told Reason‘s Nick Gillespie that he favored as little federal government as possible on issues like same sex marriage.

“I don’t think there should be federal definition of marriage,” Amash explained. “So I think the federal government should just stay out of this. Really, marriage should be a private contract that has nothing to do with government.”

But when it came to abortion, the Michigan Republican said that he wanted to see the government take a major role in forcing women to go through with unwanted pregnancies.

“It’s a tricky question, but where we have it now is not correct,” Amash insisted. “It should be closer to the point of conception, whether it’s instantly or the first three days. I think that’s more sensible. That’s what I think would be correct.”

On the question of contraception, he admitted that “I haven’t thought about all the types of birth control, but there are certain types of birth control that I would consider, you know, abortion causing and there are other methods of birth control that I think would be fine.”

The only way to explain this philosophical contradiction is if they believe that a woman, who is evidently not even relevant enough to be accorded mention in this discussion, is simply unworthy of fundamental individual liberty — the alleged raison d’etre of the libertarian movement.

If anyone truly wonders why there are so few female libertarians, this might just be one of the reasons.

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Some progress, long overdue

by digby

This is good:

The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”

The news came in the form of a blog entry authored by Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll on Tuesday afternoon, explaining that the decision is part of the company’s on-going attempt to rid their Stylebook of labels.

“The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally,” Carroll wrote.

The company’s decision comes after years of controversy over the term. Fusion, the ABC-Univision joint venture, does not use “illegal immigrant” because we believe it dehumanizes those it describes and we find it to be linguistically inaccurate.

It’s the same logic that finally persuaded them to stop calling children “illegitimate.” Just as there are no “illegitimate” people, there are no “illegal” ones. Every person is legitimately and legally … human.

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It’s getting worse: 12% unemployment in the Eurozone

by digby

The good news is that this will probably sort itself out — in the long run:

The 17-nation Eurozone set another dubious record in the opening months of 2013, as its unemployment rate continued to climb from its already record-high rate. The jobless rate also rose for the European Union as a whole as austerity efforts continue to plague the continent’s recovery from the Great Recession:

The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg.

The January jobless rate for the 17-nation currency union was revised upward from the previously reported 11.9 percent.

For the overall European Union, the February jobless rate rose to 10.9 percent from 10.8 percent in January, Eurostat said, with more than 26 million people without work across the 27-nation bloc.

Despite clear warnings that austerity isn’t boosting growth, some of the continent’s largest economies remain committed to deficit reduction. The United Kingdom, now on the precipice of its third recession in four years, has indicated that it will continue efforts to reduce the deficit, even as it has fallen far short of its past goals. The UK, in fact, has largely failed to put a dent in its deficit because austere policies have inhibited economic growth. Even Germany, the continent’s stalwart economy through the initial recovery, is lagging, and France announced last month that it would not seek to hit its deficit targets in 2013.

Ok, so a generation or two will have to be sacrificed, but it’s worth it to protect their makers and punish their takers. How else can the economy ever properly “recover?” As Andrew Mellon sagely advised when the Great Depression hit:

“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.

I’m sure the elites actually believe that having to be the strict disciplinarian hurts them more than it hurts the people.

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A scathing new report on enforcement of Wall Street crime says they’re not even trying

by digby

Mike Lux wrote this piece yesterday, telling people about a new report on Wall Street. It’s not pretty:

There is a new report out this morning once again reminding us of the greatest disappointment progressives have in the Obama administration: the lack of toughness in regards to Wall Street. The report, issued by the Campaign for a Fair Settlement (full disclosure: this is a coalition I have helped in various ways since their founding), is probably the most harshly critical analysis yet by a coalition aligned with traditional progressive Democratic groups. The report opens with this damning list of hard-to-dispute facts, and then just goes on from there:

• The Administration has yet to prosecute a single major bank or top level executive for the widespread fraud leading to the system’s collapse.
• Civil penalties have similarly failed to be imposed on top executives, and fines levied against the banks have been so small as to amount to a minor cost of doing business.
• Settlements have left the banks themselves in control of providing relief and restitution to homeowners, giving them credit for cleaning up their balance sheets more than preventing foreclosures.
• Far from showing any signs of having been chastened, the biggest banks are now even bigger, and have successfully slowed down or weakened key elements of the financial reform bills passed in the wake of the collapse.

And signs even early on in the second Obama administration are not encouraging:

• With no mention of Wall Street and the banks anywhere in either his second inaugural speech or his 2013 State of the Union address, the President appears to be wishing the crisis behind him more than addressing its still festering wounds.
• Statements by new appointees like Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew have suggested that they view the “too big to fail” problem as having been largely solved, even as new studies confirm how much the systematically risky banks still benefit from market assumptions that they retain that status.
• Despite having faced withering rebukes for their handling of key cases and settlements, agencies like the Office of the Comptroller of the currency have reignited that criticism in their attempts to amend the disastrous Independent Foreclosure Review settlement, yet again constructing terms far more favorable to the banks than to homeowners and borrowers.

The report barely mentions the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the one agency where progressives have generally given the administration better marks, it is mostly dismissive of the good things that passed in Dodd-Frank given how slow regulatory agencies have been in writing rules, and it seems to have little faith in the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities Task Force co-chaired by NY AG Eric Schneiderman- which is notable given that the coalition has historically been relatively close to Schneiderman politically.

So there are two questions that Obama loyalists might ask about this report. The first is whether all this negativity is truly deserved. The second is, why are Wall Street accountability activists so obsessed with this issue?

On the first question, I am sad to say the answer is mostly yes. If I had been writing the report, I would have been more positive about the accomplishments of CFPB, would have given the administration more credit on a few things in terms of Dodd-Frank and a few of the appointments they have made, would have pointed out that Republicans are doing everything they can to starve regulatory agencies of resources, and being the loyal Democrat I am, I would have written the report more diplomatically.

But when you add up all the results of the Obama administration’s dealings with Wall Street, it is hard to avoid the fact that life hasn’t changed much at all for the big banks, and that they continue to make money hand over fist while the rest of the economy is stuck in the mood. It is hard to think of any one of the report’s bullets listed above that aren’t accurate. Most damning of all are these absolutely true words in the report’s conclusion:

“The irony in all this is that the areas in which the Obama Administration has been found most wanting by critics for its handling of Wall Street accountability are not the result of intractable differences with a Congress hamstrung in inaction. Instead, they are areas almost wholly under the sole control of the Administration through its executive powers, and carried out largely through cabinet agencies.”

On the second question, the reason Wall Street activists are so obsessed with the lack of toughness toward Wall Street is that Wall Street is ground zero for the rest of the problems in our economy. These monstrously huge mega-banks completely dominate our economy, siphoning off money that might otherwise go into productive uses in the mainstreet economy so that the big bankers can keep speculating away. And when they screw up in ways that hurt the rest of us, even when they blatantly violate the law, the fact that they are never seriously punished means they have no incentive to stop.

Until the Obama administration fixes this problem, the rest of the economy is going to keep suffering, and the risk of future financial meltdowns will keep growing.

I’m going to guess that’s not in the cards. This round of looting will go unpunished and we’re being set up for yet another fall.

It means something that Mike would write this. He’s been trying hard for a long time to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on this. It’s tough to go up against Wall Street. But there was no longer any other way to look at this once we heard the Attorney General say this under questioning from the Senate:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy, and I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Evidently, federal law enforcement is yet another area in which the Executive Branch has no power — or, at least, feels it is injudicious to use it. This instance of presidential impotence is especially difficult because it pretty much says that even if the congress were to make new laws, the Justice Department still couldn’t enforce them because of these alleged threats to the economy. So we’ll just have to put up with the looting and wait for the house of cards to collapse again. Because otherwise the house of cards will collapse.

Meanwhile, let’s check in across the the pond, shall we?

Emboldened by its meteoric rise in Greece, the far-right Golden Dawn party is spreading its tentacles abroad, amid fears it is acting on its pledge to “create cells in every corner of the world”. The extremist group, which forged links with British neo-Nazis when it was founded in the 1980s, has begun opening offices in Germany, Australia, Canada and the US.

The international push follows successive polls that show Golden Dawn entrenching its position as Greece’s third, and fastest growing, political force. First catapulted into parliament with 18 MPs last year, the ultra-nationalists captured 11.5% support in a recent survey conducted by polling company Public Issue.

The group – whose logo resembles the swastika and whose members are prone to give Nazi salutes – has gone from strength to strength, promoting itself as the only force willing to take on the “rotten establishment”. Amid rumours of backing from wealthy shipowners, it has succeeded in opening party offices across Greece.

It is also concentrating on spreading internationally, with news last month that it had opened an office in Germany and planned to set up branches in Australia. The party’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, said it had decided to establish cells “wherever there are Greeks”.

“People have understood that Chrysi Avgi [Golden Dawn] tells the truth,” he told a Greek-language paper in Melbourne. “In our immediate sights and aims is the creation of an office and local organisation in Melbourne. In fact, very soon a visit of MPs to Australia is planned.”
[…]
Many in the diaspora believe, like Endy Zemenides who heads HALC, that Golden Dawn has deluded itself into believing it is a permanent force because of its soaring popularity on the back of the economic crisis. “The reality is that it is a fleeting by-product of failed austerity measures and the social disruption this austerity has caused,” he said.

In Greece, where Golden Dawn has begun to recruit in schools, there are fears of complacency. Drawing parallels with the 1930s Weimar period and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party, the historian Mark Mazower recently warned against underestimating the threat posed by a party whose use of violence was so disturbing. “Unfortunately, the Greek state does not seem to realise the urgency of the situation,” he told an audience in Athens…

“It is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and do I think it will get worse? Yes I do,” Psarras said, lamenting that, with living standards plummeting, the organisation was opening offices in traditional middle-class neighbourhoods. There remained a simple fact too big to ignore: in 2009 the party was a political pariah, gaining a mere 0.29 % of the vote; today it had global ambitions.

“Ten years ago, if you had said Golden Dawn would become the third biggest force in Greece, you’d be called crazy,” said Psarras. “Now look where it is.”

I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Just a bunch of Greeks bearing swastikas. But still, it’s probably never a good idea to let wealthy oligarchs off the hook while telling the people they should eat cake. It’s risky. Sometimes the people react and not always in a good way.

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Users

by David Atkins

These people really shouldn’t get within a 100 foot pole of dictating society’s needs.

Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time.

And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor, on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color.

Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use.

In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreet­Oasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like ­caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.”

Modafinil is supposed to be used by those with narcolepsy, or pilots and astronauts with incredibly important jobs requiring little sleep. It’s also been studied as a potential drug to combat cocaine withdrawal.

Use of upper drugs, particularly cocaine, by the big Wall Street boys is nothing new. But there is something very, very wrong with people who use a drug like this every day for months on end for the sole purpose of working some job that creates no value, purely for their own self-enrichment. They aren’t doing anything positive for society: it’s all about ego and wealth accumulation. Whatever overweening, propellant greed is driving these people is a social disease deeply detrimental to the public at large.

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Baby Otter therapy

by digby

That is all:

Via Jezebel:

That is all.

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From the nobody knows nothin’ files: ACA confusion

by digby

Imagine if they’d been able to just extend the existing Medicare program to everyone:

[A]t the recent AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference, where state and federal officials and interest groups lined up to present long lists of policy questions that confront them as they grapple with implementation of the Affordable Care Act and mounting public budgetary pressures.

For instance, in the “Opportunities & Challenges for State Officials” session, New Mexico’s Medicaid Director Julie Weinberg described the unknowns surrounding how “churn” between private and public coverage will change and how new Medicaid eligibility standards will impact enrollment processes.

Patty Fontneau, the executive director of the Colorado Health Benefit Exchange (Colorado’s health insurance exchange), outlined the challenges involved in providing decision support to consumers to assist in the selection of a plan from many often-confusing choices.

Something these many challenges have in common is that they are difficult to solve and all require good evidence to shape rational, effective policy.

Yet, throughout the conference venue, policy leaders seemed to lack the detailed evidence as well as a systematic way of locating and acquiring that relevant evidence from across a national research community.

When Lisa Simpson, president and CEO of AcademyHealth, asked top congressional staffers in the Congressional Plenary how researchers could better feed evidence into the Washington policy process, there were few specific or concrete answers.

I wasn’t surprised. In the past, when I’ve asked other elected officials or legislative staff how they get information, they say it usually comes down to a small network of personal relationships. The process of outreach is more often focused around building political consensus through stakeholder engagement than gathering scientific evidence. This strikes me as a very incomplete and imperfect way to shape policy, particularly considering our public investment in research.

The complexity of the program isn’t the only problem, or the fact that the people who have answers aren’t readily identifiable, if they exist at all. The post goes on to explain that even in the best of all possible worlds, there exist few processes to properly determine efficacy and nobody knows where to turn to find them.

This argues for something less complex in my mind but then that’s my bias anyway, so perhaps that’s not really relevant. The problem for the average person is mitigated by the fact that most people are covered either by their jobs, government and veterans insurance programs Medicare of medicaid. These issues are unlikely to impact them in any obvious way. But it certainly appears that the people who are administering these new programs have their hands full just understanding what they are, much less how they will work. Should be a very interesting era. Lord help them if it doesn’t end up saving money … er, bending the cost curve.

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