Tom Tomorrow and the mustache of understanding
by digby
This is just too good not to share.
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"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2013
Benghazi smoke
by digby
James Warren offered up some good perspective on “Benghazi!” yesterday. He concluded with this:
Though Stevens was an admired former Lugar staffer, Lugar has neither condoned nor condemned U.S. actions in response to the Benghazi attack. And a former Republican staffer on that committee underscored his own bottom line: “This is not Iran-Contra,” he said, alluding to the bonafide Reagan era scandal in which secret arms sales to Iran were used to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.
“These were people here in a dangerous position trying to do the best they could,” said the former staffer. “There were probably real communications issues. Rice knew when going on air this all didn’t add up. In retrospect she should have simply said, ‘It simply wasn’t clear what was happening.’ That would have taken care of it.”
Team Obama fumbled. And Republicans saw an opportunity to diminish Obama and Clinton. It was a twofer, with Benghazi serving as a potential real-time version of the nastily effective “Swift Boat” attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.
But it’s not having that same impact, and thus it’s folly to think this hurts Clinton’s chances if she chooses to run. Tom Bowen, a shrewd Democratic consultant in Chicago, says, “The idea that one of the most popular secretaries of state to serve this country will be damaged by revisions of ‘talking points’ is foolhardy.”
Yes, four Americans killed in a terrorist attack is nothing to be flip about. But voters by and large understand that the world is a dangerous place — and there are plenty of narratives that fall far short of being deemed Nixonian.
Here’s the thing, though. The right sees these contretemps as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of scandal. And the press, caught up in the daily churn of information, fails to see the forest for the trees every time. As I’ve mentioned before:
These are patented “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return… No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”, right?
The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90’s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.
But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for. Clinton’s spokesman is right when he says “I think that history demonstrates that whoever the nominee is is going to engender opposition from the right, and we will certainly be prepared” but it is only part of the story. All Democrats will also engender reporting from a press corps that persists in seeing politics through the lens of the rightwing narrative that was set forth by Scaife and his various hitmen back in the 1990’s.
It’s reflexive at this point. They don’t even know they’re doing it.
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A sermon for the ages
by David Atkins
Many of you may already have seen Bill McKibben’s extraordinary sermon “God’s Taunt” at the Riverside Church in New York. If not, definitely take the twenty minutes to watch and listen:
For those who cannot watch the video, here are some excerpts compiled by Diane Sweet at CrooksandLiars. He begins by speaking of Job answering to God that he cannot control the weather, noting that in fact that is no longer true:
…Rather, Job has to answer as all mortals did up until our time, because all of a sudden we’ve gotten rather large. Our first sense of that sudden change in stature came with the detonation of the first atom bomb at Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the mushrooming cloud, quoted from the [Bhagvad Gita], from the Hindu scripture – “We are become as gods, destroyers of worlds.”
But the images of those blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were enough to persuade us, so far at least, to go no further down that path, thank god. We could imagine the horror of those titanic explosions. We, so far, have NOT been able to adequately imagine the effect of the explosion of billions of pistons in billions of cylinders every minute of every hour of every day, but those explosions are wrecking the earth just as surely and almost as fast as nuclear war.
Consider that, so far, human beings have burned enough coal and gas and oil to raise the temperature of the planet 1 degree Celsius…the energetic equivalent of exploding 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day…enough energy so far to melt the Arctic…We’ve taken one of the largest physical features on earth and we’ve broken it, and with the others not far behind. The oceans are now 30% more acidic…The atmosphere itself, because warm air holds more water vapor than cold, is now 5% wetter than it was 40 years ago, which loads the dice for drought and for flood…
…This is the largest social justice issue that we have ever faced…When I started this work, one of the things I’d always heard was that environmentalism was something for rich white people who had taken care of their other problems, and if you worried where your next meal was coming from you wouldn’t be an environmentalist.
What we found as we worked around the world is exactly the opposite. Rich people tend to feel themselves immune from these changes. Most of the people that we work with around the world are poor and black and brown and Asian and young because that is what most of the world consists of. And what do you know, those people care as much about the future as anybody else, maybe more, so because if you are poor in this world right now, the future bears down harder on you than it does on anybody else…
…As I’ve said, so far we’ve raised the temperature one degree but the same scientists who told us that would happen have shown quite clearly that that one degree would be 4 or 5 by century’s end unless we act very swiftly to get off coal and gas and oil.
And the larger question is why aren’t we doing that? Why aren’t we trying to make ourselves somewhat smaller? Why aren’t we following, say, the lead of Germany, the only major country that’s really pursued renewable power at an appropriate pace? There are now more solar panels in Bavaria than there are in the United States. There were days last summer when Germany generated more than half the power it used from solar panels within its borders and this is Germany. Munich is north of Montreal. Think what a country could do if it had, oh, I don’t know, Florida or Nevada, Texas or California or Arizona to work with!
But we don’t act; and for a particular reason– one that will be clear to those who are used to reading the Gospels. Our richest people don’t want to act because it would reduce their wealth somewhat. The fossil fuel industry is the one percent of the one percent, the richest enterprise in human history. Exxon made more money last year than any company in the history of money. There are far more eminent theologians than me in this room; I’m not a theologian at all. But it is my firm belief that these companies have more money than God.
And so far, they have been able to deploy those funds in political ways to make sure that nothing ever changes. They have bought, in our nation’s capital and many others, a 25-year bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing…
…It’s not that Americans are addicted to fossil fuel; most of us would be just as happy if our power came from the sun and the wind, if our cars ran on electricity. The addicts…are the folks who run the fossil fuel empire, addicted to profits so great that they turn away sorrowful from the knowledge that they’re wrecking the future…
…The man who runs…[Exxon] finally admitted for the first time last summer that global warming was real and caused by carbon emissions. But, he said, it was an engineering problem with engineering solutions. Asked what he meant, he explained, “If we need to move our crop production areas, we will”…Crop production areas are what most of us call farms, and we already have them…The Exxon CEO made plain the reason for his unwillingness to change in a second interview a few weeks ago with Charlie Rose who asked him his philosophy…He just looked at the camera and said, “My philosophy is to make money.”
…[The fossil fuel divestment movement] is designed less to bankrupt the industry – we can’t do that – but more to take away their social license, to keep them from being able forever to overpower science with money and with political favor. If it’s wrong to wreck the climate then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage. And to say that out loud is an important first step in dealing with the problem we find ourselves in…
…The arc of the physical universe is short and it’s bending toward heat, and doing it very rapidly. If we don’t win this fairly quickly, than we will not win this at all. We’ve waited a long time to get started; the momentum of physics is very large. Having lost the Arctic, we have no room for complacency.
Climate change remains on the great, if not the greatest, moral issue of our time. No nation state can tackle it alone. Absent some miraculous scientific breakthrough, it will take international action and international law, backed with some reasonable enforcement mechanism.
But it sure would be nice if the world’s great religions would obsess less over women’s sexuality and a little more over things like climate change that actually matter.
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“A recession can be an excellent time to start a business” (what with the desperate workers and all)
by digby
The prime minister’s adviser on enterprise has told the cabinet that the economic downturn is an excellent time for new businesses to boost profits and grow because labour is cheap, the Observer can reveal.
Lord Young, a cabinet minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, who is the only aide with his own office in Downing Street, told ministers that the low wage levels in a recession made larger financial returns easier to achieve. His comments are contained in a report to be published this week, on which the cabinet was briefed last Tuesday.
Young, who has already been forced to resign from his position once before for downplaying the impact of the recession on people, writes: “The rise in the number of businesses in recent years shows that a recession can be an excellent time to start a business.
“Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater.”
That sounds so familiar… Oh, I know:
“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.” —Andrew Mellon’s advice to Herbert Hoover
It worked out so well before you can see why they have been so eager to do it again.
Lord Young is quite the fine aristocratic fellow:
Young was forced to quit just months into the government in 2010, after he was overwhelmed by condemnation of his claim that voters had never had it so good during the “so-called recession” due to low interest rates.
The former trade and industry secretary also dismissed the 100,000 job cuts expected each year in the public sector as being “within the margin of error” in the context of a workforce of 30 million. He added that complaints about spending cuts came from “people who think they have a right for the state to support them”.
Young quit but was quietly reappointed 11 months later.
Of course. Because he’s a Very Serious Person who knows what he’s doing. Cameron could hardly be asked to do without him:
UK employees’ average hourly earnings have fallen by 8.5% since 2009 in real terms, adjusting for inflation, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
In his report Young cites statistics from Barclays Bank showing a rise in the number of startup businesses after 2008, at the beginning of the economic crash, to trumpet the point that “a recession can be a good time to grow a business”.
He further claims in the report, addressed to David Cameron, that while there has been a considerable reduction in public-sector employment over 2010-12 the private sector has expanded to more than make up a difference.
He writes that the UK’s flexible labour markets make it one of the best environments for the creation of new firms, adding: “World-renowned firms such as GE, Microsoft and Disney all started during a recession.”
However, official statistics show that any potential economic benefits of a recession for new businesses are not being shared across the country.
In London, 14.6% of active businesses in 2011 were new, significantly higher than in the regions, where much of the public sector job cuts have been made.
There was a 10.4% “death rate”, which is the proportion of companies de-registering for VAT purposes in the year, according to the latest figures published by the ONS. In comparison, the north-west has a 10.5% new business birth rate but a 10.7% death rate.
Analysis of official jobs figures carried out for the Observer by the TUC also shows that 267,000 net new jobs have been created in London since the start of the recession in 2008; yet almost every other part of the country has fewer jobs now than before the crash.
Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, said: “The 2.5 million people still out of work will wonder what planet Lord Young is living on when he claims recessions bring economic gains.
“Not only is the government failing to deal with the living standards crisis, their advisers are revelling in the jobs and wage squeeze that is putting people’s finances under strain.”
Why not? It’s back to the good old days for the nobility.
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Poor little babykins, Jamie Dimon,wants to take his ball and go home
by digby
JPMorgan Chase & Co Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said he may consider leaving the bank where he has held the top post since 2005, if shareholders vote to split his duties, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
Shareholders will vote later this month at an annual meeting in Tampa, Florida, on a non-binding proposal to separate the chairman and chief executive roles after a more than $6 billion trading loss last year raised questions about risk oversight.
Jamie Dimon has to be the most overrated, whiny little toddler that wall Street has ever produced. And that’s saying something.
Shareholders, do the company a favor and let him quit. If only to stop the embarrassing sniveling.
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Factoid ‘o the day
by digby
Half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. A quarter pay below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually. Families that can send another adult to work have done better, but single mothers (and fathers) don’t have that option. Poverty among families with children headed by single mothers exceeds 40 percent.
Wages for those who work on jobs in the bottom half have been stuck since 1973, increasing just 7 percent.
Washington, D.C., nosed out San Jose, Calif., as the nation’s highest-income metropolitan region, fueled mainly by its army of attorneys, consultants, lobbyists and outside government contractors.
Census data for 2010 show median household income was $84,523 in the D.C. area, compared with $83,944 for the San Jose region, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. Both numbers are well above the median income of about $50,000 for the nation as a whole. While Washington’s incomes in 2010 were lower than in 2009, paychecks in the D.C. region have been more stable overall.
Update:
Also, too, another factoid for Mother’s Day:
Happy Mothers’ Day, maybe — the U.S. is one of the worst places in the industrialized world to be a mother. That is, at least, according to a report published earlier this week by Save The Children. The NGO based its index on “the lifetime risk of maternal death, the under-five mortality rate, years of formal schooling, income per capita, and the participation of women in government.” The U.S. ranked 30th, according to the measure.
Politics is superfluous
by digby
Wonkblog informs us of the latest in poli-sci literature that ostensibly proves that politics pretty much has no meaning. We already knew that it makes absolutely no difference what the president says (the “bully pulpit is bullshit” thesis.) And we know that the presidency, indeed the whole government, is completely powerless if even one small rump opposition group bands together in opposition. We also know there is nothing we can do about it. (Well, maybe we could end the filibuster but other than that it’s all baked in the cake.)
Today I learned that money doesn’t matter in politics except very slightly around the edges, which means that campaigning is almost completely useless, billionaire financed or not. This is because we have vast amounts of data from our 56 presidential elections and we know that the only thing that really matters is GDP and maybe a war. Or so they say.
So we can all go home. Any random thoughts that politics is a reflection of complex and competing human desires, ambition and values is a waste of time.
Whew. I’m going shopping!
*I’m just kidding, mostly. These studies are invaluable for anyone who is interested in politics and we must pay attention to them. But I remain unconvinced that politics can be boiled down to data-sets, particularly when we have such limited data to draw upon. I think people extrapolate far too much from these models. There’s just too much psychology, culture and heuristics involved for me to see it as anything but an art — a dark art much of the time, but an art nonetheless. And that just isn’t quantifiable as far as I’m concerned. At least not yet.
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Today’s political highlight reel
by digby
Whenever you’re tempted to completely write off all politicians, it pays to remember that while none of the are perfect (who is?) there are some who really do try to fight the good fight. I wish that room had been full of Democratic Senators and it’s worrisome that it wasn’t. But these people are respected members of the Party, not a group of fringe wierdos like James Inhofe or Ted Cruz. It matters that they are speaking out and drawing this line. There will be no Grand Bargain if it doesn’t come out of the Senate first (because Boehner can’t bring one to the floor without a big bipartisan Senate agreement)so this matters.
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No sorry David, Glenn Greenwald is not wrong
by digby
It’s interesting that David Atkins thinks that both Greenwald and Maher are wrong since I came down heavily on Greenwald’s side just yesterday. I suppose he was being polite. But obviously David’s screed requires a response from me since he could just as easily have put my name in the title of his post.
Let me first say right upfront that I don’t dictate what anyone writes on this blog. It’s a free forum and just because I might disagree with the thesis, in this case quite vehemently, I would never remove the piece simply on that basis. Free speech and clash of ideas and all that rot. But I do reserve the the right to respond when I think it’s necessary. So.
Unfortunately, David chose to represent Greenwald’s views as being some sort of simplistic “blaming” of all the world’s ills on imperialism. That’s not what he said. Indeed he said several times, in response to Maher’s repeated insistence, that he did not believe that. He was referring specifically to the perennial question of “why they hate us.” He believes that the beef stems from American foreign policy of the past six decades and not out of some religious hatred for The Great Satan. In other words, he doesn’t think they hate us for our freedoms or because Allah told them so, but rather for our insistence on interfering in the rest of the world’s business both economically and militarily. (Yes, that’s “imperialism” and we are an empire, which is indisputable.)
I don’t think it’s surprising in the least that when people find themselves on the receiving end of massive technology and military might, they become angry and violent. Sure, they might turn to their God and religion for justification, but the truth is far more prosaic — we dominate and kill them and they want revenge. It’s the oldest story in the book.
The birth of widespread Muslim fundamentalist hatred for America stemmed from covert and overt support for dictatorships in the middle east, military interference in Afghanistan, Israel, the corruption of the oil patch states and their relationship to the richest most profligate nation in the world (us) and a desire for independence and self-rule. God’s edicts fall far down the list of reasons.
Their fundamentalism gained power as much because of America’s foreign policy actions as some desire for pre-modern society — Islam was the only institution that provided power for the masses. Iran is the perfect example of how it happens: a dominant superpower decided to interfere in a nation’s internal politics in order to control its resources, the church foments a revolution and the rest is history. There’s a name for it and we all know it: blow-back. And it’s happened so often now that it’s astonishing that anyone’s arguing the point anymore. We’ve seen it manifest in the middle east over decades starting in in Iran and Afghanistan to devastating effect and we have no idea how catastrophic our little Iraq adventure is going to turn out to be. I’m not even going to mention the consequences of our relationship with Israel, which plays into everything that happens in the region.
To me, it is simply indisputable that the United States’ sometimes well-intentioned but often brutal and violent use of its global dominance as a military and economic power has resulted in the blow-back we call terrorism. Is it everything? Of course not and Greenwald was careful to say he didn’t believe so either. It’s economics, culture and yes, religion as well. All these factors play into this problem. But there’s only one factor that Americans have any direct influence over — the actions of their democratically elected government. So that’s probably the smartest first step to try and correct, don’t you think?
Do I think Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise, is unusually lethal as religions go? No, frankly, I don’t. I think the embrace of fundamentalist Islam — and especially terrorism — among a sub-set of Muslims is driven mostly by the politics of the era, probably at the hands of opportunistic leaders who use it to keep their followers on their path to power. I think we can all agree that religion has often served that purpose, can’t we? I certainly don’t think these fundamentalist/extremist Muslims don’t truly believe what they believe — and like David, I find those beliefs very noxious — but I honestly don’t think they are the most important source of the problem of terrorism either.
Maher’s facile assumption that Islam is the only religion that still embraces violence is very convenient, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if the shoes were on the other feet, Americans would have no problem adopting a religious justification for fighting back the Imperial Islamic Iranians. Christians haven’t had the need to kill in the name of God for quite some time, but I’m sure they’d be able to find that old time religious mojo if the need arose.
Not that it’s likely to happen:
If you think there are no consequences to taking on that dominant military role and then using your advanced weaponry to invade countries that didn’t attack you, depose legitimately elected leaders, torture and indefinitely imprison innocent people etc, etc. then I think you’re being naive. If it expects to be safe from any retribution, any nation that takes such power unto itself would be wise to go to great lengths to insure that none of those things happened in order to preserve moral authority and the goodwill of as many people on this globe as possible. And sadly, I don’t think we’ve met that burden whether in Southeast Asia, Latin America or the middle east.
Maybe we just aren’t cut out for this empire thing. Certainly the founders of this nation didn’t intend for us to be one. And that’s a problem, not just for them, but for us.
We are not to blame for all the world’s ills and neither Greenwald or I are making that case. But we must acknowledge that this imperial project at least requires that we take our responsibility as citizens seriously enough to oversee our government’s foreign policy with clear eyes and make our representatives and leadership project ideals and values that do not create more enemies than friends. We’re a strong country, I guarantee we can take it.
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Greenwald and Maher are both wrong
by David Atkins
It has been interesting to me to watch the various reactions to the dispute between Bill Maher and Glenn Greenwald. People tend to see the winner of the debate as the one who confirmed their own prior views. Maher’s argument is that Islam is a uniquely violent religion; Greenwald’s is that there’s no difference between Islam and any other religion, but that U.S. imperialism is to blame for any differential blowback.
But the evidence would dictate that they’re both wrong. Both of their arguments are too simplistic to be taken seriously, and both are easily assailable. We’ll start with Greenwald’s.
Falsehood #1: “Imperialism is to blame for everything.” Yes, we all know: imperialism is bad. Imperialism begets blowback. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. All of this is true. But on the question Maher puts, those answers are sleight of hand. The debater in Greenwald’s position would have to argue that predominantly Muslim nations have suffered imperialistic horrors so disproportionate to the experiences of other nations and cultures that their reactions must be equivalently disproportionate. On that front, Greenwald’s argument totally falls apart.
It would be hard to argue that the average citizen of Iran or Saudi Arabia has suffered more greatly from racism and violence than have the victims of U.S. backed military juntas and death squads in Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina or El Salvador. Yes, the U.S. coup against Mossadegh in Iran and interposition of the corrupt Shah surely led to the rise of the Ayatollahs. But it’s also true that the U.S. did far worse in Chile when we deposed Allende in favor of the brutally awful war criminal and genocidal maniac Augusto Pinochet. Few honest people would argue that Iran suffered more mightily under the Shah than Chile did under Pinochet. It’s not as if the U.S. didn’t covet Chile’s copper just as surely it did Iran’s oil. And yet, Chileans didn’t take hostages at a U.S. embassy, nor are they threatening to use nuclear weapons against the rest of the world. Did the U.S. arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, and then abandon them to their fate? Yes, and it led directly to the rise of Bin Laden. But we also did the same thing in Vietnam with far worse carnage. Somehow our far less atrocious involvement in Afghanistan led to the current predicament, while not even the horrors of My Lai set in motion a Vietnamese assault on the World Trade Center.
It would be difficult to argue that Estonians or Latvians somehow suffered less imperial oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union than did the Chechens. And yet the result is dramatically different. It would be difficult to say that the Muslim Uighur people in Western China have suffered more greatly under Chinese rule than have the Tibetans. And yet,