“Again, I say charges that the movement is racist are absurd. Here are a few of my personal tea party experiences. Keep in mind, I have performed at well over two hundred tea parties across America.
“Former Clinton and Obama budget adviser Franklin Raines owns a key carbon-emissions patent he developed as CEO of the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae, positioning him and his partners to make millions of dollars if it is used in any carbon-capping scheme implemented by the Obama administration.
Thanks to libertarian activist, financial consultant, and author of an early expose of the big banks, “Pirates of Manhattan,”(2007),Barry James Dyke, for pointing out GuideStar.org. This is a website that lets you look up financial records of registered non-profits, a handy way to see what activists and advocates of all stripes are making, what their revenues and expenditures are, and whom they employ. (more…)
In an interview with Reason magazine, February 1986, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther who converted later to Christianity, showed a keen appreciation of many free-market principles:
Cleaver: I’ve come to basically the same conclusions. My life, I think, spans the whole era of the welfare state. I was born in 1935. I remember when people were ashamed to be on welfare and receive state aid and all that, but we developed a situation where black people to a large degree and a lot of other groups such as elderly people, children and a lot of poor white people ended being harnessed by political forces, particularly the Democratic Party. In return for the federal appropriations that we now dependent upon, our leaders were obligated to get out the black vote for the Democratic Party. So this put us in a negative relationship with the economic system. We were dependent upon the federal budget—a very precarious situation, because when the political winds change, we get our living cut off.
Shock. Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) might be involved with the Taliban.
When the obvious is stated with all the fanfare of a papal decree from such organs of the ruling class as the London School of Economics and our own JFK School of Government (Harvard), can military action be far behind? File this along with my previous post, Mad Dog alerts.
“Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic Updated by Mark Twain
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
We all need to get on board with paying down debt like any responsible citizen debtor would do. We owe big-time and this is but a taste of how it may cost us:
Major employment reductions amongst those working in the public service
Health care services that are rationed. Fewer nurses, health practitioners and support staff
“One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do?
“Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn. I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.
The Daily Bellon why the show trial of Goldman (albeit a worthy target, in my opinion) is most likely to be just another ruse of the powers that be:
“The progressive press, in our estimation, tries to blame individuals or certain corporations (Enron comes to mind, and now Goldman) to distract from the larger issue, which is the corruption of civil society itself by this horrid, pernicious mercantilism.
The Boston Phoenix has this, substantiating the main point of the Cockburn piece I’ve posted below it:
“On matters of executive authority — where the judicial branch has been a vital bulwark against post-9/11 “war on terror” civil-liberties violations — Kagan’s record indicates an ideological departure from Justice Stevens, who authored watershed detainee-rights opinions and organized the five-justice majorities that struck down other Bush administration power grabs.
The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.
“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale – between seven and 11 million people.
But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………
British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.
“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”
Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………
“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”
Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.
The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.
Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”
Let me put this as bluntly as possible. A state cannot be “compassionate.” Policies might have well-intentioned goals, but they are policies - that is, legal and administrative enactments, often backed by force, that must be followed by whoever falls under their jurisdiction, regardless of their state of mind.
On the other hand, compassion is a quality of heart and intention. An involuntary A non-voluntary action consequent to a policy cannot be compassionate. Obedience to a legal requirement cannot be compassionate. Compassion can be understood only by the context and the state of mind of an individual.
Libertarianism is not..should not be…and cannot be… compassionate.
Instead, it is the attitude to government policy and law that best allows human beings to act with the compassion each is capable of. To force “compassion” on people who don’t want to be “compassionate” is simply force, just as surely as if you were forcing anything else on them that they didn’t want. What looks like “compassion” to you might, after all, look like “expropriation” to me.
“Compassionate” policies might indeed achieve some immediate goal that makes some group of people more satisfied than they previously were. But it surely makes another group unhappy in order to do so. Now, the trade off might..or might not…be worth it. But the entity making that utilitarian calculation isn’t an individual, it’s at best a committee of hacks, at worst, a mafia of thugs….or worst of all, some economic model cooked up in a Harvard professor’s study.
By transferring “compassion” to the state, “compassionate conservatism” encourages people to become less compassionate personally. People actually become meaner. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already being taxed at a third to half their money, effectively. Even the good lord only asked for ten percent.
(Note: I don’t necessarily agree with Robert Ringer’s other views on defense. I don’t see a necessity for the US to be on a perma-war footing that involves aggressive wars overseas and an extensive network of bases. As a libertarian, I endorse a strong defense but one that’s decentralized and limited to volunteers, not mercenaries. It would be based on universal ownership of and training in firearms and would refrain from interfering in foreign internal affairs. This would go along with a decentralized government, supported by state and citizen militias. Most of all, I endorse economic freedom and prosperity as our greatest defense. The more attractive the US is as a trade partner, the less foreign states are going to hurt their own economic interests by turning hostile.
Far from strengthening the country, anti-market economic policies and a perpetually intrusive foreign policy are draining money, time, and energy from it.
(Nonetheless, I don’t think we can disarm unilaterally “at one fell swoop,” without opening up a can of worms, now that the government has actually created multiple foreign threats by its belligerence).
“I repeat what I said earlier: If anything, I believe the tea-party rally on tax day was far too docile. It once again demonstrated just how intimidating the far left can be. Not only intimidating, but clever.
How so? The BHO oligarchy has managed to change the Big Question from ”Is Obama a socialist?” to ”Is the tea-party movement dangerously immersed in racism, hate speech, and violence-prone affiliations with paramilitary groups?” Never sell the Saul Alinsky crowd short when it comes to turning every negative around and pointing it in the direction of its accusers.
I honestly believe that Der Fuhrbama believes his verbal skills are so powerful that he can embarrass the tea-party people into submission. He may be a lightweight in most respects, but he’s a lightweight with an abundance of (over)confidence. The tea-party people had better take a page from Rules from Radicals and press down twice as hard on the accelerator, lest they lose their momentum long before November 2.
Docile simply doesn’t cut it. Just ask the compassionate conservatives who are now in the process of going down in flames.”
With a command of several disciplines, from finance and mathematics to poetry and philosophy, Taleb knows how to state an interesting concept in clear and engaging terms.
I’m not a fan of Nouriel Roubini. But after reading this, I figured if Taleb thinks the guy is “robust,” there must be more to him…or maybe they just hang out together at Davos.
(I have recently warmed up to NR for admitting that gold could fall below $1000).
“Eliot Spitzer was not robust because a single sex scandal derailed his career.
Nouriel Roubini is robust because he has vulva castings on the wall of his apartment, and it doesn’t derail him at all.
[Actually, Taleb has it wrong here. Spitzer fell because he went after Hank Greenberg and Henry Paulson, when Paulson had the power of the Treasury behind him and Greenberg is central to the whole AIG-Goldman business, even though the MSM will tell you otherwise. Roubini, on the other hand, never said anything that got in the way of anyone powerful.....in fact, his pronouncements have served them well].
Understand this dichotomy, and you’ll begin to understand Nassim Taleb’s conception of a robust society where we wouldn’t have financial crises like the one we just came through.
Still don’t get the significance of the Spitzer and Roubini examples?
Ok, let’s use a financial example.
When Jerome Kerveil lost billions for SocGen, it wasn’t because his trades specifically cost the firm billions. It was because, in the process of liquidating $50 billion or so of assets, the bank depressed the market to such an extent that they lost billions.
Had SocGen and Kerveil been a tenth of its size, that same liquidation wouldn’t have cost the bank much at all.
Thus SocGen was not robust, but a similar firm 1/10th as big would have been.
[Lila: Is this back-handed support for "too big to fail"?]
All of the above are examples given to us by The Black Swan author during a recent night out in Manhattan.
More than anything else, Taleb is obsessed with robustness, a topic he returned to several times during our night out.
It’s something he first started hitting on in The Black Swan, and as the Spitzer, Roubini, and SocGen examples demonstrate, it’s a very broad concept.
Norman Mailer, says Taleb, was robust, because “he had six mistresses” and nobody cared. The chairman of a large bank worth $100 million is not robust, because a blackmailer who has knowledge of some infidelities could extort him for $75 million.
[Norman Mailer's milieu was different from the banker's....So could we say that "robustness" is adaptability to one's environment?]
Our conversation, over 3 plates of oysters, two servings of shrimp, and a few drinks* ranged from fitness (we both share an interest in evolutionary fitness and the teachings of fitness guru/economist Art De Vany), finance, global warming, and who is a danger to society.
One of the biggest dangers to society.
There were two names he insisted I include: Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman.
“Paul Krugman is a danger to society!“
“He uses the wrong mathematics, that’s how I knew he was a fluke.“
Why? It’s because Krugman is pushing to create a society that is less robust. Taleb, who characterizes himself as a libertarian, even goes one step further:
“The definition of a robust society: where Paul Krugman could exist without harming others.“
Even worse though is Krugman’s fellow NYT pundit, Thomas Friedman, who with his book about globalization, “is the biggest danger.”
I challenged Taleb on his anti-expert mentality, and told him my contention that much of the appeal of someone slamming these luminaries is that it makes normal people feel good about themselves.
He kind of sidestepped the question, saying that there are plenty of experts who he doesn’t slam, like, say, dentists, because their knowledge, and their arrogance isn’t dangerous. What’s dangerous is the arrogance of someone with the power to influence policy.
After dinner, we talked fitness, and he asked me how I became familiar with Art de Vany. I told him it was through the blogger and econ prof Tyler Cowen, which immediately set Taleb off.
“That guy’s a bullshitter,” noting that Cowen admits to writing about books he only reads parts of.
“How can you write a review of a book you haven’t read?” presumably referring to this Slate review.
His advice to Cowen: “Read much fewer books, read them slowly, turn off your internet connection, and then come back.”
[Lila: Ah, but Cowen has flourished academically and he might even end up in a government position, all without reading the books he writes about...how much more robust can you get than that?]
Correction: Apologies to Prof. Cowen for aspersing him unintentionally. I meant, Taleb says he doesn’t read the books he writes about, which is quite a different thing…. Taleb was apparently referring to a Salon review by Cowen of “Black Swan” that ticked off Taleb….
As the night ended, Taleb gave me a brief ride in his White Lexus Hybrid towards a better place to pick up a cab. As we left the parking garage, a couple walked in the direction of the car, and he made a comment about not wanting to run them over.
Unless the guy was an economist, in which case, that would be a “benefit to society.”
“Trader Rick Ackerman interprets the cheer-leading in the headlines:
“Could the newspapers simply be misinterpreting the signs? It would certainly seem that way. To take the headlines cited above, we see oil’s price surge as having absolutely nothing to do with a pick-up in demand. Rather, the push toward $90 a barrel represents speculative excesses in the futures markets, exacerbated by the reluctance of traders to take short positions.
How could they, when, on any given day, a terrorist with a missile launcher could cause the global price of crude to double instantly by scuttling a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz?
As for “bets on growth” pushing stocks higher, it is not bullish speculation that has been driving up shares for the last 13 months, but rather a vast excess of liquidity in the financial system.
As for the rise in T-Note yields to four percent, we seriously doubt this is being caused by competition from expansion-minded borrowers in the private sector; rather, it comes from the rising fear among lenders that they will be repaid in a currency whose value looks all but certain to fall precipitously in the years ahead.
If the central bankers truly believe that strong economic growth is about to trigger inflation, why do they continue to hold the federal funds rate near zero?“
Mark Mitchell comments on the CFTC hearings and the manipulation of trading of gold and silver derivatives (read IOUs):
“Maguire added: “What’s going to happen, if you’re an Asian trader, or a non-Western trader, who has no loyalty, or doesn’t care about homeland security or anything else, who says, now wait a minute, if I can establish in my mind that there is 100 ounces of paper gold, paper silver for example, for each ounce of real silver, than I have a naked short situation here that I can squeeze and they can go on the spot market which is basically a foreign exchange transaction, short dollar, long silver to any amount they want – billions, trillions — whatever they want, and they can take this market, squeeze this market, and blow it up…”
In other words, the problem isn’t just that criminal naked short sellers manipulate the metals market downwards. It is that they have created a condition where a foreign entity can merely demand delivery of real metal to induce a massive “squeeze” that sends the price of metals skyrocketing, putting huge downward pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, says Maguire, with prices rising, “for 100 customers who show up there is only one guy who is going to get his gold or silver and there’s 99 who will be disappointed, so without any new money coming into the market, just asking for that gold and silver will create a default.”
This would be a point, except…except..
1. This kind of fraudulent activity in the markets in the West is going to be seen by most foreigners as a direct act of financial aggression against them, not just domestic market participants. You can’t admit that your entire market system is rigged in favor of US and European banks, and then expect that the rest of the world is just going to stand there and not retaliate in some way…with justification.
Turnabout is fair play. Defense is not offense.
2. I doubt that Chinese, Saudis or any other foreigners are interested in squeezing the dollar, since they are the primary holders of dollars. In international markets, the dollar is still the reserve currency and most people save in it. Nor is the American middle class, loyal or disloyal, going to want a weaker dollar. They earn their money in dollars. The only people likely to attack the dollar are speculators, who will do it because they see a gain to be made from it. And the people most likely to do it successfully are the same people who are involved in manipulating it in the first place...the corrupt bankers and financiers who’ve got the most to gain in this and the least to lose.
Nothing that Paulson, Greenspan, Geithner, Summers, or Bernanke have been doing adds up to anything like a “strong dollar” policy. They’ve done everything but shout “bail” to dollar holders.
Tyler Cowen has listed from “his gut” the 10 books that have influenced him the most. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is not on the list. None of Mises’s books are on the list. Keynes makes the list. Of Keynes, he writes:
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.
Which raises the question for me, “Why does Cowen even care what Austrian economists call themselves?” If he can’t put a Mises book on a list of ten books that influenced him,when Human Action is the greatest economic text ever written, yet finds room for Keynes and “his new ideas,” I have to classify him a Keynesian, pure and simple.”
Why does Cowen care? It’s all about subversion of language…
“Libertarianism” thus defined (or, more accurately, labeled) comes to mean something not very removed from “liberalism”….
…which today has moved so much to the left that in many areas it’s indistinguishable from communism.
Which means you get to call yourself a libertarian but still push for the same programs and policies that the left-liberals push for.
Which keeps you within the range of “respectability.”
And keeps you out of SPLC lists that have you rubbing shoulders with the Pentagon shooter and anyone else who decides to get physical with the state apparatus.
Mind you, at our little blog, we have no quarrel with communism or communists. We don’t think they’re evil. We just don’t want them turning us into guinea pigs for their experiments. When they feel an urge to test the limits of human malleability, we suggest that they try it out first on their spouses and off-spring. See how that turns out after a generation, and then give us a call and we’ll talk….
You don’t have to be a fan of Jesse Ventura to ask why Huffington Post, a liberal outlet, would be so illiberal as to prevent someone from even questioning the government’s version of what happened on 9-11.
Ventura didn’t say he subscribed to any “conspiracy theory” or alternative explanation. He didn’t claim he knew what happened.
He just questioned the government. That was enough to shut him down. And shut him down not in a conservative, pro-censorship venue, but on a leading “liberal” site. An online site, at that.
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal adds some nuance to Naomi Klein’s black-and-white picture of Milton Friedman’s contributions to the Chilean economy, noting how prosperity and effective enforcement of building codes have protected Chilean victims of the recent earthquake from the devastation that Haiti suffered:
“In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein’s tedious 2007 screed “The Shock Doctrine”—the Chicago Boys weren’t just strange bedfellows to Pinochet’s dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. “If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys’ advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.
For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.
As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.
In “The Shock Doctrine,” Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters “The Myth of the Chilean Miracle.” In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to “hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.” Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.”
My Comment:
Friedman, was, of course, from an Austrian perspective, far from being an ideal free-marketer. In a devastating piece, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” (1971), Rothbard even questioned his claim to be called a free marketer of any kind, listing among many sins, his advocacy of withholding taxes and of an absolute dollar standard.
All true, no doubt. But the fact remains, even if it was only in a very constrained sense that he advocated more freedom in the markets, he did advocate it. And as the article above suggests, contra Rothbard, even a limited advocacy of market freedom is better than an outright assault on it.
Glenn Greenwald never fails. I was just catching up on the infamous Leon Wieseltier-Andrew Sullivanethno-politico-theological brouhaha of last month that I completely missed while trekking around Latin America, and I found this simple but wise paragraph:
“What one thinks of Andrew Sullivan, or how angry he’s made one over the years, ought to be about the most irrelevant factor imaginable in determining one’s reaction to this TNR attack. Sometimes, even people you don’t like are the targets of odious and harmful accusations, and sometimes, even your Bestest Friends, fellow party members and listserv pals might do wrong things that merit criticism. Wieseltier’s polemic is a classic example of anti-semitism accusations tossed around with no conceivable basis and for purely ignoble ends. It’s the very tactic that has caused significant damage in the past. So obviously unhinged is this particular assault that it actually presents a good opportunity to discredit behavior like this once and for all. That’s all that should matter; how many grudges one nurses towards Andrew Sullivan is nice fodder for gossipy listserv chats, but no responsible or even adult commentator would allow it to influence one’s views on this matter.”
And that’s why Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few mainstream writers on politics I can read regularly without a bad case of moral indigestion.
“For the purposes of intimidation, after all, baseless charges work better than well-grounded ones. Nikolai Krylenko, Bolshevik Minister of Justice, said “we must execute not only the guilty, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” And it’s much the same here. If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.”
The only problem was I wasn’t actually clear from reading Yglesias (apparently a long-time sparring partner of Wieseltier’s) where exactly runs the thin red line you can’t cross. Maybe that takes years of hanging out at MSM confabs, a future I’m as likely to encounter as sequestration in a Saudi harem.
Reading Sullivan, on the other hand, I felt I was reprising some of my own intellectual history:
“As a Jew and a Catholic, we read Buddhist scriptures together. We were, in fact, somewhat painfully alike in many ways: religious traditionalists whose reverence for our faiths was also marked by our rebellion within them. We share a commitment to secularism and religion, these days a very rare combination. His mentor was Isaiah Berlin; mine Michael Oakeshott.”
But, finally, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking Wieseltier’s part, who - with minor adjustments- gets the final word on the whole sad business:
“I wish that he (Lila: all of them) would open up that their hearts to complexity.”
We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.
Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):
“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath Tagore
What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“
My Comment:
Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.
And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.
Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.
But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?
No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……
“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.
“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.
“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!
“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”
The Bunny has zeal. Bunny-speak is brave, plain-spoken and easy to read:
“The SEC was created to reassure the unwashed masses that it was safe to invest in the markets, after the Great Crash of 1929 proved it was anything but. It was a PR firm for Wall Street, slipped through as an alternative to a regulator who would or could actually do anything to curb the real crookery on Wall Street. At the helm was one of the greatest stock manipulators of all time, Joe Kennedy, who along with Percy Rockefeller and others amassed incredible fortunes running stock pools in the 1920’s.
For those who don’t know what a stock pool is, it’s a hedge fund whose sole purpose is to manipulate stocks, first up, then down, making money in both directions. Which was enormously lucrative for the operators of the pools, and the investors therein - the only losers were always the general investing public, and other participants who weren’t on the inside. I would argue that’s precisely what some of the most lucrative hedge funds of modern times also do - there aren’t a lot of ways to beat the market with 30 or 40% returns, year after year, that don’t involve larceny and criminal behavior, at least in my study of the last century of market history.”
The Bunny doesn’t mince words:
“I concluded a while ago that the rot in the system is pervasive, runs from top to bottom, and is largely unfixable. You have oligarchs, powerful and rich families and corporations, who are having their bought-and-paid-for politicians operate the country for their personal enrichment, at the direct expense of everyone else…..
“My point is that absolute power and wealth enable one to control the safeguards that were put into place to protect populations. By co-opting politicians and capturing regulators, the bad man is allowed to come into the room and do whatever he wants, whenever he likes - and the captured media merely pretends that it can’t hear the cries for help or investigate the countless damaged lives. It’s as bad as Russia under the communists, or perhaps worse.”
The Easter Bunny stays under wraps for a reason I can guess… but maybe not express publicly.
I asked a couple of people in a position to know if it was so-and-so. They denied it stoutly.
(If only John Edwards knew how lucky he was to avoid a life as a national figure, official prey for every predator with a pen)
But that particular game doesn’t seem worth either the moral or social candle. And, most often, almost as much can be learned by reading between the lines and studying public evidence as by sleuthing.
But, while sleuthing only requires elbow grease and chutzpah, analysis requires a degree of knowledge, judgment, and intellect that is simply beyond the pay-grade of some journalists, however exalted their professional status. These petty despots have pens and they have power, but they have no clothes, as surely as the emperor they shill for.
A few have figured that out. More will follow suit.
To make the story short, I went and reread a few public records that reference NSS and replayed the stout denials in my mind, recalling as best I could the silences, the gaps, the tone of the answers. I reread The Bunny carefully.
He’s an erudite man, it’s clear. I came to my conclusion about who he was. Right or wrong, time will tell.
I only bring it up to show how looking at the big picture and developing the correct perspective can be as useful and is far more cost-efficient than private-eye sleuthing that reporters think is the one and only credible way to tell a story. Baloney. And morally dangerous baloney. Dirty tricks, even for some intended good you believe in, inevitably corrupt the people who play them, in the same way black ops corrupt intelligence agencies.
Sleuthing is good to add the footnotes and the QED at the bottom of a piece of research and critical analysis. But as a way of curing social cancers - and financial racketeering is more social cancer than legal infraction - it has limited use. By the time you have written your expose to your editor’s satisfaction and done what it takes to avoid libel litigation, the story is old, the crooks have covered their tracks in paper dirt, and a new game is afoot.
Far better to play Sherlock and deduce your conclusions. Leave the investigative reporters to do their thing. You do yours but you do it to appease your own conscience, out of love for what human beings might be (hard to love them as they are, frankly), out of sheer intellectual curiosity (a great part of what drives me), glee at pelting stones at arrogant predators, and…yes…because after life’s fretful fever, we really don’t know what comes next. It might be wise to hedge our bets, as Pascal did.
There may or may not be Judgment Day. But should it roll around, we want to be able to pass muster. Well, at least, we want the She: Who Is Probably Not There to know we tried…
And then of course, we write mainly because it’s fun…
How, my dear Mary, — are you critic-bitten
(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written,
Because they tell no story, false or true?
What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do,
Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
I’ve been thinking that any real change in the US..or anywhere else… will only come from outside politics, from business, or from technology, or from a cultural trend (such as, off-grid living) or from a spiritual movement. But occasionally, I wonder if some politician could actually push things in a new direction, make some kind of real difference.
“Chile’s runoff election this month will probably mean the end of the center-left coalition’s two-decade hold on power and the emergence of businessman Sebastian Pinera as a political tour de force.
Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture has some interesting details about the extensive influence of hedge-funds, specifically Kingsford Capital, on the reporting of stories in the financial press:
“Another focus of my investigation at CJR was the appalling bear raid on a collectibles company called Escala. Not only was Escala the victim of massive amounts of illegal naked short selling, but a hedge fund convinced the Spanish government that Escala’s parent company, based in Madrid, was fleecing investors in philatelic collectibles.
One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine. Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.
“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids.
“Oblivious to the cameras – or perhaps for them – Amanda Knox, 22, and Raffaele Sollecito, 25, exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.”
I´m sure that opening, from a piece by the always incisive Ilana Mercer, got your attention.
Mercer writes here about an American “media mafia” baying in full-throated support of the murderous Amanda, as an innocent abroad, caught in the toils of Italy´s provincial justice system.
Now, we can always be counted on to get interested in anything at which media mobs bay…and this case proves to be interesting on other counts as well.
For one thing, I have a long-standing interest, nourished by the late William Roughhead, in true crime….but this go round, it´s not the murder itself that strikes me, but this passage in Mercer´s piece:
“In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt – a bloodied knife or a smoking gun – barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.”
Mercer, I suppose, means that sometimes technical details of “how” trip up the more important objective of the law..which, she says, is to do justice. I´m tempted to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes to her (that it´s not the business of the law to do justice..however one construes that), but I´ll pass….
Instead, I´ll ask another question:
By distinguishing between procedural niceties of law and the ends of justice they ought to serve, isn´t Ms Mercer making a rather good argument for the use of extra-legal methods in conducting war….
And wouldn´t that allow for some tactics I am sure she´d condemn ,if they were taken up by one of her most frequent targets, Islamic terrorists?
Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:
“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”
Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.
No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.
The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.
“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”
In short, act first, think later.
Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..
At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.
Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me — whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12, were sent on October 12 to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then, realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.
“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”
The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.
So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.
The hackers have the last word on this:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”
Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.
This story back in September ought to have made a lot of headlines, but didn´t. Perhaps it will now:
“When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?
Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.
Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change – Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”
The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.
But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.”
My Comment
Now why would Latif come out with this suddenly? Maybe he had a peek at some of that data the CRU scientists were trying to hide and decided to dissociate himself in advance from a scandal threatening to blow up…
The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:
“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.
But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….
… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.
The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!
Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”
My Comment:
I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.
Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this. Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.
When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.
“You are a 22-year-old healthy person. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 a year for health insurance, you’d prefer investing that money in equipment to start a landscaping business. Which is the best use of that $3,000 or $4,000 a year — purchasing health insurance or starting up a landscaping business — and who should decide that question: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, a czar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? How can they possibly know what’s the best use of your earnings, particularly in light of the fact that they have no idea of who you are?
Neither you nor the U.S. Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what’s best for you. The difference is that when individuals make their own trade-offs, say between purchasing health insurance or investing in a business, they make wiser decisions because it is they who personally bear the costs and benefits of those decisions. You say, “Hold it, Williams, we’ve got you now! What if that person gets really sick and doesn’t have health insurance. Society suffers the burden of taking care of him.” To the extent that is a problem, it is not a problem of liberty; it’s a problem of congressionally mandated socialism. Let’s look at it.
It is not society that bears the burden; it is some flesh and blood American worker who finds his earnings taken by Congress to finance the health needs of another person.”
“Freakonomics” co-author, Stephen J. Dubner weighs in on Climate-gate in The New York Times:
“The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude.” … “The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.”
There are several reasons for this, [Nathan] Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing power. “We’re trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.”
That said, most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to reasonably conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future.
Not so, says Wood.
“Everybody turns their knobs” — that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their models — “so they aren’t the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded.” In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another. It isn’t that current climate models should be ignored, Wood says — but, when considering the fate of the planet, one should properly appreciate their limited nature.”
Dubner´s piece reads Climate-gate as a kind of Rorscharch test for pundits. If you´re pro AGW, then all this is a tempest in a tea-cup (Paul Krugman). If you´re anti AGW, (James Delingpole), then it´s the greatest scientific scandal of the century.
“All those e-mails — people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There’s not a single smoking gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn’t actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that’s loose wording. Right? Everything is about — we’re really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there’s no trend here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain…”
“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.”
Well, I think of myself as a critic, but I don´t see the scandal right now as definitively one or the other — either game, set and match…..or a fizzle. It´s obviously a well-timed and massive hit to AGW, but I can think of worse things done in the name of science….from experiments in mind-control on unsuspecting patients… to Lysenko…..
As for its impact on AGW, I´m afraid the spin-machine will quickly rewrite the significance of some of the language used by the rogue scientists.
Still, at the end of the day, it all helps to erode people´s trust in expert authority..and that is always a good thing.
“If we observe poor Indians going about making their economic achievements, we see that they are hugely gifted. In Indian markets, it is the poorest who scout around for the best buys and bargain most energetically - while the rich get easily conned! A joke is told about Indians in England - once known as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’: Why can’t Indians play soccer? Because, whenever they get a corner, they put a shop on it! A bania (an Indian trader) is rumoured to be able to buy from a Scot and sell to a Jew and still emerge with a profit! Economists like Myrdal and Sen do not see these gifted people: they see flaws in the people and perfection in their rulers……
Sen, of course, is always on the side of the poor and the marginalised. He believes in the doctrine of redistributive justice; and his most famous work is on famines. However, soft hearts can do a lot of harm; hard heads are far better. A renowned hard head, Lord Bauer, in 1961, in his first book on India, commented that beggary on the streets of India and Pakistan is not a proof of poverty; rather, this widespread beggary exists only because the dominant communities in both these countries, Hindus and Muslims respectively, believe they earn spiritual merit by giving alms to the poor. In these very countries, there are no Parsee, Sikh or Jain beggars because these communities practice collective charity, discourage beggary as a blot on the entire community, and encourage self-help. Today, India has 60,000 tonnes of foodgrain rotting in state godowns. Famine is a thing of the past. And ‘poverty’ needs to be meaningfully understood.
Indeed, notions of ‘redistributive justice’ should be unceremoniously buried……The Law cannot be Robin Hood - and, no matter what, Robin Hood was a thief. Notions of ‘redistributive justice’ have made democracy an ugly game by which some groups gain at the expense of others…..
A majority of the world’s people, all of them desperately poor, need freedom from their predatory states. For their sake, we need economists who genuinely value freedom. Amartya Sen is not one of them.”
“President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.
The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama’s name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.”
My Comment:
Considering that Henry Kissinger has a Nobel prize, this is quite in tradition for the misnamed Nobel prize - a highly political award. Maybe some of the Swedish banks that got into trouble in Latvia are greatful for the Obama team’s globalization of QE (Quantitative Easing), after their lending spree in Latvia.
And nuclear disarmament? After two weeks in office?
Even the report displays skepticism:
“Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.”
In short, it’s an astute, if blatant, piece of public relations.
Some questions for the Nobel Laureate:
Question: Is the US Govt. going to lay down most of its nuclear weapons? Or is it going to make nominal reductions, while using that to prevent any other country gaining even a single weapon?
Question: Is the US Govt. going to reduce surveillance, quit bombing in South Asia, and threatening Iran?
Question: Is the US Govt. going to modulate its own life-style of excessive consumption (subsidized by US tax-payers and artificially cheap interest rates that effectively rob savers all over the globe) or is it going to be lecturing other countries on how to live frugally after a half century of reckless living?
John Thain now admits no one at Merrill had any idea what their CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) were worth. They created them on computer programs. Not only was the global economy rear-ended by a bunch of greedy corporate hacks, it turns out they were too dumb to know what they were doing and too reckless and arrogant to ask. It’s bad enough being scammed by psychopaths. It really hurts to be scammed by morons.
“We think it’s good news that Thain is now emphasizing the knowledge problem when it came to banking–highly paid, well-educated people at the top of their field just didn’t understand the credit derivative products they were buying and selling. This is important as much of our financial reform seems to ignore this problem, focusing instead on fixing incentives in compensation.
It also undermines the idea that the Fed–or any other regulator–will be able to properly assess the risk of these kinds of derivatives.”
My Comment:
I’ve always suspected this, because in graduate school one of my close friends was working on a PhD in finance (where he’d ended up after starting out in mathematics). He was very smart and believed that you could quantify decision- making at all levels. He wanted to turn the social sciences into the hard sciences. We had passionate arguments about this, since I thought the hard sciences were a very faulty (if useful) model for the arts and humanities. I was flabbergasted to find out one day that he didn’t understand what a mortgage was - he lived in such a rarefied world of theory and had been a student for so long. It wasn’t that he lacked empathy or emotions. He didn’t. What he lacked was any experience of the practical world. [He ended up becoming a trader for JP Morgan and had an office at the World Trade Center. Fortunately he wasn't in on 9-11].
“Resales of U.S. homes dropped 2.7% in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million, the first decline in five months, prompting the National Association of Realtors to again plead for more taxpayer subsidies for their business.”
That’s sent spot gold below $1000 and pushed the dollar higher.
Aha. So Ben Bernanke finishes his little piece of quackery yesterday, delivering it in the best bedside manner (the patient is doing so much better etc. etc..), and the silly patient refuses to cooperate and slides right back into his coma…
Read the whole piece at Market Watch, if you can do it without popping a blood vessel.
Here’s Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (which is the lobby for the real estate agents) “pleading” for more tax payer moolah in order to have a “self-sustaining” recovery.
How does a recovery based on taxing people amount to a “self-sustaining” recovery?
Huh?
Slap on the forehead. Silly me. Subsidized self-sustaining recovery is exactly the right phrase. Goes right along with war is peace, strength is ignorance and the rest of the Orwelliana lining the cabinets of US Govt. Incorp.
And how about this gem:
“Most economists had not been anticipating a decline in sales.”
Oh really? Most economists hadn’t? And why hadn’t they?
After all, IO loans (interest only loans) are waiting to be reset, the tax payer rebates from April have been used up, commercial real estate is collapsing, foreclosures are spreading to the higher end of the market, the impact of the first wave of government finance and mortgage subsidies is about to run out, so why in the world (heavy sarcasm alert) would economists worry about anything, right? Why in the world would they anticipate anything?
Thinking bad, evil thoughts about the economy is the job of us bloggers. It’s our unpatriotic, unprofessional duty to tell you what’s really going on instead of the moonshine being handed out.
Professional economists it seems are too busy professing economics to actually tell you anything marginally helpful about the economy.
As I said, I’ve never been a fan of Sarah Palin as vice-president. It was apparent to me from the beginning that she was unqualified. But the fault in picking her was not hers but McCain’s. It was an opportunistic and silly choice, given the economic challenges the country was facing, and in my opinion it called into question McCain’s own temperament. But that said, vilifying the woman at every turn is pointless, ugly, and calls into question the motivations of her critics.
To take the example of a non-white woman who I believe is as unqualified and as polarizing, would people talk about Maxine Waters in the same way? I think not. And I hope not.
Then let’s extend the same courtesy to all candidates, regardless of their political affiliation or religion or race or class.
(Note: I’ve criticized attacks on Hillary Clinton on the same grounds on this blog).
The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.
Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.
Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have. [Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It's not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].
So let me toss my two cents in.
From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.
Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).
He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.
As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..
What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.
Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.
My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.
It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.
Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.
The Pew study notes, ‘That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold.14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.…….
….. Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.”
Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy declared, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
That image – the women in the back alleys, the doors shutting on the citizens’ fingers – was powerful enough to prevent Bork from winning Senate approval. It is thus not unfair to say that the vitriol that has surrounded Supreme Court nominations ever since is one of Kennedy’s legacies, too….”
Ms. Applebaum nails it. The “borking” of not just Supreme Court nominations but of political figures in general goes back to this sad episode in media history.
The Kennedys are American royalty, like the Bushes. So on an occasion like this, it’s probably not appropriate for an outsider to say more. Anyway, I was glad to see that conservatives, even rather shrill ones like Michelle Malkin, have been restrained enough and allowed Ted Kennedy’s family a few days of solemnity and sympathy, before discussing his political or personal flaws.
I have been meaning to post the surrounding text of the famous passage in which George F. Kennan, a noted Sovietologist, cold warrior, and advocate of realpolitik, expressed his view that US policy in the post-war years should be unsentimental in its attitude toward Asia. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950 (under George Marshall and Dean Acheson), Kennan was one of the principal architects of US post-war strategy and the formulator of the policy of long-term “containment” of the Soviet Union. So the piece makes for interesting reading today, especially in light of the following:
*the destruction of Asian savings by the US government-generated debt & dollar tsunami
*the rise in food prices in Asia
* the ongoing rush by Asian governments (along with everyone else) to buy up world farmland
* the potential for global water-wars in the immediate future.
KENNAN:
II. Far East
“We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. …..
…In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better……”
“Following Alan Greenspan’s pathetic “don’t blame me” speeches and books, various Fed branches have parroted his view that the Greenspan Depression we are in was caused by thrifty Orientals whose savings drove down interest rates. So imagine my surprise upon receiving a hard copy of a Dallas Fed publicaton entitled “Taming the Credit Cycle by Limiting High-Risk Lending” and reading that “The present troubles emerged to a large extent from the growing use of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages . . .” Huh? What happened to The New Yellow Peril?
There is no mention at all — not one word — of the role of Fed monetary policy in creating the housing bubble. The culprits, say these self-serving excuse makers (the author is Jeffrey W. Gunther), are “lightly regulated institutions” that are in need of the Fed’s “disciplining force.”
My Conment
Mr. di Lorenzo can relax - this new tack does nothing to exonerate Greenspan. Look at this USA Today piecefrom early 2004, when housing was already showing bubbl-y tendencies:
“He [Greenspan] said a Fed study suggested many homeowners could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade if they had ARMs. Those savings would not have been realized, however, had interest rates shot up.
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.”
Read through the whole piece and it’s clear that American house buyers actually “preferred the stability” of the traditional fixed rate mortgages. In other words, it was only a concerted PR effort by Greenspan & Co. that changed people’s tastes in this.
Let that put an end to any moralizing of this issue. Yes - rampant consumerism and debt binging exacerbated the problem. But the problem wasn’t caused by some moral defect in American consumers. It was caused by policies deliberately pushed by the federal government in the hope that the consumer would succumb. The chairman of the Federal Reserve thus acted no differently from any confidence man or grifter who spots a mark (a naive, uninformed person easy to manipulate), then sets about winning the mark’s confidence before baiting the trap….
You can see the chairman’s own words to the national association of credit unions on February 23, 2004. (Skip down to the last 2-3 paragraphs to catch the gist)
And now, just like any con man, the Fed chairman too blames his victims.
Robert Wenzel over at Economic Policy Journal points out that the new head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is Gary Gensler, who spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs as co-head of finance.
He also has a nice hat-tip to me for spotting Roubini’s insider status first. Well, I did spot it first, but it wasn’t hard to do. His bio on wiki has the links. You’d just need to think of looking at it. What are the chances that policy wonks who go to the same schools, attend the same conferences, live in the same neighborhood and work at the same places are going to to be “independent”?
From Wenzel:
More and more the picture that is emerging of Roubini is that of a major insider. Writes The New Republic: He has a
…swelling portfolio of clients–the World Bank, IMF, 50 central banks,and 30-odd finance ministries among them….”
Recent Comments