Saturday Morning Reads

Posted: September 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , | 20 Comments

Good Morning!

Just for some fun, let’s look at this day in history. Back in  1993 the last Russian troops left Poland in what was one of the signs of the end of the Cold War.    In 1975 , it was the rollout of 1st space shuttle orbiter Enterprise (OV-101) that brought tears of joy to every Trekker’s eyes.  One of my favorite things to watch as a little girl debuted in 1964. “Bewitched” premiered on ABC TV.  I was always rooting for Samantha to use her magic as much as possible and dump Darren Downer.   Also, when I was older and in high school in 1972 ,  “M*A*S*H,” premiered on NBC TV.  Today is also the birthday of the late, great  Anne Bancroft who was born in the Bronx in 1931.  She  had some other names too!  First, she was born into the name Anna Maria Italiano.  Then she was also known as Mrs. Mel Brooks. Bancroft  starred in some of my favorite movies like “The Miracle Worker” and “The Graduate”.  She definitely got some of the best women’s roles back then. She died of uterine cancer in 2005.  Happy Birthday Mrs. Robinson where ever you may be!!!

Despite incredibly bad polling numbers, Obama’s close advisers refuse to entertain the idea that Obama may become a one-termer. It’s all in the message, you know! Plus, it’s all the fault of the villagers and the “elite”. Well, that’s what Axelroad wrote in a memo to Sunday news program producers.

Axelrod’s memo, which took on “members of the media” and “elite commentary,” seemed to be a reaction to those concerns.

He said Obama is in much better shape to beat his Republican rivals next year than his approval ratings would suggest, in part because of voter support for the jobs proposal and in part because of the public’s dismal view of Republicans.

“Members of the media have focused on the president’s approval ratings as if they existed in a black box,” Axelrod wrote.

“Two-thirds believe we should cut taxes for the middle class and rebuild America’s roads and bridges,” Axelrod wrote, referring to the CNN poll. “Three-quarters believe we need to put our teachers and first responders back to work. More Americans trust the president to handle the economy than congressional Republicans by a margin of nine points.”

Axelrod also took issue with the conventional wisdom that the president has lost much of his base to disillusionment or disappointment, saying that Obama is polling higher with Democrats than President Clinton was at this point in his first term.

“Despite what you hear in elite commentary, the president’s support among base voters and in key demographic groups has stayed strong,” Axelrod wrote.

There’s a gossipy book coming out on September 20th from Ron Suskind on the early Obama years called ‘Confidence Men’.  Details were released this morning and I’m actually more interested in reading some of the blog reactions than the book itself.  The first reaction to read comes from Marcy over at Emptywheel.  Marcy talks about the Chief of Staff appointments.

But I’m just as interested in Suskind’s revelation that Obama didn’t want Rahm at first.

The book says one of Obama’s top advisers, former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, was not the president’s first choice for the position. According to Suskind, Emanuel’s name was not even on the initial short list, which included White House aide Pete Rouse.

Folks on the Hill are now bitching about Bill Daley. Though I think they’re crazy to miss Rahm, who may have been nicer to the Hill but was also ineffective. Me, I thought Rouse was the best of the three and wonder what it was that led Obama to pass up that choice and–in what was one of his first announcements–pick Rahm instead. It’s not like Rouse wasn’t available; he has been with the Administration throughout the Administration.

There was still a lot wrong with the execution of this Administration, such as the insubordinate Treasury Secretary that Obama didn’t fire. But a decent Chief of Staff might have at least made it more effective.

It looks like Timmy was in the well from the get go. If you want a rip roaring assessment of  Timmy and his act of subordination to the President because of his uber loyalty to Big banks, you really should check out Yves at Naked Capitalism.  She’s got a great ticktock over there on just how friendly Obama has always been to Wall Street and the huge commercial banks.

Let’s be clear. I’m sure Suskind’s sources did indeed tell him what he reported in the book. But there is plenty of reason to believe that this idea, that Obama “ordered” a Citigroup resolution plan and Geithner ignored it, is just an effort to shift blame for an unpopular pro-bank strategy to Geithner.

Look at the spin: we are supposed to believe Obama wanted to be tougher with the banks and was thwarted by his Geithner. Does that mean we are also supposed to believe that Eric Holder also ignored Obama’s orders to prosecute?

The only problem with this effort at revisionist history is that it is completely out of synch with other actions the Administration took in February and March 2009 that had to have been approved by Obama. And his posture before this supposed Citigroup “decision” and after, has been consistently bank friendly. Obama knew from the example of the Roosevelt administration, which he claimed to have studied in preparing his inaugural address, that the time to undertake any aggressive action was at the very start of his term, in that critical speech. March was far too late to start studying the question of whether to nationalize Citigroup.

Remember, Obama has been on the defensive since mid 2010, when it looked like the Democratic party was going to take big mid-term losses and they turned out to be even worse than expected. The realization that the Administration’s poor policy choices were coming home to roost would no doubt lead to trying to shift blame off the President on to convenient scapegoats. That mid 2010 timeframe likely coincided with Suskind’s research and interviews. And the “inexperienced President” positioning also serves to explain why an order-bucking staffer like Geithner is still in the saddle. Obama has since leashed and collared his advisors; this failure to exercise a firm hand was a short-lived problem, although the early mistakes that resulted still haunt him. A clever story, no?

All we have to do is look at the bigger arc of the President’s financial services industry bait and switch to see that this “Geithner blew me off” account doesn’t hold up. Recall that during his campaign, Obama made a great show of having Paul Volcker, who clearly had the stature to stare down the banks, as an advisor. The assumption was that Volcker would be Treasury secretary or otherwise very influential (think Kissinger in his role as head of the NSA, which prior to his appointment, had never been a powerful position).

After the election, Obama named Geithner and Summers, two of the major architects of the deregulatory strategies that drove the global economy over the cliff, to his most senior economics/financial services positions. And to top it off, Geithner and Summers then were close allies and Summers was seen as a ruthless infighter, so together they were more formidable than either would have been individually. Volcker was given a role that was the equivalent of exiling him to Siberia, head of a newly-formed Financial Stability Oversight Council. Anyone who knew anything about the players could see that Obama had decided to throw his lot in with the banks.

A WAPO piece by  Nia-Malika Henderson and Peter Wallsten says the Obama White House was overloaded with testosterone-addicted male power baboons–specifically Geithner and Summers–that essentially created a hostile work environment for women adivsors.

In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.

“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”

Dunn declined to discuss the specifics of the book. But in an interview Friday she said she told Suskind “point blank” that the White House “was not a hostile environment.”

“The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to house full of very strong women,” Dunn added. “He values having strong women around him.”

The book, due out next week, reveals a White House that at times was divided and dysfunctional.

Robert Scheer–editor of Truth Dig–has great analysis up that supplements the idea that Obama has always been big bank friendly and that he’s gone easy on them.  Scheer also says that Obama now owns the economy.  He wrote the piece in response to the horrible poverty numbers released last week.

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around.

He blindly followed President Bush’s would-be remedy of throwing money at the banks and getting nothing in return for beleaguered homeowners. Sadly, Obama has proved to be nothing more than a Bill Clinton clone triangulating with the Wall Street lobbyists at the expense of ordinary folks.

That fatal arc of betrayal was captured by a headline in Tuesday’s New York Times: “Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade.’ ” The Census Bureau reported that there are now 46.2 million Americans living below the official poverty line—the highest number in the 52 years since that statistic was first measured—and median household income has fallen back to the 1996 level. As Harvard economist Lawrence Katz summarized this dreary news: “This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

So I absolutely had to share this picture on the left from this week’s edition of  The Economist showing the world’s biggest employers. I was shocked to see that the US Defense department came in at number 1 while a not close second was the People’s Republic of China’s Liberation Army. Then, comes Walmart and McDonald’s.  I have to say, this looks like pretty fucked up global priorities to me.

ONE of the biggest headaches for policymakers in many rich countries has been how to create jobs during a period of fiscal austerity and anaemic growth. The private sector has been slow to generate jobs, and government-spending cuts usually end up cutting jobs. And governments employ a lot of people: in our chart of the ten biggest global employers, below, seven are government-run.

Okay, well, that’s enough from me for the morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads

Posted: September 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 28 Comments

Good Morning!

It’s one of those mornings where I could really use room service.  I’m getting to that age where rush deadlines do me in. Fortunately, Bostonboomer helped me with some great links so I’m  going to share them with you!  This first one is from Boston as well as Bostonboomer and it’s about the Elizabeth Warren campaign and some interesting local dynamics.  Senator John Kerry has committed to supporting another candidate in the primary.

In the video announcing her candidacy released this morning, Warren eschews the ivory tower in favor of a populist pitch.

“I’m going to do this,” she declares. Middle-class families, says Warren, have been “chipped at, hacked at, squeezed and hammered for a generation now, and I don’t think Washington gets it.”

She adds: “The pressures on middle class families are worse than ever, but it is the big corporations that get their way in Washington. I want to change that. I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.”

Not since the Weld-Kerry race in 1996 could Massachusetts see a general election campaign like this.

As in that battle royale between two bluebloods, then-Governor William F. Weld and still-Senator John Kerry, the candidates would be well-financed, nationally supported, and adept at debating.

Like Brown, Weld had tremendous personal appeal, with voters seemingly entranced by his devil-may-care attitude and his decidedly non-Cantabrigian persona.

And like Warren, Kerry was viewed as too stiff to connect, especially in contrast with Weld.

But Kerry ended up besting Weld on the strength of his personal campaigning, the experience of the large cadre of Democratic operatives, and an electorate that still tilted to the left despite being in the outset of electing Republican governors for 16 consecutive years.

Warren’s first challenge, though, is to overcome a field of a half-dozen challengers who are incensed the party establishments in both Washington and Boston have largely pooh-poohed campaigns in which they have put their lives on hold to stump around the state and beg for money to finance their travels.

Here’s an item from Wired that’s bound to make you mad.  It seems the FBI is profiling all muslim believers as radicals and terrorists. What on earth has the last ten years done to our civil liberties?

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as theunalterable word of Allah.”

 These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.

Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.

Sam Stein at HuffPo thinks that Obama won’t include social security in the list of program cuts in the catfood commision redux movement.

Jilted by Republican leadership during the deficit-reduction talks that accompanied the debt ceiling debate, the Obama administration is now pulling back an offer to put Social Security reform on the negotiating table.

The president will not include changes to that program in the series of deficit reduction measures that he will offer to the congressional super committee next Monday, administration officials confirm.

During talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) this past summer, President Barack Obama had discussed changing the way that Social Security benefits were paid so that a lower level of benefits were paid over time. Boehner walked away from that deal, which was part of a much broader package, because of concern over a corresponding tax increase. Now, Obama is putting off support for that idea of changing the inflation formula of Social Security to chained consumer price index (CPI).

“The president’s recommendation for deficit reduction will not include any changes to Social Security because, as the president has consistently said, he does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near and medium term deficits,” said White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage. “He believes that both parties need to work together on a parallel track to strengthen Social Security for future generations rather than taking a piecemeal approach as part of a deficit reduction plan.”

“There will be no Social Security in the recommendations,” Brundage added.

The White House’s decision to take Social Security reform off the table for the time being, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is largely consistent with the president’s viewpoint that the program is not a contributor to the deficit and should be dealt with in separate discussions. The administration brought it in to the “grand bargain” talks with Boehner, an official relayed, because the president was a party to those talks. With respect to the super committee’s negotiations, he will have no seat at the table and is merely outlining his preferences for reform.

The move also makes obvious political sense. Democrats have long worried that they would upset their base should they be seen as the ones chipping away at retirement benefits, certainly after House Republicans took heat for passing a budget that would convert Medicare into a voucher-based program.

Many radical christianists have infiltrated places like the armed services and law enforcement in hopes of gathering steam come the great war against whatever the end war is supposed to be.  I’ve never been much for fiction reading and the left behind series seems like as bad as fiction can get.  There’s been complaints at the Air Force academy for years.  One of my cousins who is a devote catholic was told be students in her math class that she needed to come to prayer services and become a real christian.  That was back in the early 90s and I don’t think it’s got much better.  Evidently, one top air force general is switching the air force back to neutral.

A top US Air Force official, in an attempt to ensure the Air Force adheres to the Constitution as well as its own regulations and policies, issued guidelines that calls on “leaders at all levels” to take immediate steps to maintain “government neutrality regarding religion.”

In his policy memorandum dated September 1, but sent Tuesday to all major commands, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz said, “Leaders … must balance Constitutional protections for an individual’s free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion.”

The First Amendment establishes a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution specifically prohibits a “religious test.”

The memo was issued a month after Truthout published an exclusive report revealing how, for two decades, the Air Force used numerous Bible passages and religious imagery to teach nuclear missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons, a decision that one senior Air Force officer told Truthout last month should have “instantly” resulted in the firing of the commanders who allowed it to take place.

The Air Force immediately suspended the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare training immediately following the publication of Truthout’s report. David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Education and Training Command told Truthout last month the ethics training “has been taken out of the curriculum and is being reviewed.”

“The commander reviewed it and decided we needed to have a good hard look at it and make sure it reflected views of modern society,” Smith said.

The decison angered Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) who fired off an angry letter to Secretary of the Air Force Michael B. Donley criticizing the move and demanding Donley provide him with a report detailing “actions taken” by the Air Force that led to the suspension of the ethics training.

One more interesting political piece via the Christian Science Monitor that says that Romney may actually be a “tougher foe” than Governor Goodhair for Obama.  My guess is because he sounds sane compared to Perry, but here’s what the CSM says.

Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, frames Obama’s prospects this way: “He’s eminently beatable, and Republicans smell this. But in electoral politics, it’s always compared to whom.”

As of now, the GOP race seems to have boiled down to a choice between Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. That, of course, could change, especially if a major new prospect enters the race. But for the sake of argument, let’s say either Governor Perry or Mr. Romney will get the nod.

Polls show that GOP voters believe Perry is electable, but polls of general election voters show Romney faring better than Perry against Obama. The Real Clear Politics average gives Obama a four-point lead over Perry but just a one-point lead over Romney.

Among independent voters, Romney has the clear advantage. In the latest survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling (PPP), Perry’s favorability with independents is just 23 percent (with 51 percent seeing him unfavorably). Romney is seen favorably by 44 percent of independents, and unfavorably by 39 percent.

I’ve just got a bad case of noodley brain today, so do let us know what’s on your reading and blogging list this morning and I’ll head back to the coffee pot?

 

 

Thursday Reads

Posted: September 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Good Morning!! I have a few interesting reads for you today. There isn’t a lot to be happy about in the news these days, but I hope that some of my picks will bring a smile to your face.

Maybe this will do it: Clint Eastwood: ‘I don’t give a f*ck’ if gays marry. The superstar actor and director told GQ Magazine that he considers himself an Eisenhower Republican, and he doesn’t sound too happy with the people running the party these days.

“These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage?” Eastwood opined. “I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.”

“They go on and on with all this bullshit about ‘sanctity’ — don’t give me that sanctity crap! Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.”

[….]

“I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War,” he told GQ. “And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.”

Go ahead, make my day, Clint.

This story is a few days old, but it made me smile: Zakaria destroys Rumsfeld’s Iraq war talking points. Zakaria interviewed Rumsfeld on September 11, and the old goat still tried to claim that al Qaeda was in Iraq before the U.S. invaded.

“There’s no question that al Qaeda and Zarqawi and people were in Iraq,” Rumsfeld argued. “They aggregated there.”

“If we hadn’t invaded, they wouldn’t have been there,” Zakaria pointed out.

“We don’t know that,” Rumsfeld insisted. “You don’t know that. I don’t know that.”

“But they went in to fight us. So since we weren’t there, why would they have gone into Iraq?” Zakaria countered.

“Why have they gone into Yemen and Somalia?” Rumsfeld asked. “Why do al Qaeda go anywhere? They go where it’s hospitable.”

“Right, and Iraq hadn’t been hospitable,” Zakaria said.

ROFLOL! Why is this joke of a man able to get a book contract? Why does anyone want to put him on TV? He’s a complete loon.

Speaking of deserving people getting their comeuppance, deadbeat dad and Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh was “scolded” by a Chicago judge yesterday for failing to support his children.

A Chicago judge issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in his child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering the Tea Party favorite to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments.

Vega did issue a “rule to show cause” — which means Walsh has to tell the court why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for falling so far behind in child support over the past five years.

Laura Walsh argues her ex-husband owes more than $100,000, a number the congressman disputes. But Vega’s ruling means that the burden is now on the congressman to prove that he doesn’t owe the money, attorneys for both Walshes agree.

Laura Walsh has gone into court on numerous occasions since filing for divorce in 2002, seeking court orders to have her ex-husband meet his court-ordered child-support obligations.

What a slug that guy Walsh is!

I came across this fascinating piece by Sarah Jaffe at Alternet: Are Jobs on Their Way to Becoming Obsolete? And Is That a Good Thing? It’s a long read, but I highly recommend you take the time. Here’s just a sample:

Media theorist and author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back Douglas Rushkoff ruffled some feathers this week when he dared, at CNN.com of all places, to ask that question. It seemed, perhaps, gloriously insensitive to the plight of unemployed workers, of union workers at the U.S. Postal Service, who are struggling like so many others to stay afloat in an uncertain economy while they’re demonized in the press as greedy for wanting a decent job.

[….]

He argues that perhaps we’re going about it backward when we call for jobs, that maybe it’s not a bad thing that technology is replacing workers, and points out that actually, we do produce enough food and “stuff” to support the country and even the world—that, in fact, we produce too much “stuff.”

He alternately harkens back to a past before jobs, when many people worked for themselves on a subsistence level, and forward to a future where we are all busy making games and books and communicating with one another from behind computer screens, with the hours we have to work dwindling.

Rushkoff’s ideas really resonated with me. I haven’t worked a full-time job since 1986, and although I don’t have a lot of money, I have never regretted my decision to quit my 9-5 job and find some meaning in my life by doing things that made me happy. I did find that meaning, first by working on my own problems and issues and then by helping and being a caregiver for my elderly ex-mother-in-law in return for a place to live.

Because my expenses were low, I was able to return to college and get a bachelor’s degree, then go on to graduate school and earn an MA and a PhD. During graduate school and after, I have worked as a teaching assistant and have taught a number of courses. But now that I’m finished with my education, I’ve been reluctant to search for a full-time teaching job.

Lately I’ve survived mostly on my Social Security and selling my huge accumulation of books on the internet with a few teaching jobs thrown in. I will also have another small source of retirement income from my days as a full-time office worker when I choose to take it. I’m enjoying the time I’ve had to follow politics closely and blog about it. I’ve never been all that ambitious. I went to school simply for the joy of learning. I do want to find ways to give back, but I don’t care that much about making piles of money. I might have to check out Rushkoff’s book.

At Truthout, I learned that liberal economist Dean Baker has also written a book, and you can even download it free! The book is called “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. From the Truthout article by Keane Bhatt, Dean Baker: Why Didn’t We Make These Guys Run Around Naked With Their Underpants Over Their Heads?

KB: Your book argues that financial crises don’t have to lead to “lost decades” of massive pain and suffering and, even more importantly, that the US never even experienced a true financial crisis.

DB: There’s a lot of real sloppy thinking here. The main promulgators of this view are Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart and they say that they look back over 600 years of history and find that in almost all these cases, countries took over a decade to recover. It’s painful, because I’d like to think – and one would expect that they’d like to think – that we know more economics than we did 600 years ago. If we don’t – and we really haven’t learned anything – why do you guys get paid high salaries? I say that only partially facetiously. If we were to look back through time, a very high percentage – probably the majority – of newborn babies didn’t survive to age 5. You’d be an idiot to say that the past trend holds today – we have modern medicine, so we have a very good reason to expect that the overwhelming majority of children will survive to age 5. We have learned something in economics over six centuries, so it’s not some curse, they’re concrete problems.

Finance gets very mysterious and complicated. There are instruments that are hard for people to understand; they’re hard for me to understand. The basic story is not complicated: we need demand. As I say in the book, there’s very little about the financial crisis that explains where we are today. People who want to buy homes have no problem getting credit – you can’t go 0% down, but someone who, say, 15 years ago was able to get a home mortgage can expect to get a home mortgage today. In terms of businesses, the US, unlike Japan, has a very large capital market where firms can directly access capital through commercial paper and bond financing. The current rates are extraordinarily low in both nominal and real terms. So the idea that the banks being crippled would impede the economy doesn’t follow when hundreds of the largest firms can go straight to the market and get financing.

Let’s imagine that the big firms can get credit but the small ones can’t. That would create a situation in which the big firms are running wild, grabbing market share at the expense of smaller competitors crippled by lack of access to capital. This is not happening.

There’s a survey that the National Federation of Independent Business has done for a quarter century that asks businesses what are the biggest problems to expanding. And currently, almost no one mentions finance – either access or cost. So clearly the problem is not finance.

Read the whole interview if you can–it’s well worth it.

I’m going to end with a story that won’t necessarily make you smile, but it’s a story that puts the lie to the Bush/Cheney claims that torture helped make us safer. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, author and former FBI interrogator Ali H. Soufan argues that the opposite is true, and that in fact 9/11 could have been prevented with traditional interrogation methods. Watch his interview with Keith Olbermann:

So…what are you reading and blogging about today?

Tuesday Reads: Romney vs. Perry, 9/11 Revelations, and Hormonal Effects of Fatherhood

Posted: September 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Good Morning!! Let’s see if there’s any news out there. I didn’t see much of the Tea Party debate, because I was watching the New England Patriots crush the Miami Dolphins. That was soooo much better than watching Wolf Blitzer and the crazy people. Thanks so much to those of your who watched and documented the insanity so I didn’t have to.

According to Alexander Burns at Politico, Mitt Romney turned into an attack dog and lit into Rick Perry.

Mitt Romney went on the attack against Rick Perry at the first possible opportunity Monday night, challenging the Texas governor on whether he “continues to believe that Social Security should not be a federal program … or does he retreat from that view.”

[….]

Romney jumped in with a hit against Perry’s book, “Fed Up!” – the tome that Perry used to describe Social Security as a program that violated constitutional principles.

“Gov. Perry pointed out that in his view, Social Security is not constitutional,” Romney said.

And so on, with Perry giving weak responses. It’ll be interesting to see Romney challenge Obama on Social Security during the general election. Talk about role reversal!

Unfortunately, the latest CNN poll shows Perry still leading the rest of the Republicans in terms of electability.

Hours before the start of the first-ever CNN/Tea Party Republican debate, a new national survey indicates that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is maintaining his lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

And according to a CNN/ORC International Poll, what appears to be Perry’s greatest strength – the perception among Republicans that he is the candidate with the best chance to beat President Barack Obama in 2012 – seems to be exactly what the GOP rank and file are looking for.

Paul Krugman wrote an addendum to his recent “controversial” blog post about the September 11 anniversary.

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

[….]

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

Good for him for sticking to his guns.

Former Senator Bob Graham today called for another 9/11 investigation, because of a new report that the FBI knew of connections between the hijackers and Saudis living in Florida and never revealed those finding to Congress of the 9/11 Commission.

Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil, new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who cochaired the bipartisan congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. … No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed.”

The U.S. Justice Department, the lead agency that investigated the attacks, refused to comment, saying it will discuss only information already released.

The results of a new study suggest that when men become fathers, their testosterone levels go down. The researchers looked at testosterone levels in a large sample of men before they married and had children and again a few years after their children were born. According to TheManlyZone.com, lower levels of testosterone could be nature’s way of making men less interested in other partners and more interested in caring for their families.

Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

“The real take-home message,” said Peter Ellison, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard who was not involved in the study, is that “male parental care is important. It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Ellison added, “I think American males have been brainwashed” to believe lower testosterone means that “maybe you’re a wimp, that it’s because you’re not really a man.

“My hope would be that this kind of research has an impact on the American male. It would make them realize that we’re meant to be active fathers and participate in the care of our offspring.”

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Monday Reads

Posted: September 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 11 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, it’s yet another Monday.  I’ve been busy checking out the jobs listings for next academic year and one Hawaii posting is looking pretty interesting right now. Anyway, I’ve got a little more writing on stuff to do before I go full force on that in a few weeks.  I spent all weekend with my nose in numbers and didn’t even turn on the TV once.   Let’s start with an academic post at VOXEU on “What caused the recession of 1937- 1938?” for a good start.  It’s on monetary policy and gold.  It shows how worrying about inflation when a recovery hasn’t really taken hold yet can create further problems.  It also is an area that was investigated by economist Christine Romer who showed how tight fiscal policy (i.e. less government spending) and a tightening of monetary policy led to a recession within the Depression.  Sounds familiar!

The recession of 1937-38 is sometimes called “the recession within the Depression.” It came at a time when the recovery from the Great Depression was far from complete and the unemployment rate was still very high. In fact, it was a disastrous setback to the recovery. Real GDP fell 11% and industrial production fell 32%, making it the third-worst US recession in the 20th century (after 1929-32 and 1920-21).

The recession is often attributed to a tightening of fiscal and monetary policy. Christina Romer (2009) and others have argued that it is relevant to today’s situation because it illustrates the dangers of a premature withdrawal of stimulus when the economy is still weak.

But the recession remains somewhat of a mystery because the two most frequently mentioned causes – the reduction in the fiscal deficit and the Federal Reserve’s decision to double reserve requirements – do not appear to have been powerful enough to generate a recession of the magnitude seen. For example, Romer (1992) herself has argued that “it would be very difficult” to attribute much of the decline in output to changes in fiscal policy.1 And most studies of the Fed’s doubling of reserve requirements – most recently, Calomiris et al (2011) – have concluded that it had little impact on banks because they held abundant excess reserves, which they did not seek to rebuild after the new requirements took effect.

If fiscal retrenchment and higher reserve requirements cannot fully explain the recession, then what can? There is no doubt that there was a severe monetary shock. As Figure 1 shows, the money supply (M2) grew at a consistent rate of about 12% a year from 1934 to 1936, but then suddenly stopped growing in early 1937 and even fell later in the year. The monetary shock, however, was not the Federal Reserve’s decision to increase reserve requirements, but the often overlooked Treasury Department decision to sterilise all gold inflows starting in December 1936.

Historian Julian Zelizer is wondering about Obama becoming a one-term President.   Minx sent me this link and I found it interesting.  Zelizer seems to think that the midterm election created a timid Obama.  It seems like every where I turn I read an article on Obama plus one term president these days.

With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history.

One-term presidents usually leave office with their parties divided, the economy in crisis, wars unresolved, approval ratings in the tank and a sullen public rejecting them. Becoming a one-term president means joining a gallery of dashed hopes and crushed ambitions. Among those who were elected for just one term were men who, like Mr. Obama, came to the White House with enormous promise.

Interestingly enough, it may just be the Republicans that defend Social Security in an effort to stop the momentum of Governor Goodhair.  First up, a bit of  ass-kicking on the subject from Mittens.  Romney knows where to play the Social Security card; FLORIDA!

Mitt Romney didn’t wait long to begin his attack on Rick Perry over Social Security—his campaign is doing door-to-door distribution of a flier attacking Perry on the issue.

The flier, which a campagn spokesman said is being left at the doors of Florida GOP primary voters, portrays the GOP primary as a two-candidate race—“Two candidates. Only one will protect what’s important to you,” is the headline.

Of those two, it says, Perry is “reckless and wrong on Social Security.” The bold-face tagline: “Rick Perry: How can we trust anyone who wants to kill Social Security?”

Romney, it says, favors “entitlement reform,” but “wants to save Social Security.”

Perry has not directly advocated abolishing Social Security, although he has called it a “Ponzi scheme” and questioned whether it’s constitutional. In last week’s candidates debate at the Reagan Library debate, the two clashed on the issue, and Romney accused Perry of being “committed to abolishing Social Security. But during the debate, Perry promised emphatically that he wouldn’t do anything to affect the benefits of current retirees or those nearing retirement.

Romney isn’t paying attention to the nuances, however. In the nation’s biggest swing state, which happens to have the second-largest population of 65-plus residents, he clearly hopes to put Perry’s views into question.

Bachmann is not about to be left out of the situation.  She’s got plans in the work to attack Goodhair on Social Security too.

“Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” says a Bachmann adviser.  “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does.  She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.”

Bachmann is in Florida for private meetings and to prepare for Monday night’s GOP debate in Tampa.  It’s no secret the Bachmann camp was unhappy with the moderators of last Wednesday’s Republican debate at the Reagan Library, a debate which began as a Perry-Romney showdown and gave less time to other candidates.  This time, in Tampa, it seems safe to predict that moderators will ask at least some other candidates whether they agree with Perry’s characterization of Social Security.

“Certainly not,” the adviser says.  “She strongly disagrees with his position on that, and it’s clearly not something that’s going to sit well with the people of Florida and Iowa and South Carolina and many of the early states, where there is a large population of seniors who rely heavily on Social Security.  For [Perry] to scare them is wrong.”

This should get interesting.  Oh, a friend and I were having a conversation on Michelle and Marcus last night.  I really though they should be part of a Tennessee Williams like play with John Goodman cast as Marcus.  I think Goodman could stretch his chops enough to do a Blanche Dubois like character, don’t you?

Steve Pearlstein at WAPO has come up with the newest Republican slogan and I like it.  “Repeal the 20th century”.  Actually, it’s more like repeal everything prior to the civil war but what’s a few decades between friends?

It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.

These folks are actually talking about repealing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970s.

They’re talking about abolishing Medicare and Medicaid, which passed in the 1960s, and Social Security, created in the 1930s.

They reject as thoroughly discredited all of Keynesian economics, including the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, preferring the budget-balancing economic policies that turned the 1929 stock market crash into the Great Depression.

They also reject the efficacy of monetary stimulus to fight recession, and give the strong impression they wouldn’t mind abolishing the Federal Reserve and putting the country back on the gold standard.

They refuse to embrace Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has been widely accepted since the Scopes Trial of the 1920s.

One of them is even talking about repealing the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax and the direct election of senators — landmarks of the Progressive Era.

What’s next — repeal of quantum physics?

Cannonfire has an excellent analysis up of a NYT piece on Obama and covert activities. Cannon talks about Obama’s entire background as being spookier than a gothic novel, with Halloween coming up, you could read all the links to his past posts and get in the mood or read his summary at that link.

In 1981, Obama was allegedly an ill-to-do student at Occidental University in L.A. Yet he chose to make a covert trip to Pakistan — his first trip out of the country — at a time when the place was under martial law; the State Department was advising Americans not to travel to that part of the world. Pakistan was, of course, a key part of the covert resupply effort for the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan.

There, a local “diplomat” at the U.S. embassy (obviously CIA) set up a meeting with one of the most powerful players in Pakistan — Ahmadmian Soomro. We are given no explanation as to why a poor student would meet with the nation’s most powerful banker and deputy speaker of the Assembly.

At Oxy, Obama took classes in politics, and one of his likely professors (whom I have never named) has a “former” CIA background. (With the CIA, you always have to put the “former” in quotes.) This man was also close to Zbigniew Brzezinski — who later became a key adviser to and influence on Barack Obama.

At the time, young Obama had an Indonesian passport. It’s known that the Agency likes to recruit young men with multiple passports, which can aid in plausible deniability. (For example: Obama’s passport would not have a Pakistan stamp.)

Obama never seemed to have any trouble paying for his expensive university career. After college, he went to work for a firm which was later exposed as offering cover for CIA personnel oversees.

His mother, Ann Dunham, had a remarkably spooky background, working for AID and the Ford Foundation, both well-known for offering cover for the CIA. Although an alleged leftist, she married a man who was the key liaison between Mobil oil and the CIA-installed Suharto regime, which came to power on the backs of some 500,000 corpses. I think it is fair to posit that no real leftist would even have lunch with a guy like that. (Ann made her own mystery trip to Pakistan in 1981 — and was even learning Urdu!)

Pardon me while I get my shoe phone …

Okay, well, that’s a start to the morning for me.  So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

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