Economists Tell the Masses: "It Could Have Been Worse"

Dean Baker wrote in Huffington Post this afternoon, in his article Economists Tell the Masses: 'It Could Have Been Worse':

It is amazing that angry mobs have not risen up and chased all the economists out of the country. While the greed of the Wall Street gang provided the fuel for the bubble, the economists played an essential role as enablers.  This was most directly true for economists in policymaking positions, like Alan Greenspan at the Fed.   There are thousands of macroeconomists across the country, in government, academia and private industry who track the economy as a full-time job... [Yet] you can count on your fingers the number of economists who raised warnings about the housing bubble. The rest either did not see it, or didn't think it worth mentioning.Remarkably, no economists seem to have lost their jobs for this failing.
Unlike dishwashers and custodians, economists are not held accountable for the quality of their work.

Mr. Baker, great article. I find your comments absolutely reasonable, and wish that many more people took the time to point out fallacious reasoning that is so potentially misleading.

But the expectation of American to rise up and chase the economists? Maybe the ones on American Idol, if there are any. As a people Americans aren't really active when it comes to chasing after folks who've fooled them, over and over and over again. Or for that matter, chasing anyone else.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama Drug Policy Focuses On Prevention, Treatment

The comments of the Drug Policy Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann are understandable and cheered by those of us for whom the War on Drugs has been too costly for too long.



It will be up to Nadelmann as well as POTUS and the rest of us to maintain our voices and attention on this issue. The War on Drugs created it's own "Military-Industrial Complex," which include the Corrections Corporation of America; the GEO Group, Inc,; Cornell Companies; Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp, and Community Education Centers. Phil Smith notes in his article on the subject that "Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities" created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality." [see: http://mediafilter.org/mff/prison.html ]



These companies find support with our politicians through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, an EXTREMELY effective and vocal advocate [see People for the American Way web page at http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/american-legislative-exchange, and this side dedicated to ALEC: http://www.alecwatch.org/ ] The private prison industry is also a substantial employer and is able to work through unions as well as through national organizations like The Fraternal Order of Police.



In short, this is a multi-billion dollar industry which won't die quietly, and the people whose self interest it serves will be coming hard and fast.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Might be a Good Time for some Fresh Strong Tea

Here is a party-making moment for the Taxed Enough Already folks: There are a lot of people out there who are disenfranchised, feeling left behind, whatever you want to call it.

Opryland, Boston Common, The Mall in Washington - when it was all over, the News organizations, and the politicians that exhorted protest and "sending Washington a message" were the same ones calling participants "rabble rousing, somewhat seditious folk"

Now that the GOP has made chumps out of the party, and it's become pretty clear they were never going to get support anyway, how will the Tea Party folks roll? Do they have what it takes to get down at the grassroots level and build a party to participate on a national level - a third party?

Or will they hang on at the margin, like some Bonus Army camped out in Washington? That's where the GOP would like to keep them, sucking up news cycles as they further their agenda in the background.  Anything that keeps the light off them is a good thing for the GOP right now.  Not that they'll thank the Tea Party folk.

I know this doesn't come across as kind.  Frank talk as this sounds more than a litte rude.  Significant moments, when decisions with lasting effects are made, don't come often.  This might be such a time.

People who know me will tell you I did not think the idea of protesting ad hoc, showing emotion in demonstrations was helpful or smart.  The idea of Taxed Enough Already wasn't one I was close to, because I couldn't connect the dots, from protest to changes.

Tonight I saw primary returns come in with GOP establishment candidates leaving few spots uncovered.  It was clear the Tea Party was created to benefit the GOP exclusively - no change to the system, status quo OK thanks very much. 

At the same time the Democrats, rather than press for transparency at the Fed or for regulating the size of too-big-to-fail banks, elect a "hands off" approach to the out-of-control banking system.  Truth to tell the banks have too great a control. It is the congress, and the people, who have lost it. And neither party seems inclined to do anything to address the wealth and power imbalance that continues to favor a very few.

Could there be anything good in all of this?  Perhaps.  I'm thinking this might be an excellent time to organize a political movement for the longer term. A movement with patience and vision; that doesn't shout or yell or take cues from news organizations. This could be the time when quiet resolve, the stuff no one pays attention to, can enter, and begin to speak - quietly and clearly - to and for the American People.

This time, instead of taking cues from one or another special interest, looking at all of our neighbors would be more helpful.  Recognizing that we are all (except the Native Americans) settlers here.  That at some point in the future we will all be gone from here, regardless of where we came from. 

We're not getting any younger.  Clock's ticking.

Peace.

The Brighter the Light, The Stronger The Shadows

The news of the video and story distributed by Wikileaks continues to percolate into the national conversation, including the Christian Science Monitor. Their coverage is concerned with contrasting the story the US Military told Reuters in 2007, with the account told by the video tape. [spoiler alert: there are differences - significant ones]

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has been following the story since 06:00 this morning and has posted several updates. He is pretty rough on the slant of publishers such as Mediaite.com (where my original post emanated from) who shoot the messenger for slandering the troops and/or making much of an aberration.

Greenwald also takes the time to flesh out the point that the callous and/or sadistic satisfaction shown by the soldiers shouldn't surprise anyone - they are a product of their training. When we accept that the training process has changed them in this way, it's easier to understand them under these circumstances. It may also help understand the source of the changes we as family members may see in them, when they return home. As Greenwald puts it,

If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

He closes his original post with the statement:

The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these events are anything but unusual.

If facets of military training impair a soldier's longterm moral compass when he or she is exposed to trauma, that soldier is being served poorly by a country they are sworn to defend.    I think we - that's us - you; me; the bank teller; the grocer; the school teacher... need to advance the need for a thoughtful conversation about this, until improvements are made.    It is the least we can do in support of our children, our brothers, sisters, wives and husbands who serve in the military.

Leak as Learning Opportunity

Today, Easter Monday, I returned home from my extended family in New York.  The sun was warm on a calm afternoon with a gentle breeze.  I ate watermelon ice cream with my two girls in our driveway after the four hour drive, happy to be home and alive on a beautiful Spring day.   I came up to my office and began looking through my incoming messages, to see ‘what’s behind door numbers one two and three,’ or in other words find out what’s new and exciting in the technosphere.  I was surprised and saddened to find the item below, from a site called Mediaite.com:

“In the past few weeks, the Pentagon has been waging battle on a whole new front: classified information that ends up on the Internet…In the following video, US Military in an Apache helicopter gravely mistake a group of Iraqi men for insurgents (what appears to be a camera is viewed by those in the helicopter to be a RPG.) Warning, the video below is graphic in nature.”

Mediaite labeled Wikileaks as the problem and its target in the article.  I’m really not sure why.  Wikileaks’ ‘…primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but … also expect[s] to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.” 

I did not bring a dog to the fight between Wikileaks and anyone else; as a group it appears to have released information that matches its stated goal of exposing unethical behavior.  The most important thing in my humble view is that the story is out there, and maybe now we can discuss how to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.  The costs of this outcome are substantial, and long-lasting.  Perhaps the outcomes should be considered the (quoting Mediaite again) ‘…real threat to national security…’  

·        Our troops are killing non-combatants, and it’s being covered up.  There’s a good chance if the event is whitewashed, the effects on those troops is likely to be ‘unseen’ by military management, as well.  Threat to us:  more emotional problems, suicides, dislocation in military families, occurrences of substance abuse.

·        Our actions show we no longer recognize medical evacuation as part of the ‘rules of combatant engagement.’  The video and audio show the attack team is given permission to continue shooting at people who have been wounded, and are crawling away.  Threat to us:  If the hors de combat designation of the Geneva Convention won’t be honored by one side, there’s no incentive for the opposing side to do so.

The threat to the country’s security was exposed by Wikileaks when it published the story.  The man or woman behind the gun should not have to live with responsibility for the deaths of non-combatants, especially for shooting wounded.  Particularly, when the persons they’re shooting do not shoot back.  This ‘real threat’ remains, until the procedures our troops follow are changed.  Expediency can carry the day, but will serve our troops poorly.  

If the Military does not change those procedures to make the job safer for the soldier (and in the process for others) then the Military can only blame itself, or try and shoot the messenger, over the result.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble...

Fed,Maiden Lane

[ Note: In January of this year, Robert Reich moved to a new Blog space to continue gathering his articles from here and there. Since he writes often this is a great way to keep up without the usual stream of celebrity sightings, tea party pot shots, and pharmaceutical adverts which are now ...pretty much everywhere. Thank you, Mr. R., for your distraction-free pages.]

 

Chesterton said, "I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean." In his article "The Fed In Hot Water," Mr. Reich covers the Fed's recent disclosure that it assumed tens of billions of dollars of debt from investment banks, which the government now has full responsibility for. And did so quite a while before being authorized to do so by the Congress - as a unilateral decision.

 

Not completely new news; we knew the Fed was acting in a crisis mode to help support the economy, but the ‘new’ message is disclosure of how much money was paid and what it paid for - something the American people have been asking for quite a while. Some people are likely to be pretty ticked off to find out that the government covered debt assumed to buy out Hilton Hotel properties. Outraged may be an appropriate description for some.

 

But for many, this is TMI - too much information - to take in.  There's too much other 'stuff' in the main dialog, which already competes with stuff in our personal dialogs.  Examples:

• There aren't jobs enough for everyone, and jobs held feel less secure than ever.
• The cost of fruits - fresh, canned and frozen - is increasing as are staples and meats.  And gasoline.
• We have elected figures being called 'Nigger,' 'Faggot,' 'baby killer,' and 'Homo Communist' - by other Americans, and other elected officials. The senate and congress men and women, the people who speak for us, appear to accept this behavior.. 
• Information about our armed combat forces, our family members, in Afghanistan and Iraq is very sparse.  There’s no information at all about our forces in Japan, Bosnia, and South Korea.
• 'Celebrities' - Tiger Woods, Jesse James, and Michael Jackson - are 'above the fold' news.
• The weather is crazy, flooding some areas and causing draught in others.

I wonder if at times Mr. Reich must feel like Cassandra.

The Goog Expands Its DocVerse

Cloud,Microsoft,Google,Office

It was announced Sunday that The Goog bought DocVerse, and the blogosphere is rumbling again about "the Microsoft challenger," "the desperate competition" and similar drivel.  If I sound jaded, I'll plead guilty; I've been me sidelined from life with health issues and my attention has been almost exclusively Google's since about mid-February.

This acquisition is significant for a couple of reasons.

First, DocVerse will give Office users who produce content in teams (locally or in networked environments) a way to move toward a 'Cloud Collaboration' work model.  This puts Google first in a space which Microsoft stated would be their major objective for 2010.

Second, the DocVerse tools give people a practical means of visualizing what Google Wave - a possible future standard of e-mail - is all about.

DocVerse is a package of plug-ins which a user installs on his or her personal computer, associated with the Microsoft Office applications.  When a .XLS, .PPT or .DOC file is created or opened, the user can share the file with other people they identify; the file is synchronized to a web-based version stored in a web cloud.  When a change is made to the local copy and saved, the changes update the cloud copy.  A group of people can work in one file simultaneously; comments, changes and change history are rippled out from the cloud server as each user saves their changes.

Users can start to work online on current common tasks, such as preparing status reports requiring multiple inputs.  As an early threshold of usability is achieved, use of cloud collaboration will grow. Work-process folks will begin to look at when a team member participates in a workflow as a new focus for optimization;  work flow analyses will document improvements on how tasks may be done, improving overall data quality and time to completion.


Once teams of users work collaboratively with Office documents, the concept of an e-mail program with similar functionality will seem natural.  The impression of inviting users to collaborate on a document and interact through the document to it's completion, will gel in the user's mind and probably change how we look at e-mail going forward.

iPad -- Evolution or Revolution?

This entry is a 'kinder, gentler' version of a response I posted to the article captioned below.  Thankfully, the Huffington Post's auto-editor noticed that my submission wasn't as coherent as it should have been, and the piece was not posted beneath the article.  This is a better-collected group of thoughts on the idea of electronic publishing than I could ever have dashed off, and I will cop to the fact I shouldn't have posted a response without better clarity of thought.  If that sounds like an apology, so be it...

I love to read.  I will read just about anything - it's a pleasure to receive someone's message, which may be seconds, or centuries old.  Hearing the words in my head (sometimes, out loud) as I read is a pleasure.  This is February; I'm into my fifth book for the year. Current read, which I cannot put down?  Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney.  Awesome stuff.

I was a little put off when I read Michael Ashley's article on the iPad, when I saw he plugged his company, which publishes exclusively online. But I got really annoyed with his idea that we'd be better off with a "new" concept of 'book.'  Apparently, it's not enough for him to have a dedicated, one-to-one uninterrupted channel of communication containing another person's (or other people's) coordinated stream of thought.  Heck, that's like.... I don't know...  '... a bunch of chapters packaged between two covers...' [this was supposed to be the 'kinder, gentler' and more coherent response, so enough of that.]

Maybe we should change the concept of 'book' since aside from scholastic, reference, and summer reading, people don't read nearly as much as they used to.  What's the need for it?  There's television, there's the internet, you don't need to wade through a bunch of dark spots on a page to get an answer to your important question.  Thank goodness, because we don't have time to sit and read anyway.  We're too busy.

Maybe we do need a change in 'book.'  Although I don't think embellishing it with video and audio will help the form.  Perhaps, if we instead refine the 'cone of silence' concept introduced by Buck Henry and Mel Brooks.  That would help the form, I think.

A gift, my paperback copy of Beowulf retailed for $13.95.  At Amazon.com, it's currently $10.04 in paperback, or $9.56 for the Kindle edition.  I don't suppose the concept of 'fair use' goes too far with purveyors of e-books.  From what I understand, not only are e-books not easily lent, they're often difficult to archive.

After I finish reading it (and probably re-reading it,) I'll pass it on to a couple of friends.  This is something you can't easily do with an e-book, since that would mean lending out your electronics as well.  Sharing a book, and hearing what others you speak with regularly think about a book, is part of the pleasure of reading!

It seems as if the e-print industry sees the future as a 'one man, one Kindle, one book license' kind of place.  I don't know of any libraries planning to stock up on Kindles, to loan out to card holders.  Since people don't read as a pastime as much it will take enormous price drops to make e-books mainstream.  Without those price drops, reading isn't going to get cheaper, it's going to get much, much more expensive.  And exclusive, in the process.  Perhaps reading for pleasure will become one of the decadent activities of the privileged.

How many Kindles, iPads, Sony E-Readers, etc. can be physically produced?  Not enough to get the price low enough for everyone to have one.  Not enough for everyone to have one at any cost, realistically.  And that may be a good thing.  It ensures that much of the content beyond the daily digestion of reports, news, sports, tabloids, stock updates, recipe ideas, and amber alerts will still be available in print.  For the immediate future, anyway.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2010: Six Hairy Issues (and How to Solve Them)

These "hairy issues" are just symptoms.



1. Blaming regulators doesn't make sense. Greed and extreme self-interest are at the heart of people's problems in general, and the causes of many of the decisions resulting in our current position. Witness the power usurped from the Senate and Judiciary by the Executive branch over the past fifty years. Those same people hobbled regulators and imposed their wills to weaken the regulatory structure and further empower themselves.



2. The fact that money speaks louder than bullets in Washington is one avenue through which those self-interests are articulated. Part of this problem is the aggressive nature of the lobby industry; a key complement to it is the non-transparent environment in which lobbying must take place to be effective. If our representation is to be responsive to all constituents it cannot be for sale or otherwise influenced by financial strength alone.



3. That a corporation is afforded the rights of a human being is wrong. It has no conscience or purpose, other than to generate a profit at any cost, sometimes with catastrophically dangerous outcomes (thalidomide, tobacco, Ford Pinto...) A corporation's person status enables self-interested people to further reach for power by allowing them to do things through the corporation that would be unconscionable by an individual and/or illegal, and to only pay penalties when caught. When personal responsibility exits, a sociopath remains. This cannot be fixed with legislation; Sarbanes-Oxley's only good when it's enforceable.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost