Policy 01/28/2010

• Ezra Klein – The upside of reconciliation

  tags: policy

  • I really can’t believe this. I have been following the health care debate every day since May, and I can’t believe the Democrats wussed out at this point when they could have still got it passed. What does this leave? If the Democrats aren’t going to get things done, ….I need to find a new hobby, something that doesn’t involve thinking about or knowing anything about the news. This is too much. I can’t believe it.

    Posted by: christopherfarrell | January 26, 2010 8:25 PM

  • couldnt agree with you more christopherfarrell. whats the point. I’ve always said that our most important job as citizens is to be informed and vote. I frankly dont see the point in voting anymore. Nothing happens.

    The sad part is this is especially true of losercrats. The Republicans would have passed their entire agenda by now if they had 60 votes. While a disagree with the GOP, I am a person that would do well under their agenda so maybe I should just vote for them. At least something will get done. It is a joke. Never seen such a bunch of cowards, spineless bums.

    Posted by: fiorehoffmann | January 26, 2010 9:42 PM

  • christopherfarrell you are the spokesman for a new generation

    it’s beyond sad, it’s bewildering to understand how out of touch with their voters these politicans are, including, I finally have to conclude, Obama. For every day you’ve been watching this process I’ve been right there saying I’ll give Obama time because I think he plays a long game. But now I see no game at all.

    Now the news is on freezes and other junk that doesn’t matter today, while Rome burns.

    So the Democrats are done. The Republicans are not an answer. How will we ever save the climate from an ungodly catastrophe?

    Posted by: rosshunter | January 26, 2010 9:53 PM

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Policy 01/26/2010

• The upside of the Supreme Court’s upsetting new decision

  tags: policy

  • Well I like the Greenwald article, he makes sense of the media’s corporate speech (Fox and MSNBC) pretty well. But I do agree with commenter jesmont at 3:51:
    “What we’re really arguing about is whether the effects are bad enough. “

    But I don’t think that’s wrong, or even new. When some speech is really bad it generally has broken some other laws or tenets of the law.

    In the famous example of falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, the LOGIC is that the right of speech is never really abrogated, but the policing duty placed on government to prevent “imminent lawless action” (which cannot be settled in court prior to its effect, such as a panic or riot resulting from inflammatory speech) kicks in with a greater force – showing that the right itself is not absolute beyond all other considerations of lawfulness.

    The point to focus on is not the long-settled situation of corporations enjoying the same protections from tyranny as natural persons. It’s that the lawless action of elected officials voting certain ways because of money being given to them should be a crime, and we need to find ways to broaden the application of this logic in light of today’s politics.

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Economics 01/25/2010

• Paul Krugman For The Fed « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: economics

  • big global american corporations now run congress,the fed,and the presidency….they are all pushing jobs,money
    business out of this country because asia is the future for them….there is no one in this country to fight for the middle class…this country is slowly dying and no one realizes this…we all standby
    and watch the destruction of our economy and our democracy while big business is quickly leaving the country…whithin 5 years there will be anarchy here…because the people are complacent and we will pay for it

  • Well, you do realize that the financial markets have NO effect on our GDP, our employment or our market demand, right? You do know that, right?

    The stock market only reflects the preferences of those who OWN companies (stockholders). Our financial well-being is not determined by that measure. It is determined by how much stuff people want to buy — you know — the middle-class, buying groceries and clothes?

    A Fed Chairman needs to understand that. Greenspan, Summers, Geitner and Bernanke thought that somehow the stockmarket would produce jobs if they pushed enough graft and corruption into it — notice how well that worked out?

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Policy 01/23/2010

• Obama’s First Year « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: policy

  • I feel like I am watching Jimmy Hendrix’s National Anthem play out as a historical drama. A great nation self destructs. Is that how it felt in Russia? What a terrible time to be young. God help us.

• Ezra Klein – Tom Toles gets a look at the Democratic playbook

  tags: policy

  • I don’t buy this meme that says reform is unpopular, not at all. People are confused as hell, and they don’t like that. I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s in the bill, and as everyone says, the sausage-making was more than we wanted to know.

    But the Dems were voted in to pass reform, among other things. It’s a real easy message to say that it doesn’t kick in for a few years, and we’ll be tweaking it for decades, and we finally entered the grown-up world, courtesy Dems and the voters who loved them.

    I do not understand how their nerve just shattered, or why they think it’s a bigger win to stall than to move forward. Why, in fact, they’re killing themselves.

    I agree with jeirvine rather than Toles. The football choice of analogy is useful, because it reminds us that we all know quite well as a nation how to analyze plays, the strategy and tactics of the thing. Why, out of the entire country, the politicians we gave a landslide to now doubt this is anybody’s guess.

    But it’s quite certain that the entire nation will interpret this play for the fail that it is, and surf channels for a better game.

• Ezra Klein – Can Democrats govern?

  tags: policy

  • So what’s wrong with voting green? The only reason a lot of people have placed their climate and ecology anxieties on hold has been to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority.

    If they can’t use it to pass legislation, if they show their inability to govern at the national level, then sustainability candidates are the only answer, regardless of where they come from.

    The planet’s comfort zone for human civilization is running out, quickly. This forms its own messaging, no packaging required. This issue won’t go away, it will rise in damage and immediacy month by month, unremittingly, right up to endgame.

    What is needed are people who can get things done. It won’t be the Republicans. It was always questionable if the Democrats were able to step into this requirement.

    A little more disgusting loss of nerve like this and they’re finished with progressive dialog, because the planet’s fate itself will soon take over the entire conversation.

    Oddly, even as the Dems go down, Obama may rise, on this one front, the most important of all.

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Sustainability 01/22/2010

• Ezra Klein – Will bloggers profit if newspapers charge?

  tags: Sustainability

  • If there’s one lesson to be learned from recent history it’s how powerfully new things can happen when information is freely available.

    The newspapers haven’t really failed to learn this, but I agree they just can’t figure our how to make money from it. This, even after Google showed that advertising (paid information) will gladly and profitably travel along with free information.

    Raising the quality and extent of journalism to give us unimpeachably complete information doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the old school as a model to explore, sadly.

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Policy 01/22/2010

• Drew Westen: Obama Finally Gets His Victory For Bipartisanship

  tags: policy

  • The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan. It should have started with a non-watered-down stimulus package big enough to stop the bleeding in the job market — and a smack-down of any Republican who dared to utter the word “deficit” after 8 years of reckless, unpaid Republican spending. It should have followed with stringent regulations on Wall Street and protection of homeowners and small businesses instead of with a jobs creation program inside the administration for failed bankers and failed regulators. A stimulus — including a jobs program — strong enough to prevent the hemorrhaging of 700,000 jobs a month and a muscular approach to the bad actors who had crashed the economy would have gotten the public firmly behind the President and the Democrats, demonstrating to the average voter that they have a choice between one party that’s on their side and another that’s not. Instead, the White House just blurred the lines between the parties so the average American couldn’t tell the difference.

    With all its efforts to tack to the center, the White House missed the point. The issue isn’t about right or left. It’s about whose side you’re on. In Massachusetts, the voters believe they know. It’s now up to the President and his party to convince the American people otherwise.

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Sustainability 01/20/2010

• Sen. Lisa “dirty air” Murkowski now top fundraiser from utility industry

  tags: Sustainability

  • Speaking of convergence, and in case one wonders, a discussion of ethics and cruelty to animals DOES belong in a website about climate change.

    In fact Paul Hawken recently gave us the framework of reason that connects these things in commmon cause, introducing what to me was a brand-new paradigm, in his book Blessed Unrest.

    He combines the three disparate movements of environmentalism, social justice, and indigenous peoples, and shows how they are interconnected and part of the same whole.

    He cites the literally uncountable number (but in the millions) of organizations and efforts across the globe and calls them, together, the spontaneous arising of the Earth’s immmune system to defeat the great disease of industrial plunder.

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Policy 01/16/2010

• I could train high school students to be better-than-average political pundits

  tags: policy

  • As one who voted with jkaren, I’ll say that I could WISH Obama had leaned on jobs more, passed more stimulus, forced the banks to lend us a little bridging money during this slowdown, and more.

    I’m assuming that his judgment said he couldn’t do these things, because I’m quite certain that, like any normal person here, he would want to.

    But with all the noise about why he does (or doesn’t do) things, I never read analysis from people who ask him why he’s acted the way he has. Could someone ask him please?

    I’d love to know what he thinks about his opportunity limits and opportunity costs – I’m sure it would be a great interview.

    From his few public pronouncements, he always seems quite aware of every detail of all the debates that swirl around us and through these threads. Wish somebody would ask him his opinion.

• Ezra Klein – Tab dump

  tags: policy

  • Yes – #1 is right on, brilliant analysis by Hayes, and I love his allegory of having to pay money to the protection racket simply in order to ease misery, in the first pass at least.

    Obama (and I’m a fan of his) will be around for 7 more years. Some of this protection racket will get broken up in that time. But taking sure little steps, and not to lose footing along the way, is the real challenge for him.

• System Failure

  tags: policy

  • Now, it turns out that you can raise enough money through your
    organization so that you can reliably cover the protection fees for the
    struggling shop owners operating on the margins. Whenever they can’t
    come up with enough money, you can make up the difference. The
    improvement to residents’ lives would be massive: no longer forced to
    live in fear, they would be allowed to transact their business and go
    about their lives free from the constant, degrading fear of physical
    violence. But by taking this action you would also be channeling revenue
    into the pockets of the protection racket and, perhaps more insidious,
    further entrenching its power by conceding its central premise: that all
    local businesses must pay up in order to survive.
  • So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the
    existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press
    constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the
    filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented
    workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a
    few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the
    frontiers of the possible.

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Sustainability 01/15/2010

• Ezra Klein – Americans not getting fatter

  tags: Sustainability

  • alessandra_barbadoro is correct, it’s our food system that’s poisoning us – chronic illness is a main product of our unsustainable agri-business and food-processing industries.

    Cheap “food-products” are a principal cause of our health care crisis, which is what SimonCox is pointing to also I assume.

    Michael Pollan has been talking about this repeatedly lately. Try him in a short talk with Jon Stewart (pointing out that the food industry today creates patients for the health industry), and a longer one with Amy Goodman:

• THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2009— Page 1

  tags: Sustainability

  • Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

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Policy 01/13/2010

• A breath of fresh air: Obama’s amazing first year « Climate Progress

  tags: policy

  • Let’s not forget also that when Obama entered office the world economy was hanging at the edge of a cliff wondering what was going to happen next. That was a very real crisis, and took a lot of attention.

    As for health care, I think the calculations on the spot said there was a one-time optimal chance to get it done (i.e. before inevitable Democrat losses in 2010), so do it this year or never at all, and he “switched priorities,” if we want to call it that. But remember by then he’d already planted a lot of climate change reversal money into the stimulus. And Obama’s climate work has continued all through this. Climate can continue with a diminished Democrat presence in the House, health care couldn’t.

    All in all an impressive year’s work.

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Economics 01/13/2010

• Op-Ed Columnist – Learning From Europe – NYTimes.com

  tags: economics

  • The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

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Economics 01/12/2010

• You can never go home again (nor should you)

  tags: economics

  • the default of the finance industry has diluted the sense of morality attached in many people’s minds to paying back loans, as well as having shown us all the fabricated nature of most of the “money” involved in most of our loans received.

    The article suggests explicitly that actually it’s only people’s residual sense of morality that’s prevented many of them from walking away from upside-down arrangements.

    My guess is that this moral tie will continue to weaken to whatever extent that events show continued disregard for the working stiff.

    In short, we’re witnessing a massive destruction of cultural morality caused by a massive display of immorality in our nation’s institutions.

• Ezra Klein – Marco Rubio is an attractive Senate candidate

  tags: economics

  • well if it’s a Monday morning discussion of free markets, and the talking heads who love them, allow me to point out that we’ve lately witnessed the captains of finance recoiling in horror away from free markets.

    Without governance, it seems, every free market will work to produce top dogs, who will then work to shutter the markets from any further competition.

    A commenter made the lovely remark over at Simon Johnson’s blog one day, that the free market had in fact tried to operate, in the meltdown, to weed out the insolvent banks, but of course that was the last thing anyone wanted.

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Policy 01/09/2010

• The Atlantic Online | How America Can Rise Again | James Fallows

  tags: policy

  • That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

  • The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

    We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too.

  • The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.”
  • I have seen enough of the world outside America to be sure that eventually a collapsing public life brings the private sector down with it.
  • Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional—but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time—and our children’s, and their grandchildren’s—rather than succumb.
  • America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

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Policy 01/08/2010

• Ezra Klein – For people who like scary stories

  tags: policy

  • I agree, it’s a wonderfully written article, beautifully clear, it’s one you can send to your friends because it explains so much about why the working taxpayers have been feeling so short-changed in recent decades.

    But how to win this war, surrounded by thieves on all sides? How do we reform our representatives? How exactly do we pass campaign finance reform?

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Economics 01/08/2010

• Capital City | Mother Jones

  tags: economics

  • Now if the aerospace lobby had told us after the 1986 Challenger disaster that the key to better performance was to turbocharge the engines and quit performing preflight inspections, everyone would have agreed that they were crazy. Yet that’s essentially what the finance lobby has done over the past decade, and in some weird way we were too mesmerized to recognize it. Within months of a near catastrophe caused by one of the industry’s brightest stars, the lobbyists were busily making certain that it would happen again—and that when it did happen, it would be bigger and more disastrous than ever.

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Economics 01/07/2010

• “All Serious Economists Agree” « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: economics

  • When bankers lived in the communities that they served, they had a vested interest in helping those communities to succeed. Separate the commercial banks from the investment banks and then you’ll see the communities banks come back to life, enabling the citizens to thrive once again. When the communities banks are funding the housing market, and local businesses again, we might just have a chance of turning things around. Keep the money on Wall St and we’re all doomed. Commercial banks and investment banks have two distinctly different purposes.

• The Crisis This Time « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: economics

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