I got a lot of letters from folks this week about an online column for Forbes written by a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger (if that’s a nom de plume, it’s not bad, although I might have gone for “Harry Kingbanger” or “Harry Wandwanker”). The piece had the entertainingly provocative title, “Give Back? Yes, It’s Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%” and contained a number of innovatively slavish proposals to aid the beleaguered and misunderstood rich, including a not-kidding-at-all plan to exempt anyone who makes over a million dollars from income taxes.
This article is so ridiculous that normally it would be beneath commentary, but there’s a passage in there I just couldn’t let go:
Category Archives: Weasels
On compromise
An observation by a commenter on boston.com:
Can I burn down your house??
NO
Can I burn down your garage??
NO
Just the second floor??
NO
Lets talk about what I can burn down??
NO
YOU ARE NOT COMPROMISING!!!!!!!!!
Not to flog a dead horse but the ACA is law. The Supreme Court declared it Constitutional. Want to repeal it? Then go through the legislative process. It is not acceptable to hold the government hostage in your effort to repeal it.
Apropos of nothing:
se·di·tion noun \si-ˈdi-shən\
- Conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state.
- Insurrection; rebellion.
Paul Krugman on the principal reason why I despise NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg
From The Political Economy of Bloombergism (emphasis added):
Via Mark Thoma, Daniel Little has a nice survey essay on Saskia Sassen’s concept of the global city (pdf). These are cities that concentrate high-level coordination functions for the global economy — finance, in particular — and exhibit extraordinary concentrations of wealth as a consequence. New York and London are the prime examples…
If you’re interested in this stuff, you should also read John Quiggin’s cynical but plausible take (pdf): Quiggin suggests that the reason finance and similar activities concentrate in a handful of global cities isn’t because that produces gains in economic efficiency, it’s because of the enhanced opportunities for cronyism; it’s a lot easier to make implicitly corrupt deals when you have lunch in the same restaurants and your kids go to the same expensive private school…
…as the Bloomberg era draws to a close in New York, there has been a fair amount of speculation on why Bloomberg was such a success but Bloombergism — his mix of social liberalism and pro-finance economic policy — has been such a bust on the national political scene… Bloombergism played well with the global elite, which really doesn’t care what other people do in their bedrooms but cares a lot about being left free to rake in the moolah, which judges a man not by the color of his skin but by the size of his portfolio… Even a bit of redistribution was OK, if it seemed to contribute to a nicer environment in which to enjoy the remaining 99.9 percent of one’s income… But the rest of America is nothing like that.
Bonus Bloomberg smackdown here.
And, on the theme of “weasels”, a story from yesterday’s NY Times, Reaping Profit After Assisting on [Pres. Obama’s] Health Law.
Daniel Drezner: Man, the State, and Trust
Not often do I read something and think “I wish I had written that.” Daniel Drezner, Man, the State, and Trust is one of those (emphasis is mine):
…I do feel compelled … to blog about Edward Snowden, his NSA revelations, the scorn heaped upon him by much of the foreign policy community, and the furious pushback by other quarters against that scorn… I’m going to resist blogging about Snowden himself, since that A) distracts from the larger question of whether the NSA revelations are truly scandalous; and B) leads to some really bad psychoanalysis-cum-social commentary.
Thomas Friedman captures the sentiments of a lot of the foreign policy community with today’s column. This passage in particular pretty much sums it up:
Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.
I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.”That is what I fear most.
That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.
You know what? Friedman’s going to earn a lot of calumny for this column, but at least he’s straightforward about his cost-benefit analysis. And it bears repeating that the revelations to date involve programs that have been signed off by the relevant branches of government.
That said, here’s what I worry about:
What’s all the fuss? It’s only metadata.
Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
So, if you’re a Verizon customer, your government knows who you called, where you were when you called them, where they were and how long you spoke with them. (To clarify, there are two surveillance programs in the news: an named NSA program where phone records of Americans are the target of the surveillance and PRISM, also an NSA program, where on-line communications of foreigners are the target of surveillance. Domestic surveillance is the big issue as far as I’m concerned.) But, hey, no biggee because they didn’t record the actual conversation and there are checks in place to prevent abuse, right? No reason to be uncomfortable with the fact that any calls you made to Tea-Party-sympathizer cousin or Occupy-Wall-Street-sympathizer brother-in-law are part of some government database, right? Like I said, it’s only metadata and there are checks in place to prevent abuse. Just listen to the president (after all, he’s listening to you…):
“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution and due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”
– Pres. Barack Obama, 7 June 2013
Cass Sunstein, How to Humble a Wing Nut
I’m not a big fan of Cass Sunstein but this is pretty good (emphasis added):
There is no standard definition of the all-important term “wing nut,” so let’s provide one. A wing nut is someone who has a dogmatic commitment to an extreme political view (“wing”) that is false and at least a bit crazy (“nut”).
When wing nuts encounter people with whom they disagree, they immediately impugn their opponents’ motivations. Whatever their religion, they are devout Manicheans, dividing their fellow citizens into the forces of light and the forces of darkness…
The good news is that wing nuts usually don’t matter. The bad news is that they influence people who do. Sadly, more information often fails to correct people’s misunderstandings. In fact, it can backfire and entrench them. Can anything be done?
For a positive answer, consider an intriguing study by Philip Fernbach, a University of Colorado business school professor, and his colleagues. Their central finding is that if you ask people to explain exactly why they think as they do, they discover how much they don’t know — and they become more humble and therefore more moderate…
Securities and Exchange Commission
From today’s NY Times:
Mary Jo White, the new chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has gotten off on the wrong foot. Last week, in her first commission vote, Ms. White led the commissioners in approving a proposal that, if finalized, could leave investors and taxpayers exposed to the ravages of reckless bank trading.
No kidding. Wow. Nobody saw that coming from – like – a mile away. (I’ll be interested to see if Senator Warren offers an opinion here. This seems like the sort of thing which would bother her.) Back to the NY Times editorial:
At issue is the regulation of the multitrillion-dollar market in derivatives. When speculative derivative bets go right, the results are lavish bank profits and huge banker paydays. When they go wrong, the results are shareholder losses and taxpayer-provided bailouts…
The S.E.C. proposal would let the foreign branches of American banks avoid rules being developed under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and instead follow rules that prevail in the foreign countries where the deals are done. Foreign banks involved in derivative deals with American companies also could adhere to their own country’s rules as long as those rules are deemed broadly comparable to Dodd-Frank rules…
Matt Taibbi despises Jamie Dimon
I think fair to say that Matt Taibbi despises JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Justifiably so in my opinion. See here. And here. Anyhow, that brings us to today (last week actually). Dimon is being Dimon. Taibbi observes and shakes his head in disgust:
So JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is participating in an investor conference call. This is the semi-regular ritual where a financial executive throws out some already heavily-airbrushed numbers for a select group of financial analysts… Some of the analysts … have a reputation of throwing the occasional brushback pitch, injecting unwanted or uncomfortable questions into the otherwise well-protected narcissistic bubbles in which these CEOs mostly always live…
Just Mint It, Baby!
Update 9/30/2013: Brad DeLong is on board, The Trillion Dollar Coin–or, More Sensibly, 1000 Billion-Dollar Coins–Is the Only Way for Obama to Fulfill His Oath of Office
My original post from 1/9/2013:
Reminder: The debt ceiling will soon come crashing down on us. (Not the greatest metaphor but cut me some slack for a minute.) If the debt ceiling issue is left unresolved, it could very well cause a Constitutional crisis. Not good. The fact that there is a debt ceiling crisis is absurd – basically comes down to Congress authorizing spending but then refusing to pay for it. (The GOP is 100% at fault but that’s actually beside the point.) Continue reading
