The trouble with growth is that it will eventually stop. The trouble with advocating a planned rather than a disastrous stop is that people like wealth. Busy people don’t have the time or inclination to think it through. The pressures of the here and now trump any long-term thinking. People defend what they have and want to increase what they can get. We don’t have a civilization of compromise and collaboration, and as long as people are frantic to make a buck, they can’t even find time to imagine one, never mind a sensible path toward it.
New page: On the Environment
New page on the blog: On the Environment. I decided I needed to create a list of environment-related pieces that I keep going back to. I may add some of my own thoughts in the future but at present it’s just a bibliography.
Weekly Digest – November 30, 2014
- Excerpts from Must Read and Should Read pieces are provided at the end of this post
- Visit Rabett Run for useful analysis and commentary on climate science and the politics thereof.
- Robert Naiman, Torture Report: Mark Udall’s World-Historical Moment to Rescue CIA Oversight [See Excerpt 1 below.]
- What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting? [2]
- Jared Bernstein, The tax extender package: a lame duck turkey [3]
- Jonathan Foley, The other inconvenient truth [4]
- Eli Rabett, Picture Postcards. [5]
Should Read
- Ray Pierrehumbert, Obama’s U.S.-China climate agreement: Carbon budget and exponential curves show why this is a fair deal. [6]
- Ryan Koronowski, Most White Evangelicals Attribute Intense National Disasters To The Apocalypse, Not Climate Change [7]
- Marissa Fessenden, Even Climate Scientists Are Getting Depressed by Our Lack of Progress [8]
David Remnick, Vaclav Havel in Jerusalem
David Remnick in The New Yorker, Vaclav Havel in Jerusalem:
Not long after his unlikely rise from Czech prisoner to Czech President, Václav Havel paid a visit to Moscow. Until that moment, the leaders of Eastern and Central Europe had arrived at the gates of the Kremlin as little more than nerve-racked supplicants. They came to receive instructions and to pay obeisance to the General Secretary. Now Havel was there to see Mikhail Gorbachev, but, with an air of modest self-confidence, he carried a set of demands and an ironic prop. As Michael Žantovský tells the story in his excellent new biography, Havel asked that the Soviet Union remove its troops from Czech territory, and that the two nations sign a statement declaring them equals. Gorbachev, who had already relinquished his imperial holdings, agreed, at which point Havel produced a peace pipe, telling Gorbachev that it had been given to him by the chief of a Native American tribe during a recent trip to the United States. “Mr. President,” Havel said, “it occurred to me right there and then that I should bring this pipe to Moscow and that the two of us should smoke it together.” Žantovský, who was Havel’s press aide at the time, recalls that Gorbachev “looked at the pipe as if it were a hand grenade.” Then the Soviet leader turned to Havel and stammered, “But I . . . don’t smoke.”
Invasive plants: “Know them. Don’t grow them.”
The New England Wild Flower Society puts out an excellent three-fold brochure on invasive plants common to this region. They list species and provide some background on why you should care:
Some non-native plant species become “overachievers,” thriving in their new habitats without the insects and diseases that would normally control their growth. Once established in natural areas, they outcompete native species and become a major threat to native habitats. Some invasive plants have escaped from our home gardens and public plantings into natural areas and cause profound environmental and economic damage. Each state has developed a list of problematic plants. [Ed.: See MA’s list of invasives and potential invasives here.] Some are even illegal to sell. Please learn about the species considered invasive in your area, generate a list of the invasives on your property, and create a plan for eliminating them.
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It also describes means of control. For invasives which are frequently found in suburban yards and gardens the brochure recommends some native alteratives, e.g., red maple to replace Norway maple, highbush blueberry to replace burning bush, blue flag iris to replace yellow flag iris, inkberry holly to replace privet hedge, and serviceberry to replace non-native bush honeysuckle.
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Get a pdf of the brochure here – Invasive Brochure
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Senate report on the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation” practices
Robert Naiman in the Huffington Post:
“Time Is Running Out on the CIA Torture Report,” the National Journalreports:
Backroom negotiations over the release of a long-delayed Senate report on the George W. Bush administration’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation” practices are again hitting a wall….
The Senate is set to adjourn in mid-December, but [Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne] Feinstein can still hold off on submitting the report until the start of next year by obtaining a consent agreement that would allow her to file when Congress is not in session. But the extension would only give Feinstein a few weeks of extra daylight. The current Senate will formally expire at noon on Jan. 3…. The continued fraying of negotiations has some suggesting that the White House might be intentionally stalling, in hopes that it can run out the clock on the report’s release, especially with Republicans slated to take over.National Journal notes that outgoing Colorado Senator Mark Udall — no longer constrained even in theory by the perceived need to curry favor with power — is the last line of defense for Senate Democrats: he can declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s preferred version of the report by himself, by reading it into the Congressional Record, under the protection of the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause.
More is at stake than establishing a public record on the CIA’s use of torture and its illegal attempts to hide its crimes from other executive branch officials and Congress, important though that is. The struggle over the release of the CIA torture report is a litmus test of the ability and willingness of Congress to conduct any meaningful oversight of the CIA at all.
One of the early indicators that the Obama was not going to impress was his statement that he would not aggressively investigate potential war crimes by the previous administration.* Related links:
- David Johnston and Charlie Savage (NYT), Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs
- Adam Serwer, Investigation of Bush-era Torture Concludes With No Charges
- Glenn Greenwald, Obama’s justice department grants final immunity to Bush’s CIA torturers
* Gen. Taguba was instructed to retire in 2006, less than two years after the release of The Taguba Report but before he publicly accused the Bush Administration of war crimes.
Emily Atkin, Industry Groups Are Freaking Out About Obama’s New Smog Pollution Rule
Emily Atkin had a piece at Think Progress this week, Industry Groups Are Freaking Out About Obama’s New Smog Pollution Rule. The nickel summary: The EPA has issued a draft rule intended to reduce urban smog. The usual suspects object; however, “both industry groups and Republicans have been overestimating the cost of regulations like this since the EPA first began issuing regulation of this kind.” A longer excerpt including estimated vs actual costs of regulation:
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new draft proposed rule on Tuesday to tighten already-existing restrictions on ground-level ozone pollution, the main ingredient of urban smog.
Under the draft proposal, states would be required to lower the level of ozone pollution allowed to be in the air. Right now, the current standard is 75 parts per billion, and the new rule would change that to somewhere between 65 to 70 parts per billion. The rule would require some states with bad pollution to expand their ozone pollution monitoring, and require improvements to systems that notify the public when their air quality is at an unhealthy level.
The EPA predicts this will do wonders for public health and, by extension, the economy….
As it happens, industry groups and a number of high-ranking Republicans do not agree with the EPA. Instead, they are already predicting doom — and if you can believe it, they’re a little more exasperated than usual.
Taibbi’s back – The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JP Morgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare
Matt Taibbi is back with Rolling Stone. From his Nov. 6, 2014 story, The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JP Morgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare –
She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.
“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”…
Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.
Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.
Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”
Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.
Total recall
A piece in today’s NY Times reminded me of an article in the NYT Magazine and subsequent letter to the editor from nearly 20 years ago. It was concise and lucid. (Read the comments section from today’s piece to see why I was reminded.) I’ll adapt Kaplan’s letter for today’s times:
The 0.1% are part of a culture that values only the act of selling something for more than it was bought. When they and other like them are finished, they will, no doubt, have become more wealthy and more powerful. Yet they will have contributed so very little to the society from which they skim their profits. For all their talent, they offer nothing to the arts, nothing to the sciences and nothing to our shared stock of human ideas.
That’s it in a nutshell. From my standpoint, the super rich do little more than consume resources and generate huge piles of excrement. You want to understand my class hostility? There it is in one paragraph.
PS Dean Baker addresses Sorkin’s criticism of Sen. Warren here.
PPS A less angry take on compensation disparities and the super rich: Janna Malamud Smith, Toward A Better America: Readjusting The Value Of Low-Paid, High-Commitment Work. (I’m not a low-paid worker but I respect people who take on low-paid high-commitment work.)
Lewis Black on professional expertise, climate change, and acting responsibly
(Thanks to Eli Rabett for posting the video and his monologue in prose. He’s right. There is a rhythm to it.)