This Week In Tyranny
Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 09:14AM No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.
It probably is not too great an idea to bomb our allies even if they assure us it’s totally fine with them and they really don’t mind at all.
Torturing soldiers causes PTSD. There isn’t a safe way to do it, there isn’t a controlled way to do it.
Raytheon’s pain ray was originally developed for use in Afghanistan, but since we can’t have troops in combat forever (presumably) the real money for a war profiteer is in getting it repurposed for domestic use. A few months ago there was some typically hysterical fretting on the left about just that. Guess what? It’s coming to Los Angeles County Jail for use on human guinea pigs. Hey, don’t run afoul of the law and you won’t have anything to worry about.
The same goes for the War On Terror. Sure, it’s profitable to sell thrilling new technology for use in our never-ending attempt to scare the hell out of the public with nightmarish, apocalyptic imagery (say, when do we begin the War On Dogs anyway?) but not handsomely profitable. For that you need local law enforcement or for that matter any random yokel queuing up to buy it. It’s not like it will erode Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches or inculcate a meek, obedient populace. Only less enlightened people like those primitive savages in China are susceptible to such influence.
I think it’s completely awesome that Fox News cites Bill Clinton to support their opinions now. When did they decide he was so great? I didn’t get that memo. Even better, they cite him as an objective voice defending prewar Iraq sanctions even though his legacy is wrapped up in presenting them with maximal bias. He’s hardly a dispassionate analyst.
Imam Fiesal Abdul Rauf: “You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations.” said Rauf, who called himself a spokesman for Islam.The concept of “arguments that are happening intra-Islamically” is completely ignored in America. One would think a “hearts and minds” strategy would put following those arguments near the top of the to-do list.
But diplomats and others, including former President Bill Clinton, have said that sentiment is wrong. Saddam Hussein’s regime corrupted then-U.N. sanctions and denied humanitarian aid to his own people. In a Nov. 8, 2000, interview on Pacifica Radio, Clinton said if any child is without food or medicine, then Saddam is to blame because the dictator is “lying to the world and claiming the mean, old United States is killing his children.”
[snip]
“But after 50 years of — in many cases — oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?” Rauf asked, explaining, “I’m just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra-Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain.”
At this point McClatchy and Carol Rosenberg are two of the most important names in news. If you can watch a ten minute video, see this. Oh, and Guantánamo detainees are being force fed at night during Ramadan. Hearts and minds.
Civilian control of the military is turning into a charade.
A Texas activist engineered a reverse sting on a police department and won. It might be tempting to dismiss it as a prank, but in an era of ever-expanding intrusiveness by authorities it’s encouraging to see someone making sure those with an aggrandized view of their powers get the occasional reality check.
Target gets in trouble for a hundred grand to a single candidate. How does this pass unnoticed?
Think Progress is credited with some of the reporting in the piece, but Mayer does a wonderful job synthesizing existing stories while adding new information as well. That’s why bloggers have a limited ability to make stories stick - individual data points accumulated over time don’t as easily persist in memory. It’s simpler to keep track of a narrative presented in whole. I remembered Graham and Kyl’s fraudulent alteration of the Congressional record in Hamdan when I read it in a book. I’d read it several times online but it never stuck.
Blackwater has its own agenda. If it doesn’t align with US interests so be it. I’m not quite sure if those in charge of making these decisions have thought the whole thing through.
Paul Krugman on the nonexistent threat of inflation:
I wonder how many of the people saying this know that Moody’s and S&P downgraded Japanese debt in 2002, with Moody’s actually putting it below Botswana and Estonia.Elsewhere he takes a victory lap. While I know it may be tempting to gloat in current circumstances it’s usually best to err on the side of humility. I’ve started reading ECONned (recommended) and here’s a bit of recent history from pp. 29-30 (also cf.):
And 8 years later, Japan can still borrow at less than 1 percent.
A Wall Street Journal survey found that 89%, as close as you ever come to unanimity in most polls, saw the increase in commodity prices, including oil, as the result of fundamental forces. Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman argued the case forcefully in a series of The New York Times op-eds and blog posts with titles like “The Oil Non-Bubble,” “Fuel on the Hill,” and “Speculative Nonsense, Once Again.”
Krugman’s presence in this camp lent credibility to the “oil prices are warranted” view. The Princeton economist had been a Cassandra on the housing mania and had also correctly anticipated that the deregulation of energy prices in California could lead to manipulation. So Krugman, sensitive to the notion that speculation can distort prices, nevertheless fell in with the argument that oil prices were simply reflecting supply and demand.
Yet that belief was spectacularly incorrect. Oil peaked at $147 a barrel in July and fell even more dramatically than it had risen. By October, prices had fallen to $64 a barrel. Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum described the world as “drowning in oil.” A report by the Commodities Futures Exchange Commission attributed the large swings in oil prices to speculation. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said that earlier studies that found that the moves were the result of supply and demand relied on “deeply flawed data.”
Goldman Sachs has an absolutely toxic reputation. Their name is synonymous with fraud and crime. I suppose you can act with impunity if you’ve bought the right politicians, public outrage be damned. Still, it seems like there would be some kind of long term implication to this.
Regardless of what they think or what is in their hearts, federal officials in practice are hostile to ordinary citizens and would rather immiserate them than risk the slightest diminution of wealth for the richest. John Cole: “In my understanding of the free market, things are a win/win scenario, not a tilted table with a win/lose situation where the winner is predetermined by influence and power and connections and societal standing.”
Along the same lines, this. Via.
Hey Democrats: When John Boehner starts making sense and gets on the right side of an issue you are in serious trouble.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called Tuesday for the mass firing of the Obama administration’s economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House adviser Larry Summers, arguing that November’s midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on sustained unemployment across the nation and saying the “writing is on the wall.”Steve Benen has a nice response for him, though.
I absolutely love this headline.
I just finished Inside Out by Barry Eisler and really enjoyed a complimentary copy sent to me. In the acknowledgments he thanks the writers at this site, a jewel of the Internet era.
I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Sara Benincasa.
Reader Comments (4)
Yves Smith writes:
By October, prices had fallen to $64 a barrel. Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum described the world as “drowning in oil.”
Well yeah, by October the world was in recession. Oil consumption-wise, it still is. The supply curve for oil only becomes highly price inelastic as it is reaching new peak consumption levels as was occurring in early to mid- '08. The two parts of Smith's book I disagreed with were her criticism of Paul Krugman's take on oil prices and that hard to take seriously demonstration in the appendix that economics in the real world is complex and dynamic and that economists who use models, like Krugman, don't understand that. (I don't have the book in front of me, both issues were referred to in Chapter II if I recall correctly. I think the appendix was written by some else.)
Anyway, Corrente hosted a book discussion with Yves Smith. I didn't show up until after she was gone but, in what is now the next to the last comment in the thread at 03/28/2010 - 9:46pm, I went on and on about why I disagreed with her, Taibbi, et al. on the matter of '08 oil prices.
Why I think this is important is that when we talk about economic recovery these days, we need to understand we don't really have anything to return to; not to a housing or a dot com boom, nor to the days of "happy motoring."
I should have written: "the world was in a recession" and "the supply curve for oil only becomes highly price inelastic as it is reaching new peak output levels."
The WSJ article you quoted notes "CFTC's new review [is] due to be released in August [2009]" - was it actually released last year, and if so what did it say? Same with "The U.K.'s Financial Services Authority has found no evidence...people familiar with the matter said Friday." It sounds like people were announcing an imminent debunking; any idea if that actually happened?
Smith's argument crosses a political fault line because the idea that markets can be artificially manipulated is uncontroversial among reform advocates, but in this one particular case it involves a commodity that many of those same people would prefer to see us wean ourselves off of. The liberals' temptation is to respond: Hey, manipulated oil? Then let's go green - the sooner the better.
That doesn't negate her point that there was a price bubble, though. The sharp rise and fall in price is testament to that, even if long term trends can explain a smoother version of the same phenomenon.
The Krugman link is a bit of a face-saving walkback for him, and since he's been on the right side of so many issues I'm not inclined to rant and rave about it too much. It was more a response to his brief exercise in ego onanism.
Oh, and I think "the world was in a recession" and "the world was in recession" are both grammatically correct.
Dan writes:
It sounds like people were announcing an imminent debunking; any idea if that actually happened?
You're right, in that July, '09 WSJ article Yves Smith cited it did sound like a debunking was imminent. However, here we are in August, 2010 and the question remains a controversy among the experts.
Dan writes:
That doesn't negate her point that there was a price bubble, though.
The price of oil did spike (07/03/2008 $145.31/bbl.) and then collapse (02/12/2009 $34.03/bbl.) according to this Cushing, OK. spot price chart. The question remains: was that volatility caused solely by supply and demand fundamentals or were prices driven to their highs, in part, because of the speculation that was occurring in the futures market?
Consider this. The futures market might have been helping to bring additional oil production on-line faster than otherwise would have been the case as the demand rose through '07 and into '08 and, therefore, speculation might have been helping to keep the price of oil down during the period of the run-up. Whether or not we're bumping up against the peak oil ceiling (i.e. the maximum production rate we're ever going to achieve) certainly the Deep Water Horizon disaster has clued most of us in to the fact that bringing additional oil production on-line takes a lot of lead time and it is becoming more and more expensive.