We need to get our heads around the distinction between a whistleblower, who observes criminal or unethical behavior by government officials, and a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security. Sometimes these two things can overlap, as when we learned that the NSA was conducting warrantless wiretaps in violation of current law. Bradley Manning revealed official wrongdoing, too, but he also did so with no discrimination.

I think the distinction between a “whistleblower” and “a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security” is specious (though he allows that “these two things can overlap”). My whistleblower may be your criminal who leaks etc. It largely depends on whether you support the leak in question.

BooMan’s post starts out looking at the recently revealed Justice Department (JD) investigation of James Rosen. Coming on the heels of the AP phone records seizure, it immediately became linked to that scandal. (That’s very fortunate timing! I wonder how the WaPo managed to unearth that “newly obtained court affidavit” at such a critical moment.)

There seem to be two big differences between them, though. The first is that Rosen was more narrowly targeted than the AP was, the second is that Rosen appeared to want to force a change in US policy as part of his reporting. So at least some the details on this particular case seem to support the JD’s actions.

The problem is that BooMan is not content to stay with the details of that one particular case. He moves on to some pretty troubling generalizations instead - his condemnation of indiscriminate leaking, for example.

Whistleblowers typically approach journalists in part because they want an organization with experience and resources to comb through the documents and figure out what to publish. Daniel Ellsberg indiscriminately leaked 7,000 pages to The New York Times. Do Libby and BooMan consider him a criminal?

We can debate whether WikiLeaks is a media outlet (I think it is, or at least it was at the time of its Afghan war diary coverage), but Manning’s smuggled documents were published simultaneously - and with the cooperation of - The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. Did those outlets engage in irresponsible journalism?

This debate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Those who have been on the receiving end of the surveillance state’s attention tend to look at a story like Rosen’s in the broader context of the government attacks on the First Amendment. If national security reporting is now fair game for government attack, there’s no reason to think it will remain confined to sketchy characters like Rosen. Scoops like those from Charlie Savage and the New York Times will also presumably receive more scrutiny as well.

The American government’s sordid history of deception with highly classified intelligence goes back a long way. It’s somewhat astonishing to read someone uncritically pass along government claims that something endangers what BooMan calls “our” precious bodily fluids national security given its track record. One of the most visible tools used to keep information from the public has been the state secrets privilege (SSP), which was literally founded on a lie:

Although the state secrets privilege has existed in some form since the early 19th century, its modern use, and the rules governing its invocation, derive from the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). In Reynolds, the widows of three civilians who died in the crash of a military plane in Georgia filed a wrongful death action against the government. In response to their request for the accident report, the government insisted that the report could not be disclosed because it contained information about secret military equipment that was being tested aboard the aircraft during the fatal flight. When the accident report was finally declassified in 2004, it contained no details whatsoever about secret equipment. The government’s true motivation in asserting the state secrets privilege was to cover up its own negligence.

In the majority opinion, the court, having not seen the documents in question, relied on the Air Force affidavit to conclude that certainly there was a reasonable danger that the accident investigation report would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission.

Those who defend the status quo deserve similar scrutiny. For instance, BooMan’s claim that “[t]he report relied on sources in the North Korean government” is sloppy. The story cites “sources inside North Korea,” not inside its government. I haven’t seen any reporting that the source was an actual government official, but those who are defending the JD’s actions (BooMan and see also the Mediaite story) have made that claim. Maybe that is a trivial distinction, but maybe it is something the JD is willing to have people infer.

The problem with all this cloak and dagger stuff is that ordinary citizens cannot reliably inform themselves on the issue. The quick way to choose whom to believe is to pick the side you like better. But after that first snap decision, it helps to look at the various parties’ credibility. This may be where Libby and I part company, because I have become so distrustful of government snooping and deception that I no longer believe its national security claims without some sort of independent corroboration. She still seems willing to. Maybe that makes me cynical or her gullible; who knows.

What I do know is that we are now in the twelfth year of a war that we are told encompasses the entire globe and that by definition will never end. And war corrupts democracy: It prevents citizens from becoming educated on one of the most important issues a nation can engage in. It turns political opponents into traitors and adversarial reporting into treason. Those who push back on a wartime president are endangering (our) national security. Those who question the wisdom of our policies are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. War does not, to put it mildly, promote a culture of free and open inquiry in the country that wages it. In an environment like that, I’ll err on the side of skepticism.

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous - and much less overtly political - than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time - they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, the business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause - and before the press is mentioned, incidentally - the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal which resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal. He refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class and the icy reception he received from journalists in the capitol. Apparently he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

1. If the story is this: a couple of employees in the bowels of the agency went rogue and even disobeyed orders to stop, the story ends there. If it was the result of a general atmosphere of improvisation throughout the agency in an effort to figure out the post-Citizens United rules of the road, there’s a little more to it. If senior officials were leaning hard on those down the chain of command to audit political opponents, we have a full blown scandal. Investigate it fairly and thoroughly, and let the chips fall where they may.
(Back)

2. Also, the IRS and the ATF seem to be particularly loathed by the right, so any scandal involving those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to send the outrage meter among conservatives to white hot levels.
(Back)

3. If you want to know how someone like Rand Paul manages to get traction on the left with a stunt like his filibuster, it’s at least partly because liberals have waited for over a decade for Democrats to make a big deal - at the relevant moment - on the issue. Many on the left have been desperate for anyone to take an appropriately visible and compelling stand. Refusing to engage might foster comity in Washington, but it frustrates the hell out of the base. And Republicans are more than willing to fill the political vacuum it creates.
(Back)

4. Not to go all strict constructionist on you, but I’m always struck at how infrequently First Amendment controversies directly bear on the actual text of the amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

5. Will Bunch:

It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about — trading liberty for security, and getting neither.

On the other hand, the slippery slope Bunch describes is a much more realistic danger, because none of it is in the open and there is no transparency. When everything is happening in the shadows and out of public view, the slopes can get slippery pretty darn fast.

And incidentally, systems like that also tend to take on lives of their own. Which means the “outrageous abuse of power by an intelligence agency” scandal will be a more or less permanent feature of every presidency going forward, since the dark government operates independently of the visible one.
(Back)

6. In the early stages of a story like this it might not matter who exactly approved the seizure. As more details come out, and as time passes, the major players may well patch things up and kiss and make up. If there’s plausible deniability in the right places and an appropriate scapegoat can be found I’m sure everything will get smoothed over. Still, an aggrandized surveillance state will naturally produce scandals like this from time to time. With no real oversight or regulation, it will inevitably gravitate towards broader and more audacious seizures.
(Back)

7. From pp. 329-30 of The Operators:

I’d run into politicians and government officials and they’d all tell me they liked my reporting. Maybe they were lying, or trying to bullshit me, I didn’t know. While living in Vermont, I hadn’t understood the exact nature of the official Washington freak-out. But once I arrived in DC and started going to the cocktail parties and hitting the bars, I saw how the political and media class had completely misinterpreted my piece. The story had terrified them, striking deep-seated fears in the Washington psyche. It demonstrated just how tenuous one’s own position could be - careers could flame out overnight. And the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship - their very existence and social life. If you can’t get wasted with a journalist who’s writing a profile of you and piss all over the president who appointed you, what’s the world coming to?

A number of famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them. It didn’t matter to them that I was on assignment to write a profile - I didn’t go to France and Kandahar on a social engagement. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially those the media deemed untouchable. Bash Sarah Palin all you want, but tread carefully when writing about the sacred cows like McChrystal and Petraeus. You’re supposed to keep ill myths going. I’d fucked up - I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth. At one event, a prominent Republican senator pulled me aside and said, “You know, your story was a good thing. Got everybody focused back on Afghanistan.”

Strangely, as I continued to report on the politics behind the scenes of the war, I ended up on pretty good terms with a number of military officials, White House officials, and State Department officials. It was the other journalists who covered the military and politics that I clashed with most often. A number of reporters had paid side gigs at defense-industry funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering. They seemed to take my criticism of the military-industrial complex personally. It might as well be called, I thought, the media-military-industrial complex.

I could understand why the government officials would be pissed; I was telling them their whole strategy was a waste of time. But the reaction from a number of journalists on the national security beat seemed pretty twisted.

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous - and much less overtly political - than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time - they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, this business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause - and before the press is mentioned, incidentally - the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal that resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal, and refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class. He received an icy reception from journalists in the capitol because he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

1. If the story is this: a couple of employees in the bowels of the agency went rogue and even disobeyed orders to stop, the story ends there. If it was the result of a general atmosphere of improvisation throughout the agency in an effort to figure out the post-Citizens United rules of the road, there’s a little more to it. If senior officials were leaning hard on those down the chain of command to audit political opponents, we have a full blown scandal. Investigate it fairly and thoroughly, and let the chips fall where they may.
(Back)

2. Also, the IRS and the ATF seem to be particularly loathed by the right, so any scandal involving those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to send the outrage meter among conservatives to white hot levels.
(Back)

3. If you want to know how someone like Rand Paul manages to get traction on the left with a stunt like his filibuster, it’s at least partly because liberals have waited for over a decade for Democrats to make a big deal - at the relevant moment - on the issue. Many on the left have been desperate for anyone to make an appropriately visible and compelling stand on it. Refusing to engage might foster comity in Washington, but it frustrates the hell out of the base. And Republicans are more than willing to fill the political vacuum it creates.
(Back)

4. Not to go all strict constructionist on you, but I’m always struck at how infrequently First Amendment controversies directly bear on the actual text of the amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

5. Will Bunch:

It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about — trading liberty for security, and getting neither.

On the other hand, the slippery slope Bunch describes is a much more realistic danger, because none of it is in the open and there is no transparency. When everything is happening in the shadows and out of public view, the slopes can get slippery pretty darn fast.

And incidentally, systems like that also tend to take on lives of their own. Which means the “outrageous abuse of power by an intelligence agency” scandal will be a more or less permanent feature of every presidency, since the dark government operates independently of the visible government.
(Back)

6. In the early stages of a story like this it might not matter who exactly approved the seizure. As more details come out, and as time passes, the major players may well patch things up and kiss and make up. If there’s plausible deniability in the right places and an appropriate scapegoat can be found I’m sure everything will get smoothed over. Still, an aggrandized surveillance state will naturally produce scandals like this from time to time. With no real oversight or regulation, it will inevitably gravitate towards broader and more audacious seizures.
(Back)

7. From pp. 329-30 of The Operators:

I’d run into politicians and government officials and they’d all tell me they liked my reporting. Maybe they were lying, or trying to bullshit me, I didn’t know. While living in Vermont, I hadn’t understood the exact nature of the official Washington freak-out. But once I arrived in DC and started going to the cocktail parties and hitting the bars, I saw how the political and media class had completely misinterpreted my piece. The story had terrified them, striking deep-seated fears in the Washington psyche. It demonstrated just how tenuous one’s own position could be - careers could flame out overnight. And the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship - their very existence and social life. If you can’t get wasted with a journalist who’s writing a profile of you and piss all over the president who appointed you, what’s the world coming to?

A number of famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them. It didn’t matter to them that I was on assignment to write a profile - I didn’t go to France and Kandahar on a social engagement. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially those the media deemed untouchable. Bash Sarah Palin all you want, but tread carefully when writing about the sacred cows like McChrystal and Petraeus. You’re supposed to keep ill myths going. I’d fucked up - I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth. At one event, a prominent Republican senator pulled me aside and said, “You know, your story was a good thing. Got everybody focused back on Afghanistan.”

Strangely, as I continued to report on the politics behind the scenes of the war, I ended up on pretty good terms with a number of military officials, White House officials, and State Department officials. It was the other journalists who covered the military and politics that I clashed with most often. A number of reporters had paid side gigs at defense-industry funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering. They seemed to take my criticism of the military-industrial complex personally. It might as well be called, I thought, the media-military-industrial complex.

I could understand why the government officials would be pissed; I was telling them their whole strategy was a waste of time. But the reaction from a number of journalists on the national security beat seemed pretty twisted.

Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern.

Another issue with coverage is that developments tend to move slower than the news cycle. Activists like our group might start something like a monthly water monitoring program, but after kicking it off there really isn’t much new to report on it. You can’t make much of a story out of: We’re still monitoring!

This week there was an interesting new development though. Our county had not approved an increase in funding to our health district since 1955. We’ve had lots of renewals, but no increases. Counties and other regional bodies are capable of providing valuable services to residents, but those services cost money - paid through taxes. Asking people to raise their taxes is a pretty heavy lift, as our track record on this issue shows.

Because of the contacts and knowledge our group has gained through our water monitoring program, we knew about the replacement levy coming up and invited someone from the board to speak. He talked in general terms about what the department was doing, what its challenges were, and so on. We raised our concerns about fracking to him, and he said the department would look into subsidizing the cost of its water testing program if the levy passed.¹

So we ordered a batch of signs and put them out on our lawns:

We also talked up the issue with friends and neighbors, and generally tried to promote the issue as we could. We weren’t in any way prime movers in the effort, but we pitched in as we were able to.² And miracle of miracles, it actually passed.

There are a couple of interesting notes in the article. The eye popping one for me is this: voter turnout of 8.87 percent. My experience at the polls was certainly congruent with that. I got there about a half an hour after polls opened and I thought I’d gone to the wrong place. It was deserted.

Inside, I initially went to the wrong room (misplaced signage - not my fault!) and found out I was the first voter to show up. I then made my way to the correct room and found out I was the first voter there as well. By contrast, last November I arrived about ten minutes after polls opened and there was already a long line. It was quick inside the booth as well - the health levy was literally the only item on the ballot. That wasn’t true county wide, of course, but it’s safe to say there were considerably fewer issues than in November.

These two factors make an interesting dynamic: Lower voter turnout means each voter who does show up gets more bang for the buck. Your vote has more weight if it’s one of ten than it does if it’s one of a million. And the thinner ballot means the election results generally were something of a referendum on the levy itself. Last November’s replacement levy defeat was bundled with votes for president, Congress, and so on. But Tuesday’s replacement levy success was close to an endorsement of the levy, plain and simple.

There are potentially some good lessons for activists. The first is that action on a controversial issue like fracking can be taken through less contentious avenues like health department funding. Lots of people enthusiastically support the oil and gas industry, but the population opposed to local health department funding is pretty much limited to anti-tax zealots.

Second, a group that believes it has popular support on an issue might do well to look to special elections to get on the ballot. There is less chance of the issue getting diluted or obscured by other issues, and activists can translate their support into maximum leverage at the polls.

Finally, the process of identifying issues and reaching out to key players is a great way to build social capital. It gets you in touch with people you wouldn’t have been in touch with otherwise and can help support a related issue in ways that might not have been obvious. And every now and then it all translates, as it did on Tuesday, into a surprising and pleasant victory.

1. Technical/legal note: we refer to our program as water monitoring and not water testing, because we don’t want anyone to think the handful of metrics we look at is in any way equivalent to the far more extensive testing done by the county or the EPA. We are very careful about our word choice.
(Back)

2. This sort of purely grassroots effort is one where a third party could make hay. One would think that a party like, say, the Greens would be strongly in favor of, say, adequate funding for health departments. To the extent they are absent, they are missing out on a party building opportunity. They may not have the time, resources or inclination to do so in my neck of the woods, which is fine. But I will be decidedly unimpressed with their guilt trips about supporting the awful two party system when the next presidential election rolls around.
(Back)

Economics is a closed system; internally it is perfectly logical, operating according to a consistent set of principles. Unfortunately, the same could be said of psychosis. What’s more, once having entered the closed system of the economist, you, like the psychotic, may have a hard time getting out.

- Judy Jones and William Wilson

At the risk of entering a world I’ll have trouble getting out of, I’ve been thinking about gold lately. Gold has been extremely volatile this year, and its recent drop in value has already had some heartbreaking consequences. This is clearly an issue that demands attention.

On the face of it, buying gold as a hedge against inflation makes sense. It has been valued throughout human history, so if you’re looking for a universally recognized store of value not tied to any nation, gold might be your best choice.

On the other hand, gold is just a commodity - like, say, pork bellies. If you want a hedge against currency devaluation, any well established commodity will do. I for one have great confidence in humanity’s enduring appetite for bacon.¹ Nations with fiat currency cannot make more gold, but they can’t exactly print more hogs either. (Sure they could manipulate the price by creating a Strategic Pig Reserve and breeding more of them, and protecting their value by instituting swine controls, but then….AAAH!!! someone help me get out!)

This is particularly true in an interconnected world of global finance. No one is actually buying the items in question, but pieces of paper (or even more ephemeral electronic confirmations) that say you own them.

This is where gold investors’ rationale gets hard to understand. Barry Ritholtz gets at a unique aspect of their thinking here (via):

Gold is the ultimate currency, as it has a value that will survive even after the whole world tumbles around you. Get yourself some gold coins and a Glock and you will be just fine when the whole world goes to shit. We welcome the era envisioned in the movie Mad Max.

Anyone who wants a hedge against that needs more than symbolic ownership of gold. You want the real thing, baby. Forget about buying stocks - buy Krugerrands. When we revert to a state of nature it won’t happen gradually. No one gets out of a bubble on the way down; when it pops everyone will have their pants down. At that point the only wealth that matters is the wealth you have on your person, and maybe also the property you are on at the moment. Stocks won’t be any help.

Again: if we’re just talking about ordinary hedges against inflation, any commodity will do. The popularity of gold in particular is about more than that. It’s about hanging on when everything else has gone to pot. But if that’s what you want, your hedge needs to be disconnected from the system you expect to collapse.

If you really DO believe the system is going to collapse, you better have more than ready wealth. You’ll need your own infrastructure. Goldbugs don’t seem to have the industriousness (or won’t own up to it, at least) to construct actual physical bunkers for hunkering down in. They just walk around like mad prophets wearing “THE END IS NEAR” sandwich boards and dreaming fevered dreams of how they will inevitably be vindicated - and everyone else will be sorry they didn’t listen. But they won’t take the next obvious step of physically securing the goods and shelter needed to live in that new world. Which means investing in gold is basically stamp collecting for dilettante survivalists.

1. Bacon is delicious!
(Back)

This seemed like an astoundingly stupid idea. It was wrong on matters of simple equity. Those who were innocent of any wrongdoing or incompetence should not have been on the hook for remediation. But it was also wrong for a much more practical reason: raiding customers’ deposits would utterly destroy confidence in the entire country’s banking system. No one would ever trust a Cypriot bank again; only those forced to use them would do so. Which, since banking is (was) the largest industry in the country, meant that Cyprus’ economy would be wrecked.

As all this unfolded I really had trouble wrapping my mind around the relative equanimity with which it was being received. Paul Krugman even referred to the seizing of assets as a haircut. Now, just to be clear: I’m an economics layman and Paul Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in it. He has probably forgotten more about economics than I will ever know.

But my understanding of a haircut is that it refers to the reduction in value of a security; bonds are the most common examples I’ve seen. Are bank deposits used as collateral or otherwise treated as investments? Sure - by the institution receiving them, but not by the depositors themselves. At the very least, describing what’s happening in Cyprus as a haircut seems to require a somewhat, um, flexible understanding of the concept.

There has been a certain kind of distasteful resignation in the financial reporting on this, as though everyone recognizes it’s a bad situation but unfortunately this is the best way out of it.² And I read those reports and analyses almost with incredulity. This is going to destroy an entire country’s economy and cause an unfathomable amount of misery for its citizens. Don’t any of the major players know that?

A couple weeks in I got my answer: Of course they did. Destroying the country’s banks was by design. In a remarkably candid analysis Tyson Barker led with this:

The architects of the euro had one primary strategic goal. It was, to play on Lord Ismay’s famous quip about NATO, to keep the Americans out, the Germans in and the Mediterranean states down

The remaining half is on the fault line of this quake, too. As Karl Denninger noted, many businesses will be crippled:

There were branches of the Cypriot banks that were open in London during the time that they were closed in Cyprus. So if you were Russian that have great deal of money in these banks, or you were some kind of other off-shore person, who had money in these banks and you had some cash, you get on the plane, go to London and then you take all your money out. While the small business person in Cyprus who has his money there and needs to make payroll has his stolen.

Such brutal tactics were not necessary. Even assuming that Germany (which appears to be setting the direction for the troika) is sincerely on the warpath against tax evasion, its efforts closer to home have been far more diplomatic and targeted. Barker describes German efforts to nab tax evaders in Liechtenstein and Switzerland through a process he delicately refers to as “shadowy data acquisition.” Why not use that same kind of surgical approach to Cyprus? Taking a wrecking ball to the banking sector just supports the thesis that it’s about keeping the Mediterranean states down.

Barker’s theory was substantially reinforced last weekend when the New York Times reported: “A key demand of a recent bailout deal announced for Cyprus was that the nation drastically shrink its role as a financial center and, many in Germany suspect, a haven for money laundering.”

It may well be that Germany is going after money laundering as its primary goal, but it is using remarkably crude means to achieve that end. Since there will be such blindingly obvious and disastrous consequences, it seems only fair to say that it is also ultimately responsible for the human effects of it. Some in the troika appear to know as much and already sound defensive about it:

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici rejected charges that the EU had brought Cypriots to their knees, saying it was the island’s offshore business model that had failed.

“To all those who say that we are strangling an entire people … Cyprus is a casino economy that was on the brink of bankruptcy,” he told Canal Plus television.

But many refer to it as the Great Hunger due to the belief that the crop failure (which did actually occur) was not destined to kill so many people; rather, it was British policy that took a grim circumstance and made it horrifying. Coogan calls it genocide. Others, trying to be more charitable towards Britain, put it down to Ireland being “the unfortunate test case for a new Victorian zeal for free market principles, self-help, and ideas about nation-building.”⁴

Looking back a century and a half later, the verdict is damning either way. Whether by design or as a direct and easily foreseeable consequence of a kind of free market idolatry, those responsible are now thought to have unleashed a monstrous evil and are judged accordingly. What is happening to Cyprus now won’t cause the starvation of a million people, but the hardship it will inflict is nothing to shrug off, either. And everyone can see it coming.

1. As a distant American observer and macroeconomic layman, that is.
(Back)

2. Another curiosity: Isn’t anyone bothered by the nice, round numbers for everything? I jokingly referred to it as the Base 10 Bailout: €10b to banks, deposits over €100k seized, €100 ATM limit. Everything can be expressed as a power of 10. Does this sound like the result of a team of experts auditing the situation and at least estimating the numbers?
(Back)

3. I had trouble parsing Barker’s language here:

With its banking sector halved, the country faces a difficult if not impossible challenge to re-establish its status as a financial oasis. The high-risk political economy that fueled the tiny island-nation since 1974 has ended.

4. In the Economist article, author Y.F. also writes: “Poverty was considered a moral failure.” Laissez faire capitalists seem prone to such theological zeal in their ostensibly rational worldviews, which may explain why religious fundamentalists and free enterprise evangelists seem to end up in right wing coalitions with each other.
(Back)

Lamentations about the awful state of rock music have been around about as long as rock music, of course. They are typically rooted in the belief that music was at its zenith when the writer in question was about 16, has been in decline ever since, and can only be rescued by going back to that golden era and entering a perpetual state of suspended animation.

I obviously don’t think much of that. Music changes; either deal with it or stop listening. Composers work with what’s available, and as that evolves so do the sounds they create. Forty years ago Thom Yorke might well have been a guitar virtuoso, but the possibilities electronic music opened up are clearly more intriguing to him. So instead of Who’s Next we get Kid A. Wondering where all the great guitar players went makes only slightly more sense than wondering where all the great Gregorian chanters have gone.

That said, there actually are a lot of great rock groups out there, they just aren’t front and center. Guitar-driven rock and roll doesn’t dominate the contemporary musical landscape, or get served up to the casual listener, the way it used to. But if you’re willing to go off the beaten path (and wade through a certain amount of uninspired crap) you can find some pretty amazing stuff. But you won’t hear Aladelta by L’Hereu Escampa, Amok by Bohemian Betyars or Meet My Maker by Howl Griff on the radio any time soon.

Still, the ability to hear such artists is an almost unimaginable improvement to anyone who grew up listening to a handful of local stations. Even better, you don’t have to go all the way to Spain, Hungary or Wales to find great rock bands. No matter where you are, you are almost guaranteed to have at least a couple fine ones in your backyard. Finding ways to discover and support them is important - regardless of what you (or anyone else) might think of their prospects for finding a wider audience.

Near the end of his “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” Steven Hyden makes the case for a group near his hometown:

Part of me thinks we’d all be better off as rock fans to unplug and go local. I live in Milwaukee, and there are at least a half-dozen rock groups here that I love and can see for next to nothing at a corner bar. A couple years ago, a local band named Call Me Lightning put out a record called When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free that sounds like The Who if Steve Albini had produced Who’s Next. It’s maybe my fifth or sixth favorite rock record of the decade so far….I have a small hope that by mentioning Call Me Lightning just now, at least a few of you will be inspired to check out When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free and have your heads torn off.

High quality music doesn’t sell itself. If that was all that mattered The Donkeys would have busted out of San Diego about five years ago, and Free Energy would plotting world domination from Philadelphia. Instead they and groups like them release albums and tour as they can, often times playing any venue that will have them. Showing up to those concerts and spreading the word is also a big deal. Even in the Internet age there’s still a lot to be said for face to face contact and word of mouth publicity.

Going to live shows can also make for some pretty great experiences. Sometimes you might be packed in with an enthusiastic crowd at a club, sometimes you might be Bobby, and sometimes something totally out of the blue and wonderful happens. That last one happened to me this past Friday, for example.

It actually began last year when I stumbled on The Ready Stance. I bought their album, loved it, and kept an eye out for live dates. A couple months ago they announced a night at a small bar in Columbus, so I circled the date. I did more than go to the concert though. I got in touch with the band a few weeks before and we ended up hanging out before the show.

Think about one of your favorite albums from the last few years. Now think about sitting at a bar with the group and knocking back beers with them for an hour or so. Then they say “OK, time for the show,” walk over to the next room, pick up their instruments, and blow the walls off the place. Wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? That’s exactly what I got to do.

So when I read about how there aren’t any great guitarists any more I just think, well sure - if what you’re waiting for is the next supergroup of established stars. But all the bands above have really talented guitarists. Listen for yourself! Internet distribution lets anyone with an interest hear a huge variety of new artists, the kind of thing previously reserved for those who worked in or near the industry. And while it would be nice if enthusiasm for an artist by itself could spur sales, there are more direct ways to show support. The artists themselves will notice and appreciate it, trust me.

Steve M, a liberal at No More Mister Nice Blog, wrote a minor dissent from the left. Before continuing, though, I would like to make the FOLLOWING QUALIFICATION IN BOLD AND ALL CAPS: These observations are general and not meant to be taken as categorical. Writing that men gravitate towards one kind of argument or women another is not meant to be taken as meaning that all men or all women think a certain way.

Here is the generalization. Men generally gravitate towards (and find more persuasive) arguments that proceed from abstract principles, whereas women generally gravitate towards (and find more persuasive) arguments that proceed from lived experience. That’s not to say men don’t value lived experience or women don’t value abstract principles, just that they seem to be more persuaded by one than the other.

OK, so Steve writes that “Feinstein [came] off as dodging [Cruz’] opening question,” that “faced with the opportunity to trump what Cruz regards as his ace, Feinstein fails,” and concludes: “Democrats have to be able to refute this cloacal tsunami of bad ideas on their own terms. If a guy like Ted Cruz is going to go all ‘constitutional’ on Dianne Feinstein, then she and her fellow Democrats need to know precisely how to throw the way the Constitution has actually been applied in the real America (as opposed to Tea Party Fantasy America) back in Cruz’s face.”

Also note how he frames Feinstein’s response:

“I’m not a sixth grader,” she told the freshman Tea Party favorite. “I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it … it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture.”

He omits some key comments between “I’m not a sixth grader” and “I’m not a lawyer” though (emph. added):

I’m not a sixth grader. Senator, I’ve been on this committee for 20 years. I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in, I saw people shot. I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I’ve seen the bullets that implode. In Sandy Hook, youngsters were dismembered. Look, there are other weapons. I’ve been up — I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it. This doesn’t mean that weapons of war and the Heller decision clearly points out three exceptions, two of which are pertinent here. And so I — you know, it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture.

When Cruz makes his argument from a purely Constitutional perspective, he is arguing from abstract principle - and choosing his preferred rhetorical ground. If Feinstein answers in the same language she is ceding the rhetorical advantage to him. Instead she answers in the way the issue is rhetorically pertinent to her, which denies Cruz the advantage he tries to seize.

Feinstein’s highlighting the impact of those principles in the real world is not (as Steve M. suggests) dodging the question or responding with a non sequitur. She is answering in the language that is most persuasive to her. Perhaps as a man Steve would have liked an answer from abstract principle, but Feinstein’s answer seemed to resonate pretty widely.

In any debate where both of those weigh heavily I suspect the public will ultimately side with whichever seems more compelling. Feinstein’s answer struck me as very compelling since the human cost of our gun violence is so horrific, and Cruz’ appeal to the Constitution dry, and even somewhat callous, by comparison We’ll have to see how it plays out though.

That is an eloquently stated principle. But it is also one that would extend First Amendment protection to a book full of child pornography. Ted Cruz did not voice any kind of qualification, so evidently he believes Congress ought never, under any circumstances, say that a book or category of books lies outside the protection of the First Amendment.

Principles by themselves do not have values; invoking something on principle is ethically neutral. A principle is simply “a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption.” For instance, here is a principle: African Americans are more ignorant and criminally inclined than other Americans. It is a bigoted principle, one unsupported by any reputable research, one contradicted by the research that does exist, and one that has been used to justify a staggering amount of evil throughout our history. But it’s a principle!

Similarly, “state’s rights” is a principle. Is it a good one or a bad one? Well it doesn’t have to be either, but it has been invoked to defend some of the most morally abhorrent practices in our nation’s history. So no matter how fine it may sound in the abstract, in our lived experience it drags a considerable amount of freight behind it.

That’s what is happening now in the gun debate and the broader debate about the Constitution. Some people, apparently unlike Ted Cruz, believe that the First Amendment is not absolute and doesn’t, for instance, protect child pornography. Similarly, some people believe that assault weapons are the Second Amendment equivalent of child pornography and therefore are not eligible for that Amendment’s protection.

Those who believe otherwise and wish to invoke the principle of the thing are welcome to do so. But they will need to counter those like Feinstein who remind everyone of just how much blood has been shed in support of that principle. They will also need to accept that there are certain downside risks to the pure invocation of principle, and that even a well formed one is not a shield against all arguments. Some principles are bad; others can lead to inconvenient places. That would be the case if, for example, Ted Cruz’ positions on assault weapons and child pornography are different from the ones logically implied by his stated principles.

I actually thought that was the case back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was unable to name a newspaper she read. Sure it was fun to laugh at her when she answered “all of them,” but my reaction was: Hell, how would I answer that question? Twenty years ago I would have been able to, but the rise of the Internet (and the scaling back of newspaper coverage) has led to a situation where instead of subscribing to one source that aspires to give a full snapshot, I pick and choose individual stories from a multitude of sources.

I bring up Palin’s answer because I was reminded of it yet again last Saturday. I read a long article in the City Journal about California’s pension system, and another on the effects of incarceration in the Chicago Reporter. Both were far, far too long for inclusion in the newspaper I used to subscribe to, and in any event I don’t think any kind of syndication deal exists with either outlet.

The City Journal article showed up in the Naked Capitalism link roundup; the Chicago Reporter article showed up in my Twitter feed. I check in with the Stop Fracking Ohio page on Facebook several times a week for the latest there, I get several daily emails from different sources, RSS feeds that let me skim through headlines and just read the posts I want, and so on. In other words, just like Sarah Palin I would not be able to tell Katie Couric what newspapers I read.

That will only be reinforced if recent stories about newspaper consolidation into the hands of the wealthy represents a trend. I sure as hell won’t pay for a rag put out by the Koch Brothers or Rupert Murdoch, and even if the buyer is someone I have a higher opinion of such as Warren Buffett, the concentration of newspapers into fewer and fewer individuals’ hands strikes me as problematic.

Lest anyone start concern trolling about the specter of epistemic closure, a well chosen group of sources offers just as many opportunities for encountering opposing voices as newspapers do. For instance, the City Journal is run by the Manhattan Institute - a notably right wing group. Just because I want to dodge the propaganda catapulted by a plutocrat’s house organ (or the regurgitated conservative talking points that the right wing in Washington has been disgorging for the last thirty years) doesn’t mean I refuse to consider contrary ideas. It just means I refuse to consider thoroughly debunked bullshit. That’s Paul Krugman’s job.

It can also mean piecing together stories from different sources and reviewing competing narratives. For instance, an outlet that uses a City Hall based model of reporting on a police sweep will highlight the police chief’s characterization:

“We called them in, and we gave them a simple message,” said Oakland Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Breshears. “The message was ‘Stop the violence, change your lives or law enforcement will relentlessly make all efforts to shut down or dismantle your gangs.’ Today was the follow through of that promise.”

Here, on the other hand, is the view from someone in the neighborhood:

Later this morning, a neighbor who lives next door to the raided house came over to help with a blue vacuum cleaner, a broom, and willing hands.

Sweeps of all kinds going on this morning in Oakland. Sweeps of all kinds.

One story leads with the Tough On Crime narrative while the other goes into some detail on what exactly that entails. Residents don’t seem nearly as well served in the latter.

Those of us with a keen interest in a particular issue are now able to assemble a fuller picture by analyzing accounts from different perspectives. For instance, there was a protest at a fracking waste storage site in southeastern Ohio a few weeks ago. There’s a local newspaper’s account of it, a pro fracking post that among other things called it “a terrorist action,” and an account from the group that staged it.¹

As new sources for this kind of reporting and analysis multiply, people have the ability to weigh the merit of competing versions and decide for themselves what seems right. Sometimes there will not be a local media outlet to report stories. In cases where there is, the outlet might float above the fray as a kind of neutral arbiter; in others it will have its thumb on the scale.

(Bias is often revealed by how much coverage the outlet gives an issue, how prominent the coverage is, what views get represented in the coverage, and where those views are placed in the coverage. For instance, an industry friendly headline with a dissenting voice ten paragraphs in is not balance.)

In an environment like that a newspaper does not exist as a monolith. Many people who would once have been subscribers will increasingly turn to it only when it carries stories of interest. The rest of the time they will cobble together their information about what’s happening in the world from many new and nontraditional sources. What newspapers do you read? Who can tell anymore?

1. From the News And Sentinel article:

some of the protesters, many wearing masks, stormed the GreenHunter office, on Ohio 7 along the Ohio River, said Chief Deputy Mark Warden of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. The facility serves as a storage site for the waste generated during the process of hydraulic fracturing. “They (took) some keys, tried to clog up some of the toilets, scared quite a bit of the employees,” said Warden.

From an activism perspective, wearing masks is a bit too close to black bloc for my comfort. If you aren’t willing to show your face while you protest you may want to think twice about the nature of that protest. Also: entering the office and confronting unsuspecting employees gets filed under Definitely Not Cool. And minor vandalism just discredits the action. That said, the office was soon vacated and apparently no worse for the wear:

Using the GreenHunter office as a sort of command center, GreenHunter employees would use binoculars to identify a culprit from the raid and police would travel across the road to where the group of protesters had eventually congregated in the front lawn of a local resident.

Still, direct action and civil disobedience need to be very well organized and disciplined. It looks like this one could have used quite a bit more of both, and the lack of it is precisely what gave opponents the opportunity to make the activists look like extremists. They could have disrupted business there and drawn attention to the proposed transport of toxic fracking waste via barge without giving the pro-fracking side the opening they did. Sloppiness like that is not helpful.
(Back)