Category: Politics

Atrios has a good point

He’s commenting on a piece by Kathleen Parker. Here’s Parker:

Palin Problem

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

…

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

…

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Then Atrios:

Palin

I’m actually a little sympathetic to Palin. Her problem isn’t so much that she speaks in gibberish, the problem is that she doesn’t speak in Official Washington Gibberish. John McCain spouts gibberish all the time, as do all politicians, but it’s often the kind of gibberish which is part of the Beltway dialect. It’s pundit-approved gibberish. Whether or not it makes any sense is irrelevant. Whatever Palin’s knowledge of domestic or foreign affairs, her biggest problem is that she’s obviously completely unfamiliar with the basic contours of the core political discourse of our country. Gibberish is fine as long as it’s the right kind of gibberish.

Polling: the cell phone effect

Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium estimates the cell phone effect at about 1%. What’s the cell phone effect? The general idea is that a) pollsters mostly don’t call cell phones, b) more and more people have only cellphones and are thus not included in polls, and c) those people may have systematically different political views than the rest of the population (for example, they might be younger, and younger voters might tend to favor one candidate over another).

The cell phone effect: about 1 percent

How much has cell phone usage affected the reliability of polls? The answer may surprise you: Depending on what pollsters do about it, not much at all. Obama’s support may be understated by as little as 1%.

The question of whether polls have systematic errors is a continuing one. In the recent polling news is a Pew Center study that hits hard on the question of cell phone users. According to the survey, failing to survey people who have cell phones but no landline leads to a net underestimate of Obama’s support relative to McCain. According to a previous Pew/AP survey, cell-onlys comprised nearly 13% of households at the end of 2006. Cell-onlys prefer Obama over McCain by 18-19% (compared with an even split in the landline sample). Uncorrected, this leads to an error of about 0.13*0.185 = 2.4% in the Obama-McCain margin. Clearly this is significant, which is the Pew Center’s conclusion.

Follow the link for quite a bit more.

Kick top management in the teeth

Thus Dean Baker.

Leonhardt is Wrong, Limiting CEO Pay is Not a Sideshow to This Bailout

In his weekly NYT column, David Leonhardt argues that limits on executive compensation are a sideshow to the bank bailout. Actually, they are an essential part of the story.

A key issue in the bailout is addressing moral hazard. The message to Wall Street should not be to get rich on fees from stupid loans and then run to the big government to save your rear when the loans go bad. We give this message to the shareholders by saying that we are going to own much or all of your bank if you come to us for help.

It is necessary to give a similar lesson to the CEOs. A major problem in corporate America is that top executives have been able to pillage their corporations at the expense of shareholders. This problem is nowhere worse than on Wall Street, where high level executives (not just CEOs) routinely earn tens of millions annually in compensation, and sometimes hundreds of millions.

It is therefore crucial that the CEOs also be forced to take big hits in this sort of bailout. Otherwise, their incentive is to rip off their shareholders in the good times with irresponsible lending policies (thereby getting huge fees) and then have the government kick the shareholders in the teeth in the bad times, but they themselves can escape unscathed.

In short, kicking the top management in the teeth as part of the bailout is both a necessary part of the bailout and good policy for stemming the growth in inequality over the last three decades.

—Dean Baker

Barry Ritholtz: We’re all (Groucho) Marxists now

The “New” New Deal

I am having a hard time keeping up with all of the bailouts and special facilities created for dealing with this crisis.  Am I missing any?

  • Bear Stearns
  • Economic Stimulus progam
  • Housing Bailout Program
  • Fannie & Freddie
  • AIG
  • No Short selling rules
  • Fed liquidity programs (Term Lending facility, Term Auction facility)
  • Money Market fund insurance program
  • New RTC type program

If you are a fan of irony, consider this: The conservative movement has utterly hated FDR, and his New Deal programs like Medicaid, Social Security, FDIC, Fannie Mae (1938), and the SEC for nearly 80 years. And for the past 8 years, a conservative was in the White House, with a very conservative agenda. For something like 16 of the past 18 years, the conservative dominated GOP has controlled Congress.

Those are the facts.

We now see that the grand experiment of deregulation has ended, and ended badly. The deregulation movement is now an historical footnote, just another interest group, and once in power they turned into socialists. Indeed, judging by the actions of the conservatives in power, and not the empty rhetoric that comes out of think tanks, the conservative movement has effectively turned the United States into a massive Socialist state, an appendage of Communist Russia, China and Venezuela.

To paraphrase Floyd Norris, we have become Marxists, but of the Groucho, not Karl, variety…

John Cole is pissed off

You Have To Be Shitting Me:

This is unbelievable:

The federal government is working on a sweeping series of programs that would represent perhaps the biggest intervention in financial markets since the 1930s, embracing the need for a comprehensive approach to the financial crisis after a series of ad hoc rescues.

At the center of the potential plan is a mechanism that would take bad assets off the balance sheets of financial companies, said people familiar with the matter, a device that echoes similar moves taken in past financial crises. The size of the entity could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, one person said.

In other words, folks spent years making billions upon billions of dollars on risky transactions, more money on the stock of companies that was artificially high based on those transactions, more money bundling all those transactions into more transactions, and made a killing, and when it turns out the whole thing is a big pile of shit, you and I get the god damned bill.

I do not ever want to hear another damned word about the free market. I don’t want to hear another thing about letting the market regulate itself. I don’t want to hear about the free flow of capital. I don’t want to hear about government getting out of our lives.

None of it. From superfunds to super-bailouts, I am tired of other people getting rich being irresponsible and then being told I have to pay to clean it up. I didn’t read one punitive aspect of this new plan. Not one punishment for the people who did this.

Constitution Day

Wednesday is Constitution Day; here’s Sandy Levinson (Our Undemocratic Constitution).

Faux Originalism and “Constitution Day”

Many originalists claim to feel bound not only by the text of the Constitution (which would make them only textualists, but also by the values, aims, and aspirations of the Founders). But surely one of the central values of the Founders is that no one like Sarah Palin would ever be a candidate for the presidency (and not only because she is a woman, a piece of bigotry that would also, of course, extend for other reasons to Barack Obama). Rather, she is basically uneducated, inexperienced, and incurious about the world at large. She is no Abligail Adams or Mercy Warren, let alone James Madison or John Adams.

I have many times over the past two years, since publishing my book Our Undemocratic Constitution, been reminded, sometimes with a tone of withering condescension that ours is a “republic” and not a “democracy,” and we should keep it that way. There is, of course, some truth to that, especially if by “republican” one means a concern for public values instead of partisan interests, deemed “factions” in the 10th Federalist. Madison obviously saw no way to get read of factions, but he did believe, naively, that one might tame them through a system of representative government that would try to assure “virtuous” leaders.

Madison’s vision, of course, collapsed very quickly. Some would say 1800, though this depends on whether one shares Hamilton’s view that Burr was out-and-out unfit to be president. Others would say 1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson. I’d be more tempted to go with 1840, when William Henry Harrison, who ran under the famous slogan, Tippacanoe and Tyler too, picked the egregious John Tyler for no other reason than supplying “electoral balance,” even though he had no apparent qualifications for the presidency (unlike every earlier VP, including, one might well argue, Burr) and was a disaster as President. What is striking is that we no longer even both to lament the decline of “republican” values; instead, too many of us have become little Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters, luxuriating in the “cleverness” of political operatives who indeed care only about partisan political success and nothing else.

In any event, there is something passing strange about (some) contemporary “originalists” clutching the Founders to their bosom at the same time they celebrate John McCain’s ostensible “sagacity” in choosing the patently unqualified Sarah Palin because it might provide him an electoral boost. This is not to deny the accuracy of the analysis; it is only to say that no member of the Founding Generation would recognize such a motive (and character) as being the reason they gave for establishing a new Constitution dedicated to maintaining a “Republican Form of Government.”

Benjamin Franklin famously said that we were given a republic and the question was whether we could “keep it.” The answer is clear. Not only do we not have anything we should be willing to call a 21st century democracy; we also don’t have anything we should be willing to call a “republic.” Something to think about as we prepare to “celebrate” Constitution Day on Wednesday….. Whatever it is that (some of us) celebrate, it has almost nothing to do with 1787-88, for good (the substantial overcoming of sexism and racism) and for ill (fill in the blank with one’s favorite critique).

Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle?

George Saunders in The New Yorker.

My Gal

In summary: Because my candidate, unlike your winking/blinking Vice-Presidential candidate, who, though, yes, he did run as the running mate when the one asking him to run did ask him to run, which that I admire, one thing he did not do, with his bare hands or otherwise, is, did he ever kill a moose? No, but ours did. And I would. Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.

How does the moose feel about it? Who knows? Probably not great. But do you know what the difference is between a dead moose with lipstick on and a dead moose without lipstick?

Lipstick.

Think about it.

Moose are, truth be told, Élites. They are big and fast and sort of rule the forest. Sarah took that one down a notch. Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle?

Not Sarah.

She’s just Regular as heck.

Georgia and the Balance of Power

George Friedman in the New York Review of Books. Certainly the clearest exposition of recent events in Georgia that I’ve come across.

Georgia and the Balance of Power

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing recent events. On the night of Thursday, August 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia moved across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union (see map).

3B1D99FF-379F-48EA-AC0D-4B34E1874532.jpg

They drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured it, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

…

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin reestablished the credibility of the Russian army. (It was no surprise that its operations would render thousands of people homeless and cause civilian casualties.) But far more importantly, Putin’s invasion revealed an open secret. While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts, and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. In July, the Czech government signed an agreement with the United States to set up a ballistic missile defense installation in the Czech Republic, and in August, days after the conflict in Georgia began, the Polish government announced that it has agreed to allow the Americans to build an anti-missile base in Poland. The US–Polish agreement was hurriedly signed as a gesture of defiance to the Russians. The Russians responded with threats that Condoleezza Rice dismissed as “bizarre.”

The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk. The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance. For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, it does not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

(via Hullabaloo)

The myth of double taxation

As a rule I’m content to trust that my small band of readers will follow the excellent Dean Baker on their own (he’s the Beat the Press link on my Links list). But from time to time, I can’t resist reposting. This post recapitulates one of Baker’s themes, that the notion that corporate dividends are “double taxed” is fundamentally mistaken—or worse.

There is an old myth developed by rich people at some point in the distant past that paying taxes on dividends amounts to “double-taxation.” The argument is that profits are already taxed at the corporate level, so taxing money when it is paid out as dividends to shareholders is taxing the same profit a second time. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University professor and former top economist in the Bush administration, pushes this line in a column in the NYT.

The trick in this argument is that it ignores the enormous benefits that the government is granting by allowing a corporation to exist as a free standing legal entity. The most important of these advantages is limited liability. If a corporation produces dangerous products or emits dangerous substances that result in thousands of deaths, shareholders in the corporation cannot be held personally responsible for the damage. The corporation can go bankrupt, but beyond that point, all the shareholders are off the hook, the victims of the damage are just out of luck.

By granting corporate status, the government has allowed investors to shift risk to society as a whole. In exchange for this and other privileges of corporate status, the corporation must pay income tax on its earnings. We know that investors consider the benefits of corporate status to be worth the price in the form of the corporate income tax, because they voluntarily choose to form corporations. If investors did not consider the benefits of corporate status to outweigh the cost of the income tax, then they are free to form partnerships which are not subject to corporate income tax. In this way, the corporate income tax is a completely voluntary tax. Anyone can avoid the tax by investing in a partnership, or alternatively, any corporation can be restructured as a partnership.

The complaint about double taxation is an effort to get the benefits of corporate status for free. It is understandable that rich people would want to get benefits from the government at no cost, just like most of us would prefer not to pay our mortgage or electric bill. But, there is no reason for government to be handing out something of great value (corporate status) for free. If rich people don’t like the corporate income tax, they have a very simple way to avoid it — don’t invest in corporations. The problem is that the rich are just a bunch of whiners.

–Dean Baker

Presidential polling

There are any number of polling sites around the net covering the presidential campaign. David Moore lists some of the more popular ones. Who’s David Moore?

David Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Reveals the Truth Behind the Polls, is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll.

Not in Moore’s list, but mentioned in comments, are two sites that are to my mind the most interesting, FiveThirtyEight.com, run by sabermetrician Nate Silver, and Sam Wang’s Princeton Meta-Analysis.

I won’t go into detail here; there’s plenty of information at the two sites. If you’re a poll-follower, though, check them both out. (There’s something of a rivalry between the two; Robert at Angry Bear has a starting point for the discussion.

This graphic is from the Princeton site.

Current distribution of electoral votes

Orwell’s Diaries

Starting today, George Orwell’s diaries start appearing as a blog, 70 years after they were written (you may recall a similar project some time back blogging the diaries of Samuel Pepys). By way of introduction:

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry— in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

Here’s the first entry, August 9, 1938.

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx1 interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”2.

Notes by Peter Davison, from the Complete Works:

1The Orwells’ dog.

2It was an ancient belief that a poisonous snake injects its poison by means of a forked tongue and not, as is the case, through two fangs. So Shakespeare in Richard II, 3.20 – 22.

            Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder

            Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch

            Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies.
See also 11.8.38.

Via /.

Rank-ordering Congress

I’ve been meaning to link to Voteview for a while now. It’s a project of Keith T Poole, now at UCSD, that ranks congressfolk on a liberal-to-conservative scale based on their voting history. There’s lots to browse, but the rankings themselves are as interesting as anything on the site. Check out the 110th Senate, for example, and find John McCain in the 109th Senate rankings (but first, without peeking, guess where he ends up on the scale).

There’s an infrequent blog; the most recent entry is nominally about the political closeness of Clinton and Obama, but goes on provide historical perspective on Congress’s current polarization.

Mere filler

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.

Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.

The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy society, they look healthy, in a sick one, like ours, they look sick. And really they are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.”

It was November 8, 1941.

Borah, Hitler and Bush

David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things

A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” White House officials have identified the Senator as William Borah of Idaho, one of the longest-serving members in the history of that body, a one-time chairman and long-time ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a committed isolationist who opposed American entry into the First World War (and died in January 1940 before entry into the Second had become a major issue.)

That fact that Borah was a Republican has been cited as ironic by several commentators. David Kaiser suggests that the entire business is apparently a fabrication (unlike, it also appears, the suggestions of Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush’s financial connections with the Nazi war machine).

The purported quote from Borah has been a favorite of neoconservative Charles Krauthammer for some time. There is, however, one problem. While I cannot claim to have researched the issue exhaustively, the Proquest database of major newspapers includes not one shred of evidence that Borah ever said any such thing—and an enormous amount of evidence that he never would have.
…
More to the point, however, Borah was anything but naive about Hitler and was in fact a violent opponent of Fascism, Nazism, and the Munich agreement reached by the western powers. A selection from the reports of major newspapers during the 1930s leaves no doubt about this. Like many isolationists, he blamed Hitler’s rise largely on the Versailles treaty (an opinion which I personally do not share), but he never minced words about the nature of Hitler’s regime. In 1934 he referred to Nazism as “the malign influence which the world now contemplates with amazement and horror.” In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he violently attacked Mussolini and Hitler for making war on the government of Spain and argued that domestic Fascism was a greater threat than domestic Communism. In a radio address in late March 1939, after Roosevelt had proposed amendments to the neutrality act to allow the British and French to buy arms, Borah argued that those powers did not deserve our help. “What they are contending for is the realization of their imperialistic scheme and not the destruction of Nazism,” he said. He attacked the British for failing to oppose the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and for letting Hitler know they would not object to the annexation of Austria a year earlier (an apparent reference to the famous Halifax mission of late 1937.) “During the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia,” he said, “no mention was ever made of the teachings of Nazism and the dangers of enlarging its influence in Europe. ” He also criticized the British and French for failing to make any provision for the many anti-Nazis who had fallen under German sovereignty as a result of the Munich agreement. In the absence of a direct, sourced quote—which no one so far has produced—I cannot believe that this man would have made the statement that our President attributed to him.

Tom Friedman’s glorious, transcendent struggle

Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman’s latest declaration of war

So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we’ve finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War … may try to point out that it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us, but those are just small details.
…
There’s a reason that Friedman occupies the place he does in America’s foreign policy establishment. He’s perfectly representative of it. It’s an establishment in perpetual search of an Enemy and the next war. And finding it (or creating it) is the one thing they do well.

Arithmetic, Not Ideology

Dean Baker on one of his favorite subjects, the attribution of ideological motivations to political actors, quoted here mainly for its fine last line.

Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology

It is remarkable how often reporters/columnists feel the need to assert that political disputes are about ideological issues. Why do they feel the need to make assertions for which there is generally no evidence?
Politicians get elected by getting the support of individuals and groups with power. They don’t get elected by being political philosophers.

Contrary to what Gretchen Morgenson (ordinarily a very good reporter) tells NYT readers, the battle over the Frank-Dodd bailout plans is not about ideology. The bills are crafted in ways that make them very friendly to banks. The banks get to decide which loans get put into the program. Presumably they don’t make this decision unless they think they will benefit from the bailout.

In addition, the appraisals on which the government’s guarantee price is set are based on sale prices, which may still be seriously inflated in the bubble markets. It would have been easy to avoid the problem of inflated appraisals by setting the guarantee price based on a multiple of rents. However, the supporters of these bills chose not to go this route.

At least some of the opposition to these bills is based on the view that giving more taxpayer dollars to banks should not be a higher priority than paying for health care, child care and other important needs. It is not clear what ideological issue is at stake here, since the ideology that we all should pay higher taxes to keep the banks rich has never been well articulated.

Emphasis mine.

Econbrowser: What if we’d been on the gold standard?

James Hamilton speculates on the consequences of a US move to a gold standard in 2006.

What if we’d been on the gold standard?:
If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That’s a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here’s how we both would answer.
…
In 1929, the U.S. was on a gold standard, with the exchange rate fixed at $20.67 per ounce of gold. Geopolitical insecurity and financial worries warranted an increase in the relative price of gold, which, with the dollar price of gold fixed, required a decline in the dollar price of most everything else. Speculators bet (correctly) that Britain would abandon the standard in 1931, but the U.S. fought against the speculation, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York raising its discount rate from 1.5% to 3.5% in October 1931. This sharp increase in interest rates at a time of great financial turmoil succeeded in defending the parity with gold, but produced an economic disaster.

What’s the alternative, he asks, to abandoning the gold standard when staying on it requires raising interest rates in the face of a declining economy?

Or the other option would be to say, no, we really mean it this time, honest, we’re serious about this whole gold standard thing. So, we drive interest rates higher and watch the deflation mount. Outstanding debt that is denominated in dollars becomes more and more costly for people to repay, and we’d see a really impressive level of bankruptcies and business failures. The cycle would continue until the politicians who promised to stay on the gold standard are driven out of office and the deflation spiral could finally be ended by the new leaders choosing option 1 [abandoning the gold standard] after all.

Global warming disaster scenarios

Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph

Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km down was becoming fresher and more buoyant. So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

“The main reason we’re paying attention to this is because it is one of the switches in the climate system and we need to know if we are about to flip that switch or not,” said Rintoul of Australia’s government-backed research arm the CSIRO. “If that freshening trend continues for long enough, eventually the water near Antarctica would be too light, too buoyant to sink and that limb of the global-scale circulation would shut down,” he said on Friday.

Cold, salty water also sinks to the depths in the far north Atlantic Ocean near Greenland and, together with the vast amount of water that sinks off Antarctica, this drives the ocean conveyor belt. This system brings warm water into the far north Atlantic, making Europe warmer than it would otherwise be, and also drives the large flow of upper ocean water from the tropical Pacific to the Indian Ocean through the Indonesia Archipelago. If these currents were to slow or stop, the world’s climate would eventually be thrown into chaos.

“We don’t see any evidence yet that the amount of bottom water that’s sinking has declined. But by becoming fresher and less dense it’s moving in the direction of an ultimate shutdown.”

What is the proper response to these disaster scenarios? As even the Bush administration begins to concede that global warming is not only real but anthropogenic, the next debate becomes one over potential consequences and justified responses.

To the extent that these disaster scenarios are plausible, adaptationist responses are not. And “plausible” clearly need not mean “provable”; we have a strong motivation to prevent a low-probability outcome if that outcome is sufficiently bad. Adaptationism assumes a gradual and continous process: slow warming, slow ocean rise, etc. But the prospect of a chaotic catastrophe requires prevention, not adaptation.

Via Sam Smith

PhRMA is making new friends in Congress

Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post. No comment is really required, is it?

The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats’ top prescription-drug initiatives.

In the year since they took over on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders have been unable to pass either a bill allowing reimportation of drugs from Canada or a measure requiring negotiation of drug prices under Medicare. Neither is likely to reach the president’s desk this year. Lawmakers on both sides of these issues say the primary reason is the influence, now redirected, of the drug lobby.

Drug companies have gone on a hiring binge, retaining Democratic lobbyists in dozens of major firms. This strategy, which K Streeters call “clogging the system,” prevents adversaries from hiring anyone from those consultancies.
…
In years past, when pharmaceuticals leaned heavily Republican, Democrats did not have much reason to cut them a break or side with them on policy. Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 in part by accusing Republicans of being too close to drug companies and other “special interests.” But now that pharmaceutical money is available to both parties, the drug companies have reason to hope for better treatment.

The Democratic takeover of Congress means “we just have more friends than we used to have,” said PhRMA President W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana. “We’re trying to find more.”