Monthly Archives: March 2009

Tarnished America

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Paul Krugman highlights the deep decline in the  respect the US economy has around the world, which decline is warranted by what has happened during the past ten years.

In an article in the current issue of The Atlantic, Mr. Johnson, who served as the chief economist at the I.M.F. and is now a professor at M.I.T., declares that America’s current difficulties are “shockingly reminiscent” of crises in places like Russia and Argentina — including the key role played by crony capitalists.

In America as in the third world, he writes, “elite business interests — financiers, in the case of the U.S. — played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.”

Torture investigation starts in Spain

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This is good news.

Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be examined here. Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

Krugman and the Obama administration

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Paul Krugman has been critical of the Obama administration’s bank bailout/stimulus/toxic asset programs.  I tend to agree with most of his positions. Now Evan Thomas writes a profile of Krugman as the cover story of the current issue of Newsweek.

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in “Lords of Finance,” his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, “The Best and the Brightest.” Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial system or the devotion of Obama’s team to preserving it. But what if he’s right, or part right? What if President Obama is squandering his only chance to step in and nationalize—well, maybe not nationalize, that loaded word—but restructure the banks before they collapse altogether?

Grassley speaks

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Sen. Chuck Grassley is pretty interesting to listen to. A few days ago he said that AIG bankers should commit suicide. Now, during a budget committee meeting, he goes toe-to-toe with Sen. Kent Conrad, including references to his wife.

The back-and-forth came after Grassley, the ranking Republican on the finance committee, pressed Conrad to include an amendment of his. “I’d like to suggest to the chairman that he might want to support this because, you remember, you asked me two years ago not to take a vote on it and you said if we did take a vote on it you might not get your budget resolution adopted. So I did not ask for a vote on it and you said it was a very statesmanlike thing for me to do at that particular time and so I would hope that you would return the favor,” said Grassley.

“You know, I used to like you. Let me just say: Oh, you are good,” said Conrad.

“Well, your wife said the same thing.”

Conrad didn’t miss a beat. “She did, she said you were the biggest hit of all the speakers at the event,” he replied.

Taibbi on "Dear AIG" letter

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In an earlier post, I pointed to a letter from an AIGFP executive defending the AIG bonuses. Matt Taibbi will have none of it.
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DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.
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I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.
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AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.
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Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn’t know where that money was coming from?

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Read the whole thing. I admit I was somewhat swayed by the original letter, but upon reflection (and Taibbi’s analysis), I believe I was wrong.

Taibbi on “Dear AIG” letter

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In an earlier post, I pointed to a letter from an AIGFP executive defending the AIG bonuses. Matt Taibbi will have none of it.

DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn’t know where that money was coming from?

Read the whole thing. I admit I was somewhat swayed by the original letter, but upon reflection (and Taibbi’s analysis), I believe I was wrong.

Jim Webb launches plan to overhaul justice system

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Senator Jim Webb has launched a plan to overhaul our criminal justice system. I hope that President Obama supports Webb’s plan to establish a commission to study our system and make recommendations. This country puts more people in jail as a percentage of the population than any other. Something is deeply wrong.

America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.  With five percent of the world’s population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence. There is great appreciation from most in this country that we are doing something drastically wrong. And, I am gratified that Senator Specter has joined me as the lead Republican cosponsor of this effort. We are committed to getting this legislation passed and enacted into law this year.

Alternative GOP "budget" (updated)

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The GOP is launching a budget alternative to the President’s. However, as Ezra Klein points out, it is rather interesting in its approach to budgeting.
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Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, “It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” Indeed it was, and did. This isn’t. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “budget” as “an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time.” This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn’t explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn’t estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn’t name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.
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The health care section, for instance, says that Democrats propose “nearly $1 trillion” in health care spending as a “downpayment” on reform. The actual number is $634 billion, which someone who’s more familiar with, you know, numbers, might have characterized as “more than $600 billion,” or, alternately, “$634 billion.” The Republicans say that “the prime focus of [the Democrats] agenda is the establishment of a government-run health insurance plan,” a policy idea that doesn’t appear in the President’s budget. They say that the Lewin Group has analyzed this policy that doesn’t exist and found that it will force three out of four Americans onto government-run health care (the Lewin Group analyzed the Economic Policy Institute’s proposal, which is not the President’s budget). And so on, and so forth.

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Update:\’a0 Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight, offers his take on the Republican plan.

Alternative GOP “budget” (updated)

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The GOP is launching a budget alternative to the President’s. However, as Ezra Klein points out, it is rather interesting in its approach to budgeting.

Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, “It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” Indeed it was, and did. This isn’t. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “budget” as “an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time.” This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn’t explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn’t estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn’t name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.

The health care section, for instance, says that Democrats propose “nearly $1 trillion” in health care spending as a “downpayment” on reform. The actual number is $634 billion, which someone who’s more familiar with, you know, numbers, might have characterized as “more than $600 billion,” or, alternately, “$634 billion.” The Republicans say that “the prime focus of [the Democrats] agenda is the establishment of a government-run health insurance plan,” a policy idea that doesn’t appear in the President’s budget. They say that the Lewin Group has analyzed this policy that doesn’t exist and found that it will force three out of four Americans onto government-run health care (the Lewin Group analyzed the Economic Policy Institute’s proposal, which is not the President’s budget). And so on, and so forth.

Update:  Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight, offers his take on the Republican plan.

Watch out for data rot

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Back in the late 80s/early 90s, I collected movies on a now defunct medium called laserdisc. It was the best home video of the day. But one of the problems with some laserdiscs was what us collectors called (at the time) laser rot. Basically, over time the video output tended to get more and more degraded with sort of visual sparkles. It was caused by oxidation of the media on which the data was written, which occured if the disc was not fully and properly sealed. Today, when I burn a DVD or CD, I have wondered about whether (really, to what extent) these storage tools are subject to the same thing.

Now comes David Pogue of the New York Times with a fascinating interview on the subject.

David Pogue: What is data rot?

Dag Spicer: Data rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, being stored not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read.
The second aspect of data rot is actually finding the machines to read them. And that is a real problem. If you think of the 8-track tape player, for example, basically the only way you can find 8-track cartridges is in a flea market or a garage sale.

The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. You know, we bake the tapes first, and we extract—

DP: You bake the tapes?

Solitary confinement as torture

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In the current issue of The New Yorker,  Atul Gawande questions whether long-term solitary confinement of prisoners (common the US) is a form of torture, given the fact that man is a social animal.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint.

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He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

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In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”

One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

So, why does this country keep more people in isolation than any in history? Where is our morality?