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Does Climate Policy Just Need Better Framing? | Now that the climate bill is dead and decomposing, some advocates are writing op-eds arguing that if only its backers had framed things this way or that way, the public would've responded more positively and demanded action from lawmakers. See, for instance, Lee Wasserman's piece in The New York Times today. Most of these arguments seem pretty dubious, though. As Dave Roberts argues, the climate bill's pulse went flat less because of framing failures and more because it's just incredibly difficult to get large policies through the Senate. If all it took to get legislation passed in this country was a majority vote in both chambers plus presidential approval, we'd probably have a climate bill by now. Instead, the filibuster allowed Senate Republicans (and a few conservative Democrats) to thwart any climate-related action, and the horrible economy ensures that they'll benefit at the midterms regardless. Now, that said, the way an issue is framed is probably important over the long term. UCLA's Matthew Kahn has an interesting post asking why climate change became such a partisan issue. After all, it can't all be explained purely by self-interest. In general, states with higher carbon emissions tend to lean Republican. But a state like Arizona would benefit massively from a federal cap-and-trade systemthe sunny Southwest is a prime location for a nascent solar industry. Yet you don't see John McCain or Jon Kyl supporting a climate bill. I'm not sure I agree with this suggestion floated by Kahn, though it's at least an interesting way of thinking about the issue: When I was spending a lot of time at USC this spring, I talked at length with Jim Haw. He is a Professor there responsible for their undergraduate environmental major. In our talks about climate change politics, he stressed that a politically neutral way of discussing the issue was as "climate hygiene". Just as you have to brush your teeth and take a bath, you have to take certain steps to make sure the climate system is healthy. This "spin" on this hot button issue shifts the focus from whether a given person is a "good person" or a given company is a "good company" to a less judgemental worldview of simply engaging in day to day steps (like brushing your teeth) that become part of our routine. But think about it, if 300 million Americans each brush their teeth for 10 minutes a day, then we spend 3 billion minutes a day brushing our teeth and that equals 5 million hours. If we value our time at $15 an hour, then we are spending $75 million dollars a day to brush our teeth or 27 billion dollars a year on this activity. So even, "small investments" add up to look like they have large price tags but nobody debates the merits of brushing your teeth. One difference, of course, is that there's not a well-heeled cavity industry spending millions of dollars sowing the idea that the science behind brushing your teeth is all bunk. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76573/does-climate-policy-just-need-better-framing |
Are Tea Partiers Dupes? | Jonah Goldberg says the Tea Party movement is, in part, "a delayed Bush backlash." George W. Bush, the argument goes, was a squish who betrayed the conservative philosophy. But since the right had nowhere to go, the current backlash against deficits and the financial bailout is a time-released backlash against his policies, because "Conservatives dont want to be fooled again." But they are being fooled again. Indeed, the Tea Party movement is a vehicle of the fooling. The conservative movement is organized around the principle of opposition to progressive taxation. Tax cuts -- the more regressive the better -- take priority over everything else. That was also the organizing priority of the Bush administration -- which, unsurprisingly, enjoyed overwhelming support from conservative elites and conservative voters in both 2000 and 2004. Now, one problem with the conservative movement's monomaniacal opposition to progressive taxation is that it's a poor way to shrink government spending. People don't favor tax cuts for the rich, so the only way to enact those tax cuts is to deny that there's any trade off between them and more popular spending programs. Bush was never going to be able to oppose the wildly-popular prescription drug benefit in 2000 while also favoring a huge tax cut. He may have gotten away with abandoning the prescription drug benefit in 2003 by telling the public it was no long affordable, but that would have complicated his ability to pass another huge tax cut in 2003. So he did it all and set a fiscal time bomb. The backlash against Bush from the right is largely a way of absolving conservatism of Bush's failures. Indeed, the Tea Party movement is largely driving the Republican Party along the same lines that Bush did. The central emphasis of the movement is opposition to progressive taxation -- hence the emphasis on Tax Day rallies, the defining of "Tea" as an acronym for "Taxed Enough Already," and the general Randian flavor of the movement. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74583/are-tea-partiers-dupes |
Are Tea Partiers Racist? | Overt racism is a fairly small component of the Tea Party movement, one that organizers have worked hard to suppress. On the other hand, it's pretty clear much of the ideology of the movement is difficult to separate from views about race. The New York Times poll of the movement finds that people sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, aside from being generally conservative, are far more likely than the general public to believe that "too much has been made of the problems facing black people." (52% of Tea Party sympathizers say this, compared with 28% of the public as a whole.) The article showed that, like most Americans, Tea Party supporters lack any arithmetically coherent sense of fiscal priorities: [I]n follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on waste. Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits. This, too, fits in snugly with a racialized vision of government. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam have conducted research showing that, even independent of ideology or partisanship, whites with ethnocentric attitudes are more hostile toward means-tested government programs, which they clearly see as benefiting other, non-white people. Meanwhile, ethnocentric whites are more likely than non-ethnocentric whites to support social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. The Tea Party is not racist. But it is an almost entirely white movement, largely driven by a sense that the government is taking money away from people like them and giving it to people unlike them, with "them" understood in a racial context. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74442/are-tea-partiers-racist |
Would Hillary Clinton Have Been A More Conservative President? | Bruce Bartlett says that my liberal argument for Mitt Romney reminds him of his circa-2007 conservative argument for Hillary Clinton. Bartlett claims vindication: if Clinton had won, she'd probably be governing more conservatively than Obama: I think the evidence suggests that Hillary Clinton could have won the Democratic nomination with just a little bit more support, and probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama. For one thing, given her disastrous experience with health care reform in 1993-1994, it's reasonable to assume that she would have stayed away from that issue at all costs. I think this is mostly correct. I'm not sure Clinton would have "stayed away" from health care reform -- the issue was the centerpiece of her domestic platform, and it would have been costly to simply abandon it from the outset. I do believe, though, that any significant adversity would probably have caused her to retreat. In the wake of Scott Brown's victory, her chief political strategist, Mark Penn, urged Democrats to abandon health care reform. ("Break it down and start with the easy stuff like electronic medical records first and work up to the harder parts year after year.") That's probably the sort of strategy Clinton would have followed if she had won. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74233/would-hillary-clinton-have-been-more-conservative-president |
Is Obama A Racist? | President Obama appealed to supporters to help turn out blacks, Latinos, and women in the midterm election. The conservative Washington Examiner reported the story with this headline: (Dave Weigel has this on his blog.) Of course it's true that Democrats try to rally non-white people to the polls, since non-white people are a core Democratic constituency. It's also true that Republican party attempts to mobilize white voters. Of course, the GOP can't be indiscriminate about it -- they don't want to mobilize Jews or white college professors -- but they do target white groups. Karl Rove bemoaned the fact that George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because fewer than expected "white, evangelical Protestants" showed up at the polls. In 2004, Bush campaigned in overwhelmingly white areas and said things like, "I believe the heart and soul of America is found in places right here, in Marquette, Michigan." Marquette is 95% white and 0.8% black. The conservative outrage over Obama's attempt to rally minorities is, in part, pure partisanship. But it also reflects the idea that it's okay to target overwhelmingly white voters, and to suggest that overwhelmingly white areas are more genuinely American than diverse locales, because in some sense they assume whiteness is the lack of an ethnic identity. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74638/obama-racist |
What is a Religion? | Buruma gets a lot of things right. He is surely correct, for example, that [r]elations between church and state, or religious and secular authority, cannot be explained as abstractions, but only in the context of history. When he turns to that history, he does a fine job of laying out the complicated similarities and differences between America and Europe on church-state issues. It is true that the Western nations separate faith and politics to an extent unimaginable before the modern period. But the United States and Europe handle that separation in starkly divergent ways, with the United States both formally disestablishing religion and rigorously protecting its free exercise, and European nations adopting a range of less balanced alternatives, from Frances radically secular policy of lacit to the forms of church establishment still found in England and Germany. Following Tocqueville and other classical liberals, Buruma indicates that politics and religion each benefit from keeping out of each others business. Political actors are thus free to govern without contending with religions often non-negotiable demands, while religion is insulated from the taint of political partisanship and the corruptions of temporal power. All this is very sensible. In some of the most illuminating passages of his book Buruma applies these distinctively Western insights to the tumultuous political histories of China and Japan. In his view, much of Chinas intense political illiberalism over the past century can be traced to the fact that, for complex historical and cultural reasons, a split between religious authority and secular rule never developed in the country. Japan, by contrast, did develop a kind of separation between religious and worldly authority during the nineteenth centurya separation that disappeared during the 1930s and then returned after the countrys decisive defeat in World War II, helping to ease its rapid postwar transformation into a liberal democratic nation. Yet it is also in his chapter on Asia that Buruma runs into the conceptual problems that eventually lead him to make questionable assertions about contemporary Europe. In the midst of his discussion of China, for example, Buruma notes that during the Cultural Revolution the simple act of crumpling up a newspaper bearing [Maos] image could lead to a death sentence. Commenting on this grotesque policy, he remarks that [i]f ever there was a case of religious and secular authority being one and the same, Maoism was it. In his very next sentence, however, Buruma uses the term religious in a very different sense: As in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Hitlers Germany, this proved the danger of forcing people to renounce all religious beliefs and to worship a worldly leader instead. In the first statement, religion is the ideological motor behind totalitarian oppression; in the second, it is the victim of that oppression. He seems to think that religion denotes merely any worldview that is held with absolute certainty. This slippage becomes even more pronounced, and problematic, when Buruma turns his attention to the controversial question of how liberal societies should respond to the complex challenges posed by devout Muslims living within them. As one would expect, Buruma usually treats the tension between liberalism and Islam as a particular example of the perennial conflict between (secular) politics and religion. But at other points he makes a very different claim, writing (in a representative passage) that there is a curiously religious, even apocalyptic undertone in some . . . Absolutely. Certainly. Only if we cease to think of religion as a cluster of beliefs and practices having to do with the divine or the sacred and instead begin to use the term far more impreciselyto describe any strongly held opinion. In making this shift, Burumas subtly argued analysis of the dangers of mixing politics and religion devolves into an intellectually and morally sloppy critique of passionate politics as such. So, in Burumas view, those militantly devout Muslims who once dreamed of murdering Salman Rushdielike those today who threaten to murder the outspoken atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who succeeded in murdering filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, and who responded to the publication of satirical drawings of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in the fall of 2005 by throwing a theologically motivated temper tantrum that resulted in more than one hundred deaths in countries around the worldare a problem; but so, too, are those who uncompromisingly, and sometimes rudely, defend liberalism, the Enlightenment, scientific truth, and the right to free speech. In his book on the murder of van Gogh, he called them Enlightenment fundamentalists. Both sides, you see, are religious. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74470/what-religion |
What Happened To All That Stimulus Efficiency Money? | Last year's stimulus bill had about $20 billion for energy-efficiency measures, something that, in theory, was a grand idea. Groups like McKinsey have done a whole bunch of studies on how efficiency upgrades are pretty much magical in every way: saving a boatload of money, cutting carbon emissions, the works. But that's just the theory. As Kate Galbraith reports in the Times today, a lot of it hasn't even been spent yet: But in many cases, efficiency companies say, the stimulus money is still awaiting distribution. One exception is a weatherization program for homes, where the dollars have been moving, Mr. Grumbly of Lockheed said. Last year, more than 30,000 homes were weatherized with stimulus funds, and the number is increasing. Seth Kaplan, the clean energy and climate change program director at the Conservation Law Foundation, says that one of several reasons disbursement has been slow is that many localities are not accustomed to a flood of money coming in and do not have the infrastructure to use it. Another challenge, he says, is a shortage of labor in the efficiency businessespecially for specialized roles like air sealers. Granted, the piece gets slightly more optimistic after that point, noting that the industry is starting to gain momentum, especially as the credit markets improve. And the efficiency business will presumably keep expanding if policymakers keep offering incentives for energy efficiency, which seems likely. Last October, Obama signed an executive order requiring big upgrades to federal buildings, and there's been a lot of talk about an "efficiency standard" included as part of congressional energy legislation (there's also this Home Star proposal to give people rebates to make their homes more efficientsort of the home version of Cash for Clunkers). But, for now, it's still slow going. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74572/what-happened-all-efficiency-stimulus-money |
Is Tokyo The Greenest City? | In the Los Angeles Times, Marla Dickerson takes a look at Tokyo's efforts to become one of the most eco-friendly cities in the world: In addition to reducing solid waste, Tokyo over the last few years has unveiled a slew of environmentally conscious initiatives. Those include toughened environmental building standards, cash incentives for residents to install solar panels, and a plan for greening the city, including planting half a million trees and converting a 217-acre landfill in Tokyo Bay into a wooded "sea forest" park. The most ambitious effort yet kicked off this month, when Tokyo launched a mandatory program for 1,400 of the area's factories and office buildings to cut their carbon emissions 25% from 2000 levels by the end of 2020. The plan includes a carbon cap-and-trade system, the first ever attempted by a metropolitan area. The mechanism sets limits on emissions and requires those who exceed their quotas to buy pollution rights from those who are under their caps. The Japanese government still hasn't been able to settle on a national plan for tackling carbon-dioxide emissions, so Tokyo is leaping aheadsimilar to the way California is moving ahead of Congress here in the United States. Meanwhile, I was going to mention that maybe Tokyo should take a second look at the five million vending machines plopped around the citysurely they're not all necessary (having to walk an extra block to get hot coffee from a can isn't the worst tragedy in the world). Except on closer inspection it seems like the vending machines account for a fairly small fraction of Japan's carbon-dioxide emissionsabout 1 percent of the total. Still, that hasn't stopped manufacturers from stepping up their game. Here's a vending-machine model from Fuji Electric that powers up via solar power and then stays warm in the winter by growing moss on its side: | https://newrepublic.com/article/74619/tokyo-the-greenest-city |
Who Are America's Exporters? | In this years State of the Union, President Obama made one of his goals the doubling of US exports in five years. The president launched the National Export Initiative in March 2010 at the Export-Import Banks Annual Conference. This export promotion policy is focused on increased trade financing, advocacy, and assistance for American businesses, especially small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) interested in expanding their markets abroad. The latest profile of the U.S. exporting companies released this week by the Department of Commerce shows the landscape of U.S. exporters. U.S. businesses increased their export activity in 2008. The number of U.S. exporters increased in 2008 by 7.5 percent, translating into about 20,000 U.S. companies that decided to start exporting in 2008. Sixty-three percent of all U.S. exporting companies exported both in 2007 and 2008, a slight increase over the preceding period. This shows that more U.S. companies are exporting as a consistent source of sales. While forming the bulk of U.S. exporting companies, SMBs ship only a fraction of the value of U.S. exports. Similar with previous years, SMBs were 97 percent of the number exporting companies in 2008, but accounted for only about a third of the value U.S. exports. Large-sized businesses are only 3 percent of all U.S. exporters, but generate almost 70 percent of U.S. export value. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74430/who-are-americas-exporters |
Can Reid Win? | Politico explores the Senate Majority Leader's victory scenario: In addition to Reid and the Republican nominee, this years Nevada Senate race will include a tea party candidate, four candidates with no party affiliation and a candidate from the Independent American Party, a right-wing party that has more than 57,000 registered voters in the Silver State. Reids assessment of the race is also based on his own electoral history. In each of his four previous Senate races, third-party candidates and none of these candidates combined won at least 4 percent of the overall vote, with the total reaching nearly 8 percent in Reids 1992 race against Republican Demar Dahl. With voters sour on both political parties, third-party candidates could be in a position to garner even more votes than usual this year. The none of these candidates option could pull in an unusual level of support as well. This is an absurd way to win an election. I'd vote for Reid if I lived in Nevada, and don't blame him for playing by the rules as they exist. But this is just another example of the ridiculous nature of electoral rules in the United States. If a majority of the Nevada electorate wants to throw out Reid and replace him with a conservative, they should get to do so, not be foiled because the conservative majority is splintered. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74391/can-reid-win |
Do Republicans Love Killing Muslims? | M.J. Rosenberg, speaking at the New America Foundation, says that conservatives only like Israel because the Israeli Army kills Muslims: They are anti-Muslim. They do not like Muslims. They are on the side of Israel because Israel is they dont like Jews that much to start out with, either but compared to Muslims, they like Jews fine. Theyre infatuated with the Israeli army. Because the Israeli army kills Muslims. I mean, this is what its all about... Of course! This explains the massive grassroots conservative enthusiasm for Russia -- on Fox News and talk radio, Putin is an icon for his role in Chechnya. This would also explain the previous wave of conservative enthusiasm for Serbia during the 1990s. So maybe it's just a little more complicated than that. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74367/do-republicans-love-killing-muslims |
Who's In Charge Of Geoengineering? | Last week in Monterey, California, hundreds of scientists, environmental groups, think-tank types, and philosophers attended the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies. The topic at hand was geoengineering. And a good chunk of the conference was spent talking about what that term even means, since it can refer both to technologies that suck CO2 out of the air (which are mostly non-problematic, unless you're trying to, oh, create toxic plankton blooms in the ocean) and to technologies that manipulate the Earth's climate by, say, blocking the amount of sunlight that hits the planet (the latter's a bit dodgier). But once that was out of the way, the conference moved on to more interesting discussions about how geoengineering technologies should be regulated and governed. And that's only the start. Jeff Goodell, who a) has written a fantastic new book on geoengineering and b) attended the conference, reports on a number of tough questions that were raisedincluding the question who's going to pay for all this geoengineering research: It was generally agreed that for CO2-sucking technologies, private investment was not a problem [n.b., assuming we have some sort of cap-and-trade system in place]. Sunlight-reduction technologies, however, are another issue. if some company (or entrepreneur) is able to develop a new way of injecting particles into the stratosphere that becomes indispensible to the survival of the human race, well, that gives that company or person a lot of leverage. Im not interested in selling my soul to some company who is going to control how much sunlight hits the planet, said Phil Rasch, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. (As one audience member quipped, Gives new meaning to company town.) Granger Morgan, the head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that the creation of a profit motive would inevitably lead to a geoengineering lobby: Lobbying is the last thing we need on this. Well, there's always government funding, though that can raise its own worries, especially if national militaries want to start funding climate-intervention tech. (Some Pentagon officials are already mulling the idea.) It sort of sounds like there are so many potential headaches lurking that many of these geoengineering schemeseven they could cool the planetare unlikely to be any simpler or easier than cutting CO2 emissions. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74280/whos-charge-geoengineering |
Is The Deficit Shrinking? | This is interesting. The White House says the deficit this year is trending below forecasts, with higher revenues and lower expenditures, reports David Cho of the Washington Post: The federal deficit is running significantly lower than it did last year, with the budget gap for the first half of fiscal 2010 down 8 percent over the same period a year ago, senior Obama administration officials said Monday. The officials attributed the results to higher tax revenue and to lower spending than projected on bailing out the financial system. If the trend continues for the rest of the year, it would mean the annual deficit would be $1.3 trillion -- about $300 billion less than the administration's projection two months ago for 2010. I've been meaning to make a point about deficit forecasts. Over the last fifteen years, the official forecasts have missed every major change. During the 1990s, the deficit was forecast to remain stubbornly high even after President Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction. Instead, the red ink withered away. What's more, the budget forecasts overestimated the deficit -- then, eventually, underestimated the surplus -- every year. Starting in 2001, revenues collapsed far deeper than expected, until the economy began to recover midway through the decade, when they recovered faster than expected. Then, after the financial crisis, the deficit exploded beyond all projections. Basically, the pattern is that the budget forecasts are too conservative, in the sense of failing to account for change, both positive and negative. Predictions are consistently too optimistic in the wake of recoveries, and too pessimistic in the wake of booms. This is understandable, as change can be hard to predict. But the discussion of the deficit over the last year has assumed the enormous deficits forecast to be some kind of immutable fact, and it's not. It's a projection, and given that the projection was made in the depth of a recession, recent history suggests it could prove too pessimistic. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74402/the-deficit-shrinking |
Will Eyjafjallajokull Cool The Planet? | Back in 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines and kicked up nearly 20 million tons of sulfur-dioxide into the air. The particles spread across the global atmosphere, scattering a greater portion of sunlight back into space, and ended up cooling the Earth by about 0.4C for a spell. (The sulfuric haze also caused further damage to the ozone layer.) The eruption was a horrible disaster for the immediate areadestroying homes and farmland and kicking up all sorts of nasty air pollution. But from a scientific standpoint, the eruption provided a tidy natural experiment to test various climate modelsand, overall, the models were quite accurate in predicting how global temperatures would respond. Probably notas Nicole Allan reports, the current eruption isn't belching up nearly enough sulfates to have a global effect, although if the volcano kept erupting for years and years on end, that could change. In 1783, another Icelandic volcano, Laki, erupted continuously for eight months and had significant climate effects. Meanwhile, volcanoes do emit a tiny amount of CO2, but as David McCandless and Ben Bartels show with this graph, that tiny amount of carbon pales next to the cut in emissions from all those grounded planes in Europe: | https://newrepublic.com/article/74499/will-eyjafjallajokull-cool-the-planet |
Who Will Watch The Watchers? | Ben Birnbaum has a long, very carefully reported, and highly convincing article in TNR about Human Rights Watch and Israel. Last fall, the founder of Human Rights Watch resigned from the organization and charged it with anti-Israel bias. Birnbaum's article is not a fulsome denunciation of HRW. It's a very balanced piece of narrative journalism that gives HRW its due, while still establishing two points beyond a doubt: First, the group has attracted people to its Middle East division who tend to be highly unsympathetic to Israel. Second, there are many people in the organization who believe that it subjects Israel to an unfair double standard which sometimes results in misleading criticism. For instance: During the war, Garlasco had gotten a lot of attention for discussing Israels use of a chemical agent called white phosphorous. CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera ran segments featuring Garlasco explaining the dangers white phosphorous posed to civilians: On contact with skin, it could cause second- and third-degree burns; it could even burn down houses. Soon, news reports all around the world were repeating the story. But Garlasco would later tell Apkon and others that he thought the white phosphorous controversy had been blown out of proportion. From his experience at the Pentagon, Garlasco knew that U.S. and British forces had used white phosphorous in Iraq and Afghanistan, and usually for the same purpose that the IDF used it in Gaza: as a smokescreen to obscure troop movements on the grounda permissible use under international law. To be sure, Garlasco did not believe that the IDF had used white phosphorous properly in every instance. But he told multiple people that he thought HRW had placed too much emphasis on this issuespecifically telling one person that he had been pushed by HRW headquarters to focus on white phosphorous at the expense of topics he thought more deserving of attention because, he suspected, it was regarded as a headline-generating story. (HRW denies that it pushed Garlasco on the subject.) Whats more, while making legal judgments was not within Garlascos jurisdiction, he told Apkon that he did not think Israels use of white phosphorous amounted to a war crime. (In a subsequent report on white phosphorous, the first of six thus far on the Gaza war, HRW would say that evidence indicates the commission of war crimes.) Beyond these disagreements, Garlasco had larger critiques of HRW. He thought that the organization had a habit of ignoring necessary context when covering war, he told Apkon; and he told multiple sources that he thought Whitson and others at MENA had far-left political views. As someone who didnt have strong ideological commitments of his own on the Middle East, this bothered him. When he reported on Georgia, his firm feeling was he could report whatever he wanted, says one source close to Garlasco. And, when he was talking to headquarters, the feeling was, let the chips fall where they may. He did not feel that way dealing with the Middle East division. In addition, Garlasco alleged in conversations with multiple people that HRW officials in New York did not understand how fighting actually looked from the ground and that they had unrealistic expectations for how wars could be fought. To Garlasco, the reality of war was far more complicated. He looks at that organization as one big attempt to outlaw warfare, says the person close to Garlasco. The question of Human Rights Watch and Israel has been a simmering controversy for years. This article is going to be considered the definitive exploration of this issue for a long time. Definitely take the time to read the whole thing. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74658/who-will-watch-the-watchers |
Is There Enough Space For Carbon Sequestration? | One ever-popular idea for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from coal plants is to capture the CO2 at the smokestack and bury it underground. Up until now, the biggest hurdle here has always been cost: While burning coal is relatively cheap (that is, if you ignore the pollution, the coal ash spills, and the devastation wrought by mountaintop mining), sequestering CO2 can be pretty priceypricier than efficiency and even a lot of renewable power options. But now it turns out there may be another problem. It could prove exceedingly difficult to find space to store all that carbon underground: A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming. The document from [the University of Houston] claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station. Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University. "It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said. The paper concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others." | https://newrepublic.com/article/74663/there-enough-space-carbon-sequestration-maybe-not |
What Is McConnell Thinking? | Jonathan Bernstein, like me, puzzles over the Senate republicans stunningly inept strategy to fight on financial reform: I can think of three possibilities: 1. It's part of a long-term strategy to waste Senate floor time, in order to reduce the capacity of the Senate to get anything done. That does make some sense; eating up three days this week could, at least possibly, prevent some judicial nominee from being confirmed later this year. On the other hand, the Democrats still have unused floor hours (Mondays, Fridays, nights, weekends), so they're not running up against any real limits yet. 2. The Republicans are terrified of the talk show hosts and conservative bloggers, who are demanding maximal resistance to the dread socialist Kenyan Obama whether the resisance makes any sense or not. 3. Mitch McConnell is actually an incompetent hack and has no idea what he's doing. And the answer is...I don't know! I don't think McConnell is incompetent. I think McConnell had a perfect strategy that worked beautifully as long as the right conditions held. The strategy was to convince his caucus to hold together and oppose Obama's agenda on everything, which would make the agenda less popular, run out the clock on what's sure to be the most liberal Congress in a long time, and set up the GOP for major gains in November. The problem is that, after the passage of health care reform, some Republican Senators started getting antsy. Bob Corker publicly blasted McConnell's stone wall approach because it left the party out of the legislative loop. I'd surmise other Republicans privately agreed. Then financial regulation came down the pike. An extended filibuster might have given Republicans a chance to bleed public support for the law -- they could have gotten a lot of Wall Street money to support an ad campaign to go with it -- but they didn't have 41 Republicans willing to hold out that long. At this point, the next best strategy would have been to quickly cut a deal and avoid being painted as Wall Street lackeys. But McConnell decided to hold out as long as he could anyway, which was the worst of both worlds -- first they get hit as Wall Street lackeys, then they give Democrats a policy win. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74689/what-mcconnell-thinking |
Does Obama Really Think He Can Micromanage American Jews? | There are signs that he thinks he can. Barak Ravid reports in yesterdays Haaretz that a high-level but unnamed U.S. official has complained about American Jews speaking up about how they feel and what they think about U.S. policy towards Jerusalem. I dont particularly agree with what Ive discerned as Ravids political views. But he is certainly a reliable journalist. He did not make this up. Its one thing, however unbecoming, for the Obami to lecture Israel about its capital. Still, truth be told, the U.S. not only is apoplectic about the 180-odd thousands of Jews who live (and have lived) in areas of the city beyond the temporary armistice lines of 1949, it has never recognized anything specifically Israeli in even western Jerusalem. And, even though the Congress has legislated transferring the ambassadorial mission from shabby Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, several presidents have simply refused. Look up U.S. Consulate, Jerusalem. It is eerie how unresponsive and indifferent to historical realities the site is. Its almost as if Israel does not exist there at all. In any case, the churlish American factotum cited above was upset that prominent American Jews had made their views known about Obamas obvious hostility to Jewish Jerusalem in general. In fact, the president has never, NEVER acknowledged the special role of Jerusalem in Jewish history, in Jewish religion, in the Jewish present. Believe me: this is not an oversight. I wrote about this twice during Passover. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74568/does-obama-really-think-he-can-micromanage-american-jews |
Should the Democrats Pursue Immigration or Climate Change? | Second, Democrats seem to assume that they have nothing left to losethat all the people who will vote against them this November have already made up their mindsso that focusing on non-economic issues dear to the base will be all gain and no pain. Again, I wonder. Over the past nine months, many independents who supported Democrats in 2006 and 2008 have moved away from the party. More could follow. No doubt Democrats will try to blunt this reaction by emphasizing the connection between jobs and the economy, on the one hand, and immigration and climate change on the other. Substantive as that argument may be, I still dont think it will work. In times of deep economic concern, average Americans are more likely to see threats than opportunities. Immigration reform and climate change legislation will always be tough, but theyll be easier to accomplish when the middle class is feeling less anxious. Granted, in the long term, the politics of immigration will certainly work in favor of the Democrats. Look at California: Republicans have never recovered from the legislation and rhetoric of Pete Wilsons governorship. In the short term, however, the issue could push in the opposite direction. While the immigration debate of 2006-2007 divided Republicans, it also divided Democrats, and this year the issue will most hurt endangered Democrats in tough districts. My skepticism about the Democrats emerging strategy has nothing to do with the substance of these issues. Whats been made public so far about the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill sounds sensible, and I served as co-convenor of a bipartisan task force that agreed on recommendations for comprehensive immigration reform. I disagree, rather, with the political calculation that seems to be driving this strategy. Heres why: 90 percent of the electorate is not Hispanic, and 85 percent is not young. Relatively modest shifts in voter sentiment outside these two groups could easily swamp increased turnout within them and turn all-but-certain Democratic losses into a rout of historic proportions. While the temptation to adopt a strategy of targeted micro-politics is understandable, Democrats should instead espouse a strategy of macro-politics focused on broad-based public concerns. If that means that Senate Democrats will have to choose a new majority leader next January, so be it. At least theyll still have a majority. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74657/should-the-democrats-pursue-immigration-or-climate-change |
Is The Energy-Only Bill About To Make A Comeback? | There's still a lot of uncertainty about the Senate climate bill. Now Harry Reid's saying he'll put it on the Senate calendar before immigration, after all. "Common sense dictates that if you have a bill that is ready to go, that is the one I am going to go to, Reid told reporters earlier. Because immigrationwe dont have a bill yet." But no one knows if that's enough to bring Lindsey Graham (who is, at least for now, the sole Republican supporter of the bill) back to the tablehe's been grumbling today that he'll abandon the climate-legislation push if immigration comes up at all. Meanwhile, E&E News reports that Jeff Bingaman is advocating for the Senate to take up his smaller "energy only" bill instead, which would create a federal renewable-energy standard, offer financing for clean energy projects, put in place a whole bevy of efficiency measures, give the feds authority for new transmission lines, and also allow more oil and gas drilling off the coast of Mexico. No cap on carbon emissions. No trading schemes. "I don't dismiss what anybody else is doing, but it seems to me that we shouldn't have that hold up another piece of legislation that has great merit for the environment and energy," said Byron Dorgan (D-ND), another supporter of the energy-only approach. A few things to say about this. First, an energy bill without an actual cap on carbon isn't likely to do nearly as much to cut emissions. To take just one example, you can make homes and gadgets more efficient, but without limits on emissions, people may take advantage of the added efficiency to use more power. (See this story of Boulder's struggles to benefit from new efficiency measures.) On his new and excellent blog, Michael Levi has a good discussion of recent economic research on why both funding for alternative energy and a price on carbon are necessary to curb greenhouse gases. The other point is that it's not even clear that an energy-only bill would be easier to pass than a big climate bill that had a cap on carbon. Many liberals and environmentalists dislike the energy-only bill because it's far too weakone analysis found that the bill's renewable mandates would lead to no more renewable power than if nothing at all was passed. And it's hard to sell coastal Democrats like Bill Nelson or Robert Menendez on the benefits of offshore drilling if the only thing they're getting in return is a slew of middling subsidies for various energy sources. So it's not like this is necessarily a simpler route. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74659/the-energy-only-bill-about-make-comeback |
Was Obama's Drilling Move Aimed At... Iran? | Many observers were puzzled last week when President Obama announced his support for expanded offshore oil drilling. Perhaps. But here's another possibility: The move could have been intended to bolster international support for sanctions on Iran. At least that's what events from the nuclear summit earlier this week suggest. On Monday, Obama apparently convinced Chinese President Hu Jintao to pursue sanctions as a means of dissuading Iran from developing its nuclear program. As Time noted, "Obama reportedly indicated that the U.S. would help China make up any shortfall in oil imports resulting from Iranian retaliation for any Chinese support for sanctions." China is concerned about its growing reliance on crude imports and possible disruptions in the global oil markets. So Obama's offshore-drilling embrace may have been intended to signal that he's doing everything possible to avoid that fate. Of course, it's worth examining just how much offshore drilling can achieve here. Iran, after all, plays a huge role on the international oil marketswith estimated reserves of 130 billion barrels and daily production of 3.8 million barrels. By contrast, the offshore-drilling areas that the Obama administration is now studying off Alaska and the mid-Atlantic region are estimated to contain, according to the Interior Department, 62.6 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil at most. What's more, that oil isn't all coming out tomorrow: A 2007 study from the Energy Information Administration suggested it will take at least five years before U.S. offshore oil drilling can begin. In all, according to Steven David of Johns Hopkins, expanding U.S. oil production "could help around the edges" to blunt any Iranian reaction to eventual sanctions. But, David adds, offshore drilling in the United States wouldn't have nearly as big an impact as other oil-production moves elsewhere in the worldsuch as encouraging Saudi Arabia to boost its production or convincing Mexico to develop its oil reserves in the Gulf. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74482/was-obamas-drilling-move-aimed-iran |
Who Says That Obesity Affects Only The Poor? | Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are very rich. According to a New York Times article this morning by Michael Slackman, the first of these boasts the second highest per capita gross domestic product in the world. It has a population of 1.6 million, with only 250,000 native Qataris. That means citizens. These Qataris rank sixth globally for prevalence of obesity and has the highest rate of obesity among boys in the Middle East and North African region. They will win no soccer cups. A recent article in the Qatari newspaper Al Watan said that local health experts that, within five years, 73 percent of Qatari women and 69 percent of the men would qualify as obese. And since obesity often leads to diabetes, Qatar also ranks fifth globally in terms of the proportion of people aged 20 to 79 with diabetes. I suppose wealth and eating. The article is accompanied by a photograph showing three men (only one of them fat) wearing white headgear and robes. They looked like they were eating Big Mac and fries. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74637/who-says-obesity-affects-only-the-poor |
Who's Smarter, Obama Or Bush? | Nowhere in his essay does Troy consider the possibility that Obama has a more intellectual reputation because he is, in fact, smarter, better-informed, and more intellectually-engaged than his predecessor. It must be liberal bias. This would be a hard argument to prove if, as Troy implies, Bush's intellectual detractors were all liberal intellectuals. I would say that these detractors disdain Bush because they're intellectuals, Troy would reply that they do so because they're liberal, and we'd be stuck. Fortunately, we have the testimony of numerous non-liberals. This included Bush's admirers. There is Richard Perle, who later recalled of meeting Bush, "he didn't know very much." David Frum wrote in a generally fawning book, "Bush had a poor memory for facts and figures. Fire a question at him about the specifics of his administration's policies, and he often appeared uncertain." Bush's own wife said of him, "George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesnt need to evaluate and re-evaluate a decision. He doesnt try to overthink. He likes action." Dmitry Medvedev, who is not a liberal intellectual, recently compared Obama's intellect very favorably with that of his predecessor. Much of the ballast for Troy's defense of Bush lies in his citing the fact that Bush had some intellectuals working in his administration, which of course is nearly impossible to avoid in the modern day. One of the names he cites is John DiIulio. If that name doesn't ring a bill, he's the man who subsequently wrote this about the Bush administration: I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue. In sum, I don't think the ideological bias of liberal intellectuals is responsible for the broad impression that Obama is far more intellectual than Bush. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74415/whos-smarter-obama-or-bush |
Was I Unfair To Frank Luntz? | My TRB column on Frank Luntz has raised the hackles of National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, who has an incredulous response entitled, "Yes, Jonathan Chait, It's a Bailout Bill." I should first note that my column was primarily about Luntz, and only secondarily about Luntz's bizarre notion that financial reform would cause bailouts. Bailouts, of course, are essentially the current default policy. We had a huge bailout in large part because there was no regulation or process to avoid them. The proposed regulations may be imperfect, but they are intended to prevent the need for bailouts and to wipe out the creditors and management of bankrupt firms, which is the opposite of a bailout. As factcheck.org explains: No piece of legislation can guarantee that a future Congress wont allow the federal government to prop up a failing financial institution. But claims that this bill makes taxpayer-funded bailouts a permanent fixture are misleading, to say the least. The main point of contention is a provision that calls for a $50 billion fund to be used to liquidate a bank thats on the verge of collapse. The bill does not authorize use of the fund to prop up companies or bail them out. Rather, it would be used to keep a troubled company operating long enough for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to dismantle it. The Senate bill, which is sponsored by Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, states that the fund would be available to the FDIC to be used for "the orderly liquidation of covered financial companies, payment of administrative expenses, the payment of principal and interest by the Corporation on obligations issued under paragraph (9), and the exercise of the authorities of the Corporation under this title." (The "Corporation" is the FDIC.) This fund is even called the "Orderly Liquidation Fund" in the bill. Furthermore, while critics speak of "taxpayer-funded bailouts," the fund in question isnt financed by ordinary taxpayers at all. The bill requires banks and financial institutions to fund it, and replenish it if funds are used. The FDIC would decide which companies have to contribute, and how much, based on an institutions risk. The FDIC would have between five and 10 years to reach that target of $50 billion. As for an "orderly liquidation," the bill says that would include removing the management of the company and making sure shareholders dont get any money until other claims are paid Williamson raises two objections to my argument. Goldman Sachs and Citi, both of which are backing the Dodd bill. First of all, the fact that a bank would think a bill would be good for its business is not the same thing as a bank believing that a bill would provide for bailouts. Second of all, businesses constantly "back" legislation they don't actually want to see pass. The banks opposed financial regulation at the outset. But when they saw legislation as inevitable, and their opposition doing more to hurt than help the cause of opposition, they have switched into micro-lobbying mode: Sure, we support the bill, but we wish you'd change X, Y and Z. They're suing for peace, not extracting a benefit. To interpret the fact of their negotiation as evidence that they support the overall thrust of the bill is like interpreting German negotiation with the Allies after World War I as evidence they supported the Treaty of Versailles. My column quoted some news articles citing fierce Wall Street opposition to financial reform, and meetings in which Republicans urged Wall Street to support them and help them kill such reform. Williamson thinks this shows I'm a dupe for the lame-stream media: | https://newrepublic.com/article/74677/was-i-unfair-frank-luntz |
Are Service Exports Leading the Recovery? | With all that, the most obvious advantage of service exports during this recession is that they have performed better than goods exports. According to the BEA, from the second quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of 2009, aggregate U.S. service exports fell by 7 percent, but goods exports fell by 14 percent. Of exportable services, film and television production, education, insurance, telecommunications, and business, professional, and technical services have done the best, even expanding since the second quarter of 2008. By contrast, exports of travel (mostly generated by foreign tourists), industrial process services, and to a lesser extent, financial services have lost value over the same period. Yet, none of these losses have been nearly as severe as the worst performing goods sectors, including wheat, engine parts, corn, cars, semiconductors, and vehicle parts, in order of severity. And so it is service export growth that has really helped with unemployment. I was able to look at this more systematically by using data weve been gathering on exports from metropolitan areas using a variety of sources (Moodys Economy.com, the U.S. International Trade Commission, and Bureau of Economic Analysis). Controlling for gross metropolitan product (GMP, essentially a regional version of GDP) growth, service export growth has a strong negative effect on unemployment changes (meaning it limits joblessness), as does GMP growth. Surprisingly, however, total export growth and growth in goods have no effect. But this way of doing the analysis is biased because there are many metropolitan level characteristics that are correlated with service exporting and higher employment rates, such as a better educated workforce and a more innovative set of industries. To cancel out the effects of metropolitan characteristics, I relate the change in unemployment to the difference in the growth rate of service exports (that is I subtract the pre-recession growth rate from the post-recession growth ratestarting in the second quarter of 2008). The more stability in the growth rate of service exports, the less unemployment increased. The unemployment rate was 1 percentage point higher for every 5 percentage point loss in the service export growth rate pre and post-recession. This is basically the same result as before, but now we can feel confident that unchanging metro characteristics--like the share of college educated adults--are not driving the results. To confirm this, adding controls for college educated adults, the pre-recession service intensity, and the percentage of jobs in services does not explain away the connection (though the education effect is significant and does explain half of the service export effect). Moreover, the effect of changes in GMP growth before and after the recession does not matter, only changes in service export growth. In so far as this analysis is valid, growth in service exports over the second half of 2009 should predict unemployment decreases over the first half of 2010. By this reckoning, Madison, San Antonio, Columbia, S.C., Des Moines, and Austin should see some of the largest decreases in unemployment by June of 2010, while those metros that have performed the worst on service export growth (such as Las Vegas, Detroit, Sacramento, Honolulu, and Salt Lake City) are likely to see little change to their unemployment rates. It appears that The Economists anecdotal evidence is largely correct; exportable services amount to nice work for the metros that can get it. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74565/are-service-exports-leading-the-recovery |
What Are Nukes Good For? | Peter Scoblic comes via Arms Control Today, which is not the usual stepping stone to our magazine, and has been studying the issue deeply for a long time. With the START treaty signing, it happens to be a very good time to have a nuclear weapons expert in house. Peter's cover story is a definitive essay on the future of the bomb. The most compelling question about this subject is whether nuclear deterrence still works against madmen. He says it can: That is, in the face of the most aggressive, most highly armed, most revolutionary power the United States has ever known, deterrence worked. It worked despite serious fears about the enemys rationality. Indeed, it may have demonstrated that rationality is not the appropriate prerequisite for nuclear stability. Rationality can produce undesirable outcomes; it does not preclude crisis situations (Khrushchev was not insane when he ordered missiles to Cuba, he was just wrong); and in the heat of nuclear battle, rationality is unlikely to guide decisions in any country, regardless of ideology. Demanding rationality of our enemies is therefore both asking too much and asking too little. It is perhaps best that, as the scholar Kenneth Waltz has noted, Deterrence does not depend on rationality. It depends on fear. Fear, after all, is an evolutionary imperative in a way that reason is not, and it induces caution in a way that can be understated by cold cost-benefit analyses. No state that values its continued existence would launch an attack that meant its own certain devastation, and there is every indicationfrom their oppression at home and their manipulations abroadthat the leaders of Iran and North Korea have every desire to survive. True, historically, leaders have made strategic errors that resulted in their downfall. But they did so because they miscalculated their odds of successan error that is impossible to make in launching a nuclear strike against an adversary that clearly has the capability to retaliate. The only plausible suicide would be an assisted one in which, say, Pyongyangs leaders feared total military defeatdeterrence does not cover dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dugout, as Churchill once put it. That means the United States shouldnt push nuclear-armed leaders to the brink of extermination, but otherwise deterrence should hold. To read the whole thing, youll have to subscribe. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74370/what-are-nukes-good |
How Many Seats Will The Democrats Lose? | While he's smuggling in a lot of conservative talking points I disagree with into his political analysis, I do agree with Sean Trende's overall contention that an 80 or 90 seat GOP pickup this November is well within the realm of possibility. (Trende also concedes that an economic recovery and a bump for Obama could result in a mere 20-25 seat loss.) Trende also makes a point that's gotten too little attention: the apportionment of the House gives Republicans an inherent structural advantage: The President's weakness in these states reveals another problem for his party. Since he is weak in Republican areas and swing areas, and yet doesn't have horrible approval ratings overall, he must be very, very popular among his party's base. Some polls have his approval ratings among African Americans at 95%. Even in Massachusetts, Martha Coakley managed to win the First, Seventh and Eighth Districts, which are home to the state's liberals and minorities. The problem for the Democrats is that these voters are packed into a relatively few states and Congressional districts nationwide, diluting their vote share. This is why the median Congressional district is an R+2 district. Thus, the President could have a relatively healthy overall approval rating, but still be fairly unpopular in swing states and districts. The increased enthusiasm that Obama generated among minorities, the young and the liberal is useful, but only if it is realized in conjunction with Democratic approval in a few other categories. The House is less tilted toward Republicans than the Senate, but it is tilted. Democrats "waste" a lot more votes and voters in non-competitive urban districts. This is one reason why Republicans have in the past been able to control the House despite a majority of polls showing them losing the generic ballot. If the generic ballot is tied among likely voters, Republicans will probably gain a House majority. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74426/how-many-seats-will-the-democrats-lose |
Why Are We Listening To Newt Gingrich? | The president of the United Statesthe most radical president in American historyhas now thrown down the gauntlet to the American people. He has said "I run a machine, I own Washington, and there's nothing you can do about it." Now that's where we are. But I want to remind you as a historian that there are two rules. The first is that elections have consequences, and therefore 2006 and 2008 has a consequencethe consequence is Obama, Pelosi and Reid. However, consequences lead to elections. So here's my promiseif we will go out and recruit at every level...if we'll work as hard as we can from now until election day, not giving up a single day, when we win control of the House and Senate this way, stage one of the end of Obamaism will be a new Republican Congress in January that simply refuses to fund any of the radical efforts. [Emphasis mine.] | https://newrepublic.com/article/74373/why-are-listening-newt-gingrich |
What Does Palinspeak Mean? | Mr. Speaker, yesterday against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every land. He meant this straight. He had it composed the night before and when he stood up to talk, he read, and it was prose that almost sounds like he wanted to set it to music. Sixty-one years later, Senator Sam Brownback gave his thoughts on the wisdom of invading Iraq, and my, how times had changed: And if we dont go at Iraq, that our effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation. We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: We are serious about terrorism, were serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil Not exactly John Stuart Mill. Its got direct quotation: You say to those countries, 'We are serious about terrorism ...' rather than the more written You say to those countries that we are serious about terrorism ... This is a spoken language trait, like kids And hes all Dont do that! using mimcry rather than detached comment. Its got what linguists call parataxis, where you run phrases together without smoothing out the transitions with conjunctions and such: We go at Iraq and it says to countries ... instead of If we go at Iraq, then it says to countries ... or the way the there remain six in the world that are as our definition .... just jammed in. And never mind go at. Brownback was perfectly comprehensible, and intonation does a lot of what indirect quotation and parataxis do on the page. Yet it wasnt a polished performance but if he had given one, hed look in our times as peculiar as, well, Robert Byrd does. Byrd is old enough to have minted in the days when making a speech meant clearing your throat and reading a prepared statement bedecked with ten-dollar words, and it qualifies today as an eccentricity. The practice will die with him. And more to the point: the fact is also that no one makes fun of Sam Brownback as especially tongue-tied. Hes normal lots of the statements on Iraq in that session sounded just like his and no one batted an eye. Yet his passage on Iraq, we must admit, doesnt sound all that different from something Palin would come up with today. Yet Palinspeak still differs from statements like Brownbacks in degree. Its a rather extreme case an almost instructive distillation of the difference in public conceptions of language in Charles Eaton and Robert Byrds time versus our own. Folksy is only the beginning of it You betcha, -in for -ing, and Say it aint so, Joe! during her debate with Joseph Biden indeed make her sound accessible, ordinary, unpretentious. This, however, is America as a whole, and no one should be shocked that a public figure would strike this note. You betcha hits the same chord in Palins fans as the equally folksy and close to meaningless -- Yes, We Can intoned in a preacherly black way did when a certain someone else was saying it. Folksy is America; it always has been, but is especially so now. What truly distinguishes Palins speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. Shes far, far away from that peace. All of us use there and that in this way in casual speech its a way of placing topics as separate from us on a kind of abstract desktop that the conversation encompasses. The people in accounting down there think they can just .... But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about whats going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are there in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasnt given them much thought before; they are not her. Theyre that, over there. This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor youve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing youve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it. You see this in one of my favorites, her take on Hillary Clintons complaint about sexism in media coverage: When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, 'Man, that doesn't do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country. For one thing, the that again. All whines worthy of note, we assume, are perceived -- whines unperceived dont make the news and thus do not require specification as such. There are two explanations for how Palin used perceived here. She may have meant that she perceived the whine despite its being perhaps disguised in some way, in which case she just plopped in the perceived part when it occurred to her, which was apparently after it would have been logically placed, earlier in the utterance, such as in place of hear in When I hear a statement ... Its almost deft she thought of perception, and plugged it in before whine by rendering it into an adjective as perceived. In any case, though, this is someone watching thoughts go by at a certain distance and gluing them together willy-nilly for the first time. Or, she may have meant perceived criticism, but thought of the perception early, and instead of waiting, just stuck it in early. Its a kind of linguistic Silly String and in that, hardly unknown among ordinary people just talking. But its a searching kind of expression, preliminary, unauthoritative. To a strangely extreme degree for someone making public utterances with confidence. Then if you read the quote straight it sounds like she means women shouldnt progress. But what happened is that she thought first of the complaint, and then tacked on a reference to women progressing; in her own head she thinks of it as something good, but she perceived no need to make that clear to those listening. She in there, in her head. "And Alaska -- we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources, Palin will tell us, where the fact that it is not, in blackboard sense, a sentence at all is only the beginning. She means that the arrangement in Alaska is collective, but when it occurs to her shes about to say Alaskans such that collective Alaskans would make no sense. So, if it cant be an adjective, heck, just make it an adverb its collectively Alaskans own the resources. Palinspeak is a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression. It bears mentioning that short sentences and a casual tone can still convey information and planned thought. Here was Biden, as a matter of fact, in his debate with Palin: Barack Obama laid out four basic criteria for any kind of rescue plan. He said there has to be oversight. We're not going to write a check to anybody unless there's some kind of oversite of the Secretary of the Treasury. He secondly said you have to focus on homeowners and folks on Main Street. Thirdly, he said you have to treat the taxpayers like investors in this case. Lastly, you have to make sure the CEOs don't benefit. This could end up eventually as people making money off of this rescue plan. A consequence of that brings us back to a fundamental disagreement between Gov. Palin and me and Senator McCain and Barack Obama. Biden will never compete with Churchill as a man of words, but he gets his point across even without the prop of the F-word, and always has I remember admiring his speaking skills when I was a teenager. I dont think Palins phraseology is actively attractive to her fans. Rather, what is remarkable is that this way of speaking doesnt prevent someone, today, from public influence. Candidates bite the dust for being untelegenic, dour, philanderers, strident, or looking silly posing in a tank. But having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered a mark against one as a figure of political authority. It used to be that a way with a word could get you past the electorate even if there was nothing behind it. It was partly good looks, but partly that he had a gift for making a speech. If he had stood on daises talking like Sarah Palin day after day and there existed the communications technology and practice to bring this regularly before voters, James Cox would have become President. The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral You betcha, Yes we can! -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, lets face it: she is. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74278/what-does-palinspeak-mean |
What if They Repealed Obamacare? | The full name of the health care law is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And theres a reason for that Patient Protection part: The law also bolsters coverage for those people who have it. It eliminates cost-sharing for preventative services. It imposes a binding appeals process for people who think insurers wrongly denied treatments. It forces insurers to spend more on patient care and less on overhead --and thats not to mention the many people who pay for insurance now, but will pay less starting in 2014, thanks to the tax credits. Perhaps Cox should explain to Michiganders why, in his view, they should keep paying out-of-pocket fees for regular checkups, why some insurers should continue to have unchallenged authority to overrule doctors on treatment and why its better if stockholders take a bigger chunk out of everybodys premium dollars. And while Cox is at it, perhaps he can explain to senior citizens why they should continue to get stuck in the donut hole of Medicare Part D--the gap in prescription drug coverage that the Affordable Care Act would gradually close. To be fair, it's not the coverage and access benefits that Cox and other state officials are talking about in their speeches. It's the threat of what "socialism" will do to medical care. Its the burdens the new law will supposedly place on their states, businesses and citizens. But while plenty can go wrong as the new law comes on line--just watch how quickly insurers find loopholes in the regulations--most of the state officials complaints don't really hold up under scrutiny. Just consider what they are saying about Medicaid. The federal government and states run Medicaid jointly, which means that if the program expands states will have to spend more money on it. But look more closely at the law: For the first ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government is going to cover 98 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion. The federal contribution declines after that, but only to 90 percent. So for every additional dollar the states put into Medicaid, theyre drawing in nine from Washington. And, oh yes, the Affordable Care Act would do one other thing. It would put in place a whole series of cost-cutting measures designed to promote quality medicine and, over time, curb the year-to-year spikes in health insurance premiums. The law would encourage coordination among health care providers, begin to scrutinize treatments for comparative effectiveness and link hospital payments to performance, among other things. Of course, whats true for Michigan is true for the rest of the country. The state officials leading the nullification campaign in places like Idaho, Minnesota, and South Carolina talk a lot about what their citizens stand to lose as the Affordable Care Act takes effect. But the real loss will be if, somehow, the opposite were to happen--and the people living in those states were left dealing with the same dysfunctional health care system that exists today. Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic. This column is a collaboration between TNR and Kaiser Health News . KHN is an editorially independent news service and is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74521/what-if-they-repealed-obamacare |
Is There a Doctor in the House? Or Anywhere Else? | My former TNR colleague Suzy Khimm had a nice piece yesterday about a familiar but hugely important issue: poor Medicaid reimbursement rates that lead primary care doctors and specialists to avoid treating poor people. This issue was only partly addressed in health care reform. No one doubts it will fester, becoming a sore point between providers and policymakers and between the states and the federal government. By chance, the electronic version of Pediatrics also arrived yesterday. It includes a depressingly clarifying essay "Has leisure time become Medicaid's new competitor?" by Indiana professor Samuel S. Flint. Flint briefly describes the ways that states have induced the past generation of pediatricians to take Medicaid patients: Historically, state Medicaid programs have counted on the immutable economics of private practice. The vast majority of practice overhead costs are fixed (e.g., nonphysician personnel, rent, malpractice insurance premiums), but the marginal cost of treating each child is minimal. Consequently, it makes economic sense for physicians to accept some patients with Medicaid, because Medicaid fees for an otherwise unused appointment exceed low marginal treatment costs. The problem with this strategy is that it is predicated on the notion that leisure time has little value, and that is changing, particularly among young physicians. That's standard fare, but what gets interesting is Flint's effort to put dollars-and-cents numbers behind the argument. He notes that 38% of pediatric residents sought (and 21% accepted) a part-time position as a first job. This proportion surprised me. At least partly, it reflects the striking gender mix across the medical profession. Almost 70 percent of pediatric residents are women. Many pediatricians are working mothers, whose job schedules must accommodate work-family balance concerns. Anyway, Flint calculated that such part-time positions would shorten doctors' annual work output by 2,094 visits, while reducing income by about $34,000. Doing the long division, Flint finds that pediatricians willing to work part-time vote with their feet to forego about $18.50 per visit. | https://newrepublic.com/article/74243/there-doctor-the-house-or-anywhere-else |
Is The Government Hopeless When It Comes To Energy? | Chris Hayes has a terrific story in The Nation about one horrific and unintended side-effect of the alternative-fuels tax credit passed by Congress in 2005. The credit actually ended up paying paper companies to waste diesel fuel and pollute more than they otherwise would. Chris's piece also includes an elegant description of the Kraft process used to make paper: In 2005 Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the $244 billion transportation bill. It included a variety of tax credits for alternative fuels such as ethanol and biomass. But it also included a fifty-cent-a-gallon credit for the use of fuel mixtures that combined alternative fuel with a taxable fuel such as diesel or gasoline. Enter the paper industry. Since the 1930s the overwhelming majority of paper mills have employed whats called the kraft process to produce paper. Heres how it works. Wood chips are cooked in a chemical solution to separate the cellulose fibers, which are used to make paper, from the other organic material in wood. The remaining liquid, a sludge containing lignin (the structural glue that binds plant cells together), is called black liquor. Because its so rich in carbon, black liquor is a good fuel; the kraft process uses the black liquor to produce the heat and energy necessary to transform pulp into paper. Its a neat, efficient process thats cost-effective without any government subsidy. ... By adding diesel fuel to the black liquor, paper companies produce a mixture that qualifies for the mixed-fuel tax credit, allowing them to burn black liquor into gold, as a JPMorgan report put it. Its unclear who first came up with the ideaWrobleski told me it was outside consultantsbut at some point last fall IP and Verso, another paper company, formerly a part of IP, began adding diesel to its black liquor and applied to the IRS for the credit. (Verso nabbed $29.7 million at just one of its mills in the final quarter of 2008 for its use of mixed fuel.) Yup, total fiasco. Ideally Congress will shutter this loophole now that it's been exposed. In the meantime, Matt Yglesias makes a more general point, arguing that this sordid affair shows that when it comes to developing alternative energy sources, it's much better to simply tax greenhouse-gas emissionsthrough either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade systemthan have Congress directly bankroll alternative-energy sources, since Congress is very likely to muck things up. (There's an obvious exception for infrastructure projects, such as electric grids or mass transit, since those things won't magically materialize just because we have a price on carbon.) There's an elegant logic to Matt's view, but I wanted to quibble just a bit. There's actually a case for both taxing carbon and offering additional incentives for alternative energy sources. Pollution's not always the only externality at work. As Rob Inglis noted in this old post, even setting aside carbon, there are a whole variety of market barriers frequently preventing new alternative-energy sources from gaining a foothold (he used solar PV installations as a case in point). In these cases, public support can be vital. An Energy Department scientist I was chatting with yesterday offered up another good example. Back in the 1970s, DOE labs discovered that using electronic ballasts in fluorescent light bulbs would make the bulbs vastly more energy-efficientthe bang for the buck, as they say, was huge. But, at the time, there were only two manufacturers making the ballasts, and neither had incentive to adopt the new technology, since if one did, the other would quickly follow, and no one would gain any market advantagethey'd just have spent a bit more money. So the Energy Department briefly set up a third ballast manufacturer, which encouraged the two private companies to switch, which led to impressive energy savings for the public at low cost. Yes, the government was "picking winners" herebut with positive results. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48839/the-government-hopeless-when-it-comes-energy |
Does The Geithner Plan Have Japanese Roots? | Adam Posen has an interesting nugget in his Daily Beast piece comparing our financial crisis to the Japanese situation in the 1990s: In essence, the U.S. Treasurys plan to subsidize private investors purchases of the banks toxic assets is a too-clever-by-half mechanism to fix the banks while avoiding going to Congress for more upfront on-budget expenditures. One can imagine the discussions at the White House: We have a budget to pass, and cannot give up those goals to give the bankers still more. Figure out some way to do this off-budget. ... I know that the very same self-limiting discussions took place at Okurasho, the Japanese Ministry of Finance circa 1995-1998. And they ended with the same result, a series of bank-recapitalization plans that tried to mobilize private-sector monies and overpay for distressed bank assets without forcing the banks to truly write off the losses. Even though the top Japanese technocrats at the ministry were even more insulated from a weak Diet than the congressionally unconfirmed advisers currently running economic policy for the Obama administration, they did worse. Whatever the political context, countries usually try to end banking crises on the cheap, with a limited public role at first, overpaying for distressed assets and failing to change banks behavior, only to have to go back in a couple of years later. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48743/does-the-geithner-plan-have-japanese-roots |
When Does Fact-finding Become Fomenting? | Noam already highlighted this NYT article about how scary some of the AIG backlash is getting, but this part in particular struck me as especially bad: The Connecticut Working Families party, which has support from organized labor, is planning a bus tour of A.I.G. executives homes on Saturday, with a stop at the companys Wilton office. Were going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do, said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. I know theres a lot of anger and a lot of rage about whats happened. Were not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy. [Emphasis added.] | https://newrepublic.com/article/48546/when-does-fact-finding-become-fomenting |
Is California A Model Of Efficiency--or A Special Case? | At least, it looks like they are: Since 1975, per capita electricity use in California has barely budged, while it's shot up 50 percent across the rest of the United States. Some observers have credited the state's aggressive energy-efficiency policieseverything from installing LED traffic lights to painting roofs white to ensuring that residential air ducts don't leak heat. Meanwhile, California's "decoupling" laws have given electric utilities incentives to push energy-saving measures (in most states, utilities only make a profit if they sell, sell, sell). These are all beguiling ideas, and the California Energy Commission claims that the state has achieved most of its energy savingsequal to about 15 percent of its annual electricity usedue to utility-led programs and strict appliance and building standards. But not everyone thinks things are quite so simple. Via Kate Galbraith, a new study by Cynthia Mitchell and two other co-workers at the consulting group Energy Economics Inc. argues that other, structural factors might explain more of California's success. For one, California has higher electricity prices than the rest of the country, which helps drive consumption down. The state also has a milder climate than most other places (less air-conditioning), not to mention more multi-family urban households. And California has fewer energy-intensive industries: Manufacturing composes just 20 percent of the state's employment, compared with 26 percent nationally. Aluminum, a particularly energy-intensive sector, has seen a 40 percent employment decline in California since 1975, compared with 31 percent for the rest of the country. By contrast, California's pharmaceuticals sector doesn't pollute quite as much, and its computer and electronics manufacturers have been especially successful at reducing their energy intensity. (Though the latter might be a result of smart policiesthat's unclear.) So it's a muddled picture, and not every state could necessarily adopt California's policies and expect to see the same results (though surely they'd see some cuts). Still, it'd be foolish to write off efficiency policies entirely. They do have an effect: One recent study by Anant Sudarshan and James Sweeney of Stanfordtried to disentangle all the different structural factors and concluded that efficiency policies accounted for 23 percent of the gap in energy use between California and the rest of the countrynothing to sniff at. (Although, Mitchell points out, California's population is still growing, so even flat per-capita use won't curb emissions, which is what the state's new global-warming bill aims for.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/49035/california-model-efficiency-or-special-case |
Is Michigan State Really The Underdog? | First off, yes, Michigan does have the highest unemployment rate of any state, at 12 percent. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment picture in North Carolina is also bleak: In fact, at 10.7 percent, it's actually the fourth worst in the country. What's more, South Carolina--which is home to a lot of UNC hoops fans (since the presence of a men's basketball team at the University of South Carolina remains an unverified rumor)--has the nation's second worst unemployment rate of 11 percent. So, if you take into account the unemployment rate in the Carolinas as a whole, Michigan doesn't exactly have a monopoly on misery. Second, from a purely economic standpoint, I think you can make the case that Michigan State's presence in the Final Four has actually hurt the state of Michigan. While Detroit hotels and restaurants were expecting an influx of tourist dollars from the fans of all four Final Four teams, they've only gotten them from three of those team's fanbases since, presumably, most Michigan State fans are eating and sleeping at their homes. That's why people who really care about Michigan's economy were rooting for Louisville--with its legion of fat cat boosters--to beat Michigan State in the Elite Eight. Finally, there's this little matter of Michigan State's basketball team, which, in the popular imagination, has suddenly morphed into Hickory High. And yet, Michigan State isn't exactly your classic underdog. Tom Izzo has established such a record of dominance at the school that, since he became the coach there 13 years ago, every player that he's had for the full term of their eligibility has gone to at least one Final Four. What's more, Michigan State, according to NCAA stats from 2007, spends significantly more money on its basketball program ($6,407,390) than UNC spends on its hoopsters ($5,632,518). As for the fact that Carolina wiped the floor with Michigan State just a few months ago, I have a two-word explanation: Goran Suton! The Bosnian Bomber was out with an injury for that game, and you have to figure he's worth at least 36 points to the Spartans. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48870/michigan-state-really-the-underdog |
What Fresh Hell Awaits? | Michelle Cottle--If you thought Obamas plague-ridden first 100 days had a biblical feel, brace yourself: Were headed straight into what could reasonably be called The Acts of God Season. And I dont mean that in a good way. Pick your natural disaster--tropical storm, hurricane, tornado, wildfire. Like clockwork, they all come bearing down on this great nation as the weather warms. Few regions are safe. In the southern plains Tornado Alley, the peak season runs from May through early June, while June and July are prime twister time for the Midwest and northern plains. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, hurricane season starts in June and gets progressively uglier through September. Out west, wildfires rage in July and August. Then, of course, there are the derivative dangers: Because thunder storms are more common in summer, so are lightning strikes. And although, historically, this particular phenomenon has not occurred in sufficient numbers to require mobilization of FEMA or the National Guard, at the rate things are going Certainly, Obama cannot be rationally held responsible for such elemental disasters. But make no mistake: Every time a trailer park in Florida experiences a strong wind, a primed-for-catastrophe chattering class is going to parse the POTUSs every word and deed for signs that this will be (all together now!) his Katrina moment. Making matters worse, the media are flat-out obsessed with bad weather. As far as most networks are concerned, having ones star correspondents stand knee deep in tidal surge buffeted by driving rain and category-three winds ranks up there on the interest meter with tales of missing kids, shark attacks, and politicians banging hookers. So while it may be the hoariest of truisms that you cant control the weather, Obama sure as hell better start gearing up to manage it. Darkness. Sustained, terror-inducing darkness. In recent years, cyberspies from China and Russia have reportedly penetrated the U.S. power grid, leaving behind software that could be used to create targeted blackouts or possibly tamper with U.S. nuclear power plants, should the hackers find themselves in the mood for chaos. (Intelligence officials have stressed that it's unclear what the hackers' motives are, exactly, or whether they're even government-backed.) Stirred by the news, members of Congress have been falling over themselves in recent weeks to introduce bills to beef up grid security and fend off potential cyberattackers. Granted, it's unlikely that China would feel any desire to disrupt the U.S. economy in the midst of a recession, but accidents can happen: In 2008, security experts told National Journal that an outage in Florida affecting three million people may have been caused by a hacker with China's People's Liberation Army who was supposed to be mapping the power grid and inadvertently hit the wrong switch. Whoops. Jason Zengerle--Republicans are putting on a smiley face and claiming theyre actually happy to see Arlen Specter leave their party, but, while this is mostly spin, there is a germ of truth to the claim. After all, Specter is a notorious pain in the ass. ("There are two kinds of senators, a former Republican aide once told National Review. Republicans who don't like Specter and Democrats who don't like Specter.") And, now that Specters a Democrat, he becomes Obamas pain in the ass. Specter can make Obamas life difficult over the next 100 days (and beyond) merely by being himself. Over his 28 years in the Senate, hes developed a reputation as a politician wholl vote your way--for a price. He once told Trent Lott hed support an appropriations bill only if Lott would attend two fundraisers for him. Earlier this year, he voted for Obamas stimulus plan, but only after hed gotten a 39 percent increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health. In other words, Obama will have to spend the next 100 days working as hard for Specters vote as he would have if Specter were still a Republican. Except, now that Specters a Democrat and Obama has pledged to support him in the 2010 Pennsylvania Democratic primary, Obama wont just be working to win over Specter. He's going to have to spend some of his political capital to win over liberals, who'll have a big say in that Democratic primary and might not want to vote for a guy who opposes the Employee Free Choice Act and the public plan component of any health care legislation. Of course, theres always the possibility that Specter could make Obamas life easier and start voting more like a Democrat--now that he actually is one. But he hasnt given any indication that he will. During his party-switch negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (who last year wrote that Specter only crosses party lines when we dont need him), Specter claims that the subject of policy stances never came up. If it had, Specter explained, it would have led to a long, perhaps unpleasant, conversation. Its one thing for Obama to have those conversations with recalcitrant Republicans. But now hell be having them with a member of his own party. By Michelle Cottle, Michael Crowley, Bradford Plumer, Noam Scheiber, and Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/64577/what-fresh-hell-awaits |
How Daring Is Duncan? | Clay Risen pointed out this morning that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may have kick-started an early policy fight with his comments this week on D.C. school vouchers. Indeed, the education blogosphere has been buzzing with his support for allowing students who are already getting vouchers to stay in their private schools. "I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," he said. (Duncan indicated, however, that he doesn't support vouchers programs in the long run.) Over at the Fordham Institute's blog Flypaper, Mike Petrilli points out that Duncan went on to say, "We need to be more ambitious. The goal shouldn't be to save a handful of children. The goal should be to dramatically change the opportunity structure for entire neighborhoods of kids." Petrilli aptly notes that this sounds a great deal like language used by Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, a New York-based program designed to transform the lives of entire neighborhoods of children through schools, health clinics, and other local services. At its core, Harlem Children's Zone focuses on charter schools, which education reformers strongly support. (It's worth noting that while Obama has backed charter schools publicly, all funding for charters was shorn from the stimulus bill.) It does appear that Harlem Children's Zone and similar pioneering programs are informing Duncan's approach to policy. For instance, in the most recent issue of Chicago magazine, the education secretary had this to say: Q: Obviously you're familiar with what [Geoffrey Canada is] doing. A: Yes. I'm going to create 20 Harlem Children's Zones around the country. I am. A: I don't care. I'm going to fund it. That's pretty bold (and encouraging!) talk, particularly in the face of congressional and union opposition to broadening reform efforts that have only been tested on a small scale--like the Harlem Children's Zone. But Duncan has been on a bold streak lately. The Washington Post reported today that the education secretary plans to use some of the stimulus money to "adopt on a grander scale ideas that are producing results on a trial basis in some locales." Duncan praised longer school days instituted by some charter schools, urged that clear standards for student achievement be created, and backed reformers' pet issue of merit pay. "We also have to make it easier to get rid of teachers when student achievement isn't happening," Duncan said. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48232/how-daring-duncan |
Can The Geithner Plan Succeed By Failing? | Felix Salmon is worried about the part of the Geithner plan intended to move bad loans off the banks' books: Using some pretty reasonable assumptions, the PPIPs [the partnerships investors will form with the government] arent going to buy these loans until they drop to the low 80s which means that there simply wont be a market-clearing price [i.e., a price at which they sell] for most of the loans. [Most banks seem to be pricing the loans at 90 cents on the dollar or more.] ... [W]hen it comes to the governments stress tests, its going to be hard for the banks to persuade Treasury that the loans are worth significantly more than anybody is willing to pay under the PPIP. So if the loans dont clear [i.e., no one sells], that could be prima facie evidence that the banks are not actually as solvent as they say they are. Which could be a nasty unintended consequence of this whole plan. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48822/can-the-geithner-plan-succeed-failing |
What's The North Korean Version Of Kabuki? | Whatever it is, Laura Ling and Euna Lin--the two American journalists recently arrested by the North Koreans on the country's border with China--are now caught up in it: The Norths state-run Korean Central News Agency accused the two of illegal entry" and said, "their suspected hostile acts have been confirmed by evidence and their statements, according to the results of intermediary investigation conducted by a competent organ. "The organ is carrying on its investigation and, at the same time, making a preparation for indicting them at a trial on the basis of the already confirmed suspicions," it said. This was the first reported case in which a U.S. citizen will be indicted and tried in North Korea, South Korean officials said. The Norths criminal code calls for between 5 and 10 years of "education through labor" for people convicted of "hostile acts" against the state. In a "severe" case, the code allows more than 10 years in labor camp. The weird thing about all this, though, is that because North Korea is actually a state--albeit a rogue one--it's probable that Ling and Lin will be released. The North Koreans will use their capture as a bargaining chip; American diplomats will jump through whatever hoops the North Koreans set up for them; and that will be that. So, in a way, this beats being captured by the FARC or the Taliban or a Mexican drug cartel. Still, it has to be hell for Ling and Lin's families. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48758/whats-the-north-korean-version-kabuki |
Why Aren't The Toxic Assets Already Appreciating? | The FT has an interesting piece today pointing out that, even though bank stock prices rallied after the Geithner plan rollout, the prices of the toxic assets themselves have barely budged: The ABX index, which tracks subprime mortgage-backed securities, has barely lifted from its record lows. The leveraged loan LCDX index has gained a little but is still sharply down on the year. Top-rated commercial mortgage-backed securities have rallied but are only back to mid-February levels, while lower-rated tranches have rallied much less. Problem is, it's tough to say if this is a sign the plan won't work, or a sign the plan is even more necessary than we realized. On the one hand, financial markets tend to price in new information pretty quickly. If investors expected the Geithner plan to drive up the prices of mortgage-backed securities, then they should be snatching them up now in anticipation. On the other hand, as the FT piece concedes, investors may not be moving because they can't get favorable financing--the provision of which is the whole point of the Geithner plan. I don't know enough to hazard a guess, but the piece makes a reasonable case for the former position. For one thing, it argues, the plan just might not be big enough in scope--it would only provide financing for up to about one-third of the mortgage-backed securities out there (if you judge by their current market value). For another: [C]redit market investors are not convinced that the low prices on risky mortgage-related assets are necessarily too low. Specifically, the government's assumption that by injecting liquidity into the markets, prices will rise may not prove correct, not least because prices on the underlying collateral - property - continue to fall. That's the big question, it seems. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48671/why-arent-the-toxic-assets-already-appreciating |
How Much Ammunition Does The Fed Have Left? | Today's daily economic report from Goldman Sachs performs a fascinating exercise: It tries to measure the power of the Fed's so-called "unconventional easing." To review: The Fed normally stimulates the economy by lowering short-term interest rates. (Actually, by lowering its "target" for short-term rates, but let's not complicate this.) But, in December, the Fed basically lowered short-term rates as far as they'll go--i.e., zero--and so there's no more juice to squeeze there. (Nominal interest rates, that is. But, again, not worth getting into...) The big remaining option is what's known as unconventional easing, wherein the Fed tries to inject more "liquidity" into the economy (i.e., lower the price and increase the availability of credit) by buying up various assets--like corporate debt, consumer loans, mortgage-backed securities, or all of the above and more. So what Goldman tried to figure out is how much in the way of assets you'd have to buy up to replicate the effect of, say, another 1 percentage point drop in interest rates. Their answer: about $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48338/how-much-ammunition-does-the-fed-have-left |
How would SF Giants have handled a Trump White House invitation? | Imagine any of the Giants three celebratory visits to the White House, and now imagine half the team refusing to go because of objections with the president. Imagine Matt Cain and Ryan Vogelsong and Aubrey Huff standing behind the president for a photo op, and now imagine Sergio Romo and Santiago Casilla and Angel Pagan declining the invitation to attend. It would defeat the whole purpose of the event, a Giants team in unison celebrating the accomplishment of an entire roster and visiting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to get honored as part of a grand American tradition. The reigning champion Red Sox visited the White House on Thursday, and their trip was overshadowed by talk of racial divide. According to reports, all the Red Soxs white players attended Giants pitcher Drew Pomeranz, who played in Boston the past three years, was there but at least 10 minority players took a pass, including last years American League MVP, Mookie Betts. Other Red Sox no-shows included pitcher David Price, center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr., shortstop Xander Bogaerts, third baseman Rafael Devers and catchers Sandy Leon and Christian Vazquez. Plus the manager, Alex Cora, whos frustrated that the Trump administration hasnt done enough for his native Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria. Cora said, I dont feel comfortable celebrating in the White House. President Trump has been a racial lightning rod, including in the sports world, especially with his criticisms of NFL players protesting police brutality by kneeling during national anthems. Imagine Bruce Bochy declining an invitation to meet with President Obama. Its inconceivable. But since Trump took office, decisions by championship teams and players to attend White House gatherings have become newsier than the events themselves. The Warriors, after winning last seasons NBA championship, decided as a team they wouldnt attend a White House ceremony. On the surface, that made it easier for everyone concerned. Either everyone goes, or nobody goes. Nothing divisive. In any event, Trump disinvited them. Same with the Super Bowl champion Eagles after several players said they wouldnt go. Trump didnt disinvite the Red Sox even though Cora and several players had stated in advance theyd skip it. Everyone was left to choose for himself, and the experience seemed to be awkward and uncomfortable for those involved, including Red Sox chairman Tom Werner, who said, We dont see it as a racial divide when in fact it was. Bill Gould, professor emeritus of law at Stanford Law School and former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, told me in an email that he commends Cora on his display of leadership in choosing not to visit the White House. Gould, an African American who has been a White Sox fan since 1946, shared the same words in a letter published by the Boston Globe. Gould wrote that hes comforted by the new ownerships sharp break with the clubs tolerance and promotion of racism in the previous century but added the teams progress would be clouded by attending the White House function. The Red Sox never should have agreed to dirty the clubs reputation by meeting with this man, Gould wrote, and shouldnt have put Cora and others in the position of acting on their own. The Giants visits during Obamas administration seemed apolitical, players from both sides of the aisle and all around the globe showing up to be acknowledged for their achievements as a team. For us, it was an honor to be invited, said Giants bench coach Hensley Meulens, a native of Curacao who speaks five languages. If other people have issues going, thats their decision. I cant speak for anybody else. I think we all went. I dont know what guys would do here now. Its unfortunate, the situation. The Giants had no African Americans on their World Series rosters but many Latin players, including a record five Venezuelans in 2012. No white Red Sox players did that. J.D. Martinez was the lone minority player to attend. The Red Sox were split apart Thursday and now will try to show it wont carry over into the clubhouse. It wasnt encouraging when a Washington Post reporter asking questions about the White House visit was denied access after Wednesdays game. John Shea is The San Francisco Chronicles national baseball writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @JohnSheaHey | https://www.sfchronicle.com/giants/shea/article/How-would-SF-Giants-have-handled-a-Trump-White-13836469.php |
Does Anybody Here Understand What A Tax Bracket Is? | My post about ignorant rich people who think they can have a higher after-tax income by holding their earnings under $250,000 a year brought on a follow-up from National Review's Stephen Spruiell: But these taxpayers have other reasons to be worried. Obama has proposed increasing the tax rate on capital gains and dividends from 15 to 20 percent for those taxpayers earning over $250,000 (married) and $200,000 (single). Maybe I'm wrong about this (if I am, I'm sure Chait will let me know). Jesus Christ, yes, you're wrong. Taxes on capital gains income and dividends work the same as taxes on ordinary income. When you move int a higher bracket, only the income above that level is taxes at the higher rate. So, the lowest ordinary income tax rate is 10%. Everybody, including Bill Gates, pays some of their income tax at the 10% rate. Nobody pays their highest tax rate on all their income. Of course he could. He could do the same with the reduced tax deductions for high-income earners. But he won't. Nobody has ever designed a tax system like that. Commenter "ratnerstar" has the right idea here: It's time to stop educating these ignorant rich people and start taking advantage of them. We have some number of high-income people out there who earnestly think they can increase their take-home pay by decreasing their salaries.This is one of the great scamming opportunities of all time, with the side bonus that the targets richly deserve their fate. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48174/does-anybody-here-understand-what-tax-bracket |
Who Is Scott Gration? | Gration's military past is also a plus. While a senator, Obama derived significant street cred from Gration's martial gravitas. Now, Sudan experts tell me that Khartoum will respect the appointment of a military man--especially one like Gration, who ran Iraq's northern no-fly zone during the late 1990s--because President Bashir is himself a colonel and his government will see it as a signal of Obama's forcefulness. But there are also a few reasons for Darfur interventionists to worry. Significantly, Gration originally had his heart set on running NASA. Obama tried to put him there until defense lobbyists scotched the idea. This raises questions about whether this new assignment is an afterthought for both Gration and the administration. If Obama sees the Darfur envoy simply as a patronage job for loyal supporters--like the multilateral affairs job that went to Power--then he may not be that ambitious about Darfur. That would certainly fit the widespread perception that Obama has so far been ineffectual about Sudan, only rushing to appoint Gration after an uproar from advocacy groups. And Gration's diplomatic experience is thin--not a good thing for someone about to parachute into the middle of a diplomatic crisis with hundreds of thousands of lives at stake. (Most profiles of Gration emphasize that he knows about Africa by emphasizing how he was born in Congo and speaks Swahili--a language that is of course totally useless in Sudan.) Like previous envoys, it's likely he will spend nine months bringing himself up to speed on the issues; meanwhile, the U.S. will continue on its current blithe course, driven by entrenched players at the State Department. Finally, Gration's personality and institutional mandate are only so important. Ultimately, it's policy that matters--and we have little idea what policy Gration himself would prefer. In October, he spoke about Darfur, Israel-Palestine, and Georgia to reporter Nick Lemann, telling him that: "We've got to fix the basic issues here. ... What doesn't work is forcing a solution. Create an environment, give people the opportunity to air their differences, and see if they can come together. We don't tell them what the solution is, but we do have an obligation--let's get people in here, find out the needs, see if you can come up with a plan. Don't try to freeze conflicts!" Not necessarily the germ of a coherent Sudan policy. --Barron YoungSmith | https://newrepublic.com/article/48534/who-scott-gration |
Does The Geithner Plan Reward Savvy Investing? | Felix Salmon, pivoting off this somewhat obscure post, makes a great point: Essentially, we are not living in a world where investment prowess is repaid, and the fate of the private-sector participants in Geithner's public-private partnerships is pretty much out of their hands. Either all of these assets are going to appreciate in value, or all of them are going to decline in value. And that's largely a function of what happens to international financial markets and to the global economy as a whole. The potential buyers of these assets can do all the homework they like, trying to bid on slightly better assets rather than slightly worse ones, but the big risks -- to both the downside and the upside -- are systemic. In other words, the private participants in the Treasury plan aren't really adding value, they're just gambling that things are more likely to get better than they are to get worse. Eventually, if things get better, then this kind of plan might make sense: correlations will come back down from 1, where they are presently, and private investors will be able to play a useful role in separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to those legacy assets. For the time being, however, the days for such sifting remain far in the future. And it's not at all clear why it pays to bring private investors in at this stage. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48580/does-the-geithner-plan-reward-savvy-investing |
Can Democracies Deal With Economic Crisis? | That's one of the questions I grapple with a bit in my profile of Larry Summers this week. In addition to some ongoing developments that make you wonder, there's evidence from the recent past that our political system isn't ideally suited to dealing with financial and economic crises. The example I cite in the piece is the successuful U.S. loan package to Mexico in 1995, which wouldn't have happened if Congress had its way. But however you feel about that, it's hard not to conclude that our political institutions are far, far better at dealing with these crises than their European counterparts. Paul Krugman has a really insightful riff on this in his column today: Europes economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europes many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of Americas many states and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesnt have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis. This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: theres no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries. You might expect monetary policy to be more forceful. After all, while there isnt a European government, there is a European Central Bank. But the E.C.B. isnt like the Fed, which can afford to be adventurous because its backed by a unitary national government a government that has already moved to share the risks of the Feds boldness, and will surely cover the Feds losses if its efforts to unfreeze financial markets go bad. The E.C.B., which must answer to 16 often-quarreling governments, cant count on the same level of support. In some ways the Europeans have too much democracy, in other ways too little: Each national government is pretty responsive to its citizens, which is why none of them is moving. But because there's no pan-European authority that has broad, democratic legitimacy, there's paralysis on that level, too. It really does make our political system look functional by comparison. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48424/can-democracies-deal-economic-crisis |
How Crucial Are The Climate Talks In December? | Earlier this morning, I sat in on a Brookings Institution panel on the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen, where various countries will try to thrash out a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol this December. It sounds like a dry topic, sure, but the panelists actually ended up getting into a heatedangry, evendebate over the role of the United States in these negotiations. The arguments mainly revolved around how much was actually riding on Copenhagen. On one side, more or less, was Carlos Pascual of Brookings, who argued that, while a global treaty with aggressive targets for emission cuts was absolutely critical to averting drastic climate change, "We can't let the calendar defeat us." It's possible, he argued, that the Copenhagen talks could collapse, or that everyone could agree to a disappointingly weak new emissions regime, or thatas happened with the Clinton administration during the 1990sthe Obama team could leave Copenhagen having agreed to greenhouse-gas reductions that then get rejected by Congress. Indeed, making things especially delicate was the fact that the House and Senate probably won't finish up a domestic cap-and-trade bill before the talks get underway in December. So, he argued, we also need to think about backup plans. (Pascual also pointed out that, thanks to the current financial crisis, it might be difficult merely to achieve harmony among EU member states right nowlet alone getting the EU, United States, and developing countries into alignment.) Two of the European panelists went livid over this suggestion. In their view, Copenhagen really is an all-or-nothing proposition. If the talks go sour, we may have no chance of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2C, which means gambling on the fate of the planet. Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, replied that Pascual's view "wasn't good enoughthe United States can't come to Copenhagen and mumble." And Connie Hedegaard, the Danish energy minister, argued that setting expectations too low would give the United States and other countries an excuse to go slowwhereas scientists are warning we need to cut emissions sharply as soon as possible. Essentially, de Boer argued that the Obama administration should agree to a robust emissions treaty at Copenhagen and then go home and use that as leverage to push Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill. (This is similar to what the EU did after Kyoto.) Pascual replied that politically, it could make it more difficult to pass a climate bill in the United States if Congress feels like it's being forced to meet some target previously agreed on by international diplomats. Rational or not, U.S. senators don't react well to that sort of thing. Pascual suggested that, instead, Congress should pass some sort of resolution agreeing in principle to near-term targets before Copenhagen, in addition to a bunch of other, more modest clean-energy measures, such as a nationwide renewable-energy mandate for utilities. With all that under its belt, the Obama administration could go into the talks with a strong position even if Congress is still bickering over the details of a formal cap-and-trade bill. (And it's very unlikely a cap will get enacted before 2010.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48193/how-crucial-are-the-climate-talks-december |
How Exciting Are These New Battery Advances? | Last week, two scientists at MIT, Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder, announced what seeemd like a promising breakthrough in battery technology: a modified lithium-ion battery that could be recharged very quickly. Cell phones could recharge in seconds. A 15kWh battery, which is about what the Chevy Volt would need to go 40 miles, could recharge in five minutes, making refueling a lot easier than previously envisioned. Better yet, the battery doesn't use new materialwe already know how to make lithium-ion batteries for computers and cell phones and so forth; all that's different is the way the battery is made, which means the new battery could hit the market in just a few years. Still, I wasn't quite sure what it might mean for the future of electric cars until reading Josie Garthwaite's excellent post: In itself, the battery breakthrough of the month wont change your lifenot the car you drive, the source of electricity for your town or the way you use energy in your home. Ceder and Kang have been clear about this, though theyve set an ambitious timeline, saying the technology could be on the market within two to three years. Rizzoni emphasized hurdles beyond manufacturing (also mentioned in MITs release about the study), noting that major infrastructure investments (hello, stimulus) would be necessary to achieve the rapid charge times their research has opened up as a possibility. Even if production was a done deal, standard outlets wouldnt pack enough punch to give the batteries a full charge within minutes. Taken in combination, recent breakthroughswhich also include 3Ms recently announced battery balancing technologyreflect an industry very much on the move. With a massive injection of federal dollars for battery, energy storage and vehicle research, its poised to accelerate. But to put it bluntly, none of the recent breakthroughs will translate to mass transformation of the auto or energy industry unless costs come down (including those associated with licensing proprietary technology) and production ramps up. So it's an exciting breakthrough (much like news of a potential "spin battery" that uses magnets to power up), but there's still plenty of grunt work to be done to bring affordable electric cars to the marketplace. Sounds about right. --Bradford Plumer | https://newrepublic.com/article/48503/how-exciting-are-these-new-battery-advances |
Couldn't We Have Renegotiated The Bonuses? | Steve Pearlstein, The Washington Post's financial columnist, suggests the AIG bonus contracts could have easily been renegotiated prior to the big train wreck this weekend. (His argument is pretty similar to my own renegotiation proposal, though he talks about it as something that should have happened already rather than something that could still happen): The legal argument for honoring these ill-considered contracts is that a deal is a deal and that trying to abrogate them will only wind up costing the government even more in legal fees and punitive damages. But that doesn't mean the government and its handpicked new management team at AIG were powerless to renegotiate those contracts long before last weekend's deadline. ... Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I suspect that when confronted with the prospect of a bankruptcy and a prolonged and public investigation, the sharpies in London and Connecticut might have been receptive to the idea of renegotiating those bonuses in favor of new contracts -- contracts that increased their base pay but tied their bonuses to success in reducing future taxpayer liabilities at AIG. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48487/couldnt-we-have-renegotiated-the-bonuses |
Are The Europeans Dragging Us Into A Depression? | Via Matt Yglesias, I see the blog Fistful of Euros has a long and interesting (but somewhat technical) post arguing that Europe is rapidly heading into deflationary territory--deflationary spirals being bad because they bring about depressions. Worse, the man who runs the European Central Bank, Jean Claude Trichet, seems blithely indifferent to the situation--indifference being bad because the central bank is really the only institution capable of preventing such a spiral. (Say what you will about Ben Bernanke's role in the various corporate bailouts so far, he's been unbelievably aggressive in easing interest rates and leveraging the Fed's balance sheet to fight deflationary pressure.) It's a pretty huge concern given that, as Matt points out, Trichet presides over an even larger share of the global economy than the Fed. P.S. Matt also pipes up on something I meant to get into earlier--the lunatic idea that deficit spending can't stimulate the economy because people simply save their money in anticipation of offsetting tax increases down the road. This is a rather strained view of a concept economists call "Ricardian equivalence," and Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, has devoted a few academic papers to blowing enormous holes in it. (Paul Krugman weighs in a bit here and Brad DeLong here.) Update: Megan McArdle is also concerned. She has some worthwhile thoughts on the political and cultural context in which Trichet operates. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48164/are-the-europeans-dragging-us-depression |
Is Nationalization Even Legal? | Via Andrew, I see Time's razor sharp economics columnist, Justin Fox, has some questions about whether the government could seize a bank like Citi even if it wanted to: FDIC chairman Sheila Bair doesn't think a full government takeover of Citigroup and other multinational financial institutions is practical or even possible. Here are her reasons, as summarized by Pete Davis : 1. The legal authority to take over large banks does not currently extend to multinational financial conglomerates; 2. The FDIC lacks the funding to conduct such a massive bailout; 3. Other countries have regulatory oversight of these financial conglomerates too, and they may object to a U.S. takeover. This made me curious as to how much of Citigroup was a domestic commercial bank that the FDIC could take over ... Citigroup has liabilities of $1.797 trillion. The deposits that the FDIC has some responsibility for (up to $250,000 per depositor) add up to $241 billion. So we have this reasonably sensible system for winding down troubled banks, but when it comes to the most troubled big banking company in the country, said system only covers a fraction of the overall operation. Which leads to a couple of conclusions: 1. I get why the administration is so reluctant to take over Citi completely. 2. I don't get why we all (I'm including myself in this) thought it was okay to allow the creation and growth of gigantic financial companies for which we had absolutely no plan for winding down in case of trouble. One more reason, I think, to ease up on the assumption that Geithner must be an idiot if he hasn't yet nationalized the banks. Relatedly, Ben Bernanke had some thoughts on the subject in his testimony last week. Per that Journal piece I cited earlier: U.S. officials don't have a template for winding down a company of Citigroup's size and complexity, which Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear at a Senate hearing last week. "I'd like to challenge the Congress to give us a framework, where we can resolve a multinational complicated financial conglomerate like Citigroup, like AIG, or others, if that became necessary," Mr. Bernanke told the Senate budget committee. P.S. Apologies for the light posting today. I'm crashing on a long piece that should be out Friday. After that, it's all Stash, all the time. We can even do an open mic or something, though I'm not sure how that would work in practice. Maybe Congress can give us a framework for that, too. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48328/nationalization-even-legal |
Who Is All That Aig Money Really Helping? | Two quick AIG thoughts, both of them relating to who it is we're bailing out by propping up AIG. First, as the Times points out in an editorial today, and Josh Marshall has repeatedly observed, one company that clearly had a lot to lose if AIG failed was Goldman Sachs, the former employer of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. As the Times writes: The serial A.I.G. bailouts are especially problematic for their connection to the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs. At the time of the first A.I.G. rescue last fall, it was reported by Gretchen Morgenson in The Times that Goldman was A.I.G.s largest trading partner, with some $20 billion of business tied into the insurer. Goldman has said that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was offset, or hedged, by other investments. What is certain is that Goldman has lots of friends in high places--yet one more reason why this bailout has to be as transparent as possible. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldmans chief executive, was the only Wall Street executive at a September meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial A.I.G. bailout. Also involved in the discussion was the then head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, who is now President Obamas Treasury secretary. It's worth adding, though I'm not entirely sure what the significance is or should be, that Paulson appointed AIG's current CEO, Edward Liddy, who'd been a member of the Goldman board. (Former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg reminded me of this in our interview yesterday.) Second, as Tyler Cowen points out, riffing off another Times piece, the money we pour into AIG is actually propping up a lot of European institutions: | https://newrepublic.com/article/48168/who-all-aig-money-really-helping |
Why Would Democrats Want Arlen Specter? | A couple days ago I wrote an item doubting that Arlen Specter would have much success if he pulled a Lieberman by bolting the GOP and becoming an Independent. My rationale was that, unlike Connecticut Republicans in 2006, Pennsylvania Democrats would nominate a solid candidate in 2010 for the U.S. Senate. It never occurred to me that Specter might leave the GOP to become a Democrat--because, frankly, I just assumed the Pennsylvania Democratic Party wouldn't want him. It looks like I might have assumed wrong: Senior officials with the powerful AFL-CIO have privately assured GOP Senator Arlen Specter that theyll throw their full support behind him in the 2010 Senate race if he votes for the Employee Free Choice Act, a senior labor strategist working closely with the AFL on the issue tells me. [snip] Interestingly, because labor support would actually hurt him in a GOP primary, AFL-CIOs promise also is an incentive to switch parties earlier, rather than later. Some analysts think his only hope of holding on to his seat is to switch parties and prevail in a general election, something which labor backing would make easier. To be sure, theres no telling what Specter will do, and another wild card is whether Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell would back a Specter switch. Honestly, I really don't see why Rendell would back a Specter switch. A recent poll found that 53 percent of Pennsylvanians want him out of the Senate after 2010. His stimulus (and potential EFCA) votes aside, he wouldn't be a reliable Democratic vote. And it's not like there aren't other Pennsylvania Democrats out there who would make very strong candidate--whether it's Patrick Murphy or Joe Sestak or Allyson Schwartz or even someone else. Throw in the fact that Specter's no spring chicken, and I'm surprised Democrats would even consider welcoming a party switch on his part. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48379/why-would-democrats-want-arlen-specter |
Who's Afraid Of Socialism? | I'm talking here about the label, not the idea. Conservatives have spent a lot of time calling President Obama a "socialist," for endorsing such heresies as higher taxes on the wealthy (as we've had for much of this country's history) and universal health insurance (which happens to exist in every developed country except ours). The fact that Obama called back the New York Times, after his interview, to clarify this point makes me wonder. I'm not privy to their poll numbers, obviously, so perhaps they know something I don't. But I agree with other bloggers who've suggested the socialism charge probably doesn't have the same juice it used to have. The charge resonated a lot more a few decades ago, when large portions of the population could remember when socialism was a living, breathing political movement in this country. Nowadays, it's a pretty meaningless threat. There's one other reason I think the socialism charge might not resonate. When conservatives accuse Obama of socialism, they're criticizing the policies he's pursuing to rescue the country from economic collapse. But implicit in that charge is that Obama at least doing something--and, no less important, that he's doing something big and new. Meanwhile, the Republicans are proposing, well, not much of anything--except some familiar old tax cuts. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48279/whos-afraid-socialism |
Does It Pay To Have A Cult Following? | Apparently. Hersh: I really wanted to give the music away, but I know it means the music will stop. The model I am using is one of community-supported agriculture or public radio. Downloading the music is still free, but people can buy subscriptions to support my recording fees. Hersh: Quite a lot. For $30 a quarter, they get advance copies of all of my CDs, exclusive live downloads, and guest privileges for any one of my shows. They also get what we are calling "the bat phone" -- which is really our office number, and they can call any time they want. For a one-time contribution of $500, they get to visit me in the studio while I am recording. For $1,000, they get listed on the album credits, and for $5,000, they get an executive producer credit. On the one hand, I find it kind of depressing that someone would fork over $500 just to sit in on a Kristin Hersh recording session. (I don't know if I'd be willing to pay even $100 to watch my own cult obsession, Will Oldham, record; granted, if I did, Will would probably get all ornery and kick me out after a couple songs.) On the other hand, it's encouraging that an artist like Hersh can make a financial go of it by capitalizing on people who never outgrew the early '90s coming up with these sorts of innovative approaches. I know there's been a lot of talk about the financial way forward for print media, but you wonder if some of Hersh's money-making ideas could be adapted by newspapers and the like. Sure, people would complain that this prostitutes the paper and corrupts the editorial process, but it's a lot less corrupting than other ideas out there (paying for article placement and the like) and these are desperate times. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48290/does-it-pay-have-cult-following |
Is March Madness The Antidote To Populism? | It is in Connecticut. A few weeks ago, UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun went on a tirade in response to a blogger's question about whether he, as Connecticut's highest-paid government employee, would consider giving back some of his $1.6 million salary to help with the state's budget crunch. (Entertaining video here.) Now, a new Q-Poll finds that, by a margin of 61 to 30, Connecticut residents agree with Calhoun that he should keep his money. Even more remarkably, much of the poll was conducted after UConn lost to Pitt on Saturday for the second time this season. P.S. Shameless Roy Williams plug: I think this is the better way to go about answering a question about your outsized salary. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48340/march-madness-the-antidote-populism |
Can Specter Pull A Lieberman? | Mickey gets an answer that Pennsylvania election law prohibits Specter from doing the full Lieberman--i.e. lose his primary and then run as an independent--but that he could do a modified Lieberman by dropping out of the GOP primary and running as an independent. Remember, the only reason Independent Joe was able to beat Ned Lamont in the general election was because the Connecticut GOP did not, for all intents and purposes, field a candidate, meaning that Lieberman was able to win the bulk of Connecticut Republicans. In Pennsylvania, a number of serious Democrats are considering a run for Specter's seat, including Democratic Congressmen Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak. Yes, a recent poll found that 49 percent of registered Dems in Pennsylvania favored Specter for another term, but you have to imagine those numbers will significantly drop once the Democrats choose a candidate. So I have a hard time seeing how Specter would win a general election campaign against Toomey and a serious Democratic pol. In other words, his best bet for keeping his seat could be sticking it out in the GOP. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48281/can-specter-pull-lieberman |
What Weed Is Renee Loth Smoking? | The Boston Globe has tiny heft these days. After all, it's owned by The New York Times. In a twelve-page world and national news and editorial section it devotes about eight pages to print. The rest, ads. (There are small metro, sports and business sections, too.) You don't really get a lot of hard information from the Globe. But you sure get your fill of Renee Loth's opinion. She's the editor of the editorial page. I envy Ms. Loth. She is actually optimistic about Darfur. Not only about the warrant issued by the International Court of Justice for President Omar al-Bashir's arrest. But... ...There is also a chance that the court's arrest warrant for Bashir's arrest could have a transforming political effect. If members of his regime become sufficiently nervous about serving with a wanted criminal, and if their come under the right kind of pressure from other African Union and Arab League governments, they might decide it is in their interest to remove Bashir, make peace with resistance movements in Darfur, and enable the 2.7 million displaced people of Darfur to return to their villages. The Obama administration should exert its influence in the United Nations Security Council and with African nations to help bring about this outcome. It would be acting on the adage that says without justice there is no peace. What a sweet view of the world. I wish I had the weed Ms. Loth is smoking. Just as a post-script you might want to know that both the regime in Tehran and Hamas, its emulator in Gaza, have denounced the court for acting like colonials. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48302/what-weed-renee-loth-smoking |
What Is Pork, Really? | This is why we love Mike Grunwald: A whip-smart Time piece cutting through the BS around earmarks: The point is that most Americans think of pork as waste. That's why Republicans called the stimulus bill "Porkulus," even though it had no actual earmarks. The fact that money is earmarked does not prove it is wasted, and the fact that money is not earmarked does not prove it is not wasted. This is common sense, when you think about it. Earmarks got their name from the bygone practice of branding the ears of livestock to identify their owners, but no one would have thought a pig without an earmark was kosher. The vast majority of wasteful federal spending sprawl roads and bridges to nowhere, corporate welfare for agribusinesses and Big Oil and King Coal, bloated health care costs, and so on is done within the regular appropriations process. It's not as soundbite-ready as a $238,000 earmark for the Polynesian Voyaging Society, but it's a lot more expensive. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48258/what-pork-really |
Will Obama Have A Candidate In 2010? | The Hill is reporting that Bill Daley--former Commerce Secretary and brother of Chicago mayor Richard Daley--is leaning toward running for Roland Burris's Senate seat in 2010. This is interesting for any number of reasons, but one of them is what it does to Illinois state Treasurer Illinois Alexi Giannoulias, who's also leaning toward running. Both Giannoulias and Daley are tight with Obama: Giannoulias frequently played hoops with Obama; Daley played a prominent role on Obama's transition team. My guess is Obama would have publicly stayed neutral in the 2010 race no matter what, but now he might be hard-pressed to even express a preference behind-the-scenes. Making matters even more interesting, The Hill article says that, if Daley runs, he'll have the help of Larry Grisolano, who was one of Obama's media gurus in '08 and, after the campaign, joined David Axelrod's old consulting firm. Giannoulias's media consultant is Eric Adelstein, who, according to Obama biographer David Mendell, famously told Obama not long after 9/11 that his name would prove too big an obstacle to win the 2004 Senate campaign and that he shouldn't run. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48233/will-obama-have-candidate-2010 |
Are Scientific Breakthroughs Overrated? | Very loosely speaking, there are two types of technological advances: the everyday, run-of-the-mill sort, and then the big, truly transformational discoveries. In the latter category we can include the transistor, which was developed by AT&T's Bell Labs in the 1940s and revolutionized the field of electronics. (It's certainly in the mix for best invention of the twentieth century.) And one of the big questions surrounding this clean-energy economy that Obama wants to bring about is whether it will require those sorts of sweeping scientific breakthroughsor whether we can muddle by with small improvements on our existing solar, nuclear, and biofuel ideas. A few weeks ago, Jim Tankersly of the Los Angeles Times reported that many federal officials believe we really will need radical breakthroughs: A recent Energy Department task force report details the sort of breakthroughs crucial to fulfilling Obama's vision of a "clean energy economy" that could slash dependence on foreign oil, combat climate change and ignite the next great domestic job boom. The wish list includes cells that convert sunlight to electricity with double or triple the efficiency of today's solar panels; batteries that store 10 times more energy than current models; a process for capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal; and advanced materials that allow coal and nuclear power plants to operate at hotter temperatures and higher efficiency. Researchers are working on all of them. But what's required is more than incremental advances in technology. It is advances in understanding basic physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach," the report said. That's daunting. But not everyone concurs. The IPCC, in its 2007 assessment report, argued that we can curb emissions and keep atmospheric carbon below the risky zone of 450 parts per million by using "a portfolio of technologies that are currently available and those that are expected to be commercialized in coming decades." No need to wait for cold fusion. Similarly, Joe Romm, who worked in the Energy Department's technology office during the Clinton years, has warned that genuinely game-changing breakthroughs come about very rarely, and if we want to slash global emissions 80 percent or more by mid-century, we'll have to make do with technologies that are out there or just over the horizon. On this view, we can likely count on solar photovoltaic panels becoming steadily cheaper and more efficient over time. It's also not a stretch, perhaps, to expect that engineers will figure out how to capture carbon from coal emissions and store it in geological reservoirs deep underground. But we shouldn't bet on revolutionary gadgets like hydrogen fuel cells appearing and upending the transport sector anytime soon. (Plug-in vehicles are a safer gamble as a climate solution.) Basic scientific research is still worth funding, but the main policy tools needed here are a price on carbon and government support for deploying already-viable technologies as quickly as possible. Fair enough. But take a good long look at Romm's roadmap for keeping carbon below the 450 parts per million "red line" while relying on existing or just-around-the-corner technologies. It's daunting. Not impossible by any stretch, but really, really difficult. We're talking about adding 17 new nuclear plants around the world each yearand that's just to satisfy one of the fourteen "wedges" of a larger clean-energy push. A major technological breakthrough (or two!) certainly wouldn't hurt. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48120/are-scientific-breakthroughs-overrated |
How Many Racists Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb? | I get periodic news alerts from some journalist down in Tennessee about the political/cultural state of my home state. They're not always pride-inducing. For instance, the highlight of today's update: MTSU poll: One in Six Tennesseans Admit to Telling Racist Jokes About the President. Nearly one in six Tennesseans has told a joke about Barack Obama's race, and three-fourths say they've heard or read at least one, even though only 15 percent of Tennesseans say they would find such a joke funny. I'm puzzled as to why this mini-summary includes the phrase "even though," suggesting that the numbers don't come close to adding up. By my reading, the percentage of Tennesseans who admit to running around cracking racist jokes is roughly the same as the percentage who admit to finding said jokes amusing (16.7% vs. 15%). The remainder of the 75% are (hopefully) just passive by-standers who need to find a better class of friends and/or reading material. That said, I'm not entirely sure whether to regard these figures with disappointment or relief. On the one hand, you have to assume that the actual number of people who have told--or cackled at--a racist joke about POTUS is higher than the number who will admit to doing so. On the other hand, I'm kind of surprised the numbers aren't higher, considering the grim mood of the country. Not to delve too deeply into the psychology of Jim Webb's much beloved Scots-Irish good ol' boys (and gals) who dominate the Volunteer State, but the rednecks I grew up with most often resorted to racial nastiness when they were feeling bad about their own standing in the world. You know, the revolting "logic" of: I may be working a crap job and have a wife who's cheating on me, but at least I'm not... | https://newrepublic.com/article/48166/how-many-racists-does-it-take-change-lightbulb |
Who Won Tnr's March Madness Pool? | March Madness is over, and the president has hailed the victors. Well, the winner is ... Jason Fleming. Congratulations, Mr. Fleming, and please email your contact information to byoungsmith at tnr.com. That way, you will receive a copy of TNR's next issue, hand-autographed and numbered 1 of 1 by the staffer of your choice. There might also be a mystery item, depending on if Noam does or does not lock his door the night before we send the package. Anyway, Matthew Tokson, John Boonstra, William Airhart, and Donald Blackton rounded out the top five. I guess I won among the TNR folks by coming in eighth. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48938/who-won-tnrs-march-madness-pool |
Is The Us The Next Ussr In Afghanistan? | At the presser after Obama's speech, the Pentagon undersecretary of defense for policy Michelle Flournoy says "no": MS. FLOURNOY: And I would just further add that there's absolutely no valid comparison between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was an occupation to control a country, repress a population, install their own sort of puppet leadership. We are there to, first and foremost, combat terrorism and protect our own interests and our own people from attack. But we're also there to help the Afghan people and enable them to reclaim their country. There is absolutely no comparison that's valid between the two. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48698/the-us-the-next-ussr-afghanistan |
When Is the 2019 NBA Draft Lottery? | The NBA draft lottery will take place at 8:30 ET on Tuesday, May 14. You can watch the draft lottery results aired live on ESPN. The New York Knicks, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Phoenix Suns have the best odds of securing the No. 1 pick in the 2019 draft. Each team holds a 14% chance to earn the top pick. After those three, the Chicago Bulls (12.5%), the Atlanta Hawks (10.5%) and the Washington Wizards (9%) have the best remaining odds. This year's lottery marks the first time the new lottery rules take effect; in the past, the league's worst team had a 25% chance to win the lottery, the second-worst team had a 19.9% chance to win, and the third-worst team had a 15.6% chance. Last year, the Suns won the lottery and selected Deandre Ayton No. 1. This year, it seems like Duke's Zion Williamson is a near-lock to go No. 1 overall, followed by Murray State's Ja Morant and Williamson's Duke teammate RJ Barrett. | https://www.si.com/nba/2019/05/when-is-2019-nba-draft-lottery-date-schedule-details |
Who Cares If The Stock Market Likes Geithner? | I'm not really sure what to think about the new Treasury plan. But I do know that the fact that the stock market rallied upon its announcement is not proof that it's a good plan, just as the market drop was not proof that the last iteration of the plan was bad. I made this point in my TRB column: Stock prices represent the market's guess at the profitability of corporations. While that's related to the health of the overall economy, it's not the same thing, and sometimes the two diverge sharply. During the Bush administration, for instance, corporate profits soared while wages for most families flatlined. One clear instance where Obama hurt the stock market came when Tim Geithner announced the administration's financial rescue plan. Stocks dropped that day. The two propositions mean very different things. Keep this in mind when you read passages like this, from today's New York Times coverage of the market rally: This is the free-money rally, said Barry Ritholtz, chief executive of Fusion IQ, an investment and research firm. Traders like the fact that theres a boatload of cash headed their way. Look, if the plan works, then I can live with subsidizing rich folks. But the fact that the market is rallying doesn't mean it will work, it just means that the rich folks think they'll come out ahead. --Jonathan Chait | https://newrepublic.com/article/48589/who-cares-if-the-stock-market-likes-geithner |
Did Putin Also Make A Cameo In An 80s Movie? | White House photographer Pete Souza has a fascinating find: a picture of Ronald Reagan visiting Moscow as president, talking to a tourist who looks an awful lot like Vladimir Putin. We can't be sure it's Putin. But, first, the Soviets made a habit of disguising KGB agents (of which Putin was one) as tourists when foreign dignitaries visited, where they would pepper the visitors with their party-line opinions. And second, the tourist in the photo eerily resembles the "CIA agent" who turns out to be an undercover KGB agent in the 1985 comedy "Spies Like Us." You can watch the scene where he's exposed here: --Jonathan Chait | https://newrepublic.com/article/48535/did-putin-also-make-cameo-80s-movie |
Why Are Foreigners Cooling On Long-term U.s. Debt? | Brad Setser spots the trend: [F]oreign demand for long-term Treasuries has disappeared over the last few months. ... The rolling 3m[onth] sum bounces around a bit, but foreign demand for long-term Treasuries in November, December and January was as subdued as it has been for a long-time. That's somewhat disconcerting, obviously, since we've been issuing a lot of debt lately. Paying a higher interest rate to entice foreign buyers could be crippling. Setser says there's need to panic yet--the decreased appetite for long-term Treasuries is a function of foreigners: a.) buying short-term Treasuries, and b.) having less money to invest (at least foreign central banks), not a loss of faith in the U.S. government. Still, the long-term implications are potentially worrying: [I]f as seems likely foreign demand for Treasuries fades long before the US fiscal deficit, the US Treasury will need to sell an awful lot of Treasuries to American investors. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48484/why-are-foreigners-cooling-long-term-us-debt |
What To Make Of The Strong Housing Data? | Goldman weighs in with its daily research report: The housing data this morning were much stronger than expected, and give at least a glimmer of hope that a stabilization in residential construction activity is approaching. Though we fairly heavily discount the 22% increase in starts as most came from a bounce in the volatile multifamily sector, we place more weight on the 11% rebound in single family permits. In recessions since 1960, with one exception during the 1974 recession, an increase in single-family permits of over 5% has always marked the bottom in permits. A few key caveats, though: A swing in the weatherfrom colder than normal in January to warmer than normal in Februarylikely helped to boost both single family permits and starts. Many economic activities are affected by the weather, but construction is particularly vulnerable. ... Another reason for skepticism is that these improvements show up in the first print of data, and the improvement could yet be revised away. ... Finally, there is a strong tendency for month-to-month mean reversion in economic data, and after the very large declines of the last several months this rebound could be just that. And, even if it the construction numbers are real, it's not good news for home prices: Building more houses stretches out the ongoing adjustment in the housing market by putting more supply on the market. The homeowner vacancy rateour favorite measure of excess supplyalready stands at a record level and downward price momentum is well entrenched. ... We continue to expect price declines of another 15-20% from yearend 2008. Which makes me think we'll eventually see some backsliding on the construction front. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48473/what-make-the-strong-housing-data |
What's A Little Flogging Among Radical Islamist Friends? | You've probably heard about that disgusting public whipping of a 17-year-old girl by the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat valley last week. In some ways the visceral impact of the video could have an upside by producing a domestic and international backlash against the Islamic radicals. Pakistan's president and prime minister, for instance, have ordered an investigation, and now the recently reinstated chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry has given the government 15 days to produce a public report. But the Weekly Standard's Bill Roggio says the Pakistani opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who is close to the Islamists, has been conspicuously silent. President Zardari may not inspire much confidence, but it's pretty hard to root for Sharif. Good times. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48891/whats-little-flogging-among-radical-islamist-friends |
Is China's Economy Bouncing Back? | This FT piece says maybe, even though exports (the main driver of Chinese economic growth) are still shrinking. The key boost is in the mortgage market, which doesn't seem super-sustainable. From what I can make out, the Chinese authorities are simply lending aggressively to prevent a real estate bubble from deflating entirely: The fall in the real-estate market has also shown some indications of having bottomed out, with a strong rebound in property transaction volumes and the first slight rise in month-on-month prices since last July. ... Cao Jianhai, a senior government analyst, told the FT he expects urban property prices to fall as much as 40 to 50 per cent across the country in the next two years as a result of huge oversupply and a serious disconnection between prices and income levels. ... He said positive signs in the property sector were being partly driven by a surge in bank lending, which grew a record Rmb1,890bn in March, bringing the total for the first quarter to Rmb4,580bn more than the entire amount of new loans extended last year and nearing the governments full-year target of at least Rmb5,000bn in 2009. Also, there are some signs Chinese consumers are beginning to pick up the slack a bit, though the days when China won't have to depend on American consumers living way beyond our means as we vaccuum up their exports still seem far off: Within China, sales of passenger vehicles in March rose 10 per cent from a year earlier, and 27 per cent from February, to 772,400, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, a sign that consumer demand remains robust. I guess this is not exactly going to help us cut those carbon emissions either... --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/49004/chinas-economy-bouncing-back |
When To Engage With Iran? | Yglesias flags the debate about whether to wait for Iran's June presidential election before engaging: Apparently, the British have one view on the merits of engaging with Iran before the election and the French have a different view. The Americans, meanwhile, disagree with themselves about this. On one level, this is a sort of minor thing to be disagreeing about relative to the big strategic picture. But on another level, its hard to get very far with Iran until you make a decision. But keep in mind there are some people who think it doesn't really matter. A former top aide to a Democrat known for his foreign policy expertise recently emailed me this: There is a deep-seated, willful desire to substitute hope over experience in dealing with Iran, and we continue to see it play out in the new/old wish for Khatami, the supposed moderate, to defeat Ahmadinejad. What a load of crap. The Clinton admin got sucked into that nonsense and it still persists. When you slap these people and demand the truth, they concede the clerics are in control, and they are master manipulators who have conducted successfully a global disinformation campaign that goes largely unchallenged. Iran has gotten to this point in its nuclear ambitions in part because the rest of the world is divided as to a course of action, and because the west so dishonors its adversaries that it refuses to take at face value the words and actions of those leaders. I don't consider myself enough of an Iran expert to offer the final word here, but it does seem worth bearing in mind before waiting several more months. Plenty of well-informed people do say that, at the end of the day, the Supreme Ruler is the only one who really matters. --Michael Crowley | https://newrepublic.com/article/48260/when-engage-iran |
What's With Wyoming's Workers? | Until just a few months ago, Wyoming actually had a shortage of workers to do jobs in the expanding natural resources and mining sector, which was boosted by skyrocketing energy prices. "It created a boom in the state--I mean a really big boom," Godby says. "There were openings everywhere." Companies went looking for workers in states like Michigan, where jobs had already fallen victim to the recession, and encouraged them to move to Wyoming. The state was also enjoying a budget surplus thanks to energy revenues, and it funded projects like school and prison construction that provided new jobs. "Public sector jobs are far less volatile to circumstances like this," Godby adds, noting that many Wyomingites work for the government--about 24 percent of all those with jobs, according to the Department of Employment. (Although there might be budget cuts in Wyoming next year, they'll likely be less severe than in states that are already floundering economically.) Since Wyoming's energy sector finally began to dip in late 2008--in December, its jobs were up 7.3 percent from the previous year, but it posted only 0.3 monthly growth--some people have been laid off. But many of these people had only been hired recently from other states (they're often called "first-hired, first-fired" workers because of the impermanence of their jobs), and some have just moved back home. "In Wyoming ... if you lose your job, you leave," Godby says, noting that mining and gas field workers' transience isn't unusual, although their numbers were above the norm during the recent energy boom. "If they leave the state, that then has a positive impact on the employment number." Gallagher adds that some non-residents have decided to ride out the storm and look for jobs when summer rolls in. However, because many in this group don't claim permanent homes in Wyoming--they often live in trailers, hotels, or group houses--their unemployment might not register in statistics gathered via household surveys. Still, some laid-off workers have already found other jobs; many sectors posted growth in December. Godby isn't so sure, especially if they're unwilling to go rustic and work in a natural gas field or coal mine, or at one of the state's recreational sites, like Jackson Hole or Yellowstone. "Wyoming doesn't have a metropolitan area over 60,000 people," he says. "It's a rural economy ... and there are a few jobs in a limited set of areas." Plus, Dick Cheney lives there. (Pictured: A coal conveyor belt at the Blacke Butte Mine near Rawlins, Wyoming.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48263/whats-wyomings-workers |
What Should Obama Do In Darfur? | In Part 2, Alex de Wall, co-author of Darfur: A New History of a Long War, brings a single priority to the forefront: "Ensuring that the right of self-determination for Southern Sudan is exercised in a consensual, orderly, and legitimate manner. Everything else should be secondary and supportive to that. Let me underline: everything." In Part 3, Smith College professor Eric Reeves, who has written extensively on Sudan, argues that the root of the problem is Bashir's ruling party. Describing these men as "ruthless survivalists," Reeves forecasts that "unless we change their calculations about how they will survive, then Darfur's grim genocide by attrition will continue, with huge increases in mortality, and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement will wither as the real test of elections approaches." In Part 4, TNR contributing editor Alan Wolfe highlights the humanitarian consequences of the court's decision: "In reaction to the ICC decision, Bashir immediately ordered ten major humanitarian aid organizations out of the country, including not only Doctors Without Borders but Oxfam. Bashir has been roundly criticized for his actions and he deserves every bit of it. But if some two million people are harmed by it, can we really say, as Richard does, that 'the decision was clearly the right one from a legal perspective'?" And in Part 5, our latest posting, New York Times Magazine contributor Elizabeth Rubin underlines the gravity of the situation and the necessity to act swiftly, suggesting that "Obama should take the lead here and support the ICC, sign the treaty, and let the law be a check on the immoral compromises politicians will always make as long as there is impunity." Click here for the roundtable's homepage, with links to each part of the discussion. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48252/what-should-obama-do-darfur |
Is Caldera Obama's Brownie? | Louis Caldera, the director of the White House Military Office who was responsible for yesterday's incredibly stupid Air Force One stunt in NYC, has an impressive resume in some respects: West Point, Harvard Law, Harvard Business School, Secretary of the Army under Bill Clinton. But he's got some pretty major red flags on his resume as well. He stepped down as the University of New Mexico's president after a rocky three year tenure. He also served on the board of the failed bank IndyMac. Maybe not as much of a red flag as being forced out as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, but you do wonder. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49344/caldera-obamas-brownie |
Are Collins And Snowe Next? | Ben Smith notes that in 1994, seven Congressional Democrats went over to the GOP, suggesting that Specter's switch to the Dems "could be the beginning, not the end, of a party shuffle." The obvious candidates to follow Specter--since I don't think Richard Burr or John Cornyn is going to become a Dem any time soon--are his fellow Northeastern Republicans, Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. But I doubt this is going to happen. Unlike Specter, they don't face a mortal threat from their own state GOP, if only because Collins isn't up for reelection until 2016 2014 and Snowe isn't up until 2012. Yes, Snowe is offering up negative quotes about the GOP in the wake of Specter's switch, but she was offering up similar quotes nine years ago when Jim Jeffords left the GOP. So, for that matter, was Specter. From a 2001 NYT article on Jeffords's switch: Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who frequently votes with the moderates, said the loss of Mr. Jeffords was ''like a death in the family,'' and it had prompted a lot of soul-searching. ''I do believe that there will be some changes in the Republican caucus to reflect the more centrist positions,'' he said. ''We really have to face up to the fact that we lost some key seats in the last election.'' Of course, Specter didn't find it in his soul to bolt the GOP until he realized he was going to lose his reelection campaign. I think it'll take a similar realization for Snowe and Collins to do the same. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49351/are-collins-and-snowe-next |
Should under 12s be banned from contact sports? | Some of the world's leading experts on head injuries in sport have suggested no children should be playing contact sport before the age of 12. A group of Boston scientists told the Herald this week that the younger you started sports like rugby and American football, the greater your chances of suffering degenerative brain diseases. We put that to some key members of the Bay of Plenty rugby and sporting community who accepted the research but had a slightly different view on the best way to prepare children for contact sport and life in general. The suggestion that children under the age of 12 should not be allowed to play contact sport has been rubbished by members of the Bay of Plenty rugby community. While those involved in introducing children to contact sport in the Bay of Plenty, many of them parents themselves, accept the Boston scientists' findings, they argue that the same could be said of most rough and tumble activities children get up to. They say the key to sport is it is played in a safe and controlled environment. In Bay of Plenty, children play rippa rugby and smaller versions of the game until they are in the under-8 grade and then progress to contact. Advertisement Central Bay of Plenty junior rugby officer Polly Playle said she worried studies like these would put off parents who didn't know the game. As well as her role with the rugby union, she plays premier rugby and has a daughter who plays. "If I didn't know anything about the game it would be quite off-putting. If I wasn't a rugby player myself and my kid was playing and I heard that I'd be quite concerned. "From my experiences, it's about learning the right way to tackle and what to do after being tackled to stay safe." Members of the Bay of Plenty Rugby Union have weighed in on whether children under 12 should play contact sport. In her role, Playle runs holiday programmes and training modules for junior players which always focus on safety and proper technique. "We only teach tackle to 9-year-olds and up but in that environment it's controlled and safe - we start right back from the basics and progress. You teach a drill, you let them do it, assess it and then you can modify or progress. You're always assessing and adjusting to make sure they're safe." Black Ferns Sevens captain Sarah Hirini grew up as a country kid playing contact sport and feels lucky to have not suffered concussion over the years. She said she had always enjoyed playing contact sport and believed it was up to the parents to decide what is best for their own children. "To be honest it's up to the parents choice of what they choose to put their kids in or not, like I don't know, I don't have children at the moment but all I do know is that I grew up playing contact sport. I have been very lucky to not have concussions and I suppose, for me, I've just enjoyed playing them. "I can't comment on anyone else's decision but if you want to protect yourself then you do everything you can to do that, and that's cool." Black Ferns Sevens captain Sarah Hirini grew up playing contact sport. Photo / Getty Images Rotorua's Pete Makiha coaches Waikite Kowhai, the only all-girl team in the local under-8 rugby competition and said contact sport should be encouraged for kids, especially girls. "My team just couldn't wait for tackle season, they love to tackle boys and steal the ball from them. As long as they are taught the correct tackle technique, ie cheek to cheek, and everything else to keep them as safe as can be, I don't see any problem. "I don't know the stats but I would say more injuries happen on a school playground than on a sports field each week because, unlike playgrounds, sport is played in a controlled environment with plenty of coaching and refereeing courses offered to keep our kids safe during the season. "It also helps build courage and confidence in a child. Some of my girls are tiny but to see them tackling around the legs and taking tackles from bigger kids, it surprises me and most parents what our girls are really capable of. Every kid is capable of this." Te Puke Sports committee member Quentin Harris, who is heavily involved with junior rugby at the club, said society was leaning towards being too politically correct and children should be allowed to learn contact sports in a safe environment. Central Bay of Plenty junior rugby officer Polly Playle says when children play contact sport it's all about learning the right techniques in a safe environment. Photo / File "I think if you're going to take contact away from sports, that takes out a lot of sports. There are a lot of other things out there that can hurt kids. My thing on sport is, they look at studies about we shouldn't do this and that but they don't look at what we can do to make it better. "With rugby, I think if coaches are coaching the right technique, most head injuries probably come from tackling so as long as coaches we get in there and make sure they can tackle on both sides and things like that, they'll be safe." He said the Bay of Plenty Rugby Union had ensured there was a safe pathway for children to progress to full contact. "If rippa rugby is coached properly it leads on to tackle rugby, it's a progression. I think there are probably more accidents and injuries in the school playground than on the rugby field. What are you meant to do, stop kids running around at all?" Bay of Plenty Rugby Union rugby operations manager Neil Alton said New Zealand Rugby, along with the all the provincial rugby unions, had clear pathways for children to progress safely to tackle rugby. "The main thing, I think, is rugby has a really strong culture of safety first. That's increasing in junior age groups and right through to senior rugby. "I think we're getting a lot better and a lot of comes down to coach education, awareness and that safety is paramount to keep people participating in the game. We need to make sure, primarily, that participants are as safe as possible. "We have compulsory courses each year for our coaches to attend. Those are Rugby Smart programmes which provide information around ensuring safe techniques and coaching practices at all the age groups." | https://www.nzherald.co.nz/premium/news/article.cfm?c_id=1504669&objectid=12229728 |
Are We Russia Or Japan? | In his recent Atlantic piece, Simon Johnson argued that the U.S. had succumb to the sort of financial crisis that typically plagues emerging economies like Russia. That analysis seemed a bit overheated to me--particularly Johnson's claim that the banks had perpetrated a "quiet coup" in Washington. Now the FT's Martin Wolf weighs in with a smart rejoinder: Moreover, the belief that Wall Street needs to be preserved largely as it is now is mainly a consequence of fear. The view that large and complex financial institutions are too big to fail may be wrong. But it is easy to understand why intelligent policymakers shrink from testing it. At the same time, politicians fear a public backlash against large infusions of public capital. So, like Japan, the US is caught between the elites fear of bankruptcy and the publics loathing of bail-outs . This is a more complex phenomenon than the quiet coup Prof Johnson describes. Agreed. Beware the monocausal explanation in economies (and political systems) as complicated as ours. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/49046/are-we-russia-or-japan |
How Much Would A Good Gm/bad Gm Split Cost? | One of the problems with a bad bank approach to GM--wherein we transfer its good assets to a new company and keep the bad assets parked in the old one--is that the "bad" GM could be very, very bad (for reasons I explain here). Today's Times begins to quantify how bad we're talking about: Treasury officials are examining one potential outcome in which the good G.M. enters and exits bankruptcy protection in as little as two weeks, using $5 billion to $7 billion in federal financing, a person who had been briefed on the prospect said last week. The rest of G.M. may require as much as $70 billion in government financing, and possibly more to resolve the health care obligations and the liquidation of the factories, according to legal experts and federal officials. Wow, that's bad. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that there are better alternatives. You certaintly don't want all the bad assets polluting the good ones... --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48994/how-much-would-good-gmbad-gm-split-cost |
Which Baby Barrier Is Best For The Planet? | Condoms, for all the waste they create--about 2.75 million pounds per year--are a safer bet than the pill (mainly because we still aren't quite sure how pharmaceuticals affect the water supply). But Rastogi deems the copper intrauterine device (IUD) the clear winner, because it generates little waste and is 99 percent effective. She also concludes, however, with "a single piece of advice when it comes to contraception: Use it. No matter what type you choose, it's guaranteed to have less of an impact on the environment than the unwitting creation of a fossil-fuel burning, diaper-wearing copy of yourself." Fair enough. Still, there might be another green case for always using condoms (unless you've been tested for everything out there), since I can't imagine that unfinished courses of antibiotics used to treat chlamydia or gonorrhea, or the health effects and energy costs related to the treatment of any STD, are good for our fair planet, either. Condom use might add some extra tissues to our landfills, but oh well. As Rastogi notes, proper disposal (trash it, don't flush it) actually boosts condoms' eco-friendliness. Meanwhile, cue conservatives arguing that the only truly green form of birth control is, of course, abstinence... --Seyward Darby | https://newrepublic.com/article/48161/which-baby-barrier-best-the-planet |
What Do They Speak In Darfur? | But race alone is a crude metric here. We know, intellectually, that the Darfur people are human beings. As it happens, their sound for a beating heart is beetbeeting, almost as if they were trying to sound like English speakers! I submit that if in an alternate universe some marauders of some sort were trying to exterminate all Haitians in Haiti, there would be an immediate and decisive response from Washington. There would be a lobby - of Haitians. And that lobby would compel us, partly because Haitians are well known in many parts of America as living, breathing human beings. But we don't meet people of Darfur. They don't use the Internet. We don't know anything interesting about them. This, then, is my small attempt to show something. One might think that "Berlitz" languages of major powers were more complex than languages of "indigenous" peoples; i.e. "simpler." Wrong: big fat languages have usually been used to a great extent for generations as second languages by adults too busy to learn them "for real." It dumbs them down. It's what happened to English when Vikings beat it up, as I describe in my latest Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. It's what happened to Mandarin Chinese, the lingua franca of Chinese people who speak other Chinese varieties. Mandarin is hard enough - but try Taiwanese and risk a stroke. Indonesian is no picnic - but most Indonesians, speaking other languages natively, have long been hacking away at it. Try to learn, say, the language of the Sumatran province of Aceh, long resisting Indonesian dominance, at your peril. A book Language Interrupted by (I forget who) lays this sort of thing out at length. Fur is like Taiwanese and Acehnese. As a normal language - that is, one rarely learned by foreigners and thus not chipped down into user-friendliness - it is so complicated that learning it after toddlerhood could be dangerous to one's mental health. It's also, for the record, an especially precious language in that it doesn't have any close relatives like English has German and Swedish. It's a hothouse plant. Don't even get me started on the verbs in Fur. For some verbs, the way to say that he did something instead of that I did it, you make the first two letters in the word switch places! "I hit" is lodi, "he hit" is oldi. Then with others, to say that he did it, you tack some sound to the word you use to say I did it, and you just have to know which sound for each verb. "I bought" is ula, "he bought" is jula--but while "I dug" is urto, "he dug" is not jurto but kurto, for no particular reason. And these aren't the irregular verbs--they're the normal ones. We'll just pass the irregular verbs in silence. The insults are good, too. One memorable one is "Your anus is rough and stinking and you have not plucked its hairs!" Another one is "It's your sandal." The Fur use it to tell someone to deal with something themselves--"It's your sandal, not mine." There are many reasons that Darfur should be as urgent a horror to us as it would be if in France Jean-Marie Le Pen took power and starting working on a sequel to the Final Solution. One is the Fur's powerlessness. Another is their humanity. As to a truly vivid indication of the latter, maybe this is just the linguist in me talking, but I think one thing that should qualify is that so many of the people speak a language that is harder to master than quantum mechanics. This is, at least, one of many ways we can get in touch with thinking of the Darfur victims as persons rather than as statistics, and one more step towards a wider understanding that the Darfur victims are our sandal too. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49060/what-do-they-speak-darfur |
Is Regulation Really As Pressing As The French And Germans Say? | The Journal reports that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have been pretty adamant about financial regulation at the G-20 summit: We do not want results that have no impact in practice," said Ms. Merkel. "Germany and France will speak with one and the same voice," Mr. Sarkozy added, citing an on-and-off political alliance that has previously pitted the two countries against the U.S. or the U.K. over Europe's direction. "As the chancellor rightly said, we demand results," he said. "Regulation is not simply a word, an empty word... It is a major objective." Of the U.S. president, he said, "Mr. Obama was elected on change. We trust him. But we're talking about today and tomorrow....After tomorrow will be too late." Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of tougher financial regulation. But the Merkel-Sarkozy position makes no sense. For example, according to the Journal, one of Sarkozy's proposals is to make "banks retain some of the loans that they bundle into securities and sell to investors in a process known as securitization," which would presumably make banks a little more careful about who they loan money to. Great idea in principle. Except that the problem we're facing now isn't that banks are furiously extending loans to people who can't repay them, then turning around and offloading them to investors. The problem we're facing is that banks aren't even making loans to credit-worthy borrowers. At best, Sarkozy's proposal could stand to wait several months. At worst, it could restrict credit at a time when we want to expand it. (The specific consequences would obviously depend on the details). Meanwhile, fiscal stimulus--Obama's top priority--looks pretty damn urgent at a time when most of the world's economies are contracting and facing huge output gaps. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48807/regulation-really-pressing-the-french-and-germans-say |
Was U.s. Productivity Growth A Wall St.-driven Mirage? | Krugman did a fascinating post on this question yesterday: I went back to something that was a hot topic not long ago, and will be again if and when the crisis ends: the apparent lag of European productivity since 1995. One recent, seemingly authoritative study is van Ark et al ; and I noticed something that gave me pause. In their paper, van Ark etc. identify the service sector as the main source of Americas pullaway which is the standard argument. Within services, roughly half they attribute to distribution roughly speaking, the Wal-Mart effect. OK. But the other half is a surge in US productivity in financial and business services, not matched in Europe. And all I can say is, whoa! ... | https://newrepublic.com/article/49103/was-us-productivity-growth-wall-st-driven-mirage |
Who Won And Who Lost In The Defense Budget? | WHO LOST: The defense industry, which "is a loser because this budget is privileging the types of less expensive weapons platforms and skill sets that are required for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the expense of more expensive weapon platforms that are more appropriate for, say, taking on a pure competitor like the former Soviet Union or rising China." U.S. congressmen and women, too, who will see jobs slashed at home because of the discontinuation of weapons like the F-22 jet. "The F-22 is built in 48 different states, so 96 senators have an interest in keeping that weapons system alive." Also, because of priorities placed on certain, new programs, the "dominant strategic culture" of the military loses out. For instance, "Investing in unmanned aircraft [as the budget would] goes against the Air Force's strategic culture." NAME: Andrew Krepinevich POSITION: President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments WHO WON: The Navy, which "essentially emerges unscathed. I talked to Gates this morning. According to him, they'll get to keep their eleven carriers through 2040, and [the budget] left the proposed increase in submarine production intact." WHO LOST: The Air Force, because of the slashed F-22 program. "You look across the board, and you say, The Air Force had a pretty tough day.'" Also, the Army, which was "already in a state of disrepair after the cancellations of the Crusader Artillery System and Comanche helicopter" over the past decade. Under the new budget plan, the Army will see huge cutbacks to FCS (Future Combat Systems), which is "the crown jewel of the Army's modernization program." And, lastly, "programs that continue to be plagued by cost overrun," such as FCS, TSAT (the Transformational Satellite Communications System), and the DDG1000 (a planned Zumwalt-class Naval destroyer). These are all programs that are "coming in substantially over the projected budget." NAME: Jason Sherman POSITION: Reporter for InsideDefense.com WHO WON: The combatant commanders, who are, more than ever, helping to determine what the armed forces need. "What we're seeing in this budget is the growing influence of combatant commanders, particularly General Petraeus and Admiral Eric Olson, on the budget. You see that in the increase in funding for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, capabilities ... and you see it in the $500 million that the secretary of defense is putting into the base budget for training and equipping foreign military forces." Also, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who imposed enormous discipline on the Pentagon during the budget process, deserves plaudits. "Gates speaks quietly, but he is all bite. In developing this budget, he forced everyone in the Pentagon to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It's unprecedented that you go up to a guy like General Petraeus with the stack of medals on his chest and the four stars on his shoulder and say, You word is not enough. I want a piece of paper with your name on it, signed, saying you won't discuss this.'" --Sahil Mahtani, Amanda Silverman, and Alexander Wolf | https://newrepublic.com/article/48916/who-won-and-who-lost-the-defense-budget |
Is Hillary Clinton's State Department just like her campaign? | Meanwhile, Steinberg, a Harvard and Yale Law School graduate who served as her husband's deputy national security adviser, worked extensively on U.S.-China relations during the Clinton presidency (and even has two adopted daughters from China). Her new assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs is expected to be Democratic foreign policy heavyweight Kurt Campbell, whose long resume underscores the post's importance, and who recently co-authored a book with Steinberg. And the head of the department's Office of Policy Planning--a kind of in-house think tank designed for the long view--is Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, who spent a year's sabbatical based in Shanghai and touring through Asia. Last May, Slaughter told Newsweek that "the biggest overall challenge [facing the United States] is managing the rise of Asia." Hillary's big-think could extend beyond the regional to the global. Strobe Talbott, a longtime Clinton friend and former number-two at State, predicts an unprecedented focus on development programs. One of Hillary's pet causes as First Lady, after all, was pushing so-called "micro-loans" for Third World entrepreneurs. "Think of her slogan for the world being a variation on It Takes a Village," Talbott says. "Every time she says 'diplomacy,' she says 'and development.'" Talbott says Hillary is likely to elevate the oft-neglected posts of undersecretary for democracy and global affairs and undersecretary for economic affairs (which will be filled by economist Lael Brainard--who, illustrating the incestuous world of foreign policy mandarins, is Campbell's wife). "She has given a lot of thought to those two in particular," Talbott says, adding that Clinton will push for a new State focus on "sustainable development, global public health, the environment, and empowerment of women," a far cry from crisis management. Subcontracting crises to focus on long-term strategy has considerable appeal. But it also brings real risks. The number of outsized personalities within the State Department, as well as the number of strong wills outside it with whom she will have to coordinate, will require Hillary to be a diplomat among the diplomats. Already, there has been internal friction. Clinton's team ruffled feathers last month when it evicted the department's senior Foreign Service officer and number-three official, Bill Burns, from his offices to make room for Hillary's deputy secretary for management, Jack Lew. (Burns was moved down the seventh-floor hallway, farther from Clinton's door, according to a Foreign Policy magazine blog.) Then there was the shabby treatment of retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who says he was promised the post of U.S. ambassador to Iraq, only to discover that the job would instead go to Christopher Hill, the Bush administration's lead North Korea negotiator. The Foreign Service, meanwhile, saw the Mitchell and Holbrooke appointments as a slight--a suggestion that career diplomats are not up to the job. "The message she wants to send is that diplomacy's back," says one former top Clinton administration foreign policy hand. "But the message that's received is, 'We're not good enough to do the hard stuff.'" Hillary doesn't need additional adversaries. She is already said to resent Susan Rice, a top Obama campaign foreign policy adviser who is now ambassador to the United Nations. Rice was among the first ex-Clintonites to support Obama, she harshly criticized Hillary's Iraq war vote, and she accused her of "manipulat[ing] the truth" during the campaign. Obama has elevated the U.N. ambassador post to cabinet rank, creating another power center in a team already awash with them. And, while some interpreted Rice's job as a kind of exile to New York, she still has deep roots in Washington, where her children are in school and her husband, Ian Cameron, is executive producer of ABC's "This Week." "That's ripe for conflict" with Clinton, warns a former Bush State Department official. The role of Dennis Ross could also cause tension. During the early primaries, Ross straddled the fence between Clinton and Obama. But he quickly emerged as a top Obama adviser last summer, suggesting to some Clintonites that he'd been less neutral than he appeared. As a result, Ross felt that "he wouldn't really be welcome in Hillaryland," says one source familiar with the situation. After the election, Ross and James Jones, Obama's pick to run the National Security Council, initially discussed a White House job coordinating all U.S. policy from the Middle East to South Asia. According to this version of events, supported by a second source with close State Department contacts, Clinton balked at seeing Ross with so much authority over her department's work and brought him to State. With other envoys assigned to the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan, Ross will now focus on Iran, but, given the deep connection between Iran and Israel policy, it's unclear how he will coordinate with Mitchell. From another direction, meanwhile, Holbrooke is now considering a diplomatic approach to Iran to deal with neighboring Afghanistan's opium problem. "How do those Venn diagrams overlap?" wonders one close observer of Middle East politics. The hard-charging Holbrooke remains the biggest question mark. Asked how Holbrooke managed to bargain the bullying Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic into a Balkan peace deal, Bill Clinton once replied: "Because he has the same character as Milosevic." Holbrooke has longed to be secretary of state for decades, and probably would have achieved his dream if Al Gore, John Kerry, or Hillary herself had been elected president. Thus, it's not hard to imagine him second-guessing Hillary, his student for many years. As Clinton herself told The New York Times last week: "Occasionally he has to be, you know, brought down to earth and reined in." Holbrooke's assertiveness risks other potential clashes. He has never worked closely, for instance, with General David Petraeus, who now oversees the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan. The two egos were on display at a panel during last weekend's Munich security conference, where Petraeus cracked wise about his new partnership: "You know, it's every commander's dream to have an ambassadorial wingman who is described by journalists with nicknames like 'The Bulldozer.'" Then there's Vice President Joe Biden. The two men, while outwardly friendly, have been rivals for years. "Neither would mind if the other disappeared," says a person who has worked closely with one of them. Finally, there is Holbrooke's uncertain relationship with Obama himself. For much of the 2008 campaign Holbrooke was a bete noire in the Obama camp--a foe of Obama's top campaign foreign policy adviser, Anthony Lake, and a symbol to many of the ill-advised enthusiasm of Washington Democrats for the Iraq invasion. It was only in late summer that Holbrooke, through what one associate calls "a lot of lobbying," was accepted into the fold. Asked about the state of Holbrooke's relationship with the president, his friend Les Gelb says only, "I think it's coming." When Hillary was unable to manage conflicting egos and power centers within her campaign, the result was confusion and even embarrassment. The outcome can be similar when top bureaucrats fight. "Stovepiping" among rivals can lead to incomplete or bad information and reveal to foreign capitals that the United States is not speaking with one voice. You don't want, to take a hypothetical example, Petraeus sending signals of support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai while Holbrooke is signaling that Karzai must go. One source recalls how a lack of coordination within Bill Clinton's Middle East team during the 2000 Camp David accords meant that other Arab leaders had not been briefed properly when Clinton needed to call them with urgent requests to help Yasir Arafat accept a peace deal. "Stovepiping is a historical curse of the place," says Strobe Talbott, who is optimistic that Hillary can "exorcise that curse" from State. Fortunately, there are signs that Hillary is paying better attention to management principles than she did when running for president. Much as after her arrival in the Senate, she has been working hard to familiarize herself with the culture of her new institutional home. "She has been systematically calling people who have direct, and relatively recent, experience in the place and really drilling down on all kinds of questions--including how to make sure that various parts of the department are integrated," says one person with firsthand knowledge of that process. Since taking the job, Clinton has met or spoken with every living secretary of state. One advantage is her very close friendship with former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who has schooled Hillary in Foggy Bottom's machinations since the late 1990s, and who has recently been counseling her on the department's mores. Hillary's choice of Steinberg, who has caused precious little controversy and made few enemies during his long career in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, is also reassuring. He is widely viewed as a hardworking and reliable honest broker. According to Hachigian, who served as his special assistant at the NSC in the late '90s, Steinberg "has just an uncanny ability to strike at the heart of a national security issue--but also to understand all the politics that go into it--how the media is going to respond, Congress and the partisan politics of the Hill, bureaucratic infighting." Indeed, Steinberg comes well-armed to challenges posed by rivalries within a foreign policy team. In January, he and Kurt Campbell published a book, Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Presidential Power, which warns against a reliance on "all-stars"--high-profile figures with no inherent loyalty to the president. "[T]heir lack of a previous working relationship with the candidate and an unknown level of commitment to the president-elect's programs means that the decision to appoint them is something of a gamble," they write. "At best, they have been marginalized or ignored in the decision-making process"--Colin Powell is cited here--and "at worst they have caused significant disruption as a result of being seen as not team players (Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld)." Under Steinberg's definition, Hillary would certainly qualify as a potentially disruptive "all-star." One hopes that his study of the question will help him to maneuver Hillary away from "significant disruption." (For the record, Steinberg calls Clinton "a fabulous choice" who brings a rare mix of communications, political, and policy chops to the job. "That trifecta of skills is very rare," he says.) What's more, Hillary has taken the unusual step of appointing a second deputy, Jack Lew, to focus explicitly on management. Lew, a Queens native and Harvard grad, is a former Clinton White House budget director--an important qualification for a woman whose primary campaign ran out of cash in February. Lew will be charged with battling Congress to win more budget authority for the State Department and also with keeping an eye on the department's internal workings. Says one friend, "He's extraordinarily competent and even-tempered and a kind of anchoring figure--someone who, if there were some turbulence among the key players, would be able to enforce a certain amount of discipline and serenity." Serenity may be too ambitious a goal, but one former senior Clinton administration foreign policy official jokes that Hillary's delegation of crisis hotspots will at least enable her to spend more time in the Washington loop. "Colin Powell didn't travel much, because he said every time he went out of town Cheney and Rumsfeld would launch some new policy initiative," the former official laughs. Thus, you'll typically be able to find the secretary working hard on the seventh floor. Talk to Cheryl Mills for an appointment. Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic. Click here to subscribe to TNR and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. | https://newrepublic.com/article/61354/hillarys-state |
Would More Pork Have Protected Us Against Swine? | Today, the liberal blogosphere slammed Republican Senator Susan Collins for leading the charge of "GOP Know-Nothings" who stripped funds for pandemic-flu preparedness from the stimulus bill. "[T]hey bet that they would be able to score their political points without any consequences," blasted The Nation's John Nichols, railing against the "supposedly moderate" Collins. At the time of bill negotiations, Collins said that the funds--dedicated to researching and increasing the supply of flu vaccines--wouldn't boost the economy enough to warrant their inclusion in the stimulus. Should we have 870 million dollars in this bill?" Collins said on MSNBC in February. "No, we should not." Collins's office dismissed the stimulus-linked criticism as "blatantly false and politically motivated," and claimed that she's long been a leader on pandemic flu preparedness as part of her work to fight bioterrorism in the Senate. Plus, as Collins' communications director, Kevin Kelley, wrote me in an email: "There is no evidence that federal efforts to address the swine flu outbreak have been hampered by a lack of funds," today. (When I spoke with Richard Hamburg, a representative from Trust for America's Health, an epidemic disease advocacy group, he admitted that "anything that delays preparedness is not a good thing, but you can't really quantify how much the delay in funding has delayed [swine flu] preparedness.") But when Collins' spokesman goes on to explain what the government could be doing differently to prepare itself for the outbreak, the tone suddenly changes. "Senator Collins does, however, believe that it is a problem that the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services still do not have top positions filled," Kelley said. "She hopes the Senate will move promptly to confirm Governor Sebelius for HHS Secretary." So after pushing back against her liberal critics, Collins explicitly puts herself to the left of her GOP colleagues who have been trying to obstruct Sebelius's nomination. At the least, Collins hasn't given up on trying to redeem herself as a genuine centrist. --Suzy Khimm | https://newrepublic.com/article/49314/would-more-pork-have-protected-us-against-swine |
How Miserable Is It Being A College Basketball Recruiter? | This miserable. From an SI.com round table with four top high school seniors that included a question about who was the best recruiter they came across: Xavier Henry: Memphis' Josh Pastner never left me alone for a second. He's always awake. He was on top of it. He knows what your mom and brother are doing. He knows all the numbers in his head. No phone. All by memory. That was impressive. He'd call me at 7 a.m. sharp on Saturdays. I never picked up. I'd wake up and say "Oh my god" then just let voicemail answer. The messages were always like, "Memphis Tigers! Memphis Tigers!" He's always positive. He'd say, "Call me, X! Call me, X! Call me, X!" like 12 times before letting go. "You know the number. Call me!" | https://newrepublic.com/article/49098/how-miserable-it-being-college-basketball-recruiter |
What's The Impediment? | I hold no brief for Avigdor Lieberman, not at all. I have already characterized him as a neo-fascist, and a neo-fascist he is. What's more he is an utterly reckless person, and the weird parliamentary system -too democratic by half- encourages the recklessness of Israeli politicians for many of whom it is by now habitual, perhaps even by now almost generic or genetic. Today, another loudmouth, Gilad Erdan, minister of the environment, about which he knows roughly nothing, also took to the bullhorn and proclaimed that Israel is not America's 51st state. Believe me, that is not the issue in America's politics where, on the left wing margins, at least, the question is whether the United States is a satrap of the Jewish state. It is a false issue. But at a time when the country is overwhelmed by burdens at once domestic and international it would be wise and apt for Israeli politicians actually to appreciate (and to express that appreciation) for the unyielding military and diplomatic support provided Jerusalem from Washington. This does not mean that Israel's political class has to fall into line behind every step that the Obama administration takes. But, to be fair, my own sense is that the administration is walking delicately between its ideological presumption that it can engage with reckless states and chiliastic movements and still maintain the country's strategic alliances with kindred democratic allies. I suspect that these are inevitably more divergent paths, and that this divergence will face the president with many wrenching dilemmas. If one can judge by AfPak, he will take the historically sanctioned path. And, by the way, no, it is insufficient for Obama to say that Al Qaeda will not be conciliated by anything Israel does to palliate the Palestine question. Israel's enemies are Hezbollah and Hamas, Syria and Islamic fanatics spread through every Arab country, including Jordan and Egypt, two vulnerable states themselves beset by religious insurrectionists. In any case, Bibi Netanyahu is not Lieberman or the callow Erdan from his own party. Netanyahu knows what the stakes are which means that he understands that a "two-state solution" is the only possible resolve for the conflict. And the fact is that, all of the injunctions put before before Jerusalem by the various peace professionals about this solution notwithstanding, the Israeli body politic is itself committed to such a resolve. That has been Israeli policy for at least 16 years. It is a gross lie to deny this. The Greater Israel movement is dead. So is the Peace Now movement that assumed a territorial retreat will resolve everything. This movement died the day after Israel left Gaza. The outstanding cartographical issues are mostly symbolic and procedural. It is that Israel cannot assume that any territory from which it withdraws will remain peaceful. And that Palestine's frontier with its Arab neighbors will not become what Gaza's frontier with (relatively well-intentioned) Egypt has become. A cease-fire was made, and the cease fire has not held. What's more, the smuggling of trajectiles and other weapons through the tunnels of the strip goes on unabated. This is despite a United Nations resolution. And in southern Lebanon another cease-fire resolution providing for an end to smuggling from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah is continually violated. One lesson Israel has certainly learned is that U.N. Security Council resolutions are worth less than the paper on which they are printed. Until this issue is addressed conscientiously and practically there will be no progress on the two-state solution under any borders. And, instead of repeating the two-state shibboleth, it is time for the well-intentioned brokers -President Obama included- to confront the real barrier to peace which is Palestinian and Arab behavior after an Israeli withdrawal. This will be the test, and nothing else. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48888/whats-the-impediment |
Is There A Flaw In Obama's High-speed Rail Plan? | Earlier today, Barack Obama laid out his blueprint for spending $8 billion in stimulus money on high-speed passenger rail, flagging ten intercity corridors that could receive funds for new lines. The well-trafficked Northeast corridor is also eligible for upgrades, though, as Matt Yglesias's correspondent points out, most of the low-hanging fruit there has been plucked already, and it may be more effective to improve service elsewhere. Here's the White House's map of potential corridors (notice that much-maligned L.A.-Las Vegas route isn't eligible for federal funds). Anyway, I was intrigued by a criticism Richard Nadler made over at the Corner. He notes that promoting passenger trains could actually increase greenhouse-gas emissions if they end up pushing freight off rail and onto trucks. At the moment, freight trains get priority in the United States, which explains why Amtrak is constantly plagued by delaysthe passenger cars get short shrift. In Europe, by contrast, passengers get priority and freight gets shafted, which (Nadler argues) is why the EU ships far less of its freight by train, and hence has higher freight-related emissions. We've seen before that one of the more sensible ways to save oil and curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions is to shift more freight off trucks and onto electrified rail. Granted, there's a decent case for bolstering the country's passenger-rail network, too, but if we absolutely had to pick one or the other, electrified freight rail does appear the better investment from an economic and climate perspective. Actually, no, I'm not sure the trade-off is that stark. Here's a useful paper by two economists, Jose Manuel Vassallo and Mark Fagan, exploring this question. In the 1950s, the portion of freight carried by rail was similar in the United States and Europe. But by 2000, 38 percent of U.S. freight went by train, compared with just 8 percent in Europe. Vasallo and Fagan argue that 80 percent of this disparity is due to geographical factors: Shipping distances are often shorter in Europe and sea transport is more competitive. That still leaves 20 percent of the difference due to other factors, including Europe's emphasis on passenger service and bad policies. For instance, Spain has long sported different track gauges than France, which means locomotives often had to be changed at the border, causing all sorts of delays and headaches. Lack of competition among carriers is another problem. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49078/there-flaw-obamas-high-speed-rail-plan |
What On Earth Is Citigroup Talking About? | Today's Journal reports that the government is already looking into plan B D for Citigroup, which could include the dread "bad bank," in which the government strips out Citi's toxic assets and tries to sell them at a profit later on: Barely a week after the third rescue of Citigroup Inc., U.S. officials are examining what fresh steps they might need to take to stabilize the bank if its problems mount, according to people familiar with the matter. ... One possible future step could involve creating a "bad bank" to take distressed assets off the balance sheet of Citigroup or other troubled financial institutions. Differing approaches are still being considered. Treasury officials already are developing a public-private partnership to tackle that problem more broadly, and the two concepts could either run parallel or be merged. Relatedly, there's this remarkable paragraph: Citi executives said they haven't detected signs of corporate clients or trading partners withdrawing their business, even though the New York company's shares are hovering near $1 apiece -- closing Monday at $1.05 on the New York Stock Exchange. Citigroup says it has a strong liquidity position and that its capital levels are among the highest in the banking industry. [emphasis added.] If Citi's right about the rest of the banking industry, we're in even more trouble than we thought... Finally, the Journal also had this interesting nugget: | https://newrepublic.com/article/48317/what-earth-citigroup-talking-about |
Is Tarp Scaring Off Goldman's Best And Brightest? | That's certainly the line Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein is pushing. Thanks to the strings attached to the TARP (i.e., bailout) money they've received, banks like Goldman face restrictions on how much they can pay their 25 best-compensated employees (more or less). As I understand them, the restrictions don't limit pay per se, but do limit the size of a bonus to one third of overall compensation, which is meaningful since that's where most of these guys make their money. (This fact sheet is pretty helpful.) The implication of this Journal piece is that this makes it tough (but hardly impossible) to pay your top 25 employees much more than $1 million a year, which is a real constraint for Goldman as it minted 953 millionaires last year. In fact, the restriction theoretically creates a weird situation in which Goldman's 25 highest-ranking employees could make a lot less than more junior employees. Hence Blankfein's complaint that the pay restrictions are "going to limit our ability to compete, both here and abroad." Sounds plausible in principle, but I'm not sure I buy it. If I'm a Goldman employee who made, say, $5 million in 2008, and I have to take a $4 million pay cut this year, I'd feel pretty confident this would not go unnoticed by my higher-ups, particularly since I'd probably be one of those higher-ups. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the relevant Goldman official would remember I took such a pay cut and make it up to me once we returned the TARP money. I guess you can't actually write a contract to this effect, because the contract would presumably be worth the discounted value of the extra $4 million and might put you over the compensation limit. (Though, who knows, there are probably ways to pull this off legally. Maybe you could structure it as a backloaded salary, not a bonus...) But Goldman is a reputable firm that prizes "employee loyalty," as they say in the big-box retailing sector. I'm guessing I'd feel like my bosses were good for it. On the other hand, if I were a mildly antsy Goldman employee who'd given a lot of thought to decamping for a hedge fund even before TARP, this might be my impetus to leave. But then Blankfein's problem isn't TARP per se, it's that he already had some unhappy campers. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49016/tarp-scaring-goldmans-best-and-brightest |
Does Electrified Rail Make Sense? | Over at The Oil Drum, there's a fascinating (though long and somewhat technical) post by Alan Drake, an engineering consultant, laying out what it would take to drastically expand electrified rail in the United States. This would be a fairly straightforward way to reduce oil consumption and, for that matter, curb a good chunk of our carbon emissions. It's worth dividing this blueprint up into a couple of components. The first, easiest step would involve wiring up all of uor existing trains that currently run on diesel and power them with electricity instead. That would reduce our daily oil consumption by about 2 percentnot jaw-dropping, but nothing to shrug at, either. And, as a bonus, electrifying all of the current commuter-rail lines would speed up service and cut travel times by 15 percent or so, since electric trains can accelerate and brake more quickly than their diesel counterparts. Better yet, electrified rail corridors could double as a high-voltage transmission backbone, bringing power to cities from remote wind and solar farms. Drake argues that a few modest federal incentives could bring all this about fairly quickly. The second step would be to shift most of our long-haul freight shipping from trucks over to rail, which takes some planning and upfront spending, but is an outrageously sane idea on the merits. As Philip Longman explained in a recent Washington Monthly piece, an investment of $250 billion to $500 billion over 20 years would help us move 85 percent of the nation's long-haul trucks off the road and reduce the country's oil consumption by up to 22 percent. Our economy would also be 13 percent larger in 2030 than it otherwise would be, thanks to improved efficiencies. Fewer trucks on the road also mean fewer traffic accidents and less congestion. So this looks like a no-brainer investment, too. Then there's the third and thorniest component, which involves expanding intercity and high-speed passenger rail as an alternative to cars and planes. The stimulus bill plunked down $8 billion for passenger rail projects, and Congress might shift even more federal funding toward rail when the big transportation bill comes up for reauthorization later this year. But it's easy to be pessimistic about whether we'll ever see enough money for a grand, Europe-style network of high-speed passenger rail that crisscrosses the country (as opposed to the occasional isolated projectthe Acela in the Northeast, or the planned line between San Francisco and Los Angeles). | https://newrepublic.com/article/48291/does-electrified-rail-make-sense |
Should We Finesse One Of Reform's Thorniest Issues? | They describe their differences with others--say, for example, me--with admirable concision: "The disagreement over the potential uses of the public plan to rein in system costs could not be more profound. Our vision would not use the public plan's potential market power over provider payment." In my view, the public plan's bargaining power over providers is a feature rather than a bug. If insurers can't match that, that's a strike against private coverage rather than an argument against the public plan. Sure, cost control through government monopsony raises genuine concerns. So does every other cost control measure in the real world. Per dollar of reduced spending, I wager that the resulting distortions would be less burdensome, less intrusive, and more inefficient than those likely to result from private actors cutting costs in other ways. Yet the ultimate merits may be beside the point. Nichols and Bertko's constrained public plan would have weaker tools to control costs, but it would still provide many important benefits to patients and to the entire healthcare system. It would provide a backstop for chronically-ill people who feel badly-served by private coverage. It would provide a benchmark competitor for private plans. It would provide an organizational structure for key health system innovations. Most important, it might actually exist, which makes it far superior to some excellent alternative that dies in Congress for lack of a half-dozen critical votes. Moreover, health reform won't end with the passage of any single bill. Congress could always step in and fix the program later. They will probably have to, if as I fully expect, this self-constrained public plan structure proves too weak for effective cost control. Medicare Part D provides a useful guide. On the technical merits, the legislation which created the Medicare prescription drug benefit was terrible. In a blatant giveaway to big Pharma, Medicare was barred from negotiating reasonable deals for itself and its covered population. The program spent huge sums while failing to protect individuals against catastrophic medical expenses. Provisions such as the "donut hole" made no sense in terms of established insurance principles. In a longer view, however, this benefit was sorely needed. Its defects can be remedied. Indeed the policy itself created strong pressures to do exactly that, for instance to cut public expenditures through harder bargains with drug makers. A similar process would likely take hold were Congress to enact a public plan. If medical costs continue to rise, every public payer will bargain more aggressively on services and on price. Political bargains struck today can buy time for providers and private insurers. They cannot halt this basic process or bind a fiscally-desperate future Congress from unpacking the most powerful tools close at-hand. Nichols and Bertko's "Modest proposal" is not my favorite policy. And it's not without its political and policy dangers. Their preferred public plan will cost more than it otherwise would, and may thus attract scorn from the Congressional Budget Office. Absent hard bargaining over price, the public sector may turn to more annoying, less powerful cost containment measures that could undermine public support. Of more immediate relevance, there is no guarantee that insurers or others who oppose an expansive public plan would sign on to anything less. They understand the logic of incrementalism as well as I do. Still, if that's what it takes to get this deal done, I guess I am for it. --Harold Pollack | https://newrepublic.com/article/48593/should-we-finesse-one-reforms-thorniest-issues |
Can We Stiff The Bondholders? | I meant to link to this yesterday and just didn't get a chance, but Josh Marshall has a great post raising a lot of important questions about bondholders--in particular, whether they should take a hit (and how big) as we bail out (and potentially nationalize) major financial institutions: Now, on the one hand, this sounds like a no-brainer. If you lend money to a company that goes bankrupt, that's tough luck. Maybe you recover a percentage on the dollar of what you were owed. But too bad. Why taxpayers should cover those loses is really hard to answer. But let's try it. The counter-argument is that if bondholders, especially the most 'senior creditors', take a big hit it, will create a big shock to the financial system worldwide, making bond-investing money extremely risk-averse for a long time and making the credit markets seize up again on far worse a scale than happened last fall in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy. ... I come into this extremely suspicious of arguments for why taxpayers need to cover the bondholders' losses. Yes, those bonds are held by pension funds and insurance companies. In broad terms they're held by very, very wealthy people. But I've talked to different economists who I think are pretty on the level on this and they think the systemic risk is very real. And not just huge shocks to the credit markets. The losers aren't just guys in Monopoly suits who hold these bonds. It's your insurance company, your state pension fund, etc. So there's potentially a lot of collateral damage. Josh and I actually had an offline discussion (actually e-mail--is that considered "online" these days?) about this a few weeks back and I think our views are kind of merging, though I'm still probably slightly more concerned than he is about a global meltdown, and he's probably slightly more galled than I am (though not much) at spending hundreds of billions--maybe trillions--to bail out the bondholders. The other question is the counterparties, of course. But the tradeoffs seem kind of similar... --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48336/can-we-stiff-the-bondholders |
How Much Bailout Money Do We Still Have? | According to the Journal: Based on Dow Jones Newswires' reporting and calculations, it appears that Treasury has, at most, $52.6 billion left in its rescue fund. That would mean about 92% is already committed. That assumes the Treasury spends $100 billion in TARP funds to rid bank balance sheets of toxic assets. Obviously, this is a big deal since the point of those stress tests is to determine whether banks need more capital. And if we have at most $50 billion left, then we may not have enough to make good on that part of the bank plan. Or, maybe more precisely, this constrains the size of the hole we're willing to acknowledge, since it's hard to believe Treasury would say the banks need $100 billion if it only has $50 billion lying around. (Maybe I'm wrong about that--maybe Treasury would use that as an impetus to squeeze more money out of Congress, but that doesn't seem like a strategy with a high likelihood of success given the current mood.) As for my own efforts, I could never really figure it out and just had to keep it vague in my pieces. It turns out there's a good reason for that: The Treasury has yet to provide an official accounting. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner twice was asked to specify how much remains in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The question arose amid the series of new programs the Obama administration has announced in the past several weeks to boost ailing financial markets. In both instances, the secretary avoided a direct answer. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48690/how-much-bailout-money-do-we-still-have |
Has Congress Abandoned Cap And Trade This Year? | Via Dave Roberts, George Stephanopoulos is suggesting that congressional Democrats may have just decided to prioritize health care over climate policy this year: George Stephanopoulos says Dems can't possibly pass both healthcare reform and cap-and-trade, and they've effectively chosen healthcare. Dems have supported a plan to push healthcare through via budget reconciliation, which requires only a 50 vote majority. They have not supported a plan to do the same with carbon policy, and "there are nowhere near 60 votes for it," so it's effectively dead this year. We'll see where this goesmy sense is this year's agenda is still fluidbut a few broader thoughts. If true, I think there's some logic to this decisionand I say this as someone who believes climate policy is more urgent than health care. For one, the health care debate is further advanced than the debate over cap and trade. That's partly because Obama and McCain basically agreed on the need to regulate carbon during the campaign, so they barely discussed cap and trade; instead, they bickered over peripheral issues like offshore drilling and gas-tax holidays. By contrast, health care reform is ripe now. The arguments have been flayed to death. The key alliances formed. Republicans are hopping aboard the reform train. Under the circumstances, it makes sense for Democrats to focus on health care this year, rather than go for broke and jeopardize the whole budget with a thornier climate bill. Now, the thing is, climate policy can't wait too long. Some scientists have warned that there's a very small window of opportunity left for developed countries to get their emissions under controlif we don't act soon, the Earth's climate might enter tipping-point territory, at which point it could prove impossible to stabilize global temperatures below a desirable level. What's more, the United States is planning to join the Copenhagen climate talks this December to negotiate a successor treaty to Kyoto. If the rest of the world thinks that Congress has given up on carbon caps, they might say "screw this" and abandon their own climate efforts. That doesn't mean Congress has to pass a cap-and-trade bill in 2009just that it has to look like there's a realistic chance they'll pass one fairly soon. Anyway, climate activists and environmentalists probably shouldn't see this as a ringing defeat. Congress could still pass a number of incremental energy measures this yearfrom a renewable-electricity standard for utilities to a nationwide grid overhaulthat will smooth the way for big carbon reductions down the road. Then, next year, with health care and the banking crisis hopefully behind him, Obama can make a strenuous push on cap and trade and nudge public opinion. (What's more, the EPA will have started regulating CO2 by then, putting pressure on Congress to stop stalling.) And, if Republicans insist on filibustering indefinitely, it's possible that Democrats could put cap and trade into next year's budget reconciliation billthere's one per year, after all. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48553/has-congress-abandoned-cap-and-trade-year |
Are Frank And I Too Hard On The New Dems? | Our point isn't that Clinton came into office believing government should largely get out of the way. The point we tried to make--and which may have gotten lost a bit, but which is worth emphaiszing--is that Clinton and the New Democratic ideas he embraced were largely about making sure prosperity was widely shared. But the corollary point is important, too--that, by the second term, it became easier for the Clintonites to believe that government could create this prosperity more effectively if it stepped back in many respects. This evolution is a central part of our argument. To wit: "many New Democrats came to believe that if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly [emphasis added]..." Or consider this passage: Before long, the economy was creating jobs at a dizzying clip--ten million between 1993 and 1997, another eight million between 1997 and 2000. Rising productivity was driving up wages across the income spectrum. ... It really did look like shrinking deficits had triggered lower interest rates and unleashed a wave of private investment that was powering the economy to new heights. It's what came next that darkens the narrative. Amid all the new economy triumphalism, the Clintonites deregulated the telecommunications industry and repealed New Deal-era restrictions on bank consolidation. In 1997, Clinton even signed a bill lowering the capital-gains tax rate, that perennial GOP fetish. Having begun their administration grudgingly appeasing Greenspan, the Clintonites gradually embraced his view that, in many cases, government could do no better than step aside. [emphasis added] The second point is kind of related to the first. It is unquestionably true that Obama has borrowed/updated some of the ideas Clinton proposed on the campaign trail in 1992, and which he pushed during his first term. We have a riff in the piece about a policy wonk named David Osborne, who was the inspiration for Clinton's version of the market "nudging" and "harnessing" ideas Obama has adopted. Similarly, we note that Obama's proposals--particularly on health care--have "more than a hint of Ira Magaziner." The point, to return to the first idea, is just that Clinton got away from some of this stuff in the second term, when it became less clear that more affirmative efforts were necessary. It took the ensuing eight years to clarify that they were. Ed actually summarizes Obama's worldview in a way I'm pretty comfortable with--and which is pretty consistent with our piece: I'd say the more we learn about Barack Obama's domestic ideology, the more it looks like a "third way" progressivism chastened by the economic experiences of the last decade and yoked to a much firmer commitment to the necesssity of maintaining some of the "old" social bargains and regulatory practices of the New Deal and Great Society eras. P.S. A final small point: I think Frank and I (and Ed as a result) were a little too casual in our use of two separate concepts interchangeably: "New Democrat-ism" and "Clintonism." There's obviously a lot of overlap there. And, as a practical matter, it's often tough to disentangle: a.) a broad governing philosophy from b.) the particular governing philosophy of a leader who subscribes to "a." But they're rarely the same (for obvious reasons--theory-versus-practice kind of thing). In particular, one could argue that second-term Clintonism may have drifted in a more laissez faire direction than New Democrat-ism as originally conceived. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49163/are-frank-and-i-too-hard-the-new-dems |
How Do Our Allies Deal With Torture? | Several recent op-eds advocate aligning U.S. interrogation policy with those of Israel and the United Kingdom. Both countries have unequivocally outlawed the torture of detainees, despite their long experience combating terrorism. Israel has not had an easy time of it. Following two public scandals that raised questions about the accountability of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, the Israeli government established an independent commission to set clear guidelines about coercive interrogation. After some deliberation, in 1987, the commission authorized the use of psychological coercion and "moderate physical pressure" in "ticking time bomb" scenarios. Not long afterwards, these practices became widespread--everything, they assumed, was equivalent to a "ticking time bomb"--although Shin Bet's former head interrogator Michael Koubi says he always checked with the courts before personally employing the most violent of these methods. A decade later human rights groups and Palestinian detainees petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, which delivered a 1999 ruling that is similar to the approach Andrew Sullivan would later advocate in the pages of TNR. The Court banned all "violence directed at a suspect's body or spirit," making any interrogator who employs such techniques answerable to the law. If charged, however, the interrogator may invoke "the defense of necessity," which forces the court to examine whether the interrogator's actions could be considered "necessary" in that individual case. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49270/how-do-our-allies-deal-torture |
Did The Aig Bonus Backlash Kill Talf? | Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein both have some good thoughts about why TALF is underperforming to this point. That's the program that's supposed to revive the markets for consumer, small business, and student lending by giving investors generous incentives to buy securities backed by those loans. The hope was to support up to a trillion dollars in lending through the program, but so far we're only talking about a tiny fraction of that amount--$4.7 billion in March, another $1.7 billion in April, according to The Washington Post. Matt and Ezra conclude that the big obstacle here is anxiety on the part of investors who, as Matt puts it, "are afraid that if they leap into this in a big way there may be a huge public backlash and then along come the executive pay restrictions and all the rest." That seems like a big chunk of it, no question. And it doesn't shock me after the AIG bonus uproar in the House last month, which even the Senate seems to have been embarrassed by, judging from the way it basically ignored the House bill. It's also a reason why I can't fault the administration for trying to evade some of the restrictions that have repelled investors from TALF and similar programs. Having said that, the problem seems to be as much the design of the program as the political risk per se. And I'd guess that's more fixable. Per the Post: The Fed relies on primary dealers, or brokerage houses, to play a key role as intermediaries in TALF, funneling the government loans to investors and holding on to the asset-backed securities as collateral. But the primary dealers have been extremely cautious in designing their contracts with investors, hobbling the program's progress, said people who have been involved with the deals. ... The Fed loans, for instance, are supposed to be "non-recourse," meaning that the investors who participate cannot lose any more than they put at risk. But an executive of a primary dealer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said his firm and others are trying to structure contracts such that if a deal goes sour, they can go after all an investor's assets, not just those put at risk through TALF. ... "The primary dealers are taking a very defensive posture, trying to protect themselves," said a government official involved with the program who also was not authorized to speak publicly. "Part of it is just generally being cautious, and part of it is because they're afraid if anything goes wrong there will be political consequences and reputational risk." It sounds like it's not so much the investors who are discouraged by the political risks here as the primary dealers. The problem seems to be that, as intermediaries, the dealers don't have a chance at much upside, but face a big downside if the politics blow up on them. If there were a way for the government to lose the intermediaries, so that the only people facing political risk were the ones who stood to make big gains, I'd guess the program would be getting more traction. But maybe there's no practical way to do that. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49271/did-the-aig-bonus-backlash-kill-talf |
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