Prophecy & Disasters from the Right & the Left

If you have any doubts that right wingers can be contemptuous of science, allow Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann to put your mind at rest. From Religion News.com:

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians," the Minnesota Republican said Sunday (Aug. 28) at a campaign rally in Florida. "We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, `Are you going to start listening to me here?"'

As you would expect, the Press jumped on that. The Washington Post has a video clip of Bachmann making those remarks, under the heading "Bachmann: Hurricane is Message from God". The Backmann organization says she was just joking.

I watched the clip which was, amusingly, preceded by an energy industry ad promoting fracking. It didn't look like a joke, but it didn't look the least bit serious either. It was obvious rhetorical flourish.

Suppose she had been serious. Is it offensive to science to suggest that a natural disaster is part of God's plan and is a punishment or a warning? No. If there is any offense here, it is against religion for presuming that one knows the mind of God.

On the other hand, there is Billy McKibben. From his column in The Beast:

Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.

Just out of curiosity, what is Irene's last name?

Category 3 Storms have rarely hit Long Island since the 1800s; one was the great unnamed storm of 1938, which sent 15-foot storm waters surging through what are now multimillion-dollar seaside homes.

I admit to some curiosity about how rare Category 3 storms were before 1800, but the fact that a much worse storm hit in 1938 might mean something. What was that storm's middle name?

Critics of the climate change agenda have frequently argued that the agenda amounts to a pseudo-religion. Boy did McKibben step up to be the poster child. It is hard enough to mine decades of climate records for a coherent pattern. To claim that a single weather event is due to global warming is utterly unscientific. Maybe Irene was a harbinger of coming climate disasters. Maybe it is just the case that rare events happen rarely, but occasionally.

McKibben's pompous alarm is no more rational than Bachmann's Biblical rhetoric, but if Bachmann abuses religion, McKibben abuses science.

Opposition to Keystone = Opposition to Energy

There is no form of power generation, however green, that is not opposed by some gaggle of environmentalists. My grad school colleague Steve Hayward expresses this in logical form at Powerline:

Hayward's First Axiom of Environmental Energy holds that there is no source of energy—"clean" or otherwise—that environmentalists won't oppose if it becomes cheap, practical, and scalable.

That's good, but I think we can firm it up a bit. Here is Blanchard's First Axiom of Environmental Energy:

The strength of environmentalist opposition to any source of energy (S) is directly proportional to its economic viability (V).

I add this corollary:

S is always greater than zero, even where V is less than zero.

Environmentalists have opposed wind farms, especially near Presidential vacation sites, and they are now filing suit to stop the building a large solar power facility.

Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council this week notified the Interior Department that it will sue to block the Calico Solar Power Generating Facility, a proposed 660 megawatt solar power plant in Pisgah Valley in Southern California. The environmentalist groups allege that the Interior Department violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to adequately account for the project's possible effect on the desert tortoise, a federally threatened species.

Now I am all with the DoW, SC, and NRDC on this one. Large scale solar power arrays are full tilt crazy. Oh, and think of the tortoise!

Meanwhile, the opposition to the Keystone pipeline is intense enough to confirm my axiom. The pipeline would extend from Canada's oil sands to refineries on the Gulf coast. It would carry about 850,000 barrels a day. Is this a good idea?

Duh. Robert Samuelson has a fine post on the subject. I will list my reasons (some of which got from Samuelson) for thinking that this is a no-brainer.

1. For the foreseeable future, our economy will continue to run on fossil fuels. More fuel is more fuel.
2. Oil from Canada is not oil from dictatorial regimes. The left cares about that except when they don't.
3. Oil from Canada makes North America (including the U.S.) less dependent on "foreign oil", which is also something the left pretends to care about.
4. Extracting oil from the sands involves environmental costs. But blocking Keystone will not stop Canada from extracting the oil. If it doesn't come here, the oil will go west towards China.
5. If the oil pipeline goes west rather than south, that will substantially decouple Canada economically from the U.S. That would be very bad for the U.S. strategically.

I have no doubt that a pipeline bisecting the United States will involve inconveniences. Pipelines leak. Land has to be appropriated. I just think that the national interests indicated in my list are overwhelming.

Opposition to the Keystone pipeline is incoherent unless what you really want is to starve the U.S. of energy. I suspect that that is exactly what a lot of the opposition wants, but they are not about to say so and I doubt very much if they have come to grips with what that means.

Approval Ratings & Ragnarok

Mike Rowe is always fishing for some new dirty and unpleasant job to do. He should trying being an advisor to Mitt Romney right now. Rick Perry has surged in all the major polls since he announced his candidacy, and he is now an average of ten points ahead of Romney.

Romney's strategy so far has been to act as the presumptive nominee. He has kept out of the squabbles between other Republican contenders and mostly out of the news. That seemed to be working just fine until Perry happened. No bother! Ross Douthat at the New York Times thinks that Romney is sitting pretty. His only real threat was another establishment candidate. Let Perry percolate for a bit. The Texas governor is unelectable. As the real contests approach, Perry will burn out.

All that may be true, but… There are two things that make you a viable candidate for a party nomination. First, do the voters think you are a viable candidate? Second, does the money think you are a viable candidate? Perry has established himself with the voters. Romney should keep a close eye on the money. If the money looks to go south, he is in deep doodoo.

Enlarging the view a bit, this is shaping up to be a very interesting election. If Perry wins the nomination, he will be the most conservative politician to do so since Ronald Reagan. I have a hard time believing that Perry is electable, but then I had a hard time believing that Reagan was electable. I am hearing the same things about Perry that I heard about Reagan back in 1980.

In a typical election cycle, you'd be putting your Vegas money on Obama. This is no typical cycle. We suffered a severe recession. Whether we get a second dip or not, there has been no recovery. That is very unusual. Obama, not Perry or Romney or any other Republican, will have to run with that record. Yikes.

Obama's overall approval rating is dismal but not unprecedented. What is or should be existentially terrifying for the Obama camp is how broad their champion's fall has been. FiveThirtyEight, the polling blog at the New York Times, shows that over this year Obama's approval rating has fallen precipitously among 27 definable demographic groups.

Among "pure independents", Hispanics, and Conservative Democrats, Obama's approval rating has fallen about ten percent respectively. Independents are the swing voters who often decide elections. Hispanics are a key Democratic voting bloc and he is barely breaking even. Conservative Democrats are, well, Democrats. Obama has fallen seven points, from 44% approval to 37% approval, among voters older than 64. That is the demographic most likely to vote.

Is it too soon to talk about a failed presidency? It is not too soon to say that Obama has lost the confidence of nearly every bloc of American voters.

Obama will not recover on his own. We know our man pretty well by now. He has nothing. Short of an unlooked for economic surge or some other happy accident, he will not recover. The only way he wins next year is if the Republican nominee is existentially alarming. Maybe Rick Perry will fit that bill. That is what Obama's supporters, all 48 of them, have to hope for.

If Obama does win, he will limp across the finish line. We will have reelected a man in whom no one but himself has confidence.

Justice Department Attacks American Guitar Maker

Okay, so my brother is hard at work putting the finishing touches on a fine guitar and suddenly he is surrounded by Federal Agents. He dutifully raises his hands and is marched off… to the break room, where all the employees including my bro are told they can skedaddle. Uncle Sam had declared a national holiday for Gibson employees. Here is how the Wall Street Journal puts it.

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

I'm sorry, but is ebony or rosewood really "Fish and Wildlife"? Never mind. I understand that an illegal traffic in certain commodities such as "ebony wood in various forms" is something that the U.S. government and other governments wish to discourage. This week's raid didn't seem to be about that, however. I haven't been able to find any statement about the purpose of the raid from the agents of Fish & Wildlife & Ebony Wood in Various Forms, so I will have to make do with this statement from Gibson.

The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department's interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

If that is true, this looks like a labor issue and it looks very fishy. Is it really the business of the Justice Department to enforce laws in India in the absence of some treaty or some request by the Indian Government? I would like to know something more about the warrants.

The Gibson statement has more.

In 2009, more than a dozen agents with automatic weapons invaded the Gibson factory in Nashville. The Government seized guitars and a substantial amount of ebony fingerboard blanks from Madagascar. To date, 1 year and 9 months later, criminal charges have NOT been filed, yet the Government still holds Gibson's property. Gibson has obtained sworn statements and documents from the Madagascar government and these materials, which have been filed in federal court, show that the wood seized in 2009 was legally exported under Madagascar law and that no law has been violated. Gibson is attempting to have its property returned in a civil proceeding that is pending in federal court.

I don't know what the U.S. Government has against Gibson, but there is surely something wrong with seizing Gibson's valuable property and holding it indefinitely without further legal action to justify the seizure.

As the WSJ notes, Gibson is a maker of iconic guitars. All over the world Gibson guitars are coveted by players both famous and aspiring. Collectors line their private museums with Gibson guitars. Maybe the Justice Department has better things to do that trying to drive one more American manufacturer overseas. Or maybe I am wrong, and this is part of the Obama Administration's jobs agenda.

ps.  See this interview with Gibson owner at Breitbart. 

Perry Wrinkle

In my American News essay today I argued that Governor Rick Perry's statements on evolution and global warming were unforced errors. They will be used to show that he is an extremist and they distract attention from the issue on which he can win the White House. It's the economy, stupid.

I am not entirely certain that what I wrote is correct. Perry's statements made him the center of attention at a key moment. He has seized the lead for the Republican nomination in the recent Gallup poll. They show him as a man whose mind has content and who is not afraid to express his opinions. This may look good to a lot of voters when they compare him to the current occupant of the White House.

There is also the possibility that Perry is playing Reagan style rope-a-dope. The Democrats and the press waged an all out war against Ronald Reagan from the moment he secured the 1980 nomination. They painted him as mean and crazy. The trouble was, after four years of cartoons showing Jimmy Carter as a clueless bumpkin, mean looked pretty good. And after all the crazy cowboy hype, all Reagan had to do was walk onto the debate stage in a suit and talk English. His enemies made it very easy for him to look reasonable by comparison to their caricatures.

It is altogether possible that Perry is playing the same game. The Obama team is already rousing the troops against Perry. They may well waste most or all of their ammunition before the real campaign begins.

The other question is whether enough Americans and especially enough independents will regard Perry's views as extremist or care much about them. Perry thinks that evolution is a theory with gaps. He is right of course, but the same is true of most important scientific theories. He thinks that evolution and creationism ought to be taught together. Kids are smart enough to make up their minds.

Creationism ought not to be taught in schools, even side by side with evolution. The doctrine that scientific evidence supports a literal reading of Genesis has no scientific value. However, Perry acknowledges that evolution ought to be taught in schools. I doubt that a majority of voters will consider his view extremist or alarming.

Governor Perry said this about the climate change issue:

I do not buy into a group of scientists, who have been, in some cases, found to be manipulating this information. And the cost to the country and to the world of implementing these anti-carbon programs is in the billions if not trillions of dollars at the end of the day. And I don't think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is more and more being put into question."

Governor Perry thinks that a lot of scientists have manipulated the data on climate change and seems to think that the consensus on Anthropological Global Warming is beginning to crumble. He is right about the first point, though it isn't clear how significant the examples are. He is probably wrong about the second point, at least just yet.

He also believes that the anti-carbon programs would be ruinously expensive and he opposes spending that money. Here he is on very solid ground, if only because we very certainly are not going to spend that money. Cap and Trade came a cropper here and climate change agreements have gone nowhere globally.

A reasonable person may certainly disagree with Governor Perry here, but disagreement is what often happens between reasonable persons. Perry's view on global warming represents a consensus among conservatives and is in accord with political reality. They are well supported, for example, in the British Telegraph.

I still think that these are distractions. If Governor Perry wins next year's Presidential election, it will be on the economy and the national debt. He might yet benefit from the distractions. The left will argue that his opinions are loony tunes, but they are the opinions of an awful lot of Americans and they aren't stupid. Perry may play rope-a-dope all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue.

For whom the bell polls

I expect the President's job approval to recover somewhat over the next year as voters really begin to juggle him in one hand and the Republican nominee in the other. As for right now, Gallup has a wonderful device for comparing approval ratings of any set of four Presidents. If I was trying to find good news for the President, this is where I would go.

At 942 days in office, here is how recent Presidents ranked in approval.

Clinton 46%
Reagan 43%
Obama 40%
Carter 32%

Bush 41 and 43 were outliers, having much better approval ratings at this point. That didn't do 41 any good in 1992. Given the four figures above, Obama isn't doing that badly. Of course, Reagan and Clinton benefited from relatively good economies. Obama cannot count on that.

It also has to be worrisome that, right now, Obama's approval rating is falling in Carter's direction. Gallup has Obama today at 54% disapprove to 38% approve. Rasmussen is giving the President better numbers now (12% deficit instead of 16%). Democracy Corps, a Democratic outfit, has the President down by 5% and CNN by 10%.

Rasmussen has some more worrying information for the Obama campaign. Rasmussen provides a sample of likely voters, a better indicator than registered voters. His large samples allow for a measure of intensity. Only 19% of the sample strongly approves of Obama's job performance, while 45% strongly disapprove. That is especially significant, since intensity indicates not only how a block will vote but the likelihood that they will vote. All nineteen and forty-five percent will turn out. That means a Republican candidate just has to get bag another six percent to get a majority of the popular vote. The standard way to put this is that, if these numbers are accurate, and if the election were held today, Obama would be toast.

Those are two big ifs. Another bit of bad news for the Hyde Park Hamlet is that potential Republican candidates have pulled ahead or almost even in the Gallup poll.

Romney 48%/Obama 46%
Perry 47%/Obama 47%
Obama 47%/Ron Paul 45%
Obama 48%/Bachmann 44%

So Romney is ahead by a hair; Perry is tied; and Obama is leading Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann by 3 and 4% respectively. I repeat: Paul and Bachmann are within striking distance! I also note that that is among all registered voters. One wonders what the numbers would look like if Gallup was giving us likely voters.

These are not predictions are even projections. They are samples of where the President is right now. He is in trouble. I make no predictions about the election outcome. That is for my Election Shaman. I will make some broad predictions about the campaigns.

1. Unless some unforeseen event occurs (Canada launches an invasion of North Dakota and Obama personally takes command of the Fargo police force and has the invaders arrested), Obama will get no help from factors external to his administration. The economy is unlikely to surge next year.
2. The Obama Administration will not suddenly announce dramatic policies that will restore confidence in the President and in the large number of unemployed, underemployed, and "I give the Hell up" Americans.
3. The election will turn on whether the Republican nominee inspires some measure of confidence. If he or she does, Obama will not be returned.
4. Almost all of the Obama campaign's energy will be spent knocking down the Republican nominee.

That's how I see it now. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the 2012 campaign.

Obama Topples Gaddafi

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize started a war while away on spring break in Brazil and won it while on vacation at Martha's Vineyard. You have to acknowledge a kind of elegance in that. If recent reports are accurate, the regime of Col Muammar Gaddafi has collapsed.

The President hasn't made it easy to give him credit. His administration denied that the Libyan intervention was a war at all, preferring to call it by the weasel words "kinetic military action." It was a war. They consistently denied that the U.S. was in charge. We were in charge. They denied that we and our allies were targeting Gaddafi when we were obviously targeting Gaddafi. They had a very hard time explaining what our policy was. The ostensible purpose was to protect civilians. What we were really doing was using airpower to decimate Gaddafi's forces and provide air cover to the rebels so that the latter could topple the regime.

All that being true, the President has all but bagged his second major league bad guy and he gets credit for that. Assuming that the Administration was in fact lying about the policy it was pursuing, as I indicate above, I now have to admit that the policy worked. Without putting American boots on the ground, the U.S. used its awesome airpower to depose a dictator. Focusing narrowly, that was a policy successfully executed.

Whether the policy will be successful in broader, more important terms, remains to be seen. Who are the rebels and what will they do when they establish control of the capital? What kind of regime will they form? President Obama ended an unsavory regime on the cheap, which is good, but you get what you pay for. We have no way of controlling events on the ground but we have to take full responsibility for them. If the rebels should begin spilling large buckets of blood, the blood is on our hands. Likewise, if Libya should fall into the hands of more dangerous people than Muammar, they can thank us for handing it to them.

There is also the small matter of the War Powers Act. The President acted in utter contempt of this law. On the one hand, I have to thank him for demonstrating what I and most conservatives have long believed: that the Act was a bad piece of work. On the other hand, should Presidents be allowed to ignore the law? Here Congress in general and the Republicans in particular share the blame.

Finally, there is the question of the logical implications of this success. The Administration seems to be bending over backwards to assure the designated Assad, who seems to be murdering people much more vigorously than Gaddafi did, that nothing like this is in store for him.

If the Administration wasn't lying about the purpose of the Libyan kinetic thingy, shouldn't we be spending at least a few cruise missiles to protect Syrian civilians? Since we obviously were lying, shouldn't we want Assad Jr. to at least wonder whether he's next? That might give us a little leverage.

I wish I could say that this makes no sense, but it does. Syria is an instrument of Iran. That makes it much more dangerous to American policy in the region than Libya ever was. If we go after Assad as we did Gaddafi, the Iranians will respond by increased efforts to destabilize Iraq. Of course, they may do that anyway, but I suspect that it is fear of that that stays our hand in Syria.

This is a mess, but the region is always a mess. For now, if Gaddafi is really done with, the President gets credit.

The Green Jobs Agenda Comes a Cropper

I am under-amused by my friend and local blogosphere colleague Cory Heidelberger's remark that "Republican economics is wrong, intellectually, empirically, and morally." I think the view that America ought not to turn into Greece is neither intellectually, empirically, nor morally wrong. That doesn't mean that Cory's view, that we ought to emulate Greece, is morally wrong. Somehow I have never developed the taste for believing that people who disagree with me do so out of some character flaw.

I do think that "Democratic", i.e., liberal economics is frequently wrong both intellectually and empirically. Take the green jobs agenda that President Obama is so fond of. This economic strategy proceeds on the assumption that jobs can be created by investment in "green" energy technologies. These include wind and solar power and energy efficiency.

Like most conservatives, I find this strategy to be "intellectually" suspect. It is possible, of course, that as a result of current investments, green technologies will someday become self-sustaining and so create real live jobs. There are reasons to be suspicious about that claim. But the fact that we have to subsidize them now means that they aren't self-sustaining yet. That means that wealth has to be diverted from productive sources to support unproductive ones. Such a diversion cannot result in a net job creation in the short term, which is precisely what the President thinks it can do.

So much for the intellectual side. Can the conservative intellectual analysis be empirically verified? Astonishingly enough, the New York Times has confirmed it.

Aaron Glantz has the goods.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream…

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

The weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry. Even after that issue was resolved, the program never really caught on as homeowners balked at the upfront costs…

Job training programs intended for the clean economy have also failed to generate big numbers. The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.

There are some empirical findings for you! There are more in the article. The green jobs agenda is intellectually and empirically wrong. I would not argue that it is morally wrong to believe in it. Moral censure for intellectual and empirical error would be draconian indeed. But is there not some measure of moral error in continued spending when it is clear that the spending is useless?

California has forged ahead with environmental legislation, including its own version of cap-and-trade that is part of the landmark anti-global-warming law AB 32 enacted in 2006. Another measure, signed into law earlier this year by Mr. Brown, requires utilities to generate at least a third of all their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

The 600-turbine Alta Wind Energy Center southeast of Bakersfield is set to become the world's largest wind farm when it is completed in 2015. Terra-Gen, a company based in New York that has received more than $300 million in private investment from Google and Citi for the Alta farm, says it will bring 1,020 megawatts on line by the end of the year. But even when it is fully up and running, the wind farm will bring only 50 permanent operations and maintenance jobs to rural Kern County, the company said.

Okay, that's private investment, though I am guessing that Google and Citi aren't getting something for that trouble. But let's do the math. A $300 million investment divided by 50 permanent jobs equals what? Six million dollars per job.

The green jobs agenda is an intellectual and empirically verified farce. My friends on the left will still believe in it, and insist that we invest in it. What else could they do? But this kind of spending on useless things means that somebody isn't getting a raise and somebody else isn't getting a job. That might matter morally.

Solvency Deniers 2

When I drive long distances I amuse myself by listening to podcasts sandwiched between thick slices of jazz. My favorite podcasts are mostly audio theater (Selected Shorts, New Yorker Fiction, and Pseudopod) and nonfiction stories (The Moth, This American Life, etc). I listen to some intellectual content podcasts (All in the Mind, Philosophers Zone, etc.) and a number of Buddhist podcasts (Buddhist Geeks, Zencast, San Francisco Zen Center).

I include a few political podcasts like Ricochet and The New Yorker Political Scene. The latter provides a good sample of what left leaning journalist say to each other when they are the only ones in the room. Today I listened to John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza converse about the current financial turbulence.

I was not surprised that they considered the Republicans to be solely to blame for the recent debt ceiling problem. I was mildly surprised by their honesty about the President. Like a lot of the pundit left, they are clearly suffering from a confidence deficit. They implicitly recognized what I last blogged about: that the President is thinking a lot about the campaign and little if anything about anything else.

I was taken aback, however, by their studious avoidance of the issue of sovereign debt. It is one thing to discuss the Republicans and the Tea Party movement without mentioning the fact that, as a result of the lifting of the debt ceiling, U.S. debt has reached 100% of the GDP. To also discuss the European financial crisis without mentioning the issue of sovereign debt suggests a pathological avoidance of reality.

The New York Times has its own version of blindness. In an editorial posted yesterday, the Times complained that "austerity" was the wrong idea on both sides of the Atlantic. Now I understand the Keynesian argument that government spending is sometimes (meaning always) necessary to stimulate economic growth. It takes a remarkable blindness to call what the U.S. and Europe are doing austerity. Trying to cut the rate of debt growth at a time when governments are spending billions and trillions of dollars that they do not have is austerity on no logical planet.

Excessive indebtedness is a real, long-term problem. But Europe's broad downward trajectory can only be turned around if governments — both those of lenders and debtors — spend more in the near term to put people back to work and get consumers back to spending.

The Times appears to acknowledge that "excessive [government] debt is a real problem," but that acknowledgment is negated by the phrase "long-term". What they mean by "long-term" is that we should ignore it altogether at present. Unfortunately, as Keynes himself pointed out, in the long run we are all dead. Very unfortunately, the long-term may have arrived.

What the Times wants is for the U.S. and Europe to borrow and spend a lot more, in the short-term. It is self-deceit to press that position without laying out some realistic numbers and projections. If trillion dollar deficits we are running right now are not sufficient, what would do the trick? To see the problem, consider the familiar thought experiment: why not just give every U.S. citizen (and hey, why not the Greeks as well) a hundred thousand dollars each. That should stimulate the damned economy! Almost anyone can see that that would be madness. Okay, then at what point between that degree of largess and borrowing %100 of GDP does borrowing become unsustainable?

The Times won't attempt any such calculation because it would reveal the fact that our current rate of borrowing and spending is unsustainable. There is simply no realistic possibility of new, massive stimulus spending on either side of the pond. It doesn't matter how necessary it is or how much the Times or anyone else wants it.

Likewise, the Times ignores its own reporting when it seriously questions whether government spending can effectively create jobs. Consider the President's green jobs agenda. It doesn't seem to be working very well in California.

A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

Byron York notes that key Democrats are losing confidence in the green jobs agenda.

Instead of explaining how government spending can effectively create jobs and how it can be fiscally possible, the Times simply calls for more and more spending. That is the Times' blindside, and it is apparently ubiquitous on the left.

ps.  As I was listening to the New Yorker Political Scene, I happened to pass a wind farm in Western Iowa.  Not a single blade on the dozens of towers was toiling or spinning.  Metaphor?

In Drouthy Middle August When the Bones of Campaigns Show

Yesterday morning I woke up in what would have been a pleasant rain, if it hadn't been raining on me. At 5:30 am I found myself standing next to KS, my best friend of thirty plus years, under a narrow rock ledge, listening to thunder and watching everything in our camp get soaking wet. I piously announced that the situation called for a speech. KS said: "let's hear it." I reproduce my rhetoric in its entirety.

We should'a brought the fracking tent.

I didn't exactly say "fracking." There was no applause.

At that moment I felt Obama's pain. He has been on a bus tour. The Administration denies that it is a campaign event. It's a campaign event. Then the White House made a major announcement. From Michael Shear at the New York Times Caucus:

"In early September, we will put forward proposals for jobs-creating ideas and economic growth ideas," Jay Carney, the White House press secretary said Wednesday morning. "We want to be aggressive with deficit reduction that helps pay for things you need to do in the near term to grow the economy."

Well, that's our man. In drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show, we are told he will make a speech about jobs … in September. The Administration will no doubt deny that this is a campaign event. As Mr. Shear explains, it's a campaign event.

A major jobs speech by the president could help set a campaign narrative for Mr. Obama as his Republican challengers increasingly focus their attacks on his handling of the economy. Top aides to the president are eager to show that his ideas are being stymied by a recalcitrant Republican Congress.

Okay, but for that the speech has got to work. Mr. Shear concludes:

White House officials have said the president's speech — to be given soon after Labor Day — will contain new ideas that go beyond those he has made in the past several weeks.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, thinks that the White House has anything new up its collective sleeve. Even if they did, the advance warning just makes them look more hapless in the meantime.

It is doubtful that this President or any other could do much to increase employment in the short term (= between now and the election). I think it's pretty clear that Administration isn't thinking about that. They are, as Mr. Shear acknowledges, thinking about the "campaign narrative".

To find someone who is thinking about it, I offer Mickey Kaus.

Hey, here's your Big Jobs Idea: It looks as if the UAW is about to agree to new contracts based on flexible pay–e.g. no raises, but bonuses linked to something like profits. Why is this signifcant? Because if the entire economy were filled with workers whose pay was flexible, there would be a lot more jobs. At least that is the argument of economist Martin Weitzman in his 1984 book The Share Economy…

If workers make only their base pay plus a share of profits, for example, employers have an incentive to hire people as long as they are worth the base pay. Meanwhile, the deal can be structured so every new hire slightly dilutes the "share" of all the previous hires. Where before you were splitting the profit "pot" by 100 workers, say, now each worker gets 1/101th. That's not gooey–it's even a little nasty. But the upshot is that employers have an incentive to scoop up workers like "vacuum cleaners" in good times and to avoid layoffs in bad times.

There is an idea. I like the idea of predictable raises. I used to get them. As you get older, your pay goes up. There is more than a little logic in that. Older workers might be generally more valuable for their experience. Workers can look forward to increasing prosperity over their careers. If the employer's cash flow is increasing, it is the sort of thing the employer can afford. However, the raises will sooner or later add up to the cost of some number of employees whom the employer would like to hire but cannot afford. Kaus' reform would trade wages for jobs. Which would you rather have, if you have to choose?

This is not the kind of thing a President can enact; however, it is the kind of thing he could promote if he were into thinking. He could take credit for it later. If the UAW is really prepared to sign on to something like this, it is a very good sign for the auto industry and the American economy as a whole. It is not a good sign for the unions. The whole point of a union is to make hiring less flexible by protecting existing workers against job seekers. The point of Kaus' reform is to encourage hiring by removing those protections.

I expect that the President will offer nothing as interesting as that. He will say a lot of things that nobody will pay much attention to. So I will offer my own speech. It will come in November. It will involve a fracking tent.

Man Down

Barack Obama finally did it. He fell below 40% approval in the recent Gallup poll. Gallup has 39% approval, 54% disapproval. For all you Rasmussen haters, the Gallup poll is worse for Obama overall. On the other hand, Rasmussen does this interesting trick of comparing strong approval with strong disapproval. Powerline notes that the current stats for the President are 43% to 55%, an approval index of negative 22 points.

Obama's low ratings are no doubt tied to the economy, but I suspect his lackluster leadership has a lot to do with it. I don't know how much it has to do with actual policies but there is this, from Real Clear Politics. Of five major polls, four have opposition to the Health Care reform leading support by 10-14%. The fifth has opposition leading by a mere seven percent.

All this makes an interesting context for this week's Eleventh Circuit Court ruling that the health care mandate is unconstitutional. This will increase pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the question. I would not predict the Court's action and I do not think that public support or opposition is likely to determine the Court's decision. I do think that strong public opposition makes it slightly easier for the Court to strike the mandate down if that is the way the majority is inclined to go.

I don't like it when the judiciary decides major policy questions but in this case I think the Court should strike the mandate down. If they do not, then the notion of implicit limits on Congress's power will be dead. Liberals may well be very sorry if that happens.

Gone Wisconsin

Well, The New York Times does a heroic job of spinning the recall election in Wisconsin.

Five months after Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin pushed through a law stripping public unions of their bargaining rights, the Republican Party has paid a price. Two of the state senators who backed the law were thrown out of office by voters on Tuesday and replaced with Democrats. Mr. Walker's opponents did not succeed in turning over the Senate, but it was still an impressive response to the governor's arrogant overreach...

Had Democrats won one more district, they would control the Senate, but they were also trying to send a warning to Republican lawmakers around the country who are trying to break public employee unions. In that, they succeeded.

Mickey Kaus spins the election the other way.

Unions Lose Again in Wisconsin: It looks as if the organized labor movement has failed to recall enough Wisconsin Republicans to regain control of the state senate. That's

a) in an off-year election where union turnout usually makes the difference

b) in famously progressive Wisconsin

c) after spending many millions

d) with a nationwide media and organizing push

e) when labor had a galvanizing issue in Gov. Scott Walker's direct assault on the institutional collective bargaining power of public employees, which led to a dramatic walkout by Democrats.

It looks to me like the ball spins both ways with equal ease. More important is the simple fact that Wisconsin Democrats have failed three times in a row: they couldn't stop Walker's bill, they lost the Supreme Court election, and they failed to take control of the State Senate. That doesn't sound as terribly ominous for Union busters as the NYT's would have it.

Craig Gilbert, Washington Bureau Chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, puts it like this in an interview with Margret Warner on PBS Newshour:

Well, I think one reason Democrats did fall short is because that they were playing on Republican turf. Five of the six districts were Republican districts. That's what happens when you try to recall an incumbent in the other party.

And also the other thing that happened was Republican voters turned out to be just as motivated as Democratic voters. We didn't know that going in. We knew Democrats and their labor allies were very jacked up about this election. They were up in arms over Gov. Walker's agenda.

But Gov. Walker is arguably the most polarizing governor in America, in terms of his almost unanimous support among Republicans and his unanimous opposition among Democrats. And that brings out people on both sides.

That is the story. Republicans were just as motivated as Democrats." Public union members furious about threats to their benefits were met with other citizens equally furious about government spending. . In "famously progressive Wisconsin," the mobilized, funded, and furious Democrats can't quite win.

It is not easy to see how the situation improves for Democrats. They will almost certainly attempt a recall of Governor Walker with no reason to suppose they will have better luck. At some point voters will realize that the Democrats are using the recall process to produce nonstop election campaigns and those same voters may be very weary of the process by that time.

All the things he is not

Intrepid reader and long time friend, A.I., recently blasted me for psychoanalyzing Barack Obama without a license. Well, Drew Weston is a gin-you-wine Professor of Psychology and he sees Obama pretty much the same way I do. From the New York Times:

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a "balanced" approach to deficit reduction, one that weds "revenue enhancements" (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with "entitlement cuts" (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who've worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president's storytelling…

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that "centrist" voters like "centrist" politicians…

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.

Apparently I'm a natural at this psychologizing thing. Or maybe it doesn't take professional training to see the President for what he is. Here is what "a lot of Democrats" are thinking about the President. From the Washington Post:

If there is a hallmark of Obama's campaign and governing style, however, it is an aversion to second-guessing, making it unlikely that the White House will respond to the unrest with any major overhaul. His aides note that his unconventional 2008 presidential campaign also faced plenty of naysaying but ultimately proved successful.

But back then, Obama was running as an agent of change.

Of course, the kind of attitude just described was rigidity and stubbornness and an inability to admit mistakes, back when Bush W. was President. Now it is just a benign "aversion to second guessing." However, the real problem is that his first guesses are so anemic.

With President Obama's reelection on the line, Democrats are increasingly anxious about what they see as his failure to advance a coherent and muscular strategy for addressing the nation's economic ills.

Or any other kind of strategy. Richard Cohen thinks the problem is a lack of empathy.

Obama has always been the man he is today. He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance — the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is. He has next to none of the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians. He would eschew the cliché, but he feels little of their pain.

Bill McClellan at St. Louis Today has finally seen the light.

I was splashing around in Lake Michigan last week when the realization hit me like a wave — I was wrong about Barack Obama. I should have voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary three years ago.

At the time of the primary, the decision seemed easy. I saw in Obama the same qualities Jack Kerouac saw in Dean Moriarty in "On the Road." He was 'something new, long prophesied, long a-coming."

It might have occurred to McClellan at the time that On the Road, however "semi-autobiographical", was fiction and that Jack Kerouac might not be the best guide to reality. It seems to be occurring to him now.

It's not just Americans who are finally beginning realize that they are not living in a novel and Barack Obama is not a fictional character. From Der Spiegel:

America's president, as the political scientist Richard Neustadt once noted, may be the most powerful man in the world, but he has only one real power: the power of persuasion.

Barack Obama was back at the pulpit on Monday afternoon, as the world's stock exchanges plummeted. "No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country," asserted the president. It had taken Obama three days to make a statement on Standard & Poor's decision to strip the United States of its top credit rating.

But Obama convinced no one. Even while the president was speaking, the Dow fell below 11,000 for the first time in nine months. This is certainly a problem for Obama, but more than that, it is a problem for America.

The problem with Barack Obama is not that he lacks empathy or courage. There is no reason to believe that he is the genius that many, without evidence, mistook him for, but neither is there any reason to believe that he is stupid. He is simply utterly lacking in any quality beyond self-admiration. No ideas, no particular passions, no content that is not provided by the room around him. He has lived his whole life this way and has been richly rewarded with fame, fortune, and armed forces. Now that we are facing a real crisis, we are finally finding out all the things that Barack Obama is not.

The Solvency Deniers

Intrepid reader Stan is right to be offended by the blame game. The question is not who is to blame, but what to do about it. Cherished interlocutors Donald, Bill, and A.I., seem convinced that there is no solvency crisis and that the fault for the solvency crisis belongs solely to the Republicans. The latter is adolescent; the former, pathological.

President Bush does share a lot of blame for the present crisis, along with Republicans who weren't the least bit shy about spending when they held Congress. However, Bush isn't President anymore. I underline that for Bill's benefit. Obama is president and he continued Bush's economic policy. That means he owns it.

As for the reality of the crisis, if this one isn't real it is difficult to imagine what a real one would look like. Europe is headed for a major financial meltdown. It doesn't look as though there is any realistic chance of avoiding that now. What is the cause? Let me suggest that it isn't Republicans. It is the simple fact that one European government after another can't pay its debts. There is reason to suspect that China is headed for the same kind of disaster.

The U.S. still enjoys a cushion in so far as our Treasury Bonds are the last refuge of world capital. That ought not to be reassuring. It ought to be terrifying. Our debt is now, for the first time since WWII, equal to the GDP. Does anybody think that, absent serious reform, it won't continue to grow? If the CBO's more realistic scenario is indeed realistic, we will indeed be where Greece is now in a couple of decades. Perhaps I need to reproduce the CBO's ominous chart.

What happens in the short term if Europe does meltdown? They buy a quarter of U.S. exports. What happens in world capital markets do lose confidence in Treasury Bonds and there is no safe refuge left?

The U.S. has to put its fiscal house in order. Even if ObamaCare paid for itself (it doesn't) and Social Security were fixed (it hasn't been), these programs soak up enormous resources that can't be used for anything else. Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid are out of control.

It is a case of world class irresponsibility to pretend that we can solve the solvency crisis without reforming entitlements. Yes, we are going to have to have tax increases. We are also going to have to reduce the size of the welfare state. Anyone who refuses to recognize this is estranged from reality.

IOUSA

Donald Pay, in his comments on my previous post, challenges the notion that entitlements are largely to blame for our debt situation.  He thinks Bush-era tax cuts are more to blame.  I am going to post the 30 minute version of IOUSA.  Think it is worth the time of everyone.  You'll note that this film uses largely 2007 numbers.  The numbers are far, far worse today, just four years later.  Watch this and ask who is more right, Donald Pay or David Walker, the former comptroller of the United States and the mind behind IOUSA. You can also see an updated version called IOUSA Solutions. Note this film has various parts that go beyond the eight minute intro. 

Update: I forgot to open comments.  Now corrected.

 

Debt Matters

I think Prof. Blanchard's post below is one of the finest analyzes of our situation that I have read.  I think it is both accurate in its depiction of our situation and how we got here.  I was going to comment on his post, but my comment got so long I decided that since I retain authorship rights on this site I would just post the whole damn thing here. Read Ken's post and then the comments to put this in context.

While we play the blame game, isn't it clear that all sides are to blame, even (especially) ourselves?  We have built an economy based on the idea (noted by commenter A.I.) that we are a consumer economy.  But, as Donald points out, much of our manufacturing base has fled the country (I have some level of agreement with Donald about the exporting of jobs).  A society that consumes without producing will find itself in debt.  Is it any accident that the personal savings rate declined at the same time the government was going deeply into debt?  We live in a "live for the moment" society where we are unwilling to make provision for the future.  That is why debt is a moral problem as well as an economic one.  We must learn the old lesson of living within limits.  Both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, have sold us a bill of goods on this matter.

Cheney's famous remark to Paul O'Neil (that deficit's don't matter) is true, but at the margins.  Debt does not matter if it is debt for useful/productive things (like a house) and is debt that you can manage.  Our debt is problematic in both ways.  We are in debt because we are transferring wealth from future generations to ourselves in the form of entitlement spending and copious tax breaks.  We are not building anything lasting, just making future generations pay for our consumption.  Also, because of demographics and lack of any planning, it is clear that soon we will be unable to to service our large debt.

Just one word about the Keynesian assumptions of Donald and A.I.  This I think it a fundamental disagreement, and I disagree respectfully.  The purpose of an economy is not to drive consumer demand.  That is a result of a strong economy, but not the purpose.  A strong economy is best defined as being able to efficiently produce goods and services, i.e. produce them profitably.  As I say, consumer demand will naturally follow.  But this is why I think that it is correct to focus on the "supply side" rather than on the demand side.  If goods and services are produced efficiently (i.e., if business is truly productive), then business is profitable and the profits go into expansion of jobs.  As wealth is created people will naturally buy more.  But for economic reasons, and the moral reasons I hinted at above, I think it is problematic to say that we must keep consuming more and more so we can keep driving the economy. 

I think the debt and jobs are linked in at least two ways. First, metastasizing debt means more and more resources will have to be diverted from productive uses to simply servicing government debt.  That's not good.  Second, it creates a level of uncertainty that makes business queesy about acting.  I happen to think the main factor (but not sole factor) hurting our economy now is uncertainty.  It'd be helpful if the Congress and President (and I don't just mean the current personalities; I mean anyone who happens to fill those roles in the coming years) could come to an agreement on gliding towards budget balance.  And we have to actually trust that such an agreement will be honored.  This is why I think that Democrats are more to blame than Republicans because Democrats have made it painfully clear that they don't even think there is a debt problem.  To paraphrase Leo Strauss, they fiddle while Rome burns, but they are excused by two facts: they don't know that they are fiddling or that Rome is burning. 

We shouldn't be shocked that politicians play politics.  It's what they do.  The question is whether there ultimately is any substance behind the inevitable games.  Here I think Paul Ryan is the hero.  Unlike, say, every Democrat in Congress for the last two years and the President this year, he actually has put his cards and the table in the form of a budget (yes, the President had a budget, which he quickly disowned and the Senate voted down 97-0). 

A.I. is simply wrong in asserting the big health care bill saves money.  That has been demonstrated false by everyone who is not a lackey to the administration.  Give the CBO some truth serum, i.e. make them talk about what is likely to happen versus the fanciful promises of the bill, and they will tell you that "Obamacare" is a major contributor to future debt. 

Other than this I have nothing to say.

 

A Minus Equals F

Here is the bad news: the U.S. lost its triple A credit rating. For the first time S&P downgraded America's credit to double AA. There isn't any good news. I don't know what this means in terms of immediate financial consequences. It is easy enough to say what it means in larger terms.

1. Paul Krugman is an idiot. I have demonstrated this well enough in the past. It has been verified again. Krugman isn't stupid nor is he crazy (though to be fair a case can be made for that). He is just living in another world. Krugman thinks that the U.S. government has not spent nearly enough. Much more spending is necessary to generate job growth. The trouble with that is that we have already been spending at WWII levels. If that doesn't work, what would? And from whom do we borrow the trillions more that Krugman thinks we need? Greece?
2. A lot of people on the American left are Paul Krugman. They say we need to focus on jobs, not on the deficit, but that is just another way of saying we need to keep spending more borrowed money. John Kerry thinks the Tea Party is the problem and that the press should "stop giving them equal time". That's like blaming your fever on the thermometer.
3. The Republicans are the problem. Yes, in so far as they are rigidly opposed to raising taxes. Federal taxes at present are at present taking a historically small cut of the GDP. We are going to have to let them rise to the norm and maybe a bit higher than that.
4. Taxes won't solve the problem. Beyond a certain point, taxes have diminishing returns. They will begin to retard economic growth and encourage tax avoidance. No realistic or even unrealistic level of taxation can restore the budget to solvency.
5. Congressional Democrats are the problem. Yes, in so far as they are acting like an opposition party. They obviously think they were put on this earth to sustain and increase spending. No progress can be made on the real problem so long as they insist and are able to continue doing that.
6. The President is the problem. To be sure, in so far as he is incapable of leadership. The presidency was designed to provide leadership for Congress in setting a national agenda and in dealing with a national crisis. The President submitted a budget earlier this year that ignored the fiscal crisis. After the Ryan plan forced Democrats to abandon that budget, the President proposed…nothing.
7. The gridlock in Washington is not the problem. S&P didn't downgrade our credit rating because Congress didn't increase taxes on the rich.
8. The national debt is the problem. That would be it. As in Brussels, so on the Potomac. Financial institutions worldwide are losing confidence that the U.S. government can address the solvency crisis. If that continues, it will lead to catastrophe.

This crisis has been coming for more than a half century. Conservatives have been warning about this for all that time. We now have the cold comfort of being right.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

If you are looking for something very real and fascinating and available through Netflix Instant Watch, have I got a film for you Comrade! The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel, is as gripping and resonant as an historical drama can be. It is also penetrating enough to count as a significant document of political science precisely because it sticks scrupulously to the surface of things. Martina Gedeck (Ulrike Meinhof), Moritz Bleibtreu (Andreas Baader), and Johanna Wokalek (Gudrun Ensslin) all provide masterful performances. If there were any justice in the world, Wokalek would have received an Oscar for best actress.

The Baader Meinhof Gang, or the Red Army Faction as they called themselves, carried out bombings, assassinations, bank robberies and kidnappings in West Germany from 1967 to 1977. The group was led by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof. In 1972 they were captured but remaining RAF members continued the terrorist campaign, then focused on securing their leader's release. The RAF established an alliance with an extreme Palestinian faction and many of their members were trained in camps in the Middle East. In 1977 four Arabs hijacked a plane bound for Frankfurt and demanded the release of the RAF leaders and a couple of Palestinians. The plane was eventually stormed by an elite unit of the German police. Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof all committed suicide in prison.

The RAF probably never amounted to more than a few hundred members, with a much smaller core. It did, however, have the sympathies of large numbers of Germans. Christopher Hitchens wrote a much better review than I am capable of producing, and he has this:

There were three officially democratic countries where for several years an actual weaponized and organized group was able to issue a challenge, however garbled and inarticulate, to the very legitimacy of the state. The first such group was the Japanese Red Army, the second (named partly in honor of the first) was West Germany's Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and the third was the Red Brigades in Italy.

You may notice that the three countries I have just mentioned were the very ones that made up the Axis during the Second World War. I am personally convinced that this is the main reason the phenomenon took the form it did: the propaganda of the terrorists, on the few occasions when they could be bothered to cobble together a manifesto, showed an almost neurotic need to "resist authority" in a way that their parents' generation had so terribly failed to do.

Hitch may well be right here but I suggest another, not necessarily exclusive motive: anger against the United States. Those who came of age in the former Axis in the 60's could not very well hate the U.S. for defeating them in WWII. Still, it's the kind of thing that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. Vietnam gave them a legitimate excuse to hate and wage a guerrilla war (or more accurately, a monkey war) against America. In the film, Ensslin's mother explains that her daughter's actions have left her feeling liberated.

Bruno Ganz plays Horst Herold, a kind of national security Dumbledore who orchestrates the police action against the RAF while serving soup to the people who carry out his strategies. While he is no nonsense about the manhunt, he keeps expressing pious liberal opinions about changing the political conditions that he supposes encourage the terrorism. That his efficiency can be combined with such naiveté says a lot about the political culture then and now.

The Baader Meinhof Complex, as the title reveals, suggests that a psychological dysfunction was behind the group's terrorism. To be sure, the German police were brutal. In 1967 police joined a pro-Shah goon squad in clubbing down unarmed protesters. That movement triggered the RAF's campaign. However, police brutality does not add up to a police state, which is what the Baader Meinhof gang wanted to believe that the West German government was. It wasn't. So they set out to make it one.

They committed crimes precisely so that there would be arrests. Now there were political prisoners. The prisoners staged hunger strikes and otherwise committed suicide in order to make the case that the regime executed its enemies.

All this was not political action, it was political theatre. They had very little in the way of a coherent program beyond the most abstract communist dogmas. They were searching for something that would give their lives meaning in the way that totalitarian ideologies had done for the previous generation. They turned their lives into a drama that was at least compelling enough to hold their interest. For that, they were willing to kill people.

Ulrike Meinhof's suicide was probably the result of psychological collapse. Not so that of Baader and Ensslin. Theirs was very deliberate and had a double purpose. The lesser purpose was to encourage their comrades at large to believe that they had been executed. They hoped that new generations of the RAF would emerge, and they would be immortalized as martyrs. The primary purpose was to be in control of their fate. They brought the curtain down at the moment of their choosing.

The Baader Meinhof gang were not the conscience of their generation, they were its bad conscience. They were monsters, worse than thugs and worse in a sense than most terrorists. Their motives were neither venal nor uplifting in any way. They are fascinating enough, but not deserving of the least bit of sympathy.

The Once & Future History of Unions

Back in grad school I would occasionally spend an hour puzzling through an edition of Le Monde, trying to figure out what the French Left was up to. Now you can go online and get the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique.

These days Le Monde, like a lot of pedigreed papers, is in danger of extinction. It's amazing that it has lasted this long. I noticed this bit from The Economist.

WHEN the managers of Le Monde introduced computers to the paper's print works in the early 1990s, they hoped for greater efficiency and lower costs. But this was not the priority of the Syndicat Général du Livre et de la Communication Ecrite, a trade union which controls the printing of French national newspapers. It demanded that for each new computer, Le Monde should pay for one print worker to type on the keyboard and another simultaneously to watch the screen. It got its way.

Let us call that the parasitic tendency of unions, without comment on how pervasive a tendency of unions it is. Clearly this sort of thing represents a major obstacle to the function and survival of any industry. It also makes the product more expensive. In the case above, the union effectively cancelled much or all of the cost advantage that computers could provide. Why did the union get away with it?

The last time a paper tried to fire large numbers of Syndicat du Livre workers was in 1975, when Le Parisien Libéré, a morning daily, announced 200 layoffs. During a violent, months-long strike, Le Parisien lost half of its circulation and never got it back.

The Syndicat could impose ridiculously costly work rules so long as the public supported them. The French public did in 1975. Why that? Like a lot of Europeans, the French conceive of an income as something like a title of nobility: you can get it for all sorts of reasons, but once you do it is yours for life. Working for your income is only one way, and perhaps the least preferable way, to get it. Class and union solidarity was all about winning and protecting such titles. The result of this of course was inflexible industries and economies.

French papers are as badly bullied by print unions as British papers were until Rupert Murdoch, a media baron who has recently had other troubles, helped to break their power in the 1980s…

When Mr Murdoch (and a fellow tycoon, Eddie Shah) humbled Britain's print unions by setting up presses that shut them out, they revived the entire British newspaper industry. Papers suddenly found they could cut the cost of production, improve quality and launch new products.

Le Monde has been purchased by a trio of tycoons who will now attempt something similar. Either they will break the union or Le Monde is not long for le monde.

Something similar may be playing out in Wisconsin. The budget bill that attracted national attention has given school districts a lot more flexibility in dealing with their unionized employees. John McCormack tells the story in The Weekly Standard (the article does not seem to be available online).

[Emily Koczela, finance director for the Brown Deer school district] was able to change the teacher's benefits package to fill in the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plansuch as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)saved $200,000.

As a result, Koczela was able to reverse a decision to lay off 27 teachers. If that turns out to be typical, it seems likely that Governor Walker's budget reform will prove to be a smashing success.

Will the voters see it that way? It's hard to tell, yet. Ann Althouse notes a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article:

The plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for public employees may be the issue that sparked this year's recall campaigns against six Republican state senators, but neither side is talking much about that issue now as the elections approach.

Althouse shrewdly comments:

So the shocking outrages the touched of the protests don't move the voters, and the recall elections are like normal elections, asking voters whether they'd like their next helping of legislation to be conservative or liberal.

Everyone wants his or her job to be insulated from economic forces. I know I do! At some point, those protections have to be paid for by sacrificing additional jobs that might be created. They can also threaten firms and governments.

Americans do not think of an income the way the French are wont to do. We think of an income as something to be had in exchange for goods and services. This will make it a little easier, I suspect, for us to adjust to the new economic reality that is now becoming visible.

ps.  When you squeeze the words together in an internet address, lemonde looks a lot like lemonade.  Just sayin'. 

The Lesser Crisis & the Greater

For most of the last two weeks my cell phone and my kindle were cut off. We did have an internet connection on the ship, but it was annoyingly slow and expensive. As I reconnected with the grid today I find out that a deal has been achieved on raising the debt limit. I note that, if anything, the Canadians were a lot more worried about this than most of their neighbors to the south. Here is my take.

The two parties make for four factions. The Democrats are divided between those who are exclusively concerned to avoid any cuts in federal spending and those who are largely if not exclusively concerned with winning the next election. Perhaps I need to say that the Administration falls squarely in the latter category.

The Republicans are divided between those who insist, apparently at all costs, on reductions in federal spending and those who think that the next election is the more immediate concern.

In the House vote, the Democrats divided right down the middle (95 yea/95 nay). The Republicans went three to one in favor of the deal (174 yea/66 nay). Here's the deal: the debt limit will be raised by $2.1 trillion and maybe more depending on Congressional action. The deficit will be reduced by a similar amount. All this depends on a questionable mechanism. A joint committee (6 R, 6 D) will be formed to produce a bill that will include the necessary cuts. If that effort fails, the bill passed today will trigger automatic across the board cuts in such programs as Medicare and cuts in defense amount to half the military budget.

Well. It is hard for me to imagine that this is real, but the punditry is obsessed with the question of who won. At first glance, it clearly looks like the day belongs to Orange John Boehner. He got a bill that apparently reduces the deficit by over two trillion smackers without any tax increase. Of course, the joint committee may recommend tax increases. I think it should if it comes with sensible tax reform. Assuming that the automatic cuts are avoided (they aren't going to happen), we are surely looking at real cuts in federal spending. That is a big defeat for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, a two or even three trillion cut in the deficit over ten years doesn't look that impressive when you consider that we have been running deficits of a trillion and a half per year. Keith Hennessey has the best analysis of the bill and the fiscal crisis in general. He makes the important distinction between a cash flow crisis, which is what the debt limit issue amounts to, and the solvency crisis. The former has diverted our attention from the latter and from the continuous string of bad news about jobs and the economy.

Congress is not yet seriously addressing the solvency crisis, which is the real threat to our economic security. We are still paying off debt year after year by borrowing more trillions. That can't go on much longer.

The Congress will have to do the job, for the White House is providing no leadership. The President whines and makes demands, but as usual he takes little part in the action. Those who think a parliamentary system would be better than the one we have should thank Barack Obama. He has virtually transformed John Boehner into a Prime Minister. His only concern seems to be to make sure that no real issues are addressed before November of next year. He wants to keep his job. If he has any idea what his job is, he has kept it a secret.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaack. I spent ten days hiking, rafting, kayaking, and eating. That included seven days on a cruise ship. Here are some things you might want to know if you are thinking about going.

1. The Alaskan topography is breathtaking. Just flying into Anchorage is worth the plane ticket if it's clear and you have a window seat.
2. There is a really big mountain in Alaska called Mount McKinley that is called Denali. If you want to sound Alaskan, call it 'the mountain'. However, you will be lucky to see it at all because:
3. Alaska in the summer is cool, cloudy, and wet. No one knows what it is like in the winter, for no one other than vampires and their victims remain there past October. Winter in Alaska is not a noun but a verb: it means going somewhere else before the vampires arrive.
4. Princess Cruises has two lodges up there. Both of them are gorgeous.
5. Anchorage is a real town. Everything south of Anchorage is like a Disney fabrication illustrating what people used to do in Alaska. Every port of call that we called upon had the same seven stores. If you ask about newspapers, the locals look at you with blank stares. However, the scenery is always wonderful, even if all you can see is a hint of a pine covered ridge with a bald eagle soaring out of it. That, or a sea plane. Apparently everyone in Alaska is born with a pilot's license.
6. A cruise ship is a great example of reverse functionalism. We used to climb into ships to get somewhere. Now we go somewhere to have an excuse to climb into ships.
7. The Coral Princess was a hoot. Inside it looks like the setting of BioShock, without the flooding or the splicers. The food is very fine. It is served in reasonable portions and you can eat as much as you like. Meals are (for the most part) covered so you don't have to whip out your cruise card for an extra slice of cheese cake. You do have to pay for drinks, but they are reasonably priced. The more cognac I consumed, the more reasonable the price became.
8. I would like to tell you what the ocean is like, except that, like Waubay, you can't see it for the water. What you can see is whales and glaciers. Whales spend a lot of time trying to get out of the water, something that is called breaching. They seem to view the temporary experience of gravity as a treat. Glaciers spend their time trying to get back into the water. Our ship spent most of a day in front of one glacier and we got to see it 'calve'. Great chunks sheer off and fall into the soup, raising great waves that entertain the gulls and disturb the seals, who take their own cruises on chunks of ice.
9. Bald eagles are really big. The coast of Alaska is like the hair club for birds. If you go sea kayaking, you might get to see star fish but don't call them that because they aren't fish. They are sea stars. We also got to see jelly fish, which are called that but aren't fish either.
10. Ships rock. At first glance this seems like an advantage for women, who get to sit down when they pee. In fact it is an advantage for men as it excuses our characteristically bad aim. Taking a shower is easier than on land. You don't have to move your head to get all the shampoo off. The ship moves you.
11. Unfortunately, when the cruise ends they make you leave. 
    

I can offer four reasons for an Alaskan cruise: living on floating restaurant for several days, watching the landscape covered by pine, fog, and snow and the occasional glacier, and the wilderness shore excursions. All that added up to maybe the best vacation ever. Finally, there is a brew pub in Anchorage: the Snow Goose. They serve maybe the best IPA I have ever tasted.

Finally, we disembarked in Vancouver. It turns out I like Canada. It is positively crawling with Canadians, but they turned out to be really nice. They speak English, French, Chinese, and every other language. One final tip: if you go to visit Vancouver, check out the No. 9 restaurant in the Richmond suburb. While I treasured every meal aboard the Coral Princess, my favorite meal was the spicy chicken and cashews at this Chinese place. Nearly everyone there was either an Asian family or a European Canadian dad with his Asian wife and kids. That's a good sign.

ps.  While I was in Vancouver I thought to myself: this is the kind of place that would give out free pipes to crack addicts.  Actually, I didn't, but if I had I would have been right.