Words Against Chaos

The Project of Speaking, the Project of Selfhood

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:29:10 -0400

To write is to endeavor. To write is to endeavor to say something of value, to encapsulate in words and phrases chosen by the deliberate evaluation of intellect and the kinetic drive of one’s metaphysical self, something that carries truth within it. The idea may be the vehicle; the words may be the terrain across which the idea lays out its demand that we travel with it; the text may be a filter, a mask, an approximation. One hopes to create something more than that, something precise, but one is limited, always, by the fact that every choice, every action, every assertion, every utterance, changes the landscape irreversibly. That is the responsibility of writing.

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climateadaptation: Climate adaptation in Congo. The boat at...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:02:06 -0400

climateadaptation:

Climate adaptation in Congo. The boat at 2:25 is mesmerizing.

ideatrotter:

Uniting climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Congo Basin

Communities in the Congo Basin are heavily impacted by the twin threats of deforestation and climate change. Could a green belt around the village of Lukolela in the DRC help the local community adapt to climate change, while also bringing carbon reduction benefits?

The Centre for International Forestry Research’s latest project, COBAM aims to tackle these problems and create a synergy between climate change mitigation and adaptation through forestry projects in the region. CIFOR visits one community involved in the project in Lukolela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

More at CIFOR

The Most Dangerous Game

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:15:00 -0400

A Syrian plane was forced to land, by Turkish authorities, in Ankara yesterday. The plane was boarded, and reports suggest security officials confiscated military communications and possibly weapons guidance equipment, thought to have originated from Russia. The Syrian regime is accusing Turkey of “piracy”, and the government of Vladimir Putin is demanding answers.

Syria recently fired rockets into Turkish territory, killing 5 civilians in a village near the border. The Turkish parliament authorized the government to respond with military force to any Syrian military intervention on Turkish soil or against Turkish civilians, interests or military positions. Turkey has responded, and there have been reports of skirmishes. Turkey is a NATO signatory, meaning that under the NATO treaty, Syria’s actions may warrant a full-scale military response from NATO.

Enter Vladimir Putin. Putin’s government is notoriously paranoid about the NATO treaty’s mutual self-defense provisions, and until the rocket attacks on the Turkish village had blocked all attempts to admonish, sanction or threaten the regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite his relentless killing of thousands of Syrian civilians.

In what is now more and more typical of the defensively revelatory, overheated posturing of the Putin regime and its allies—the women from Pussy Riot were charged, by Putin’s government, with a crime against the state for allegedly denigrating the Russian Orthodox Church, by suggesting it was tied to Putin’s corrupt government—a Russian weapons contractor has been quoted in the international press as giving assurances that there was no military equipment onboard the plane held and searched in Ankara.

Obviously, that “assurance”—whether true or untrue—also reveals a close working relationship between the Putin regime, its allies in the weapons industry, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It has long been argued that Assad feels no pressure to stop bombing civilian homes and neighborhoods from tanks and aircraft, because he has the implicit support of Putin’s government.

This geopolitical game is far from a harmless tale of intrigue and covert operations. It is the most dangerous game either of these two regimes could play, and Putin’s government appears to be calculating that the inexplicable madness of the situation—an ailing superpower supporting a regime focused on the mass killing of its people—will preclude any direct military intervention by NATO.

But such an outcome is not clearly the most probable. NATO invoked the mutual self-defense requirement after the attacks of September 11, 2001, so that the most powerful military alliance in the world, Turkey included, would soon be at war in Afghanistan, toppling the most backward, if extremist and dangerous, regime on Earth. A lot more is at stake, in terms of regional peace and stability, in Syria.

The Assad regime is thought to have huge stockpiles of chemical weapons. There are reports Assad may have begun to authorize the deployment, or redeployment of those weapons—possibly to keep them secure against rebel attacks. Syria sits astride a region that has long been the crossroads of the world, hosts the only Russian military base outside the former Soviet Union, and its coastline can be considered vital to regional and global shipping.

Syria borders not only Turkey, but Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. A game of covert proxy war and diplomatic brinksmanship in Syria could lead to a catastrophic regional conflagration. NATO may be prompted by external escalation to act to end the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and it may do so with the support of international bodies looking to prosecute the dictator for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

In July, Putin’s government discontinued weapons sales to Assad, and pledged to halt all weapons traffic to Syria until the escalating civil war there came to a close. Now, it appears that pledge may have been broken, and that Assad persists in his bloody quest to hold onto power, with covert assistance from the Russian Federation.

The United Nations should act diplomatically to dismantle the apparent covert alliance between the Kremlin and the Assad regime, laying out the crimes of the regime, the violation of the sovereignty of Syria’s neighbors, the misuse of civilian air traffic routes for military cargo, and pressure the Russian Federation to withhold its veto or to support a UN Security Council measure calling for the prosecution of Bashar al-Assad and the establishing of an internationally supported process of democratic transition in Syria.

The Thing about all those Romney Untruths

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:55:00 -0400

Has anyone else noticed that Mitt Romney seems pathologically incapable of formulating even one sentence that does not include a lie, a dodge, an absurdity or dog-whistle innuendo? His speeches are being fact-checked and found to be vapid, vague, full of distortions, smears and ancient partisan talking points from the bad old days of Abramoff and the bought Congress—empty rhetoric that has no connection to the present reality, and yet the same media doing the fact-checking seem content to report that Romney is now “in much better shape” or “picking up steam”.

Yesterday, Romney gave a speech on foreign policy, in which he laid out literally zero foreign policy goals, except to toughen sanctions against Iran—the suggestion being they are not yet tough enough or that Obama has not done so, when in fact Pres. Obama has instituted the toughest sanctions in history against Iran, and they are having a major impact, putting Ahmedinejad’s popularity at an all-time low, bringing dissenting Iranians into the streets in protest.

The speech revealed the same flippant, reckless, schoolyard-bully randomizing on world affairs that we have become accustomed to hearing from Romney. In similar fashion to his shame-inducing London and Israel trips and his libelous unpatriotic smears in the wake of the Benghazi attack, he managed to defame the president, the nation and the military, all while dismissing the Arab Spring’s wave of democratization as little more than a worrying increase in “risk of conflict”.

He also decided to falsify the record by alleging that Pres. Obama has been on the sidelines for the major international security events of the last four years. Independent observers, presidential historians and even Obama’s Republican rivals admit he has been one of the most hands-on, engaged-in-details presidents, personally directing operations—from the liberation of hostages taken by Somali pirates to the killing of Osama bin Laden to the NATO air campaign that helped Libya’s democracy movement to dismantle the Qadhafi regime.

Far from being disengaged, Pres. Obama personally urged Hosni Mubarak to relinquish power, urged the leaders of the Yemeni and Libyan regimes to lay down their arms and turn over power to interim democratic authorities. He has successfully brought the Iraq war to a close and has personally overseen operations targeting militants, terrorists and war criminals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Libya, Uganda and—though it has not been disclosed to date, most likely, informed observers suggest—Syria.

What is most astonishing about the President’s weak performance in the first debate is not that it happened; incumbent presidents are often at a disadvantage for various reasons, the most important being they sleep little, have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and do not have the luxury of being able to dedicate an entire month of their lives to debate prep. Also, they are not accustomed to having to explain the self-evident in such a fashion; they have become project oriented, and are more on mission than on message—at least when they are honestly doing the job.

What is most astonishing about the President’s weak performance in the first debate is that the media have been so unwilling to do the very thing they accuse the President of not doing enough—call Mitt Romney out on the rampant lying and innuendo of which nearly 100% of his rhetoric is made. This is a grave disservice to the American people and to democracy itself. That a candidate could be so far from contact with lived reality, so far from any specificity whatsoever on his policy proposals, so far from honest disclosure of whatever accounting tricks have been used to avoid paying taxes to the people he now asks to hand him the world’s most powerful job, and be treated as just another candidate doing the job of campaigning, is a moral disgrace.

Don’t you believe you and your family have a right to the truth, in every instant, about every issue of public significance?

The First Amendment conceives not of a morally bankrupt, absent-minded press, obsessed with he-said/she-said stenography and rumor-mill analysis. The First Amendment conceives of a free and independent press, empowered by genuine liberty and force of purpose to act as the people’s fourth arm of representative government, keeping a watchful eye on all that is not right in the halls of power.

Mitt Romney is not yet there in those halls. He is not yet an elected “leader of the Free World”. But he is responsible for his actions, and he needs to be held to account for every last untruth he mutters in public. A few of Romney’s most obscene distortions:

He claims the President of the United States “sympathizes” with terrorists;
he suggests that saving the auto industry was a pointless exercise in “big government”, even though the auto industry remains fully private and independent, and is now thriving;
he claims Pres. Obama has “destroyed jobs”, even as a report from the Financial Times and the Brookings Institution finds that the US economy, under Barack Obama’s leadership, is “the brightest spot in the world economy” and that the US recovery “defies [the] threat of global recession”;
he attacked fully 47% of the people of the United States for being “victims” who are lazy by character and feel they are “entitled” to live off the government;
he says he will cut taxes “across the board” by 20%—an action that will cost $5 trillion—but says it will cost nothing;
he says he will “strengthen” Medicare by eliminating it and replacing it with a system of government-backed coupons (“vouchers” or “premium support” tickets) allowing for discounted unregulated hugely expensive private insurance—at a projected additional cost of $6,000 PER YEAR to the average senior citizen;
he tells one audience that no pre-existing conditions will be covered, unless the patient has never spent a single hour without insurance coverage, then tells 60 million viewers that his plan will cover all pre-existing conditions—a flagrant lie;
he says he devotes himself “to the hundred percent”, but vows to ban same-sex marriage, eliminate rights for same-sex couples, strip women of their reproductive and health rights, shut down community clinics, after school programs and clean energy funding;
he has pledged to spend whatever it takes to back any ally of the United States anywhere on Earth, no matter the situation, yet he plans to give away $6 trillion in tax reductions, mostly to the already affluent;
he has pledged to support “small business job growth”, but plans a tax overhaul that will hurt Main Street mom and pop shops and help Walmart and Staples expand their market dominance;
he says he will “balance the budget” by cutting spending, but includes $8 trillion of military and tax expenditures in his notoriously vague budget blueprint;
he says he will defend and support the Constitution, yet he constantly resorts to dog-whistle racist innuendo, designed to elicit the support of bigots and hardliners who oppose universal civil liberties;
he says his energy policy is the best way to create jobs, though it depends primarily on the least job-creation-intensive forms of energy: coal, oil and frack-extracted gas;
he says he wants “North American energy independence”, but relies entirely on finite mineral resources that enrich billionaires and foreign autocrats—including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Russia’s Vladimir Putin—while sabotaging investments in the decentralized, clean-energy economy that is our best chance to rebuild a vibrant, expanding middle class.

There is a lot more. The list is epic, because Romney rarely makes an entirely true statement about anything. The more he has gotten away with spouting untruths, the more he has been emboldened to continue to do so.

As a matter of justice, and out of a deep commitment to genuine participatory democracy, independents of principle, and those moderates in the Republican party, have to take stock and recognize what is going on. Whether you like or dislike Barack Obama, whether you believe he has done everything possible to steer us toward a better future, you have to be honest enough with yourself, for the sake of posterity, to recognize that Mitt Romney is waging a pathologically dishonest campaign, which offers almost no detail of any kind that the American people can trust, regarding what he would do as president.

(It is not even clear whether or not he has paid all of his taxes for the last ten years, how much wealth is stashed in Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts, how long he worked at Bain Capital, or how closely he worked on that company’s offshoring of American jobs.)

It is not acceptable for these lies to go unchallenged. It is not acceptable for the media to report partisan polling sources, statistics stated as questions that were never asked (as when physicians’ dissatisfaction with private insurers was widely reported as “disapproval of Obamacare”), and split-second debate reactions, as if they somehow mean that a man this dishonest and disloyal is looking like a better and better bet for the most powerful office on the planet. It is irresponsible, and we the people need to reject that kind of media mind-bleed. We can do better; we need to do better; we need to vote the truth.

- - -

Originally published October 9, 2012, at IndependentsOfPrinciple.com

climateadaptation: Deadlines to register to vote TODAY and...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:18:00 -0400

climateadaptation:

Deadlines to register to vote TODAY and TOMORROW. Hey! Reblog!

Also, New Pew Poll has Romney leading Obama 49 to 45. Is your state on this list?

election:

DON’T FORGET! Deadlines to register to vote today (Mon) in TN, HI, WA and tomorrow (Tues) in MI, KY, FL, PA, TX, DC, CO, UT, NM, AR, AZ, GA, MT, LA, IN, IL, OH. Register now!

ourtimeorg:

Please RE-BLOG this image and remind 5 friends that more than 20 states have voter registration deadlines in the next few days. Register to vote and get more info at www.ourtime.org

Mitt Romney Lies to Tens of Millions

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 02:10:15 -0400

Tonight, Mitt Romney gave us absolute confirmation of his view of the American electorate: he believes the truth does not matter and that most voters will not care enough or be diligent enough to even notice bald faced lies. Romney’s campaign has spent 18 months and over $228 million to promote a raft of vague policies built around a tax plan that costs $5 trillion; he now claims he has no such tax plan.

Romney was aggressive, even rude, flippant with some of his remarks, and throughout the debate, willing to lie outright to misrepresent his positions and distort the truth about what he will do if elected president. While he and his campaign have consistently said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and protect care for pre-existing conditions only for people who have never been a day without coverage, tonight he claimed all pre-existing conditions will be covered, despite no plan to do this.

His “zingers” plan turned out to be subtle, more a kind of talking-point quip-making by which he again repeated the lie that Pres. Obama is trying to take over the entire American economy with an ever expanding and intrusive federal government. In fact, Obama’s healthcare reform, student loan reform, financial regulatory reform, Recovery Act and clean energy investment, are all examples of his decentralization of power, in an effort to build a healthy and growing middle class from the grass roots.

Romney repeatedly claimed that he has no intention of implementing a $5 trillion tax cut, despite the following statements made by the President being 100% accurate: Romney is calling for a 20% across-the-board tax cut, which disproportionately favors the wealthy, and which will cost $5 trillion. He has no plan to fund this tax cut, just the idea that it will pay for itself, eventually, somehow. He favors spending another $1 trillion extending the Bush-era tax cuts. And, he wants to increase Defense Dept. spending by $2 trillion, over and above what the Pentagon is asking for. He has no plan to pay for any of this.

So, he lied when he said that he will not increase the budget deficit by even $1. His plans expand deficits by at least $8 trillion, with no plan of any kind that would replace the money lost or spent. That makes this one point of Mitt Romney’s debate performance tonight the single most expensive lie in American political history.

Romney alleges that he will not approve any plan that adds any money to the deficit, and that he will not raise taxes on middle class families. So, either he is lying when he says he will not raise taxes, or he is lying when he says he will cut taxes, or he is lying when he says he will not add to the deficit. It is mathematically impossible that Mitt Romney is not lying about his plans.

Romney falsely alleged that all gas and oil drilling under Pres. Obama is taking place on “private land”. This is patently false. Throughout the Marcellus Shale, local and state governments are turning over public land to private firms through intensely dubious “leasing” policies, whereby virgin forest is converted to barren industrial wasteland and then abandoned. Public lands are being despoiled, and Romney plans to expand that practice; his bizarre and unfounded claim regarding private vs. public land is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the irresponsibility of his plans.

Romney falsely claimed that “clean coal” exists. It does not. There are theoretical technologies that might, someday, if they are made to work, produce energy from coal in a significantly cleaner way, but they would be far more expensive and would take far longer to develop than wind and solar energy, which are already affordable and can cover far more than 100% of our total energy demand. That Romney spoke of clean coal is just a sign of how pervasive his lies were, throughout the debate.

Romney’s lies were relentless tonight for two simple reasons: 1) he does not believe he can win any other way, and 2) he obviously believes that telling egregious lies that his own campaign his spending hundreds of millions of dollars openly contradicting will not hurt him with the American voter, because he does not believe it is necessary to be truthful to win.

That says a lot.

Mitt Romney's "Zingers" vs. the Rights of the American People

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 09:31:00 -0400

With the revelation that Mitt Romney and his campaign have been “preparing” for the first presidential debate, tomorrow night, by rehearsing “zingers” and “one-liners”, we the people of the United States have still more confirmation of the degree to which Romney holds the American people in either unabashed disregard or unrepentant disdain.

For those who think this is a severe critique, bear with me: it warrants explanation.

Mitt Romney has said is “not concerned about the very poor”; he has said it is not his job to think about the “47 percent” of Americans he accuses of being “victims” who only want to live off the state; he has said that income inequality—possibly the single most intractable driver of the prolonged economic slowdown following the Great Recession, indeed of the recession itself—should only be discussed in quiet rooms, behind closed doors. Yes, he really said that.

He has said that Pres. Obama’s foreign policy can be equated to “terrorism”, and that “illegals” should be dealt with harshly. And though he says he supports exceptions for rape or incest in any federal abortion ban proposal, he has also said that it is not his place to denounce extremists or to correct or moderate the views of radicals like his own vice presidential nominee, who believe that a victim of rape should be forced to have her attacker’s baby, even if her life is in danger.

Mitt has said he wants to lower taxes on the wealthy to such an extent that his own tax bill—this part he didn’t say out loud… that’s for quiet rooms, remember—could be reduced to just 1% of his total income, WHILE he plans to balance the budget. That means he plans to increase your taxes to pay for eliminating his own, and that he will cut funding for your children’s education, for healthcare, for veterans’ benefits, for regulating businesses that—if not regulated—could and would poison our water and our air.

He has said all of this… oh, and that the trees in Michigan are “just the right height”. So, he also has discriminatory tendencies toward the majority of overly diverse trees on this planet.

He has said all of this, and yet he refused to reveal HOW he would pay for giving trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to the already wealthy. He refuses to give any specifics about his tax plans, which seem at time to be the only issue he really wants to discuss.

Mitt Romney’s unbelievable propensity for gaffes and untruths now manifests as an infantile plot to turn a debate about who should lead the most powerful democracy on Earth into a flurry of zingers and a jokefest for those who enjoy making a mockery of democracy. Romney has actually foregone meeting with citizens in favor of practicing hid purported zingers, leaving some to question his fitness for any public office.

The fact is: no serious candidate for elective office can be so flippant about the meaning of his words, or about whether he is heard to be making serious policy statements or just riffing impertinent “zingers”, unless he harbors a genuine belief that voters will not care. So, the would-be zing-meister Romney either believes the “etch-a-sketch” concept—that voters don’t really understand and don’t really want to understand politics, so it’s OK to say one thing one day and the opposite the next—at the core of himself, or he is really not that serious about legitimately winning this election.

Either way, this kind of campaign is a slap-in-the-face to the American people and a degradation of our democracy.

People have a right to know what a candidate for the nation’s highest elective office actually plans to do, and why he thinks that way, and what his honest views are regarding the tough questions he might face in a debate. Jim Lehrer, tonight’s moderator, is so serious about the sanctity of his role as a journalist and an informed, impartial observer, he even foregoes his own franchise, deliberately not voting in order to avoid clouding his views at all. In the face of that kind of monastic respect for the civics of a great democracy, we are offered “zingers” and an etch-a-sketch campaign that routinely repeats hate-oriented lies and destructive distortions.

We deserve better.

Family of 3 Would Need 328 Years to Take as Much Gov't $$ as Romney

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:48:33 -0400

The incredible detail about this infographic is that the $10 million is just ONE way in which Romney has received assistance from the federal government. His rejection of any and all forms of government assistance to individuals and businesses would be more credible if he volunteered to repay every penny of every tax credit he or any of his immediate family, his staff, his companies or their vendors.

47% of Americans Say: Mitt Romney Has No Clue about 'Real Economy'

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:42:47 -0400

Mitt Romney is right now busy trying to explain the most amazing blunder a candidate for president could make: alienating nearly half of all Americans, possibly more—if we consider that people often take offense at such rudeness whether directed at them or not. But what the 47% remark tells us, most strikingly, about Mitt Romney is that he really has no idea how the real economy works, what it is like to live in the real economy, or what the impact of public policies really is.

For Mitt Romney, every single person who receives any form of funding from the government is “dependent”, and “thinks they are victims”. This includes everyone who receives Social Security—an earned benefit people funded from their own paychecks, but which does not pay enough to qualify the recipient to pay income taxes. It also includes everyone on Medicare—another earned benefit people funded from their own paychecks.

More stunningly still, Mitt Romney, by using the 47% figure, is including everyone who served in the armed forces and receives benefits or a pension from Veterans Affairs. To Romney, they are parasites addicted to the public dole; to everyone else, they are courageous souls who earned their benefits by putting their lives on the line to protect and to serve everyone else in society, including Romney himself.

So Mitt Romney, when candid, openly declares to a room full of rich donors that he is not interested in senior citizens, veterans, public servants, hard-working underpaid single mothers, or anyone else included in that 47 percent, and that he believes they are ALL parasites whose selfishness is robbing him of additional easy money from tax cuts.

And THERE is the kicker: Mitt Romney is campaigning to become president at a time when the always already unaffordable Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are bankrupting the government and plunging the nation into incomprehensible amounts of debt. And yet, he is promising even more massive new—far more unaffordable—tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

AND: he wants a chunk of that public money, YOUR money, for himself. He wants to reduce his overall tax burden to just 1%, funding his tax cut with cuts to your earned benefits, school funding and the social safety net. He wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare, thus implementing the single most massive redistribution of wealth in the history of the world, giving YOUR earned benefits to Wall Street, so people like him can profit from taking risks with it.

Mitt Romney unashamedly proclaims all of these things in public, sparking near universal outcry, from his own party—for incredibly stupid campaign etiquette—and from the general public—for insulting not just 47% of all Americans, but really all Americans who are not independently wealthy, or who have ever paid payroll taxes or served their community or their nation in any way—and he vehemently refuses to apologize, saying he didn’t mean to say what he said in a way that would sound offensive, but that the meaning of it was accurate.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem: Mitt Romney has no clue about economics, or politics, or the functioning of our government. Maybe this is why, when he was governor of Massachusetts, the state fared worse on several different measures of progress in public policy efficacy than almost every other state. He thinks rich people getting rich is what makes us free, and ignores the contributions of the hundreds of millions of real people who make this democracy what it is, who build and secure it, and whose day to day lives in the “real economy” are what make us free.

It is never smart to call any contest before it is over, but it is very fair to say that Mitt Romney is—as Michelle Obama said the office of the presidency can do—revealing himself, just by getting perilously close to the nation’s highest office. And throughout the summer, the Republican National Convention and the month of September, Mitt Romney has been revealing, to an ever wider swath of the American electorate, why it would be so dangerous to allow him to hold that office.

People who received earned benefits from the government are not parasites, or victims, or trapped in a cycle of dependency. They are not any one thing. They are diverse, worthy, and often committed citizens who have often not been adequately compensated for their troubles. Mitt Romney knows nothing about this, clearly.

We need to honor the worth and the value of all of our fellow citizens, and of all people. When our economy, and our public policy, and our tax code, and our politicians, and our system of free enterprise, really do that, our economy will thrive and grow. It is not the self-interest of millionaires and billionaires that makes democracy work or a free economy thrive; it is democracy, and a fair marketplace for ideas, hard work and humanity.

theatlantic: longformpodcast: Episode 7: Ta-Nehisi...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:39:21 -0400

theatlantic:

longformpodcast:

Episode 7: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle, interviewed by Evan Ratliff.

“I was 24 when my son was born. People always say that kids get in the way, right? But actually it had the opposite effect on me. I feel like I could have spent my twenties doing all sorts of self-destructive things - that was my natural inclination - but having a kid suddenly makes that not OK…. The stakes of everything just went up. I think I’m the type of person where, for any reason, I only respond to pressure. That kid just so raised the pressure, for everything. … So I started writing for the Washington Monthly, and the Monthly pays shit, everybody knows that, right? They were paying ten cents a word at this point. But because they have these big-shots writing for them, nobody ever calls for the check! But I would say, ‘no, I need you to send me that check. Yeah, I know it’s only $150, but I actually need that check, you really need to send that check.’”

Show notes and links:

Coates’s blog for The Atlantic

“Fear of a Black President” (The Atlantic • Aug 2012)

“‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’” (The Atlantic • May 2008)

“Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom” (Washington Monthly • March 2002)

Coates on Longform

You should listen to this.

The ONLY 3 Reasons Mitt would Withhold Tax Plan

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:42:13 -0400

Let’s be honest. There are only three possible reasons Mitt Romney refuses to clearly explain his views on health insurance, Medicare, and Social Security, or specify how he would close tax loopholes to fund his mega tax cut for millionaires and billionaires:

He has no idea how he would do it;
he is leaving room for future etch-a-sketch moments;
he knows most people would be outraged by his plans (perhaps because they will make him look like he is looting the pockets of ordinary families for his own gain)…

It has to be one of the three. Which one is acceptable to you?

Romney now for AND against healthcare reform

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 09:41:26 -0400

Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave the most recent in a long series of unhelpful, slippery interviews relating to his policy plans. He said there is a lot in Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform law that he would like to re-enact after repealing the law. Remember, Romney was the Massachusetts governor who passed healthcare reform with an individual mandate, when no one else had done it.

Then, as a presidential candidate, he declared war on the very same policy priorities, embodied in Pres. Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He vowed to repeal the law, despite the fact that doing so would lead to widespread suffering, prolonged illness and even death, for people already benefitting from expanded insurance coverage and a prohibition against denying coverage for so-called “pre-existing conditions”.

More etch-a-sketch than ever, Romney even fibbed about his semi-reversal on his determination to strip over 30 million Americans of their health insurance. He said he would support a ban on denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, but a staffer later clarified that he had misspoken; in fact, Romney should have said that he would favor such a ban ONLY for people already 100% continuously covered, who never missed a single day of private, for-profit health insurance.

In the words of one reporter, today, those who had been unable to get coverage, for whatever the reason, including for insurers having denied coverage or mandated under treatment due to a pre-existing condition, would be “out of luck”.

So, Mitt Romney is now for AND against healthcare reform, but he is unclear about even what aspects he would favor or whether he would like to harm or help ordinary people victimized by a rapacious industry uninterested in health outcomes. Every voter needs to be clear: Mitt Romney wants to strip you of health insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, Veterans Benefits, and your social safety net, and he wants Wall Street to control your health decisions.

If you are over 65, he plans to issue you a coupon for a government-funded “discount” on unregulated, high-cost private, for-profit health insurance, where providers may deny you treatment at any time and deny you coverage if you have ever been ill or without insurance.

The most energy-intensive areas of Europe and North Africa,...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 09:33:05 -0400

The most energy-intensive areas of Europe and North Africa, visible from outer space. Every light on this photographic map is a hot-spot where cutting-edge clean-energy development could create new wealth, strengthen the middle class, and counter the threat of catastrophic fallout from global climate destabilization.

From politicalprof…

Bloomberg & Cuomo Wrong About Fracking

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:03:42 -0400

Mike Bloomberg says his New York City administration has conducted a study and found that natural gas from hydro-fracking will be a cost-effective way to transition away from coal as a source of electrical power. He is wrong. Fracking carries with it massive environmental risks, including the contamination of groundwater, surface watersheds and drinking water supplies. Contrary to what Bloomberg has declared, there is no known technology in existence to prevent such contamination, and geology in the loose rock of the Marcellus Shale is not adequate to the task.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is also wrong about fracking. He recently approved the lifting of a moratorium on all hydro-fracking across the state of New York. The moratorium was in place, because there was no scientific evidence the industry was capable of containing the hundreds of toxic pollutants, or the spill gas itself, that are part of the hydraulic rock-fracturing process. Cuomo lifted the moratorium without any evidence that any technologies have been developed that would prevent groundwater contamination or geological seepage of spill gas.

Both the city and the state of New York have more power generation and economic development potential from solar and wind power than they have from the natural gas trendlines currently overrunning states across the US. Natural gas and fracking carry massive negative externalities, so they appear to be cost-effective, but they are not. The long-term environmental degradation and ill health effects are far more costly than the limited and temporary surge in local economic output.

Wind and solar power, on the other hand, have none of those hidden costs. AND, they will spark growth in marketing, manufacture, investment, information technology and research and development as well, all of which are strong in New York City and New York state. Bloomberg and Cuomo are betting on the wrong horse, because they put too much faith in the ability of the marketplace to hide the real costs of dirty energy, and too little faith in the virtues of a genuinely clean-energy-based decentralized 21st-century economy.

US Enacts Fuel-efficiency Standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:08:14 -0400

The US government is imposing the strictest fuel-economy and carbon-emissions standards to date. This is a major step toward greening the transport sector, and achieving a fuel free future.

According to USA Today:

Strict new federal fuel-economy and carbon-emission standards made final Tuesday are the biggest technological challenge to the auto industry since the government began regulating emissions in 1970 and mileage in 1975.

The rule sets the equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon as the average the auto industry must achieve by 2025, up from 29.7 mpg now and 35.5 mpg in 2016.

The tough “CAFE” standard (for corporate average fuel economy), which was to be announced earlier this month, was announced Tuesday by the Obama administration on the day that Republicans’ national convention got underway in Tampa.

It is “a monumental day for the American people,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in announcing the final rules.

Read the full article here…

D'Souza Libel-pic is NOT a Documentary

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:51:00 -0400

D’Souza does not claim to be documenting the irresponsible tendencies of extremists who lie; he claims to be documenting “evidence”, which is not what he does. The film is raw, unmitigated propaganda, funded by billionaires who have vowed to “destroy” Obama.

Dinesh D’Souza has devoted his career as a commentator to smearing hard-working, honest people committed to real solutions that benefit real people in a democratic way, often resorting to the feeble trope that they want to destroy America. D’Souza wrote a self-interested, ideologically biased book, defaming President Obama as an enemy of the United States, and basing his analysis on the untested theory that having experienced places other than the US in childhood somehow built a pattern of anti-American rage into the president’s psyche.

Not only is the concept totally unfounded, by any standard of psychoanalytic practice; it relies on literally zero evidence outside D’Souza’s pretense that such psychoanalytic presumption is not only plausible but airtight and binding. D’Souza, who pretends to be a liberty-loving conservative, in this way, posits that human free will is utterly impossible, and that place determines everything there is to know about a person’s character.

What’s more, D’Souza bends the truth in order to make it appear that specific places automatically generate an insuperable, irreversible, deeply ingrained hatred for the United States and for liberal democracy. D’Souza presents no evidence for this, only the self-fulfilling rhetoric of the self-convinced pseudo-conservative, who is willing to lie in order to sell books, attack the democratic electorate of the nation, and defame a public servant who has done literally nothing in his entire life to indicate anything other than a deep and personal love for democracy and specifically for the American brand of it.

D’Souza’s main problem, as a commentator, is his apocalyptic obsession—his continual and constantly disproven claim that any and all “liberal” public policies will lead irrevocably to the end of democracy, the destruction of the United States and to some sort of Stalinist nightmare scenario. His second problem is that his target in this smear campaign is perhaps the most eloquent champion of the transcendent values of American democracy, and one who is strengthened by his hands-on work at the human scale in working to improve the lives of real citizens in concrete ways.

That a film has now been made to allow D’Souza to trumpet his propaganda is a sign of how devoid of valuable ideas the so-called “conservative” movement has become—hijacked by right-wing ideologues, detached from reality, and by self-interested billionaires looking to use public policy to more easily access the private wealth of families and communities not empowered with their limitless fortune. Not one aspect of this film, other than its allowance for such individuals to speak directly to the camera, makes it a “documentary”.

The film is designed to stoke latent racist anxieties and urges, and to condone and justify that kind of visceral, irrational hate. The summer of 2012 has provided ample evidence of a concerted—perhaps tacitly so—campaign by the campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican National Committee, as well as super-PACs and billionaire-backed “social welfare organizations” that keep their donors secret, to invade the public discourse with dog-whistle racist rhetoric—language that racists or those with latent discriminatory tendencies recognize as favorable to their mindset, but which others might overlook as the skewed language of cultural or ideological preference.

Some critics have gone as far as to say outright that “Mitt Romney is a racist liar”, for deliberately and knowingly participating in smears with literally zero basis in fact and which seem to serve no purpose whatsoever other than dog-whistle politicking.

D’Souza’s complaint that Barack Obama is opposed to promoting the values of American democracy is rooted in three concepts:

1. That Barack Obama has family-related experiences in Indonesia and Kenya—which D’Souza views as being 100% in all ways given to unmitigated hatred of the Untied States (this is of course an outright falsehood, not to mention racist propaganda);

2. That Barack Obama is a “European-style” “extreme left-wing liberal” whose ideology leans toward establishing absolute government control over all private affairs, from commerce to medical treatment to technological development.

I offer three points to refute this ridiculous line of reasoning:

It is, of course, D’Souza who has supported the authoritarian policies of Pres. George W. Bush, the stripping of basic civil liberties for the empowerment of undemocratic and constitutionally unfounded military policies;
That totalitarian-nightmare-scenario is not how people live in the European countries D’Souza wants Americans to fear and loathe; in fact, much the opposite, human rights and freedom of expression are often so firmly established that government activities are shut down by public protest and by the will of the people;
Obama’s policies have been so favorable to private for-profit businesses that Wall Street is now doing well, once again making record sums (depending on the sector), even as small businesses continue to struggle with a sclerotic banking sector that refuses to lend…

3. That Barack Obama has been imposing policies that are 1) connected to radical anti-American extremist groups abroad (TOTALLY UNTRUE) and 2) have dismantled the underpinnings of liberal American democracy.

This last point is among the most important to refute, because the lie is subtler. Obviously, Pres. Obama is not working to “destroy” the American middle class by implementing policies that help to give the middle class more economic strength in the face of an economic framework heavily biased (by 40 years of pro-corporate policy) toward the already wealthy. But the real lie embedded in this vein of attack has to do with who it is that is opposed to strengthening the American middle class.

D’Souza and the corporate interests that back his smear campaign against the president—who, incidentally won more than 10 million votes more than any other candidate in American history—seek a laissez-faire state of extralegal economic interest-peddling that corrupts the political process and undermines middle class and working families, and builds in long-term economic hardship at the human scale—where families, communities, schools and (real) small businesses live, work, earn and spend.

The radical vitriol and extreme vehemence of the “critique” of Obama from these interests is rooted not in the president’s opposition to the rights and wellbeing of most Americans, but in their need to protest loudly enough to distract attention from the real impact of their own policies.

D’Souza’s propaganda film is a symptom of how grossly corrupt our political process has become, and why it is so urgent that a citizen-led groundswell of people-centered reform and human-scale democratization gain traction. Big money interests have become addicted to the easy cash giveaways pseudo-conservative ideologues with no grip on the real-world impact of their policies are willing to give them in order to get into and say in office.

The election of 2012 is a stark choice between a pseudo-democracy paid for and run by ultra-wealthy multinational corporate interests, on the one hand (Mitt Romney’s tax cuts for the wealthy, funded by everyone else), and a citizenship-centered future, in which real people have a chance to improve their situation through education, hard work and collaborative ingenuity (the long-term reform process designed to restore a strong middle class and a forward-thinking business community).

Lapham's Quarterly: Lapham's Quarterly is looking for a fall intern

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:07:35 -0400

Lapham's Quarterly: Lapham's Quarterly is looking for a fall intern:

npr:

laphamsquarterly:

We are in need of an editorial intern for the fall, from September 17th to November 23rd. The internship is ideal for someone who has finished college in the spring and is looking to put that liberal arts degree to work. You will get a say in all of our editorial meetings, you will contribute to the magazine, you will write for the website, and you will be an essential member of the staff. The internship is full time in our Union Square offices and it is unpaid.

Find out more about the internship here (scroll down). Applications are due September 7th.

Announcing: The Hot Spring Quarterly

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:31:00 -0400

We are launching a new digital publication to debut in September, 2012: The Hot Spring Quarterly. It will be published every three months, and run from 80 to 120 pages, or so, featuring important articles, essays, news and research from TheHotSpring.net, and partner sites.

The thematic feature of the inaugural issue will be the “hunting the paradigm shift” idea underlying the Hot Spring Network itself, and the human-scale focus of related projects, as embodied in the Humane Future Manifesto (which will be included in the first HSQ—Read and share via http://bit.ly/humanefuture)

The HSQ will be distributed online and in various ebook formats. It will be available for free online, at http://bit.ly/hotspring-q and on Issuu.com.

Please suggest any content or collaborators here…

Deadline for submissions: Sept. 4, 2012
Deadline for final copy: Sept. 7, 2012
Date of release: Sept. 25, 2012

Thanks, and best wishes,
Joseph Robertson

NY Launches Statewide Solar PV Initiative

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 09:46:00 -0400

New York initiates the beginning of a transition to clean energy:

Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a series of bills to begin a new program to bring more solar power to New York, called the NY-Sun Initiative. Managed by the New York State Energy Research & Development Agency (NYSERDA), the goal of this initiative is to double the amount of on-site electricity produced in the State by solar PV capacity in 2012 compared to 2011 and to quadruple that in 2013. $104 million has been set aside in incentives. In addition to existing incentives for solar in NJ and CT, commercial facilities in the NY Metro area have a unique, but temporary, opportunity to install solar PV at a relatively low cost, reducing long-term electricity costs greatly.

Read the full article here…

Newsweek Got it Wrong, Period

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 09:23:42 -0400

Nevermind Newsweek’s decision to pander to big money interests and tabloid market dynamics, which they hope will sell lots of magazines… Niall Ferguson’s cover story is full of distortions and propaganda for a discredited political and economic philosophy. Almost immediately, the flagrantly dishonest article was thoroughly fact-checked and discredited, point by point, by other news outlets and scholarly institutions, while Newsweek admitted to not doing any fact-checking whatsoever. (More on this below.)

Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story is a convenient political and economic fantasy, rooted in what must be a knowing misrepresentation of the economic truth of this moment in history. Newsweek’s editors should be embarrassed to have let a partisan diatribe like this through, much less to have the poor judgment to feature it as a cover story. In addition to his frequent misrepresentations of hard data, and factually unfounded smears of the president, Ferguson entirely ignores how grossly unhealthy our banking system really is, and why. (More on this below.)

How bad is the Newsweek screw-up?

Multiple fact-checks have shown that Ferguson:

Switched years for key employment data, to blame Obama for what happened under Bush;
Altered calculations of actual jobs records, to say Obama has killed jobs, when in fact he has created millions;
Made up and/or inflated figures on household loss of real income;
Tried to suggest that the entire Affordable Care Act would cost over $1.2 trillion, by not counting the parts of the law that pay for expanded insurance coverage provisions, and through which the law actually reduces deficits;
Actually defended this last sleight of hand by openly describing what he did to make the numbers look bad for Obama, when in fact they favor him;
Made a false projection of $222 trillion in future debt repayment shortfalls, without counting any of the actions being taken to ensure that such figures will never become real;
Ignored and/or lied about the biggest drivers of that projected shortfall being healthcare market pricing, Defense spending and the Bush tax cuts;
Omitted and/or lied about the fact that Pres. Obama has taken action to deal with all three;
Falsely alleged that Obama fully ignored the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission recommendations (he used them as part of the framework for budget and debt-ceiling negotiations);
Praised Paul Ryan for fiscal “courage”, though Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles commissions recommendations;
Misrepresented in almost every detail Pres. Obama’s record on foreign policy and national and international peace and security;
Misrepresented Pres. Obama’s interest in, understanding of, and actions regarding the democratic awakening of populations living under authoritarian governments across the Arabic-speaking world…

The most comprehensive and widely circulated fact-check of the article, by Matthew O’Brien at The Atlantic, calls Ferguson’s article “a counter-factual history of the last four years”. O’Brien observes that, far from providing a researched and factually-based argument for his views, “Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again.”

As the Atlantic fact-check notes, Ferguson attempts to saddle Obama with millions of job losses and Social Security Disability recipient increases that actually happened while Bush was still president or before the Recovery Act became law. The tax policy of George W. Bush, who gave more free cash to corporate interests and to the richest Americans than any other president in history, drained the consumer market economy of resources, a trend which caught up with him in 2008, when the US stock-trading, credit, jobs and housing markets, all experienced record collapse, almost simultaneously.

It turns out, when the truth is taken into account, that Pres. Obama’s policies have created 3.1 million new jobs since 2009—four times what Bush was able to create in the seven years prior to the 2008 crash. What hobbled economic growth and saw two recessions during Bush’s term, the second being the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, rife with millions of foreclosures and potentially hundreds of bank failures, was bank bloat—a condition of financial malady based on deliberately flawed accounting. (More on this below.)

In fact, Ferguson seems to conveniently ignore data that show the beneficial effect Pres. Obama’s economic policies have had, in reducing the catastrophic fallout from the worst financial crisis in eight decades. This analysis clearly shows that since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act began to take effect, in the late 2nd quarter of 2009, job losses in the United States have been steadily declining, with employment opportunity spreading, however gradually—whereas both the Euro currency area (EA-17) and the European Union more broadly (EU-27) have seen the crisis worsen.

How and why our banking system is ailing (1999-2012):

When then outgoing Pres. George W. Bush and his administration engineered the largest direct redistribution of wealth in world history, from ordinary Americans to the 10 biggest banking conglomerates in the United States, they did so telling Congress that the crisis was incomprehensibly, inexplicably widespread, and urgent, and they were right, in at least one genuinely alarming way, which can be broken down as follows:

The banking system had become dependent on systemic and escalating overvaluations of lending accounts, so that:

There was no longer anything close to the amount of real money in circulation to account for the unprecedented claims of private wealth holdings, on which the banks were basing their operations, and…
Without an immediate infusion of record sums of money, major banks would start to unravel…

The problem Pres. Barack Obama would face, immediately upon taking office, on January 20, 2009, was not a “slumping consumer economy” or “a bad job market”; it was not “flagging consumer confidence” or “a decline in purchases of durable goods”. All of those things were happening, but they were merely symptoms of a larger, more widespread “perfect storm” of economic frailty, and that perfect storm was driven by one dominant trend: the banks were not honest about what their operations were worth, or why.

The truth is that the banking system was grossly overvalued in 2008, in ways that tied into the finances of every household, business and municipality, even state pension plans and payrolls, across the United States. The impulse to overvaluation became so rampant that significant problems inherent in one after another banking project or line item were overlooked, sometimes explicitly dismissed, as being little more than untoward appearances rooted in an old-fashioned way of thinking.

There have been as many attacks on Obama for not doing more to donate taxpayer money to the propping up of the banking system as there are attacks on him for not withholding all taxpayer funds from the banks and other economically hobbled corporate interests. That is largely because not everything is known about the real condition of the banks, at the time of the taxpayer-funded bailouts. The one thing the Treasury Department has made clear about the banks’ health, both under Bush and Obama, is that there is too much wrong to make all of it public; there is a real economic and security interest for the United States, for its citizens and for its trading partners, in making sure the banking industry looks solvent.

Ferguson mentions none of these facts, except for the nation’s biggest banks being “at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements”, under the Basel III accords. He first disregards the nation’s not having fully adopted these international rules, then—either from ignorance or from lack of interest—fails to mention the problem of so much of the asset claims of major banks being, in themselves, fictional.

How we got into this mess (1969-2008):

During the three decade run-up (1969-1999) to the boom in undisciplined conglomerate banking (1999-2008), banks were given little nudges in the direction of wealth-only banking. The reason? It is easier to make money from money, so in dealing only with high-end accounts, banking institutions could more reliably do what they want to do: lend, retrieve the wealth desired, lend again for higher amounts, and count the increases as profits earned.

If you know the people whose money you manage are financially secure, and will have more money in the future, it is easier to make your projected earnings grow, and to back up those claims of future profits. It is easier for the banker, in other words, to talk up future earnings and to celebrate himself for earning them, if everybody is already wealthy, and there are policies in place to direct funds from less affluent outsiders into the pool of wealth available to one’s clients.

The question is whether taking shortcuts allows for proper application of a word like earnings.

During the Internet boom-time of the 1990s, money was pouring in from across the world, as digital valuations of investment capital kept increasing in unprecedented and hard-to-predict ways. Some astute observers warned of a bubble and a coming crash. Others ignored the warning.

Alan Greenspan famously worried about the “irrational exuberance” of dot-com investors. (Greenspan, of course, would then become the most powerful irrationally exuberant backer of banking deregulation that led directly to the undisciplined conglomerate banking boom and its long-term assault on the Americacn middle class economy.)

When key regulations from the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed, in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999, large banks were pushed into an eat-or-be-eaten free-for-all, in which gobbling up competitors became necessary to maintaining the radical increases in bank holdings and future earnings projections, to which major financial institutions had become accustomed. But takeovers and mergers are sometimes little more than a way of borrowing against the future:

For instance, Bank A holds 8% of the national market; Bank B holds 4%. After the takeover of Bank B by Bank A, the new Bank AB now controls 12% of the national market. This makes Bank AB worth more than the combined total of the two institutions that formed it. At least, this is how Bank AB will report its assets under management, its growth potential, the value of its market position, its attractiveness as an investment, or business partner, and its consequent borrowing and lending power.

This last is extremely important, because it allows an institution that is actually struggling to maintain its own profit projections to claim a significant, though phantom, increase in market value. The repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed for and invited rampant distortions in the real market value of financial assets: a single institution could now borrow money from one of its own subdivisions, “repaying” it immediately after borrowing a larger sum from the Federal Reserve or from another bank, using that borrowed money as collateral (and, effectively, counting it twice on the overall institution’s balance sheet, at least for a few days.

These sorts of games became commonplace, and accounting methods were “modernized” to cope with the new way of counting money… to compete with other institutions that would use numbers to make numbers grow, even before lending, borrowing or earning a penny. Appearances could stand in for reality; projections could manifest as profits, whether there was actual real-world activity to support every dollar and every cent.

It is not known exactly how much of the growth in bank-held assets, between 1998 and 2008 was the result of this kind of asset inflation, but the growth in total US financial wealth was near $50 trillion, while the all-time record bailouts totaled less than $3 trillion.

When the Obama administration subjected the nation’s biggest banking conglomerates to the uncomfortably invasive financial accounting “stress tests”—as a condition of deploying the second half of the TARP funds (Troubled Asset Relief Program) and the expansion of FDIC insurance on personal accounts from $100,000 to $250,000 per account—, the financial sector was thrown into an uproar, primarily because it became evident that most, perhaps all, of the major banks could not survive a deeper crisis without government assistance.

The ration of real assets to claimed wealth holdings was so low that it was not evident any o the biggest banking conglomerates could actually follow through on its promises to depositors and investors. Every time any bank built a loan, a lending program, or a new division, around these kind of inflated wealth claims, it borrowed against the future; now, the banks are caught in a mathematical trap: they need to grow—or appear to grow—to show health, but their ill health stems from their doing too much of that, and this behavior needs correcting.

Many of the world’s leading economic analysts and observers have suggested there is no better solution than to continue gradually doing what is possible to shore up the dysfunctional banking sector, steering more investment capital—through both tax policy and more direct assistance—to the kind of projects that build value at the human scale. And, the solution is, and must be, gradual, because the stark choice we really do face is:

either: gradual but steady improvements throughout the system or the sudden…
or: the sudden shock of a widespread banking collapse and its painful but maybe curative aftermath…

Mitt Romney famously said Detroit should be allowed to fail—Detroit being the auto industry, one of the most significant drivers of American economic health and expansion. Many have asked if he would do the same to the financial sector; so far, Romney—a leading beneficiary of the Bush-era boom in undisciplined conglomerate banking, offshoring of wealth and asset inflation—has not spoken up for letting the banking system collapse.

Ferguson ignores this underlying framework for the present global crisis in banking, as relating to the human-scale economy, because he does not have a solution, does not harbor affection for anyone in politics who does have a worthwhile solution to what is not working at the human scale, and is more focused on writing a bitter partisan diatribe than on reporting the truth of the matter.

Key distortions in Ferguson’s budget rhetoric:

Ferguson’s article distorts a lot of details of the agonizingly flawed process of federal budgeting. In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, the process of calculating the federal budget over the coming decade was shifted, from an arithmetically founded budget rooted in real commerce, real wealth and the strength of a growing middle class, to an arithmetically unfounded “supply side” philosophy, rooted in the assumption that increased wealth for the wealth generates future wealth for everyone.

In 2009, when Barack Obama took office, Sen. Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republican Senate conference, pledged to use budget and economic policies to “destroy” the Obama presidency. This empowered the Republican House, sworn in under Speaker John Boehner, in 2011, to oppose two major budget-fixing projects, which would do nothing to undermine the programs in question, but would save taxpayers upwards of $1 trillion over ten years.

Republicans in the House and Senate refused to support cuts to federal spending that would target ONLY “fraud, waste and abuse” in Medicare, Defense and Homeland Security. Those ant-fraud projects would save more than $1 trillion over ten years, without reducing services or affecting military readiness, salary or supply. Even where such provisions have made it into law, as part of the Affordable Care Act, Defense Reauthorization or Budget Sequestration deal, Boehner and McConnell have sought to obstruct such efforts.

Ferguson ignores the impact of that political maneuvering, which was the intended impact: to make it appear as if Barack Obama got the numbers wrong on deficit reduction, on economic stimulus, and is not an adequate or honest steward of the federal budget. Nevertheless, Ryan’s unwillingness to correct the bad fiscal math inherent in the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires—coupled with his determination to vastly expand tax breaks for corporations and the already wealthy—means his plan has no honest hope of balancing the federal budget.

Yet Ferguson defends that plan as viable, courageous and our “only hope”.

All of that is just about the framing of Ferguson’s argument. Here is perhaps the most craven misrepresentation of the entire article: Ferguson falsely alleges that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—which he refers to erroneously as “Obamacare” and “Pelosicare”—will add $1.2 trillion to the federal budget deficit over ten years, and he claims to get this information from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Atlantic’s fact-check suggests:

Maybe Ferguson doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “deficit”? The only other explanation is that he is deliberately misleading his readers. The CBO is quite clear about Obamacare’s budgetary implications. It reduces the deficit. Here’s what the CBO said exactly:

“[T]he effects of the two laws on direct spending and revenues related to health care will reduce federal deficits by $210 billion over the 2012-2021 period.”

In other words, the law is more than paid for. As Paul Krugman pointed out, it does spend $1.042 trillion covering people, but it pays for this coverage by finding savings in Medicare and levying a surtax on investment income for high-earners. That Ferguson looked up the CBO’s estimate of the bill’s cost and didn’t notice that those costs are paid for is peculiar indeed. Even more peculiar is that he is apparently doubling down on this falsehood. And yes, it is a very deliberate falsehood.

Joe Weisenthal is scathing in his critique, going after Ferguson’s persistence in distorting evidence, even in his rebuttal to those who point out that he has distorted evidence:

On Twitter @nycsouthpaw catches another glaring case of Niall Ferguson abusing the CBO’s words.

In Ferguson’s new post he quotes the CBO as saying:

If you are wondering how on earth the CBO was able to conclude that the net effect of the ACA as a whole was to reduce the projected 10-year deficit, the answer has to do with a rather heroic assumption about the way the ACA may reduce the cost of Medicare. Here’s the CBO again:

“CBO’s cost estimate for the legislation noted that it will put into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. The combination of those policies, prior law regarding payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare, and other information has led CBO to project that the growth rate of Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusted for overall inflation) will drop from about 4 percent per year, which it has averaged for the past two decades, to about 2 percent per year on average for the next two decades. It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved …”

Indeed, it is, which is why I wrote what I wrote.

Ferguson italicized the last line about it being unclear if such reductions can be achieved, as if this line undermines the whole thing.

But Ferguson is truncating the CBO’s quote.

Here’s the full quote from the same report:

In fact, CBO’s cost estimate for the legislation noted that it will put into effect a num- ber of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. The com- bination of those policies, prior law regarding payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare, and other information has led CBO to project that the growth rate of Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusted for overall inflation) will drop from about 4 percent per year, which it has averaged for the past two decades, to about 2 percent per year on average for the next two decades. It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or will instead reduce access to care or the quality of care (relative to the situation under prior law). Also, the legislation includes a provision that makes it likely that exchange subsidies will grow at a slower rate after 2018, so the shares of income that enrollees have to pay will increase more rapidly at that point, and the shares of the premiums that the subsidies cover will decline.9 Such possibilities could lead to pressure on law- makers to adjust those policies.

So the CBO is not saying that the deficit reductions are unclear. What’s unclear is how they will be achieved.

Distortions of this kind permeate the entire fabric of Ferguson’s article, and they are there for a reason. He needs to alter the data emerging from the actual economic landscape of this moment in history, because he wants to tell a story about the “radical” (Ferguson’s own word) and mathematically infeasible policy proposals being pushed by Pres. Obama’s opponents.

This allows Ferguson to elevate the radical and mathematically challenged budget philosophy of Romney’s VP choice, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). While credible economic observers note the factual inviability of Ryan’s budget proposals, not to mention their antiseptic vagueness and severely detrimental impact on real people, Ferguson says it is America’s “only hope”.

Where rhetoric trumps the truth:

In his critique of the Ferguson’s Newsweek hijacking, James Fallows takes issue with the following claim:

In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech… Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a ‘pivot’ back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility.

Fallows observes that:

The “from the vantage point of Beijing” assertion is based on no adduced evidence, and based on my experience and interviews there is more or less the opposite of the truth. Again, note that a Harvard professor of history uses the phrase “boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech.”

Even the headings and graphs in the article are inflammatory and misleading. At the bottom of page 22 of this edition of Newsweek, in the center column, Ferguson adds a graph intended to show what he calls Obama’s “EPIC BUDGET FAIL”. This is a Harvard professor, purporting to be an historian with knowledge of economic and political facts, trendlines and consequences, yet who distorts the information in the graph in question, using the half-asleep slang of college kids on a reality TV game show. It is shameless hyperbole, unsupported even by the graph for which it serves as a caption.

The graph in question shows the budget deficit projections that emerged from the flawed data published by the Bush administration, and which was the only government data the Obama administration could work with when it took over. The data were flawed in part, because there was a habit of reporting real data in phases, under the Bush administration, correcting significant mistakes months or even years later. They were also flawed, because the scope of the Wall Street / credit / housing crisis was far more widespread and entrenched than anyone knew in early 2009.

That the actual deficits are higher than the projections emerging from that flawed data is knowable only because the Obama administration has improved significantly on the reporting of government spending and consumer market data. One of those improvements was the decision to include all of the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—also far more costly than had previously been reported—in the federal budget projections. Nevertheless, the graph still shows the Obama administration getting deficits under control and steadily reducing them.

Ferguson repeatedly uses a simple rhetorical tactic to mislead his readers—and apparently his editors at Newsweek: he switches out evidence from the real world for absolute statements that carry so much emotional content, he could only undermine them by adding detail. He falsely asserts that Obama “did nothing to address the core defects of the [healthcare] system”, which he outlines as:

“the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire”;
“the ‘fee for service’ model that drives health-care inflation”;
“the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage”;
and, of course, his Republican friends’ favorite scapegoat: the right of the American people to access the courts…

Item 4 is a non-starter, because the Constitution explicitly forbids the Congress from making any law that would abridge the right of the people to seek redress for grievances. An existing right to sue cannot be curtailed. Still, the Affordable Care Act does help to create new channels of mediation that should reduce the temptation to use the courts as the only means of seeking redress.

Items 1, 2 and 3, are all the result of the private-sector for-profit marketplace for healthcare service delivery and compensation. The solution Ferguson seems to be hinting has not been tried is the single payer system that his preferred candidates have vowed to oppose in every way possible. It does not seem, from his rhetoric, that Ferguson would embrace a single-payer system, but he will use the flaws of the private health insurance markets to attack Barack Obama, because that is his only real interest in writing this article.

The Affordable Care Act actually does specifically address each of items 1, 2 and 3, so again, for Ferguson, the temptations of inflammatory rhetoric trump the value of presenting his readers with the facts in evidence.

On page 24, Ferguson makes the astounding claim that:

Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touch-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

This is an absurd lie. What about achieving the historic START II treaty for nuclear disarmament with the Russian Federation? What about killing Bin Laden? What about drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan? What about military action against piracy? Special forces in Uganda? Successfully working with China to reprimand North Korea (a first)? What about tough sanctions against Iran? Stuxnet? What about extricating the United States from Iraq, as promised?

The truth is: the extreme falsehood of Ferguson’s claims about Obama’s military decision-making is one of the strongest cases for the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of his writing in this Newsweek cover story.

Longing for the ‘imperial presidency’?

Just above the graph on page 23, Ferguson includes this strange sentence: “After the imperial presidency of the Bush era, there was something more like parliamentary government in the first two years of Obama’s administration.” What Ferguson is referring to is representative democracy, in which a parliamentary process (the US Congress debating and enacting legislation, so that law—and not tyrants—may rule) is carried out by individuals elected by the citizenry to steer national policy in a more just and humane direction.

Is Ferguson opposed to democracy? Does he long for a more authoritarian way of enacting economic policy? A planned economy? He praises China for its GDP growth and suggests that the Obama administration is getting it wrong for not being more like China, which as a state-run nationalist-capitalist economy in which only the Communist party is allowed to rule, and ordinary people have no vote whatsoever.

In one of Business Insider’s intense critiques of the article, Ferguson is accused of longing for the bad old days of hard-line British imperialism:

The most important insight we can have into this man Ferguson is that he wants the United States citizenry to be more militant, to have a zeal for imperialism, or so goes a review of Colossus:The Price of America’s Empire. Instead of just enjoying the comforts of family and the fruits of American prosperity, Niall would want us to be like his old British empire, with an appetite for world domination.

What is going on at Newsweek?

First of all, Newsweek has explicitly, embarrassingly and unfortunately, been forced to admit that it does no fact-checking at all. It has no fact-checkers on staff. The article was not fact-checked. That explains a lot. But it does not explain how not one editor, editorial staffer, intern, nor anyone involved in layout and design, noticed the vitriolic confabulations posing as facts, the distorted data not lining up with what informed observers already know, or the campaign-ad demeanor of the piece, sounding like it had been paid for by the Romney/Ryan campaign.

The Columbia Journalism Review is unforgiving in its critique:

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cover story so comprehensively demolished as Newsweek’s disingenuous anti-Obama piece by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, who puts together a greatest-hits compilation of the right’s economic smears of the past three-plus years.

Behind what is misrepresented as a link to Paul Krugman’s rebuttal and Niall Ferguson’s response, Newsweek presents only Ferguson’s bombastic and dishonest “response”, leading with the following artfully rendered subheader: “The liberal New York Times blogger objected to ‘multiple errors and misrepresentations’ in this week’s Newsweek cover story on Obama’s record in office. Author Niall Ferguson rebuts the charges.”

Paul Krugman does write a blog for the New York Times, called “Conscience of a Liberal”, but unlike Ferguson, Paul Krugman is not writing as an ideologically narrow-minded “blogger”: he is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and his position at the Times is not “blogger” but columnist. His economic research and work product are not “liberal” but factual; it is Ferguson who makes his living endorsing, distorting and puffing up a discredited ideological perversion of economic reality.

Newsweek should know better than to try so unashamedly to flip that coin.

As of this writing, Newsweek itself has been silent on the unethical mess of confabulation posing as its cover story, issuing only this statement: “Niall Ferguson has responded to Paul Krugman’s critique. Newsweek continues to monitor the debate.”

There is no regard in this reply—or in the dismissive admission that Newsweek, “like other news organizations”, does not fact check—for the truth. The article is considered—precisely as Ferguson would have it—to be one version of reality, requiring no connection to facts in evidence or anyone else’s lived reality. That posture simply cannot be the whole of Newsweek’s view of whether the truth matters in journalism.

In case they need encouragement to take responsibility and issue the appropriate retraction and corrections, here are some more fact-based critiques:

The Atlantic - A Full Fact-check of Niall Ferguson’s Very Bad Argument Against Obama
The Atlantic - As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize
The Atlantic - Paul Krugman Shows Newsweek How to Fact-check
Paul Krugman - Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition
New York Magazine - Niall Ferguson Smacked Down over Another Questionable Newsweek Cover
Columbia Journalism Review - Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson Debacle
Politico - Newsweek Silent on Niall Ferguson Errors
Salon - Niall Ferguson trolls everyone at Newsweek
Slate - Niall Ferguson’s Absurd Critique of the Obama Administration in One Chart
Business Insider - Niall Ferguson Publishes Embarrassing Defense of Newsweek Article
Business Insider - Niall Ferguson Proves the UK Bankers Want to Take Control of an Imperialist US
MSNBC PowerWall - Newsweek’s Anti-Obama Cover Story: Has the Magazine Lost all Credibility?
MediaMatters - Newsweek, Niall Ferguson and the Conservative Echo Chamber
Brad DeLong - More Lies from Niall Ferguson…
Foreign Policy - The Laziest Paragraph I will Read Today (warning against shoddy work by NF, from 2011)

Ultimately, we must ask: why is Newsweek—which has consistently explained what is wrong with the “trickle-down” theory of economic growth Ferguson backs, and for which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are perhaps the most aggressive and fundamentalist proponents in presidential campaign politics to date—framing the 2012 election according to an unfounded economic hypothesis which over the last 40 years has diverted more wealth from ordinary Americans to the ultra-wealthy, and which led to the 2008 collapse?

We cannot speculate here as to the exact psychology of the publishers, or the discussions going on behind closed doors, because we are not privy to that information. But we can say, without any uncertainty, that Newsweek has, at least for this edition, handed its journalist brand to the most dangerous distortions of economic and political reality currently in the wind. This is a stain on its journalistic record from which it will be very hard to recover any time soon.

New York magazine’s response puts it like this:

Suffice it to say, as the pile-on continues, the online traffic for the article is probably insane, but in no way worth it. Is this just what’s become of the Tina Brown method? Since she took over as editor of the struggling newsweekly that combined with her Daily Beast, the magazine has faced repeated criticism for what certain corners of the Internet refer to as trolling. From Michelle Bachmann’s gaze to Zombie Princess Di, Gay Obama, and Wimpy Mitt Romney, Newsweek covers have grabbed attention (which does not necessarily translate to sales).

But the Brown brand of getting people chattering with eye-popping covers and counterintuitive takes isn’t the same as willingly distorting the truth. As Krugman writes, “We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers.” With the future of the print product already in doubt, cheap clicks at the expense of credibility just aren’t going to cut it.

Not to discount entirely the value of rhetorical flourish: By the end of Niall Ferguson’s article, a fair minded and at least moderately informed reader might have a strong feeling that the bold-faced NW marking the end of the story stands for “not worthy”.