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Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

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Yes we did.

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No one could have predicted…

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Looking Out for the Little Guy

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I wish actual personhood had the same kind of rights and protections that corporate personhood had:

On Thursday, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan said that Joe Berlinger, the director of “Crude,” would have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage from that documentary. The film chronicles the Ecuadorians who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron) saying an oil field contaminated their water. Chevron said that Mr. Berlinger’s footage could be helpful as it seeks to have the litigation dismissed and pursues an international treaty arbitration related to the lawsuit.

In a telephone interview on Thursday night, Mr. Moore, whose films include “Bowling for Columbine” and “Capitalism: A Love Story,” said that he had never heard of such a ruling.

“If this isn’t overturned, it would make a lot of documentary filmmakers afraid,” Mr. Moore said. “People are going to have to start getting rid of all their extra footage now, right?”

Should the decision of Judge Kaplan be upheld and a subpoena be served for Mr. Berlinger’s footage, Mr. Moore said, “The chilling effect of this is, someone like me, if something like this is upheld, the next whistleblower at the next corporation is going to think twice about showing me some documents if that information has to be turned over to the corporation that they’re working for.”

This seems kind of crazy to me.

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Such a Sound Strategy

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I know Mistermix has touched on this already, but it is nice to see this splashed on the front page of the NYT:

Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.

The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and with collecting royalties from it, never took steps to comprehensively address the issue, relying instead on industry assurances that they were on top of the problem, a review of documents shows.

In the intervening years, numerous blowout preventers and their control systems have failed, though none as catastrophically as those on the well the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was preparing when it blew up on April 20 — an accident that has left tens of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Agency records show that from 2001 to 2007, there were 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations, leading to 41 deaths, 302 injuries and 356 oil spills. Yet the federal agency continues to allow the oil industry largely to police itself, saying that the best technical experts work for industry, not for the government.

Critics say that, then and now, the minerals service has been crippled by this dependence on industry and by a climate of regulatory indulgence.

“Everything that’s done by the oil industry is done for profit,” said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who demanded this week that the Interior Department investigate these backup safety systems. “Throw in the fact that regulators have taken a lax attitude toward overseeing their operations, and you have a recipe for catastrophe.”

It really is kind of amazing how successful industry has been at gutting almost every aspect of regulation in this nation. Not only was there no effective regulation of the oil industry, if regulators were simply allowing the oil industry to regulate themselves, there was no regulation at all, because that is what “regulating themselves” means. It means looking the other way. I’d sure like it if cops would let me regulate my own speed on the highway.

And adding insult to injury, we’re paying the regulators to not regulate.

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Atrios Wins, We All Lose

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Atrios, the other day, describing this story about the toxic dispersants (symptoms at high doses: headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems) being poured into the gulf by the ton to break up the oil slick:

Nick Kristof, today:

The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.

I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.

***

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.

Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.

Our corporate persons are so powerful that when we don’t know what something is going to do to us or our bodies, we say fuck it, hope nothing goes wrong, approve it, and then listen to those same interests scream about tort reform twenty years later when half a town has cancer.

This whole country has become nothing more than a slow-motion train wreck.

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The Secret War in Laos Wasn’t a Secret to Laotians

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This Glenn Greenwald piece about the helicopter attack in Iraq contains something that always sort of drives me insane about Americans and our concept of ourselves in the world:

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved — at least not primarily. Of course those who aren’t accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they’re taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

All of this is usually kept from us. Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don’t usually see what is done by us. We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare instances when we’re graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it’s all very unusual and rare. That’s how we collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib photos, and it’s why the Obama administration took such extraordinary steps to suppress all the rest of the torture photos: because further disclosure would have revealed that behavior to be standard and common, not at all unusual or extraordinary.

We’re like the little kid playing hide and seek who stands behind a thin tree and thinks that just because he can’t see us because the tree is blocking his vision, we can’t see him. Remember when the wingnuts were going after Michael Isikoff for an off-hand remark about the desecration of a Koran at Gitmo- because as we know, everyone in the Middle East gets all their information from Newsweek- otherwise they would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS hear about it! Or the lunatic attacks on Scott Beauchamp, because if the New Republic hadn’t published it, no one in the middle east would ever think that American troops would run over a dog!

They don’t learn about this stuff because of the American press. They learn about it because an American helicopter just lit up their next door neighbor and his girls with a 30mm chain gun because he stopped to pick up a bleeding photographer and help him. They learn it because it was their son or their nephew who was whisked away to Abu Ghraib and sexually humiliated and threatened by dogs.

It’s crazy, really, how myopic we are. But I guess it is easier than facing the truth. What’s on tv tonight, btw?

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A Real Scoop

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Debbie Schlussel’s report that Sean Hannity’s charity is a scam — it donated less than 4% of its take to the wounded vets it purports to support — is being picked up by “reasonable” conservatives.  Frum, for example, wonders if other conservatives will even mention that Sean likes to fly to those events in private jets, and charters a fleet of luxury SUVs for transporting his entourage.   Sully calls that “a poignant question”.

I’ve got a touching question, one which may be a bit unreasonable, given the ruthless self-examination on display here:

Where the fuck were these guys when a Kos diarist outed Hannity’s charity, or when the Washington Post reported that most of these charities were scams, in 2007?

Update: The head of the foundation, Ollie North, issued a press release [pdf], denying everything.  The Post story is based on a 2007 report by the American Institute for Philanthropy.  They gave Freedom Alliance, the charity Hannity was pimping, an “F”.   AIP is a membership-only organization that charges for its guide, so I can’t see what it was rated more recently.

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Another Tanqueray and Tab?

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Keep ’em coming, we got a long drive ahead of us:

When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.

Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.

With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.

The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.

Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings.

I’m sure this is nothing that can’t be cured another round of tax cuts, deregulation, and a sustained assault on public employees by the wingnut welfare recipients at Reason.

This is what happens when you turn over the financial future of your country to people with the intelligence, integrity, and long-term planning skills of Ernie McCracken.

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Revenge of the DFH

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This, if true, is hysterical:

Olbermann says a source in the Bayh camp cited “left bloggers” as a reason for his leaving. “People said mean things to me!” What a fucking loser.

In addition to patchouli, it appears the DFH has another weapon in his arsenal to defeat centrists- the sternly worded blog post. I think every centrist, right now, should be required to answer whether they could ever be driven from a race by “left bloggers.” Because if they can, then I think these Senators should, at the very least, be forbidden from voting on matters of war and national security.

And could someone deploy the Mother of All Blog Posts against Ben Nelson?

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Double Your Pleasure

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The NY Times is full of cheer today:

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, a widely watched measure of the housing markets in 20 metropolitan areas, rose 0.4 percent from September on a seasonally adjusted basis. It was the fifth consecutive month that prices were up.

Underneath this apparent good news were some disquieting signs of deterioration, however.

But seasonal adjustments tend to hide any weakness in the cooler months, when fewer houses are sold. On an unadjusted basis, the index was flat in October.

“We’ve started to see the possibility of either a leveling off of prices for a few months or perhaps a double-dip,” said Maureen Maitland, the vice president for index services at S.& P.

One of the most frustrating things about politics is when you know one group of people is right about something, but they are just powerless to do anything. Krugman, Atrios, and dozens of others have been warning about a double-dip recession (Krugman was just warning about it on the Sunday shows), and the stimulus bill should have been bigger and not had all those ridiculous tax cuts, but because of the way our legislature is set up, nothing can be done about it.

That is what has been adding to my angst the last couple of weeks regarding the health care debate and the kill the bill folks. On a lot of things, I think they are absolutely right- the public option would be better, I think the mandates will be politically dangerous and suck, there should be more subsidies, single payer would be better, there shouldn’t be abortion restrictions, and so on. On so many of these things, I agree with the DFH crowd. The problem is, I don’t see any way of getting that done, and one of the things I like about Obama is he understands the art of the possible and takes what he can get. Personally, after the behavior I saw from Big Pharm, the insurance industry, the AMA, and medical providers, I’m to the point I would just nationalize the entire damned health care system like the British NHS. And I’m starting to ramble.

At any rate, the DFH crowd is probably right about the economic future- Atrios has been more right than most. And once again, they will be ignored and the centrists and the blue dogs and the self-annointed fiscal conservatives will rule the day, as we all go down the crapper together.

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On Centrism

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Larison:

Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist” consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies, but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable, “serious” people. The trouble for liberals who accept this consensus is that they feel a constant pull to align themselves with corporate and financial interests in addition to endorsing every military action and security measure imaginable.

Back when I was a full-fledged wingnut, I used to point to Democrats like Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman as “good” Democrats.

I was (and probably still am) a moron.

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Waste Not, Want Not

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Read this:

In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers have not been able to decide how to divide up space for, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.

I sure could go for another lecture about fiscal conservatism from Republicans right about now.

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Whatever

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This will never work:

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a new “social contract” with the world’s banks to make them more responsible to society.

Mr Brown told a G20 meeting in Scotland it was not acceptable that banking success was reaped by the few but failure was “borne by all of us”.

He called for a fund for future bank bailouts to be considered, possibly paid for by a tax on transactions.

Brown seems to fail to understand a few things. First, contracts, social and otherwise, are for the little people. That is why the bankruptcy bill was passed a few years back at the behest of the industry- to keep the proles in line and to guarantee the banks can bleed you dry- while trillions in unmentioned loans and guarantees and bailout bucks are thrown to the banks when they shit the bed. They screw up, we give them trillions, they lavish themselves with bonuses. It is the circle of life in our own global corruptocracy.

Second, privatizing the profit and socializing the costs was not an accident, it was the plan. Go read McClatchy’s recent series on this.

Third, the fund will not work, because the banks will just buy off enough Senators and congressmen to waive the rules as they did for fees during the last decade. And should they actually be required to put some money in a fund, not only will the charges be passed on to us so we can get hit both ways with higher banking fees and taxes spent on propping these robbers up, but then once the money is in the “fund,” you can;t just have it sitting there, can you? You will have to invest it in something! And then you can write unregulated CDS on that, and then you can write some more CDS on the CDS, and you see where this is going, with the inevitable next round of hoocoodanode. Goldman and a few others, with their tentacles deep into the higher reaches of government, will no doubt survive and prosper, and we will be treated to months of sycophants and useful idiots explaining we just don’t truly understand how smart the Goldman guys are. “Best of the best! They know what they are doing!” They sure do…

Nothing short of breaking up all the large banks, executing the credit ratings agencies, and then a strict and ruthless enforcement regime will help, and there simply is no willpower for that. Not only is there no willpower for this, as both parties are bought and paid for in full, but if there was any movement on this front, wingnut teabaggers would scream about socialism and tyranny, Reason magazine would scream about government involvement in the private sector and the free flow of capital and the glory of the invisible hand, moderate Democrats everywhere would worry about such public involvement, Joe Lieberman would spend months posturing in front of cameras with a furrowed brow, and whoever was tasked with enforcement would be found in bed with a hooker or whatever else is required to destroy them.

In short, we’re just screwed. Learn your place, deal with it, and learn how to grow food. Watching the way the big money boys have shaped the debate, whipping people who would be helped into a froth about socialism, it just seems so clear to me now after spending the last two decades in a haze. “Sorry unemployment is at 10 percent and you are losing your health insurance while I give myself a couple million dollar bonus, but socialism and Hitler and abortion on demand and death tax oh my God two gay men want the same rights as you! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!”

Such a joke.

/dirtyfuckinghippy

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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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DougJ’s earlier post today on Cheney reminded me of this article from Walter Pincus the other day:

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general’s review of the agency’s interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program.

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

At the same time, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, whose review of the program was largely declassified Monday, said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.

Unlike virtually everything else in Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap, I tend to trust Pincus and his body of work, so I have no doubt that morale might be low.

What astounds me, though, is that morale might be low at the CIA because the Justice department might prosecute people who- get this- BROKE THE LAW. Imagine that- the Justice department has duties other than politically motivated prosecutions, micromanaging US Attorneys, and stocking the department with religious nuts and gay-bashers.

And what I find even more astounding is that the Republicans and Dick Cheney are, so far, successfully pivoting and presenting themselves as the defenders of the CIA, when it has been Dick Cheney and the neocon establishment that has spent the last four decades undermining, attacking, and debasing the CIA. It wasn’t the liberals who cooked up Team B– that would be George Herbert Walker Bush who approved it, Paul Wolfowitz who was part of the team, and Richard Perle who was instrumental in making it happen. It wasn’t Ted Kennedy and the liberals who spent the entire last decade undermining the CIA and basically making George Tenet say whatever the hell Dick Cheney wanted them to say, that would be the Republicans. It wasn’t Dennis Kucinich who ignored the August 6th CIA memo about bin Laden, setting the stage for the largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the dirty hippies at the DNC who created the Office of Special Plans to create an excuse to attack Iraq and directly undermine the intelligence from the CIA, that was Dick Cheney and Doug Feith and company.

And let’s not forget that it wasn’t Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer who outed a covert CIA agent and then conducted a full-on media jihad against her and her husband. No, again the honors for that go to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Bob Novak.

So if morale is low at the CIA and they are feeling a little butthurt, they might want to think about how things have happened the last few decades. They aren’t in the position they are in because of Eric Holder. Far from it. And if they can’t figure this out on their own, and need me to point this crap out, then quite frankly, I don’t think they are smart enough to be handling classified intelligence in the first damned place.

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Dirty fucking economic predictions

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Paul Rosenberg highlights Dean Baker’s 2002 piece about the housing bubble:

This paper shows that there is no obvious explanation for a sudden increase in the relative demand for housing which could explain the price rise. There is also no obvious explanation for the increase in home purchase prices relative to rental prices. In the absence of any other credible theory, the only plausible explanation for the sudden surge in home prices is the existence of a housing bubble. This means that a major factor driving housing sales is the expectation that housing prices will be higher in the future.

Matt Yglesias explains why there is no professional benefit to being prescient in the economic world:

And in the reputational economy of analysts the consequences are even worse. If you go along with the herd and then predict a problem a month before it arises, then you strike everyone as prescient. But if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero. But Ben Bernanke who made very mainstream mistakes and then pivoted adroitly once the bill came due does.

Of course, it’s the same with everything. The people who opposed the Iraq war are are still those cranks that nobody wants to listen to, while George Packer and Fareed Zakaria are hailed as brilliant foreign policy minds. Zakaria and Bernkanke are bright and competent, which is why they’re good examples here: it’s not just that our discourse holds up idiots as experts, it’s also that, within the world of intelligent commentators, those who are wrong are rewarded while those who are right are ignored.

Again, I don’t see how any of this ends well for the United States.

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Don’t worry about the government

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None of you seem to mind my obsession with Ambergate, so I’m going to give it one more whack. Ambinder wrote:

And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.

Spencer Ackerman replies:

Talk to anyone who’s handled raw intelligence and s/he will tell you something on the order of this: “I thought it would be like a secret newspaper, but instead what’s already available in open-source materials is often more useful.” Rarely is there ever a clear policy option “implied” by intelligence — that’s a category error. Policymakers read intelligence, use it or discount it in whole or in part, and then make decisions. Intelligence is a text to be interpreted, not a compass pointing to true north. What’s more, those who acquire and analyze intelligence on a discrete subject use the same body of open-source information to shape their judgments as the rest of us do.

Which implies choices for journalists. We can choose to treat intelligence as more definitive than it is and enable the presumption of deference to those who say, Well, if only you saw the intelligence I saw… Or we can choose to treat intelligence-based claims as valuable but not definitive, and contextualize such claims within larger bodies of evidence.

In other words, “we weren’t privy to the intelligence” is the new “no one could have predicted”.

This shit never changes. Governments like to bamboozle people. One way they can do this is by claiming there is top secret intelligence proving whatever it is that they people to believe. In Ambinder’s world, even if this stop secret intelligence turns out not to mean what the government said it meant, we were still wrong to question it.

How is that not contrary to the first principles of journalism?

Update. Speaking of Marc Ambinder, this analysis of Fran Townsend’s remarks in an interview with Ambinder is spot on (from Michael Scherer, of all people):

In an interview with Marc Ambinder, Fran Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, says that the White House provided the language to Ridge only because he previewed his speech internally. “So I called him said, here’s what I think should go in it,” Townsend tells Ambinder. “It wasn’t an order. I didn’t regularly see his speeches in advance. He made speeches all the time without running it by us.” This is less of a denial than a startling admission: Townsend, whose job profile had nothing to do with politics, is admitting that she wanted political language praising the President inserted into an election-year statement about new measures to protect against terrorist attack.

Scherer’s whole piece, based on an advance copy of the book, is worth reading.

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Kruggers on Ambers

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Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that Marc Ambinder’s “the hippies were wrong to be right” post is such a classic that it merits further discussion. Here’s Paul Krugman:

But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.

Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.

Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.

The rules of modern day punditry are almost as complex as those of modern day wingnuts (minus the boycotts, I guess). Whether or not something is rational is of no relevance. Arcane mixtures of “balance”, deference to power, and “seriousness” have completely replaced common sense.

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