For now, I've moved the discussion of Professor John Yoo's Torture Memo over here: http://delong.typepad.com/the_torture_memo/
May 13, 2008
New York Times Death Spiral Watch (John Tierney Edition)
Outsourced to Mark Kleiman:
The Reality-Based Community: Greenhouse-gas footprints and environmental activism: John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians and greedhead conservatives. (The theocrat, nativist, and imperialist wings of conservatism prefer their faux-populist gotcha!s on different topics.)
If you travel frequently by air, even on commercial flights, you can’t escape having a huge carbon footprint. Yet many of the most vocal advocates of cutting emissions — politicians, environmentalists, journalists, scientists — are continually jetting off to campaign events and conferences and workshops. Are they going to change the way they operate? If not, how are they going to persuade anyone else to cut back emissions? (My advice to the peripatetic preachers: Do not try explaining why your work is more important than everyone else’s.)
Where to start?
The point of environmental management isn't to denounce sin, it's to get prices right. The problem with GHG-emitting activities is that they are artificially underpriced due to the lack of a carbon tax (or equivalent mechanism, such as cap-and-trade, for internalizing the external costs of those activities). With the right prices, the cost of conferences with physical attendance will rise, improving the competitive position of alternatives such as high-quality teleconferencing, which allows people to meet virtually rather than physically. But if people want or need to confer in person, and are willing to pay the full price including the price of the environmental damage their travel does, they can do so with a clear conscience.
Rich people use more goods and services than poor people. That's what "rich" means. Of course multi-millionaires have larger gross GHG footprints than you and I do. So what? If Tierney wants to work on decreasing income gradients, I'm all for it. But of course he's not. He just hates the idea that some rich people use their wealth to promote ideas he dislikes.
A large gross carbon footprint doesn't imply a large net carbon footprint. That's what offsets are about. Once GHG contributions are priced appropriately, there won't be any need for private offset purchases. But in the meantime someone who wants to be personally GHG-neutral can get there by writing checks for the activities necessary to offset his or her footprint. Tierney's admirer and fellow faux-populist glibertarian Glenn Reynolds thinks that this is no better than "buying indulgences." The difference, of course, is that the purchase of an indulgence didn't offset the damage done by the underlying sin (and certainly didn't make reparation to the other people injured by it), while GHG offsets actually undo the original damage. If Al Gore is prepared to pay for enough carbon sequestration or tree-planting or whatever to offset the GHG costs of his house and his air travel, it's no skin off my nose, and given the nature of market transactions it's a benefit to whomever he's buying the offsets from; otherwise those people wouldn't be willing to sell at the price. Isn't it astonishing how many devotees of "the free market" know jack sh*t about how market processes actually work?
Footnote Yes, Tierney's technique is precisely that of feminists who criticize anti-feminist women such as Phyllis Schlafly for not staying home and raising their kids, as anti-feminist ideology would dictate. And the technique is equally dishonest and offensive in the two cases. Schlafly is a liar and a scoundrel, but she ought to be criticized for what she says, not for entering into the debate. Is she supposed to leave the case for sex-role differentiation to be made exclusively by men, which would discredit it from the outset?
Second footnote Yes, there are some fools on the "moral/spiritual" or "deep environmentalist" end of the spectrum who also disdain offsets as indulgences. Indeed, the Al Gore who wrote Earth in the Balance might not have been fully comfortable with the offset idea. But if he's learned something in the meantime, and the climate-change denialists haven't, it's not Gore who warrants criticism.
Third footnote And yes, offsets are not without their practical problems, especially the problem of choosing a baseline. But that's a technical issue, not the basis for an objection in principle.
May 12, 2008
A Song of Religious War, Abuse of Prisoners, Ethnic Cleansing, and Similar Light Topics
A little history lesson, about the 45:
Source: David Robertson Photography: http://www.dwrobertson-photography.com/gal_loch_arklet.aspAndrew Lang : Poems of Andrew Lang : THE BONNIE BANKS O' LOCH LOMOND:
There's an ending o' the dance, and fair Morag's safe in France,
And the Clans they hae paid the lawing,
And the wuddy has her ain, and we twa are left alane,
Free o' Carlisle gaol in the dawing.So ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the laigh road,
An' I'll be in Scotland before ye:
But me and my true love will never meet again,
By the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.For my love's heart brake in twa, when she kenned the Cause's fa',
And she sleeps where there's never nane shall waken,
Where the glen lies a' in wrack, wi' the houses toom and black,
And her father's ha's forsaken.While there's heather on the hill shall my vengeance ne'er be still,
While a bush hides the glint o' a gun, lad;
Wi' the men o' Sergeant Mor shall I work to pay the score,
Till I wither on the wuddy in the sun, lad!So ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the laigh road,
An' I'll be in Scotland before ye:
But me and my true love will never meet again,
By the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.
Yuppies in the Fields
We signed up for Eatwell Farm's http://www.eatwell.com/ large weekly box of (relatively) locally grown (they are in Dixon) vegetables for $24.50 a week. They tell us such things as:
The chickens have spent their spring among the citrus, leaving their valuable droppings to fertilize the trees. Now they have moved on to their summer pasture, which is two acres of alfalfa that we planted last fall. I believe that the eggs are always richest when the chickens eat alfalfa. The egg production fell for a few days after we moved them. It is back up to normal now...
They send us recipes:
They encourage us to view the farm as more than just a black box from which a weekly box appears:
If I were a better sociologist, I would have something profound to say about how the highest form of gesellschaft turns out to be where one becomes rich enough to purchase a reasonable facsimile of gemeinschaft as a luxury out of one's ample disposable income--and then one begins to view the turnips in the box not with a "Jeebus! I'm paying this for turnips?! I loath turnips!" But rather with a "Hmmm... This is a challenge..."
Italian turnip soup, if you are curious.
Jonah Gelbach on McCain's "Economist" "Supporters"
Jonath makes the mistake of taking the McCain "economists" letter as an analytical statement, rather than as an expression of attitude written by spinmasters, and demands intellectual consistency:
Economists for Obama: McCain's Economist Supporters vs. Facts: Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen has posted the text of an email... prominent, right-leaning economists [who] have endorsed John McCain's stated economic proposals... the usuals (e.g., Becker, Hassett, McCain chief economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, Taylor, Harvey Rosen, Meltzer, etc.)... [NS] prominent economists who have earned their academic reputations.... I've previously discussed the enormous increase in deficits that would be caused by McCain's tax proposals, as scored by Len Burman and Greg Leiserson of the Tax Policy Center. So let me focus on the second paragraph [of the letter], which is uniformly contradicted by both facts and experience:
"His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks." Well, this one has already been repudiated by... John McCain's chief economic adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin. I've already posted on this issue:
McCain has already had to change his "definition" of those nasty earmarks he'll eliminate (somehow, without a line-item veto). According to this story by the Politico's Ben Smith, Holtz-Eakin initially claimed that there were $100 billion in earmarks in the current budget, the idea presumably being that eliminating all of these earmarks would give McCain $100 billion to work with in paying for his tax cuts. After a former senior Democratic staffer, Scott Lilly, pointed out that many of these earmarks included stuff McCain supports, like money for Israel, Egypt and U.S. military construction, Holtz-Eakin stated that in fact the real amount of money associated with earmarks McCain would not fund (again, magically preventing them without a line-item veto) was only $16-18 billion.
"[I]mplementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto..." Clearly, this one is there to allow them to respond to criticisms, like the parenthetical reference in my earlier post, based on the fact that under current law, the President has no capacity to pick and choose which items to fund. President McCain will have to sign or veto actual statutes, not their components.... I am not a constitutional lawyer, but given my understanding of the Court's language in Justice Stevens's opinion for the Court, I find it very difficult to imagine that McCain and his lawyers (much less his economists) will be capable of "implementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto".
"[P]ausing non-military discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their explosive growth..." Gee, I hardly know where to begin on this one. First off, a one-year pause would do nothing to stop "explosive growth". It would reduce the level of spending, to be sure, but then that "explosive growth" would go right on happening. This is a mathematical principle of which each of the economist-letter's signatories no doubt is aware.
That said, this post over at CBPP is worth a look [Update: I see that Mark Thoma posted much of the CBPP post, which I should have noted was written by Richard Kogan, back in March]. It shows the following:
Domestic discretionary spending fell from 18.4% of all non-interest federal spending in 2001 to (an estimated) 14.7% in 2008. By comparison, defense and security spending (in which the CBPP includes DHS and Veterans' spending) rose from 21.7% to 29.2%.
The real, i.e., inflation-adjusted, growth rate of domestic discretionary spending over this period was 1.3%. That's hardly an "explosive growth" path; by comparison, defense/security increased 9.1%, while SS/Medicare/Medicaid increased 3.8%.
As a share of GDP, domestic discretionary spending actually fell, from 3.1% to 2.8%. That means that this category of spending has been becoming less, not more, burdensome. Defense/security rose from 3.6% to 5.6% of GDP over this period, while SS/M/M rose from 7.7% to 8.4%.
I am frankly baffled as to what my colleagues on the right are talking about when they discuss "explosive growth" in "nonmilitary discretionary government spending". The real money on the spending side is in the military and entitlement categories....
[I]t is difficult for me to believe that people who promote John McCain's economic policies on the basis of the second paragraph of the letter above can simultaneously be aware of the facts and providing honest assessments. Perhaps I am wrong. I hope so.
I think that the disconnection of the letter from fiscal and economic reality is, from the point of view of the signatories, a feature and not a bug--because the McCain platform is so far out in the Gamma Quadrant, nobody will think that this is what the economists actually believe, and they will not have to spend any time defending it.
I Know That This Is Wrong...
But I cannot help but ask you all for your views on this:
The Corner on National Review Online: The Bush Legacy [Jonah Goldberg]: About a month ago, I called Ramesh in a panic because I'd forgotten that I was slated to do a Close-Up Foundation interview on the Bush legacy and I hadn't thought too much about it. Fortunately, not only did Ramesh have some great thoughts, but I was wrong about the date — by a month (I'd entered it into my PDA wrong). Anyway, I'm doing the interview this Thursday and while I have my thoughts far better organized, I thought it'd be interesting to know what NRO readers think Bush's legacy will be. Please send thoughts — hopefully constructive — to JonahResearch@AOL.com
Post 'em in comments, and I will send them all bundled up to JonahResearch@AOL.com...
Grading Tim Geithner
Felix Salmon defends Tim Geithner at the New York Fed. I think Felix is right:
Has Tim Geithner Been Captured by Wall Street?: Gary Weiss has a long profile of Tim Geithner in the June issue of Portfolio, and... he gives a lot of space to some very harsh criticisms of the New York Fed chief... accuses Geither of having been captured by those he would regulate, and of working for Wall Street rather than Main Street, especially when he helped to orchestrate the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan....
Weiss does a reasonably good job of laying out the first best defense against such accusations - that the risks of doing nothing were so enormous that Geithner was forced to act. Once you've accepted that, everything else is niggling: did the Fed use too much of its own balance sheet? Could Geithner have designed a different kind of bailout? The answers to those questions are unknowable, and in any case don't change the fact that Geithner averted something which could have been truly disastrous...
But more important is that:
the accusations themselves are... incoherent. In what way could Geithner have been "outmatched" by Alan Schwartz, when he forced Bear Stearns to be sold for a peppercorn, wiping out its executives' enormous equity holdings?... [I]t's simply false to say that Bear Stearns' competitors "stood to gain" from Bear going out of business: the collapse of one investment bank is bad news for all of the others, since it forces a 360-degree reevaluation of counterparty risk. Weiss makes great play of the fact that Geithner is heavily influenced by Goldman alumni such as Gerry Corrigan and John Thain... but the biggest winner in the Bear Stearns deal was Jamie Dimon. And a victorious JP Morgan is a much bigger competitive threat to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch than Bear Stearns ever was.
Weiss is right that the New York Fed is a creature of Wall Street, but that's what it's meant to be. If... you're worried that Wall Street has too much influence over the Fed, then you should be looking... to Ben Bernanke - a man whose name, tellingly, appears only in passing in Weiss's piece.
As I have said before, I think the Fed's behavior was appropriate. JPMorganChase got a nice present for being well-capitalized enough to be willing to help the Fed deal with systemic risk. Those at Bear Stearns whose actions had created the systemic risk got appropriately fleeced:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: Twenty First-Century Central Banking: The problem of dealing with moral hazard in twenty first-century central banking has taken an interesting twist. Twice in the past decade the Federal Reserve has intervened in cases in which specific institutions have gotten into serious trouble--specific institutions that the Federal Reserve, or at least the New York Federal Reserve Bank (lines of authority are somewhat unclear) has concluded are too big to be allowed to fail through standard processes. The two institutions are the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management--LTCM--in 1998, and the bank Bear-Stearns in 2008.
In 1998 LTCM had suffered major losses on a mark-to-current-market basis (although its long-term prospects in the event of global financial recovery from the crisis looked correspondingly good), and appeared both illiquid and--if forced to liquidate its positions at then-current values, especially if liquidation induced significant price pressure against it--insolvent. Alan Greenspan and Peter Fisher at the New York Fed gathered all of the Federal Reserve's major creditors in a room, told them that they had a problem, and told them that they should solve it: that systemic risk would be created by an LTCM bankruptcy and liquidation and that the Fed did not want to go there. The creditors agreed to cooperate and split both the liability and the upside (with the exception of Bear Stearns, that declined), and they made LTCM an offer. The only alternative bidder was said to be Warren Buffett, who claims to have not been focused on the situation because he was fishing in Alaska. With only one potential bidder, the equity of LTCM's principals and investors was confiscated--to the dismay of LTCM's principals and investors, some of whom believe that they would have been able to get a much better split of the upside had they been allowed to play their creditors off against each other.
In 2008 Bear Stearns had suffered major losses on a mark-to-current-market basis (although its long-term prospects in the event of global financial recovery from the crisis looked correspondingly good), and appeared both illiquid and--if forced to liquidate its positions at then-current values, especially if liquidation induced significant price pressure against it--insolvent. Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner at the New York Fed declared that systemic risk would be created by a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and liquidation, that the Fed did not want to go there, and that the only deal they would fund and support would be a deal that sold Bear Stearns to J.P. MorganChase at $2 (later raised to $10) a share, and the Federal Reserve kicked into the deal a put on Bear Stearns assets that one might speculate had a full-information liquid-market value of perhaps $3 billion. Various speakers for principals and investors in Bear Stearns protested that this effective confiscation of their equity value was unfair and inappropriate, and that a better split of the upside or at least a payment of more than $2 a share was appropriate.
We now have two precedents. If the Federal Reserve judges that a major financial institution:
- is too big to fail in that its failure will generate systemic risk
- has followed portfolio strategies that have produced inappropriate and excessive leverage requires immediate action
then the Federal Reserve will intervene to structure and support a deal that leaves principals and investors in the offending systemic risk-creating institution with effectively zero equity. Counterparties will be rescued. Principals and investors will not--even if normal more lengthy legal and bargaining processes would give principals and investors a share of the equity value on the table.
This is not the arms-length equal-treatment impersonal-rule-of-law ideal to which a government should aspire. This does, however, seem to get the incentives about right.
Charlie Kindleberger once wrote, in Manias, Panics, and Crashes, that the key to avoiding both depression and moral hazard was for the lender-of-last-resort to always show up in a crisis but for its appearance to always be doubted until the very last moment. These two precedents suggest that the Federal Reserve is evolving a case-law-of-twenty-first-financial-crisis that is somewhat different: in a crisis the lender-of-last-resort will always show up, but investors and principals in individual institutions that need to be specially rescued will discover that the lender of last resort is not their friend.
When Hyperbolic Discounting Attacks!
Back in January, the question of whether to declare the last day of instruction here at U.C. Berkeley--May 12--part of reading period and cancel the class is a no-brainer. the students are good, enthusiastic, and well prepared. There are oceans of material to cover. The syllabus has just been hacked with a chainsaw--the half-week unit on contemporary Chinese monetary policy has just bitten the dust--and I don't wan;t to have to cut any more. And the question of whether to extend the semester and have another meeting on May 14 is also a no-brainer: it wouldn't be fair to grab normal course time for review, would it?
But today it is May 12, and this is the 44th time I have trudged into this particular course's classroom this semester. And my heart sinks at the thought that I have to do it again...
This is not to say that this has been a bad course: these are good kids, they were well-preoared, and they have learned a lot.They are still pestering me with questions about John Hicks's IS curve and John Taylor's monetary policy reaction function (which I have no covered at such length that I guessed they have to be on Friday's exam). But my marginal disutility of lecturing all of a sudden feels very high...
On a related issue, I have never been gladder that my real gradebook is in paper in my backpack then when I see this:
May 11, 2008
Three Names Shock Me...
Tyler Cowen tells me about economists who have endorsed John McCain's economic plan:
Marginal Revolution: Economists who have endorsed John McCain's economic plan: Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Vernon Smith, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Steven Davis, Francis X. Diebold, Martin Eichenbaum, Martin Feldstein, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Anne Krueger, Deepak Lal, Burton Malkiel, Paul W. McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Tim Muris, June O'Neill, Michael E. Porter, Kenneth Rogoff, Richard Roll, Harvey Rosen, George Shultz, Beryl Sprinkel, John Taylor, and Arnold Zellner.
Three names shock me: Francis X. Diebold, Anne Krueger, and Kenneth Rogoff. I am going to have to revise my opinion of each of them down several large notches. Even if you do think that the Republican Party is better than the Democratic one, right now--in the middle of John McCain's gasoline tax idiocy--is not the time to sign on. Right now is the time to extract a price in terms of policy consistency and rationality for one's support. Krueger, Rogoff, and Diebold know that very well--and ought to have acted on it.
Tyler goes on to say:
The... statement reads:
We enthusiastically support John McCain's economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles that have made America great.
His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their explosive growth and place accountability on federal government agencies.
His plan would keep taxes from rising, because higher tax rates are exactly the wrong policy to restore economic growth, especially at this time.
His plan would reduce tax rates by cutting the tax that corporations pay to 25 percent in line with other countries, by completely phasing out the alternative minimum tax, by increasing the exemption for dependents, by permitting the first-year expensing of new equipment and technology, and by making permanent a reformed tax credit for R&D.
His plan would also create a new and much simpler tax system and give Americans a free choice of whether to pay taxes under that simple system or the current complex and burdensome income tax.
His plan would open new markets for American goods and services and thereby create additional jobs for Americans by supporting good free trade agreements such as the one with Colombia and working with leaders around the world to avoid isolationism and protectionism. His plan would also reform education, retraining, and other assistance programs so they better help those displaced by trade and other changes in the economy.
His plan addresses problems in the financial markets and housing markets by calling for increased transparency and accountabi! lity, by targeted assistance to deserving homeowners to refinance thei r mortgages, and by opposing so-called reform plans which would raise the costs of home-ownership in the future.
The above actions, as well as plans to address entitlement programs--especially Social Security, Medicare and other government health care programs--and his regulatory reforms--especially in the area of health care--constitute a broad and powerful economic agenda. Because of John McCain's experience working with the American people in all walks of life, with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and with leaders around the world, we are optimistic that these plans will become a reality and will create jobs and restore confidence and strong economic growth."
James Poulos on the Invisible College
A good college--visible or invisible--is composed of people who (a) know stuff, and (b) think well. The best colleges are made up of people who know different stuff, who think well in different ways, and who--most important--understand that when they listen to people who know different stuff than they do and who think well in different ways than they do, they learn.
James Poulos:
James Poulos » In Defense of Blogger Collegiality: [W]hat has drawn this motley crew of bloggers together in such a way? Surely not a freakish felicity with constitutional law, or even a common writing style. In fact, all of the bloggers mentioned in this post share what I at least think are fairly wild mutual divergences in style and tone, as well as in content and slant. If anything, there’s a vague libertarian consensus among those identified on the right. But Ramesh is a different kind of conservative than Ross, I am a different kind of conservative than both of them, and Reihan has just identified himself succinctly as a
Rawlsekian neoconservative singulitarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberalincrementalist.
Add other blog greats with whom many of us are familiar, like Andrew and Daniel, and the valences of intellectual diversity are only intensified. The main common attribute, it seems to me, is idiosyncrasy, which isn’t necessarily correlated with collegiality in any way. What looks like a nonthreatening difference of opinion to one idiosyncratic blogger might strike another as a dangerously or dumbly uncategorizable source of opposition.
No, the big conspiracy here I think is one among people who like a good conversation, and have discovered a consistent set of conversation partners whose content and style best compare and contrast with their own. Professional bloggers are paid conversationalists — or should be, at least. And the good social art of collegiality well understood is an essential part of good conversation — especially good public conversation. People sometimes fear that the blogosphere will close itself off to new talent, but, based on the dynamic I’ve just outlined, that strikes me as impossible. The ‘gold rush’ is probably over, but blogging will probably take on the generational tempo of the music world, with big acts retiring for a while to pursue real lives and then making comeback tours after a suitable hiatus — and with lots and lots of new acts competing for attention. Sometimes attention is won by mere novelty, but more often it’s won by talent. That may be somewhat boring when the talent involved is taking ‘Baba O’Reily’ and turning it into a Nickelback-style gruntfest, but may be less so when the talent involves daily attention to political, economic and cultural life.
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Chris Wallace of Fox Department)
Outsourced to Ezra Klein:
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: Martin asks, "This weekend, Chris Wallace on Fox interviewed Sens. Schumer and Durbin. He noted that Sen. Obama wants to raise the capital gains tax, but that 50% of the people who get taxed make $50,000 or less, therefore making this a middle class tax hike. Is this true? Are they playing with the numbers?"
I can't tell you exactly which number set Chris Wallace is working off of, so I'm not really in a position to say whether exactly 50 percent of those getting taxed make under 50 percent. But there's definitely some trickery going on here. Lots of ordinary Americans have money in the stock market through pension funds and the like. But they have very, very little of it. A share or two of stock, a bit of property. In 2005, the wealthiest one percent of Americans received almost 70 percent of long-term capital gains, and paid 72 percent of the capital gains taxes. What Wallace is trying to do is confuse the issues of eligibility and exposure. Lots of Americans might end up paying a minimal amount of the capital gains tax, but the real exposure is among the wealthy....
That group there in the middle? The so-called average taxpayers Wallace is so concerned about? They make, on average, $176 from capital gains in a given year. They will pay next to nothing. The Top 1 percent makes $232,000! The capital gains tax, in other words, is a tax on people with capital gains. Those people are overwhelmingly the rich, and the rich are overwhelmingly the ones who pay the tax. The fact that lots of Americans have nominal holdings is effectively meaningless here. Wallace is just using them to mislead as to the tax's true target.
Charlie Stross Takes His Sense of Indignation for Its Sunday Walk
The large bandwidth downside of advertiser-supported media:
Charlie's Diary: Why your internet experience is slow: Here is a random-ish URL from Salon.com, a not too unusual online magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/05/09/askthepilot276/. This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith... 950 words of text... 6.5Kb.... (Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)
In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links.... But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?... I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files... in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read....
This is a novel in HTML.... "Accelerando" runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages.... It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words....
If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?
(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)
Newsweek Death Spiral Watch
That four-year countdown until the death of the Washington Post unless it radically reforms itself? That applies to Newsweek as well.
Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:
Matthew Yglesias: Perception and Reality: Michael Isikoff reports that the guy John McCain picked to run the GOP convention has done some lobbying for the military junta that rules Burma. Then there's this dissonant element of the analysis: "But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists." But it's not just a perception that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists, he's actually surrounded by lobbyists. This is a quantifiable reality of McCain's campaign -- it's chock full 'o lobbyists.
Philippe Sands Talks to Bill Moyers About the Torture Team--David Addington, John Yoo, and Company
This is even scarier than I had imagined it would be:
Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS: After 9/11, writes Philippe Sands, our highest government officials sanctioned a 'culture of cruelty' that put our troops, our Constitution, and our own standing in the world at risk. This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee began hearings trying to find out how the President came to approve "enhanced interrogation methods" — that's the official code for the use of cruelty in the pursuit of confession. The administration has been fighting to stop a public accounting of the internal decisions behind that policy. The officials who took part in those discussions fear they could one day face prosecution if their actions turn out to have been illegal. Those key officials talked to Philippe Sands for his book, and this week he was asked to testify at those hearings in Congress.
REP. JERROLD NADLER:This hearing of the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties will come to order....
REP. MIKE PENCE: Some, of course, have suggested that relationship-building interrogation techniques are preferable and even more reliable in the long-run than stress methods. They raise the question, though, what about the hard cases? And I can tell by your grin you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you could move people who have masterminded the death of more than 3000 Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods.
PHILIPPE SANDS: I did smile because, frankly, the image that weeks and weeks of rapport-building with KSM is somehow going to produce results is counterintuitive. But the reality is we don't know. And I spoke in my investigation to a lot of interrogators — military, FBI — who basically said, "coercion doesn't work. You get information that they want to give you that they think is going to stop the pain from happening."
BILL MOYERS: Philippe Sands is known in top legal circles for his work on torture cases spawned by such infamous dictators as Chile's Pinochet and Liberia's Charles Taylor, and by genocide around the world. He's a counselor to the Queen of England, and director of the Center on International Courts and Tribunals in London, where he closely studied the British fight against terrorists of the IRA.
PHILIPPE SANDS: The thinking in the British military and the thinking across the board politically — it's really not a left-right issue, it's a broad consensus in the United Kingdom — is that coercion doesn't work. The view is taken in the United Kingdom that it extended the conflict with the IRA probably by between 15 and 20 years....
BILL MOYERS: Let me go right to a story that happened after your testimony. It's the story of the suicide bomber in Baghdad who drove his bombing vehicle into an Iraqi police station. It turns out that he had been held at Guantanamo for over three years. Pentagon records say that he had told people he wanted to kill as many Americans as he possibly can . And a lot of people — you go to the blogs this morning — a lot of people are thinking, why give someone like that the benefit of the doubt?
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, firstly, we give people the benefit of the doubt because that's the nature of our system. We are a country, United Kingdom, United States, who believe fundamentally in democratic values. We don't assume guilt. We assume innocence. There are people at Guantanamo who pose a threat, undoubtedly. But there are also a great many more people who don't pose a threat. And in those circumstances, I think using this as an example to somehow come down on the merits of the Guantanamo system is not a sensible thing to do. I think Guantanamo has been a problem as Abu Ghraib has been a problem, because it has undermined America's claim to moral authority in facing up to the very real challenge of terrorism. And, locking them up and throwing away the key is only going to exacerbate the problem. And it's a problem that we faced in Britain, for example, in relationship to the IRA back in the 1970s and the 1980s. That's not the way to go.
BILL MOYERS: You told the committee this week that the British experience in fighting the terrorists of the IRA actually extended the conflict 15 to 20 years. What's the evidence for that?
PHILIPPE SANDS: The story's a simple one. Back in '71, '72, the British moved as the United States has done now, to aggressive techniques of interrogation. They used pretty much the same techniques: hooding, standing, humiliation, degradation. Five techniques, they were called.... But there was a bigger problem, even beyond their illegality, in my view. And that was this: That what the use of those techniques did was to really enrage part of the Catholic community, who felt that IRA detainees alleged to be terrorists, were being abused. And it turned people who were perhaps unhappy with the situation into being deeply and violently unhappy with the situation. And if you speak to British politicians who were involved in that period, and the British military, what they'll tell you is that there is a feeling that the use of those types of techniques extended the conflict.
BILL MOYERS: Did you learn that people will say anything to stop the torture?
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, actually, I think it's self-evident that that is what happened. If you speak to interrogators, they will tell you that aggressive techniques of interrogation don't work. They don't produce meaningful information. And just the other day, I was listening to a very interesting tape of John McCain. And he explained how he, in the end, had signed a confession, owning up to crimes against children and women in North Vietnam, basically because he had reached a point, he thought he wouldn't be broken, where he had reached a point where he simply couldn't bear it any more, and he wanted the pain to stop. And the only thing he could do was to tell them what they wanted to know. And that's, that's what interrogators will tell you. Abuse produces information that is the information the detainee thinks you want to know, and nothing more than that. It's not reliable.
BILL MOYERS: Going back to the hearings, one member of the committee, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona, a Republican, said--and I quote-- "The results of a total of three minutes of severe interrogations of three of the worst terrorists were of immeasurable benefit to the American people. A full 25 percent of the human intelligence we've received on Al Qaeda came from just three minutes worth of rarely used interrogation tactics."
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I remember that very well. And I appreciated very much everything that Representative Franks had to say. But I've described that to my friends in London as a sort of Monty Python moment in the hearing. Because he alleged that there had been three individuals water boarded. They had been water boarded for no more than one minute each. And they had spilled the beans. And I was sitting there watching him and thinking, well, that's new information. I've never heard that before. Where on earth does that come from? Counterintuitively, I can't imagine how a waterboarding of one minute is suddenly going to produce useful information. We don't even know if it is useful. But also, imagine the scene. You've got guys there with stopwatches. We're gonna waterboard him for one minute, and then we will stop. And in that one minute, everything will come up. I don't know where he got all that from. I thought he sounded as though he made up on the stop. We don't have any objective evidence that any of these interrogation techniques have produced any useful information. KSM, you've referred to, has owned up to virtually everything under the sun that has happened that is bad for the United States in the last five years. And I find that counterintuitive to common sense. I would say I don't have actual information on KSM. I do have actual information on detainee 063. I spent time, as I describe in the book, with the head of Mohammed al-Qahtani's Exploitation Team. And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of him....
PHILIPPE SANDS: Look, Bill, I've spent 20 years during courtroom work as a litigating lawyer. I like to see evidence on things. I like arguments to be based on evidence. David Rivkin is unable to provide any evidence. I have honed in on the interrogation of one man, detainee 063. The administration has publicly declared they got a mass of information out of him that related to all sorts of extraordinarily important things to protect the Americans. I then spoke to the people who were involved in his actual interrogation and the head of his Exploitation Team. That's not what they told me. If the evidence I had been given had been different, then I would reach possibly a different conclusion. Not as to the legality or the utility of torture, but what do we do in the face of evidence that it works? But there isn't evidence that it works. The British experience is that it doesn't work. The Spanish experience is that it doesn't work. The Egyptian experience is that it doesn't work, in the sense of producing meaningful information that is going to protect a country. Sure, it produces information. But as John McCain said in his interview in 1997, it produces the wrong information. Because someone who's subject to that sort of pain and suffering is going to do anything they can to stop it from happening. And they will tell the person who is abusing them what the person wants to hear, and nothing more and nothing less.
BILL MOYERS: Philippe, you spent a long time and made a lot of trips and talked to a lot of people to do this book. What was driving you? Why did you-- you've got enough to do. Why did you want to do this particular book?
PHILIPPE SANDS: I did it totally off my own back. I was fascinated by a simple question. How could lawyers at the upper echelons of the administration, trained at Harvard Law School and other distinguished institutions, have approved torture? In what circumstances could that happen? I didn't understand how it happened. And it combined with a real sense of injustice that the truth of the story had not come out. Because what the administration said, and I was really catalyzed by a press conference I read in June, 2004, as the administration struggled to contain the disaster of Abu Ghraib. The administration spun a story. You're a press man. You know how governments work. I know how governments work. And the story was this: The desire for aggressive interrogation came from the bottom up. People on the front line, people at Guantanamo, elsewhere, told us they needed to move to new techniques. Who are we at the top, to say no? And in that context, we approved certain techniques.... But it struck me as counterintuitive, because I know the American military. I've got a lot of friends in the American military. And they are deeply committed to the rules of the Geneva Conventions and other international rules, and don't go about the abandonment of President Lincoln's disposition. So what I decided to do was I took the famous memorandum by Donald Rumsfeld, signed in December 2002, where he writes on the bottom—why standing limited for four hours a day, I stand for eight hours a day--and I tracked back the entire decision making process, identified the 10 or 12 people I needed to meet. And one by one, tracked them down, went and found them, spoke to them and I'm truly grateful to them. Once I'd had my first conversation, which I think was with Diane Beaver who was the lawyer down at Guantanamo, I was then able to get right up to the very top. And one by one, I followed from Diane Beaver, the lawyer at Guantanamo, her boss, Mike Dunleavy (who's the head of interrogations, through General Hill, who is the head of Southern Command in Miami, up through General Myers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, up to Doug Feith, the head of policy at the Pentagon, and then right up to the main man in my book, Jim Haynes. Jim Haynes was Mr. Rumsfeld's lawyer. And Jim Haynes wrote the very famous, the infamous, iconic, why is standing limited to four hours memo. And he went to Harvard Law School. And I just couldn't understand how someone so well trained could authorize abusive interrogation like that.
BILL MOYERS: And did he talk to you?
PHILIPPE SANDS: He did talk to me. I had two meetings with him. The fact of the meeting was on the record, the content of those meetings were off the record. But as I say in the book, concluding chapter includes taking to account everything he said to me.... [T]ake Diane Beaver. I had written a previous book where I treated her legal advice. She had been the person down at the bottom who'd signed off on aggressive interrogation. I didn't like her legal advice at all. I thought it was really bad advice and wrong advice. And I was rather uncomplimentary, perhaps even rude about it, in my last book. And then I met her. And she explained to me the circumstances in which she found herself. I don't think it justifies what happened. But she described to me the pressure she felt herself under, the anniversary of 9/11 coming up. This man, detainee 063, al-Qahtani, present and caught. Tremendous pressure coming from the upper echelons of the administration. She described to me a visit that the administration has never talked about in which the three most important lawyers in the administration, Mr. Gonzales, who's the president's lawyer, Mr. Addington, who is the vice president's lawyer, and Mr. Haynes, who is Secretary Rumsfeld's lawyer-- came down to Guantanamo at the end of September, talked to them about interrogations and other issues, watched an interrogation, and left with the message, do whatever needs to be done. Now, put yourself in Diane Beaver's situation. You're getting a signal from the main man at the top of the administration: do whatever needs to be done. That takes the lid off and opens the door.
BILL MOYERS: Was there a single architect of the decision, the person who said, "Take the gloves off?"
PHILIPPE SANDS:There was one lawyer in particular who everyone kept referring to as being, if you like, the brains. I'm slow to use that word for such an awful series of events. But the driving force behind it, and that was David Addington.... But he wasn't speaking off his own back. I mean, he was speaking for the vice president. And I think that the finger of responsibility in the end, will most likely go to the vice president. But Mr. Rumsfeld was deeply involved. And, of course, the president has indicated just within the past month, that he signed off on everything.
BILL MOYERS: You subtitle the book Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Tell me briefly about that memo and why it betrayed American values.
PHILIPPE SANDS: The memo appears to be the very first time that the upper echelons of the military or the administration have abandoned President Lincoln's famous disposition of 1863: the U.S. military doesn't do cruelty.... It's called the U.S. Army Field Manual, and it's the bible for the military. And the military, of course, has fallen into error, and have been previous examples of abuse.... But apparently, what hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty. And the Geneva Conventions were set aside, as Doug Feith, told me, precisely in order to clear the slate and allow aggressive interrogation... at the insistence of Doug Feith and a small group, including some lawyers. And the memo by Donald Rumsfeld then came in December, 2002, after they had identified Muhammed al-Qahtani. But it was permitted to occupy the space that had been created by clearing away the brush work of the Geneva Conventions. And by removing Geneva, that memo became possible. Why does it abandon American values? It abandons American values because this military in this country has a very fine tradition, as we've been discussing, of not doing cruelty. It's a proud tradition, and it's a tradition born on issues of principle, but also pragmatism. No country is more exposed internationally than the United States. I've listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there's nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can't the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that? You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers, which is why the backlash began with the U.S. Military.... It slipped into a culture of cruelty. There was a, it was put very pithily for me by a clinical psychologist, Mike Gellers, who is with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, spending time down at Guantanamo, who described to me how once you open the door to a little bit of cruelty, people will believe that more cruelty is a good thing. And once the dogs are unleashed, it's impossible to put them back on. And that's the basis for the belief amongst a lot of people in the military that the interrogation techniques basically slipped from Guantanamo to Iraq, and to Abu Ghraib. And that's why, that's why the administration has to resist the argument and the claim that this came from the top.... It started with a few bad eggs. The administration has talked about a few bad eggs. I don't think the bad eggs are at the bottom. I think the bad eggs are at the top. And what they did was open a door which allowed the migration of abuse, of cruelty and torture to other parts of the world in ways that I think the United States will be struggling to contain for many years to come.
BILL MOYERS: You said that the backlash came from the military....
PHILIPPE SANDS: You've got different camps who are struggling down at Guantanamo. And I think it would be wrong in any way to give the sense that there was unanimity to move towards abuse or that there was even strong support towards moving towards abuse. There was a strong body of belief down at Guantanamo amongst the military community, amongst the military lawyers, with the FBI, with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, that this is a bad thing. Abuse doesn't work, abuse undermines authority, abuse undermines morale. We are going to stop it. Initially, they weren't successful. But once the abuse began, a backlash followed. And the folks down at Guantanamo identified a man in Washington who was the general counsel of the Navy, a man by the name of Alberto Mora, who truly is a heroic individual, in my view, who intervened very courageously, no personal advantage, directly with Jim Haynes, and said, "This must stop. If it doesn't stop, I'm going to reduce this into writing, and I'm going to cause a big fuss."...
BILL MOYERS:The legal affairs correspondent of The National Journal, a very respected fellow named Stuart Taylor, says that we should focus on amending the law to prevent future abuse of torture, but not hold those responsible for past interrogations of questionable legality. What do you think about that?...
PHILIPPE SANDS: I think the crucial issue is you've got to ascertain the facts. I was asked by the committee what should happen. My answer to that question was, "Let's sort out the facts. Once we've sorted out the facts, then it will be for others to decide what to do." I'm satisfied here a crime was committed.... The Geneva Conventions were plainly violated in relation to this man. And in our system laws, if a man violates the law and commits a crime, he is punishable.
BILL MOYERS:So who violated the law?
PHILIPPE SANDS: I think it goes to the top.... I'm not on a witch hunt. I'm not saying that there should be a campaign of investigation and prosecution and sentencing, and conviction, and so on and so forth. What I'm saying is let's start by sorting out the facts. Once the facts have been sorted out, let's see exactly what they say, and it will be for others to decide what needs to be done. But until that's done, you can't close on the past and you can't move forward.... The lawyers were deeply involved in the decision making process. The lawyers that I've identified, from John Yoo at Department of Justice, preparing a legal memorandum which abandons American and international definitions of torture, and reintroduces a new definition that has never been passed by any legislature, that is totally unacceptable. What was he doing there? Was he really giving legal advice? No he wasn't. He was rubber stamping a policy decision. This is not careful, independent legal advice. What was Jim Haynes doing when he recommended to Donald Rumsfeld the authorization for the approval of 15 techniques of interrogation? He was saying to the Secretary of Defense, I'm your lawyer. I'm telling you this is fine. You can do it. If he hadn't done that, Mr. Rumsfeld would not have signed the piece of paper that Jim Haynes wrote. Jim Haynes is directly involved in the decision making process. And the lawyers, as such, play an absolutely key role. Now, at the end of the day, they're not the most important people. The most important people are the people whose signatures are actually appended. They are the politicians who actually decided the issue. But in this case, without the lawyers, they would never have had a piece of paper to sign.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think that people like David Addington and John Yoo and Jim Haynes, and the other lawyers you've mentioned who advised and were on the torture team, should ultimately be held responsible in court for what they did in government at this period of time?
PHILIPPE SANDS: If they were complicit in the commission of a crime, then they should be investigated. And if the facts show that there is a sufficient basis for proceeding to a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted. Lawyers are gatekeepers to legality and constitutionality. If the lawyers become complicit in a common plan to get around the law, to allow abuse, then yes, they should be liable.... Soldiers on the front lines who are doing their best in difficult circumstances, to protect the United States, should not be blamed for what was decided at the top.... If people like Doug Feith and Jim Haynes had said to me, "Look, Philippe. September the 11th came. The anniversary was coming. We were getting information that there were going to be more attacks. We had people that we were told had information that we need to do something about. And we therefore felt, in those circumstances, it was right to use all means appropriate and necessarily to get the information. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we realize we fell into error, we made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that. We will learn from those mistakes. We'll make damn sure it doesn't happen again." I didn't get that at all. There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility. When you read these chapters, when you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith's book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it's as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it's about individual responsibility. And there's been an abject failure on that account.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think torture's still going on?
PHILIPPE SANDS:I don't think torture is still going on at Guantanamo.... I think there was probably far more systemic torture in Afghanistan, at Bagram and in Kandahar, but not in the military. And I think the military has now stopped. But it's important not to forget that although the military now, following in particular, the intervention of the United States Supreme Court in 2006, very important judgment in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which said, Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions can be invoked by all detainees at Guantanamo. So on the military side, it has stopped. But there remains the other side, the dark side, as Vice President Dick Cheney called it, the CIA. And just in the past few weeks, the President of the United States has vetoed legislation which would... prohibit the CIA from using the very techniques of interrogation that are the subject of this book....
BILL MOYERS: I read comments just this week by a noted Arab scholar, who said that if you walk the streets of Cairo today, stop at the book stalls, stop at the book stores, you see, looking out at you everywhere, photographs of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. That the-- this torture, these enhanced interrogate-- interrogation techniques — this cruelty-- has seized the imagination of the Arab world. And that long after all of us have gone, including the torture team, the next generation of Arabs will living with those images. What's your own sense of that?
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, that, I'm very sad to say, is my observation. I do travel a lot. I travel, you know, in South America, I travel in Asia, I travel in the Arab world. I do a lot of work for governments around the world. And it's sad but true. The image of the United States today is that it's a country that has given us Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Now, that is not the America that I know. I've spent a lot of time here, you know. I'm married to an American. My kids were born in the United States. I know what the true America is. And for me, this is a distressing story, because it has allowed those who want to undermine the United States a very easy target for doing it. It's even worse than that, Bill. I mean, I've been in situations-- in a globalized world with the internet, the legal advices that have been written by people like John Yoo at the Department of Justice, and the memos written by Jim Haynes, that have been put in front of the desk of Donald Rumsfeld, have gone all over the world. They've been studied all over the world. Other governments are able to rely upon them, and to say equally, look, this is what the United States does. If the U.S. does it, we can do it. It's undermined the United States' ability to tackle corruption, abuse, human rights violations in other countries, in a massive way. And it will take 15 or 20 years to repair the damage. And that's why, irrespective of the complexion of whichever next president happens to hold that high office-- and I think irrespective of whether it's Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama, or anyone else, there will be a recognition of a need to move on. And moving on means recognizing that errors were made.
BILL MOYERS: So the next president has to wrestle with this, and so do we?
PHILIPPE SANDS: I think we're all going to be wrestling with this. And I think we have a responsibility to wrestle with it in a constructive way, precisely because I think we do face real global challenges. And the threat of terror is real. And the importance of putting the spotlight on the past is to make us learn for the future and to make sure it doesn't happen again.... You need to take the trouble to go and spend many, many hours with people, talk to them, get to know them, understand what motivated them, understand that these are not bad people. These are not people who wanted to do bad things. These are people who found themselves in a very difficult situation, under intense pressure from the top. I think once you've spoken to people, you begin to get a clearer picture. And I hope I have accurately conveyed the conversations in a fair and balanced way. There are people I liked, there are people I didn't like. There are people whose views I shared. There are people whose views I didn't share. But I thought it was terribly important to lay out in the book the range of views that were expressed, and often not even to comment on them. But to let people's views inform the reader, and the reader can then form a view as to whether they agree or disagree. But I have put the other side of the argument, against my own argument. And there will be many, I'm sure, who will disagree with me. And that's fine. Because that's what our societies are about, debating these important issues. I know what I think, though. What happened was wrong, and it needs to be sorted out.
BILL MOYERS: And it's only the beginning. There will be more hearings in June before the same committee, with David Addington saying he will be there, and many of the others: John Yoo and Haynes, and others, saying they will come voluntary and testify.
PHILIPPE SANDS: Yes.... The next hearing is slated in for the 26th of June. I think John Yoo is going to appear at that hearing. He has agreed, if I understand it, to come voluntarily...
Phillip Carter on the "Stabbed in the Back" Narrative
He tries to lay to rest the ghost of Vietnam, which is its turn the ghost of the western front of World War I:
Vietnam Ghosts - Intel Dump -: Ah yes, the "stabbed in the back narrative." This narrative is popular among American military officers of a certain age, who believe if only they'd had gutsy political leadership, support from the homefront, and a willingness to steamroll North Vietnam with overwhelming force, we might have won the war.
It's a good story, but it's wrong. No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people's will. It's true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I've read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn't lose the Vietnam War because of any "stab in the back." We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.
This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.
On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send "unprepared and improperly trained soldiers" into the "guerilla warfighting conditions" of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army's lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.
Fake Steve Jobs on the Red Queens' Race that Is a Competitive, Contestable Market--and Why Dell Will Not Bounce Back
You know, I have forgotten whom Fake Steve Jobs really is:
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why Dell will not bounce back: love Charles Cooper of CNET... but I have to take issue with his latest effort (see here) where he tries to argue that while Dell looks like crap today, in fact Dell could bounce back just the way Apple did....
What people overlook is that the advantages that allowed Dell to prosper for about a decade were all fleeting advantages. Dell was for a while an innovative company, but its innovations did not involve product design. They involved manufacturing and distribution efficiencies. On the distribution side, Dell sidestepped the cumbersome... distribution model... wholesalers like Ingram Micro and Tech Data who in turn sold to retailers who in turn sold to end customers -- Michael Dell early on recognized that this was stupid and simply decided not to play ball.... The other PC makers knew they were caught in an abusive relationship with their channel but it took them a decade or so to unwind the old relationships and sell direct.... Game-changer here was the Internet which made it easy for anyone to set up their own Web store and build direct relationships with customers. Dell's advantage got erased.
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers... brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people... you, Mr. Parts Supplier, end up paying rent to Dell for the privilege of carrying its inventory on your books. Nice, right? Trouble with this "innovation" is that the advantages it creates are fleeting. What wiped this one out was a little place called China.... The rise of China means everyone can make PCs pretty much as cheaply as Dell does. And it's not just cheap manufacturing anymore. The real genius and power of China lies in its armies of low-cost and brilliant engineers. Seen a Lenovo box lately? Heck of a lot nicer than anything Dell is pooping out from its factory in Round Rock.
Bottom line is this: the only innovations worth making are the ones involving product ideas and product design.... To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.
The other reason Dell won't rebound is that the company is yoked to Microsoft. Vista has hurt them tremendously. Don't doubt it. All of the PC makers know this and they are furious about it. But what can they do? They put their future in the hands of the Beastmaster. They figured they could deal with the Borg's evil nature; they didn't anticipate having to deal with the Borg's incompetence.... [I]nstead of putting our future in the hands of the MicroTards we undertook the massive effort of creating a next-generation operating system of our own. A lot of people, including some very smart ones, said this was crazy. Especially for a company with 2% market share. They said we were suicidal, ridiculous, old-fashioned, hubristic, doomed. The effort cost us huge amounts of time and money and was far from a sure bet. But my feeling is if you don't dare bet on yourself and your own people, you shouldn't be in business. So we made the bet. And now it is paying off in spades -- on Macs and iPhones and other devices which we have not yet announced but will restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives, trust me....
Now as for Dell, well, you know what their big problem is? Dell doesn't have me. Or anyone like me. Mostly because, let's face it, there isn't anyone else like me. I'm one of a kind. Sui generis, as the French say. What Dell has is Michael Dell. Don't get me wrong. He's a nice guy. And a smart guy. But he's not a visionary. He's not an artist. The stuff he's good at -- squeezing suppliers, screwing distributors -- was very cool ten or fifteen years ago. Today? No big deal.... The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.
May 10, 2008
The Bush Administration: Worse than You Can Imagine Even Though You Know It Is Worse than You Can Imagine
Via Sadly, No! Stew Magnuson reports on psychopaths who "have the ear" of Undersecretary Jay Cohen:
Security Beat: Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation. The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking.... Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld” and “Lucifer’s Hammer.”...
Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.
“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.
“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked.
“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.
“I cannot guarantee I’m going to be a great help to Homeland Security,” Niven said earlier....
The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored...
The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine even though you know it is worse than you can imagine.
Bruce Bartlett Prays for Fiscal Sanity from the GOP
He prays in vain:
>The GOP's bait-and-switch tax strategy - Los Angeles Times: The rhetoric defies reality, when what the nation really needs is a permanent plan. It is an article of faith among Republicans that tax cuts are the cure for every problem the economy faces, and that tax increases are the equivalent of economic poison. Any hint by Democrats that the current administration's tax cuts should be revisited in light of changing economic or fiscal conditions is met with charges that they are proposing the largest tax increase in history.
>The truth is that President Bush's tax cuts didn't do much good for the economy; they were mostly giveaways to GOP political constituencies and were little different conceptually from pork-barrel spending. Although there were some good elements to the tax cuts, such as the reduction in marginal tax rates, they were fatally undermined by their temporary nature.
>The fact is that the massive tax increase Republicans claim the Democrats are proposing is entirely the result of the GOP's penny-wise and pound-foolish policies. Rather than expend the effort to make their tax cuts permanent in the first place, they attached expiration dates to every major provision. Most will expire automatically at the end of 2010. The alleged tax increase that would result is simply a consequence of the tax system returning to what it was before 2001, when the first tax cuts were implemented....
>Republicans respond that they had no choice; they didn't have the votes to enact permanent tax cuts, so it was temporary cuts or nothing. This is not true. They could have made them permanent, but that would have required bipartisanship and more political capital than Republicans were willing to spend. So they took the easy way out, figuring that Democrats wouldn't dare oppose extending the tax cuts when the time came, lest they be accused of favoring a vast tax increase....
>This sort of political game may be fun for Republicans who think that they have boxed Democrats into a corner. But this game has had real economic consequences. Because the tax cuts are not permanent, their economic impact has been severely diminished. All economists know that permanent tax changes have far more effect than temporary ones because people won't change their behavior significantly unless they have some assurance that the tax regime will be in effect for the long term...
Andrew Samwick Wants to Take Back His Party
From Andrew Samwick:
Whitman Republicans? | Capital Gains and Games: On Thursday, Governor Christie Todd Whitman visited campus. She may be the only unabashed Rockefeller Republican with any political prominence today.... She articulated as well as anyone I've heard recently the case for decentralized, responsible, and effective government. If she were running this year, she would have my vote.
So I started to wonder whether she might be a viable candidate.... [W]hat about 2012 against a Democratic incumbent? She seems to have recovered from her frustrating years at the EPA and has parlayed her success with It's My Party, Too into a PAC, which has now merged with the Republican Leadership Council (an odd name for a centrist organization given today's Republican leadership at the national level). She's clearly still active. Maybe the opportunity will present itself.
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Don Gonyea of NPR Department)
Outsourced to James Fallows:
James Fallows: "Stupidest policy ever" contest update: Don Gonyea of NPR... traditional "one side claims, the other side responds" approach -- as if there were any identifiable economist or energy expert, from any political camp, who thought that the "tax holiday" proposal made sense. Maybe he missed the previous night's All Things Considered broadcast, which contained a very good segment about the pointlessness of the [gas tax holiday] plan? And he presented the whole issue as a matter of campaign tactics: the Hillary Clinton campaign had been hitting Obama hard with a crisp attack ad about his refusal to give American motorists "the help they need," while Obama had come back only with a woolier, more "complicated" reply about why the plan was mad. Yes, this episode shows us something about the two campaigns, but it's not mainly about their relative skill in attacking each other.
Reducing the Number of One-Person per Car Commutes
What is to be done with respect to mass transit:
Matthew Yglesias: Transit Up: Via Atrios, we learn that people are price sensitive:
With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.
Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.
The question is: What happens next? What really shouldn't happen is for politicians to run around talking as if expensive gasoline is a temporary phenomenon. Responsible leaders will tell people that prices will fluctuate, but that as long as the Chinese and Indian economies keep growing, the general trajectory will be upward. Then they should sympathize with people who would like to take transit, but find it prohibitively inconvenient and with people who've just started taking transit and are finding it annoying and they should commit to making transit better and more available.
Alternatively, you could act like southern Florida and propose steep service reductions on your commuter rail system. But that'd be crazy. Jurisdictions with existing commuter rail lines need to make service more frequent. With transit, you can get into good equilibria and bad equilibria. On the good path, you have tons and tons of people who want to ride your line and as a result service is very frequent so as to accommodate all the traffic. And because service is so frequent, lots of people find the line convenient to use. On the bad path, infrequent service leads to low ridership which leads to infrequent service which leads to low ridership.
Hilzoy on the Character of John McCain
She writes:
Obsidian Wings: Great Choice, Senator McCain!: Via... Josh Marshall, this from Newsweek:
After John McCain nailed down the Republican nomination in March, his campaign began wrestling with a sensitive personnel issue: who would manage this summer's GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.? The campaign recently tapped Doug Goodyear for the job, a veteran operative and Arizonan who was chosen for his "management experience and expertise," according to McCain press secretary Jill Hazelbaker. But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists. Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.
Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to "begin a dialogue of political reconciliation" with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing "falsehoods" by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses.
You have to admire not just the McCain campaign's tin ear, but their impeccable sense of timing:
Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise. (...) With voters going to the polls, state-run television continuously ran images of top generals including junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, handing out boxes of aid at elaborate ceremonies.
"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country. "It is not going to areas where it is most in need," he said in London."
No doubt all these stories are just falsehoods too.
What's particularly amusing is the McCain campaign's rationale for choosing Goodyear:
Ironically, Goodyear was chosen for the post after the McCain campaign nixed another candidate, Paul Manafort, who runs a lobbying firm with McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. The prospect of choosing Manafort created anxiety in the campaign because of his long history of representing controversial foreign clients, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. More recently, he served as chief political consultant to Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian prime minister who has been widely criticized for alleged corruption and for his close ties to Russia's Vladimir Putin—a potential embarrassment for McCain, who in 2007 called Putin a "totalitarian dictator." "The Ukrainian stuff was viewed as too much," says one McCain strategist, who asked not to be identified discussing the matter.
So Ukraine is too much, but Burma is OK?