Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

This report (very graphic) on the effects of depleted uranium (DU) is absolutely horrifying. Reports on the effects of DU from other sources here and here. Older report from the Guardian here. DU and white phosphorous are new munitions in our wars and haven’t gotten much attention (in the US anyway), but it’s hard to imagine reports like this - if true - remaining quiet forever.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Brig. Gen. Terence J. Hildner, 49, of Fairfax, VA.
2. Marine Lance Cpl. Edward J. Dycus, 22, of Greenville, MS.
3. Marine Sgt. William C. Stacey, 23, of Redding, CA.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 17.

US military bases aren’t really popular outside of the US. Drones don’t appear to be popular anywhere.

US terror drone crashes in Somalia. Here is your updated drone crash scorecard:

• US terror drone crashes in Somalia
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan
• US spy drone crashes in Somalia
• US drone crashes in central Somalia
• 2 US terror drones crash in Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Three US drones crash in Somalia
• US drone goes down in Afghanistan
• Another US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan

Signs of the times.

Via Avedon, Anglachel:

My interest in Apple is as a signifier of a particular mentality among the cultural elite - let’s call them Whole Foods Nation - that wants others (like me) to ratify their consumer purchases (phones, canned beans, presidents) as markers of cultural, moral and intellectual superiority.

Use whatever gadget you want, but don’t lie to yourself about the very brutal world of global manufacturing where it was produced.

digby: “I’m glad the president finally realized that he was trying to govern a nation that didn’t actually exist.”

Bipartisanship is dead! Long live bipartisanship!

blogroll amnesty day is here again!

This week in Oakland. Hannah:

Last week, a special inquiry into the Oakland, California Police Department’s operating procedures concluded that they had been grossly inappropriate, especially in their dealings with citizen protesters. So, the casual observer might expect that a chastened OPD would react to a sense of guilt with restraint and institute some reforms. That’s not, however, how guilt often works. What happens more often is that individuals and corporations “double down” or do it again, as if to prove there was no wrong in the first place. I think that’s an example of the deadly sin of pride - obviously self-defeating.

The fact that all of these “journalists” repeat the same ridiculous crowd number, march times, etc isn’t just an indication of their tendency to downplay activist mobilization; its an index of their basic and fundamental worthlessness as news sources. . They’re just copying and pasting.

[snip]

It isn’t just that there are errors, or that these errors are small and pointless; it’s that the level of non-knowledge required to produce these texts is huge: these articles are what they are as a function of the total distance and disconnect from what actually happened and a total dependence on being told what happened by the Police press officer (and an inability to do anything more than write that down, and slightly change the word order to cover their tracks).

Best post-mortems I’ve seen of #OO #J28 #moveinday — so far at least — have been done by occupiers, not journalists. #newsdesert

Also from lambert, this on Europe’s lost generation.

At Balloon Juice, something serious from DougJ: “It’s a tragedy, plain and simple, one that has real victims and real perpetrators.”

Some snark from mistermix: “Isn’t it about time for one of Scheiffer’s kids to take over that show?”

Sarah Proud and Tall singles out this from National Review:

(For the uninitiated, Gawker’s imperative role on the Internet is that of the mother bird, partially digesting the work of others with the enzymes of bored irony and the gastric juices of sarcasm, and regurgitating stub articles fit for the consumption of the shrieking, featherless hatchlings that comprise my doomed generation.)

Your weekly Pierce:

Mike Lee, the Tea Party rookie from the Beehive State, a Tenther extremist whose views on the Constitution dead-end somewhere on the wrong side of Cemetery Ridge. Which, of course, doesn’t prevent him from waving the document around as though he picked it personally at Ollivander’s two days ago. (“The Constitution chooses the senator, Mr. Lee.”) The New Republic sees Lee as the amiable intellectual face of the Tea Party. Among his other amiable intellectual pursuits, Lee wants to do away with the federal income tax and with birthright citizenship. He does so, however, in a way that, as TNR puts it, “doesn’t scream crackpot.” This is true. Rather, it says “crackpot” in clearly audible, measured tones.

Now, though, the senator is having a bit of a snit over the president’s recess appointments, which the president made because the Republican party has abandoned government entirely for a career in legislative mime.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 272-3:

It should come as no surprise that the exams were roundly and deservedly derided by anyone who knew much of anything about banks and was not in on the con job. Bill Black, former senior bank regulator, put it bluntly: “There are no real stress tests going on.” The “adverse” scenario that determined how much dough the bank might need if things turned out badly was far from dire enough. Mainstream economists increasingly came to the view that the downside case looked like a middle-of-the-road forecast. The process also made insufficient allowance for the just-starting avalanche in commercial real estate.

Not only was there not enough stress in these “stress tests,” they were not much of a test either. The normal practice in a regulatory exam is for the supervisor to sample loan files. The authorities made no review of these documents. In the past, it has taken well over a hundred examiners months to go over a single loan portfolio of a large bank. But here, roughly 200 examiners were allotted to 19 banks, a mere ten examiners on average across a broad range of businesses. Moreover, the authorities punted on evaluating the exposures most likely to cause havoc if the economy weakened further, meaning the trading books of the big capital markets players, Citigroup, Bank of America (the reluctant new owner of Merrill), J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman. They were simply asked to run scenarios using their own risk models, the same ones that had performed to dismally and were the very reason they were in this fix!

• Hannah’s Blog
• Under The LobsterScope
• The Adventures of Fat Cat and Everyman!
• The Confluence
• FALKLANDS
• Elle Varner - Conversational Lush

I’ve BAD linked to Hannah before, and will likely continue to do so. She very quietly runs a terrific blog.. The Confluence probably gets lots more traffic than this site but not nearly as much as it deserves.

The last two are music links, which may not be strictly part of BAD but neither are household names so I think it’s in the spirit of the thing. Falkands is a band in Edmonton that ought to be huge. Conversational Lush is a new, free mixtape, and Elle Varner is an exciting newcomer.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army 1st Lt. David A. Johnson, 24, of Horicon, WI.
2. Marine Cpl. Christopher G. Singer, 23, of Temecula, CA.

Drones have started to bomb Somalia. PressTV report, with caveat. Maybe they were just early to the story.

Chaos in Oakland. MSNBC botches report of it.

Lots of reports on possible movement on Wall Street fraud. The new working group gets cautious approval from the normally skeptical David Dayen and Matt Taibbi. Stay tuned!

More ex-Murdoch employees arrested. Via.

Bruce Dixon on the industry we lionize and the slaves it employs. Built by the poor but designed by the smart.

Yvette Carnell looks at a parallel with an earlier time.

Leftover links. SOPA proponents have an irritating habit of insisting that all you need to do is read the legislation and you’ll see it’s all perfectly fine. There’s Richard Cotton’s “if you’ve read the legislation you know it applies only to foreign web sites” and Lamar Smith’s “It’s easy to engage in fear-mongering and it’s easy to raise straw men and red herrings, but if they read the bill they will be reassured.” One of the reasons for all the opposition is that it’s a terribly written law that leaves all kinds of room for interpretation. Another is that folks who are aware of the recent past and are capable of connecting dots, drawing clear inferences, and looking at context have arrived at the obvious conclusion that SOPA will almost immediately begin harming a whole range of sites not mentioned by the legislation. Those who want to quarantine discussion to only those sites mentioned in the bill are either willfully blind or have an ulterior motive.

At least one music blog took part in the protest:

If the Blogger fiasco from a few years back taught us anything, it’s that there really is no such thing as a legal mp3 blog. No matter how much permission you have or from whom it came from (including the bands themselves) all it takes is for one faction of the machine behind an artist to take qualm with an mp3 on your site and you’ll be getting a take down notice from your hosting company (if they’re nice enough to not just shut you down).

Take the case of Masala, co-founded by Guillaume Decouflet in mid-2005. Together with his partners, Decouflet has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to underground genres such as kuduro and funk carioca. Masala’s writers weren’t typical music bloggers, waxing lyrical about Neon Indian and the new Phoenix remix: mostly DJs, they shared South African electronica, Japanese dancehall, UK funky and Senegalese hip-hop. “We haven’t been posting any Whitney Houston or anything,” Decouflet explained. He only recalls receiving one DMCA notice - ever - from Blogger. As this email did not name the offending song, he says he doesn’t know what caused the complaint. Masala’s bloggers responded to Google’s email, Decouflet insists, but never heard back. That is, until their entire site - and more than four years of archives - were deleted this week.

Digby hasn’t lost anything off her fastball: “This has all the hallmarks of Mitt’s compassion chip misfiring.”

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 217-8. After noting two weaknesses with the floating currency system Smith details the last one:

And the third is that “floating” rates can be influenced by central bank interest rate policies. For instance, the Bank of Japan kept dropping its call rate, its overnight interest rate, starting at the end of 1990. Although the relationship is loose, the yen did weaken considerably over the 1990s as interest rates fell, helping Japan have a robust export sector even though its domestic economy was a basket case. Conventional trade-oriented theories of exchange say that the currencies of countries running large trade surpluses ought to rise, thus making their exports more costly and reducing their competitiveness. However, these models ignore the role of the financial system. A country like Japan with low interest rates can see its currency become a funding vehicle (recall the discussion of the yen carry trade in chapter 7). Foreigners will gamble on exchange rates, borrowing in the low interest rates and investing at higher interest rates elsewhere. This activity suppresses the price of funding the currency because the speculators must sell the low interest rate currency to buy investments of the country offering higher returns, and the sales of the currency borrowed will keep its price down.

And Japan was soon to have company in the “cheap currency” club, albeit for different reasons.

China pegged its currency at 8.28 renminbi to the dollar in 1994. The initial motivation for setting a fixed rate was to give exporters greater predictability, and this is not a trivial issue. Volatile exchange rates can wreak havoc with planning and profits. Hedging costs money, and even sophisticated players can wind up worse off from trying to protect against exchange rate movements than if they had done nothing.

But as the Chinese economy performed well, China maintained its peg, which increasingly looked to be at an artificially low level (as economies become more successful, their currencies usually rise in value). Like the Japanese before them, China saw trade surpluses with the United States grow and started acquiring U.S. assets. But for many years, this pattern looked benign, since the Chinese surpluses, although sustained, were not large by global standards.

And then the Asian crisis hit. The causes are debated, but external debt has risen sharply in many Asian economies. Many had set interest rates high to attract foreign investors and had currency pegs. Unfortunately they were too successful. The influx of hot money stimulated their economies and produced trade deficits. High domestic interest rates and a fixed exchange rate made borrowing in foreign currencies like the dollar look like a smart move. Thailand in particular went on a debt binge. But that put borrowers at risk of much higher debt-servicing costs if the home currency fell versus the dollar.

Speculators, seeing Thailand’s precarious position, started to attack the currency. Thailand wound up depleting its foreign exchange in mounting a defense and was first to let its currency float in 1997. As the baht plunged, many banks and companies that had borrowed in foreign currencies suddenly saw the debt payments skyrocket, pushing them into insolvency.

Although the Asian countries wanted to organize a bailout, the move was beaten back aggressively by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy secretary, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner, then at the IMF but about to assume the role of assistant secretary for international affairs at the Treasury. The IMF provided a rescue package in August, using the same template it had in Mexico in 1995, requiring structural reforms, such as cutting entitlement spending, letting insolvent institutions fail, and raising interest rates. Note that this is almost the polar opposite of the approach advanced economies used to fight the current crisis.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

In the middle of 2010 I wrote a post titled “ACTA and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” that discussed the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA is basically an attempt by legacy media companies to leverage their hyperbolic rhetoric and wildly inaccurate math into an extralegal framework that would allow them to dictate which web sites are permitted to exist.

It appears to be off the table - at least for the moment - so the existing US framework is largely based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA definitely has its problems, sometimes hilariously so, but contains one important protection: Safe Harbor provisions. Safe harbor means, if you host infringing content unknowingly, and respond in a timely manner to DMCA takedown notices, you cannot be held liable. This makes it possible for a site like YouTube to be a “dumb pipe” and allow users to upload whatever they want. If YouTube had to vet every single clip, the site would be unusable in its current form; few would bother uploading a video and then waiting until it eventually got cleared by the censor (or not).

That, along with the occasional random and specious seizure by the Feds, is the current practice. But when the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) started making its way through Congress I thought I was going to have to write a “SOPA and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” post. In fact, I might just need a “[Insert wrongheaded bill or trade agreement acronym here] and the Overblown Threat of Piracy” template ready to pull out every year and a half or so until the copyright extremists break the Internet or are defeated once and for all.

Happily, though, this time around there were a number of really thoughtful posts covering the deeply problematic technical, legal and commercial problems with SOPA. So instead of just echoing points made better and with more detail elsewhere, I’d like to address something raised somewhat tangentially in several places: The viability of existing legal music and video services, in particular Hulu.

Chris Hayes raised this on his January 15th show. Perhaps channeling just a bit of his inner grumpy old man, he compares today’s file sharers to those of a more innocent time (i.e. when he was in college):

But let me respond to that quickly because people make that argument, and that argument seems dubious to me for this reason: In the era of…when file sharing first exploded with college dorms downloading, I think there was a case to be made that a lot of what was happening was convenience, right? It was, I don’t want to buy CDs and burn them, and I am just sitting here with a high speed connection, and I can get it. But what has happened since then with Netflix and iTunes and all these things is that you can get most of what you want on the Internet, right? That convenience aspect to me seems greatly reduced in a world in which we do have Hulu, so I think there’s been some innovation on the part of big media companies, right? You can watch “Lazy Sunday,” the iconic Saturday Night Live video that was downloaded, that was viewed seven million times on YouTube, which is what I think is what precipitated your [NBCUniversal Executive Vice President and general counsel Richard Cotton] interest in this topic.

They have approached it with roughly the same mindset that the US auto industry approached competition from Japan in the 1970s. Remember that? Low mileage cars with planned obsolescence baked in suddenly had to contend with fuel efficient and reliable compacts in the showrooms, and they looked pretty shoddy in comparison. So executives lit upon the brilliant approach of not offering a competing (or heaven forbid superior) product, but of producing really crappy versions of the vehicles that were eating their lunch. Then when these inferior products inevitably tanked the geniuses in the boardrooms could claim that the public didn’t want fuel efficient, reliable cars, and they doubled down on gas guzzling rust buckets.

Hulu is basically the Ford Pinto of video sites; it isn’t a minor player because it’s the best kept secret on the Internet but because it sucks. (In fairness, unlike the Pinto there are no reports of Hulu bursting into flames, though I believe it also has yet to sustain a rear impact so who can say.) It appears designed to fail so that Hollywood could point to it, say consumers prefer piracy to a legal alternatives, and attempt to shoehorn the online media experience into an unworkable pre-Internet model. This in turn is very convenient for an industry that has so stubbornly resisted coming to terms with new technology.

Hulu has become such a mess that its owners are desperate to unload that turkey attract a buyer, but no one is dumb enough to offer anything for it. So it limps along. Yet when NBC and News Corp. launched it in 2007 it actually had a ton of promise, and a lot of its early users loved it. The joint owners seemed committed to getting lots of content out there, and it looked like what was emerging was a real winner: A place where viewers could watch any of the shows on two of the four major networks, along with a wealth of other clips, older shows, trailers and so on.

More importantly, it offered full runs of content: all episodes of all seasons. This is huge because that is one of the main ways people like to watch shows now. Late to a popular NBC show like “The Office”? Go to Hulu and catch up! Start with the pilot and work your way up over a few weeks. Hulu abandoned that quickly; it seemed like weeks or maybe months to me, but in any event they started screwing with content well before they had any real traction in the marketplace - which, as Netflix can testify, can be hazardous to your bottom line even if you are established. Doing it before is suicide.

So they were randomly yanking content. Then they launched a paid version, which is fine if it allows access on more devices or more throughput - more simultaneous streams, high def options, stuff like that - but will only sow confusion if it offers different content. Guess which route Hulu took.

Moreover, it has different interfaces, most of which are about as appetizing as garlic ice cream. You just never know what you’re going to get when you go there. It all comes across as a half-assed mess.

This is what the studios have come up with; this is their alternative. The wheels were meant to come off, the engine was supposed to fry. It was never intended to be competitive with anything, it was meant to be a scapegoat.

Which is a shame, because there are lots of people who want something like what Hulu initially looked like it might be. If anyone from the MPAA or RIAA is reading this, please take away the following sentence before anything else in this post: It is not in any company’s immediate or long-term interests to presume its customers are criminals. Folks are willing to pay for quality; here’s just one note of despair from a message board: “Alternatively, does anyone know of (legal) alternatives to Hulu? I have no problem with paying for a good service, just can’t find someone to give my money to.”

Yes studios, that’s right - people want to give you money! In exchange for a quality service, sure. Some will game that system, some will stay outside it, but there are enough people out there who want to give money to you to make it profitable. But you have to actually put some effort into it. Quality offerings, along with outreach, education, and well placed reminders - think fences, not walls - can get lots of people into your orbit and happily parting with their hard earned cash.

Will the profit margins be as fat? Probably not. But lots of professions, from programmers to travel agents, have faced that future without trying to make the Internet unusable while fighting it. Even within the industry there are plucky startups like Bandcamp finding ways to make money delivering entertainment to people. Draconian copyright schemes would either shutter or neuter sites like that, because the cost of fighting even a specious liability claim would be prohibitive. While many of them are successful now, they operate on razor thin margins. The prospect of huge legal bills would be enormously chilling to them. (Sarah Lane pointed this out in a Tech News Today podcast last week; that episode’s discussion on SOPA is well worth a listen.)

And incidentally, if you think running these upstarts out of town on a rail might be considered a fringe benefit - at a minimum - of the proposed legislation, well, you may just be on to something. Legacy media companies don’t want the competition, and they certainly don’t want living, breathing counterexamples to their empty claims. But if the major studios spent as half as much time and money trying to deliver a decent product as they did conjuring up monstrosities like ACTA, SOPA and PIPA, maybe the future wouldn’t look so terrifying to them.

“I Was Never Bored at All” from Francis made my best of 2010 list.  Petter Nygårdh from the group sends word of their new single, “Traktor.”  Give it a listen at Spotify or Soundcloud.  Or both! (The B-side contains a Simian Ghost remix.)

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Marine Cpl. Joseph D. Logan, 22, of Willis, TX.
2. Marine Cpl. Kevin J. Reinhard, 25, of Colonia, NJ.
3. Marine Cpl. Jesse W. Stites, 23, of North Beach, MD.
4. Marine MSgt. Travis W. Riddick, 40, of Centerville, IA.
5. Marine Capt. Nathan R. McHone, 29, of Crystal Lake, IL.
6. Marine Capt. Daniel B. Bartle, 27, of Ferndale, WA.
7. Marine Cpl. Phillip D. McGeath, 25, Glendale, AZ.
8. Army Spc. Keith D. Benson, 27, of Brockton, MA.
9. Marine Lance Cpl. Kenneth E. Cochran, 20, of Wilder, ID.
10. Marine Cpl. Jon-Luke Bateman, 22, of Tulsa, OK.
11. Army Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin B. Wise, 34, of Little Rock, AR.

Comment from Doc (and see the main post as well) on a tremendous accomplishment in Wisconsin. Good for them, and best of luck on the recall.

The president turned down the existing Keystone XL proposal, so it will at least be delayed. (Also, Robert J. Samuelson: Still a dumbass.) But Canada’s wingnut PM isn’t giving up on it. Meanwhile, fracking is wreaking havoc in communities unfortunate enough to be on top of big shale deposits. And it’s happening in part because short-sighted term limit laws help to make sure it’s only the lobbyists - and not the legislators - who know how government works.

Term limits are one of those conservative agenda items masquerading as reform. A balanced budget amendment is another. The goal is to cripple, constrain, shrink, stupefy and impoverish governments to the point that they provide no useful service, at which point the public gives up expecting anything and the dystopian laissez-faire project can proceed with a minimum of friction. Twenty years ago, when I was much more gullible, I was a big fan of these bad government initiatives.

Very nice long piece from lambert on the occupations in winter.

It’s kind of funny that the nominally liberal Think Progress would post something like this, wherein the good old US of A is rescuing stranded Iranian sailors and those ungrateful Persians respond by being mean. Maybe the US-led sanctions have them feeling less than warmly toward America? Or maybe the string of assassinations of their scientists has them feeling a little jumpy and suspicious? It’s a Fox News-worthy presentation; no context, no complexity, just catapulted propaganda.

This week in ick. (CBS coverage.)

Yves Smith with the week’s headline win, and the body lives up to the title. Also: she is not impressed with those who substitute the invocation of white male privilege for persuasion.

The move to end corporate personhood begins to pick up some steam.

Union buster promoted to White House Chief of Staff.

The hi tech gadgets we so dearly love are made by slaves.

Atrios pointed to this report that the Attorney General worked at the law firm which gave the legal go-ahead for MERS. MERS, potentially the most fraudulent actor in a story stuffed to bursting with fraud. Cynthia Kouril calls it a bombshell and writes:

Even if Holder and Breuer are not planning to return to Covington after their stint in public service, their pensions are presumable tied to the viability of the firm. This isn’t a “did you work on this particular matter” kind of conflict of interest, this is more existential.

I know I quote Charlie Pierce a lot, but seriously is there anyone else out there who can put together a paragraph like this?

And come on now, John King: First you throw out that first question down here on Thursday night and then, when the adulterous hypocrite responds the way everyone on the planet knew he would respond, you stand there like a cigar-store Indian without standing up a quarter-inch for your profession until David Gergen stands up for you two hours later. Of course, having David Gergen stand up for you is rather like building your seawall out of Maypo, and, anyway this isn’t the kind of high-and-mighty dudgeon that we should have to take from a staff-banging megalomaniac who has spent his career saying things about his political opponents that weren’t merely “close to despicable.” They were the very living, breathing definition of it.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 271-2:

Putting banks into receivership, and reprivatizing them down the road, is actually a well-established practice, but the FDIC can usually find takers for their assets and deposits on a short timetable, so these interventions do not raise complex procedural or political issues. Even though history shows this approach is the fastest path out of a financial crisis, it was clearly off the table as far as large financial players were concerned. Instead, another of the four measures, the so-called public private investment partnerships (PPIP), billed as a way to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets, was clearly a back-door subsidy.

Another move taken during this period was the relaxation of “fair value” accounting rules. That gave the banks considerable latitude in valuing supposedly illiquid securities, in effect enabling them to not mark them down. The big problem here was the bogus “illiquidity” claim, oft repeated in the media as gospel. It wasn’t that the vast majority of the toxic assets weren’t trading; investors like hedge fund manager John Paulson said there was “plenty of liquidity,” even in “opaque areas.” The real impediment was that banks were carrying these positions at prices well above the bid in the marketplace. Claiming “illiquidity” was a pretext for banks to maintain fictitious valuations and thus avoid recognizing losses.

The effect of this change was that it represented a form of what is called regulatory forbearance, which is a fancy way of saying the regulators give waivers for known problems on the assumption that now is not the time to impose tough requirements. Holding banks to their normal capital requirements, which the now-phony accounting finessed, allowed them to pretend they were in better shape than they really were, and thus raise less equity.

But this sort of move was the polar opposite of what history had shown to be the best approach. An IMF study of 124 banking crises concluded:

Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance.

As the stress tests moved forward, it quickly became clear that they were an exercise in form over substance. Ben Bernanke had remarked that the fall in bank stock prices was “detached from real US economic fundamentals.” No one had a problem with “detachment” from sanity when lenders were on a risk bender charging way too little for the possible downside, with the result that asset prices, ranging from houses to commercial property to corporate takeovers (which helped boost equity markets) were inflated as a result. Recall that in the late 1990s Greenspan had gone from worrying about “irrational exuberance” to becoming a stock market tout.

I wanted to write about SOPA this week and thought Chris Hayes had a very nice segment on it. Since MSNBC doesn’t provide transcripts of his show I had to provide my own - which crowded out the blogging time. I’ll do a SOPA post next week, referencing this as needed.

I did my best to get what everyone said correct and omitted most of the verbal padding (“you know?”, “right?” etc). At times there was cross talk or something was hard to make out, but obviously any spelling, grammatical or other errors ultimately belong solely with the host of the show. Please send any complaints or requests for correction to upwithchris (at) msnbc (dot) com, or to Twitter handles @upwithchris or @chrislhayes. Thank you.

Via.

[HAYES]: Our story of the week: the most important bill in Congress you may have never heard of. Right now on Capitol Hill some of America’s biggest industries are waging an epic battle over the future of the Internet and the future of American commerce with big money and long-lasting implications. The founder of Google has said of this legislative issue, “it would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world,” while dozens of international human rights organizations wrote that it “sends an unequivocal message to other nations that it is acceptable to censor speech on the global Internet, and the circumvention technology that they use to access information under oppressive Internet regimes would be outlawed.” Prominent Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe says the legislation “will lead to the silencing of a vast swath of fully protected speech, and to the shutdown of sites that have not themselves violated any copyright or trademark laws.”

Large tech companies like Google, Facebook eBay, and Yahoo are so opposed to the legislation there is even talk of shutting down their sites for a day as an act of protest, and the battle lines that have been drawn confound almost every traditional political category. On the side in favor of this legislation you have Al Franken and John Conyers lined up with Tea Party Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO; while opposing the legislation you have Nancy Pelosi, Michele Bachmann and Justin Bieber.

And what is perhaps most remarkable is that while this epic battle wages, while money pours into lobbying and advocating, most Americans have absolutely no idea it is going on. A report from Media Matters surveyed all the major networks’ and cable networks’ prime time coverage - this one included - and found exactly zero coverage of the legislation with the exception of a single segment on CNN.

As it turns out the company I work for, NBC Universal, is not at all neutral in this legislative battle. They are very, very supportive of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA] and its Senate counterpart. In fact, we will be hearing from a representative from NBC in just a moment, but in the meantime you can get a sense of how my employer feels from this mug that was sitting in my office kitchen. “Steal this mug,” it says cheekily, “but not our content.”

And stealing, or more precisely piracy, is the problem SOPA says it attempts to solve. Now, as a copyright holder myself, as someone who creates intellectual properties, such as it is, for a living, I’m not in the “information needs to be free” techno-utopian camp. I think people should be paid for their work, so I understand sites like Pirate Bay, where people can go and download the latest films and TV shows for free, are a big issue.

The problem is that sites devoted to massive file sharing of copyrighted works are smart enough to headquarter themselves in countries with loose jurisdictions. So the solution this legislation proposes is effectively to make third party intermediaries - search engines, user-generated sites and Internet service providers - the enforcers of copyright.

Facebook and Google and Twitter would have to zealously police copyright infringements or face legal sanction from copyright holders, up to and including being shut down and having their access to credit card processing companies cut off.

Think about it this way: What the US government was able to do to Wikileaks private parties would be able to do to each other with the help of the courts. And not just that. Individuals who stream copyrighted material could face criminal prosecution and prison time. And if you don’t think this applies to you at all, think again.

You ever upload a YouTube video with a song playing in the background or a video of your kids’ birthday party where you sing “Happy Birthday”?

[Video of home movie with people singing “Happy Birthday”]

That right there with the squirming kids and mouse costume is in fact a copyright violation. The copyright for “Happy Birthday” is fiercely protected. That’s why you rarely hear it sung in movies, why we can only play five seconds, and there’s much, much more where that came from.

Now, under the legislation it is very unlikely that that family there would be prosecuted. The surface problem may be unlicensed copying but the deeper problem is that computers and the Internet are one big copyright infringement machine. Files can be copied, downloaded and distributed, and the technology continues to outpace attempts to squash it. The technical infrastructure of the Internet is complicated, and sometimes its democratizing potential can be vastly oversold.

But the fact remains that over the past ten years, as everything else in American life seems to push towards more concentrated power in fewer hands, the Internet has been the one development mitigating against that. It is disruptive and empowering in a way few things are in 21st century American life, and it won’t stay that way on its own.

The history of technology, dating back to when we had literally thousands of movie studios in this country and do-it-yourself radio stations, is that what starts out as disruptive and democratic becomes concentrated and co-opted. As long as there are sites that empower users to create and re-purpose and even copy, there will be some piracy.

The question is, if that’s the cost, is it still worth it? There’s been a lot of news on SOPA this weekend. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is slated to hold a hearing on SOPA Wednesday, but Republican chairman Darryl Issa decided to postpone it, saying that he didn’t want flawed legislation to be taken up by the House. Also the bill’s author, Republican Lamar Smith, decided not to include one of the most controversial provisions which would have allowed essentially private parties to get the government to block sites using technical means, and yesterday there was some pushback against SOPA from the White House, as they released this statement on their blog:

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

Here’s a response from Rupert Murdoch that he sent out as a tweet: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy. Plain thievery.”

All right, right now I could like to bring in Alexis Ohanian [OHANIAN] who is the co-founder of Reddit.com; and Richard Cotton [COTTON], Executive Vice President and general counsel for NBCUniversal. Thank you for joining us.

[COTTON] Glad to be here, Chris.

[HAYES] Richard, you have been working on this issue for quite a while, I mean, in Internet terms ([COTTON]: yes). I want you to explain, and you’re coming from a different place than I am I think, but I want you to explain what do you see as the core issue? Particularly because we have legislation right now, the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that does provide some protections for copyright holders. YouTube has to have an employee - right? - whose job it is to supervise copyright infringement. Something that’s put up that’s a copyright infringement, that person is contacted, they have to take it down, if not they can face sanction. What is is about the current regime that you think is insufficient that necessitates new legislation?

[COTTON] So let’s take a big step back. What is it that we’re talking about? We’re talking about jobs. We’re talking about web sites that are wholesale, and I repeat the word wholesale devoted, to theft, to stealing content that is the production of our creative industries, distributing illegal counterfeit goods that are produced by iconic US brands who have devoted themselves to researching and producing innovative products. These sites are exclusively that this legislation is devoted to outside the United States. So what this legislation is addressing are web sites, as I say, wholesale devoted to illegal activities that if they were in the United States would be subject to criminal prosecution and to shutdown. This legislation would not effect a single site in the United States. So to mention a US site effected by this legislation is wrong, and it is totally wrong to say that a single post or a small amount of legitimate activity would be threatened by this legislation. So the difficulty with the policy debate is that we have to separate out what the legislation actually does and what is an extraordinary amount of disinformation that has been distributed about the…

[HAYES] Sure, but in terms of what the legislation actually does, I mean, saying this wouldn’t effect a single US site, there are, Alexis you run a US site and there are all sorts of people that run, there are a bunch of companies that run US sites that say: Of course this would effect us. Part of this…

[COTTON] But Chris, seriously, that is wrong, and the problem with this debate is that this legislation…

[HAYES] So they’re making it up?

[COTTON] Yes, this legislation…

[HAYES] But then why are they making it up?

[COTTON] This legislation is devoted exclusively to foreign sites. That…look at the legislation. It is devoted to foreign sites. Saying that it would effect a US site is categorically 100% wrong.

[HAYES] Alexis, I want you to respond to that since you run a US site and you clearly disagree with Mr. Cotton.

[OHANIAN] Yes, what troubles me is that for instance the anti-circumvention policies would lump a site like Reddit, really any site where users can post content that could potentially deemed illegal if, say, it is instructing someone as to how to get around some of these blocking…

[COTTON] That is simply wrong

[OHANIAN] …and furthermore the bigger problem I have here is that this legislation will not only break the Internet but it won’t even work to curb piracy. I’m a businessman, I’m an entrepreneur, my best interest as someone who’s working on a book to…who wants to protect copyright is to come up with a solution that actually works, and I believe that innovation not legislation is the solution.

[HAYES] I want you to pursue this, because I have read some legislation, I have been through the manager’s amendment which came out of the House. I’ve read interpretation by Harvard Law professors…

[COTTON] But if you’ve read the legislation you know it applies only to foreign web sites.

[HAYES] No, that’s not true, because…

[COTTON] That is true, that’s what it applies to.

[HAYES] But, so you’re saying that there is…when you say you’re going to cut off the DNS blocking or you can cut off MasterCard - right? - to a certain site, right?

[COTTON] After a judge has ruled that it is wholesale devoted to illegal activity. Only wholesale devoted to illegal activity and outside the United States.

[HAYES] But, OK, if that is the case, if your interpretation of the law - and I have read this legislation and I have read law professors writing about this legislation - if that is the case…

[COTTON] That is what the law says.

[HAYES] If that is the case, what is the nature of the massive, what is the goal of the disinformation campaign that unites all of the people I have cited, and Google and Facebook, and all of these companies that are, that might have domestic sites that are located in the US like Reddit, what is Alexis’ motivation to lie about this to get this stopped? I just don’t understand. There’s this contention about what actually the interpretation of the law provides. You’re saying it’s clear as day, it doesn’t apply to US sites. If that’s the case why is everybody wasting their time? It just makes no sense to me.

[COTTON] Well, I do think what lies behind it is, there is a policy disagreement, and the question, the big issue here is in fact about the rule of law on the Internet. The Internet is very young. It has grown up with a certain ethos that literally anything goes. And over time you cannot have something that is that is the pillar of 21st society be just rampant with lawless activity. And so what we’re, what the accurate policy discussion is how do you actually go about reducing the amount of illegal activity on the Internet. And what I would say is that there is a philosophical disagreement. The question is for a site that is wholesale devoted to illegal activity, should we allow easy access to those sites? And what I would say to you is, when they’re outside the United States and not subject to our criminal enforcement, we have to use technological tools. And those technological tools do involve, as you said, trying to cut off financial support to sites that are wholesale devoted to illegal activity, and trying to make it difficult to access sites outside the United States that are wholesale devoted to illegal activity.

[HAYES] And I think the question is, is making the change to the architecture to the Internet to prevent what you’re saying, what are the consequences of that architectural change? I want to get Alexis’ response to that right after we take this break.

[Commercial break]

[HAYES] As you can tell from our program here, this is a very hotly disputed piece of legislation. The White House has had some concern about it. Richard Cotton here from NBC and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit. Alexis, I want you to answer that question: Why…are you misinformed? Why are you…what is your concern about the legislation? If as Mr. Cotton says it only applies to foreign sites?

[OHANIAN] Yes, well, I first want to make a note. The Internet is not a lawless place. The DMCA has been used, has been working, in fact it’s been abused in certain instances where Warner Brothers for instance issued takedowns for files it never even saw. But what we’re talking about with this current legislation, with Protect IP and with SOPA, is the equivalent of, it’s the equivalent of being angry and trying to take action against Ford just because a Mustang was used in a bank robbery. [Taps desk on each word for emphasis] This is not the proper course for dealing with piracy and it won’t even solve the problem.

[HAYES] Why won’t it solve the problem? Because this is…there’s a bunch of arguments that people against SOPA make, right? And one of them is, there’s different levels at which the argument happens. The pragmatic argument is, OK, fine, we agree. And I think I’m just talking for myself here, it is a problem that there are web sites where you can go and download these things. That’s a problem.

[OHANIAN] Agreed.

[HAYES] They say it won’t solve the problem. Why will it not solve the problem?

[OHANIAN] Piracy is a service problem. Companies, a very successful game company called Valve solved the problem in one of the most notoriously bad markets ever: Russia. By offering a service that was more valuable to people than piracy. It is a service problem.

[HAYES] What do you mean a service problem? I don’t even understand that.

[OHANIAN] It is simply because pirates can deliver something easier than you could get it otherwise. When you have to wait three months to get access to something, when there is, when there are barriers to getting the information, to getting the content you want, people will go through other means. But if you can provide a service that is actually better you can win with business. And as an entrepreneur I see piracy as an opportunity.

[HAYES] But let me respond to that quickly because people make that argument, and that argument seems dubious to me for this reason: In the era of…when file sharing first exploded with college dorms downloading, I think there was a case to be made that a lot of what was happening was convenience, right? It was, I don’t want to buy CDs and burn them, and I am just sitting here with a high speed connection, and I can get it. But what has happened since then with Netflix and iTunes and all these things is that you can get most of what you want on the Internet, right? That convenience aspect to me seems greatly reduced in a world in which we do have Hulu, so I think there’s been some innovation on the part of big media companies, right? You can watch “Lazy Sunday,” the iconic Saturday Night Live video that was downloaded, that was viewed seven million times on YouTube, which is what I think is what precipitated your interest in this topic.

[COTTON] Yes. Correct.

[HAYES] You can now watch it on Hulu, and it’s, and so that convenience argument seems to be a little specious. Isn’t it a very different terrain right now?

[COTTON] And wholesale thievery will undercut the very innovation you’re talking about, Chris.

[HAYES] (To [OHANIAN]) Continue.

[OHANIAN] Actually, to go back to the earlier point. What scares me most about this legislation is that whatever they do is going to be circumvented anyway. And in fact the State Department right now is giving people the same tools that would be used to circumvent dictatorial regimes in places like China. The tools that people are using right now…

[HAYES] The technical tools, you’re saying, to get around DNS blocking…

[OHANIAN] …to get around DNS blocking in a country like China would be used in this exact same instance to circumvent this legislation.

[COTTON] Joe [Sestak, [SESTAK]], you wanted to…

[SESTAK] [inaudible] with this cup. You talk about losing jobs here. And yet the Government Accounting Office said last year that they looked at this, and they cannot substantiate any evidence that this has had an impact in jobs. In fact, the industry, the media industry, the entertainment industry, has grown since 2007 at 1% over the rest of the economy, and most of its profits come greatly overseas where piracy is rampant. In short, this piece of legislation is the right step in the wrong direction. If you look at another bill out there, the OPEN Bill by Issa, which really goes after those web sites overseas through the ITC, where both parties can go before it, for both to have their side listened to, and then strangles the money that goes to them like we did WikiLeaks, that is the way to begin to think about this, not this bill here.

[HAYES] Richard, I want to give you a chance to respond to that, we’re going to take one break, come back, Richard Cotton is going to talk more about this. Hope you’ll join us.

[break]

[HAYES] All right, we’re back with Richard Cotton from NBC Universal, Richard I want you to respond to what Alexis was just saying, and what former Congressman Sestak said about alternatives to this, and the efficacy, I mean, this efficacy problem strikes me as fairly fundamental, right? The economists when writing about this issue compared it to the war on drugs, right? That it’s sort of a “squeezing the balloon” problem, and you can, you know, we’ve increased the amount of money we spend on enforcing drugs, but the fact is there’s a demand for it and it just moves around. Particularly given the way the Internet works, is this, why is this going to be effective if other things haven’t been?

[COTTON] All law enforcement is cat-and-mouse. The fact is, the good guys do certain things, the bad guys try to evade it. That’s not a recipe for doing nothing. If you hear about a burglary in your neighborhood, your reaction is not: “Let’s shut down the burglary unit of the police department.” You want the burglary unit to get a little bit better. So all this is, it’s a first step, it’s not a silver bullet. By the way, piracy is never going to go away. But right now it is rampant, it is out of control, the web sites we are talking about are offshore, they’re 100% devoted to illegal activity, they’re undermining our jobs, our economy, our key businesses. What we need to do is to take some steps. In the Netherlands, by the way, there was a court order to block access to The Pirate Bay, traffic to it declined 80%. It didn’t go away, it declined 80%. So the fact is, there is no silver bullet. But we have to start down the path to make it more inconvenient to get stolen content while everyone is trying to make it convenient for consumers to get legitimate content where they want it, when they want it, and how they want it.

[HAYES] Alexis.

[OHANIAN] This analogy of the neighborhood is interesting, because I’m imagining it like we’re about to obliterate the neighborhood that just had a burglary. The tech sector right now…

[COTTON] Sloganeering doesn’t help.

[OHANIAN] …is one of the healthiest parts of the US economy. One of the healthiest parts. And whether it’s a startup like Google or Facebook or whether it’s a startup right now here in New York working on a General Assembly just getting started, they are creating jobs in this economy…

[COTTON] And this legislation would not have a single impact on all of that.

[HAYES] Well, there’s a lot of concern about liability costs

[OHANIAN] As an investor I would not want to touch that.

[crosstalk]

[COTTON] This legislation specifically says there can be no secondary liability. The only thing that can happen pursuant to a court order is that an ad network, a credit card company, or a search engine, has to respond with respect to a specific site that has been adjudicated by the court…

[HAYES] Right, but if they don’t respond…

[COTTON] To be wholesale, to be wholesale, no, the only thing they have to do is obey the order.

[HAYES] But then that’s an unenforceable provision, if they don’t have to respond then why is this going to solve the problem? If all you, if you raise it and you say: “Google, you have to de-list Pirate Bay and Google says “we’re not going to de-list anything…”

[COTTON] Well, they have to do that. But that’s a specific action required by a specific court order after a judge has made a full finding with all due process protections in place.

[HAYES] I want to return, I’m going to, thank you for your time Richard Cotton, really, I really do appreciate it [reaches across table, shakes Cotton’s hand] and Alexis Ohanian, thank you guys. I think this is a really important issue, it’s not getting enough coverage, I want to return to it in the future and maybe we can have you both back.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Pfc. Neil I. Turner, 21, of Tacoma, WA.
2. Army Pfc. Michael W. Pyron, 30, of Hopewell, VA.
3. Army Pfc. Dustin P. Napier, 20, of London, KY.
4. Army Spc. Brian J. Leonhardt, 21, of Merrillville, IN.
5. Army Spc. Christopher A. Patterson, 20, of Aurora, IL.
6. Army Spc. Robert J. Tauteris Jr., 44, of Hamlet, IN.
7. Army Staff Sgt. Jonathan M. Metzger, 32, of Indianapolis, IN.

Domestic use of drones being questioned.

Hannah pointed me to this story with this comment:

Just this month, Romney’s buddy down in Arkansas, Warren Stephens (erstwhile banker to Bushes and Clinton) acquired 16 regional newspapers from the New York Times (about $140 million) under the pseudonym “Halifax” (Stephens Media has acquired a bit of a bad odor since the Righthaven fiasco occasioned by the effort to sue bloggers for copy right infringements) and has put all the employees on notice that they must agree to be fired “at will” to keep their jobs initially.

What I learned from Corrente this week:

• Military tactics being used by law enforcement (via).
• Occupy Congress on Tuesday (via).
• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Also from Corrente, this from Mike Elk:

Yglesias does not provide any examples of how the so-called “destructive potential” of private equity firms leads to a company being successful over the long run. Unlike Creswell, Ygelsias does not interview economic experts or workers with varying or opposing views of the effects of private equity firm-ordered layoffs.

While they work at mainstream media outlets, wonk bloggers like Yglesias and Klein aren’t held to the same standards as the reporters working for the same outlets. Yet many young Americans view them as trusted sources of where to get news.

Like Klein, Yglesias has written on a wide range of healthcare, economic and foreign issues, despite not having done in-depth field reporting on these topics. Their stories are often centered on the debates of the day between other journalists and policy elites, and they don’t talk to workers or the general public.

Also affinis and lambert both highlighted this:

“Fuck the Police” can carry negative connotations, and sugar-coating the booming chants of “Kill Cops” and “Fuck the cops, We don’t need them, All we want is total freedom,” isn’t going to clear up those feelings. From the announcement of this action, the discussion from non-approvers of the march has centered around a “PR war” instead of focusing on what the police are actually doing. While public opinion is vital for Occupy Oakland, catering the message for approval by corporate media and bought politicians will not help the people of Oakland.

Going after banks, fighting against school closures, demanding jobs, calling for better public service, fighting for equality, stopping foreclosures…these are all areas that need addressing and are being addressed by Occupy Oakland. The violence oozing from Oakland Police Department is also issue. Discussing bank fraud on Monday and police brutality on Tuesday neither diminishes the weight of the topic nor its overall importance.

I’ve got Clutch Magazine in my RSS feed (RSS is a great and underrated technology, by the way) and Britni Danielle seems to pick a lot of issues I enjoy reading about. Here’s one on how the recovery, such as it is, is not reaching the black community. (Or the public sector.) Then this on what colorblind might really mean. I grew up in a largely white suburb and thought I was colorblind. Then I went to college and realized how aware I was of the different races and cultures represented. Then, since I was a theater major, I did a part in Day of Absence with the university’s African theater and holy shit was I aware of race once I was the only white person in the room. (Also see this and the responses to it. “Their race and nationality doesn’t matter to me” certainly came off differently to the responders than to the commenter.)

Paul Campos on the function of a gadfly.

I’d say as a general rule of thumb a column devoted to unsolicited advice runs a higher than usual likelihood of producing dumb and offensive commentary.

Two from Charles Pierce. This:

This guy was the budget director for George W. Bush, who fought two off-the-books wars, cut taxes while doing so, and pushed through a Medicare adjustment without the slightest idea how anyone was going to pay for it. The nation did not “plunge” into a recession, Mitch. You clowns pushed it off a cliff. Nobody “called off the prom.” You kidnapped all the class officers, poisoned the canapes, shot the band, and burned down the fking banquet hall. You’re the Carrie White of our national economic prom, Mitch.

Leave aside the fact that the whole column - if, by column, you mean mewling litany of Hallmark banalities better stitched on a pillow in your maiden aunt’s parlor - is hung on the notion that, by taking Tim Tebow’s ruptured duck 80 yards to the house, Demaryius Thomas - who grew up impoverished in Georgia, with a mother and grandmother presently doing hard time because our drug laws are insane - did not justify his own upward struggle against impossible odds but, rather, it is “really about faith.”

it really is kind of amusing watching our nation’s elite journalists have a very public Admiral Stockdale moment - ‘Who am I and what am I doing here?’”

ECONNED EXCERPT from p. 214: In fairness, the idea that high levels of international funds flows produce financial instability is still hotly debated among economists. Yet another approach suggests that a high level of borrowing, which generally goes hand in hand with high capital mobility (the destination country too often winds up having a debt party), can put a modern economy on tilt when debt levels get too high. Physicist Mark Buchanan describes the work of Yale economist John Genakopolous, and physicists Doyne Farmer and Stephan Thurner:

In the model, market participants, especially hedge funds, do what they do in real life - seeking profits by aiming for ever higher leverage, borrowing money to amplify potential gains from their investments. More leverage tends to tie market actors into tight chains of financial interdependence, and the simulations show how this effect can push the market toward instability by making it more likely that trouble in one place - the failure of one investor to cover a position - will spread more easily everywhere.

That’s not really surprising, of course. But the model also shows something that is not at all obvious. The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly. Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market loses its stability in a “phase transition” akin to the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water. Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain. This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Newt Gingrich’s recent (and apparently brief) flirtation with attacking Mitt Romney for his time at Bain Capital is already being discussed in traditional election year terms. Some on the right are spinning it as a benefit to Romney because it will inoculate him against those attacks in the general election. Conventional wisdom fonts like Joe Klein are making similar noises (via) as well.

The thinking goes like this: There’s some bad bit of news about a candidate out there. Ideally it stays buried and no one ever talks about it. But if it’s going to come out, better that it comes out early; that way the candidate can address it when there is a smaller audience than in September or October. It also gives the candidate the chance to develop a politically effective canned response, usually ending with something like “this is old news, we’ve already discussed it extensively, and only a desperate campaign or an irresponsible news outlet would keep flogging this dead horse.”

That works best with something like a personal frailty or a relatively minor but inconvenient political position. In Gingrich’s case, reconciling his multiple divorces with the moral expectations of GOP primary voters is an example. It looks bad, so he goes on TV with a televangelist and says he cheated a lot because of his boundless passion for America, problem solved. Sure his opponents might bring it up again, but he can say he’s already covered it, pivot and counterattack them for being craven opportunists. Textbook political strategy.

There are some cases where the textbook gets thrown out the window, though. Not all political missteps can be dismissed with a little boilerplate on the hustings. Some votes are iconic; just ask Bob Bennett or Hillary Clinton. A big enough vote - a vote on something that has lasting impact or that touches on something considered of fundamental importance - can become very firmly attached to a candidate and resist all attempts to shake it off.

Romney’s career at Bain is more like that than it is some minor gaffe. Libby Spencer thinks it’s a line of attack that will stay relevant through election day, and I agree with her. (More from Libby here.) It will remain fresh because Romney’s tenure at Bain literally personifies exactly the kind of soulless and greedy big money capitalism that has increasingly suffocated communities around the country.

One of the great domestic anxieties of the last few decades for most Americans is the specter of some high finance vampires swooping in, extracting the lifeblood of a perfectly good company, and leaving some dangerously weakened remnant to fend for itself. For an awful lot of people that is the central economic narrative of our time; anyone who thinks it will go away because some candidate mouthed some words about it is crazy.

And of course, it also won’t go away because Mitt Romney is Mitt Romney. His entire life has been so thoroughly steeped in wealth and privilege that he cannot speak off the cuff for very long without saying something that reveals just how wildly, offensively out of touch he is with the lives of citizens he aspires to lead. Even if he would like to put the subject behind him, all a reporter needs to do is stick a microphone in front of him and say “Mitt, say some stuff.” You don’t need to do much digging to get some gold from that one. (I could save the old boy a fortune in consulting fees. My plan: Have someone type up a long list of bland talking points, put them in a three ring binder, and hand it to him with a note reading “you may recite any of the enclosed verbatim during a debate. In all other circumstances keep your mouth shut.”)

Now, the attacks may go away or soften for other reasons. In noting the milder attacks coming from Democrats mistermix wrote Gingrich is “putting Bain in the same boat as the rest of the hated Wall Streeters who almost took this country to ruin and haven’t been punished for their actions.” But the president has actually outraised Romney at Bain, and if 2008 is any indication he will once again receive lavish funding from the likes of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. So if the president decides to lump Bain in with Wall Street that might mean taking it easier on them. But that isn’t relevant to whether Romney is somehow protected from those attacks by virtue of facing them now. It’s still a hell of a punch, a haymaker, should someone want to throw it.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Still quiet on the drone front. Nothing reported in Afghanistan/Pakistan. This reported in Somalia from Press TV, presented with the usual caveat. Allegations of torture at Bagram; Karzai wants control transferred. The Taliban notes that Bagram has had accusations of torture for years and mocks Karzai’s sudden concern.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad R. Regelin, 24, of Cottonwood, CA.
2. Army Spc. Pernell J. Herrera, 33, of Espanola, NM.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 21.

So Mullah Omar is no longer on America’s hit list? I thought he was right behind Osama bin Laden on the US al Qaida hierarchy. Is it maybe something to do with rumored peace talks aimed at getting us out of Afghanistan? Anyone got any more information?

Snapshot from the recession.

A while back someone - I forget who and would link back if I remembered - remarked that Obama and Reagan share a curious dynamic: Both are enormously popular with constituencies whose policies they hurt. In Reagan’s case, blue collar white voters, in Obama’s African Americans. Yvette Carnell noted the latter this week:

So please, stop thinking that the worst thing a white politician can do to you is call you a nigger, because it’s not the worst by any stretch of the imagination. The worst thing any politician can do to you is refuse to take your demographic seriously and thus, recapture and neutralize your political power. The worst thing a politician - any politician - can do to you and me is saturate us with symbolism and starve us of substance, as is the case with our current President who sends us Christmas cards showcasing a beautiful black family, with few policy initiatives that actually support any black families other than his own, to match the card.

Would Ron Paul make a good President? I’m not sure, but he’d certainly make an effective Republican nominee for President. I wholeheartedly believe that having a Republican nominee in the fray who has real policy differences with establishment politicians would be superior to having Obama face his slightly more evil twin - Mitt Romney - in the 2012 election.

Via millbot, the best song you will hear this week.

Speaking of Romney (via (via)), it looks like Mitch Daniels is doing his best to make sure workers’ right are front and center in this election year. Which will give Randy Johnson plenty of opportunities to explain to voters just what kind of job creator Romney was. And for ads like this and this to refresh Indianans’ memories of what the candidate of Mammon has in store for them. And Romney is the least sleazy of the bunch. (The original Globe page, and story itself, isn’t loading for me at the moment. Anyone else not getting a page but no story?)

Lambert asks if libertarians know anything about jubilee years. Krugman asks if anyone knows anything about anything.

Horror story of the week.

The president recess appointed several people to fill important posts. Republicans freaked out and looked terrible doing it. He’s also responsible for a huge increase in renewable energy investment (via). Progressives have lots of reasons to be happy with the president on the domestic front. And yes, I do have some sympathy for the argument that structural reforms in fundamental areas like elections (via) are almost a prerequisite for major policy initiatives to have a shot at success. I think, though, it’s possible to acknowledge all that and still wonder where this feistier president has been hiding away the last few years.

When fraud is rampant it only makes sense to stand up for yourself.

Sunday funnies. Southern Beale: “Maybe this is a generational thing but I don’t get my sense of empowerment from my underwear.”

John Cole: “Yes, this is the very same Politico that, were it not for Fox News, would be the worst source of bullshit, nonsense, and trivialization of politics in the country.”

Paul Constant (via):

Let’s take a moment to reflect on Romney supporters. There are quite a few young ones, and they all look like creepy little jerks. They are obviously born of wealth, their pale skin moisturized as much as human skin can be moisturized, their teeth perfect and white, their hair leavened with a dollop of extremely expensive product, their costly clothing hanging perfectly on their toned bodies. Hiding behind their smiles is an intense hatred for any humanity that does not look like it trotted right over from the country club. But, oh! Those smiles! It took me a moment to realize that the Romney supporter was telling me that the room was full and I couldn’t get in due to fire codes, because his body language was completely detached from what his words were saying. His broad smile and gimlet eyes seemed to suggest that he’d just asked me to be his best friend for ever and ever, even as he was denying me entrance into a place I wanted to go. Underneath those textbook-perfect manners and impeccable optimism lurked something nasty.

ECONNED EXCERPT is postponed. Sorry!

Non-internet related activities have taken precedence this week.  Back on the weekend (I think).

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Pfc. Justin M. Whitmire, 20, of Easley, SC.
2. Army Spc. Kurt W. Kern, 24, of McAllen, TX.
3. Army Sgt. Noah M. Korte, 29, of Lake Elsinore, CA.
4. Army Staff Sgt. Joseph J. Altmann, 27, of Marshfield, WI.

US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan. Here is your updated drone crash scorecard:

• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan
• US spy drone crashes in Somalia
• US drone crashes in central Somalia
• 2 US terror drones crash in Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Two US drones crash in south Somalia
• Three US drones crash in Somalia
• US drone goes down in Afghanistan
• Another US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US drone crashes in Pakistan
• US spy drone crashes in Afghanistan

Drones are starting to get some attention thanks to a piece by the Washington Post (sigh). Here is digby’s take, and this from Jim White: “Despite the allure to Brennan and Obama that drones are somehow magic, clean ways to take out enemies, they are fraught with all the same real world problems as any other tool of war.” Including this.

Ron Paul doesn’t care about civil liberties. He isn’t a civil libertarian, he just would prefer states to do the oppressing. And as Tom Hilton points out, there are a whole raft of implications to that which would be deeply objectionable to progressives. A Paul presidency would be a train wreck domestically. But on foreign policy he is advocating policies that would substantially benefit the country.

If his isolationist streak meant ending our wars and zeroing out foreign aid is that a wash? Of course not. We spend a fortune on wars and a pittance on foreign aid. It would be a huge plus.

As Glenn points out, Paul is putting some of the most pressing issues of our time - war and peace - onto the table. He is forcing a discussion on them at a time when no one in Washington, Republican or Democrat, wants to talk about them. If you’re more interested in what we actually do in this country than in cheering for the right team that’s a pretty important contribution to the discourse. I would hope it’s possible to endorse someone’s views on a particular subject - particularly when they are cogently presented - without conflating that with a blanket endorsement of everything the individual says. This seems to me a mark of intellectual maturity along the lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.”

But because we’re already having folks like ABL trying to shoehorn everything into election year politics we are being told it all has to be looked at in the context of who we will cast a vote for more than eleven months from now: “So, am I monster for caring more about my uterus and the rights of minorities and the underclass than I am about the victims of drone strikes in a foreign land? Maybe. But I’m ok with it.” (This is probably a much easier position to take when you aren’t the one sorting through the body parts.) Do we really have to pull out those scales a year before the election? Couldn’t we wait till, say, September or so?

Also, it’s kind of funny that she approvingly quotes Schaub criticizing Greenwald for “his terribly-clever use of the weasel word ‘many’,” using her own weasel word of “more” to make it seem like she isn’t really that worked up about it - that seems to be the pretty clear context to me, anyway - and responding with this when called on it:

Too bad your reading comprehension skills are so lacking that you could read what I wrote and make such a mind-numbingly stupid statement.

Here’s a hint. Look for the word “more” in my post.

Batocchio has kept up Jon Swift’s year end blog roundup tradition. Much thanks to him for continuing it, and rest in peace Al. The blogosphere is a poorer place without you.

I’ve personally used it as an occasion to highlight my favorite post from Avedon, and here it is. Memorializing the dead is good, but we should also be more careful to appreciate the living. As Al McGuire once said, “Why wait until the guy’s dead? Buy him a drink while he’s alive!” What’ll you have, miss?

In that same spirit, Corrente had a really great year. I saw a lot of bitching about 2011 on Twitter, but politically there were some really good things happening. Last year was more about issues; this year will be more about personalities. Anyone think that will be an improvement? Corrente will be a refuge from what promises to be a year nonstop horse race coverage and candidate worship. This week: Occupiers still occupying (via) and a largely overlooked item about strategy (via).

mistermix: “If your need to hate is greater than your desire to help, then your charity will have to be financed solely by private contributions, so you can deny help to those you deem not worthy, just as Jesus did.”

Via Twitter I saw a site called citebite that appears to let you highlight an excerpt from a post, like this. Very cool.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 268-9:

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the vast panorama of financial instruments and strategies that have grown up (and blown up), in recent years. But the complexity of these transactions and securities is all part of a relentless trend: toward greater and greater leverage, and greater opacity.

The dirty secret of the credit crisis is that the relentless pursuit of “innovation” meant there was virtually no equity, no cushion for losses anywhere behind the massive creation of risky debt. Arcane, illiquid securities were rated super-duper AAA and, with their true risks misunderstood and masked, required only minuscule reserves. Their illiquidity and complexity also meant their accounting value could be finessed. The same instruments, their intricacies overlooked, would soon become raw material for more leverage as they became accepted as collateral for further borrowing, whether via commercial paper or repos.

But even then, the banksters still needed real assets, real borrowers. Investment bankers screamed at mortgage lenders to find them more product, and still, it was not enough.

But credit default swaps solved the problem. Once a CDS on a low-grade subprime was sufficiently liquid, synthetic borrowers could stand in the place of subprime borrowers, paying the borrowers paid and winning a reward when real borrowers could pay no longer. The buyers of CDS were synthetic borrowers that made synthetic CDOs possible. With CDS, supply was no longer bound by any earthly constraints on the number of subprime borrowers, but could ascend skyward, as long as there were short sellers willing to be synthetic borrowers and insurers who, tempted by fees, would volunteer to be synthetic lenders, standing atop their own edifice of risks, oblivious to its precariousness.

Institution after institution was bled dry. Yet economists and central bankers applauded the wondrous innovations, seeing increased liquidity and more efficient loan intermediation, ignoring the unhealthy condition of the industry.

The firms that had been silently drained of capital and tied together in shadowy counterparty links teetered, fell, and looked certain to perish. There was one last capital reserve to tap, U.S. taxpayers, to revive the financial system and make the innovators whole. Widespread anger turned into sullen resignation as the public realized its opposition to the looting was futile.

The authorities now claim they will find ways to solve the problems of opacity, leverage and moral hazard.

But opacity, leverage and moral hazard are not accidental byproducts of otherwise salutary innovations; they are the direct intent of the innovations. No one at the major capital markets firms was celebrated for creating markets to connect borrowers and savers transparently and with low risk. After all, efficient markets produce minimal profits. They were instead rewarded for making sure no one, the regulators, the press, the community at large, could see and understand what they were doing.

Introduction

Here are my favorite songs this year from my RSS feeds. I use Sharp Reader as my aggregator but it requires the .NET framework, which older computers may not have. Feed Reader doesn’t need it and is good too. See the “Free MP3 sites” part of my blogroll for my current feed list.

Most weeks I burn as many new songs as I can fit onto a rewritable CD and give it a thorough listen (usually five times), so in that spirit I keep the list under the same limit. In a way 80 minutes is arbitrary, but it’s also respectful of listeners to show some restraint. If you fall in love with my taste in music drop me a line and I’ll get you the rest of the songs I considered but didn’t have room for.

On the reckoning of time

I age songs by release date, not recording date. Until I get my grubby little hands on it, it doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned. When it first makes it out to the public it is new, no matter how long it may have been gathering dust somewhere.

Recommended albums

In addition to the ones mentioned in the list here are the albums in 2010 I enjoyed front to back:

Astrid Williamson - Pulse. Went for a more electronic sound and still sounded great. I really admire artists like her and White Hinterland that change up their sounds and still keep a high quality.

Hannah Peel - The Broken Wave. A very pretty voice singing somewhat off-kilter (and occasionally disturbing) songs. Contrast is good.

Lupe Fiasco - Friend of the People. Nobody is pairing restless, socially aware lyrics with great beats as well as Lupe Fiasco. Don’t be fooled by the title, “WWJD He’d Prolly LOL Like WTF!!!” is very serious, and maybe the best hook on the album as well. (In other news: The Show Goes On got a great lyrical rework from Angel Haze.)

J Mascis - Several Shades Of Why. Dinosaur Jr. guitarist. I saw this one on several Best Of lists, which was nice. It doesn’t have the edginess that buzz merchants seem to favor, but it’s a really enjoyable collection.

Should O, Devotion! by Liz Green get a US release I’ll recommend that as well. Some have criticized it for the sameness of the sound throughout, but she has an absoluteley mesmerizing voice. She’s also an engaging and entertaining lyricist. It doesn’t have a single “w00t this is awesome!” moment but I listened to it, start to finish, over and over. (Also, sign me up for whatever Kate Jackson ends up putting around these two.)

(2011 Album of the Year) Lydia Loveless - Indestructible Machine. There already seems to be an emerging “she’s an old soul” meme gathering around her, but I don’t agree with it. She sings of alienation, excess, anger and dysfunction; those all fit very nicely on a young person’s frame, thank you very much. But her hooks are killer and she has a powerhouse voice to help her belt out her tales of woe. That should be enough, right?

Repeats

I make it a point to listen to unfamiliar artists and to not repeat anyone on the songs list. However, if I really like one I’ll keep checking them out. Here are some folks mentioned in previous years.

Wussy - Strawberry. I actually just bought the album this week; their pre-release sample was great though, so I’m assuming the rest is awesome too. “Muscle Cars” was on my 2009 list.

Circus Devils - Capsized! Robert Pollard’s “Rud Fins” was on my 2007 list. Pollard writes better short songs than just about anyone. On Capsized! “Cyclopean Runways” comes in under 2 minutes and “End of the Swell” under 1(!), and both are great.

Lushlife - No More Golden Days. Cassette City was one of 2009’s recommended albums. He puts together some really nice hooks and I love his delivery.

Hype of the year

I thought it was going to be Elizabeth Harper, aka Class Actress: A fashionable, attractive woman from a hip locale. That usually means a label is desperately trying to distract the audience from the limitations of a marginal talent. The only hitch is that Weekend is a terrific song, one of the final cuts from the list. So she’s earned her hype. Instead I’ll just cut this baby in half, hand one chunk to Lana Del Rey (get over her already, boys) and pre-emptively hand the other to anything written about LCD Soundsystem in 2012.

Honorable Mention

I usually reserve an Honorable Mention spot for a longer song. Most years there’s at least one 7+ minute song that I like quite a bit, but since I try to get lots of different artists on the list I don’t want a single tune to crowd out several other candidates. When a longer song really blows me away (like “Bushels” by Frog Eyes in 2007) I’ll make room, but overall I prefer to keep my selections under five minutes or so.

”Valerie” - The Donkeys (Buy)
Off of Born With Stripes (recommended). The first Donkeys song I heard was Excelsior Lady a few years ago, and I loved the guitar work on it. There’s much more of that on the new album. “West Coast Raga” includes some really catchy sitar (honest!) and was on some early drafts of the list. But as the year went on and no extra long songs caught my attention I decided to put this one in the slot. It clocks in at a little under 7 minutes, and it has the best guitar solo of the year. It doesn’t dominate the song, either - The Donkeys don’t seem to go for guitar hero pyrotechnics. The solo happens in the context of the song, lasts less than a minute, and is out of this world.

The List

(And yes as proof of concept I burned them on to a CD using Winamp.)

20. “400 Milles” - Les Breastfeeders (Buy)
Wins the 2011 “Louie, Louie” award for Best Garage Band Song.

19. “Nothing Nada Nothing” - Arrica Rose and The dots (Buy)
When I first started thinking about putting this on the list I’d think “is it really one of the best songs of the year?” And I’d listen through the first verse, then into the chorus, yes fine. Then the second verse ends and those horns start and oh my God those horns. Like something out of Common One-era Van Morrison. “Nothing Nada Nothing” is a very, very good song without them, but with them it is one of the year’s best.

18. “Cardiac Arrest” - Teddybears (ft Robyn) (Buy)
It was nice to see Robyn get some love towards the end of the year. I bought her first album when it came out in 1997 because I thought “Do You Know (What It Takes)” and “Show Me Love” were absolutely phenomenal pop songs. Not too long after that Britney Spears sucked all the oxygen out of the room. This seemed outrageously unjust to me - I thought Spears was a low powered version of Robyn and couldn’t for the life of me understand how Spears was getting all the attention (then I saw the video for “Hit Me One More Time” and much was explained). Since then Robyn has been recording her own stuff and popping up elsewhere and - what do you know! - wherever she shows up there seems to be terrific music. (I had Rye Rye on last year’s list, and this year Robyn collaborated with her.) I think she’s a terribly underrated artist. “Cardiac Arrest” is just the latest example of many.

17. “Gas Station Roses” - Natalia Zukerman (Buy)
Elevated from the pedestrian “done me wrong” genre because Zukerman’s guitar, lyrics and delivery all make clear that she is as dissolute and unreliable as the object of her complaint. Favorite lyrics in 2011: “Now time’s an asshole / that forgot your birthday.”

16. (2011 Best Vocal) “Country Girls” - Kentucky Parlor Pickers (Free download)
Best vocals not because of technical merit but because of their unvarnished gusto. This singer is selling these vocals, goddammit, and you’re buying.

15. “Body Language” - Ish (Buy)
Biggest mystery in pop music this year: Why was this not #1 across the English speaking world? It’s got everything you could ask for. Everything. How on earth did it remain unknown?

14. “Sooner Or Later” - Joelistics (Buy)
Seems like this year’s best example of successfully incorporating hip hop into pop. Most of the time trying to do that results in a painfully awkward, contrived “here’s where we rap!” bit jammed into the middle of an otherwise un-hip hop song. Here, Joelistics grabs the rhythm and internal rhyming/alliteration but keeps the pop framework. THAT’S how you do it, folks. Also - “Sooner Or Later” does a great job evoking the expat experience. Dig the lyrics.

13. “Drive With Me” - Armen At The Bazaar (Buy)
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” seemed to sour a lot of people on a capella music. (I seem to remember even Bobby McFerrin being turned off it - or at least the song.) That’s a shame, because layered, inventive and unadorned vocals like this deserve an honest listen.

12. “Snapped” - Jhene Aiko (Artist home page)
Aiko could have gone with an unhinged “You Oughta Know” style but instead delivers an emotionless, almost flat, vocal. That actually makes it more powerful.

11. “Spare Change (dirty) feat Rellik, Touch & Leemai” - Plex (Buy)
Every year Brockway Entertainment releases a year-end Canadian Rap Future Superstars compilation, and I’ve downloaded the past couple. Both have been really high quality; it sounds like a lot of work goes into picking songs for them. The 2011 edition placed this one on my list as well as the song at #2, and had two near-misses (“Gets Me High” by Indelible and “Execution” by TRP). It’s still a free download, and I highly recommend the 2012 edition when it goes live.

10. “Further” - Correatown (Buy)
Off of Pleiades (recommended). A beautiful, delicate ballad.

09. “Sound of the Bells” - Jill Andrews (Buy)
Off of The Mirror (recommended). Makes me think of Sarah Siskind’s “Falling Stars” from my 2009 list - a singer in Nashville’s orbit releasing well-crafted, well-produced singer/songwriter pop songs. I hope she doesn’t get pigeonholed as a pure country artist because I think her music has appeal beyond it.

08. “Through The Night” - Ren Harvieu (Artist home page)
She’s getting lots of buzz and as The Line Of Best Fit put it: “Yes, it’s AOR, music your mam would probably like, whatever - there’s a void in the market opened up by Adele’s massive gob and it needs filling.” But it’s also gorgeous and lush, and Harvieu’s longing delivery is compelling. So: AOR, fine; mam would like, fine; it’s also one of the best songs of the year. These things are not mutually exclusive.

07. “Nylons in a Rip” - Nikka Costa (Buy)
Great percussion, great synth, great vocals. An all-around killer pop song.

06. “Raid” - Pusha T (Buy)
Piano/bass, piano/bass, piano/bass. I’m only vaguely aware of anything else happening in “Raid” because as soon as it starts the piano and bass hijack my brain. Best hook of 2011.

05. “You’re Too Weird” - Fruit Bats (Buy)
From Tripper (recommended). I’ve heard that Fruit Bats might be a bit of an acquired taste depending on one’s ability to enjoy male voices in a higher register. (As a Rush fan this has never been an issue with me.) The rule of thumb here is that if you don’t like Supertramp you might want to give this a miss. That said, “You’re So Weird” has a very nice groove, a cool little guitar solo, and 2011’s most memorable fadeout: “I’m the only one who ever believed in you,” repeated into silence.

04. “Perfect Slumber” - Ebba Forsberg (Artist home page)
Forsberg’s vocals are hard to describe. Almost husky, but not. Almost smoky, but not. Viscous. Somewhat incongruously, the speaker-popping bass near the end makes me think of the solo in Free’s Mr. Big. (Paul Rodgers, you sold your soul when you left them.)

03. “Free The Pterodactyl 3” - Hot Club de Paris (Buy)
Actually prompted me to do a quick audit. It’s coming up on five years since I began this little hobby. Since then I’ve listened to over six thousand songs from over five thousand different artists, and I figured out those numbers to give context when I write: This one has the best chorus out of all of them.

02. “Be Who U-R (dirty) feat Miss Tee” - Underground Realroad (Artist home page)
It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

01. (2011 Best Song) “Sounds Like Love” - Charity (Buy)
A song bursting with sweetness and exuberance. My favorite moment: “and we’ll see heaven - all right! - where we are.” Lovely.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims. Which may be happening (for a while, anyway).

Combat operations have concluded for Army Spc. Mikayla A. Bragg, 21, of Longview, WA. Via.

Matt Taibbi had a phenomenal post on who exactly has skin in the game.

Our foreign policy is shrouded in secrecy. This is why I look to media outlets outside the US sphere of influence.

Memo to US: Creating weapons of mass destruction is not a good idea!

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

ECONNED EXCERPT Smith gives an overview of some of the, ahem, innovations in finance and then writes on pp. 243-4 (emph. in orig.):

All three of these innovations turbo-charged an explosive growth of credit arbitrage strategies by investment banks and hedge funds, which produced the “wall of liquidity” that fueled profligate lending. Greenspan’s super-low interest rates post-2001 provided the impetus for these new approaches. Together, these innovations and strategies led to an acceleration in the growth of debt that was not fully recognized by regulators, and to the extent that it was, they saw it as the result of market forces and therefore salutary. And yet, these new activities nevertheless were backstopped by the authorities when hit by a classic bank panic. Understanding of the role of credit trading strategies is therefore essential to interpreting what came to pass.

Consider this classic Wall Street joke. On a slow day, some market-makers decide to start trading a can of sardines. Trader A starts the bidding at $1, B quickly bids $2, and several transactions later E is the proud owner of the tin for $5.

E opens his new purchase and discovers the sardines have gone bad. He goes back to A and says, “You were selling rotten sardines!”

A smiles broadly and says, “Son, those aren’t eating sardines. They are trading sardines.”

Let’s say a large-scale market in trading sardines developed, where the price was $5. But the price of sardines in the real world of eating sardines is only $1. What would happen?

You’d see makers of sardines care only about making trading sardines. They’d ramp up production to satisfy demand at the new miraculously profitably price. According to orthodox theory, the influx of supply would lead to prices to drop from the $5 level.

But in the world of trading sardines, the price is $5 not due to normal supply/demand considerations, but due to dynamics within that market. As long as cheap funding persists, there is a virtually unlimited demand for trading sardines at $5. In fact, remember how asset prices and loans interact. If banks are willing to fund a lot of the purchase price of trading sardines at $5, prices could rise even further, since new investors might want to get in on the action. What happens in that scenario?

Anything that can plausibly be called a sardine will go into the can. The can of rotten sardines in the classic story is thus no accident. It is precisely the outcome you expect when manias or other mechanisms that produce sustained price distortions take hold.

Tahiti Boy topped my Best of 2009 list and is back with his annual Christmas song. It’s called “Forget It’s Christmas;” download it here.

Topping one of my annual Best Music posts means free plugs for any new efforts. Tahiti Boy gives me a good excuse to link to some seasonal music though.

Most such efforts sound phoned in. The Revelations feat. Tre Williams actually sound like they broke a sweat on It’s That Time Of Year. One original, three covers, all terrific. And it’s a free download to boot.

“Noëls d’avant” by Meb really snuck up on me. Name your own price download here.

Light Organ Records released With Bells On! last month and Christmas A Go Go! shared “Christmas List (Fa La La)” by Jody Glenham. It has a crazy good beat that I highly recommend regardless of your plans on the 25th. Catchiest original holiday tune for 2011.

Back in a week with Best Music. 2011 was a very good year.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Drone strikes on hold. (Emphasis on “hold”.) Via. They’re making their way here though.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Marine Maj. Samuel M. Griffith, 36, of Virginia Beach, VA.
2. Army Pvt. Jalfred D. Vaquerano, 20, of Apopka, FL.
3. Army Spc. Ronald H. Wildrick Jr., 30, of Blairstown, NJ.
4. Army Sgt. Christopher L. Muniz, 24, of New Cuyama, CA.
5. Marine Lance Cpl. Christopher P. J. Levy, 21, of Ramseur, NC.

Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 26.

The National Defense Authorization Act was signed into law this week. A majority of Democrats in Congress (House, Senate) voted for it and it was signed into law by a Democratic president, so naturally this is all the fault of the Republicans (via). The defense of the president (I haven’t seen anyone standing up for Democrats in Congress on this one, thank God) is that it’s all fine because they aren’t coming for you yet (it “probably ultimately have zero effect on anyone”), the courts might vacate this abomination anyway (it “might even die in the courts”) so what’s a little pandering and spinelessness between friends, ZOMG REPUBLICANS BOO!! (“If he vetoes this bill to kill that amendment, and then causes the Republicans to win in 2012, they’re just going to pass the same bill, and allow President Gingrich/Romney/Perry to detain people at will, anyway, right?”), it’s all the emoprog’s fault because they all sat out of last year’s elections and forced all those independent voters to be aware that the economy was in the crapper and no one in Washington had done anything of note to fix it (“Look, folks; when you help right wingers get elected, you don’t get to act shocked and sadden when they do exactly what they promised to do”), I have personally peered into the president’s soul and can assure you he’s just about to do awesome things (“It’s entirely possible, even likely, that Obama will declare an end to al Qaeda within the next year, and he has already all but declared an end to hostilities against the Taliban”), and anyway it doesn’t matter because it exempts US citizens except for the ones accused of aiding the enemy and when in American history has that ever been abused?

And this: “Obama didn’t place this odious amendment into the bill; Republicans did.” (Carl Levin switched parties apparently.) But the president signed it into law. This one is on the Democrats as much as the Republicans, period. If they really objected they could have made it a fight. They didn’t.

Republicans are crazy, though. In Washington and elsewhere.

Questions about the details on the events that led to a Medal of Honor award.

On Modern Monetary Theory (MMT):

Neoliberalism operates in a very similar manner to MMT in that it essentially gives policymakers a vision for what the world should be like and a toolkit to achieve this. In this regard MMT is far more humble and, rather than chasing the spectre of self-equilibrating markets or some other such imaginary entity, it merely asks that we reform the monetary system so that a functional finance approach can be taken to policymaking.

In this, MMT sees a far more stable and prosperous world in which policymakers understand that, among other things, taxation should be used as a means to stabilise aggregate demand rather than to raise funds for government spending. Without changing the very terms of debate – as the MMTers seek to do – such would be impossible, as it is clear to anyone today that politics is largely dominated by soundbites and ideology.

In my experience MMTers are aware of this and in this they are far more politically savvy than their academic post-Keynesian colleagues. If the frame of reference is not changed there is simply no hope that we can ever change the direction taken by government.

The war in Iraq is over. We end our wars a lot more quietly than we start them. I wonder why that is.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 230-1:

Indeed, just as structural barriers had undermined efforts to use a cheaper dollar to help the United States sell more goods to Japan, so too did significant changes in U.S. business behavior confound the normal mechanisms by which economic policy had operated. Some of the prized accomplishments of the “free markers” boosters had worked too well. The first was the effort to reduce labor’s bargaining power as a way to tame inflation. Second was a movement, spurred by in influential article by Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen in 1993, that called for much greater use of stock-based pay to align top management interests with those of shareholders.

There was a problem with this idea, however. The Jensen approach was intended to solve what is called a principal-agent problem, which is that you may not be able to trust the person you hired to do a good job for you. He may instead serve his own interests first.

But who was in charge of designing these new reward systems? The very same mangers who might be out for themselves. The foxes were still in charge of the henhouse, although they concealed their control by having human resources departments hire executive-friendly compensation consultants. And who approved these packages? Directors nominated by the same incumbent management. Can anyone be surprised that they engineered an explosive growth in CEO pay?

Because tax and cosmetic considerations favored equity-linked pay, corporate chieftains became obsessed with pleasing Wall Street. The result was an increased focus on meeting short-term earnings targets at the expense of long-term investment. Starting in 2002, U.S. corporations were running an average net financial surplus of 1.7% of GDP, which contrasts with an average deficit of 1.2% of GDP for the preceding forty years. While firms in aggregate have occasionally run a surplus, J.P. Morgan noted:

…the recent level of saving by corporates is unprecedented….It is important to stress that the present situation is in some sense unnatural. A more normal situation would be for the global corporate sector - in both the G6 and emerging economies - to be borrowing, and for households in the G6 economies to be saving more, ahead of the deterioration in demographics.

Companies were giving more priority to fattening their bottom lines, even if they were actually starving in terms of long-term growth. In all previous postwar economic recoveries, the lion’s share of the increase in national income went to labor compensation (meaning increases in hiring, wages, and benefits) rather than corporate profits, according to the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the post-2002 upturn, not only was the proportion going to workers far lower than ever before, but it was the first time that the share of GDP growth going to corporate coffers exceeded the labor share.

In other words, despite business friendly deregulation, companies now thought it better to stress containing costs rather than growing. So, loose money tended more and more to fund consumer spending and asset purchases instead. The financial economy was taking precedence over the real economy:

Human rights attorney questions the Wisconsin DOA on free speech restrictions

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Last week an Oregon blogger named Crystal Cox had a $2.5 million defamation judgment issued against her. It was for posts she had written about investment firm Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick; the case hinged on whether her allegations were factual or not. Padrick said they were defamatory, while Cox said they were factual but that because said facts had been leaked to her by an inside source she could not provide details. She then claimed she was protected by journalism shield laws allowing her to not name the source.

There are some extremely interesting and complex details to hash through in this case. The big one is the nature of shield laws in the Internet era. It is now possible for an individual to write anything at all, true or not, about anyone, and for that to be visible to the whole world. If that individual is sufficiently knowledgeable and persistent it’s also possible to manipulate search engine optimization to put those posts right at the top of the results page for the target. Cox was knowledgeable and persistent.

The underlying assumption of shield laws seems to be that organizations are unlikely to pursue vendettas and also unlikely to go to the mattresses to defend a spurious piece of reporting. In other words, the circumstances that create a full blown defamation lawsuit will be rare, and the defendant will have incentive to settle. But in our new world it’s possible for there to be a proliferation of defamatory content as well as a legion of single minded fanatics willing to take the full legal journey out of pure spite.

It is easy to envision courts getting clogged up with this kind of case, where one pissed off individual with an axe to grind comes up with an imaginary source to justify any kind of claim, then hides behind shield laws to get away with it. It’s a real problem. We need a way to evaluate claims of inside sources made by bloggers in a way that allows a defamation claim to be evaluated without potentially compromising the identity of a whistleblower.

There’s a lot to chew through, and Judge Marco Hernandez failed to even take a bite: “the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law[.]” In other words, she is not employed by a respectable outlet so to hell with her.

David Carr then took to the Paper of Record to write a nasty, snide little piece that also completely missed the issues at play. He piously begins by claiming to have come to the case on the blogger’s side: “I went to work on a blog post, filled with filial umbrage, saddened that the Man once again had used a boot heel to crush truth and free speech.” (“Filial umbrage” reeks of insincerity, just in case the ironic mention of the Man was not enough to clue you in on the joke.)

His entire post drips with contempt for the unwashed rabble who dare to practice journalism outside the high temples designated for it. “In the pre-Web days,” he sneers “someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told.” Yes of course, Mr. Carr, because the New York Times has never missed an important piece of news, does not have blind spots and always prioritizes stories strictly according to their importance! Why should anyone ever attempt to bring anything to anyone’s attention outside of that which arrives via the comprehensive and infallible process used by newspapers?

Articles like his are a great example of exactly the kind of flawed reporting that creates such deep skepticism towards traditional outlets. There is a real issue here that Carr’s arrogant, smug and superficial (he doesn’t even mention shield laws!) gloss completely misses. Whether he misses it out of laziness, a simple lack of intelligence or some compelling need to demonstrate he’s not like them doesn’t matter.

The plain fact is, anyone who got their information on the case from David Carr’s writing at the New York Times would be substantially less informed than those who read Curtis Cartier’s piece at the Seattle Weekly blog. That is why we need bloggers, lots of them, in lots of places. And we need to find a place for their journalism - yes, David Carr, journalism - within the legal system. Because even the Times cannot cover all the news that’s fit to print.

On a frigid windy day in December, hundreds (thousands?) of people traveled to Manitowoc, WI to show their support at a solidarity rally for the workers at Manitowoc Crane.  Members of IAM Local 516, the International Aerospace and Machinists union, voted 180-2 to go on strike on November 15 after the company introduced last-minute language into their contract that mirrored the “reforms” that Governor Scott Walker imposed on public employee unions earlier this year.  Manitowoc Crane’s “freedom to choose” proposal includes forcing the union to make membership dues optional and extend union benefits to non-union workers.

The crowd was a colorful mix of public and private sector unions including AFSCME, SEIU, TAA, Ironworkers, Steelworkers, and Teamsters, as well as many non-union supporters.  Many of the unions represented at the rally presented donations they had collected for the Manitowoc machinists.  It was inspiring to hear some public employees talk about how they felt they were “returning the favor” after the huge display of solidarity put on by private sector unions and the larger community at the Capitol in February.

I drove up from Madison with a small contingent of occupiers from Occupy Madison.  Our “We Are the 99%” banner fit right in at this rally, and several of the striking machinists expressed thanks and helped us keep it from blowing away.

And of course, what’s an anti-union-busting rally without Scabby the Rat?

After about an hour of listening to speeches, we put on our comfy shoes and marched to the picket line, completely shutting down a major street for blocks and chanting slogans like “United we stand! Divided we fall! An injury to one is an injury to all!” and “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”  Some wonderful folks from Occupy Milwaukee joined our small Madison group and helped lead the chants through chattering teeth.

Once at the plant, we joined the picket line briefly and marched with the striking workers.

Amazingly, these workers are out picketing from 6am to 6pm Monday through Friday.  This is not a one-day publicity strike aimed at making the company look bad; they’re really in it for the long haul.

Overall, I think the rally was a huge success.  It was encouraging to see such a great showing of support from so many different unions.  However, and this might have something to do with having listened to hours and hours of speeches through a PA system at the Capitol last winter and spring, but I wish the format had been different.  Personally, I’m a bit put off by a parade of union officials expounding on the virtues of the “middle class” and shouting the word “Solidarity!” repeatedly until it starts to lose meaning.

Having spent some time at a couple different Occupies, and having spent a great deal more time sitting at home anxiously watching the live feed from many more Occupies, I saw stark contrast between the general assembly format used at these gatherings and being talked at by union leadership from a stage.  More and more I’m buying into the idea of horizontal, hierarchyless democracy, and it’s time we apply this model to unions, too.  

A lot of the frustration I’ve heard expressed by union members relates to having little or no control of or involvement in (or even knowledge of) what their union leaders actually do.  Why listen to Phil Neuenfeldt or Marty Biel talk about the strike when you could hear it from the rank-and-file workers who are actually on strike?

I would love to see a rally like this take advantage of the general assembly model to allow a greater diversity of voices to be heard.  And while using the human megaphone can be a long and messy process, it brings a group of people together like nothing I’ve seen.  I’ve heard what union leaders have to say (repeatedly), and I think it’s time for the hardworking, dues paying members of the working class to step up and take it from here (just imagine if the top-down business union model suddenly became obsolete!).  

Workers already have a great deal of power; we just need to learn how to wield it.  The Manitowoc Crane employees are demonstrating this already.  In an era marked by less effective methods of direct action like publicity strikes and corporate campaigns, not to mention the failure to build an adequate strike fund, these workers are making a significant financial impact on the company by stopping production and withholding their labor.  Rank-and-file members must wake up and realize that we can’t wait for someone to fight on our behalf.

Spending a couple hours outdoors in the biting wind really makes one appreciate the hardship these workers endure on a daily basis.  Not only are they sacrificing their comfort and health to hold the line, but the machinists receive only minimal funds from the strike fund to pay bills and feed their families.  Sometimes striking workers are able to secure part-time work to make ends meet in lieu of a paycheck, but from what I’ve heard, employment opportunities in Manitowoc are too scarce.  

The machinists at Manitowoc Crane aren’t just fighting for a better contract and the right to have a union, they are standing up for the entire working class.  You can help by sending money to the strike fund, sending food and toy donations to the district lodge, and making sure to tell your friends and families about the strike.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Combat operations have concluded for:

1. Army Spc. Thomas J. Mayberry, 21, of Springville, CA.
2. Army Spc. Ryan M. Lumley, 21, of Lakeland, FL.
3. Army Sgt. 1st Class Clark A. Corley Jr., 35, of Oxnard, CA.
4. Army Sgt. Ryan D. Sharp, 28, of Idaho Falls, ID.

I’ve passed along numerous PressTV reports of drone strikes in Somalia. Those reports (most of them, anyway) are now being disputed:

Jeremy Scahill of the US magazine the Nation recently exposed secret CIA operations in Mogadishu. He has spoken publicly about US drones operating in Somalia and elsewhere.

Scahill believed there could be innocent reasons for the misinformation, including a “benign misinterpretation” of events on the ground amid the chaos. And US attacks with other weapons – including cruise missiles or air strikes – may have been misreported.

Alternatively, the reports could form part of a targeted anti-US news campaign, said Scahill.

“There is an extreme propaganda war going on between Iran and the US at the moment. You’ve got to assume that everyone has an agenda.”

Avedon pointed to this article about the UN looking into the US not protecting human rights in the Occupy movement. Also see this.

Athenae is a terrific writer. Two examples from this week; first: “you felt the rails humming long before you heard the train.” Then:

As I say when we discuss gun control, we are never going to implement Stupidity Control. We are never going to be able to come up with a system that doesn’t wind up benefitting somebody who just wants heroin. So we either let that person’s story become the reason nobody gets to eat, or we let him have his heroin, chill the fuck out, and the 98 percent of people who need hotdogs for their kids get hotdogs for their kids without the food gestapo crawling all over their receipts from the fucking Kwik Trip.

A nice article on someone who’s been rethinking Occupy. Via.

Robert Samuelson is still a wingnut.

David Sirota: “The government finds money to crack down on food stamp ‘fraud.’ If it wanted to go after finance crooks, it could.”

The worst kind of loss in sports is the close one. The one where, at the very end and by the smallest margin, victory is snatched from you. The blowout is the easiest to take. When you’re outlcassed in just about every respect and it’s never close, eh who cares. Hit the showers, write it off, go get a good night’s sleep and forget all about it.

I think the latter dynamic explains why there has been such a generous reception for Charles Pierce. Usually when a new blogger makes a splash there’s a temptation to discount the success. At least for me. I’ll read and think, “well big deal - everyone’s been saying that; I’ve been saying that.” I haven’t seen a hint of that jealousy with respect to Pierce because he’s doing the blogging equivalent of a blowout win. As in this concluding paragraph:

We can applaud the president’s “strong leadership” in this area. We can even re-elect him based on it. But it doesn’t have anything to do with what we were designed as a nation to do. We can fool ourselves that all of this is constitutional, but it’s not, and no hack White House lawyer can make it so. Secret wars are lies institutionalized and, sooner or later, we’re all praying for the repose of the souls of nuns murdered so long ago that hardly anyone remembers them.

the fact remains that the effectiveness of the “We Are the 99 Percent” argument is completely dependent upon its independence from the anesthetic stupor brought on by ameliorative political rhetoric.

Really nice posts by digby and Kay.

Barucha, a young anarchist with Occupy Oakland:

“It’s not our job to rail against union leadership,” she said. “We don’t have to come out and criticize union leadership, because we’re leading by example. The occupation movement being able to provide a better framework of getting the rank-and-file working class’s needs met. [It] exposes the recuperation of the union institution by political parties.”

Line of the week from Ryan Grim:

A Project Veritas associate surreptitiously filmed a journalism professor saying that Stein “goes out drinking at night with people,” which this reporter can independently confirm is true.

ECONNED EXCERPT from pp. 213-4:

Recent research suggests that the two phenomena, high international capital flows and financial crises, are related. Former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Rinhart of the University of Maryland have created a dataset of financial crises going back 800 years. Their conclusions are sobering:

Serial default on external debt - that is, repeated sovereign default - is the norm throughout nearly every region of the world, including Asia and Europe….Another regularity found in the literature on modern financial crises is that countries experiencing large capital inflows are at high risk of having a debt crisis. Default is likely to be accompanied by a currency crash and a spurt of inflation. The evidence here suggests the same to be true over a much broader sweep of history, with surges in capital inflows often preceding external debt crises at the country, regional, and global level since 1800, if not before.

Also consonant with the modern theory of crises is the striking correlation between freer capital mobility and the incidence of banking crises….Periods of high international capital mobility have repeatedly produced international banking crises, not only famously as the dud in the 1990s, but historically.

Let’s consider what this implies. First, high levels of international capital movements are at least associated with, and perhaps cause, financial instability. While crises became frequent starting in the late 1980s (Japan’s bust was followed by the Mexican crisis in 1995, the Asian crisis in 1997, the Russian default and Long-Term Capital Management implosion in 1998, and the dot-com bubble of 1998-2001), the first major modern episode was the Latin American sovereign debt crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And that, in turn, was not very long after the liberalization of international capital flows that started cautiously in the 1960s and gained steam in the 1970s.

Second, as the intervention to lower the value of the yen shows, international funds flows do not necessarily have a propensity to normalize. There are not strong forces toward equilibrium in these markets. Currencies in particular are not known for long periods of misvaluation relative to seemingly fundamental forces, such as health of an economy and trade balances. And even when the yen was forced higher, which by any conventional wisdom should have largely corrected the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance, it persisted.

More recently, the dollar’s standing as reserve currency means that letting it fall to the degree required to reduce trade imbalances, particularly with China, could roil financial markets. And the Chinese are not too keen about taking losses on their huge holdings of dollar denominated assets (even though the alternative is buying yet more U.S. assets, which will make the cost of the eventual rebalancing even greater).