August 2015 archive

(Note: This is a panel discussion from some time ago with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureates in Economics, and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  The interview with Christopher Beha of Harper’s Magazine referenced below took place recently at Book Culture book store in New York- ek)

Joe Stiglitz: The Dangerous Economic Thinking That’s Killing Greece and Threatening the European Union

By Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet

August 21, 2015

Bad economic ideas inflict untold human suffering. When they come cloaked in a fog of Orwellian obfuscation, their poison and effects can spread with little hindrance. The public is misled. Power plays are hidden from view.

…

In discussing Greece’s Third Memorandum of Understanding and its draconian terms, Stiglitz observes that the MoU is really a “surrender document” that eclipses the country’s economic sovereignty and ensures that Greece’s depression – already deeper than America’s Great Depression – will get worse. An economy that is seeing youth unemployment reaching up to 60 percent is likely to lose another 5 percent in GDP. That is over and beyond the 25 percent plunge in GDP the country has suffered since the imposition of austerity measures.

Socially conservative Germans, Stiglitz warns, are doubling down on the discredited notion that austerity policies help economies recover in times of crisis. In reality, the insistence on keeping wages down, stripping bargaining power from workers, forcing small business owners to pay taxes a year in advance, and cutting pensions will only hamper demand and lead to a deepening spiral of debt. (Stiglitz emphasizes that hardly any of the money loaned to Greece has actually gone to help the Greeks themselves, but rather private-sector creditors, namely German and French banks).

…

In Stiglitz’s view, what’s behind the ill-advised economic schemes is a power struggle in which Germany and its supporters seek to undermine the Greek economy in order to push out a government (Syriza) they do not like. In doing so they are tearing apart families, snuffing out the hopes of young people and delivering humiliation and suffering to a country. History shows that such a policy does not turn out well for anyone.

Stiglitz reminded the audience that John Maynard Keynes once issued warnings about the Treaty of Versailles, the peace settlement signed at the end of World War I, which ordered Germany to pay massive reparations. Inflicting more pain on a weakened economy would send an already-battered nation into depression. Keynes turned out to be correct: resentment of the harsh terms and the resulting high unemployment led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Far from restoring stability in Europe, the Treaty set the stage for an unprecedented disaster and unspeakable human misery.

Stiglitz warned that Germany, a major beneficiary of debt write-offs following WWII, had not learned the lesson of its own history. Officials are blind to the reality that debt forgiveness is necessary for Greece at a time when nearly everyone, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), recognizes that the country simply can’t pay back what it owes. Instead of remembering the terrible consequences of mass unemployment following WWI, many Germans insist that it was hyperinflation that led to Hitler, and so they tend to support central bank policies that guard against that problem rather than the far more worrisome specter of joblessness.

As Stiglitz describes, the result of all this historical amnesia and economic blindness is a “Dickensian” nightmare that recalls 19th-century debtors prisons where people were punished for the inability to pay debts and locked (literally) into a situation in which paying them was, of course, impossible. Only now, the prisoner is an entire country.

Stiglitz notes the fundamental problem that eurozone leaders will not let individual countries like Greece, Portugal or Spain change economic policies, no matter how harmful they become. Extreme right-wing elements will benefit as trust in government diminishes. As Stiglitz sees it, flaws in the design of the euro, as well as flaws in the design of the European Central Bank, which is not equipped to address unemployment, hurt Europe’s prospects and yet are extremely difficult to address because they are embedded in treaties that require the unanimous agreement of member countries to alter. He pointed out that if you look at countries like Sweden, it appears that those that did not join the eurozone seem to be in better shape than those that joined. The eurozone has been stuck in persistent stagnation, whereas Sweden’s economy, for example, is brightening.

When an audience member asked whether forgiving Greek debt would lead to moral hazard – encouraging other countries to borrow beyond their means – Stiglitz responded that it was unimaginable that any country would want to go through what the Greeks are enduring. He noted that the lenders bear even more responsibility for the current mess than the borrowers. Goldman Sachs structured irresponsible deals that allowed the Greek government at the time of the Maastricht Treaty to hide its debt. Stiglitz concluded that if anything, moral hazard is a problem on the lender side, as there is little to discourage lending money to countries that are unlikely to be able to pay back. He also noted that the idea of the Greek government selling assets in the middle of a depression to pay back debt was a bad idea, because prices are so low this amounts to little more than a fire sale.

…

The real deficit in Europe, said Stiglitz, is a “democratic deficit.”

Michael Hudson (Research Professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) and a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, a former Wall Street analyst) is the author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy Global Economy.

“Casino Capitalism”: Economist Michael Hudson on What’s Behind the Stock Market’s Roller-Coaster Ride

Smoke and Mirrors of Corporate Buybacks Behind the Market Crash

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Paris liberated during World War II; A first swim across the English Channel; Actor Sean Connery, composer Leonard Bernstein, and musician Elvis Costello born; Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ released.

Breakfast Tunes

Or rather, panic about the right things-

The GOP’s austerity hawks are throwing away a golden opportunity (again)

by David Dayen, Salon

Tuesday, Aug 25, 2015 05:58 AM EST

The U.S. Congress should have gaveled in an emergency session yesterday to react on the latest twist in the capital markets. Failure to do so creates unnecessary pain and will damage American competitiveness for the next generation.

I’m not talking about the stock market.

…

Right now, the U.S. can borrow money for 10 years at around 2 percent – a staggeringly low number, made so by an increase in global demand for Treasury bonds. When the economic winds shake globally, investors lead a “flight to safety,” looking for any instrument that won’t lose money. And despite the tumult of the past decade, investors still see Treasury bonds as the safest investment in the world.

What this means is that investors will hand over cash to the U.S. government with effectively no interest in real terms.

…

Significant borrowing, to repair crumbling infrastructure like bridges and water systems, or upgrade the electrical grid and broadband capacity for the entire nation, would have a seriously stimulative impact on an economy that’s already showing some labor market success. It would help arrest the persistent demand deficit that has existed in our economy since the outset of the Great Recession.

…

The lack of government debt is a problem for the world, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently. Former White House economist Jared Bernstein goes further, explaining that budget deficits lead to smoother and stronger economic growth. Our deficit is falling fast, and the government not only can handle throwing a couple hundred billion at upgrading the basic structures that make the country go, but would benefit handsomely from it.

…

This actively harms our economic potential over the next several years. We can’t have nice things because we’re still governed by a backwards ideology that thinks the government should run the country like a family manages their budget. But if a family could borrow money for free and use it to make all kinds of improvements in their lives, they’d jump at the chance. If we ever want to make America great again, we have to get over this dysfunction and get out our checkbook.

Those letters nice and friendly enough for you?

The Hugo Awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories.

Now unlike some competing awards like the Nebula Award which is decided by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Hugos are nominated and decided by fans, specifically attendees at the World Science Fiction Convention (the Hugos are also older).

There are two classes of registration, a regular one which, uhh… gives you the right to vote for Hugos I guess, and an attending registration that gets you onto the Convention floor and allows you to attend some seminars and workshops.

While most of us tend to think of Science Fiction as kind of lefty utopian fantasy worlds that present metaphorically the condition of society and present solutions for challenges humanity might face, there has always been a jingoist, misogynous, racist, authoritarian element that some authors embrace with gusto and glee, some pander to as a way to make a quick buck off inferior work, and others lazily use as a crutch they hardly notice in pursuit of a rattlin’ good yarn with lots of babes and blasters.

Quick- how many Black people in Star Wars?  Yes, Lando.  And…?

I do think it’s a rattlin’ good yarn and not as obviously horrible as, say, Horseclans or Gor but there you go.

For years the target audience of Science Fiction was pimply-faced adolescent white boys who hated women because they were nerds who were never, ever, going to meet one, particularly since they spent all their time either jerking off or reading Sci-Fi, Comic Books, and playing Dungeons and Dragons in their mother’s basement.

But starting in the 60s Science Fiction started to change and there were more and more thoughtful works about the nature of Science and Humanity and they began to attract a more main stream audience.  This made the publishers very happy of course, but it kind of pissed off the fan boys who wanted epic space battles with monsters and aliens.  And where the Green Wimmen at?

As time passed the same social impulses that led people to the Right-Wing also started causing virulent divisions in the gaming and Science Fiction communities.

Which brings us to the present and the Sick Puppies.  Just as there is a Conservative publishing cartel that games The New York Times Best seller list (Dinesh D’Souza, ‘nuf said), someone thought there were too many non-white and female Hugo Award winners recently and decided to do something about it.  They and their like-thinking comrades bought a bunch of registrations to WorldCon and submitted their favorite authors, books, movies, and TV shows and openly organized to nominate them and make sure they won.

It wasn’t much of a secret and after the ballots were cast the steering committee in charge of the Awards simply refused to give them out in the categories they thought were compromised by what most considered ‘cheating’.

If only the sci-fi writers who hijacked the Hugo awards had the wit to imagine a world beyond the Good Old Days

by Helen Lewis, The Guardian

Saturday 18 April 2015 03.00 EDT

(For some science fiction and fantasy fans) the alternate universe they most crave is the Good Old Days. SFF is in the grip of its own culture war, with a group of authors suggesting that the recent success of female and non-white writers is proof that political correctness has spread its tentacles so far that it is now ruining stories that include actual tentacles.

…

The sticking point is nominations for the Hugos, the genre’s best-known awards, which will be handed out in August. Anyone who pays $40 (£27) to attend the science-fiction convention Worldcon can nominate up to five of their favourite books in each category for a Hugo. The intention was that the awards would be more democratic and open to a greater range of works: nerds know how it is to be excluded from the cool gang. (Even if the cool gang here is literary fiction writers, which is absolutely no one else’s idea of a cool gang. Pass the sambuca, Richard Flanagan!)

The voting system encourages fans to feel they have ownership of the awards and to treat them as a barometer of genuine, grassroots opinion. As 2014 winner Kameron Hurley put it: “They historically rewarded popular work, set in the kinds of old, colonial, dudes-rule-everything universes that my work explicitly challenges.”

But times are changing, and there are complaints that the Hugos are being used “as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert under-represented minority or victim group here) or because a work features (insert under-represented minority or victim group here) characters”.

That sentiment comes from US SFF author Brad Torgersen, who is a Mormon, a libertarian and a gun-rights enthusiast, and as such feels that the current trends in SF do not favour the types of books he personally enjoys. In February, he suggested a slate of works readers could vote for to ensure the Hugos had relevance outside “rarefied, insular halls of 21st-century Worldcon ‘fandom'”. The slate is called Sad Puppies, because fellow author Larry Correia once said that not having his books nominated for the “snooty and pretentious” awards “made puppies sad”.

So far, so niche. But because this is the internet, someone always has to pitch in and turn the hostility up to 11. Enter a man called Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day, with his own slate called Rabid Puppies. Vox Day is even less polite about minorities and “victim groups”: he claims that marital rape is an oxymoron, because “marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis”, and that race is linked to IQ (you can imagine which way). He also opposes women’s suffrage, saying “the women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilised western society and little girls”. He’s so bigoted it’s perversely refreshing. Oh right, he actually said that, you think. Bloody hell.

The result of this perfectly legal manipulation is that, in the words of Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, “The Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired.”

…

It works like this: if you worry that you might be accused of an -ism, get your defence in first by asserting that the accuser is an envoy of an ivory tower elite and you are merely a tribune of the people. As it works for Farage, so it does for Vox Day. Yes, you might have gone to private school, worked as a commodities trader and have been a member of the European parliament since 1999, but you are an outsider! Yes, you might have got nine titles from your own tiny Finland-based publishing house on the Hugos shortlists, but that’s only because you are trying to seize back science fiction from a self-serving clique!

Over and over again, we see the mechanism by which power re-asserts itself when challenged. With a gymnastic leap, those on the defensive become the underdogs, cruelly repressed by the BBC, feminists, people from Islington, some nebulous “elite” or the suggestion that sometimes a female character in a videogame might wear a decently supportive bra.

Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo awards

by Damien Walter, The Guardian

Monday 24 August 2015 08.25 EDT

As I write it is clear that the Puppies’ disproportional effect on the Hugo shortlists was not reflected in the award winners. In fact, the fan vote was triumphant in nearly all categories, except a handful where the Sad Puppy bloc vote forced work of such poor quality onto the ballot that fans were left no choice but to nominate “no award” instead. It was the worst result possible for the Sad Puppy voters, and a personal humiliation for their leaders.

Far from infecting sci-fi with with their right-wing rhetoric, the Sad Puppies have only succeeded in inoculating the field against it. Theodore Beale, a Hugo protest leader and prominent anti-vaxxer, has himself acted like a weakened viral infection, catalysing sci-fi’s immune response against the retrograde aesthetics on which he has built his reputation. The other Puppy leaders retreated into relative silence as the determined response of sci-fi fans rolled over them. Meanwhile, their antics have woken up all of sci-fi fandom to the value of diversity.

‘No award’ sweeps the Hugo Awards following controversy

by Michelle Dean, The Guardian

Sunday 23 August 2015 12.20 EDT

The World Science Fiction Society noted in its announcement of winners that the “no awards” were without precedent. Five, they said, was also “the total number of times that WSFS members have presented no award in the entire history of the Hugo Awards, most recently in 1977”.

The unprecedented number of no award votes followed a controversy over a voting bloc, known as the Sad and/or Rabid Puppies, that loaded the ballot earlier this spring.

The Puppies say they are reacting to the transformation of the Hugos into what one called an “affirmative action award“. The Puppies organized themselves to vote as a bloc in the nominating process in order to put more white, male candidates on the ballot. As the voting turnout for the nomination process is typically low, the strategy worked.

Critics of the Puppies in the science fiction community pointed out that their leaders, among them Vox Day and Brad Torgerson, were promoting unrepentantly sexist, racist and homophobic views. Among the Puppies’ slate of nominees was a book put out by the Patriarchy Press. Another of their favored writers, John C Wright, is better known for his rabidly homophobic views than for his work.

Further reading-

• Hugo award nominees withdraw amid ‘Puppygate’ storm, by Alison Flood, The Guardian
• The Puppies are taking science fiction’s Hugo awards back in time, by Adam Roberts, The Guardian
• The Hugo awards will be the losers if politics takes the prize, by Sarah Lotz, The Guardian
• George RR Martin says rightwing lobby has ‘broken’ Hugo awards, by Alison Flood, The Guardian
• George RR Martin urges ‘every true fan’ to rally for Hugo awards vote, by Alison Flood, The Guardian

Entertainment

• The 100 best novels written in English: the full list, by Robert McCrum, The Guardian
• Not to be: Barbican U-turn over Hamlet soliloquy, by Jamie Grierson, The Guardian
• Yvonne Craig, the original 1960s Batgirl, dies aged 78, by Alexandra Spring, The Guardian
• Patrick Stewart: totally over the top – but impossible not to love, by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian
• The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: trailer features ‘same chair, different ass’, The Guardian
• Watch Jon Stewart hit John Cena with a chair at WWE SummerSlam, By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post
• ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Premiere Recap: Welcome to Hell-Ay, By Noel Murray, Rolling Stone
• John Oliver has received ‘thousands’ of donations for his televangelism ministry, By Abby Ohlheiser, Washington Post
• Tails of the unexpected: the craziest cat quiz ever, by Leo Benedictus, The Guardian
• Sundance 2015 review: Grandma – Lily Tomlin cranks it up to the max as a ranting poet on the road, by Brian Moylan, The Guardian

Sports

The Little League World Series starts with a double elimination round (you need 2 losses to wash out).  Currently eliminated on the International side of the bracket are White Rock South Surrey of BC and Los Bravos de Pontezuela of the Dominican Republic.  Advancing are Tokyo Kitasuna and Cardenales of Venezuela.  On the Bubble facing deciding games are Tung Yuan of Taipei, Cronulla of Australia, AVRS of Uganda, and Seguro Social of Mexico.

On the United States side of the bracket Webb City MO and Wilshire-Riverside of OR have been eliminated.  Advancing are Red Land PA and Pearland West of TX.  Bowling Green Eastern  of KY, Cranston Western of RI, Northwood SC, and Sweetwater Valley must win to advance.

As you know it was a Mercedes 1 – 2 at Spa-Francorchamps.  Third place (at the time) Vettel was a stop after a blow out on the next to last lap.

In other racing news, British IndyCar driver Justin Wilson in coma after being hit by flying debris.  He used to drive for Minardi and Jaguar and his former Formula One associates are shocked and sympathetic (having lost Jules Bianchi to head injuries suffered a year ago in Japan in the last few weeks).  At the same time, like many others they wonder why IndyCar is so dangerous.  The answer to that is that the Drivers are encouraged to use Turn Left bumper car tactics that are totally unsuited to open wheel racing.  Also the Yellow Flag rules mandate bunched rolling re-starts that result in multiple additional accidents.

They do this to promote “close races”.  Those are always much more fun to watch as are flaming chunks of twisted metal.

Bullfighting is hardly a sport which is why I enjoy titles like this- Man killed during bull run in Spain pushes death toll to 10 so far for year.

Usain Bolt beats Justin Gatlin to 100m gold in ‘clash of good against evil’.  His opponent was twice banned for doping.  Oh, and he’s from the U.S..  Yay team.

Baseball

• How ’bout those Mets?  Five games ahead in the NL East.
• Damn Yankees lost C.C. Sabathia, not much of a loss but it’s probably a career ending injury, and the game.  Half a game back in the AL East.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

–Aristotle

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.