Tag: ek Politics

A Four Part Interview on Reality Asserts Itself, The Real News Network.

Marx and Tolstoy Helped Me See the Limits of Liberalism

Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”

Chelsea Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes

International Law and “The Responsibility to Protect”

(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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Would the fall ever come to an end?

This Week’s Market Sell-Off May Not Be Such a Bad Thing

by Neil Irwin, The New York Yimes

AUG. 21, 2015

The United States stock market was on track for its worst week since 2011 by Friday afternoon, and the Hong Kong market had already reached that milestone. The British stock market has fallen for eight straight days, the third-longest run on record. The price of oil and emerging market currencies around the world continued a swoon that dates to last year.

And it’s about time.

That’s not to minimize the losses investors have incurred, or to say that each of these moves can be completely justified by data, and certainly not to predict what will happen next week or next month. But if you step back just a bit, what has happened in financial markets this week looks less like a catastrophe in the making and more like a much-needed breather when various markets had been starting to look a little bubbly.

Yah think?

(F)lat stock prices in 2015 mask what came before: a remarkable run-up in stock prices in the preceding half-decade. From mid-2009 to mid-2014, stock prices rose much faster than corporate earnings, or gross domestic product, or pretty much anything else you might think of as fundamentals.

In effect, investors became more and more willing to take the risk inherent in owning stocks, so much so that they were willing to pay very high prices for shares relative to the profits of the companies they were buying a piece of. Thus, by definition, they were accepting low returns (low both by absolute standards and even relative to the very low interest rates offered on safer investments like government bonds).

Just over three years ago, in July 2012, investing $100 in the S.&P. 500 captured more than $7 in annual earnings; putting the same money in a 10 year U.S. Treasury bond paid out only $1.55.

In other words, stocks might have been risky, but investors were being compensated nicely for that risk.

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Even after the sell-off in stocks this week, the same $100 invested in stocks buys only $5.59 in earnings, compared with $2.08 for Treasury bonds. The fact that investors aren’t being compensated very much for taking on risk is, quite logically, making them more skittish when those risks materialize.

A mix of interventionist policies from the Federal Reserve and other central banks, and a global glut of investment capital have created a mismatch between the global economy, which has grown glacially, and markets, which have been on fire.

As Josh Brown of Ritholtz Capital Management tweeted on Friday, “2015 is the first year since the recovery began where the real economy is outperforming the financial economy.”

Greek PM Tsipras Resigns, Calls for New Election as Left Wing of Syriza Splits to Form New Party

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras Tenders His Resignation

Greek crisis: Syriza rebels break away to form Popular Unity party

by Jon Henley, Shane Hickey, and Alexandra Topping, The Guardian

Friday 21 August 2015 06.00 EDT

Rebels within Greece’s ruling party, the leftwing Syriza movement led by the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, have announced they are breaking away to form a separate entity called Popular Unity.

Angry at what they see as a betrayal of Syriza’s anti-austerity principles, the 25 MPs announced their intention to form a new party in a letter to parliament the day after Tsipras resigned to pave the way for snap elections next month.

Led by the former energy minister, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the new movement will be the third-largest group in the Greek parliament and could conceivably receive a mandate to try to form a new government.

Tsipras announced his resignation in a televised address on Thursday night. He said he felt a moral obligation to put Greece’s third international bailout deal, and the further swingeing austerity measures it requires, to the people.

Last week he piloted the punishing deal through the Greek parliament, but suffered a major rebellion when nearly one-third of Syriza MPs either voted against the package or abstained. Tsipras is gambling that he will be able to silence the rebels and shore up public support for the three-year bailout programme.

Or you can call it a co-operative, depends on your Point of View.

Canadian Maple Syrup ‘Rebels’ Clash With Law

By IAN AUSTEN, The New York Times

AUG. 20, 2015

To keep prices high, the federation enforces strict quotas for the province’s 7,400 producers. Instead of flooding the market during years with bumper crops, all syrup produced beyond that amount is stored in the federation’s warehouse, which helps prop up prices by limiting supply. When seasons are lean, it releases the syrup, to maintain stable supply and pricing. (Sales of small containers to consumers at farms are exempt from the system.)

After five particularly bad seasons drained most of its stock by 2008, the federation enlarged its hoard. Stacked in barrels nine high, the reserve currently holds about 60 million pounds of maple syrup.

Prices are set by the federation, in negotiation with a buyers’ group. The federation holds most of the power, given that it controls a majority of the world’s production.

Such domestic systems are facing scrutiny in a global marketplace. One major hurdle in the talks over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal with 12 countries, has been Canada’s refusal to dismantle a similar quota system for dairy and poultry farmers.

Brown gold.  Worth more a barrel at this point than Oil.

Some people misunderstand my relationship with Donald Trump.  I think he’s a privileged asshole who doesn’t care about anyone except Donald Trump.

I also think he’s astute in his marketing and I’ve worked with the kind of pollsters that businesses buy and they sneer at the politicals.  They work with much larger samples so the demographics are at least 95% confidence (Want to slice them finer?  Get a bigger sample.).  They are not Frank Luntz faux focus groups (there is a whole other art to that I’ll maybe tell you about someday).

Anyway this has less to do with the accuracy of metrics than it does to Trump’s ability to spot an under served market and fill it.

In this case the market is true Teabagger Republicans, the ones that genuinely hate government nearly as much as they hate the Mexicans and other unworthies and think they’ve been disenfranchised and betrayed by their elected representatives.

And this is what I think is the true Trump appeal, the willingness of even the Reds to revolt.  He throws them meat on occasion whether he means it or not.  He’s an actor (or a con man, but they’re basically the same).  On other things he is remarkably libertarian for which they fault him not at all.  This is because he is expressing their fundamental rage with the current regime and refusing to apologize for it.  They feel the Villager Media is completely corrupt (except Faux) thus their genuine outrage at the poor treatment Trump is getting (including Faux).  I think this is a great development.

Trump has shut down the Republicans and exposed the also rans as the corporatist shills they are.  I’m not sure they can ever recover and there’s no reason for him to quit.  He’s running a remarkably frugal campaign based on free coverage.  As long as the polls don’t get embarrassing and they sure aren’t yet, why stop?

I say to you, dismiss Trump at your peril.  Consigning him to the ‘Entertainment’ section does you no credit at all, it merely highlights how badly you’ve missed the point.  Even idiots like E.J. Dionne are starting to get it (the most pretentious piece I’ve read in a while).

The Donald Trump show: 24 hours with the Republican frontrunner

by Paul Lewis, The Guardian

Tuesday 18 August 2015 06.00 EDT

“Fifteen series of The Apprentice has made Trump a polished television performer,” Stone says. “If you look at the show he looks like a decisive, tough leader, in the high-back chair, perfectly lit, perfectly made-up, making decisions.”

Stone, who used to work for Ronald Reagan, recalls how in 1980 a reporter asked the then presidential candidate how an actor could possibly occupy the White House. Reagan replied: “How can a president not be an actor?”

Stone adds: “The voters don’t distinguish between reality TV and politics.”

…

To the extent to which it can be summarised into a coherent narrative, it is that America is in decline, losing jobs and industry to China and Mexico, and losing oil to the Middle East. Barack Obama is stupid. The other presidential candidates are also stupid, or boring.

They’re all controlled by wealthy donors who pay for their campaigns and are the dark forces pulling the strings. Money is the real puppet-master in America, and Trump knows this because he’s rolling in it, and he’s been controlling politicians all his life.

Now only Donald Trump, a smart, successful, property tycoon and TV celebrity so rich he is beholden to no one, can fix the problem. He will bring jobs, take care of veterans and the elderly, and be the most militaristic person in the room.

The audience loves every second of it, especially those parts that parody the political establishment, such as when Trump does an impression of a stiff politician. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, in the mock drone of a monotone politician. His shoulders are hunched, his eyes squinting at an imaginary script near the podium. “Hello,” he says. There are howls of laughter.

“You don’t want a scripted president!” he tells them, as people rise to their feet for a standing ovation and the loudest applause of the night. As the crescendo builds, he adds: “And you don’t want a politically correct president!”

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For decades presidential contenders have been coming to the fair to eat corn dogs and slap the backs of farmers, but veterans of the festival will say they’ve never seen anything quite like the pandemonium sparked when Trump turns up.

He is supposed to visit a life-sized cow carved out of butter, but his entourage quickly realise it will be impossible to make a path through the mob. Instead, for close to an hour, Trump and the crush of people around him just meander through the fair in the searing heat.

People are laughing and reaching forward to shake his hand or take his photo. They shout things like “We Love You Donald” and “Bring It Home Donald” and “Money, Money, Money, M-o-ney”, the tune of The Apprentice theme song.

It takes five minutes for a Guardian reporter to squeeze through the scrum and ask a question. “You said voters don’t care about policy. Why do you say that?”

Trump looks tickled. “The voters know I have good decision-making abilities,” he says. “They trust me.”

The Quiet Demise of the Army’s Plan to Understand Afghanistan and Iraq

By VANESSA M. GEZARI, The New York Times

AUG. 18, 2015

The Army had begun developing the program as an experiment in 2006; it expanded quickly as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan foundered and American policy makers cast about for novel approaches. The idea was to send teams of social scientists, including anthropologists, to gather ethnographic, sociocultural and economic information and advise front-line soldiers on a range of delicate topics, from the mechanics of forging tribal alliances to how to persuade villagers to how to respond to local offers of hospitality.

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Since the invasion in 2001, the United States military had been making choices about which Afghan leaders to support, which companies to reward with contracts, whom to trust and whom to kill. These choices, the shopkeeper said, were the key to why so much had gone wrong. “You are making mistakes,” he told his American interlocutor. “You have been making mistakes for eight years. I tell you one thing, different people tell you something different. There’s no right person with you to advise you. So all the people working with you are wrong.”

The Army created the Human Terrain System – at the height of the counterinsurgency craze that dominated American strategic thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan late in the last decade, with much fanfare – to solve this problem. Cultural training and deep, nuanced understanding of Afghan politics and history were in short supply in the Army; without them, good intelligence was hard to come by, and effective policy making was nearly impossible. Human Terrain Teams, as Human Terrain System units were known, were supposed to include people with social-science backgrounds, language skills and an understanding of Afghan or Iraqi culture, as well as veterans and reservists who would help bind the civilians to their assigned military units.

On that winter day in Zormat, however, just how far the Human Terrain System had fallen short of expectations was clear. Neither of the social scientists on the patrol that morning had spent time in Afghanistan before being deployed there. While one was reasonably qualified, the other was a pleasant 43-year-old woman who grew up in Indiana and Tennessee, and whose highest academic credential was an advanced degree in organizational management she received online.

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She was out of her depth, but at least she tried to be professional. Two days earlier, another member of the Human Terrain Team casually told a sergeant that he could have sex with me if he gave the team member some supplies he wanted. The Human Terrain Team member claimed to be joking, but the sergeant and I were mortified.

The shortcomings I saw in Zormat were hardly the extent of the Human Terrain System’s problems. The project suffered from an array of staffing and management issues, coupled with internal disagreements over whether it was meant to gather intelligence, hand out protein bars and peppermints, advise commanders on tribal conflicts or all three – a lack of clear purpose that eventually proved crippling. It outraged anthropologists, who argued that gathering information about indigenous people while embedded in a military unit in active combat posed an intractable ethical conflict. Once the subject of dozens of glowing news stories, the program had fallen so far off reporters’ radar by last fall that the Army was able to quietly pull the plug without a whisper in the mainstream media.

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By the time the Human Terrain System was shut down in September, the program had cost American taxpayers more than $700 million and was bereft of purpose; with the war in Iraq purportedly over and deployments to Afghanistan dwindling quickly, it had run out of soldiers to advise.

Let’s make it clear that CISA is nothing more than CISPA missing a ‘P’.

Now, why I won’t soon be moving to Windows 10-

How Would Microsoft’s User Agreement Work with CISA?

By emptywheel

August 17, 2015

(W)hen I hear about the many privacy problems with Microsoft 10 – including the most recent report that it will send data to Microsoft even if you’ve disabled some of the spy features on the operating system. Is this the kind of thing Comey had in mind?

I’m even more intrigued given the report that Microsoft changed its Services Users Agreement to permit it to scan your machine looking for counterfeits.

…

Add that to this part of the Users Agreement, which permits Microsoft to retain, transmit, and reformat your content, in part “to protect you and the Services.”

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The two together seem to broadly protect not just Microsoft sharing data with the government under CISA, but also deploying countermeasures, as permitted under the Cyber Intelligence Sharing Act.

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This Service Agreement would seem to imply consent for automatic updates including those that disable what gets called a cybercrime under the bill (that is, counterfeit software) and a general consent to let Microsoft do what it needs to to “protect you and the Services.”

In still another sign of how the TPP is unraveling we have the story of Chile from Truthout.

Where the Trans-Pacific Partnership Could Lose

By Julia Paley, Truthout

Friday, 14 August 2015 00:00

In Chile, where the administration of President Michelle Bachelet has moved forward with the TPP negotiation process, opposition is strong in the legislature. Even Bachelet’s minister of foreign affairs has indicated that Chile won’t sign the agreement if the TPP doesn’t meet certain criteria.

The Chilean controversy over the TPP highlights some of the biggest problems with the agreement – for working people in Chile, the United States, and around the world – and it makes plain the false promises the Obama administration used to push Democrats to support fast track.

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Under ordinary circumstances, signing on to a free trade agreement would be a no brainer for Chile. It has agreements with more countries than any other nation, and additional ones are on the way. In fact, Chile already has trade agreements with all the other countries involved in the TPP.

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As critics in many countries agree, the TPP is expected to harm health by extending the duration of patents for medicines and medical procedures, making them unaffordable for millions of people and increasing the cost of implementing public health measures. The TPP is predicted to limit culture and education by increasing the time before movies, music, and books enter the public domain – thereby keeping the price too high for low-income people as well as schools and libraries. And the TPP could curtail Internet freedoms by impeding innovation and criminalizing popular forms of sharing. All of these, which could impact people in the United States as well, hit other countries especially hard.

What’s particularly thorny for Chile is that standards for these issues were already hammered out in bilateral agreements with the United States and other countries. The concern is that joining the TPP will be tantamount to renegotiating the terms of trade – and coming out with less favorable results than before.

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The fact that Chile already has free trade agreements with all the other countries in the pact means it has no particularly strong incentive to sign on. Unlike countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam, whose access to investment and export markets are likely to increase substantially under the TPP, the agreement won’t bring major trade benefits to Chile. Meanwhile, the costs to the country – in terms of its own ability to create laws in the future and extensions of intellectual property protections – could be high.

As the negotiation process nears a close, congressional representatives in Chile have renewed their opposition.

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Minister of Foreign Affairs Heraldo Muñoz made declarations about how far the Bachelet government was – and was not – willing to go. In response to deputies’ concerns, he declared that in the area of intellectual property, patents, and services, Chile would not accept any terms worse than those already negotiated in its existing free trade agreements. Specifically, in relation to patent protection for pharmaceuticals, he said that Chile would insist on the five years allowed for in existing treaties and not agree to the 12 years proposed for the TPP. “If there isn’t an agreement that’s acceptable, we won’t sign it,” he declared. Moreover, with regard to the US certification process, he affirmed, “we will not accept any interference in our sovereignty, and if that were the case, the agreement would not go into effect.”

Well, since we’re bombing Syria and have allowed Turkey a free Kurd hunting license.