Tag: ek Politics

I had the distinct pleasure of being around for all of poblano’s career on Daily Kos.  I must admit he wasn’t my favorite author, not because I had any particular beef with him, but because I just wasn’t interested in his subject matter.

You see I find electoral horse race diaries dull beyond description and am much more interested in policy and good governance than the politics of personality.

Still, he’s an interesting case study.  When he came he was a sports statistician and a proponent of the then novel Sabermetrics system of analysis.  His particular contention was that the same techniques could be applied to political polling and give you a quite accurate prediction of the outcome of any given contest.

Some people were offended by his results since their perceptions were rose tinted by wishful thinking and at times discussion in poblano’s diaries became quite heated.  When he came out as Nate Silver and got picked up (along with his blog FiveThirtyEight which I feel was established partly as a reaction to his reception at dK) by The New York Times I’m sure he was not sorry to shake the dust off and go.

During the 2012 election cycle kos followed Nate’s predictions quite closely and with good reason as he has a remarkable record of success-

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions-he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states-won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by one percentage point. He correctly predicted the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races that year.

…

In the 2012 United States presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, he correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That same year, Silver’s predictions of U.S. Senate races were correct in 31 of 33 states; he predicted Republican victory in North Dakota and Montana, where Democrats won.

Of course kos got results nearly as good by simple poll averaging, no complicated weighting required.

In July of last year Nate picked up his site and moved to ESPN where, while he still talks about politics, he is much more sports focused.

It seems we have a celebrity feud brewing between poblano and Herr Doktor Professor.

The real problem with Nate Silver’s attack on Paul Krugman

By DYLAN BYERS

3/27/14 11:48 AM EDT

Nate Silver took a not-so-veiled shot at his former New York Times colleague Paul Krugman on Wednesday, suggesting – through some tongue-in-cheek empirical analysis – that the columnist had taken a more critical attitude to Silver following his move to ESPN.

“Mr. Krugman’s views of FiveThirtyEight have changed since it re-launched March 17 under the auspices of ESPN,” Silver wrote. “To be sure, the difference in Mr. Krugman’s views could reflect a decline in quality for FiveThirtyEight. The web site has brought on almost two dozen new employees and contributors. And it has expanded its coverage beyond politics into sports, economics and other areas.”

The problems with Silver’s attack are manifold: One, it’s petty. Two, it’s snarky. Three, it’s self-centered. Four, it eschews objectivity in favor of personal gripes. Five, it uses data to infer, rather than deduce: Silver suggests Krugman has become a critic because Silver is no longer at the Times. He might pause to wonder if the shift in tone is due, at least in part, to the fact that Silver spent a year hyping up a site that has yet to live up to expectations, and that, in the meantime, he badmouthed columnists like Krugman as “worthless.”

…

Silver doesn’t care about being first or breaking news – fine, he doesn’t need to. But he needs to at least be relevant. So far, Silver’s site has achieved relevancy just twice – once with his March Madness picks, which were largely useless, the second time with his Senate predictions, which reportedly scared the bejeezus out of Democrats. But aside from these “events,” there is little reason to check in with FiveThirtyEight on a daily basis, unless you’re an adoring fan.

Now the truth is I haven’t been to FiveThirtyEight so I have no idea whether any of this is so or not.  I remember poblano as a pretty mild and even-tempered guy unless you started messing with his data.

As nearly as I can figure Herr Doktor Professor’s (who I do read every day) main criticism is that the Fox/Hedgehog analogy is inapt because poblano’s entire history and fame rests on the fact he’s a Hedgehog who endlessly repeats his one big truth which is that the data is what it is, something that’s completely in line with my interactions with him (not that there were many).

To disclose my personal bias, I recently wrote this-

I have my disagreements with…

Herr Doktor Professor and normally when I do I focus on other economists who understand the problem more clearly or are more forceful in their expression.  In today’s piece I don’t disagree with this-

The case for stimulus was that we were suffering from a huge shortfall in overall spending, and that the hit to the economy from the financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble was so severe that the Federal Reserve, which normally fights recessions by cutting short-term interest rates, couldn’t overcome this slump on its own. The idea, then, was to provide a temporary boost both by having the government directly spend more and by using tax cuts and public aid to boost family incomes, inducing more private spending. Opponents of stimulus argued vociferously that deficit spending would send interest rates skyrocketing, “crowding out” private spending. Proponents responded, however, that crowding out – a real issue when the economy is near full employment – wouldn’t happen in a deeply depressed economy, awash in excess capacity and excess savings. And stimulus supporters were right: far from soaring, interest rates fell to historic lows. … So why does everyone – or, to be more accurate, everyone except those who have seriously studied the issue – believe that the stimulus was a failure? Because the U.S. economy continued to perform poorly – not disastrously, but poorly – after the stimulus went into effect. … But that’s all water under the bridge. The important point is that U.S. fiscal policy went completely in the wrong direction after 2010. With the stimulus perceived as a failure, job creation almost disappeared from inside-the-Beltway discourse, replaced with obsessive concern over budget deficits. Government spending, which had been temporarily boosted both by the Recovery Act and by safety-net programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits, began falling, with public investment hit worst. And this anti-stimulus has destroyed millions of jobs. In other words, the overall narrative of the stimulus is tragic. A policy initiative that was good but not good enough ended up being seen as a failure, and set the stage for an immensely destructive wrong turn.

Indeed D.C. is still in the thrall of freshwater monitarists who have been constantly and consistently wrong for 40 years to the exclusion of all competing points of view and the only solutions considered by either party have such low multiples as to be almost entirely ineffective.

Fiscal policies work to increase demand and economic activity.  Monetary policies don’t work except to contain inflation.  Period.

Moreover Herr Doktor Professor argues that these conditions apply only at low interest rates (zero lower bound) and that money can be created only through the Federal Reserve action (demonstrably false, a Department store can create money), but this is not a discussion of MMT.

The Shrill One has consistently argued, against steadfast and vociferous criticism, for fiscal not monitary policy action and for actions with higher economic multipliers.  I don’t have his back, but I think he deserves a little credit for that.

We can educate him about modern banking and the money supply later.

In the mean time we could do (and have done) worse with our policy decisions than to bury Mason Jars of currency in abandoned coal mines and let companies bid for the rights to do that and pay people to do that and other companies bid for the rights to dig them up and pay people to do that too.

Or as Atrios suggests we could just give everyone some free money which has less impact on the environment.

The point is that “stimulative” action should be stimulative and not just encourage the coupon cutting class to sit on their stash and persue asset bubble after asset bubble.

The problem is inequality.

Now I strongly suspect Herr Doktor Professor and I have very serious disagreements “about modern banking and the money supply”, but he was quite polite to me when he signed my copy of his book and I told him I had studied Samuelson.  I leave it for you to decide if his attitude toward poblano has changed.

* Math Is Hard November 4, 2012, 3:08 pm

* Trivial Stakes November 6, 2012, 5:29 pm

* The Real Real America November 7, 2012, 2:08 am

* Power-Mad Conservatives November 7, 2012, 7:08 pm

* Deficit Hawks Down – Please November 8, 2012, 9:00 pm

* Unqualified November 10, 2012, 4:19 pm

* The 2012 Election, Reenacted November 21, 2012, 5:28 pm

* The Stiffs and the Players November 27, 2012, 7:23 am

* Notes on Epistemic Closure November 30, 2012, 7:30 pm

* The Non-Surge in Government Spending January 22, 2013, 5:00 pm

* Nate Silver, Superstar August 5, 2013, 6:40 am

* Sergeant Friday Was Not A Fox March 18, 2014, 7:55 am

* Further Thoughts on Hedgehogs and Foxes March 18, 2014, 4:15 pm

* Tarnished Silver March 23, 2014, 10:48 am

* Data as Slogan, Data as Substance March 26, 2014, 1:00 pm

I’m actually far more concerned that poblano’s science guy is a climate change denialist.

The Limits Of Conciliation Revisited

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

on March 27, 2014

In merciful brief, the president attempted to explain to the world why the self-destructive and mendacious decision of the United States to engage in aggressive war in Iraq in contravention of god alone knows how many provisions of international law was manifestly different — politically, legally, and morally — from Vladimir Putin’s land grabbing in and around Ukraine. Before anyone gave him a chance to be president, and throughout his unlikely rise to the White House, the president famously called the war in Iraq “the wrong war in the wrong place.” It was the first stark difference between the president and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and the clearest difference between the president and Senator John McCain in that year’s general election. It represented the cleanest break available to the country from the bloody stupdity of the previous administration. It was the seedbed for all the hope and all the change. The problem arose when the architects of the American fiasco were allowed to escape any real accounting for what they’d done in Iraq and to the United States. There was no public punishment, no public shaming, no indication from the new administration that it was ready to demand penance from the old. And yesterday, the president illustrated quite clearly the size of the corner in which his basic philosophy had painted him.

The case he made was preposterous.

…

He knows so much better than that. The case we made before the U.N. was a insult to the world, built on stovepiped intelligence, wishful thinking, and outright bullshit, and delivered by Colin Powell because, as Dick Cheney put it so eloquently, Powell could lose a couple of points off his poll numbers. He knows that the Bush people were going into Iraq even without the U.N. — which, of course, it eventually did. (Digby handled this with her usual aplomb.) He knows we made Iraq take its oil industry private, and he knows why. He knows who the profiteers are, and he knows into whose pockets the oil revenues descended. They are the people he inexcusably let off the hook by looking forward and not back, and by offering them and the country absolution without first demanding penance. (For all her other faults, Holy Mother Church at least gets the order right.) All of these things make up what he once called “the wrong war.”

…

He also knows very well why the riposte about America in Iraq to any attack on Russia in the Crimea has such a sting. It has a sting because it is almost entirely accurate. The destruction of American credibility in the areas of foreign affairs and international law that was wrought by our criminal occupation of Iraq will cost us decades to repair. The rest of the world, most of which declined to participate in our excellent adventure, doesn’t have to listen to our preaching on those subjects without snickering. The president yesterday sought to rouse the outrage of the world against Russia through what were essentially debating points. If he had demonstrated, early and loudly, that he was going hold the perpetrators accountable for the crimes they committed in the previous administration, that he was going to call them to account for their lies, their greed, and their basic disregard for democratic norms and for the standing of the United States in the world, if he had demanded penance before absolution, then, maybe, he could have given yesterday’s speech and not looked and sounded so damned bizarre. As it was, it was less a speech than it was an elegy, a sad eulogy for missed chances and lost, golden promises.

Another Financial Crisis Is Looming-Here’s Why and How It Will Play Out

By David Dayen, AlterNet

March 26, 2014

So are we on the precipice of another financial crisis, and what will it look like?

To be sure, danger still lurks in the mortgage market. The  latest get-rich-quick scheme, with private equity firms buying up foreclosed properties and renting them out, then selling bonds backed by the rental revenue streams (which look suspiciously like the bonds backed by mortgage payments that were a proximate cause of the last crisis), has the potential to blow up. And continued shenanigans with mortgage documents could lead to major headaches. A new court case against Wells Fargo uncovered a bombshell, a step-by-step  manual telling attorneys how they can fake foreclosure papers on demand; the fallout could throw into question the true ownership of millions of homes. Even subprime mortgages are in the midst of a comeback, because what could go wrong?

…

Recent actions from the Federal Reserve suggest that they are thinking about guarding against financial instability, amid concern that microscopic interest rates and expanded balance sheets have fed speculation. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently began looking into leveraged loans that have been packaged into bonds known as collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs. These CLOs are traded privately between buyers and sellers, so regulators cannot discern whether they hide risks, or whether the sellers cheat the buyers on prices. And some of them are “synthetic” CLOs – derivatives that are basically bets on whether the underlying loans will go up or down, without any stake in the loans themselves. Recently, commercial banks have attempted to get CLOs exempt from the Volcker rule, the prohibition on trading with depositor funds. CLO issuance has skyrocketed since this lobbying push, and it could be the next vessel Wall Street uses for their gambling activities.

But whether the SEC will actually enforce securities laws on CLOs, and drive them out of the shadows, remains to be seen. And other examinations of shady derivatives deals and price-fixing, if past history is a guide, will end with cost-of-doing-business settlements instead of true accountability. Meanwhile, we are told that the economy has little to fear from big bank failures. The Federal Reserve recently released results of its stress tests on the 30 biggest banks; it claims that 29 of them would hold up in the event of a deep recession. But the stress tests, designed in conjunction with the banks subjected to them, do not realistically measure the reality of a financial crisis, and if they did, the banks would all fail them.

Ultimately, we don’t yet know exactly where the next financial crisis will emerge. But we do know how the conditions for future crises get set. When law enforcement fails to prosecute Wall Street for prior misdeeds, they give no reason for them to curb their behavior.

…

Similarly, the size and power of the largest financial institutions, which has only grown since the crisis, virtually guarantees similar outcomes. Congress and the White House have not yet moved to chop these behemoths down to size; as a result, their sprawling corporate structures and inadequate risk controls make them almost unmanageable.

(Die Führerprinzip)

Obama’s New NSA Proposal and Democratic Partisan Hackery

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

25 Mar 2014, 9:49 AM EDT

I vividly recall the first time I realized just how mindlessly and uncritically supportive of President Obama many Democrats were willing to be. In April 2009, two federal courts, in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, ruled that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) required the Pentagon to disclose dozens of graphic photos it possessed showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration announced that, rather than contest or appeal those rulings, they would comply with the court orders and release all the photos. The ACLU praised that decision: “the fact that the Obama administration opted not to seek further review is a sign that it is committed to more transparency.”

This decision instantly turned into a major political controversy. Bush-era neocons, led by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, excoriated Obama, arguing that release of the photos would endanger American troops and depict the US in a negative light; Cheney expressly accused Obama of “siding with the terrorists” by acquiescing to the ruling. By contrast, Democrats defended Obama on the ground that the disclosures were necessary for transparency and the rule of law, and they attacked the neocons for wanting to corruptly hide evidence of America’s war crimes. I don’t think there was a single Democratic official, pundit, writer, or blogger who criticized Obama for that decision.

But then – just two weeks later – Obama completely reversed himself, announcing that he would do everything possible to block the court order and prevent it from taking effect. ABC News described Obama’s decision as “a complete 180.” More amazingly still, Obama adopted the exact arguments that Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney were making over the prior two weeks to attack him specifically and transparency generally: to justify his desire to suppress this evidence, Obama said that “the most direct consequence of releasing the [photos], I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.”

Now, obviously, the people who had been defending Obama’s original pro-transparency position (which included the ACLU, human rights groups, and civil liberties writers including me) changed course and criticized him. That’s what rational people, by definition, do: if a political official takes a position you agree with, then you support him, but when he does a 180-degree reversal and takes the exact position that you’ve been disagreeing with, then you oppose him. That’s just basic. Thus, those of us who originally defended Obama’s decision to release the photos turned into critics once he took the opposite position – the one we disagreed with all along – and announced that he would try to suppress the photos.

But that’s not what large numbers of Democrats did. Many of them first sided with Obama when his administration originally announced he’d release the photos. But then, with equal vigor, they also sided with Obama when – a mere two weeks later – he took the exact opposition position, the very anti-transparency view these Democrats had been attacking all along when voiced by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.

At least for me, back then, that was astonishing to watch. It’s one thing to strongly suspect that people are simply adopting whatever views their party’s leader takes. But this was like the perfect laboratory experiment to prove that: Obama literally took exact opposition positions in a heated debate within a three week period and many Democrats defended him when he was on one side of the debate and then again when he switched to the other side.

…

This new proposal would not, as some have tried to suggest, simply shift the program to telecoms. Telecoms – obviously – already have their customers’ phone records, and the key to any proposal is that it not expand the length of time they are required to retain those records (though telecoms only have their specific customers’ records, which means that – unlike the current NSA program – no one party would hold a comprehensive data base of all calls). As reported by Savage, Obama’s proposal does nothing to change how long telecoms keep these records (“the administration considered and rejected imposing a mandate on phone companies that they hold on to their customers’ calling records for a period longer than the 18 months that federal regulations already generally require”). That’s why, if enacted as he’s proposing it, Obama’s plan could actually end the NSA’s bulk collection program.

That puts hard-core Obama loyalists and pro-NSA Democrats – the ones that populate MSNBC – in an extremely difficult position. They have spent the last 10 months defending the NSA (i.e., defending Obama) by insisting that the NSA metadata program is both reasonable and necessary to Keep Us Safe™. But now Obama claims he wants to end that very same program. So what will they do?

If they had even an iota of integrity or intellectual honesty, they would instantly and aggressively condemn Obama. After all, he’s now claiming to want to end a program that they have been arguing for months is vital in Keeping Us Safe™. Wouldn’t every rational person, by definition, criticize a political leader who wants to abolish a program that they believe is necessary to stop terrorism and preserve national security?

But that’s not what will happen. After spending months praising the NSA for responsibly overseeing this critical program, they will now hail Obama for trying to end it. When he secretly bulk collects the calling data on all Americans, it shows he’s a pragmatic and strong leader who Keeps Us Safe™; when he tries to end the very same program, it shows he’s flexible and devoted to our civil liberties – just as he was right to release the torture photos and also right to suppress them. The Leader is right when he does X, and he’s equally right when he does Not X. That’s the defining attribute of the mindset of a partisan hack, an authoritarian, and the standard MSNBC host.

One use of the word chaff is thin strips of foil used to confuse radar.

The House’s NSA bill could allow more spying than ever. You call this reform?

Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Tuesday 25 March 2014 09.07 EDT

The House proposal, to be unveiled this morning by Reps Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, is the more worrying of the two. Rogers has been the NSA’s most ardent defender in Congress and has a long history of distorting the truth and practicing in outright fabrication, whether in touting his committee’s alleged “oversight” or by way of his attempts to impugn the motives of the once again vindicated whistleblower who started this whole reform debate, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

…

His new bill seems to have the goal of trading government bulk collection for even more NSA power to search Americans’ data while it sits in the hands of the phone companies.

While the full draft of the bill isn’t yet public, the Guardian has seen a copy, and its description does not inspire confidence. Under the Rogers and Ruppersberger proposal, slyly named the “End Bulk Collection Act”, the telephone companies would hold on to phone data. But the government could search data from those companies based on “reasonable articulable suspicion” that someone is an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power”. The NSA’s current phone records program is restricted to a reasonable articulable suspicion of terrorism.

A judge would reportedly not have to approve the collection beforehand, and the language suggests the government could obtain the phone records on citizens at least two “hops” away from the suspect, meaning if you talked to someone who talked to a suspect, your records could be searched by the NSA. Coupled with the expanded “foreign power” language, this kind of law coming out of Congress could, arguably, allow the NSA to analyze more data of innocent Americans than it could before.

President Obama’s reported proposal sounds more promising, though we have even fewer details than the Intelligence Committee proposal. The administration’s plan would supposedly end the collection of phone records by the NSA, without requiring a dangerous new data retention mandate for the phone companies, while restricting analysis to the current rules around terrorism and, importantly, still requiring a judge to sign off on each phone-record search made to the phone companies – under what the New York Times described as “a new kind of court order”.

This phone plan, apparently, represents Obama coming full-circle as his self-imposed deadline on NSA reform arrives Friday, when the court order authorizing bulk collection runs out. But there’s no indication that the president’s plan would stop other types of bulk collection – such as internet or financial records – and there’s still a big question about what the NSA could do with the data they receive on innocent people two “hops” away from a suspect.

…

Rep James Sensenbrenner’s bill, the USA Freedom Act, would make a much stronger and more comprehensive bill than either new proposal – at least for those interested in real NSA reform. Sensenbrenner, who originally wrote the Patriot Act provision that the NSA re-interpreted in secret, called the House Intelligence proposal “a convoluted bill that accepts the administration’s deliberate misinterpretations of the law”. Although, even his bill could be strengthened to ensure bulk collection of Americans’ records is no longer an option for the NSA, or any other government agency.

Obama to set out proposal to end NSA’s mass collection of phone data

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 26 March 2014 08.47 EDT

Under plans to be put forward by the Obama administration in the next few days, the National Security Agency would end the bulk collection of telephone records, and instead would need to seek a court order to search records held by the telephone companies.

A separate proposal, to be published on Tuesday by the leaders of the House intelligence committee, would not necessarily require a judge’s prior approval to access phone or email data.

Neither the White House nor the House intelligence committee proposal would require telecommunications firms to keep such records any longer than the current 18-month maximum, a significant shift away from the five years during which they are currently held by NSA.

…

The bill, titled the End Bulk Collection Act of 2014 and currently circulating on Capitol Hill, would prevent the government from acquiring “records of any electronic communication without the use of specific identifiers or selection terms.”

…

But the bill would allow the government to collect electronic communications records based on “reasonable articulable suspicion”, rather than probable cause or relevance to a terrorism investigation, from someone deemed to be an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power.”

A draft of the bill acquired by the Guardian proposes the acquisition of such phone or email data for up to a year and would not necessarily require prior approval by a judge. Authorisation of the collection would come jointly from the US attorney general and director of national intelligence.

…

The House intelligence committee proposal represents competition to a different bill introduced last fall by privacy advocates in the Senate and House judiciary committees known as the USA Freedom Act. That bill, which has 163 co-sponsors in both chambers, does not lower the legal standard for data collection on US persons, and would prohibit the NSA from searching for Americans’ identifying information in its foreign-oriented communications content databases, something the House intelligence bill would not.

…

But in a sign of the continuing contentiousness on Capitol Hill over changes to NSA surveillance, James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and co-author of the USA Freedom Act, preemptively rejected the House intelligence committee proposal, calling it “a convoluted bill that accepts the administration’s deliberate misinterpretations of the law.

“It limits, but does not end, bulk collection. Provisions included in the draft fall well short of the safeguards in the USA Freedom Act and do not strike the proper balance between privacy and security,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement late on Monday.

…

According to a New York Times report late on Monday, Obama will propose ending bulk phone data collection and replacing it with individualised orders for telecom firms to provide phone records up to two “hops” – or degrees of separation – from a phone number suspected of wrongdoing. The effort goes further towards the position favoured by privacy advocates than Obama proposed in January. Obama will request the Fisa court approve the current bulk collection program for a final 90-day renewal as he attempts to implement the new plan.

…

“Until Congress passes new authorizing legislation, the president has directed his administration to renew the current program, as modified substantially by the president in his January speech.”

Obama is cancelling the NSA dragnet. So why did all three branches sign off?

Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union, The Guardian

Tuesday 25 March 2014 10.09 EDT

To anyone who criticized the National Security Agency’s phone-records dragnet over the last nine months or so, the American intelligence community had this stock response: all three branches of government signed off on it.

The intelligence community was right, at least in a sense, but what it presented as a defense of the surveillance program was actually an indictment of our oversight system. What it presented as a defense of the program was actually a scandal.

…

(I)f the administration is right that the dragnet was unnecessary, we should ask how all three branches of government got it so wrong.

The answer, in a word, is secrecy. When intelligence officials proposed the dragnet, there was no one on the other side to explain that the government’s goals could be achieved with less-intrusive means. There was no one there to mention that the law the government was invoking couldn’t lawfully be used to collect call-records. There was no one there to mention that the bulk collection of call records was unconstitutional.

Instead, there was an entirely one-sided system in which government attorneys presented the supposed interests of the intelligence community in the most expansive way possible, and the judges of a poorly resourced court tried unsuccessfully, and sometimes halfheartedly, to imagine what ordinary citizens might say in response. Over time, and perhaps without entirely meaning to, the court developed a wholly new body of law, a body of law animated not by democratic principles but by the values of the intelligence community – collect, analyze, conceal.

The intelligence committees that were meant to serve as a further check on unwarranted government surveillance failed just as profoundly.

…

One can confidently predict that the administration’s proposal to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records will not go far enough. According to the Times report, the administration’s proposal will still have the NSA collecting records about people who are two steps removed from terrorism suspects, not just records about the terrorism suspects themselves. The administration doesn’t seem to be contemplating new limits on the agency’s authority to retain, analyze or disseminate the records it collects. And it isn’t proposing to end bulk collection of all records – just the bulk collection of phone records. And of course Congress must approve the proposal.

But, as David Cole has observed, this much can be said about the administration’s proposal already: the president is acknowledging that a surveillance program endorsed by all three branches of government, and in place for more than a decade, has not been able to survive public scrutiny. It’s an acknowledgement that the intelligence agencies, the surveillance court and the intelligence committees struck a balance behind closed doors that could not be defended in public.

Yesterday’s Results

Today’s Games-

Saturday’s Results below.

Transcipt

25 Years After Exxon Valdez, BP Was the Hidden Culprit

By Greg Palast, TruthDig

Posted on Mar 23, 2014

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit-British Petroleum, now BP-got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

And because BP’s willful negligence, prevarications and fraud in the Exxon Valdez spill cost the company nothing, its disdain for the law, for the environment and for the safety of its workers was repeated in the Gulf of Mexico with deadly consequences, resulting, two decades later, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

Hoyer: Congress should lay ‘groundwork’ for grand bargain budget deal

By Mike Lillis, The Hill

March 24, 2014, 06:00 am

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer will call on Congress Monday to lay the “groundwork” for a budget “grand bargain,” warning that a failure to do so risks upending the United State’s status as the world’s premier economic power.

…

“Short of reaching a big deal, we can still leverage opportunities before us to make progress toward the goal that proponents of a such a deal have long sought,” Hoyer will say Monday during a budget forum in Washington sponsored by Third Way, according to the prepared remarks. “If we’re going to show the world that America is serious about tackling our problems head-on, Congress will have several opportunities this year to work in a bipartisan way to fix structural problems in our budget.”

…

Congress is running low on must-past legislation that might provide a vehicle for some of the controversial budget changes of the order Hoyer is urging. And even Republican plans for sweeping fiscal reforms, such as Rep. Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) recently unveiled tax policy overhaul, have been largely ignored by GOP leaders, who don’t want to highlight party divisions in a high-stakes election year.

…

“It’s at this moment – when we don’t have a crisis breathing down our necks – that we have the best chance to lay the groundwork for the hard decisions we will need to make,” he will say.

Hoyer said a package of expiring tax benefits – known collectively as the “tax extenders” – offers Congress one such opportunity for fiscal reform, while a must-pass transportation bill provides the chance for new infrastructure investments.

The Most Important Point of All Was Ignored

by Joe Firestone, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on March 23, 2014

SS is not bankrupt now, it has $2.6 Trillion in Treasury IOUs in the SS “trust fund” accumulated because Treasury has used FICA collections to “pay for” other Federal spending since 1983, when the Government began to collect more from workers and employers than was paid out to beneficiaries. The accumulated IOUs, projected interest on them, and future FICA collections are projected as being enough to “cover” 100% of SS benefits until 2033, and then 75% of benefits thereafter. 100% of benefits could be “covered” from 2033 on, if the payroll tax cap on Social Security were to be removed.

…

Huntsman (and Hoyer) is conflating the SS “Trust Fund” running out of money in 2033, with SS running out of money. The first is happening as it was always planned to happen when the Reagan Administration and Congress agreed to raise FICA payments to almost double the amount previously paid, for the boomer generation to cover its retirement benefits; but the second depends on what Congress will do in the future to close the gap between current projected FICA revenues and projected benefits.

These two are different because the Government can do various things to close that gap. Huntsman mentions only cutting benefits or moving the SS retirement age to either 70 or even 75, so that enough will be left in the fund to close the revenue/benefits gap. But there are other ways of doing this easily; most notably removing the payroll tax cap so that the well-off, or those who are prospering, will pay the same share of their income into Social Security as most of the rest of us, and/or there can also be gradual small increases in the employee and employer contributions that will close the projected gaps indefinitely.Other points of less importance, and moral arguments, which from my point of view are among the most important, about the right to a decent secure retirement for the elderly are made, as well.

But, there is one point, the most important one of all, which is not made in all these “progressive” push back arguments against Abby Hunstman’s right wing Petersonian “Fix the Debt” rant. That is the point that there is no entitlement crisis and no emergency, and neither an increase in payroll taxes, nor robbing from “future generations” is necessary to close the projected gap after 2033 because Congress can pass legislation providing for annual automatic funding of expected costs for all SS and Medicare trust funds.

That’s done now for Supplementary Medical Insurance (Medicare Part B), and Prescription Drug Benefits (Medicare Part D), and the same practice using similar legislative language can be extended to the SS Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds. End of story. Once that is done, no gaps between SS revenue and benefits can be projected by institutions, such as CBO, under current law.

You may doubt this solution by pointing out that legislation like this just pushes off Huntsman’s Social Security solvency problem to the Treasury at large, rather than its being SS’s problem, but it doesn’t solve the real insolvency problem. Only it does, because the Government as a whole has no fiscal solvency problem, since it can always use its authority to create the reserves in the Treasury spending accounts to pay all its bills including all those exceeding its revenues.

The customary way of creating such reserves is to sell Treasury debt instruments, destroying reserves in the private sector, and getting the Fed to place an equal amount of reserves in its accounts. But, there is another way it can be done under current law, and still other ways open to Congress, if they want to pay all the SS benefits they would have guaranteed by the proposed change in the law that would solve this faux problem.

The way any gap appropriated by Congress can be closed under current law, is to use Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) to do it. As many of my readers know, I’ve explained how this would work in my e-book. But, the basic idea is that coin seigniorage can be used by the Treasury to require the Fed to use its reserve creation authority to place reserves in Treasury accounts, without Treasury engaging in any additional taxing or borrowing.

So, this capability coupled with Congress providing for annual automatic funding would end the Huntsman, Peterson, Bowles, Simpson, Ryan, (Hoyer,) and Obama revenue gap problems with Social Security and all other entitlements, for that matter, without these poor folks having to worry about taxing the rich, like them. And, if Congress doesn’t like that alternative way of placing reserves in Treasury’s accounts so it can spend Congressional appropriations, then it can always just go ahead and place the Fed within the Treasury Department, giving the Secretary the direct authority to order the Fed to fill its accounts with enough reserves to cover any revenue shortfalls, without either raising taxes or issuing more debt instruments.

So, these are the easy ways to end the faux crisis which won’t befall us anyway until 2033. Why won’t the “progressives” pushing back against Abby Huntsman mention solutions like these? Why do they, instead, always propose solutions that will raise taxes on the wealthy? Are they afraid to let the people know that the Government isn’t like a household and doesn’t have the same financial problems they have, just written large? Are they so insistent on solutions that will tax higher income and wealthy people, because they must kill the two birds of full employment and greater equality through taxing with a single stone?

I like the eliminate the Fed option.  Fed independence of Treasury is the merest chimera of a fiction anyway except to the extent that it is a creature of and toady to the Banks.

Some Facts About How NSA Stories Are Reported

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

23 Mar 2014, 6:41 AM EDT

Who created the uber-nationalistic standard that the only valid disclosures are ones involving the rights of Americans? Are we are all supposed to regard non-Americans as irrelevant? Is the NSA’s bulk, suspicionless surveillance of the private communications of hundreds of millions of human beings inherently proper simply because its victims aren’t American citizens? Even more extreme: are American journalists (and whistleblowers like Snowden) supposed to keep the public ignorant of anything and everything the US Government does to people provided those people aren’t blessed with American citizenship? Do you condemn whoever leaked the existence of top secret CIA black sites to Dana Priest on the ground that it didn’t involve violations of the rights of Americans? It makes sense that US government officials view the world this way: their function is to advance the self-perceived interests of the US government, but that’s not the role of actual journalists or whistleblowers.

The public interest from the Huawei story is obvious. It demonstrates that the NSA has been doing exactly that which the US Government has spent years vocally complaining is being done by China. While the US has been telling the world that the Chinese government is spying on them through backdoors in Huawei products, it’s actually the NSA that has been doing that. It also yet again gives the lie to the claim that the NSA does not engage in economic espionage.

It shows massive deceit and hypocrisy by US officials: with their own citizens and to the world. DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, often a government and NSA defender, understood this point perfectly, writing yesterday that “The Huawei revelations are devastating rebuttals to hypocritical U.S. complaints about Chinese penetration of U.S. networks, and also make USG protestations about not stealing intellectual property to help U.S. firms’ competitiveness seem like the self-serving hairsplitting that it is.”

Leak Shows NSA Breached Huawei’s Internal Servers, Grabbed Executive Emails And Source Code

by Tim Cushing, TechDirt

Mon, Mar 24th 2014 3:36am

As Karl Bode pointed out in an earlier story about the US government warning Americans away from Huawei network equipment, many of the Huawei spying allegations can be traced back to its main competitor, Cisco. Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel sees the NSA’s Huawei spying as little more than a way for it to protect some of its main collection points.

…

If there’s been no evidence uncovered that Huawei equipment is being deployed with Chinese government-friendly backdoors, then the NSA is engaged in self-serving corporate espionage, one that keeps Cisco — and consequently, the NSA — in wide circulation.

Even if you believe this is exactly the sort of thing our intelligence agencies should be doing, it’s hard to ignore the inherent hypocrisy of the government’s words and actions.

…

While the revelations that the NSA is surveilling a foreign company deemed untrustworthy by government officials are hardly surprising, the whole situation is tainted by the US government’s hardline against Huawei. Many accusations have surfaced over the last decade but have remained unproven, even as the US government has locked Huawei out of domestic contracts and persuaded other countries to seek different vendors. This isn’t passive monitoring being deployed to detect threats. This is an active invasion of a private company’s internal network in order to subvert its hardware and software, all of which will likely benefit its largest competitor, either directly or indirectly. The NSA isn’t Cisco’s personal army, but their mutual goals (widespread Cisco deployment) are so closely aligned, the agency might as well be.

How the NSA Deals with a Threat to Its Backbone Hegemony

By emptywheel

Published March 22, 2014

Now, for what it’s worth, the NYT story feels like a limited hangout – an attempt to pre-empt what Spiegel will say on Monday, and also include a bunch of details on NSA spying on legitimate Chinese targets so the chattering class can talk about how Snowden is a tool of Chinese and Russian spies. (Note, the NYT story relies on interviews with a “half dozen” current and former officials for much of the information on legitimate Chinese targets here, a point noted by approximately none of the people complaining.)

But the articles make it clear that 3 years after they started this targeted program, SHOTGIANT, and at least a year after they gained access to the emails of Huawei’s CEO and Chair, NSA still had no evidence that Huawei is just a tool of the People’s Liberation Army, as the US government had been claiming before and since. Perhaps they’ve found evidence in the interim, but they hadn’t as recently as 2010.

Nevertheless the NSA still managed to steal Huawei’s source code. Not just so it could more easily spy on people who exclusively use Huawei’s networks. But also, it seems clear, in an attempt to prevent Huawei from winning even more business away from Cisco.

I suspect we’ll learn far more on Monday. But for now, we know that even the White House got involved in an operation targeting a company that threatens our hegemony on telecom backbones.

The politics of hopelessness

E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post

Sunday, March 16, 7:52 PM

Obama and his party are in danger of allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the 2014 elections, just as they did four years ago. The fog of nasty and depressing advertising threatens to reduce the electorate to a hard core of older, conservative voters eager to hand the president a blistering defeat.

…

The most telling fact about the Democrats’ defeat in Florida’s special House election last week was the party’s failure to get its voters to the polls. This owed to many factors, but one of them is disaffection in Democratic ranks.

The recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll pegged Obama’s approval rating at 41?percent, his disapproval at 54 percent. But the most disturbing finding to him ought to have been the 20 percent disapproval he registered among Democrats. Winning back three-quarters of those discontented Democrats would, all by itself, bump up his overall approval rating by more than six points. It’s where he needs to start.

With more than two and a half years left in his term, Obama has already begun to convey a sense of resignation that his largest achievements (except, perhaps, for immigration reform) are behind him.

Thanks for nothing.

Like joanneleon, friend of the site.

Former NSA Official Thinks A Blog Containing Nothing But His Own Tweets Is ‘Defamatory’

by Tim Cushing, TechDirt

Tue, Mar 18th 2014 12:19pm

Many people have varying ideas as to what exactly composes defamatory content. Some mistake statements of opinion (“this product sucks”) for defamation. Some feel anything that doesn’t describe their products or services in glowing terms is defamatory. Some feel any sort of criticism is defamation, even if the criticism is based on known facts.

But John Schindler (whose strange foray into Wikileaks/Snowden conspiracy theories we’ve covered here previously), former NSA officer and holder of a PhD in history (just ask him!) has gone far beyond any of these misperceptions. According to him, things he actually said are defamatory if published by a third party.

I have no idea how someone as self-assuredly brilliant as John Schindler would make this error but here’s the chain of events. Schindler routinely berates anyone who questions his claims, calling them “stupid” and refusing to advance the argument past endless appeals to his own authority (the aforementioned PhD). Someone took notice of Schindler’s tactics and crafted a Tumblr blog containing nothing but screenshots of actual Schindler tweets.

Which proves that Professors with PhDs can be thin skinned pompous self important bullying assholes, QED.

Way to go joanneleon.