10 Monday AM Reads
Here is what I am starting off my week reading:
• A Little Inflation Can Be a Dangerous Thing (NYT)
• Rearranging the Deck Chairs (Tim Duy’s Fed Watch) see also Fed Ponders Jobs, Inflation Targets (WSJ)
• Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates Continue to Amaze with 25% YTD Gains (International Business Times)
• Effort on Home Loans Stalls (WSJ)
• A New York double feature:
……-Jobs and the G.O.P. (New Yorker)
……-Obama’s Economic Quagmire: (New York Mag)
• The real truth about Social Security (The Economist)
• Bartlett: Class Warfare, Republican Style (Social Science Research Network) see also Republicans Accuse Obama of Waging ‘Class Warfare’ With Millionaire Tax Plan (Fox News)
• Is In Time the intelligent sci-fi film we’ve been waiting for? (Guardian) see also What Would Humanity Be Like Without Aging? (Discover Magazine)
• The United States of Design (Fast Company)
• Adult GOP Governor Calls for a More Honest Debate (NYT) see also Republican front-runners Mitt Romney, Rick Perry come from different worlds (Washington Post)
What are you reading?
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September 19th, 2011 at 9:40 am
I would consider voting for Ron Paul (who has no chance) or Mitt Romney (whose a little too slippery and Bubba like).
I don’t understand why the GOP field, with such an eminently beatable sitting president, cannot produce an intelligent, credible, reality based candidate.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:10 am
Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America going down?
by Adam Gopnik September 12, 2011 (subscription required)
A good review and (mostly) gentle thrashing of the increasingly fashionable declinist rhetoric
ABSTRACT: A CRITIC AT LARGE about new declinist books by Ian Morris, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. Decline has the same fascination for historians that love has for lyric poets. The great summit of declinism was established in 1918, by the German historian Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West.” His thesis was that each culture-civilization has its own organic pattern of development, and none can escape its foreordained cycle of growth, blossoming, and wilting, any more than a single rose can. Spengler’s real superiority over this century’s declinists is that he isn’t writing public policy—he’s just watching the wheels go round and looking for patterns in the roll. What Spengler contributed to history was not pessimism but a form of relativism—the insistence that each culture should be respected as a whole and not viewed as a debased version of another.
In “Why the West Rules—For Now” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35), Stanford professor Ian Morris is out to settle Spengler’s questions using methods similar to the ones that Jared Diamond used in “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Morris believes that great leaders play no role in history and that new philosophical ideas are more or less fungible, invented to justify whatever was happening anyway. There are no great men; there are no big ideas. Above all, Morris insists that the great hinge in human history is turning now.
In his new TV-series-accompanying book, “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (Penguin Press; $35), the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson is always dashing and often quite brilliant. Ferguson is determined to revive Max Weber’s old idea that a “Protestant ethic” was behind the great Western leap forward, and links the decline of the West to the decline of Protestant faith. His recurrent thesis is that everything was going splendidly with the West until about five years ago, when bad financial policies and lax immigration rules brought unwelcome debt and dubious Muslims into the heart of Europe. A writer crafting history on the grand scale should keep the news cycle a little at bay.
In “That Used to Be Us” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $28), Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum accept that the post-9/11 obsession with the Islamic threat and the War on Terror was a catastrophic national distraction. “Twenty-five years from now the war we undertook against al-Qaeda won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math,” the authors declare. Friedman and Mandelbaum’s book is marked by a kind of tactical disingenuousness. Not only do they propose, as a way to arrest the decline, a third party, with no clear policies, programs, popular constituency, or potential leaders; they also present every problem as one confronted by a uniform “we.” Friedman and Mandelbaum want their countrymen to face the future without first facing the facts about their countrymen: this is the country that a lot of “us” want.
NB: The GOP cannot nominate a viable candidate because the extremists it relies upon as shock troops have decided they’ve earned a place at the table.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:11 am
BR, Michael Bloomberg perhaps? Clearly the far/religious right would bolt but to where? And of course you are correct, Obama is beatable. His far left has bolted on principle and the more pragmatic left are rightfully unimpressed.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:23 am
RW’s last statement is what is happening. I have (had?) Republican friends where e-mail communications had to be stopped because they are head-banging, EXTREME right neo-cons who are an example of the problem in the party and the only thing they knew how to send were political rants. There somehow has to be an electable compromise-driven, moderate out there who can get this country back on track……..well, maybe not!?!? The deficit circus is just an example of the stupidity this country has become mired in because of the extremists.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:24 am
I’m always surprised that Paul’s name comes up but Kucinich’s doesn’t. They are similar in their political leanings (Constitutional integrity), but Kucinich doesn’t have the disconnect from reality (specifically, pandering to the “religious”), required of a Republican candidate such as Paul.
I’m also surprised, BR, that you actually ask such a question. The reason the GOP can’t produce a “intelligent, credible, reality based candidate,” is because they are rabidly against all of those things. Intelligence, credibility, and acknowledgement of reality are disdained in what currently passes for “conservative” ideology.
Think about it. Could the party that elevates the insanity and/or hypocrisy and/or stupidity exhibited by its leaders (Perry, Bachmann, Cantor, McConnell, Ryan, Gohmert, Wilson, Palin, etc.), that openly and blatantly foisted such “issues” as Teri Schiavo, birtherism, Islamophobia, trickle down, death panels for grandma (then immediately seeking to destroy SS and medicare, and a long list of other falsehoods), and which actually placed us in the dire straits in which we find ourselves, EVER field a rational candidate?
When your choice is the lesser of two evils, choosing the greater of the two is unwise, to put it politely.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:25 am
The better graphic would be a depiction of a WWE wrestling match.
You have a “good guy”, a “bad guy” and an announcer participating in a staged production designed to produce action and drama.
But they all work for the same guy – Vince McMahan.
Our political system is the same model. Republicans or Democrats, rightwing or leftwing, makes no difference. At the end of the day, they work for the same people and produce the same policies. We used to laugh at the idiots in the Soviet Union who voted in “elections” with selected candidates.
What’s the difference here? The endless wars, off shoring of jobs, open borders, financial fraud, and increasing income inequality will continue no matter who “wins” the election
September 19th, 2011 at 10:25 am
Spiegel has a great new interview with German Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann. In it he defends his position for allowing the market to punish countries who fail to properly handle fiscal policy. I think this is a must-read for those following the Greek crisis as Weidmann is a huge player. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,787064,00.html
September 19th, 2011 at 10:27 am
I though Obama had that part of the spectrum sewn up.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:29 am
wally:
Exactly.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:30 am
@barry
Ron Paul is a joke–he calls himself a libertarian, but the list of “buts” is getting longer every day. “I’m a libertarian…but I think the gov’t should ban abortion.” “I’m a libertarian…but I let my own good friend and 2008 campaign manager die due to lack of health insurance, pushing hundreds of thousands of $$ in medical bills on everyone else…” etc…
And the reason a moderate can’t win the Republican nomination is that the Republican Party drove all of its moderates out of the party, branding them “RINOs” and traitors.
Where are the Republican moderates that you’d be more interested in supporting?
Why, they’re Democrats now!
Even as recently as 20 years ago, Obama would not have been a conservative Democrat. He would have been a moderate Republican. The conservative Democratic wing *IS* the old moderate Republican wing–The Ben Nelsons, the Evan Bayhs, the Harry Reids of the world.
So if you want a moderate Republican, if you can’t stand extremist Republicans, or if you’re a liberal who understands that some pie is better than no pie at all, you have no choice…vote for Obama.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:32 am
Summers in the FT comparing Euro to Vietnam – . http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5eaa83dc-dfca-11e0-b1db-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1YPPjVhox
————-
Daniel Ellsberg drew out the lesson regarding the Vietnam war that came out of the 8,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, which he had secretly copied a few years earlier. It was simply this: policymakers acted without illusion. At every juncture they made the minimum commitments necessary to avoid imminent disaster – offering optimistic rhetoric, but never taking the steps that even they believed could offer the prospect of decisive victory. They were tragically caught in a kind of no-man’s-land – unable to reverse a course to which they had committed so much, but also unable to generate the political will to take forward steps that gave any realistic prospect of success.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:41 am
BTW:
Romney? Not to pick on Mormons, as they seem to be fairly prosperous and are fairly good citizens with strong family units, but they recently taught that blacks would only be in (their version of) heaven as servants (until they needed some for their university football team), and they wear under garments they believe will protect them from evil (maybe Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could be revived by putting America to work knitting a set of long johns big enough to protect the US from missile attack). If your mind can accept these kinds of ideas as being fundamentally true, I don’t want you running the show, no matter how shiny and clean your public persona (same goes for all of the other religious BS any candidate would bring into the WH).
September 19th, 2011 at 10:44 am
Does Anyone Know the True Cost of EV Batteries? (Not Really)
“….If you want to start an argument about electric vehicles (EVs), the best way to do it is to mention battery cost.
The problem is, there’s no single price for electric car batteries. You can’t look it up on the Web or point your finger at a number in a catalogue. And that, of course, leaves the door open for some lively arguments.
Two weeks ago, three industry experts told us that they estimate today’s production EV battery costs to be between $800 and $1,000/kWh. When we printed those numbers, EV enthusiasts and backyard EV converters were quick to respond. “Lithium batteries today cost around $1 per Ah, so a 24 kWh pack like the Leaf equals approximately $7K if you buy cells as a private person,” wrote one commenter on a Design News blog last week. Assuming that the commenter was talking about a typical 3.5V EV battery, it would mean that the cost falls in the neighborhood of $285/kWh….”
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1366&doc_id=233282
September 19th, 2011 at 10:48 am
This election cycle really illustrates how the Left perpetrates political fraud just as Right does.
Here we essentially have two liberal progressive GOP candidates — one guy who INVENTED Obamacare and the other guy who supported Hillarycare and Al Gore, and sure enough you have all these left wing outlets trying to paint them as “right wing small government lunatic nut jobs”. The track record says manifestly that they are not.
Ron Paul is the ONLY non-progressive candidate out there. Not only do we not have a far right we don’t even have a moderate right — unless you define the right as simply a group of people that wants to wage war and take away civil liberties, which describes the left today just as well.
Both the Republicans and Democrats are big government progressives. It’s just that the GOP wants it more in terms of military and corporate monopoly (which in practice is the same thing as public monopoly).
The republican candidates today are simply actors willing to switch back and forth between roles as special interests dictate while putting on an act that convinces naive or disinterested political factions that they actually represent their views.
To portray them as “far right” is to perpetrate a fraud that disenfranchises the US voter.
In the US we have one “Special Interest Totalitarian Party”.
It gets stronger and stronger every year.
September 19th, 2011 at 10:49 am
REAGAN CENTENNIAL NATIONAL FOOTBALL COIN TOSS
http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_cointoss.html
They should flip the coin 241 times. Once for every Marine who died, prior to Reagan’s Retreat there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/opinion/23gaddo.html
They could also get an eight-sided conin. once for each year he raised taxes on working people.
http://old.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett200310290853.asp
Instead of creating this Reagan myth, the GOP needs to get to work to fix their lowest rated Congress in history,
September 19th, 2011 at 10:50 am
yo, frankie, have any links for that?
you’re great at making s*** up, it’s little wonder you’re such a strong proponent of the Fantasy that is the “Left-Right” ‘Political Spectrum’..
you shouldn’t have missed..
John Adamson Says: September 19th, 2011 at 10:25 am
The better graphic would be a depiction of a WWE wrestling match.
You have a “good guy”, a “bad guy” and an announcer participating in a staged production designed to produce action and drama.
But they all work for the same guy – Vince McMahon.
Our political system is the same model. Republicans or Democrats, rightwing or leftwing, makes no difference. At the end of the day, they work for the same people and produce the same policies. We used to laugh at the idiots in the Soviet Union who voted in “elections” with selected candidates.
What’s the difference here? The endless wars, off shoring of jobs, open borders, financial fraud, and increasing income inequality will continue no matter who “wins” the election
–above
September 19th, 2011 at 10:56 am
I think Mister Adamson just about nailed it…I’ll vote for you BR or Petey.
September 19th, 2011 at 11:12 am
BR, you would seriously consider a candidate who wants to eliminate all Federal regulation on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional. Eliminate Sarbanes/Oxley, Dodd/Frank, do away with the SEC (hey, it was not in the Constitution that we should regulate securities markets), do away with bank regulation (you think we can let the private markets regulate themselves). Get a grip!!! I know you are frustrated, but Ron Paul??? The only useful thing he would do is get rid of the wasteful war on drugs which would free up significant budget resources that are presently being wasted.
September 19th, 2011 at 11:41 am
br,
the same thought i had in 2004 about why the dems couldn’t produce a candidate with common sense, credibility, intelligence, and leadership skills. bush was so eminently beatable that you would have thought it just took a pulse. and all that came out of the primary process was his highness john kerry.
super-anon is right. the ‘special interest totalitarians’ seem to be outsmarting everyone. obama is a lock in 2012.
September 19th, 2011 at 11:42 am
Will SPY ever break the jinx with Crude
http://discussions.ft.com/longroom/tables/equity-strategy/crude-and-sandp-love-relationship-crude-is-going-to-take-down-sandp
September 19th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Barry, with your stance on Wall Street Fraud,
I don’t see how you can vote for Any Republican.
As soon as another gets elected there goes SEC oversight, and FRAUD becomes legal.
Then, a Republican appointed FED chairman will rubber stamp any Inflation Rate the President/VP want’s just like Greenspan under Bush.
If you want a Functioning Economy you need to vote Democrat.
September 19th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
JimRino:
The Dems are the lesser of 2 evils, but only barely (as they are far right of center, nowadays).
We need to chase all of the professional politicians away (including the whackadoodle Teabaggers, who are about as “grassroots” as Fred Thompson driving around in his old red pickup truck).
September 19th, 2011 at 12:28 pm
WRT the Political Spectrum cartoon: As Wally and others point out, that empty space representing Center-Right is occupied by Obama, a number of Democrats including some Blue Dogs who are nearly far right and of course the few remaining moderate Republicans. There is no ideological room for a third party on that spectrum even if it could obtain sufficient funding to compete which, under the current system, it probably couldn’t.
If you add another spectrum of something like authoritarian-libertarian/anarchist at right angles to create a political space you get a four-celled box with some room to spare but, once again, it is not clear a new party could be successfully formed to claim any space under the current system where money is (nearly) as good as a vote and corporate entities with a great deal of money have managed to obtain (nearly) the status of citizens.
The rapidity with which the Tea Party movement, a movement with anarchic as well as revanchist tendencies, was conscripted into service by a conservative/authoritarian Republican party being a case in point. There was a price to pay for that as I’ve noted and it is not clear if a Republican candidate can be nominated that will satisfy the radicals and also be successful in a national election. More to the point perhaps, it is not clear an overt split between authoritarian and libertarian elements in the party in the party can be avoided regardless.
September 19th, 2011 at 12:56 pm
So if we ask them to pay at least the same % tax on their income as we do; then it is class warfare. But when they rob us of our hard earned social security and Medicare benefits (to pay for continuing their tax cuts); it’s not? Amazing that anybody who is not a millionaire can vote for these clowns.
http://thehill.com/video/house/182271-rep-ryan-class-warfare-is-rotten-economics
September 19th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Barry is linking to the class warfare meme? wow he has lost it.
Income distribution at a post depression high. Tax rates on the the top .01% and post recession low. (cap gain @15%)! I thought this was a site that focused on “empiricism”
Yeah there has been a class war alright and Paul Ryan side has won going away!
September 19th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
should read “post depression low of 15%”
September 19th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I love reading the comments. Esp Petey. You rock.
Regarding politics I recommend everyone re-read the Mike Logren article:
http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779
I expect Suskind book will be terminally depressing for O fans:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/books/ron-suskinds-confidence-men-focuses-on-obama-review.html?scp=1&sq=suskind&st=cse
Ron Paul is great fun. Crazy as a loon, but wants to legalize marijuana and I’m ok with that.
He won the CA straw poll by huge margin but you gotta pay to play and someone bought $26k of tickets for Paul:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/09/ron-paul-supporter-cuts-big-ch.html
I’ve got a Ron Paul bumper sticker on the right side and a Obama/Biden bumper sticker of the left side of my pickup truck. I’d vote for Bloomberg. Maybe Huntsman but I do worry about the magic underpants.
September 19th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
petey, wally:
Correct. Obama and most of the Democratic party already occupy the center-right segment in that drawing. An accurate drawing of the American political spectrum — as defined by the position of political office holders, not voter populations, and in the broader context of Western democracies — would look more like:
“Vaguely remember FDR” (10%), aka ‘”mildly left of center”
“Corporate Democrats (40%), aka “center right” (Obamaland)
“Old fashioned country-club conservatives” (%10) (overlapping, and even somewhat left of Obama)
“Far right, pandering to astroturfed Tea Party, Christianist theocrats” (40%)
YMMV. The basic problem with politics in this county is that both parties are trying to represent different tribes within the top 0.1% of our citizens (by wealth) and that group has become militantly “Galtian”. Very short-sighted focus on “not gonna pay no goddam taxes nohow” rather than any kind of paternalistic (old fashioned conservative) focus on a well-functioning, orderly society. Our contemporary rich aren’t even as smart as the Goldman-Sachs motto “long-term greedy”.
Those who perceive Obama as “left” are mostly sucking the PR exhaust of the Republican party. He’s well to the right of Richard Nixon on everything but gay rights (where he’s *still* to the right of the voting public).
Most of our real problems are simply “off the table” right now. If our problems were at home plate, the Republicans are deep in right field kicking up dirt in the warning track, and the Dems are playing left field very shallow and towards center. Maybe even short-stop. Everybody in politics is playing defense and nobody willing to step up to the plate gets a hearing.
September 19th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
And what’s wrong with some “class warfare”? I think this is the only way to get the extremists out of the way so that some more moderate ideas can get implemented and the middle class considered in this country.
September 19th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
The big problem at the moment for the United States is that there is no confidence in our leadership. Seriously no one knows what our wacked out special interest driven government is going to do. Dow we want the great give away our future to the generational wealthy (The rich) or to generational lazy (the unions). It seems like the real question to be answered at the end of the day should be how much do we want to give away?
Are we going to continue to increase government spending as % of GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html
What is the right % of GDP to collect as taxes? http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?chart=F0-fed_F0-state_F0-local&year=1902_2015&units=p and how should the money be used?
I agree there a gaping hole in the political middle and I am pretty sure that the political scientist have a good idea what to do to it. My personal opinion is that the best thing for the United States is to take as much power away special interest oriented mother fuckers as we can! That would really give the hard working American a chance.
September 19th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Give away to unions…? Nice try, unions have been decreasing as a % of the workforce for 30 years! They are a spent force.
% of GDP as govt spending going up? Wars, boomers retiring and a lesser depression will cause those #s to rise.
Oligrachs and lobbyists..CORRECT!
September 19th, 2011 at 8:09 pm
That donkey should stand over center left, if not center.
September 19th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
@Lesly, agreed, there is no “Left” of any consequence much less power remaining in the US of A: Democrats are (roughly) at political center, Republicans are (roughly) right, eo ipso, all compromises will be right of center on that spectrum at a minimum and, given Democratic Party fecklessness, probably closer to far right. The road to fascism is a slippery one but surprisingly easy for a nation to travel when times are hard.
September 19th, 2011 at 9:37 pm
As I now know some people in “unions”, I’d like to say, that like Reagan’s Welfare Queen, the “lazy” union member is in the minority. Most work hard, because if you don’t, the contractor will go non-union or under the table as much as possible.
Florida drug tested their welfare recipients recently, only 2% tested positive.
The “right” plants propaganda to divide and conquer working people to vote against their own interests.
September 19th, 2011 at 9:39 pm
From your book, and being anti-Fraud, I got the impression, Barry, that you were a Democrat.
Your ability to see reality and ignore the right wing propaganda, makes you a Democrat.
I’d welcome you’re run on the scary “Left”.
Any man who stands up for America to be run by Honest Business, is a Democrat these days.
September 20th, 2011 at 2:16 am
All the bickering back and forth among the electorate is what i think both sides want. If we are to busy fighting amongst ourselves then we will not be focused on the issues. Although I lean to the fiscal conservative side and really am also socially liberal I can see that we need to have more compromise on BOTH sides so we can get on with things and stop being so polarized. When the average american sees all the antics and posturing in the capitol it causes uncertainty and lack of confidence which makes them want to not go spend/consume and engenders some fear in those whose jobs are in limbo so to speak. Hopefully clearer heads will prevail and the extremism on both sides of the aisle will go away for the betterment of our shared country.
September 20th, 2011 at 9:19 am
“the extremism on both sides of the aisle”
It has been a one way street for 32 years…only 20 of which I thought made sense!