August 2011 archive

An Annual Reminder.

Echo… echo… echo… Pinch hitting for Pedro Borbon… Manny Mota… Mota… Mota…

You may remember my brother the activist.  I keep trying to get him to post, but he’s shy and busy.  He sent me this yesterday and I thought I’d share it with you.

I need to add that he’s a great admirer of James Carville’s political savvy (though not his policies) and one story he likes to tell is how during the height of Monica-gate Carville was on one of the Talking Head shows and made a point about how important it is to stay on message.  Carville then proceeded to demonstrate his gift by working the phrase “Cigarette Lawyer Ken Starr” 27 times into the next 30 seconds.- ek

The date – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 needs to be as well known to Joe and Jane American as September 11, 2001.

Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 PDB

Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct foreign terrorist attacks on the U.S. Bin Ladin implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted] service.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted] service at the same that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

So Vice President Dick, tell me again how the REPUBLICANS WILL KEEP US SAFE?

So Senator McSame, tell me again how invading and occupying IRAQ has helped the U.S. hunt down BIN LADEN?

I’m printing my own bumper stickers filled with images from 9-11 and this text-

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center”- Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor

“All right. You’ve covered your ass now.”- George W. Bush

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge

August 6 is the 218th day of the year (219th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 147 days remaining until the end of the year.

I wrote this one year ago. Today is the 10th Anniversary of George W. Bush dismissing the warning of an imminent terrorist attack. Osama bin Laden may be dead but his legacy continues with the US continued “war on terror”

On this day there have been many significant events. Certainly, one of the most memorable is that this is the anniversary of dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It is also the anniversary of President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act.

Recent significant history that has been over looked by my usual sources is this: The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing better known as the August 6th PDB. It was handed to President George W. Bush, who was on one of his many vacations to his home in Crawford, TX, by Harriet Miers, who was the President’s WH Council, and promptly ignored. Whether Bush ignored the warning that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the US because he was told to let it happen or, the darker theory, that the government made it happen will never be known, at least not in the lifetime of those reading this. Whatever Bush’s motive was, it set off a series of events in this country that has affected us all and divided us like no other incident since the Civil War. The US has now been in Afghanistan for almost 9 years 10 years and Iraq for over seven eight and, despite the Democrats holding the White House and the majority in both houses of Congress, there is no end in site to those two wars. Despite campaign promises to restore the rule of law and the Constitution, the Obama administration has continued the most heinous of the Bush policies that are violations of not just US law but International Law, ratified treaties and agreements. A sad anniversary, indeed.

I am very sorry, folks, but I was in a hurry to finish up the piece and there was a horrible traffic tie up before I could get home.  I got home late, and was finishing up the 21st song out of 24 when I fat fingered my keyboard, wiping out almost everything.

That teaches me, regardless of the venue, to save after EVERY paragraph.  It would not have made any difference if I had been writing in Word, or Works, or at any blog site.  If one does not save work, it gets lost.  However, there is a bit of a workaround.

Load up Lazarus for Firefox and it can help.  It is not perfect, but if I had been using it, I would lost only the two or three paragraphs before my keyboard mistake.  I still do not know what I did, but I now save after EVERY paragraph!  I use it now, although I am not sure how well it works.

It is disheartening to lose so much work, but there is a silver lining to that black cloud.  Next week the piece will be much better, because I had time to think about it and improve it.

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by: mishima
• Cartnoon by: ek hornbeck
• Countdown with Keith Olbermann by: TheMomCat

Featured Essays for August 5, 2011-

• What’s Hampering Jobless Veterans by: jimstaro
• Shrill? Part Deux. by: ek hornbeck
• Hate Crime sentencing? Not so much. by: Robyn
• Random Japan by: mishima

DocuDharma

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by: mishima
• Muse in the Morning by: Robyn
• Cartnoon by: ek hornbeck
• Countdown with Keith Olbermann by: TheMomCat

Featured Essays for August 5, 2011-

• What’s Hampering Jobless Veterans by: jimstaro
• Shrill? Part Deux. by: ek hornbeck
• Hate Crime sentencing? Not so much. by: Robyn
• Network images of GLBT people, 2010-2011 by: Robyn
• Random Japan by: mishima

DocuDharma

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

The Story So Far (imagine a Star Wars Scroll):

Under normal conditions, the primary political parties are representatives of distinct interest groups within the status quo. Democracy, after all, is allowing the citizens of the country to choose winners and losers among the elite, rather than having that choice performed by military might, accident of birth, or etc.

For most of its political history to the late 1800’s, the US was either dominated by one or two political parties. The (extra-constitutional) winner take all electoral college system and the winner take all nature of a state legislature selecting the state’s Senator strongly pushed in that direction.

And with business interests always falling on distinct sides of important issues of the day, that meant that political interests have long been distributed among the rival claimants for power or the natural party of government and natural party of (regional) opposition.

But alongside this was a political institution that allowed third parties to emerge and compete for influence ~ and indeed, the Great Re-Alignment from the Democrats and the Whigs to the Republicans and the Democrats occured in part thanks to the existence of third parties that were available to merge with the Anti-Slavery Whigs once they had been purged from the Whig Party. So in the late 1800’s …

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Eurozone asks markets for ‘weeks’ of breathing space

By Claire Rosemberg, AFP

7 hrs ago

One  of the signs of insanity is repeating the same mistake in hopes of a different outcome. Seventy five years ago, the congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt did exactly the same thing that congress and President Barack Obama did on Wednesday with the same results.

FDR’s Recession

By the spring of 1937, production, profits, and wages had regained their 1929 levels. Unemployment remained high, but it was considerably lower than the 25% rate seen in 1933. In June 1937, some of Roosevelt’s advisors urged spending cuts to balance the budget. WPA rolls were drastically cut and PWA projects were slowed to a standstill. The American economy took a sharp downturn in mid-1937, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production declined almost 30 per cent and production of durable goods fell even faster.

Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising from 5 million to more than 12 million in early 1938. Manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak and was back to 1934 levels. Producers reduced their expenditures on durable goods, and inventories declined, but personal income was only 15% lower than it had been at the peak in 1937. In most sectors, hourly earnings continued to rise throughout the recession, which partly compensated for the reduction in the number of hours worked. As unemployment rose, consumers’ expenditures declined, leading to further cutbacks in production.

The Roosevelt Administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the depression, and appointing Thurman Arnold in the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice to act, but Arnold was not effective. In February 1938, Congress passed a new AAA bill which authorized crop loans, crop insurance against natural disasters, and large subsidies to farmers who cut back production. On April 2, Roosevelt sent a new large-scale spending program to Congress, and received $3.75 billion which was split among PWA, WPA, and various relief agencies. Other appropriations raised the total to $5 billion in the spring of 1938, after which the economy recovered.

The stock market plummeted over 500 points yesterday wiping out any gains from the recovery since 2008. The market is continuing to fluctuate after rather weak jobs report. While the U-3 dropped to 9.1%, it was due mostly to workers who are no longer seeking employment or are now in the ranks of the under-employed and jobs creation was weak. So after the debt ceiling deal and the worsening European banks situation, investors lacked confidence that the US could increase productivity.

But the White House and Congress insist on sticking to their story that if they hadn’t given the hostage takers all they wanted with no jobs stimulus or revenue increases, they wouldn’t have gotten the debt deal and the markets would have crashed. As John Nichols said in The Nation, “Unfortunately, it was wrong. Not just morally wrong. Not just politically wrong. Not just economically wrong. It was wrong with regard to the cherished markets.”

As I assemble this the DOW is once again down over 200 points and the question is whether it will remain above 11,000 at the close.

Rates of Wrath

August 4, 2011, 11:41 am

The US 10-year bond rate is now down to 2.5%. So much for those bond vigilantes. What this rate is saying is that markets are pricing in terrible economic performance, quite possibly a double dip. And it also says that Washington’s deficit obsession has been utterly, totally wrong-headed.

Meanwhile, Italy’s spread against German bonds is soaring even further. What are markets pricing in here? Default as a real possibility; maybe even euro breakup. The latter certainly sounds a lot more plausible now than it did a few months ago.

The Wrong Worries

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: August 4, 2011

Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2.

…

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back.

…

Those plunging interest rates and stock prices say that the markets aren’t worried about either U.S. solvency or inflation. They’re worried about U.S. lack of growth. And they’re right, even if on Wednesday the White House press secretary chose, inexplicably, to declare that there’s no threat of a double-dip recession.

…

The point is that it’s now time – long past time – to get serious about the real crisis the economy faces. The Fed needs to stop making excuses, while the president needs to come up with real job-creation proposals.

…

This might or might not work. But we already know what isn’t working: the economic policy of the past two years – and the millions of Americans who should have jobs, but don’t.

You know, it’s just a stinking Nobel Prize in Economics.  This guy knows nothing.

Pulling Rank

August 5, 2011, 9:12 am

I’ll pass the specific arguments by, and note another feature of this “debate” that has struck me a lot during recent economic controversies: the way Williamson tries to settle the argument by pulling rank, portraying Quiggin as some kind of obscure and unqualified guy.

It’s funny in this case, because Quiggin is in fact a prominent economist, Williamson not so much. But even if this weren’t true, that’s no way to argue. Which is why it has been so sad to see how common this kind of argument has been in recent years.

I don’t have time right now to track down all the examples, but if you look at how many freshwater macroeconomists have responded to Keynesian arguments in this crisis, you find over and over again that they resort to assertions of privilege – basically, I am a famous macroeconomic expert and you aren’t – rather than really addressing the issues. And this is so ingrained a response, apparently, that they use it in situations where it’s truly ridiculous: Lucas accusing Christy Romer of not understanding basic macro, then demonstrating that he doesn’t understand Ricardian equivalence; Barro belittling the credentials of yours truly, just after forgetting that there was rationing and investment controls during World War II.