Tag: ek Politics

Humans rarely consider themselves irrational and beliefs that seem wildly implausible on their face often make perfect sense if you accept the premises of the argument.  The ideology of the Islamic State while seemingly barbaric actually has a lot in common with the more theocratic varieties of Christianity.  After all, any individual’s condition in the mundane world is trivial and transitory compared to the eternal glory and reward the faithful will receive before the throne of [insert preferred deity here].  The New York Times has an interesting piece-

ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, The New York Times

SEPT. 24, 2014

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.

This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking that forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda and it has led to a fundamentally different view of violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful.

…

All of the most influential jihadist theorists are criticizing the Islamic State as deviant, calling its self-proclaimed caliphate null and void, and, increasingly, slamming its leaders as bloodthirsty heretics for beheading journalists and aid workers.

The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West.

…

The Islamic State’s founder, Mr. Baghdadi, grafted two elements onto his Wahhabi foundations borrowed from the broader, 20th century Islamist movements that began with the Muslim Brotherhood and ultimately produced Al Qaeda. Where Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers, Mr. Baghdadi adopted the call to political action against foreign domination of the Arab world that has animated the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other 20th century Islamist movements.

Mr. Baghdadi also borrowed the idea of a restored caliphate. Where Wahhabism first flourished alongside the Ottomon Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded shortly after that caliphate’s dissolution, in 1924 – an event seen across the world as a marker of Western ascent and Eastern decline. The movement’s founders took up the call for a revived caliphate as a goal of its broader anti-Western project.

…

Adhering to Wahhabi literalism, the Islamic State disdains other Islamists who reason by analogy to adapt to changing context – including the Muslim Brotherhood; its controversial midcentury thinker Sayed Qutb; and the contemporary militants his writing later inspired, such as Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Islamic State ideologues often deem anyone who supports an elected or secular government to be an unbeliever, even Islamists, and subject to execution by beheading.

…

Some experts note that Saudi clerics lagged long after other Muslim scholars in formally denouncing the Islamic State, and at one point even the king publicly urged them to speak out more clearly. “There is a certain mutedness in the Saudi religious establishment, which indicates it is not a slam dunk to condemn ISIS,” Professor Haykel said.

I know this is a drum I keep banging, but I think that a visceral understanding of this issue is critical to effective political action.

We are governed by morons.

I mean no disrespect to the mentally challenged, moron is a clinical term for people who (assuming they are over 18 years of age which is the cap in these calculations) function with the intellegence of children between 9 and 15.  They are perfectly capable of working under supervised conditions.

The problem is that like a pack of spoiled brats indulged in every fantastic whim and self-indulgent desire by parents who wish for nothing so much as to ignore them and evade responsibility for their disruptive, destructive, and bullying behavior, there is no effective supervision.

Just as you would not trust a 9 year old to make nutritious and wholesome dietary choices (Broccoli yuck!  Oooh, candy!) or a 15 year old behind the wheel of a 4,000 pound death machine, you can’t expect people with limited capabilities like this to behave in a co-operative and productive way without regulation and discipline.

It is our job as voters, and that of our elected representatives as our surrogates, to provide it.  If they do not, then we must replace them, otherwise we are the shirkers who are not doing our duty and fulfilling our obligations to the community.

A couple of pieces have come to my attention that explore this, and to the extent that they despair of democratic action I think they are misguided.  We have reached a tipping point, a place where a critical mass of perfectly ordinary citizens have come to realize that the disconnect between the aspirational lies we’ve been promised and the dismal results we’ve been delivered by the institutions of elitism (looking at you Ivys) are insupportable.

There are many, many more of us than there are of them and if history teaches us anything it’s that disparities this deep are always resolved, either by reform or revolution.  Now one would think that a reasonable accomodation is preferable to pitchforks and torches but remember-

Umm…  we’re not exactly dealing with the brightest bulbs on the tree here.

A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis

by Joe Firestone, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on September 21, 2014

Before the “no” vote on Scotland’s independence, The New York Times, carried a post by Neil Irwin in the Upshot making the point that the then upcoming vote “shows a global crisis of the elites.” He argues that the independence drive reflects “. . . a conviction – one not ungrounded in reality – that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades.” He also thinks that this applies to the Eurozone and the United States to varying degrees, and is “. . . a defining feature of our time.”

Irwin then updated his first post last night, expanding it and recognizing the victory of the “no” votes in the referendum. His new post did not add anything essential to his “global crisis of the elites” diagnosis, so the references and quotations below come solely from his pre-vote post. But the points made apply equally well to his update.

Prior to continuing, a few points I found significant from Neil Irwin’s pieces-

Scotland’s Independence Vote Shows a Global Crisis of the Elites

by Neil Irwin, The New York Times

SEPT. 18, 2014

When you get past the details of the Scottish independence referendum Thursday, there is a broader story underway, one that is also playing out in other advanced nations.

It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction – one not ungrounded in reality – that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.

The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.

…

What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people’s tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist.

…

It is in continental Europe that the consequences of bungling by mainstream elites are perhaps the most damaging. The decades-long march toward a united continent, led by the parties of the center-right and center-left, created a Western Europe in which there was a single currency and monetary authority but without the political, fiscal and banking union that would make it possible for imbalances between those countries to work themselves out without the benefit of currency fluctuations. When it all came to a head from 2008 to 2012, national leaders were sufficiently alarmed by the risks of budget deficits that they responded by cutting spending and raising taxes.

As such, the imbalances that built up over the years in Europe are now working themselves out through astronomical unemployment and falling wages in countries including Spain and Greece. Even the northern European economies, including Germany, are experiencing little or no growth. As Paul Krugman noted this week, while the Great Depression of the 1930s was a sharper contraction in economic activity initially, the European economy is performing worse six years after the 2008 crisis than it was at the comparable point in the 1930s.

The details of the policy mistakes are different, as are the political movements that have arisen in protest. But together they are a reminder that no matter how entrenched our government institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.

Power is not a right; it is a responsibility. The choice that the Scots are making on Thursday is about whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: People don’t think the way things are going is good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.

In Scotland and Beyond, a Crisis of Faith in the Global Elite

by Neil Irwin, The New York Times

SEPT. 20, 2014

There has been an implicit agreement in modern democracies: It is fine for the wealthy and powerful to enjoy private jets and outlandishly expensive homes so long as the mass of people also see steadily rising standards of living. Only the first part of that bargain has been met, and voters are expressing their frustration in ways that vary depending on the country but that have in common a sense that the established order isn’t serving them.

…

But there are always people who have disagreements with the direction of policy in their nation; the whole point of a state is to have an apparatus that channels disparate preferences into one sound set of policy choices. What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things are going is so high as to test many people’s tolerance for governing institutions as they now exist.

There is simple economic math behind it. Consider the United States, which has had stronger growth than Britain, Japan or Continental Europe since the financial crisis and the deep recession it spawned. The United States economy is now 6.7 percent bigger than it was at the end of 2007.

But that masks what has been a miserable last several years for most working Americans. The Census Bureau said last week that the inflation-adjusted median household income – pay for people at the exact midpoint of the income distribution – was $51,939 in 2013, up just $180 from 2012 and still 8 percent below 2007 levels.

It gets worse. The 2007 peak in real median household income was slightly below the 1999 peak. In other words, a middle-class American family is worse off financially today than it was 15 years ago.

…

The sense that the system isn’t working for most American workers pervades public opinion polling, including a recent New York Times/CBS News Poll. Seventy percent of respondents disapproved of congressional Republicans, but congressional Democrats fared barely better, with 61 percent disapproval. Fifty-three percent disapproved of President Obama’s handling of the economy; similar numbers disapproved of President George W. Bush at this point in his presidency.

Or, instead of polls, you can look at results, where every election seems to have the potential to be a wave election, in which one side makes major gains. The idea of overwhelmingly electing President Obama and congressional Democrats in 2008 and turning around and overwhelmingly favoring Tea Party Republicans in 2010 may not seem consistent, but it’s what you might expect in a world where the political mainstream has delivered consistently mediocre results.

Now to continue with Joe Firestone (op. cit.)

To summarize his argument, for decades now, the elites in major modern, industrial nations have committed leadership blunders and created great discontent among the citizens of their nations, to the point where their polices have contributed to damaging their economies seriously, and the rise of popular resistance embodied in extremist parties and independence movements. Elites have had vast power, but have not lived up to their responsibilities to serve the people of their nations. Discontent with their actions and results is so high that many are questioning the legitimacy of the very governing institutions that claim to serve them, and are exhibiting a greater and greater willingness to do something about these institutions and the policies that they and the elites are generating. Scotland is but one example of that, and his implication is that more examples are in the offing.

It’s significant, some might say even remarkable, that Irwin’s article appeared in The New York Times, since it is a flat out criticism of elite leadership over a number of decades and a warning to elites to improve their performance or deal with the consequences. But I think it still misses the most important question. That question is whether there is a global crisis of elites or a global crisis of democracies? I’m afraid I think that the crisis of elite leadership is only a symptom of the underlying cause of a broader global crisis of democracy.

Think about it. Irwin is describing a situation in which the elites have been failing their citizens for decades now, following neoliberal economic policies that have resulted in increasing inequality and the renewed appearance of extreme economic instability, and doing this while they continuously mislead the public about their poor performance, using the power of the money that supports them and permeates the mass media.

…

And the overwhelming popular discontent with both the political elites and political institutions has not yet served to generate movements that are powerful enough to dislodge them at the polls; even though the claimed signal advantage of democracy over other forms of government is the ability of people in democracies to replace political elites who won’t serve the people’s interests with leaders who will – without bloodshed and in an orderly fashion.

The failure of democratic institutions is the reason why we have elites that commit blunder after blunder, but are never replaced by more competent leaders who do respect the popular will. It’s the reason for Irwin’s global elite crisis. There would be no such crisis if badly performing elites could be easily replaced. But they can’t. Top leaders may come and go in modern nations, but slightly lower level officials, advisers, and consultants, still at the commanding heights of power, remain the same.

Deliver the government to one party or another and leadership at the top changes, but the same or people with very similar views are still called upon to staff the government or advise it. They survive government after government. They move to the non-profits. They move to the international organizations. They go into large corporations for awhile. But they are never retired from the elite circles of governance, even when it seems that they appear to be near senility.

And regardless of past failures, they keep getting appointed to serve new governments on grounds that they have valuable experience or have learned lessons from their previous bad experiences. In present day democracies, past failures provide the qualifications they need for future failures. And yesterday’s failed leader is preferred to today’s new leader with new ideas.

So, the inescapable conclusion is that there is something wrong with modern democracies: namely, that their institutions are no longer effective at performing their essential function of replacing “bad or incompetent rulers” bloodlessly, when that needs to be done.

Firestone thinks democracy needs to be re-invented.  I don’t think we are yet at that point provided we use it.  In any event as Einstein is reputed to have said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  We have 40 years of failure.  How much evidence do you need?

CIA’s John Brennan Refuses To Tell Senate Who Okayed Spying On The Senate

by Mike Masnick, TechDirt

Mon, Sep 15th 2014

As you may recall, over the past few months, there’s been a rather big story brewing, concerning how the CIA spied on Senate staffers. Specifically, after having explicitly promised not to do so, the CIA snooped on a private network of Senate staffers who were putting together the giant $40 million report on the CIA’s torture program. The CIA tried to spin the story, claiming that they only spied on that network after realizing that those staffers had a document that the CIA thought it had not handed over to the staffers (they had), believing that perhaps there had been a security breach. However, when read carefully, the CIA’s spin actually confirmed the original story: the CIA, against basically all of its mandates and the basic concept of the Constitutional separation of powers, had spied on the Senate. While both the Senate and the CIA asked the DOJ to investigate, eventually the DOJ said the matter was closed and there would be no prosecutions.

At the end of July, the CIA finally came out and admitted that it had spied on the Senate, and effectively admitted that CIA boss John Brennan had flat out lied about it back in March. The CIA’s inspector general then revealed that the spying went even further than people had originally believed. This raised even more questions, but with Brennan “apologizing” and Senator Dianne Feinstein saying that she was satisfied with the apology, it seemed like this unfortunate incident may have been over and done with.

Apparently not. Last week, in the latest meeting concerning the torture report redactions, apparently some Senators asked Brennan to reveal who authorized the spying on the Senate staffers, and Brennan refused to tell them, leading to a bunch of very angry Senators — which may create some further issues, given that the Senators are supposed to oversee the CIA.

…

The McClatchy report suggests that in the meeting, Brennan “raised his voice at Feinstein.” Senator Levin noted that the CIA’s response to this whole thing is bogus, because even if there is an independent investigation (set up by the CIA) going on, it doesn’t mean that Brennan himself gets to shirk his responsibility to answer questions coming from the Senate committees that oversee his activities.

…

Of course, the big question is, what will the Senate do about this other than make a lot of noise? Brennan seems to be banking on “absolutely nothing,” and he may be right.

Clapper changes his story on false statements to Congress on bulk collection

By Meredith Clark, NBC News

09/18/14 11:33 AM

It’s a problem when the director of National Intelligence can’t seem to get his story straight.

Speaking Thursday at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, D.C., James Clapper said that the intelligence community has not willfully violated the law, an assertion which documents and information from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden contradict.

…

But last year, in an interview with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, Clapper took a different approach to his tense March 2013 exchange with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. When Wyden, a Democrat, asked if the NSA gathers “any type of data at all on millions of Americans,” Clapper responded “No,” and “not wittingly.” After a Guardian report contradicted that statement, Clapper said he gave the “least untruthful” response to a complicated question.

Wyden’s office confirmed that not only had Clapper received Wyden’s questions in advance, but that he had been offered the chance to amend his answer after the public hearing, but did not do so. Wyden has been a leader in legislative efforts to reign in NSA spying.

Clapper Denies Lying, Announces New Ethics Policy

By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

9/18/14

An unapologetic James Clapper bristled at accusations of misconduct in front of a trade group today, announced that he intends to continue serving as national intelligence director through the rest of the Obama presidency, and released a new “National Intelligence Strategy” (.PDF) that includes a “Code of Ethics” that seems disconnected from the reality of intelligence collection as revealed by Edward Snowden.

Speaking in public, but in a friendly setting, Clapper mocked the notion of intelligence collection without risk, the potential for embarrassment or invasion of privacy. He snidely called it “Immaculate Collection.” (see NBC video.)

…

“While we’ve made mistakes, to be clear, the IC [intelligence community] never willfully violated the law,” he insisted.

And he complained bitterly of being “accused of lying to Congress.”

Clapper flat-out lied to Sen. Ron Wyden during a Senate hearing in March when he said the NSA does not wittingly “collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Clapper has previously said he “responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.”

On Thursday, he said he had been falsely accused of lying “because of a mistake and trying to answer on the spot a question about a specific classified program in an unclassified setting.”

His audience was made up mostly of contractors who do, or want to do, business with the intelligence community. One question from the audience: “You have a very supportive private sector in front of you. What is your most pressing need?”

Clapper said his people have failed to come up with ways to continue accessing critical intelligence without the sort of bulk data collection that was disclosed by Snowden.

“If you have ideas of how we can find the needles without having the haystacks, I’m all ears,” he said.

And I’ll lie again.

Sweden shifts to left in parliamentary election

Associated Press

September 14

The result marks the end of an eight-year era of tax cuts and pro-market policies under Reinfeldt, who said he would also resign as leader of the conservative party. Many Swedes worried that his tax cuts have undermined the country’s famed welfare system.

…

His center-right Alliance has cut income and corporate taxes, abolished a tax on wealth and trimmed welfare benefits. It has also eased labor laws and privatized state-owned companies, including the maker of Absolut vodka.

Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor has grown faster in Sweden than in most developed countries, though it remains among the world’s most egalitarian, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Sweden Looks to Exclude Far Right From Coalition

By DAVID CROUCH, The New York Times

SEPT. 16, 2014

The left-leaning Social Democrats, with 31 percent, barely exceeded their total from the previous election four years ago, a result seen as a disaster for the party and setting off a leadership fight. The Green party, the Social Democrats’ most likely coalition partner, scored less than 7 percent, and conceded its dreams of being Sweden’s third political force dashed to the far right.

Together with the Left party of former communists, the so-called red-green bloc mustered only 43.8 percent of the vote, compared with 39.3 percent for the center-right bloc – a wafer-thin margin unforeseen in opinion polls.

…

But inequality in Sweden has grown, and with it a fear that the free market is failing to deliver the standard of welfare services that Swedes expect. The left attracted voters by promising a sharp break with the Reinfeldt government’s economic austerity policies, pledging to tax banks and the well-off to fund schools and infrastructure, and to create jobs.

…

“It is too early to predict if we could support a government with bourgeois ministers,” the Left party leader, Jonas Sjostedt said. “But we are not willing to be in a government with the Liberals,” a reference to a center-right party that won 5.4 percent of the vote. He also said, “we are too far away from the Center party to be in government with them.”

Mr. Lofven said later Monday that he would not have Left party members in his government, and in response, Mr. Sjostedt said that the Left would become an opposition party.

Sweden’s Election Deadlock Sets Stage for Budget Failure

By Johan Carlstrom and Niklas Magnusson, Bloomberg News

Sep 16, 2014 9:26 AM ET

Social Democratic leader Stefan Loefven said yesterday he won’t bring pre-election ally the Left Party into government, and instead opened the door to Reinfeldt’s former allies, the Center and Liberal parties. The two have already said they’re not interested in joining the Social Democrats.

“To close the door on the Left Party this quickly and in this rather brusque way will make it much harder for him to get his budget through,” Mikael Gilljam, a professor at Gothenburg University, said by phone.

…

“Stefan Loefven didn’t take the hand we extended and now we will become an opposition party,” Left Party leader Jonas Sjoestedt said after meeting Loefven yesterday. “That’s bad because it will result in a weaker government.”

While the Left won’t seek to block the parliamentary approval of any government formed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party, it will only offer support to Loefven’s budget proposal if certain demands are met, Sjoestedt said.

…

Swedish law was designed to make it easy for minority-governments to pass budgets by allowing the bill that gets the most votes pass. That’s provided political stability as the Social Democrats ruled without majority backing for most of the period since World War II.

That law was circumvented last year when the opposition broke with tradition and blocked parts of Reinfeldt’s budget. His party has said it won’t hesitate to do the same.

The proper way to drink it (single malt of course) is a sip as distilled to celebrate the raw spirit and then mixed with clear water or chips of ice to dilute it so the perfumes are released.

Or you can eat some haggis.

While not as Scots as Dane (full quarter Viking and don’t forget it!) I must admit the urge to get naked and tint myself with woad is strong.

Where’s my sheep’s lung pudding?

Scientists Find ‘Direct Link’ Between Earthquakes And Process Used For Oil And Gas Drilling

by Emily Atkin, Think Progress

September 16, 2014 at 2:59 pm

A team of scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have found evidence “directly linking” the uptick in Colorado and New Mexico earthquakes since 2001 to wastewater injection, a process widely used in the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and conventional drilling.

In a study (.PDF) to be published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Tuesday, the scientists presented “several lines of evidence (that) suggest the earthquakes in the area are directly related to the disposal of wastewater” deep underground, according to a BSSA press release. Fracking and conventional natural gas companies routinely dispose of large amounts of wastewater underground after drilling. During fracking, the water is mixed with chemicals and sand, to “fracture” underground shale rock formations and make gas easier to extract.

The USGS research is just the latest in a string of studies that have suggested the disposed water is migrating along dormant fault lines, changing their state of stress, and causing them to fail.

For their research, the four California-based USGS scientists monitored the 2,200 square mile Raton Basin, which goes from southern Colorado into New Mexico. They pointed out that the Basin had been “seismically quiet” until 1999, when companies began “major fluid injection” deep into the ground. Earthquakes began in 2001 when Colorado wastewater injection rates were under 600,000 barrels per month, and and since then there have been 16 earthquakes that could be considered large (above a magnitude of 3.8, including two over a 5.0 magnitude), compared with only one – a 4.0 magnitude quake – in the 30 years prior.

“These earthquakes are limited to the area of fluid injection, they occur shortly after major fluid injection activities began, and the earthquake rates track the fluid injection rates in the Raton Basin,” the paper said, noting the scientists’ comparisons of the timing and location of earthquakes with the timing and location of injected wastewater. By the mid-2000s, Colorado’s wastewater injection rates were up to 1.9 million barrels per month.

Taking that and the unexpected frequency of the earthquakes into consideration, the paper noted that it was “highly unlikely” that the quakes could have been due to any random fluctuations underground.

“Detailed investigations of two seismic sequences places them in proximity to high-volume, high-injection-rate wells, and both sequences occurred after a nearby increase in the rate of injection,” the study’s accompanying press release said. “A comparison between seismicity and wastewater injection in Colorado and New Mexico reveals similar patterns, suggesting seismicity is initiated shortly after an increase in injection rates.”

Hey, it’s the highest functioning level of mental disability.  You can work under supervision.

All these effing geniuses: Ezra Klein, expert-driven journalism, and the phony Washington consensus

Thomas Frank, Salon

Sunday, Sep 14, 2014 07:00 AM EST

In a recent article on Vox, Ezra Klein declared that his generation of Washington journalists had discovered political science, and it is like the hottest thing on wheels. In the old days, he writes, journalists “dealt with political science episodically and condescendingly.” But now, Klein declares, “Washington is listening to political scientists, in large part because it’s stopped trusting itself.” Klein finds that political scientists give better answers to his questions than politicians themselves, because politicians are evasive but scientists are scientists, you know, they deal in “structural explanations” for political events. So the “young political journalists” who are roaring around town in their white lab coats frightening the local bourgeoisie “know a lot more about political science and how to use it” than their elders did.

…

The powerful in Powertown love to take refuge in bewildering professional jargon. They routinely ignore or suppress challenging ideas, just as academics often ignore ideas that come from outside their professional in-group. Worst of all, Washingtonians seem to know nothing about the lives of people who aren’t part of the professional-managerial class.

How well-known is this problem? It is extremely well known. One of the greatest books of them all on American political dysfunction, David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), is the story of how a handful of poli-sci geniuses got us into the Vietnam War. How political science conquered Hanoi, you might say, except that it didn’t exactly work out like that.

You can see this dysfunction for yourself in the headlines of recent years. Ever wonder why the foreign policy authorities never seem to change, keep coming back, despite racking up shattering failures like the Iraq War? It’s because of the way Washington worships expertise, and the way these authorities have perched themselves atop a professional structure that basically does not acknowledge criticism from the outside.

Ever wonder why the economic experts never seem to change, keep coming back, despite racking up such shattering failures as the housing bubble and the financial crisis and the bank bailouts? Ever wonder why a guy like Larry Summers gets to be chief economist at the World Bank, then gets to deregulate Wall Street, then gets to bail Wall Street out, then almost gets to become chairman of the Fed, and then gets to make sage pronouncements on the subject of-yes- inequality? It’s for the same bad reasons: Because D.C. worships expertise and because Summers, along with a handful of other geniuses, are leading figures in a professional discipline dominated by what a well-informed observer once called a “politburo for correct economic thinking.”

…

“Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People – powerful people – listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

…

Allow me to drop a single, disturbing data point on this march of science. You might recall that Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from the early 1930s until 1994 with only two brief Republican interludes. What ended all that was not an ill-advised swerve to the left, but the opposite: A long succession of moves toward what is called the “center,” culminating in the administration of New Democrat Bill Clinton, who (among other things) signed the Republicans’ NAFTA treaty into law. Taking economic matters off the table was thought to be the path of wisdom among expert-worshipping Washingtonians, but it had the unforeseen consequence of making culture that much more important for a large part of the population. Democrats were eventually swamped by all the crazy grievance campaigns of the right, which has splashed back and forth in the mud of the culture wars ever since.

In 2010, the two parties repeated the act, with D’s embracing the extremely unpopular Republican bailout strategy (and a more modestly unpopular Republican healthcare program) and R’s pretending to be some kind of ’30s-style protest movement waving signs in the street.

Not getting this is standard in the comfortable and well-educated precincts of Washington, D.C. All political contests are battles over the center, everyone here knows that, and so Democrats who wish to win must always move to the center, meaning to the right. That the noble pursuit of the median voter might somehow bring defeat is beyond comprehension.

So a data-minded commentator like Nate Cohn is able to look out over the blasted moonscape of Appalachia and conclude that a party of the left has nothing it might conceivably offer the people there. If Democrats wish to win back the seats that Republicans have taken away from them in such stricken areas, the Dems must either become more conservative themselves or sit audaciously on their butts for a couple of decades while some new generation is born and grows up to populate the boarded-up towns and collapsing houses of the deindustrialized hinterland. Those are the only choices.

The fatalism here may be science-driven, but still it boggles the mind. Today, the right is out there organizing and proselytizing and signing people up for yet another grievance-hyping mass movement. Over the last 40 years they have completely remade the world, and at no point did they play by the centrist rules.

But the Democrats chase nobly on after grand Washington bargains and sign more free-trade deals and make endless compromises with Wall Street-and then can’t figure out why such achievements don’t win them the adoration of the people in the hard-bitten countryside. No matter. They’ll simply wait for a new generation to come along, a new public that is more enlightened, better able to appreciate the fine distinctions between the parties, that is capable, at long last, of making the rational choice.

Transcript

Obama Broke His Promise to Latinos

Why are we still supporting him?

By CARMEN VELASQUEZ, Politico

September 08, 2014

When Barack Obama and I last sat down in 2006, I refused to shake his hand. Today, I still won’t. His announcement last weekend that he would delay executive action on immigration is his fifth broken promise to Latinos on this all-important issue for our community. He has been blind to the pain of the 1,100 deportations our communities face every day and the anguish our families feel as they are swung back and forth as political pawns.

The question for us Latinos – especially the nearly 24 million of us eligible to vote – is, what to do about this? How can we ensure that the fastest-growing demographic in the country isn’t taken for granted by Democrats who purport to be our allies but often dash our hopes in the face of the least bit of political pressure? There are no obvious or even satisfactory answers, but one thing is clear: We’ve been slapped in the face one too many times by this president. And it probably won’t be the last: Obama has a long record of betraying Latinos – and it predates his days in the White House.

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In the run-up to his second election, Obama vowed that immigration would be the top priority in his second term. Latinos made their mark on election night 2012, and many voted with the plights of their undocumented mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and best friends in mind. We delivered for Obama, with 71 percent of us supporting the president. Only 27 percent favored Mitt Romney – a lower percentage than Republican candidates received in the last three presidential elections. Our votes made a difference: We helped Obama win the key states of Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

We believed in Obama’s “Audacity of Hope.” We put him back in the White House expecting him to keep his end of the bargain – finally.

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Last weekend, Obama backed off his most recent promise to push immigration reform through executive action to protect vulnerable Senate Democrats who would otherwise come under fire during the upcoming midterms. But by trying to shield those lawmakers, he may have harmed others.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Illinois Reps. Brad Schneider and Bill Foster – all Democrats who have kept their promises to the Latino community and consistently supported reform – will face reelection and risk losing if disaffected Latinos refuse to show up at the polls. Between now and the midterms, more than 60,000 Latinos and immigrants will very likely be separated from their loved ones and thousands of U.S. citizen children will be left without a mother or a father before the president acts. Most of these human beings have lived in the United States for more than a decade and do backbreaking work that Americans do not want to do, contributing to and growing industries that Americans cannot do without. All they ask is for a chance to get right with the law, legally enter the workforce and stay together with their families. Obama’s broken promise and delayed action will mean many of them will be deported.

Their suffering and that of their families, friends and children should weigh on the consciences of the president and the Democrats who encouraged Obama to put off – again and again and again and again and again – the push for immigration reform.

As for our own plan of action? It’s hard for me to imagine many of us voting for Republicans, who have at times been downright hostile to immigrant communities. But maybe Latinos in places like Colorado, Florida, Arkansas and North Carolina – states with closely contested Senate or governor’s races – should sit this election out. Maybe only by paying a price at the polls will Democrats finally stop throwing us under the bus.

No One is Happy with Obama When it Comes to Immigration

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Tuesday September 9, 2014 12:23 pm

President Obama’s immigration strategy makes no sense to me.

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For political reasons Obama delayed his promised executive actions on immigration – even though this executive orders seems to be more popular than his current complete lack of leadership

In an attempt to find compromise Obama has instead adopted an immigration strategy that makes no one happy. He already upset people on the right with some of his positions and by initially saying he would take executive action. Yet by breaking his promise to take executive action by the end of the summer he also managed to anger people on the left without winning over any conservatives. Even people who don’t care that much about the issue are still left with the impression Obama is cynical and dishonest.

It is impressive to see a politician adopt the strategy of first taking the political hit by announcing a controversial plan, and then getting none of the rewards by also lying to your supporters.

Obama’s Best Hope Against ISIS Was Just Killed, So Let’s Make Friends with Iran

By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept

9/10/14

Thus far, U.S. hopes against ISIS have been pinned on the group’s most palatable enemies: The Iraqi Army, Kurdish Peshmerga, and more moderate Syrian rebels. While those groups have not been defeated, their position today is weaker than ever. As such, some cooperation with America’s ostensible enemies in the Iranian military will likely be necessary to any plan to defeat the Islamic State.

Obama’s non-Iranian options look particularly bleak after yesterday’s shocking assassination of one of Syria’s top anti-ISIS rebel commanders and dozens of his lieutenants. The commander, Hassan Abboud, was killed in an explosion during an underground meeting. So many members of his group, Ahrar al-Sham, were killed in the explosion that it’s now unclear whether it will continue to exist and provide a key counterweight to ISIS. Ahrar al-Sham was one of the best organized Syrian opposition factions aside from ISIS.

The loss of Abboud and his lieutenants only underlines the need for a reset of U.S. policy in the region. While American politicians have cast ISIS as a mortal threat to their country, the group’s primary conflict today is not with the United States – even if ISIS’s horrific beheadings of U.S. citizens served the group’s propaganda goals, and even if America’s catastrophic military adventurism facilitated [its creation and ascendance ].

No, ISIS’s real focus today is on expanding its territory by combating regional governments – Iraq and Syria at the moment – and by fending off rival militias. And it turns out this has done wonders for relations within the Middle East. For the first time in three years, the interests of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Qatar and Iraq are all aligned towards stifling the existential threat posed by the radical insurgency of ISIS. Even the Iranian and Saudi governments – normally bitter rivals – are seeking to set aside their differences to confront this rising danger.

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Rather than reflexively satisfying an emotional need to “do something” in the face of atrocities committed by ISIS against American citizens, a policy of coalition-building across ideological lines could potentially eliminate the group and perhaps begin to heal sectarian divisions in the region. Obama’s speech tonight offers a prime opportunity to articulate a pragmatic, effective strategy. If ISIS is really the apocalyptic threat that U.S. politicians have made it out to be, such pragmatism is absolutely necessary. American policy on this issue has so far been both incomprehensible and counterproductive. But by bringing all major parties to one side against ISIS, something positive may be salvaged from it yet.

Steven Sotloff Was Sold To ISIS By ‘Moderate’ Rebels, Family Spokesman Tells CNN

By Ed Mazza, The Huffington Post

09/09/2014 12:10 am EDT

Steven Sotloff, the American journalist murdered by Islamic State militants last week, was sold to the terrorist organization by supposedly moderate rebels in Syria, a family spokesman told CNN on Monday night.

“For the first time, we can say Steven was sold at the border. Steven’s name was on a list that he had been responsible for the bombing of a hospital,” Barak Barfi said on “Anderson Cooper 360.” “This was false, activists spread his name around.”

“We believe that these so-called moderate rebels that people want our administration to support, one of them sold him probably for something between $25,000 and $50,000 to ISIS, and that was the reason he was captured,” Barfi told Cooper.

Today is Internet Slowdown Day, a day of protest and action seeking to preserve “Net Neutrality”- the concept that no content is privileged in it’s delivery to your computer by censorship or commerce.  Our old friend d-day explains.

“Cable companies could make this page so slow, it will still be loading”

David Dayen, Salon

Wednesday, Sep 10, 2014 07:43 AM EST

(T)he spinning wheel is meant to dramatize what would happen if Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, a former cable industry lobbyist, succeeds in creating an Internet “fast lane.” Under a proposal put out by the FCC in April, companies could pay Comcast or AT&T or Verizon to speed their preferred content to consumers more quickly. This paid prioritization would create a permanent digital divide, reducing competition and innovation on the Internet and discriminating between content for the first time.

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Wheeler argued that the FCC would not allow telecoms to “divide haves and have-nots,” saying that under his strategy, the agency would police any abuse of the fast lane on a case-by-case basis. More important, the proposed rules offer a choice, between the Wheeler proposal and a plan that would reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier service, like phone lines, giving the FCC stronger authority to ensure that no company could discriminate against any kind of content. “We look at reclassification as the only path forward for real net neutrality protections,” said Tim Karr, senior strategy director at Free Press, one of the organizations putting together the Internet Slowdown. “The issue is about our rights to control our Internet experience.”

The FCC’s public comment period for its new Internet rules closes Sept. 15. So during the Internet Slowdown – where the spinning wheel icon will be accompanied by text like “Cable companies could make this page so slow, it will still be loading” – users will be encouraged to sign a letter to the FCC backing reclassification and opposing Internet fast lanes, through an action website called Battle for the Net. The letter will also forward to congressional representatives and the White House. In addition, if users leave their contact information and ZIP code, they will receive a phone call connecting them to the office of their member of Congress, so they can register their personal support for net neutrality.

Even though 4 million people have already delivered comments to the FCC – “it’s the largest response on any rule making in their history,” Karr told Salon – with near-unanimous support for reclassification, the groups organizing the Internet Slowdown feel the issue could still benefit from increased public awareness. The participation of so many websites and advocacy groups ensures that tens of millions of people will see the message today that Internet content should remain free of discrimination. And it’s likely to be just the beginning. “This is an escalation, but it leaves room for further escalation,” said David Segal of Demand Progress, another organizer of the Slowdown.

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For someone like me who worked his way into journalism from a personal blog, there would be no way to do what I do without the protections of an open Internet. In a country increasingly dependent on Internet use, people intuitively understand that controlling their daily Web experience will lead to disastrous outcomes. The forces fighting for the Internet are using old-fashioned methods – calls and letters, protests and mass collective action – to protect the most modern technological achievement. Do we still have a society where organizing against concentrated power matters? We’re about to find out.

Because of technical limitations (basically my own hazy understanding of the actual mechanics of our sites and the disastrous results of my last tinkering) we will not be displaying the official logo, but I don’t want you to get the impression that this is a cause that TMC and I and our sites, The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma do not fully support.

Please contact the FCC today and let them know in language that is polite but capable of no other interpretation or misunderstanding that you are against the Wheeler ‘Fast Lane’ proposal and in favor of regulating broadband Internet as a ‘Common Carrier’.