So asks Dean Baker.
No.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The longer answer is that the graduates of the Ivy League who would otherwise go into investment banking should care, but I’ll view them with the same degree of concern that they view people in the automobile, textile, steel, machine tools, etc. industries.
Not really updated this for the past few days, as my wife’s birthday has taken precedence.
First, we have Maliki threating an escalation against the Mahdi Army (see here and here), and then we have reports that he’s seeking to ease tensions with the Mahdi Army, and that he has
suspended raids against them.
So it appears that there are some mixed signals out there.
It doesn’t help that the performance of the state security forces was atrocious, with More well over 1000 deserting or refusing to fight.
Abu Aardvark, who has an advantage over most bloggers, and for that matters most US journalists, in that he can read Arabic, the fact that Maliki’s response to all of this has been to recruit over 10,000 members of the Badr Brigades (you know, the ones who are in the pay of the Iranian Republican guard) and the Dawa militias, after insisting that there were no resources available to hire more forces after insisting that there were no positions available to Sunni security forces.
Nothing Maliki does is about anything but short term personal political advantage, which should come as no surprise.
In related news Muqtada al-Sadr is offering to help purge the security forces of militia elements, which I assume means elements of the Badr Brigades and the Dawa militia, and we are seeing an uptick of violence in Sadr City.
If this is not surreal enough for you, the State Department just renewed the contract for Blackwater security with out any changes to the terms, so they still have a license to kill with impunity.
Needless to say, being really pissed off by this, because there is one thing that all the various factions in Iraq can agree with, they want the unaccountable, incompetent, and violent mercenary forces out of their country.
Given the timing of the Basra raid, I have come to the conclusion that this was instigated by Bush and His Evil Minions™, particularly Dick Cheney, who visited just before this all blew up, at least in generalities, if not specifics.
I think that they wanted a dramatic sign of progress prior to the Petraeus testimony
Truth be told, I was never a fan of his acting, and his politics were paleolithic, but he was fun on talk shows.
The background here is fairly simple. The Communications Decency Act (CDA)grants a safe harbor for online providers of an “interactive computer service” from things that others might post.
So, for example, if someone other than me posted in the comments that Frau Blücher of deliberately scaring horses, I could not be held responsible in a libel suit.
What happened here is that Roomates.com is a roomate get together service, and when one logs in, you are asked about things like race, sex, sexual preference, religion, whether one has children, etc.
The problem here is that advertising using these categories an unambiguously clear violation of the fair housing act, and they were sued by the fair housing councils of San Diego and the San Fernando Valley.
Roomates.com claimed that they were immune under the CDA because the users of the service, and not Roomates.com entered the data, but the 9th circuit court of appeals called bullsh$#.
They said that Roomates.com required in order to participate, and as such, it was generating the illegal content itself.
I agree wholeheartedly with Eugene Volokh, who says that they made the right call. They were deliberately creating discriminatory ads, and deliberately facilitating these ads, as opposed to the hand wringing of publius of Obsidian Wings and Susan Crawford.
The analogy here is the difference between a bookstore carrying a publication that infringes on the Fair Housing Act, and the publication that actually carries those illegal ads.
The internet should not be a magic wand to excuse illegal behavior. Publius argues
….. that litigation if often done in bad faith. As any real litigator will tell you, the point of litigation isn’t necessarily to vindicate a right, but to harass an opponent with discovery, document productions, and other expensive tactics. So long as a claim is plausible, you can inflict real damage (and maybe get a favorable settlement) even if you think you will ultimately lose.
Every bookstore operator operates the same way. The books you host do not open you up to law suits, but the store newsletter does.
The internet is not a license to break the law, and we have case law distinguishing between hosted content and user generated content, and this was clearly the latter. Roomates.com is guilty as hell.
It appears that while Hillary Clinton was condemning the Columbia free trade pact, mark pen, in his capacity as CEO of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, was having meetings with representatives of the Columbian government in order to lobby for the agreement.
Penn subsequently apologized for this, but the Change to Win union alliance is now demanding that Penn be fired by the Clinton campaign:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, April 4, 2008CONTACT: Greg Denier
Noreen Nielsen
(202) 721-0660WASHINGTON, DC – The following is a statement from Change to Win executive director Greg Tarpinian concerning the latest revelation that Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist Mark Penn met Monday with Colombia’s ambassador regarding the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
“It’s time for Senator Hillary Clinton to send her vaunted ‘chief strategist’ Mark Penn packing — back to his job consulting for union busting corporations and anti-labor governments for good.
“We have questioned Penn’s role in the Clinton campaign in the past for his representation of union busting employers like Cintas. At that time, Penn said there was a wall between him and his firm’s representation of union busters. The latest revelation that Penn — whose firm represents the Colombian government in its effort to secure passage of a so-called free trade agreement — is actively involved in securing its passage in the middle of Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign is outrageous. It also suggests that he has been playing a double role – advising the Senator on what to say to curry Democratic voters and advising the Colombian government on what to say to curry a majority of votes in Congress.
“The vast majority of Americans do not believe that we should be granting preferential trade status to a government that coddles death squads that target union organizers. Colombia remains the most dangerous country in the world for union members, where more than 2,200 workers have been murdered since the 1980s by Colombian death squads for trying to form unions while the government has done nothing to effectively stop the murders. It is time for Penn to go.”
A postscript to all this is that Columbia has now fired Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, saying that, “The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable.”
Bummer of a birth mark, Hal.
The good general wrote to the Dean of the UC Berkely law school, regarding their hiring of war criminal John Yoo.
I wish I could write so well. The phrase, “Mengele Professor of Sado-Political Studies” is prize.
A shining interrogation center upon a hill
Christopher Edley, Jr
Professor of Law and Dean
School of Law
University of California, BerkeleyDear Dr. Edley,
I’m very impressed by your decision to hire former Justice Department official John Yoo to serve on your faculty. It was a very shrewd marketing move on your part. It allows Berkeley to finally get past its sordid history as the battleground for the expansion of our civil liberties and become the foremost advocate for that “shining interrogation center upon a hill” so many of us wish our nation to become.
Go read the rest.
Some recent news on how we raise our children. First is a news story about a mother who let her 9 year old son ride alone on the subway. There is nothing wrong with the story, except for the fact that it qualifies as news. Kids have been taking mass transit on their own at that age for years, but in this plan-every-minute soccer mom stamp-out-independent-thought culture we have, it gets a significant amount of media play.
We are raising kids who will never have the smallest adventure, nor the smallest sense of responsibility.
Kudos New York Sun Columnist* and mom, Lenore Skenazy for not buying into the toxic waste paranoia of the phony missing child hysteria of the mid-1980s.
On the darker side, we have a six year old kid who is labeled a sexual harasser for smacking a girl on the butt.
The police were called, and his school record now lists him as a sexual harasser.
This is insane. Did the kid do something wrong, of course he did, and his parents should have been called in, and he should have gotten a few days detention, but it’s not sexual harassment.
We was 6 years old, not 13.
Then we have an 8 year old child suspended because he is alleged to have sniffed line from a marker on his shirt. School administrators are suggesting that he was “trying to get high”, aka “huffing”.
There are two problems with all of this, the first is that we are allowing people who are clearly psychopaths abuse their authority, and the second is that increasingly, there are policies in place to support these psychopaths.
Osama bin Laden does not have to destroy America, we are doing it through what we do to the next generation.
*When I say the phrase “Kudos to NY Sun Columnist”, something is very, very, wrong with reality.
You just have to love this.
The Badr Brigades are militia of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, the artist formerly known as SCIRI).
In addition ISCI and Maliki are doing their level best to ensure that they occupy as many positions in the security services, police and military, as possible.
During the Iran-Iraq war, the Badr Brigades fought for the Iranians. They were a part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which the State Department has declared a terrorist organization.
As a result, these folks are literally collecting a pension from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
So, the dog that we choose to hunt with in Iraq is literally pulling a pension from the Ayatollahs.
Well, it looks like 80,000 jobs were lost in March, and the unemployment rate went up to 5.1%, see here, here, and here.
There was good news, at least by the standards of the hacktacular financual press, the ISM’s report on non-manufacturing businesses rose, from 49.3 to 49.6, when it was expected to be 48.5.
Note that while the headline on the story speaks of a rebound, it’s not. Any number under 50 is a contraction, so the contraction was slower than expected, but it was still a contraction.
Given these numbers it’s no surprise that the Federal Reserve is signaling more rate cuts.
It won’t work. We need to go Nordic on this problem and nationalize the insolvent institutions, for a time at least.
Give all this information, it should come as no surprise that we are getting reports of skyrocketing vacancies in commercial space, the stuff that all the “experts” said was not going to be a problem.
This is typical. Commercial space lags residential space.
It won’t help that Oil is back above $105/bbl.
It also looks like Delphi auto parts may be going under, Appaloosa Management LP is pulling out of a deal to invest 2.55 billion in the manufacturer.
This will leave GM on the hook for a lot, and they may have no parts for their cars.
It appears that some lenders are filing foreclosure, but not taking possession, so as to avoid property taxes and fines for not properly maintaining the property.
We have a cancer here, and the Senate sell out bill is not going to fix this.
Now that Wynn has given his resignation, there is a consensus developing in Annapolis that it would be a good thing for Donna Edwards to get in on an early election, if just to give her a seniority jump on the other freshman congressmen.
O’Malley is proposing a change in the election law to allow for a special election based on the current primary results, which would cut the cost of special elections in half, more so if you hold it at the same time as the general election.
Generally it sounds good to me, though I’m inclined to go with the special election and swearing in at the same time as the general, as it is even cheaper.
Elizabeth Spiers at Fortune magazine notes that increasingly, it seems that consumer price index numbers have no bearing in reality.
It’s true.
Here is a graph from John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics
If he is only half right, it means that total price change over the past two decades is understated by something near 50%.
When one tries to get a grip on the cost of living, there will always be a subjective element. When, for example, did the cost of ice delivery get dropped from the CPI. The ice man was a big deal in 1922, after all.
That being said, there has been a consistent assault on accurate CPI numbers from pretty much everyone in government for the past 30+ years.
It makes things easier. Artificially ow CPI numbers mask declining living standards and make inflation adjusted benefits cheaper, allowing for lower taxes.
The question is then how is this done.
The first way is through what is called “hedonics”. Basically, it adjusts the prices of commodities because their quality has improved. Check out The Illusions of Hedonics from the Mises Institute for a good critique.
Let’s apply hedonics to a car, for example. It’s clear that a new car today is far safer and more fuel efficient (per weight of car) than a car of a few years ago, so why should we not make an adjustment for that?
The first answer is that we can measure this more accurately in other ways. Safer cars mean less health care spending*, and better fuel economy means less spending on gas. Thus, the market basket would change.
The car delivers the same service as it did 20 years ago, just as my computer, despite being millions of times more powerful than it was 20 years ago delivers the same service, word processing, spread sheets, etc.
The second way of fudging the numbers is by messing with what goes into the “basket” which is used to figure CPI.
Why, for example, is a 3 fold increase in the price of housing in the past decade or so not inflationary, but instead “asset appreciation”. Housing is a necessity. It should be an integral part of any look at inflation, but instead, the rising house prices are waved away with some fairy dust, and all is well.
Look at the picture above, and if Mr. Williams is right, and I believe that if anything he is conservative on this, it means that there is about a 2½% spread between official and real inflation.
That means that true cost of living doubles an extra time roughly every 20 years. Which means that right now, the cost of living is nearly twice what the government is reporting, because it ignores skyrocketing healthcare, education, and housing costs, along with using bogus tweaks to create a bogus number.
No wonder the people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs.
*I would note however, from a purely economic perspective, replacing airbags with double ought buckshot shells would net an even higher reduction in health care costs, since dead people need no health care.†
†And this argument is why people who see classical economics as the tool for all societal problems are full of it. Economics is a tool, not the tool for dealing with the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated in Memphis, TN.
In congressional testimony before the House Armed Services, Sue Payton, Air Force under secretary for acquisition, was asked if asked if additional credit was given in the process for exceeding the contract minimums. Her response was that the minimums were just that, minimums.
If you did not meet the minimums, your bid would not be accepted, but that, “It was also very clear that extra credit would be given to the offeror who exceeded that threshold”.
Much of the crux of Boeing’s complaint is that this is irregular. It is not. I have read hundreds of requirements for military programs, and the overwhelmingly majority of them have a “threshold” (minimum), and an “objective” (good to have).
This has been a part of the procurement process for years, and to the degree that Boeing is using it for a challenge, this is completely bogus.
As Bill Sweetman Notes, the F-22 is not even close to achieving its desired maintenance goals:
This is not academic. Last year, there was a class-A mishap when an F-22 sucked in a piece of RAM and trashed an engine.
The wild blue yonder boys seem determined to innovate themselves out of any meaningful military capability.
He is calling for a a march to protest the American Occupation on April 9, the 5th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
While the Iraqi government is saying that it will not block the march, provided that it is peaceful, I have very few illusions.
This will get ugly, and if Americans, whether military or mercenary are involved in the violence, it would be incendiary.
This time, it appears that the protests are in Xinjiang, where the Muslim Uighur protested Chinese rule.
There are a number of non-Han areas in China, and I think that the indigenous people in those areas are all looking at the Olympics as a potential opportunity to demand greater autonomy and cultural respect.
Some guy falls down the stairs, gets a head injury, tries to drive home, zones out in the parking lot in his car, and when a disoriented man does not respond to police orders, he is tased repeatedly, then wrestled to the ground, handcuffed, and dies (see here and here).
It’s clear that Tasers should be legally as a lethal weapon, because the police use them irresponsibly and with impunity because, unlike other potentially lethal force, there is no review board following the use, unless there is a death.
Well it looks like the US Census Bureau’s experiment with hand held computers is crashing and burning.
Not surprised.
I went door to door for them in 1990, when I could not find a job in the collapsing “Massachusetts Miracle.”
More specifically, she called Clinton a, “Big F*cking Whore, and applied similar language to Ferraro.
Air America’s official statement is here.
She was doing a stand up gig at the SF Air America affiliate at the club, and yes, this is over the top, and not the F-bomb.
Also, I don’t get Air America, no station that I know of carries it in the Ballmur area, so I haven’t heard her before….Does she always sound this….drunk?