Haven't run one of these in more than a month (and I'm backdating this one -- had it collected but didn't finish it due to an achey back):
Paul Krugman: Hearsay Economics: Chart here shows that federal government total expenditures has basically remain flat since 2009 when the stimulus ran out, contrary to the opinions of Joe Scarborough (and many others):
Well, I've gradually come to the realization that most of the commentariat doesn't do what, say Martin Wolf or I do -- grub around in published data, read reports, and all that. Instead, they rely on what they heard somebody say the facts are; hearsay economics. Of course, they don't listen to any old bum on the street; they listen to people of repute, people in their circle. But the repute in question has nothing to do with technical expertise; hey, Admiral Mullen is a serious person, so if he says something on any subject, such as economics, it must be solid.
And where do the reputable people get their information? Why, it's what they heard somebody in their circle say. It's hearsay economics all the way down.
You can see how this leads to the incestuous amplification I've written about. Everyone they know -- tous le monde, as Tom Wolfe used to say -- says that we have exploding spending and the deficit is a crucial problem. How could it not be true?
Krugman has the same chart framed more explicitly here: as federal spending relative to potential GDP.
Yitzhak Laor: Israel needs to be threatened by international sanctions: From Haaretz, quoted by War in Context:
The tendency to blame the Palestinians for failing to compromise is part of the colonialist hauteur. We imprison Palestinians, torture, steal, spread out on their land and ask them to compromise with us? In the name of what? In the name of fear of the extreme right?
Now Avigdor Lieberman comes along and declares that a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians is impossible and everyone is silent. The Palestinians are actually offering a peace deal. The big obstacle and the one that grows from year to year is the settlement enterprise, which promises that no solution will be achieved until it sinks us all.
In order to put pressure on the government, it is worthwhile learning from Beitar Jerusalem and its fans' racist war: The fear of international sanctions work. The time has come to encourage the international community to fight Israeli intransigence and pressure Israel to give up on the occupied territories and its residents, who lack a voice from the perspective of our democracy.
I think one can make this argument more emphatically. Due to various political factors, Israeli politics is in a right-wing death spiral -- the Palestinians have been utterly marginalized as a possible influence on Israeli behavior, and no Israeli faction is able to resist the drive toward expanding the settlement or using brute force as the answer to to every problem. The only way to moderate Israeli policy is to hold up a standard of morality and impress that onto public consciousness, and one effective way to do that short of violence is sanctions.
Chase Madar: Government Persecution, From Aaron Swartz to Bradley Manning:
"Prosecutors destroy a life." That could be a headline in every newspaper every day in a land where the answer to every problem (and many nonproblems) is police and prisons. When 26-year-old Internet prodigy and freedom of information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11, the tragedy was the direct result of US attorneys deciding to throw criminal charges at him for violating a website's "terms of services" while accessing publicly subsidized academic research. [ . . . ]
The Justice Department's legal assault on Swartz is of a vindictive piece with the prosecution of others who have carried important information into the public realm. Front and center is 25-year-old Bradley Manning, the Iraq War enlistee accused of being WikiLeaks's source in the military. The restricted foreign policy documents that Manning allegedly released don't amount to even 1 percent of the 92 million items the government classified last year, but the young private faces life in prison at his court-martial in June for the charge, among twenty-one others, of "aiding the enemy." Then there's Jeremy Hammond, age 28, who in his freshman year at the University of Illinois hacked the computer science department's home page, then told them how they could fix its problem. He got thrown out of school for that; now he's in a federal prison facing thirty-nine years to life, charged with various hacks and leaks (all apparently led by an FBI informant) including the 5 million internal e-mails of Stratfor, a private security firm hired by corporations to surveil private citizens, among other activities.
I don't know enough about Swartz to write intelligently about him. There are aspects of "hacker culture" that I deeply disapprove of, but I have no doubt that the public would be better off if government and corporations had far less leeway to keep secret the information that is needed to check their excess powers. It would be better if this were done through a public policy that would limit possible excesses -- a system that would reliably redact info that should remain private -- but lacking any such policy I can't help but sympathasize with those who act in the public interest now. Swartz seems to have done that more often than not, putting him in a long and honorable tradition.
That leads us to the prosecutor, who appears to have abused his power and misjudged this case, tragically. I suspect this is part of a deeper cultural problem -- everything in the system selects for hardline prosecutors, which is part of the reason America jails so many people for so long -- but it's rarely so glaring as in cases over the unauthorized leak of information the public needs (e.g., the Bradley Manning case).
Another paragraph from Madar which is sort of tangential here but bears repeating:
Circulation of knowledge is a social justice issue, too. Dean Baker estimates that reforming the patent law regime for pharmaceuticals -- currently a system that guarantees Big Pharma's monopolies -- would shrink annual spending on prescription drugs from $300 billion to $30 billion, a savings some five times the annual cost of Bush's tax cut for the richest 2 percent. Meanwhile, grotesquely prolonged copyrights for literary and artistic properties are fencing off the cultural commons, a boot on the throat of a generation's creative voice.
Also, a few links for further study:
Paul Krugman: The Japan Story: Various points, including that Japanese output per age 15-64 worker hasn't been nearly as bad as they'd like you to think (1.2% growth per year), that this has happened despite persistence of a long-term liquidity trap, and that government macroeconomic policy has never been as willing to permit inflation as it should have been.
Jamie Malanowski: Richard Ben Cramer, 1950-2012: Recalls the late journalist's much bruited book on the 1988 presidential campaign,What It Takes, regarded by many as the best-ever campaign book, certainly much more ambitious than anything before or since. Doesn't mention Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, which I have read and regard as the single best book on Israel's neverending conflict with its people and neighbors -- in large part because it locates the conflict not in every side's wrongs in the past but in the fear of a future without the reassuring identities of the present conflict.
Josh Marshall: Speaking for My Tribe: on guns, and the author's phobia of them -- one that I share, so I'm reluctant to describe the fear as irrational. Also: Not for Everyone: "I do not want to be in a bar, in a mall, at a school -- and I do not want my children in those places -- where lots of even well-meaning but absolutely ordinary people have fire arms."
Karen Narefsky: Why Does the US Postal Service Have to Be Profitable? Good question. Sub: "Losses have forced the USPS to cut back on its services, and we have only our fetish for privatization to blame." This would be a good place to drop a brilliant quote from Bill Bryson'sNotes From a Small Island if I could find it quickly, but the gist is that there are things that government should do even if they aren't cost-effective -- indeed, given the profit imperative of business, only government can provide for goods and services that business can't. The USPS is actually a mixed case: some things it does are good business, and some aren't.
Joseph Stiglitz: Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth: Mostly talks about education, since education has long been touted as the path for lower/middle-class youths to advance and since higher education has become more and more expensive and inaccessible over the last few decades. Still, there's much more to the story: I think the superrich sense that there are fewer slots at the top, and have been closing ranks to keep what's left in the hands of their heirs. Conversely, the penalties for starting out poor are becoming more slippery and severe. Just because a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama can slip through the gauntlet doesn't offer much encouragement, as so few of us have their instinct or knack for sucking up to power.
Matt Taibbi: Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail: Focuses on HSBC, engaged in "drug-and-terrorism money-laundering" as well as the usual financial shenanigans.
Paul Woodward: The Zygier Affair: One of many posts at this site on Ben Zygier, an Australian who worked for Mossad, crossed them, was kidnapped by them, then died in an Israeli prison. Probably a real story there. While on the subject, some posts say all they need in the title: If it's time to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, it's also time to include Mossad.