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Today I reach the age of Jesus.
By then, he'd already walked on water and cured lepers. For most of us, that would have made for a pretty stellar C.V. ... but he was just getting warmed up.
Me? Not only have I not matched him, but I've yet to pull off either trick.
Lots of catching up to do. In the meantime, maybe I should stop having my portraits painted to include halos and a heavenly light emanating from my person. At least for a little while.
Teabaggers Love Government Aid After Flood
As you may have seen in the newspapers, radio and the intertubes, much of the state of Georgia is underwater. People have lost their homes, cars and other precious things (like children and loved ones, but I know those are not quite as important to you folks…). But foolishly, they are looking to the Government for help. Starting with our Governor Sonny ‘rugged individualist’ Perdue, they are now calling on the Government to help. That’s where we need you John Galts and teabaggers who really, really want the Government out of all our lives.
Daily Kos: Calling All John Galts in Georgia
F.C.C. Chairman Seeks to Protect Free Flow of Internet Data
F.C.C. Chairman Seeks to Protect Free Flow of Internet Data - NYTimes.com
Winning vs. Justice
Our foundation, the rule of law.
From 2001-2008, the Department of Justice was transformed from a respectable, reasonably-run segment of the executive that operated to prosecute violations of the law into a partisan frat house on the Monday after a weekend-long party. Drunk with power, philosophically opposed to the rule of law, or simply used as a political tool, the DOJ under W followed the fundamental belief that if you are in charge and you win, then justice has been done. Though blind, Justice could still act improperly and at odds with political goals. Better to cover her, lest other goals be compromised. Regardless of the means, the ends were all that mattered.
Of course, winning is not the same as doing justice. As part of his campaign for President, Obama, an excellent lawyer in his own right, promised major changes to the DOJ. Once elected, our new President started at the top, installing an Attorney General who understands the import of the rule of law and of justice as central to the DOJ's mission.
As one of his first major acts, AG Holder shockingly decided not to contest the appeal of Ted Stevens. Formerly the Republican Senator from Alaska, Stevens had been convicted for corruption under W.
Now you might be saying to yourself "How could this have been a partisan play by W's cronies?" or "Why would the Republicans go after one of their own?" A number of reasons...
- Stevens had run into trouble with the press for pushing for pork projects such as the "bridge to nowhere."
- One of the oldest Senators, he seemed behind the times and out of touch, once famously calling the Internet a "series of tubes."
- Between 1 and 2, he was giving the party a bad name and hurting the party's image. As such, Senator Stevens had made himself expendable.
- With Gov. Palin running for Vice President as an anti-corruption, anti-establishment candidate, it helped her story to say that she got rid of corruption in her state. Who better for her to take down than Alaska's own long-serving, powerful state Senator?
- Ted Stevens represented a highly conservative constituancy. Even were he to be run out of town, it was likely that a different Republican would take his spot. In fact, even though he was facing these corruption charges during his campaign, Stevens was only narrowly defeated by his Democrat opponent.
So if the prosecution of Stevens was a partisan play by Republicans, then shouldn't Holder's decision to drop the case also be seen as partisan?
That argument might have some weight, had Holder not clearly stated his reasons for dropping the charges.
The federal judge presiding over the Stevens decision "said he had never seen such mishandling of a case by prosecutors. He took the extraordinary step of opening an investigation into whether the Justice Department attorneys broke the law by withholding evidence, and he encouraged Holder to increase training for new and experienced prosecutors."
In response, Holder said the following:
There are things that we have to take into account given what has happened recently, with regard to training, with regard to resources, and I expect that we'll have some announcements to make to you all in the not too distant future. . . .
I always want to ensure that the Justice Department acts in a way that is consistent with the long tradition of this great department — that we treat people fairly, that if we make mistakes we admit them and that we then take the appropriate action.
In other words, there's a new Sheriff in town.
What's more, Holder isn't stopping at spouting rhetoric to the press. A friend and federal Public Defender, passed on this quote today:
Your job as assistant US attorneys is not to convict people. Your job is not to win cases. Your job is to do justice. Your job is in every case, every decision that you make, to do the right thing. Anybody who asks you to do something other than that is to be ignored. Any policy that is at tension with that is to be questioned and brought to my attention. And I mean that.
-- Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States
Notice that Holder wasn't talking to those who work directly for him, or to those in charge of big cases. He was talking to assistant US attorneys. He was talking to the foot soldiers of the department, the grunts, the younger attorneys who might have worked exclusively under the prior administration, the DOJ attorneys most in need of retraining.
And, with that statement, the pursuit of justice and respect for the rule of law returned to their proper places as guiding principles of the DOJ.
One-Percenters And The System's Collapse
Branko Milanovic, lead research economist at the World Bank, argues in The Crisis of Maldistribution that the real driver behind the collapse of the international economic systems is the over-accumulation of wealth in the few which arose as part of the vast inequality in income between the very wealthy and everyone else over the last two or three decades prior to the financial collapse. The super-rich, having no place to invest their money began "throwing money at anyone who would take it" without understanding the risks.
The current financial crisis is generally blamed on feckless bankers, financial deregulation, crony capitalism, and the like. While all of these elements may be true, this purely financial explanation of the crisis overlooks its fundamental reasons. They lie in the real sector, and more exactly in the distribution of income across individuals and social classes. Deregulation, by helping irresponsible behavior, just exacerbated the crisis; it did not create it.
The numbers Milanovic cites -- all before the collapse -- are staggering.
To go to the origins of the crisis, one needs to go to rising income inequality within practically all countries in the world over the last 25 years.
- In the United States, the top 1% of the population doubled its share in national income from around 8 percent in the mid-1970s to almost 16 percent in the early 2000s. (Piketty and Saez, 2006). That replicated the situation that existed just prior to the crash of 1929, when the top 1% share reached its previous high watermark.
- In the UK, the top 1% receives 10% of total income, a share greater than at any point since World War II (Atkinson, 2003, Figure 3).
- In China, inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient (the most common measure of inequality), almost doubled between 1980 and 2005. The top 1% of the population is estimated to garner around 9% of national income.
- Even more egregious were developments in Russia, where the combined total wealth of thirty-three Russian billionaires listed on the Forbes list in 2006 was $180 billion as against total country’s GDP of about $1,000 billion that same year (Guriev and Rachinsky, 2008).
Milanovic then points to a couple of the most egregious anecdotes.
Just before his downfall, the richest oligarch, Michael Khodorovsky had an estimated income equal to average Russia-wide incomes of 250,000 people. (The same number for Bill Gates and the United States in 2005 was 75,000.) Think of it. With his income alone, that is without touching a penny of his wealth, Khodorovsky could create (if need be) an army of quarter million people. No wonder the Kremlin took notice, and Khodorovsky ended up in jail. . . .
Similarly, in Mexico, Carlos Slim’s wealth, prior to the crisis, was estimated at more than $53 billion. Assume a conservative return of 7% on his assets, and that gives an annual income of $3.7 billion with which, given Mexican GDP per capita in the same year, Slim could command even more labor than Khodorovsky: 440,000 people. These are only a few examples. But they were replicated, albeit on a smaller scale, in practically all countries of the world.
Interesting theory. Read on for more...
On Looting
Now that we own their sponsor, U.S. taxpayers should get a free Man U jersey with income tax payment. Or we should be able to have Rooney punch a banker. Either way.
Does listening to pundits discuss he financial crisis make your head spin, leaving you both angry and confused? Do you know that something in the discussion is just not right... in an Orwellian sense? Do you feel like you're watching the aftermath of the largest theft in the history of the world?
If so, you're not alone... and you're right to feel this way.
In the early nineties, a pair of economists classified the behavior that led to this debacle, described the environment that would make such behavior likely, and suggested that it would happen again as the natural result of that environment.
Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting.”
The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that . . . investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.
In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.
The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”
[Emphasis added.] Sound familiar?
On certain low-documentation loan programs, such as stated income/stated asset (SISA) loans, income and assets are simply stated on the loan application. On other loan programs, such as no income/no asset (NINA) loans, no income and assets are given on the loan application form. These loan programs open the door for unethical behavior by unscrupulous borrowers and lenders.These loan programs are designed for borrowers who have a hard time producing income and asset verifying documents, such as prior tax returns, or who have untraditional sources of income, such as tips, or a personal business. These loans are called liar loans because the SISA or NINA features open the door for abuse when borrowers or their mortgage brokers or loan officers overstate income and/or assets in order to qualify the borrower for a larger mortgage.
For more on how these loans were abused by lenders, see this Washington Post article from 2007. (And if you have more time, devote an hour to listen to "The Giant Pool of Money," a fantastic report by This American Life.)
So what about the idea that a lot of smart people just made innocent mistakes, or that this is a systemic problem that no one could have predicted? Looting is not just an error in judgment, but knowing, self-interested behavior.
The term that’s used to describe this general problem, of course, is moral hazard. When people are protected from the consequences of risky behavior, they behave in a pretty risky fashion. Bankers can make long-shot investments, knowing that they will keep the profits if they succeed, while the taxpayers will cover the losses.
[The distinction between moral hazard and looting is an important one.]
With moral hazard, bankers are making real wagers. If those wagers pay off, the government has no role in the transaction. With looting, the government’s involvement is crucial to the whole enterprise.
Knowing that their financial institutions were too big too fail, bankers made choices that were only rational in an environment where personal gains were all that mattered, and where a government bailout was seen as inevitable. The government was the escape route, the getaway driver... and the thieves got away scot free.
We should be angry. We've been robbed.
It Kind Of Makes Me Hate Baseball
One of the few players willing to speak honestly about his cheating. (image via deadspin)
C and I have a running dialogue regarding the terrible behavior of everyone involved in MLB's steroids scandal -- owners, players, press, agents (I know, redundant) -- everyone.
These guys are liars and cheats. They've made millions while ticket prices have skyrocketed and municipalities have raised taxes to pay for new ballparks, and even though they've been caught red-handed, all but a couple have refused to admit any wrongdoing. Who'd have thought that only Jose Canseco would be honest and forthright with the public? Disgusting.
Yet it's not a problem that is limited to baseball. Just look at the real estate industry over the last decade. Or at Wall Street. Or at how W and company sold the invasion of Iraq and then defended his decision. Or at how Republicans in Congress spent money they didn't have while they were in power, but now that they're out of power claim that spending is always morally wrong and bad for America. Changing the story, being disingenuous, refusing to take the blame -- all persist and are symptoms of a deeper social problem, a disease that is causing our society to rot from leaf to root.
I guess baseball truly is America's sport.
As always, The Sports Guy kills it in his most recent mailbag...
We always talk about the tangible effects of the Steroids Era (it screwed up the numbers historically, compromised the competitiveness of the games and tainted some of the nicer memories we had as fans from 1990 to 2007), but the underrated effect was the realization that some of our greatest players were scumbags. Should we have realized this after the Pete Rose scandal? Yeah, probably. But look at some of the greats from the past 50 years. Rose lives in Vegas and spends his days betting on horse racing. Barry Bonds seemed like a truly awful person even before he let his buddy rot in jail for him. Clemens was willing to sell everyone out, even his wife and friends, to try to keep his name clean. Mark McGwire doesn't have the decency to admit that he cheated. Neither does Sammy Sosa or Raffy Palmeiro. A-Rod lied in 2008 on national TV, then lied about the lie. There are 103 names from that 2003 random drug-test list still out there, only none have the balls to come out and say, "You know what? I'm probably on there and I'm ashamed of what I did." And when you think about how many All-Stars cheated over the past two decades -- is the number 70 percent? 75 percent? 80 percent? -- the unwillingness of the commissioner's office and the player's union to apologize publicly or admit any culpability whatsoever is really staggering. Why is Bud Selig still the commissioner? THIS HAPPENED ON HIS WATCH! Why is Gene Orza still running the players' union? THIS HAPPENED ON HIS WATCH! Everyone's collective "apology" this winter seemed to be, "Let's move on, it's spring training, the World Baseball Classic will be fun, fantasy baseball is starting up ... no use crying over spilled milk."
Ask yourself this: Do you feel like the players, union leaders, owners and executives even feel bad about what happened? Because I don't feel like they do. And it makes me kind of hate baseball. I will still follow it, and I will still love the Red Sox, and I will still do the League of Dorks ... but at the same time, when the sport flounders because of the economy this summer, part of me will be thinking, "What goes around comes around."
Reddit Headline Hilarity
Dead Man Walking: Our beloved Dennis Kucinich, the man who's nuts are bigger than anyone in DC, save for Hillary, is proposing putting the Federal Reserve under government control. Dennis for the love of god, stay in crowded spaces. We love you!
Good times, good times.
Tracking Obama
An action shot of the left hand that controls the Executive branch.*
Some friends and I have been interested in following and documenting Obama's actions now that he's President. We're curious to know whether he's living up to his campaign promises, and we thought it'd be useful to keep them in one easy-to-find place.
We started noting what we'd read in the news and sending it back and forth in an email thread, but really -- what is this, 1999? So I started a blog, and invited the friends as moderators. Unfortunately, we found that once our days picked up for a few hours, we quickly fell behind and started missing events. Not a very useful tool if it's ad hoc and incomplete.
Obama's first signature as president -- Jan. 20, 2009.
Brains beat brawn every time on the Internet, so off to Google my friend Chris went. For posterity, some useful resources are listed below.**
- Politifact is useful for tracking campaign promises and is being kept up to date.
- FactCheck.org is great for all recent claims made by politicians or floating around the rumor mill.
- FiveThirtyEight.com is Nate Silver's political stats and analysis site -- the best in the business.
- Whitehouse.gov tracks the various executive orders, which is kinda cool, too. So far...
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
January 22, 2009
- Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities
- Review of Detention Policy Options
- Ensuring Lawful Interrogations
January 21, 2009
- Presidential Records
- Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel
PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDA
January 22, 2009
- Review of the Detention of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri
January 21, 2009
- Freedom of Information Act
- Pay Freeze
- Transparency and Open Government
Still, Chris couldn't find a blog or other site that's just tracking what Obama does, what actions he approves or denies each day. Another oddity -- Kottke (citing others) also notes that once the new White House site goes up, the prior president's site disappears -- *poof* -- and is moved over to that president's library site.
All problems seem strange, given the ubiquity of this type of information. If anyone finds resources or tools that are particularly useful, please post in the comments.
* The President's watch is a Jorg Gray JGC6500 Chronograph Watch. Or you could go here and pay double...
** Many thanks to those willing and able to dedicate themselves to this work. Also key is Obama's dedication to transparency and the open, free exchange of information. So refreshing.
[First image via The Big Picture. Second image via Reuters, ffffound.]
Friends Abroad Watched The Inauguration
Mary (in profile) and Sun (front and center) are intercontinental when they eat french toast.
A couple of my friends -- law school classmates -- are giving back by working for the public good in southeast Asia. They got together in Cambodia to watch the inauguration, and had their photo snapped and blown up with a half-page, above-the-fold article in the Phenom Penh Post!**
Mary is working in Chiang Mai, Thailand, experimenting in the new frontier of corporate social responsibility and setting up a new ice cream business dedicated to supporting needy children in the region. She's posting adventure updates on her blog.
Sun is working as a law clerk for the UN in Cambodia. She explains,
The United Nations Assistant to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT) provides the international component to the “hybrid” court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The tribunal was set up in 2003 jointly by the UN and the Cambodian government to prosecute senior members of the former Khmer Rouge regime. Among the crimes charged are violations of the Cambodian penal code, genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Convention.
[It's] a clerkship, but on the international level. doing research, writing memos, orders, decisions and stuff for the pre-trial judges. Ok, that's familiar. But throw in this hybrid tribunal and parts of the civil law system (since cambodian criminal procedure is based on the french civil system from the 1950s) and the learning curve is steep.
Sun is blogging, too. Check her out here.
Great to see that they're getting to hang out and enjoy life abroad. Now if they can just keep the damn paparazzi out of their way, they'll be set. Celebrity is nice for a minute, but believe you me, it gets old fast.
* Caption refers to a line from The Move by the Beastie Boys.
** Their friend who was interviewed by the Post was misquoted by the reporter!
What I said to journalist I liked McCain personally, but I don't like Republican Policy: 1) War in Iraq and 2) Anti-abortion. He misquoted my opinions -- anyways now I turned to support Obama.