Obsidian Wings

A New Cap-and-Trade Proposal

by publius

This was simply too good to leave in the comments. In Hilzoy's post illustrating that McCain doesn't seem to know what cap-and-trade actually means, commenter Model 62 writes:

Maybe McCain's campaign should develop a cap-and-trade system for clarifying remarks. Advisers who shed more light on what McCain Actually Meant can sell their additional clarity to McCain advisers who can't reach the Campaign's Overall Targeted Lucidity Floor.

Good stuff.

Privatizing The Army

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block."

The obvious way to read this is as indicating that Halliburton had the connections to block any investigation of its recordkeeping. And while that's true, I'm not sure that's what's going on here. The next paragraph of the NYT story:

"Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services."

In fact, KBR did at one point threaten to stop providing basic supplies -- little things like food -- to our troops in Iraq. (I've put the account of this episode below the fold.) What that means is, to my mind, even more scandalous than simple corruption by a company with good connections. It means that we have outsourced absolutely critical functions to private companies, companies which, unlike military personnel, can threaten to stop doing their jobs without facing courts-martial. In wartime, when a company is doing something as important as providing food to our troops, the military has no choice but to cave to their demands. (That's one reason I said it was more scandalous than simple corruption: it virtually ensures that that corruption will occur, while simultanously leaving our troops at risk.)

To my mind, we should not allow any company to assume any critical function in wartime without putting in place some guarantee that it will go on performing that function whether it wants to or not. If it's impossible to do that legally, then that function should not be outsourced. Period. We cannot allow any private company to threaten to stop supplying our troops during wartime. But we have.

There He Goes Again, Again ...

by hilzoy

A couple of weeks I noted that John McCain didn't seem to understand what a cap and trade system was, despite the fact that he not only advocates such a system, but has actually co-sponsored legislation to create one. There was some debate in comments about whether McCain might have meant something else. Now, however, Kate Sheppard at Gristmill reports that he's done it again. From a press conference today:

"QUESTION: The European Union has set mandatory targets on renewable energy. Is that something you would consider in a McCain administration? [...]

MCCAIN: Sure. I believe in the cap-and-trade system, as you know. I would not at this time make those -- impose a mandatory cap at this time. But I do believe that we have to establish targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions over time, and I think those can be met."

Sheppard comments:

"Which is, of course, completely out of line with his own proposal for a cap-and-trade scheme, both the plan he proposed with Joe Lieberman last year and his own presidential plan, released last month. They both would, by nature, be mandatory -- hence the "cap" in the name. This isn't the first time McCain has misunderstood his own policy on cap-and-trade. In the Republican debate in Florida in January, he also denied that his cap-and-trade program included a mandatory cap on carbon.

He also appeared confused about the definition of cap-and-trade in an interview with Greenwire ($ub req'd):

It's not quote mandatory caps. It's cap-and-trade, OK. It's not mandatory caps to start with. It's cap-and-trade. That's very different. OK, because that's a gradual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. So please portray it as cap-and-trade. That's the way I call it."

Except, of course, that mandatory caps are an essential part of a cap and trade system. Thus:

"Emissions trading (or emission trading) is an administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. It is sometimes called cap and trade.

A central authority (usually a government or international body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emissions must buy credits from those who pollute less. The transfer of allowances is referred to as a trade. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those that can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost to society"

And:

"What are the elements of a well-designed cap and trade program?

A successful market-based program requires just a few minimum elements. All of the following are absolutely essential to an efficient and effective program:

A mandatory emissions "cap." This is a limit on the total tons of emissions that can be emitted. It provides the standard by which environmental progress is measured, and it gives tons traded on the pollution market value; if the tons didn’t result in real reductions to the atmosphere, they don’t have any market value.

A fixed number of allowances for each polluting entity. Each allowance gives the owner the right to emit one ton of pollution at any time. Allocation of allowances can occur via a number of different formulas.

Banking and trading. A source that reduces its emissions below its allowance level may sell the extra allowances to another source. A source that finds it more expensive to reduce emissions below allowable levels may purchase allowances from another source. Buyers and sellers may “bank” any unused allowances for future use.(...)"

Lest there be any doubt, check out this exchange from the January debate Sheppard cites:

Russert: Senator McCain, you are in favor of mandatory caps.

McCain: No, I'm in favor of cap-and-trade. And Joe Lieberman and I, one of my favorite Democrats and I, have proposed that -- and we did the same thing with acid rain. They're doing it in Europe now, although not very well.

And all we are saying is, "Look, if you can reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, you earn a credit. If somebody else is going to increase theirs, you can sell it to them." And, meanwhile, we have a gradual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Just ask yourself why anyone would bother buying and selling credits, as McCain suggests, if they didn't need them in order to make up the difference between their actual emissions and what they're allowed to emit. Moreover, note that the acid rain program McCain refers to has a mandatory cap, as does the EU program he refers to.

***

The best you can say for McCain, on this point, is that he is completely unfamiliar with what is supposed to be one of his signature issues. Not knowing what "mandatory cap" means, in this context, is like not knowing what a "strike" is in baseball. You might, if you wished, explain why you said you hoped your team got a lot of strikes by saying that you thought strikes were a good thing, like 'striking gold', or that you thought that 'striking out' indicated the beginning of a long journey around the bases, as in 'striking out for the territories.' That might even be what you meant. But if it were, that would show that you weren't all that familiar with baseball.

A Strange Way To Spend Your Time

by hilzoy

John McCain can't seem to catch a break. First, he had to cancel a fundraiser with someone who had said that rape was like bad weather: "As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." (Except that -- oops! -- McCain kept the money from the fundraiser, and the people who gave it will still get to meet him at an event. But that event will be held in "a different venue.")

And now this:

"A key organizer of John McCain's meeting Saturday with former supporters of Hillary Clinton is best known for her role in another bitter American fight: The effort by some white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to keep his possible African-American descendants out of family gatherings.

Paula Abeles emailed Politico yesterday to complain that her group had gotten short shrift in a blog item, writing, "I initiated the teleconference with McCain on Saturday and was solely responsible for the guest list." Another Clinton backer at the event, Will Bower, confirmed that she was "integral" to assembling the group.

But Abeles first made the news in 2003, when she and her husband, then-Monticello Association President Nat Abeles, led the fight to keep members of the Hemings family -- descendants of Jefferson slave and, some historians believe, mistress Sally Hemmings -- out of a gathering of the Monticello Association, which is made up of lineal descendants of the third president."

Ben Smith cites an AP article, which is kind of incredible: apparently, Ms. Abeles spent a considerable amount of time pretending to be a 67 year old black woman on an internet chat group in order to find out how members of the Hemings family might be planning to get into the event:

"Lucian Truscott IV, a Jefferson descendant who believes the Hemings family should be recognized, (...) said that when the Hemings family started discussing the reunion on the Yahoo! site about three months ago, Nat Abeles promptly told the Jefferson family they were only allowed to bring two guests each.

When Truscott tried to accommodate the few dozen Hemingses by getting invitations from other Jefferson family members, Abeles countered by telling association members they had to be present to bring guests.

Then Truscott thought of using junior members - teenagers attending the event with their parents - to sponsor the Hemings family. Nat Abeles said only full members were allowed to bring guests.

"Every time we'd think of a way to get the Hemings there, he'd come up with a new rule," Works said."

Why did she do this?

"It might have been childish, but I really think I was working in the best interest of the majority of the family members to make the reunion a calm and civilized gathering," she said.

I have to wonder: with all the things in the world that one might choose to spend time on -- being kind to a child, helping the sick, the halt, and the blind, even correcting Someone who is (genuinely) Wrong on the Internets -- what kind of person would decide that the thing she really had to do was keep actual descendants of Thomas Jefferson out of a meeting of descendants of Thomas Jefferson? Couldn't she think of a single non-repulsive, non-spiteful, non-racist thing to do?

I also wonder: hasn't the McCain campaign figured out about Google yet?

The Benefits of Neutrality

by publius

Kevin Drum writes that the era of flat-rate broadband pricing may be over because of infrastructural limitations. But this part isn’t quite right:

The enormous boom in long-haul fiber construction in the late 90s, followed by the dotcom bust, left us with so much overcapacity that for the past decade there's been no point in charging for bandwidth. . . . But if demand for video is driving demand for more bandwidth, then someone's got to pay for it[.]

The problem isn’t the long-haul fiber though – that capacity is still more than enough to handle the increased loads. The problem is the local “short-haul” infrastructure – i.e., the last-mile facilities and more localized transport facilities. These are the facilities that run closer to your house (think of interstate highways versus off-ramps and secondary roads).

But anyway, Kevin's larger point is right – there is a potential looming capacity problem. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, this very concern gets to the heart of what’s really at stake in the net neutrality debate. The real importance of net neutrality is not so much to protect people from discrimination, but to create rational incentives for a better, more efficient Internet in the face of capacity constraints.

To back up, one benefit of capacity constraints (for now) is that they create demand for a solution. Indeed, the way we “solve” this problem will determine the future of the Internet.

For instance, in a world of access tiering, companies have less of an incentive to increase capacity – that’s because scarcity will have been built into the business model. For that reason, a world of access tiering will depress innovation and be less receptive to new, data-intensive applications/services. Thus, in this world, companies would solve the capacity problem by assuming more control and increasingly relying on bandwidth scarcity for revenue.

If, however, companies had to be content/application neutral, different solutions would necessarily emerge. Companies would be forced to build more capacity or to find better ways to compress data. There would also be greater demand for solutions from “the edge” – i.e., individual companies and entrepreneurs (e.g., BitTorrent) would have more incentives to create new data-compression techniques. And, frankly, I have more faith in the collective mind to develop these new services than say Comcast and AT&T.

In short, net neutrality encourages better solutions. The entire debate – to me – is about what sort of incentives we want to create.

(On an aside, charging for bandwidth alone is perfectly consistent with net neutrality principles, assuming it’s content neutral and transparent).

Make It Stop

by hilzoy

Susan Faludi had an op-ed in the NYT today. She notes the following quotes:

"“In many ways, he really will be the first woman president,” Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined “Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?” came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: “Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel.”"

Dear Everyone: please stop this nonsense. Bill Clinton was not, in fact, our first black President. And without some pretty serious surgery and a whole lot of hormones, Barack Obama could not possibly be our first woman President. Whatever point people are trying to make when they say these things, there must be a better, and less ridiculously condescending, way to put it.

And besides, this all plays into a pretty ludicrous conception of masculinity, according to which George Bush's swaggering and bluster are supposed to show that he's manly, while -- well, something, though what exactly is never clear, is supposed to show that Obama is not. If I truly thought that masculinity was anything like the sneering, bullying caricature that people try to foist off on us every four years at about this time, I'd either take a vow of celibacy right now or spend some serious effort trying to discover whether it's possible to become gay by sheer force of will.

John McCain: The Robin Hood of Health Care

by publius

As we all remember from childhood, Robin Hood was the original working class hero. He, um, redistributed from the rich to help the poor. From reading Tony Pugh’s McClatchey piece on the candidates’ health care policies, you would think that John McCain is a modern-day progressive Robin Hood on health care. (I first saw the article in the print edition of the Houston Chronicle).

The article begins by describing a mother (Ms. Espinoza) who has employer-based health care for herself, but can’t afford to add her children (they remain uninsured). After Pugh describes to her the candidates’ rival health care plans, she ultimately decides that McCain’s policy sounds better. It’s outrageous and depressing, but it’s not her fault — it’s the fault of people like Pugh who need to do a better job describing the real-world consequences of these policies.

I’ll get to the policy side below, but first the politics. In one sense, McCain’s health care proposal shouldn’t be understood as policy at all — it’s merely a political weapon. It lets him say something in response to questions from the public and the press about health care. What’s troubling, though, is that the proposal may not be bad politics, assuming the public remains misinformed.

To the general public, McCain’s health care “policy” is “I’ll give your family $5000 — go knock yourself out.” And if that’s all you know, it doesn’t sound that bad. Having an extra $5000 is better than not having it (or $2500 for individuals). The problem is that McCain's tax credit shouldn't be analyzed in a vacuum. The same policy that would provide families $5000 would create enormous collateral damage — indeed, it would ultimately cause families to pay significantly more money for significantly less coverage (more on that below).

The political challenge, then, is figuring out ways to tell the truth in simple compelling terms — after all, it’s not demagoguery if it’s true and important. The public needs to understand that McCain’s policy isn’t just “here’s an extra $5000.” The promise of extra cash, though, is probably why Ms. Espinoza (depressingly) preferred McCain’s approach. True, she's only one person — but we shouldn’t overestimate the ability of people to understand complex policy issues that can be obscured through, say, lying or lazy reporting.

So that’s the politics — below is my more detailed policy gripe with Pugh’s portrayal of McCain’s proposal:

McCain's Thesis

by hilzoy

The NYT has gotten a copy of John McCain's thesis at the National War College. It's quite interesting. I think the NYT's account of it is somewhat misleading in its focus:

"About a year after his release from a North Vietnamese prison camp, Cmdr. John S. McCain III sat down to address one of the most vexing questions confronting his fellow prisoners: Why did some choose to collaborate with the North Vietnamese?

Mr. McCain blamed American politics.

“The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted to the National War College and never released to the public. Prisoners who questioned “the legality of the war” were “extremely easy marks for Communist propaganda,” he wrote."

The topic of McCain's thesis is whether the military's Code of Conduct needed to be revised in light of the experiences of POWs in Vietnam. Most of the thesis is concerned with questions like: should the word 'reasonable' be added to the requirement that POWs make "every effort to escape"? (McCain seems to think so: the probability of successful attempts was nearly nil, and there were serious reprisals against other prisoners.) Should the requirement that POWs give only their name, rank, and serial number be relaxed? (McCain says no, for various reasons, most importantly that it gives prisoners a very clear standard to hold onto, and if necessary to return to once one has failed, and having this to hold onto matters a lot given the enormous disorientation of interrogation under torture.) He emphasizes the enormous psychological importance of managing to communicate with one's fellow prisoners even when one's captors forbid it, the difficulties of exercising leadership under conditions like the ones he and his fellow prisoners endured, and the importance of maintaining something like a chain of command despite that fact.

The parts the New York Times focusses on are not central to McCain's argument. His main point seems to be that it is important that people who are asked to fight for our government have some idea what they are fighting for, and that this will help them under captivity. This is not a nutty thing to think.

Moreover, the Times' focus seems to me to get the whole thrust of the thesis wrong. One of its most impressive features is that McCain does not seem to be at all interested in ascribing blame, going over the horrors he experienced, or anything like that. I think it would have been perfectly understandable if he were, but he isn't. The whole tone of the thesis is matter-of-fact: what useful lessons can we learn from this? And how should we go about implementing them, so that we improve the odds that the next group of prisoners do better? And while he doesn't talk about it, I think that the idea that debate in this country ought to be in any way limited because of its effects on POWs would have been at odds with other things he does say. He thinks that America's Vietnam policy was distorted by an excessive focus on POWs:

"It should also be explained to the American people that in all wars men become prisoners, and although it is the duty of our country to do everything possible to bring about the return of these prisoners; by no means should the existence of prisoners of war substantially influence or effect national policy." (p. 34)

If the existence of prisoners of war should not lead us to alter our policy, it stands to reason that it should not lead us to alter our view of our own basic freedoms.

McCain does think that those prisoners who were captured later, and who had therefore been "exposed to the divisive forces which had come into focus as a result of the anti-war movement in the United States" (p. 30), were less likely to hold up during captivity, but his answer to that is not to limit debate or to blame the anti-war movement, but to suggest that the armed forces "inform them as to the nature of the foreign policy and goals of the United States of America." (p. 30)

All in all, I think it's an impressive thesis, less for its actual conclusions or for the depth of its arguments than for its tone: no dwelling on what happened, no recriminations, no self-congratulation, just a determination to learn as much as possible so that we can all do better next time.

***

There is, however, one part of the thesis that is quite interesting and relevant to contemporary discussions. McCain writes (p. 9):

"One of the standard methods to wear down a prisoner's resistance to their demands was the use of what can be described as "self-induced punishment." That is to say, prisoners being ordered to sit, kneel, or stand for long periods of time deprived of rest or sleep. This form of torture, without laying a hand on a prisoner, was sometimes very successful in breaking his will."

McCain is talking about what we now call 'stress positions' and sleep deprivation. Back in 1974, McCain not only had no problem calling these things torture, he did not think that that point needed any kind of defense or elaboration. Back then, before the definition of torture had become a political issue, it was just obvious.

Compare that to his position today, as described by Marty Lederman:

"Senator McCain rightly insists that the U.S. may not (i) torture; (ii) engage in cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3; or (iii) engage in conduct that shocks the conscience, under the McCain Amendment. He also insists that waterboarding violates each of these legal restrictions, that the Bush Administration's legal analysis has been dishonest and flatly wrong, and that we need "a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program."

The Feinstein Amendment would have accomplished all of these objectives, but Senator McCain voted against it, presumably because he wishes that the CIA be permitted to continue the use of other of its enhanced techniques, apart from waterboarding. Those techniques are reported to include stress positions, hypothermia, threats to the detainee and his family, severe sleep deprivation, and severe sensory deprivation. Senator McCain has not explained which of these he thinks are not torture and cruel treatment, nor which he would wish to preserve for use by the CIA. But if the President does as he has promised and follows Senator McCain's lead by vetoing this bill, the CIA will continue to assert the right to use all of these techniques -- and possibly waterboarding, as well."

Back in 1974, McCain doesn't seem to have been in doubt about whether sleep deprivation and stress techniques were torture. These are not the worst techniques on the list. (For my money, that dubious honor would go to hypothermia if it were extreme enough, and severe sensory deprivation if not.) Why does he now think that these techniques are OK?

Guess What? You Already Did

by hilzoy

Maureen Dowd passes on this gem:

"A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered. “I will never do that to them,” 43 said."

Guess what, Mr. President? You already did.

Estimated number of people killed when the Shi'a uprising was suppressed: 30,000.

Number of Iraqis killed in our President's war of choice, according to Iraq Body Count, which surely understates the casualties since it counts only those that make it into the papers: 84,393-92,071. We don't have to get into the question, how plausible are the much, much higher estimates? to know that George Bush has easily surpassed his father when it comes to getting Iraqis killed.

If he wanted not to do that to them, he chose a very odd way of going about it.

Guns N' Justices

by publius

Via Volokh, I saw this excellent overview of what to look for in the Heller Second Amendment case by Professor Mike O'Shea at Concurring Opinions. The decision could come Monday.

There's a lot to chew over, but the upshot is that the Court seems poised to recognize some sort of individual right. The critical question will then become how broadly the Court reads that right. If it's broad enough, it could jeopardize a significant amount of federal gun legislation.

And that of course is the problem with overturning decades-old precedent -- it undermines everything that's been built "on top" of it (e.g., legislation, other precedents), thus creating a lot of collateral damage. That doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to overturn settled precedent. It just means that there are good reasons to avoid doing so even when you think the initial case would have come out differently if you were considering it on a blank slate.