Obsidian Wings

Out of Laser Sights, Out of Mind

by Eric Martin

This might interrupt the steady flow of flowers and candy from the lucky liberated:

As the US draws down its troops and supplies, which should culminate in a total withdrawal by 2012, funds for humanitarian relief operations in Iraq are dwindling at an alarming rate. US funding generally comprised 30-56% of total funding for humanitarian activity post-2003 invasion. However, the US is currently diverting its focus from Iraq towards the war in Afghanistan, as well as relief from natural disasters in countries like Haiti and Chile. Halfway through 2010, the US has only contributed $7.2 million to the [Iraq Humanitarian Action Plan] and other humanitarian assistance programs in Iraq; this comprises approximately 8% of the total funding collected so far in 2010. Furthermore, this total is $217.2 million less than US donor contributions in 2009.

Mark Leon Goldberg has a point:

Back in 2003, the most powerful country in the world decided it would lead a coalition to invade and occupy Iraq.  You can debate the merits of that decision all you want, but as a consequence, a civil war erupted that displaced about 3 million people. These refugees and IDPs still depend humanitarian assistance to fulfill their basic human needs.  It seems to me that the United States has a special moral obligation to provide adequate levels of humanitarian assistance until such a time when the Iraqi government is fully capable of providing for its citizens. That time is not now.

 On the other hand, since "we already won" the war in Iraq, what do they need aid for?

Oh My God, Oh His God, Oh Her God, Oh Your God

by Eric Martin

Adam Serwer suggests that the seemingly jarring claim by Tennesse gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey that "Islam is a cult" should not really surprise anyone.  He might be right:

If you're surprised by this remark, it's because you're not reading what they're reading. The right-wing media is full of sentiments like this, bigoted remarks you simply could not say about any other religion without serious social consequences. Just take this yesterday, from Andy McCarthy:

The Ground Zero mosque project is not about religious tolerance. We permit thousands of mosques in our country, and Islam is not a religion. Islam is an ideology that has some spiritual elements, but strives for authoritarian control of every aspect of human life — social, political, and economic.

...[McCarthy's] already working backwards from the conclusion that Islam is "not a religion" because it "strives for authoritarian control of every aspect of human life." (Christianity or Judaism for example, would never tell you exactly what you're allowed to eat or whom you're allowed to sleep with.) But the point is that while all bad people are not Muslims, all Muslims are bad. Why bother with a detailed conspiracy theory?

Islam is not a religion? Wow. 

This is frigtening and disturbing stuff.  If not surprising, apparently.

Trickle Down Didn't

by Jacob Davies

We may not be the New York Times, but we can still have fancy interactive features:

The gradual squeeze of everyone but the upper 10% is like trying to get out the last of the toothpaste from the tube. Now I know that income share isn't the whole story: in theory, at least, inequality could grow and everyone could still be better off (although inequality itself makes people unhappy). But in reality, the squeeze didn't make everyone better off. I'll try to get another one of these together with real incomes plotted to tell that story.

(Update: This won't work in older browsers or if you have JavaScript disabled, sorry. That's a WONTFIX bug.)

Modest Maos

by Eric Martin

This is, apparently, what socialism under the reign of ObaMao looks like (The blue bars that is.  The red bars are capitalism in all its glory):

$6,400 more for people with $500,000 in adjusted gross income, with cuts for earners with $150,000 or less doesn't seem too outrageous to me.  Chart from the Wall Street Journal courtesy of K-Drum.

Social Security is not "Government Spending"

by Jacob Davies

There's a schizophrenia over Social Security among those who would like to see it done away with. On the one hand, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security - and have been subsidizing the rest of the budget for 25 years - don't count as "taxes" when it comes to asserting that "half of the people pay no tax", even though for most people payroll taxes are larger than income taxes.

But when it comes to the Federal budget, Social Security is the boogeyman, the big bad king, the trillion dollar monster of spending.

Except it's not spending.

Here are things that are "spending": Buying a road. Buying a jet fighter. Buying a rocket. Buying 3,500 more jet fighters. Buying a school. Buying a dozen shiny new aircraft carriers. Buying your grandmother a pacemaker. There is a legitimate (if overblown) concern that when the government buys things, it doesn't tend to get a very good deal. This turns out to be true when it comes to jet fighters and aircraft carriers, and less true when it comes to roads and schools and medicine.

Social Security, though, is not spent by the government. It is distributed by the government, based on a lifetime of payments into the system and certain rules that act as insurance for widows and orphans and the disabled. (We like being nice to orphans, right?)

The recipients are the ones who do the spending. And those good, solid American individuals are presumptively possessed of the wisdom to spend it more appropriately than the government. They can spend it on food and rent and clothes and gifts for their grandchildren and trips to Florida, or hookers and blow and video poker, or burn it in their fireplace, or whatever it is they want to do with it.

It isn't government spending. It's the way in which about a third of the population gets to retire while the other two thirds provide for them, and the way in which we insure against bereavement and disability. It isn't scary. It's boring, but nice. Like your grandma. And if your grandma wants to spend hers on video poker - well, who am I to judge?

Trust but Verify

by Eric Martin

This item from Friday should not be allowed to slide down the memory hole:

Long before an eruption of gas turned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig into a fireball, an alarm system designed to alert the crew and prevent combustible gases from reaching potential sources of ignition had been deliberately disabled, the former chief electronics technician on the rig testified Friday.

Michael Williams, an ex-Marine who survived the April 20 inferno by jumping from the burning rig, told a federal panel probing the disaster that the alarm system was one of an array of critical systems that had been functioning unreliably in the run-up to the blowout.

Williams told the panel that he understood that the rig had been operating with the gas alarm system in "inhibited" mode for a year to prevent false alarms from disturbing the crew.

He said the explanation he got was that the leadership of the rig did not want crew members needlessly awakened in the middle of the night.

If the safety system was disabled, it would not have been a unique event. Records of federal enforcement actions reviewed by The Washington Post show that, in case after case, rig operators paid fines for allegedly bypassing safety systems that could impede routine operations.

Computers used to monitor and control drilling operations intermittently froze, to the point that the problem became known as "the blue screen of death," Williams said. Despite attempted repairs, the issue remained unresolved at the time of the blowout, Williams said.

Earlier in the drilling operation, one of the panels that controlled the blowout preventer -- the last line of defense against a gusher -- had been placed in bypass mode to work around a malfunction, Williams said.

Williams said a colleague told him that an inspection of the rig in the spring, shortly before the disaster, found extensive maintenance problems. The colleague said "that we were going to be in the shipyard a lot longer than anticipated because the rig was in very bad condition," Williams said.

We should not trust industry to regulate itself, and we desperately need to add teeth and effective enforcement to our existing regulations.  These commercial activities are simply too dangerous to be conducted under any other regime.

Many Journeys to Freedom Made in Vain

by Eric Martin

Yet another example of stark anti-Muslim bigotry from high ranking Republican Party officials.  This one from Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, a leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, in response to question surrounding the growing opposition to the addition of a Muslim community center to a mosque already built in that state (via):

...Ramsey proclaimed his support for the Constitution and the whole "Congress shall make no law" thing when it comes to religion. But he also said that Islam, arguably, is less a faith than it is a "cult."

"Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it," Ramsey said. "Now certainly we do protect our religions, but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face."

Again: aside from the sheer ugliness of the bigotry on display here, this cheap demagoguery is actually counterproductive in terms of weakening al-Qaeda and other extremists groups that pervert Islam.  Not to mention that such a blithe disregard to a fundamental Constitutional protection is alarming in its own right.

There's a Hole in the Junket

by Eric Martin

As I'm sure many readers are aware, Wikileaks released a massive trove of classified reports on the Afghan war effort over the weekend (see the Wikileaks report here, and media coverage here, here and here). 

The Wikileaks expose reveals a history of the conflict that often contradicts official Obama and Bush administration statements - with documented incidents of direct support for Taliban groups from Pakistani intelligence and military groups; accounts of the ineffectiveness, unpopularity and corruption of the Karzai administration; details regarding the the maintenance of black prison sites at Bagram and elsewhere (where the red cross is denied access, and allegations of torture abound); evidence of an uptick in paramilitary and military special operations raids that frequently result in civilian casualties; and other troubling details.

However, much of the progressive foreign policy community (and others) have reacted with a collective, if knowledgable, shrug.  Charli Carpenter's take is typical (not to single her out, as she is generally very good):

My initial reaction just from browsing the headlines: it’s news that between our accidents and the Taliban’s intentional terror campaigns, many civilians have died? That Bagram has become the new Guantanamo? That it is US policy to kill or capture Taliban leaders? That the Afghan government is corrupt? Or that the US is using drones to kill insurgents and sometimes these operations go awry? That elements within Pakistan have been funding and training the Taliban?

Either there’s not a lot of “there” in these 90,000+ documents, or the mainstream media is down-playing what’s actually ground-breaking in the reports.

There is too much nonchalance in this reaction, though, and it misses the significance of the leaked material.  On the one hand, it is true that for those closely watching events in Afghanistan, many of these "revelations" would merely confirm already-held suspicions, known facts or prior analysis.  However, that is a very, very small subset of the overall US population. 

Not to mention that many war supporters had previously dismissed media reports on these subjects that were, due to journalistic conventions, levened with the appropriate amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.  The Wikileaks dump removes the caveats and casts doubt on the doubters, helping to refine and clarify the establishment media narrative.

Further, regardless of one's orientation to the continuation of the war (supporter, opponent or some hybrid), the behind the scenes glimpse of the raw reports flies in the face of the Bush administration and, later, Obama administration accounts of events in this region.  Michael Cohen remarks about the Pakistan involvement angle:

Hmm, for something that everyone seemed to know was true, it's funny how President Obama didn't seem fit to mention it in his public remarks explaining why he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. And I'm genuinely curious if any of the various supporters of escalation felt urged to mention at the time that the American people were receiving a rather incomplete picture of the war their country was fighting in Afghanistan - and the role of Pakistan in prosecuting that conflict. 

This is very true.  At the time that influential think tanks like CNAS were selling the President, and the public, on implementing a costly counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign that could only succeed with a legitimate and popular central government (Karzai's was not that, and "everybody knew it") and no significant support and safe haven from foreign patrons (as "everybody knew," Pakistan was providing this), few COIN proponents were showing the proper level of concern over the resiliency and impact of these crucial obstacles.  While acknowledged in some instances, these fundamental impediments were soft pedaled and waved away far too easily.

In a similar sense, is there really widespread knowledge of special operations and CIA/paramilitary "dirty war" activity in Afghanistan?  How about torture and indefinite detention at Bagram?  On the contrary, it seems that there are more complaints about restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan than there are concerns over special ops run amok - at least from right wing critics.  

Those same right wing voices frequently chastise Obama for being soft on terror because he, ostensibly, no longer tortures detainees, while, inversely, Obama receives too much credit from some supporters for his supposed abandonment of this Bush administration vestige.  But revelations about Bagram challenge that narrative directly. 

Political leaders go to great lengths to put a positive spin on events associated with military conflict, and in this country, the media is often more complicit than adversarial.  Afghanistan has been no different.  The Wikileaks report has the potential to peel away a portion of the facade, which is significant even if many dedicated observers already knew about the truth beneath the veneer.  The sooner this country comes to grips with the fact that our mission in Afghanistan is overly ambitious, while excessively costly, the sooner there will be more and louder calls for disengagement.  Let's hope this turns up the volume.

[UPDATE: Two takes worth looking at are Jay Rosen's and Amy Davidson's]

Think Happy Thoughts and Say Happy Things

by Jacob Davies

Optimism is a fine thing, even in dark times. Things generally will return to getting better sooner or later, and despair is useless in helping get there faster. But there is optimism and optimism; "One day I'll get a job so I won't stop looking" is the good kind. "We can't pay the rent next month but I'm sure it'll turn out fine" - not so good.

I'm having a little trouble with the economic forecasts of the Obama administration on those grounds. The CBO estimate on Friday indicated unemployment over 8% through 2012, combined with economic growth of about 4% through the same period. I'm no economist, but those two things seemed unlikely to coexist. 8% unemployment means insecure consumers afraid of losing their jobs, a large section of the population earning nothing and buying little, and businesses unsure of future demand and unlikely to invest. And as we've seen in the last few weeks, even the extended unemployment benefits that have kept the unemployed still spending some money are unlikely to make it even for another six months, let alone two or three years.

But I could be wrong. 8% unemployment would be terrible, but if economic growth was really 4% at least that would be something. Is that combination unprecedented? It's not actually unprecedented. In fact, the CBO projections very closely fit the pattern of the early 1980s recession and recovery:

(The purple line is "now" for the current recession, although the points for 2010 are still CBO projections.)

So that gave me pause. It is at least possible for roughly the predicted pattern to occur, although I think it's worth noting that employment fell further and faster than it did in the early 80s, the recession was a little deeper, and even the projected amount of growth in 2010 seems over-optimistic.

But the more I thought about the differences, the less convinced I was that their scenario was plausible. The basic dynamics of the situation are different. In both cases there have been drops in interest rates. In the 80s, the drop was far larger and from a far higher point. This time around we had barely gotten back to "normal" rates when we dropped back to zero again. But the really big difference is the household wealth effect. In the 80s, a period of high interest rates had choked off consumer lending and resulted in a serious dip in home values, but a shift to lower interest rates pushed up house prices and allowed a great deal of consumer lending.

Our situation is different. House prices were hugely inflated, and the crash has not even brought them to long-run average values (and I do not believe the crash is anywhere near over). There is no prospect of a major rise in home prices, and households are saddled with massive mortgage debt:

I'm not seeing where the equivalent boost in demand is going to come from this time. The stimulus is done, and nothing more is on the cards. When even the none-too-thrilling predictions of 8% unemployment through 2012 seem unreasonably optimistic, I think we're in trouble.

Open Thread: The Long Hard Crawl

by Eric Martin

My time flies.  Last month, his 8th, he started crawling.  Now he's like a little marathoner - of crawl.  And, naturally, his instinct is to make a b-line for whatever it is he shouldn't be going near.  He used to be such a good baby:

But then, nothing makes him happier than breaking the rules.

But mostly he's just very earnest.  I'm not sure what he's thinking about most of the time, but boy does he mean it.