Obsidian Wings

Administrations Never Give Up A Power, And Extend It When They Can: Example 2,942,

--by Sebastian

I don't have very much to add to this:

But I would hope that nobody needs me or anyone else to explain why this assertion of power is so pernicious -- at least as pernicious as any power asserted during the Bush/Cheney years.  If the President has the power to order American citizens killed with no due process, and to do so in such complete secrecy that no courts can even review his decisions, then what doesn't he have the power to do?  Just for the moment, I'll note that The New York Times' Charlie Savage, two weeks ago, wrote about the possibility that Obama might raise this argument, and quoted the far-right, Bush-supporting, executive-power-revering lawyer David Rivkin as follows:

The government's increasing use of the state secrets doctrine to shield its actions from judicial review has been contentious. Some officials have argued that invoking it in the Awlaki matter, about which so much is already public, would risk a backlash. David Rivkin, a lawyer in the White House of President George H. W. Bush, echoed that concern.

"I'm a huge fan of executive power, but if someone came up to you and said the government wants to target you and you can't even talk about it in court to try to stop it, that’s too harsh even for me," he said.

Having debated him before, I genuinely didn't think it was possible for any President to concoct an assertion of executive power and secrecy that would be excessive and alarming to David Rivkin, but Barack Obama managed to do that, too.  Obama's now asserting a power so radical -- the right to kill American citizens and do so in total secrecy, beyond even the reach of the courts -- that it's "too harsh even for" one of the most far-right War on Terror cheerleading-lawyers in the nation.  But that power is certainly not "too harsh" for the kind-hearted Constitutional Scholar we elected as President, nor for his hordes of all-justifying supporters soon to place themselves to the right of David Rivkin as they explain why this is all perfectly justified.  One other thing, as always:  vote Democrat, because the Republicans are scary!

This is important in four ways.  First, it is a large step beyond even what Bush II did in the war on terror.  Asserting the power and authority to kill an American citizen without due process of law is something even Cheney didn't try.  

Second, as we know from the torture policies [not to mention simple familiarity with the limits of human knowledge] we can't trust the government to always identify the right person. 

Third, by asserting the state secrets doctrine to cover the assassination policy, President Obama and his administration are attempting to remove any check on the power he is asserting.  This is especially troubling, because it means that all of the regular checks to keep the misidentification problem under control end up being avoidable.  And after-the-fact checks end up being avoidable. 

Fourth, even granting the good faith of the current Administration in making sure they have the right guy, and in never using it for improper purposes, how can we trust every future administration with this power?

You Never Trust a Millionaire Quoting the Sermon on the Mount

by Eric Martin

Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a speech yesterday defending a recently passed California law setting emissions standards/targets that, in many ways, shocked me deeply.  The reason for my surprise (pleasant at that) is that Schwarzenegger spoke some truths that are rarely uttered by mainstream politicians - and even less frequently by politicians on the right side of the spectrum. 

He took on, full bore and without pulled punches, the corrupting influence of money in politics; the fact that the greedy self-interest of powerful factions often overwhelms the public good; the many external costs associated with our dependence on fossil fuels (which are almost never taken into account when calculating the costs of environmental regulations); and the fact that our dependency on oil warps our foreign policy decisions.

His speech is a long-overdue thing of beauty:

I want to talk about the corruption of the democratic process, and about forces willing to sabotage this country's economic future for private gain.

I want to talk about Texas oil interests that have descended up on California to overturn a Californian environmental law. and then assume that they've done the dirty work thanks to millions of dollars of scare tactic advertising.[...]

There's a great drama, there is a great struggle playing out here in California right now that the rest of the world doesn't pay much attention to and knows very little about. And that's why I'm here today to put the spotlight on this very important issue. [...]

Oil companies like Valero and Tesoro and Frontier are blatantly trying to manipulate the will of the people and the good.[...]

The effort is similar to the conspiracy hatched among oil companies in the 1920s to get rid of light rail systems. Then, the companies bought up the easements for light rail systems in 45 cities and then systematically dismantled them. [...]

Today Valero and Tesoro and others involved are involved in a conspiracy, but not in a criminal conspiracy, but clearly in a cynical one. They are not seeking to buy rail systems, but to buy votes this time. Yet the motivation is the same which is self-serving greed.

2/3 of Californians approve our state law to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But you know who the two most prominent opponents are?...Valero and Tesoro, also two of the state's top polluters. They're behind an initiative on the November ballot called Proposition 23, which would suspend our law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in reality, because of the fine print when it comes to unemployment, they really don't want to just suspend it, they want to kill this initiative, they want to kill our laws. [...]

...And while they're not creating a shell company, they are creating a shell argument that this is about saving jobs. Does anyone really believe that these companies that out of the goodness of their black oil hearts are spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs?  This is like Eva Braun writing a kosher cookbook -- it's not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen, it's about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits. [...]

Those who seek to overturn our carbon reduction law say that the green-tech future is too costly. Another excuse, great, great excuse, huh?

But here's what they don't want to tell you. the cost calculations doesn't include the increased of cost doing business their way, the old way. They don't include the cost of rising oil prices as the developing world demands more and more oil.

They don't include the costs of job losses that is rising oil prices will force.

They don't include the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks that have gotten and continued to get.

They don't include the costs of pollution that are already causing -- the cost, for instance, to hundreds of thousands of Americans who die every year from smog-related diseases.

They don't include also the cost of 6.5 million hospital visits a year for smog-related illnesses.

They don't include the cost of the NEXT War over Oil. And believe me, eventually it will come as we become more and more dependent on Oil. I mean, I think that we have had enough wars in the Middle East because of Oil.

Don't you think so? [emphasis added]

The bolded parts really do bear emphasizing: Wealthy interests in this nation (and elsewhere, obviously) have in the past, are currently, and will continue to, manipulate the political process to enrich themselves - usually at the expense of the common good.  That is a simple, obvious and undeniable fact.

Which is part of why it is so maddening that any talk about making the tax code even slightly more progressive (or eliminating hedge fund loopholes and corporate welfare) receives such push back from people that should know better, and whose interests would be better served by a slight tilt toward the middle class - especially following an era during which the Bush administration's heavy hand placed was placed firmly on the scales in favor of the uber-wealthy.

There was in the past, is now, and will continue to be, a class war being waged in this country, only popular discourse has perverted its contours, its winners and its ongoing losers.  The wealthiest Americans are not under siege any more than the oil industry is looking out for the jobs of Californians. They are not operating under onerous tax burdens (in fact, the wealthiest among us pay a lower effective rate than the working stiffs) any more than the oil industry is operating under environmental regulations that make profits unattainable. 

They are not on the verge of Going Galt, and if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to find a stable, advanced, Western liberal democracy with friendlier tax codes. 

The numbers tell the story about which classes are winning and, surprise, it's not the all powerful middle and lower classes:

The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.

The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the United States, compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

A different measure, the international Gini index, found United States income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The United States also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.

At the top, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, census data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.

Such gaping disparaties in wealth are not only bad for a consumer-oriented economy (hard to keep consumption churning when the vast majority of consumers don't have the  means to consume), but it is bad for democracy as well (with the means to affect political decisions increasingly reserved for an ever-smaller cluster of extremely wealth interests).

The dynamic surrounding the fight over Proposition 23 that Schwarzenegger describes is a microcosm, not an outlier.

The Four Hundred

by Doctor Science

No sooner did I post about what kind of backround the American super-rich have when Forbes came out with the 2010 list. Of course, I cannot resist a challenge, so I've made a new table, this time with the top 50 names on it -- so far. I also spent a lot of time making sure to document my assertions, and putting in code to make the table sortable in a bunch of fascinating ways.

In sum:

• 16 out of the 50 (32%) grew up in great wealth: they were basically born on home plate.
• another 11 were what I'd call solidly upper class -- not Great Big Trust Fund Rich, but *extremely* comfortable. Altogether, around half of the people on the list were in the top few percent of the population from birth.
• 12 or 13 (depending on how you count Michael Bloomberg's family) are from the upper-middle class. Notably, most of them made their fortunes in the Computer/Internet sector -- not surprising for people who were basically brought up as technocrats.
• 4 are from middle-class families, 2 from the lower-middle class, and only one -- Harold Hamm -- is definitely from the lower class.

Speaking as someone from the "upper-middle tech" class, only those last 7 (or 8) people were really "self-made", everybody else started with enough cultural capital or just plain capital to not really be on a level playing field with the rest of the population. The Forbes list does *not* show the triumph of free-market competition, it shows that, as Forbes itself has admitted, Want to get rich quick? Have a fabulously wealthy family.

If you can't give your children a couple hundred million bucks each for their start in life, you may be wondering about how to up their cultural capital. Putting together this table (and skimming a whole bunch of biographies), I have two suggestions:

1. Be Jewish. My ballpark estimate is that being Jewish gives you an extra economic class(by my definition, e.g. from middle to upper-middle)es worth of cultural capital. I suspect it's due to a very solid tradition of respecting people who go to school, respecting people who make deals, and having more people in an average extended family who have actually done things like go to college or start a business.


2. Marry a well-educated woman. If you sort by class and look at people from below the upper class, I think there are a larger-than-expected number of billionaires whose mothers had jobs requiring higher education: especially in the sciences, though teachers also make a good showing.

But don't let that distract you, tempting though it is. This game isn't completely fixed -- that's how you get the suckers to keep playing and betting -- but it's *mostly* fixed. A huge portion of the wealth -- and thus the power -- in America is concentrated in the hands of people who did nothing to earn it. If that's not aristocracy, what do you call it?

yo gummint so big.....

it uses busses for rollerskates!  when it stands up the sun goes out!  it uses bowling balls for earrings!

Or, in the more measured words of the Republican Pledge To America:

Our plan stands on the principles of a small, more accountable government

Sounds great. Ain't gonna happen. Details at 11.

OK, introductions first I guess. "singingbone" is "russell". At some point I'll figure out how to make it use my actual name. Or, everyone will just get used to the fact that "singingbone" is "russell". Whichever comes first.

Next, many thanks to the kitteh for the the very kind invitation to post. I will do my best not to be an idiot, and will try not to blow anything up.

Next after that, if you want to save yourself a few minutes, you can skip this and read sekajin's comment here. It's crisp and to the point, and pretty much says most of what I'm going to say here in fewer words.  I'm just going to add detail.

If you're still with me, more after the jump. 

Not Complicated

by Jacob Davies

Imagine that 310 people reside in the United States of America, and that it's a small village, not a country.

Of those 310, 238 are adults not in the care of others.The rest are children, institutionalized elderly and disabled, and members of the armed forces; their needs are taken care of directly.

Of those 238, 154 are in the civilian labor force. The rest are "students, housewives, retired workers, seasonal workers interviewed in an off season who were not looking for work, institutionalized people, and people doing only incidental unpaid family work". Some receive retirement income, some rely on the income of employed members of their household.

Of those 154, 139 are employed. They do, for wages, all of the jobs in the village. The jobs are the things we've decided to do this year - maintaining houses, repairing roads, tending to the sick, teaching children, doing paperwork, arranging who does what and where, making sure the electricity and gas keep working, making the things we need to replace the things that wore out or were lost, digging the metals out of the ground to make those things, drilling for energy in the ground, growing the food that we eat.

So far so good.

Now we have the leftovers. 15 people who want to work can't find a job in our little village. Why? Is there nothing to do? Well, nobody's hiring because times are a little tight, but there's plenty to do - the streets are dirty and broken, the pipes are old and need replacing, the bridge should be torn down and a new one put up.

Maybe 5 of the people just need a little time to look for a new job, think about things, get their life together. So you've got ten guys just standing around doing nothing even though stuff needs doing.

What's up with that?

I'm bored of discussions of tax policy and wealth distribution and blah blah blah. Money bores me. There's work to be done and people who want to do it. Why don't we put them to work?

Enough About You: Let's Talk About Me

by Gary Farber

My name is Gary Farber.  You killed my father.  Some of you are familiar with me, and some are not. 

Who the hell am I?

I'm the FNG as an Obsidian Wings front-page blogger.

But!

My first appearance at Obsidian Wings was via a post by Katherine R. on December 16th, 2003, when she linked to a post of mine, and named it Post Of The Week.  This attracted my attention to Obsidian Wings, with its first set of bloggers, Moe Lane, Katherine R,  and Von.

Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman!

Admin and Meta and Open Thread, O My

by Doctor Science

Or should that be "Admins and Metas and Open Threads, O My"?

Admin:

I've never been a Real Blogger before, only a roving commenter. Am I supposed to be monitoring all posts for Evil Trolls and Spammongers? Or just the comments to posts I make?

It's taking a little mental re-tooling for me to think about making *posts* where before I would make *comments*. It seems so ... forward.

Meta:

Abi Sutherland at Making Light commented on:

how much, over the last wee while, I’ve noticed the same people turning up on pretty much all the blogs I currently follow. I recognized one person from Obsidian Wings in a thread here on Making Light; I’ve been watching several local regulars (plus one friend-of-friend from LiveJournal) say wise and good things in the Slacktivist comments; and a couple of names from Crooked Timber have made themselves welcome in our conversations here.

Hm, I thought later, everywhere I go, I see the same people, chewing over the same issues in subtly varying but essentially congruent fora. You know, this is probably what epistemic closure feels like.

I've decided I'm to blame.*g* No really, I think it's the re-configuration of a particular corner of Bloglandia, the one that wants to (mostly) talk about serious stuff without having to yell all the time. Mostly.

If I post about any of the "Stargate" TV series, will you-all look at me funny? Funnier?

Open Thread:

To start you off: The .doc file of J. Alfred Prufrock. I have measured out my life in login codes.

Freedom's Just Another Word

by Eric Martin

Conor Friedersdorf's expresses his frustration with the Republican Party's rhetorical reverence of freedom and liberty (in the context of domestic safety net policies) while actively working to undermine actual freedom and liberty in tangible ways at home.  After citing an alarming list of ways in which civil liberties have eroded in recent years, Friedersdorf laments:

This is a severely abridged sampling of the manifold ways our civil liberties are under attack. The War on Drugs and The War on Terrorism are the biggest culprits. Unfortunately, the Republican Party — the one that is always fretting about lost liberty — generally lends law enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts their blind support, and appoints too many judges who do the same. As you can see in the quote that begins this piece, it’s thought-leaders go so far as to assert that these issues are less worrisome attacks on liberty than President Obama’s domestic agenda.

I regard the actual, ongoing abrogation of civil liberties in America as the clearer, more present danger, as compared to the unintended consequences of “smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.” Indeed, these issues seem to me unsurpassed in their importance.

Americans are on an assassination list already. Innocents are imprisoned today. SWAT teams took out countless doors in no-knock raids this week. The last two presidents have asserted authority unprecedented in American history… and even when they break the law it goes unpunished.

Neither President Obama nor his conservative critics satisfy me on civil liberties. Were the GOP to nominate a candidate more respectful of my rights in 2012, I’d vote for him or her, and say good riddance to the incumbent. Despite my dislike of his domestic agenda, on the other hand, I’ll vote for Obama’s re-election if his challenger prattles on about doubling Gitmo, more intrusive spying, or any other movement that pushes us farther in the wrong direction.

We can’t afford a nation less solicitous of civil liberties than is already the case.

Forced to choose, I’d rather live in the ACLU’s idea of the perfect America than a country where we repeal Obamacare, eliminate earmarks, and persist in chipping away at civil liberties to fight drugs and terrorists. The former may be a “road to serfdom.” The latter is a shortcut to the same place.

It's hard out there for an actual small government conservative these days.

Don't Do The Cybercrime If You Can't Do The Time

by Gary Farber

Except that who is responsible for Stuxnet is a mystery. 

What we know is that it's incredibly dangerous.  And it's at least possible it was targeted at Iran's nuclear program, perhaps the enrichment centrifuges in Natanz.

Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target – a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.

The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something.

The old-fashioned way

by Doctor Science

One of the things that doesn't really get examined enough in discussions of US economic inequality is inherited wealth. It's obvious to me, at least, that inherited wealth can be expected to be an *enormous* problem with any "level playing field" expectation -- after all, historically the rich have been aristocrats, who by definition inherit their positions.

But how much of an effect does it really have in the US? Don't most rich people get that way from money they collect during their careers?