Progressive Versus Conservative Economics

Economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took a moment to belabor the obvious yesterday in his blog:

Let me start with a puzzle: why did faith in the wonders of financial deregulation persist so long?

After all, if you step back from the record, deregulation began producing disasters from early on. Early deregulatory moves helped bring on the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s; Garn-St. Germain produced the savings and loan debacle; freed-up capital flows produced the Asian crisis and LTCM; and now we have the great bust. So why were Very Serious People so convinced that it was a good thing?
...
these are pure fantasies on the part of the right. The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

Boom For Whom

Obvious, because in fact I've mentioned it myself once or twice. When you consider that most of the people who package and recite today's television news are included in the red bars, it's all the more reason to understand that we've been sold a bill of goods. Our economic growth since Reagan has averaged less than it did in the preceding years since the end of World War II, as the calculator at Measuring Worth helpfully shows in table form:

US	1945 to 1979	1980 to 2010
Real GDP	3.19%	2.73%
Real GDP per capita	1.76%	1.68%

See NOTE 1

Not only has the general growth of the U.S. economy been slower since the conservatives took over, but, as both Krugman's chart and a whole host of other charts have shown, the income distribution has been far worse for the vast majority of Americans as well.

Why did I pick those particular periods? They roughly represent the times when first progressives, and then conservatives were in charge of the American economy. There were good times within both periods, as well as bad. We've conducted a seventy year-long experiment in the power of these two differing economic philosophies. To conclude that the conservatives did better requires a lot of mental contortions that I'd just as soon avoid.


NOTE 1: I created this chart by putting those parameters into Measuring Worth's handy annualized growth calculator page. Then I just copied and pasted the HTML source for the resulting table.

Here is the suggested credit note from that site:

Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson
"Annualized Growth Rate and Graphs of Various Historical Economic Series," MeasuringWorth, 2011.

URL: www.measuringworth.com/growth

And The Votes Are In

There are a couple of bits of good news from today's elections. This election was almost entirely state and local races. While there may be other news with more than local implications, these two jumped out at me thanks to Taylor Marsh.

First, in Ohio, SB-5, the regressive law that was meant to break the public employee unions in the state, has been repealed by a substantial majority:

Unions hung a humbling defeat on Kasich, who has fast become his party’s poster boy for conservative overreach, by rolling back Senate Bill 5, a new collective bargaining law that bars public sector strikes, curtails bargaining rights for 360,000 public employees and scraps binding arbitration of management-labor disputes.

Ohio Senate Bill 5's repeal buoys Dems

This was an important victory for the public employee unions, and arguably could reverse the trend of decreased union power in politics. I think the latter will only happen if the unions learn that they must treat Democrats as potential allies, rather than as trusted friends. Unqualified support for Democrats got them where they are today, which is screwed just about every time an issue important to the unions comes up.

Still, it's a hopeful sign. Democrats thinking this is good for them need to think again - while there was an alliance between Democrats and unions at the state level, the national Democrats stayed strictly out of it. They aren't any more friendly to unions than Republicans these days.

The second bit of good news is that the Mississippi referendum to make zygotes into people has failed:

Mississippi would have become the first state to define a fertilized egg as a person, a measure which was aimed at outlawing abortion in the state but, opponents contended, would have led to all kinds of unintended consequences.

In the end, those concerns won out in a strongly anti-abortion state. The amendment trailed 59 percent to 41 percent with more than half of precincts reporting. The Associated Press has said it will fail.

Anti-abortion ‘personhood’ amendment fails in Mississippi

What's interesting is this paragraph from Aaron Blake's report:

The measure earned the support of both Republicans and Democrats in Mississippi — including both of the major parties’ nominees for governor — but some of them hesitated to support it, including outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour (R).

Anti-abortion ‘personhood’ amendment fails in Mississippi

Democrats haven't been doing jack to help women at the national level, and at least in Mississippi it appears that local Democrats want to emulate that record. One of the leading Democratic candidates in Mississippi, the nominee for governor, supported this travesty, and the outgoing Republican governor had problems with it.

Yet it will go down to defeat by a wide margin, in one of the most conservative states in the country.

Tell me again why they're worse than Republicans?

I'll vote for Democrats who actually fight for and represent progressive values. Those who don't can count on my voting for someone else. I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils any longer.

What people should take from this is that doing anything else just ends up as more of the same.

It's The Same All Over

Caption: A 250 meter-resolution image of the El Hierro undersea eruptions taken by NASA's MODIS satellite on Nov. 6, 2011.

Image credit: NASA/MODIS


Not much to report that I can see regarding the El Hierro event that is still, thankfully, not a full-blown volcanic eruption. I did find this little gem, though, in the live blog from Earthquake Report:

Update 08/11 – 21:20 UTC - The La Restinga Webcam story (continued) :

Joke Volta has called this evening Mr. Atilano, the webcam owner and got a totally different story than the person who “tweeted” that the President of El Hierro prohibited the use of the webcam.

Mr. Atilano said (unfortunately too late) that the president story was total nonsense. A typical rumor who starts to live his own live and was probably a setup by political opponents of Alpidio Armas.

He said the real reason is simply TOO MUCH VISITORS. In only 1 hour the webcam had more than 350000 visitors! Mr. Atilano said that they are working on a solution. A stronger server and more traffic capacity may solve the problem tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

It had been reported, via Twitter naturally, that the Spanish government was trying to keep a lid on this so that tourists wouldn't be scared to visit the Canary Islands. The actual explanation was a good deal more prosaic - what was an Internet connection mostly used by a few scientists and hobbyists was suddenly inundated with connection requests, and it stopped working. That, of course, didn't stop people from spreading a story that fit with their own prejudices and/or self interest.

Which, I think, just goes to show that politicians can be opportunistic little assholes just about anywhere, and people can be credulous morons when someone tells them something they're inclined to believe.

Another Good Reason To Stop Watching Television

If you remember fondly those days of yore when the Emergency Broadcast System was tested back during the Cold War, your government has heard you:

The national Emergency Alert System is an alert and warning system that can be activated by the President, if needed, to provide information to the American public during emergencies. NOAA’s National Weather Service, governors, and state and local emergency authorities also use parts of the system to issue more localized emergency alerts. The test is an important exercise in ensuring that the system is effective in communicating critical information to the public in the event of a real national emergency. It is a critical communications tool that can provide alerts, warning and information rapidly across multiple television and radio platforms.

Our top priority is to make sure that all members of the public know that this test is coming up – and that it is just a test. For most of us, this test will look and sound very similar to the local tests of the Emergency Alert System that we often see on TV or hear on the radio.

Help Us Spread the Word – On November 9, “This is Just a Test”

At about 2PM EST Wednesday, November 9, our televisions and radios will stop doing whatever they were doing, and do something else. What will it look and sound like if it's working correctly? Well, I'm not sure, and that's not because I neglected to read the description:

What will people hear and see during the test?

On November 9, the public will hear a message indicating that “This is a test.” The audio message will be the same for both radio and television. However, the image on the screen and the text/crawl at the top of television screen may not be the same for all viewers. When the EAS test is over, regular programming will resume.

Announcing First Nationwide EAS Test

There you are then. You've been warned. Now carry on.

Profiles In Fierce Advocacy: Sometimes The Mikes Are On When You're Saying What You Think

Caption: A wireless microphone and a small office/home router - everything you need to get someone else's careless mutterings on the Internet.

Image credit: Wesley Fryer

Oh my. Just saw this at Al Jazeera:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, a "liar" in a conversation with his US counterpart, Barack Obama, accidentally broadcast to journalists at last week's G20 summit in the French resort of Cannes.

"I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar," Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on.

Reporters in a separate location listened in to a simultaneous translation as Obama responded, according to a French interpreter: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you."

France's Sarkozy called Netanyahu 'a liar'

Yet President Fierce Advocate seems to bend to Netanyahu's will whenever there's a conflict between our interests and those of Netanyahu and his band of thieving warmongers. I'd have written "Israel's interests", but I really don't think that's the case. The best thing for Israel right now would be to be persuaded to make peace with its neighbors, and learn to cooperate with them rather than shell them.

Politicians will eventually learn to never say anything they're actually thinking when there are microphones in evidence that they can't control. That will be a sad day, because then we'll have fewer ways of showing just what hypocrites they are.

Interesting and Disturbing Happenings In The Canary Islands

Caption The north side of El Hierro Island in the Canary chain, about a year ago.

Image credit: Mataparda/Flickr


Unbeknown to me, it would seem there's been a very interesting volcanic eruption going on in the Canary Islands, as the U.K. Guardian reports:

Homes have been evacuated and roads closed on the southern-most Canary Island following a government-issued warning about a possible volcanic eruption.

The southern tip of El Hierro was shaken by a 4.3-magnitude quake late on Saturday as an underwater volcano just off the coast started spewing matter some 60ft into the air.

The island, which has 500 volcanic cones, has experienced more than 10,000 tremors in the past four months.

Renewed fears of an eruption came as vast quantities of magma - the molten rock from just under the earth's crust - began bubbling into the sea off the port of La Restinga.

Ready to blow? Homes evacuated on Canary Island as underwater volcano spews molten rock 60ft into the air

The Associated Press reports that some of the debris has been accompanied by a foul smell. There are some folks in the area live blogging for Earthquake Report, and this is how they describe it:

Update 06/11 – 21:34 UTC :

Raymond is still at his (safe) viewpoint position and says that he is smelling a faint sulfurous odor. He isn’t seeing the Jacuzzi in the dark, but he hopes to see the red glow of the magma later at night as he sees that the harmonic tremor is still saturated and as the earthquake activity has increased again.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

That's not the worst news when it comes to gases, though:

Update 06/11 – 21:57 UTC :

PEVOLCA confirms a further increase in carbon dioxide emissions in El Hierro (see also Patrick Allard comment just below). The emission of CO2 is one of the parameters of a volcanic eruption precursors but has to be assessed jointly with others, such as deformation and seismicity depth


El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

The news on the seismicity depth front isn't looking terribly good. There was this a little later:

Update 07/11 – 09:28 UTC :

- Reader Marco Schaapherder just told us that we might not have seen a shift in earthquake depth since midnight. He was right! Magma may have found his way up a few more km, as the focal depths are getting up to 14 km now.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

Which I take to mean that magma is getting closer to the surface. That's probably why people are being evacuated.

Let me just stress that even the experts seem to be unsure what all this means, and I'm not even close to being an expert. This is why everyone is jumpy in that part of the world right now, though.

Dana Hunter passed on via e-mail that this might end up being what's called a Surtseyan eruption, which is the name used to describe an eruption that happens in shallow water. Since the activity noted so far has been occurring out at sea, that seems like a reasonable expectation. That probably would be better than having some eruption on land. As the quote from the Guardian mentioned, El Hierro is riddled with volcanic cones, so you'd have to think that an eruption on dry land is at least a possibility.

For those of us who aren't in harm's way, there are some other interesting tidbits, in the form of rocks like this one:

Image credit: NHArq

According to the caption at the Image credit link, it floats. It's probably pumice, with some rhyolite embedded in it (the silvery crystals). I've never seen anything quite like it before.

Geoscience Professor Erik Klemetti, a columnist at Wired, comments:

There are also some new images of the floating pyroclastic chunks that have been coughed up during this eruption – and they continue to look as strange as they sound (see below) with a mixture of light rhyolite/phonolite that is highly vesicular (filled with bubbles) and dark basalt/basanite (that is also full of bubbles). There is an unsubstantiated report of a “big rock” being ejected from the eruption, but no image (or size) so far.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

At the moment, the harmonic tremors are subsiding a bit, but that isn't necessarily a good sign. Hopefully, this will turn out to be something other than a full-blown eruption, and everyone who has had to evacuate can go back to their homes soon.

(h/t to Expat, who e-mailed me a link to the Earthquake Report live blog.)

UPDATE: It looks like maybe the harmonic tremors haven't subsided after all. The problem may be that the seismic chart the Earthquake Report bloggers were using isn't quite as reliable as it could be:

Update 08/11 – 08:32 UTC :

IGN and Graphics rescaling

Caption: (by Cujo359) This is the chart this quote refers to. Note that about midway the blue strip chart seems to change. To the left its peak values are clearly off the scale, and past the center line to the right they are visible. That's what they mean by rescaling.

- When discussing the activity with Raymond during the night, he hard a hard time believing that the harmonic tremor decreased seriously (see update 07/11 – 23:59).
- He did not detect any serious change while i reported this (of course it was dark and he was reflecting the explosion vibrations he felt)
- I was unable to confirm him that it was a real decrease because the graphics we use are coming from the IGN website and IGN NEVER REPORTS RESCALING the graph. Most of the time it can be seen by white spaces or blue lines in the seismograms and harmonic tremor graphs, but at the time of reporting no visible change was detected. Since midnight it is obvious that the scale was adapted a number of times. We request @ IGN that they will indicate the rescaling actions in a separate log.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

I use the word "reliable" advisedly here. When a graph is suddenly rescaled like this with no notation to indicate this has been done, it's easy to misinterpret. If you can't be sure what you're looking at, that makes the interpretation of that data unreliable.

To make a long story short, it appears there has been no real change in harmonic tremors in the last day or so. So maybe they don't need to be quite so jittery as they were a couple of hours ago.

How Many More Generals Must Go?

Caption: Major General Peter Fuller in happier days, designing new helmets for the Army.

Image credit: U.S. Army

I missed this development Friday, and as James Ala notes, that is probably by design:

US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk:

Major General Peter Fuller, a top US commander in Afghanistan, has been relieved of his duties after criticising the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

Not only is Afghanistan the graveyard of Empires; it is fast becoming the graveyard of loose-lipped generals. First General McChrystal, now Major General Fuller have died from foot-in-mouth disease. There is something very wrong with this mission to make two flag officers go off the deep end.
...
Sidebar: This was a very nasty dirty deed done dirt cheep; real graveyard stuff. It popped up on the google machine around 21:30 Pacific Daylight Time on a Friday[.]

US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk

The military, even ours, is anything but a democratic institution. There are good reasons for that. As we learned in the McChrystal fiasco, any officer who publicly criticizes a policy he's in the act of implementing is likely to have his career come to a resounding halt. Major General Fuller must have known this when he said what he did to Politico.

Our Afghanistan policy has been wrongheaded for a long time. It has only gotten worse since President Obama took over. There is no point in applying more force to the situation. The Afghan people are going to have to sort this out on their own. They probably never trusted us, and after ten years of bloodshed, they certainly don't now.

In the interest of not letting this one go quietly in the night, I pass it along...

Afterword: While I worked in the defense industry for a long time, I never worked with or for Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier, MGEN Fuller's previous post, nor have I met him.

UPDATE: Corrected the link for James Ala's article. It had originally pointed to the Guardian article that James was quoting.

Robert Reich And The Coming Of Shadows

Caption: A dying Emperor Turhan gets the bad news from Kosh in the Babylon 5 episode "The Coming Of Shadows".

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359 (see NOTE 1)

Emperor Turhan: How will it end?
Kosh: In fire.

That bit of dialogue, from the Babylon 5 episode "The Coming Of Shadows", has been playing quite often in my head lately. It occurs between Kosh, the enigmatic but seemingly all-knowing alien, and an emperor who is trying to at least begin the process of establishing peace between his own world and an enemy race before he dies. While he might not have meant it to, Kosh's prediction no doubt breaks the old man's heart. Before the end of the episode, Turhan is dead, and thanks to his foolishly power-hungry political allies, the two races are headed for war.

Robert Reich tells us why I feel this way as he describes how things have been going recently on the economics front:

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.

Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.

I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Washington Pre-Occupied

Note how he doesn't make much of a point of talking about the difference between the two political parties at this point. It's clear to Reich, a former Clinton cabinet member and a politician in his own right, perceives that in this area there are no real differences. This is something I've been saying for some time, of course, as have many others out here in the land beyond DC. It's becoming apparent to folks who just recently moved into our neighborhood, now, that this is true.

The other point is more unnerving - Reich sees that in the near future things are going to get ugly. I'm afraid this is true. My guess is that it will be in 2013, particularly if Obama is re-elected, because it will instantly become clear that nothing is going to change. Should a Republican be elected to the White House, a distinct possibility at this point, It might take a little longer for the realization to set in, but it will nevertheless.

At that point, no one with any sense will enjoy being in this country.

No one in DC who has the power to change things wants to. They think they can just keep a lid on this thing, I'm sure, until the rest of us just learn to accept the way things are now.

I'm afraid that they're sorely mistaken. For us, this is becoming a battle of survival.

This is why I keep on trying to make the point that we need to demand of our politicians, all of them, that they do what's needed. If you're willing to pat them on the head and give them your vote, then you're doing nothing but perpetuating the problem.

NOTE 1: You can recite this in your sleep by now, can't you? Screenshot of the episode by Cujo359. Babylon 5 is the copyrighted work of J. Michael Straczynski, Warner Brothers, and a bunch of other people who had absolutely nothing to do with this article.

Saturday Entertainment: MTV

There was a time, long ago, when the "M" in "MTV" meant "music". As xkcd explains:



There was a time when you could tune into the channel pretty much any time you wanted, and be treated to marvelous little videos like this, this, this, or one of my personal favorites:



Now, you have to comb YouTube.

In some ways, television was better back then...

Bill Black Does Three Bullet Points

Writing about the Occupy movements a month ago, I mentioned the importance of having three bullet points in a presentation:

Back when I worked for a relatively large defense firm, I had a boss who when we were making up slides for a presentation, would insist that we only have three "bullet points", meaning three thoughts or concepts to discuss, per slide. "What happens if there are four things to talk about?", I'd ask. "Remove one of them", was the response. Needless to say, most of those slides had either two or three bullet points, since almost never made sense to make a slide with only one. I suspect this sameness didn't help hold peoples' interest very much.

Why did my boss insist on this rule? It turns out that someone did some research into how best to hold an audience's attention in these sorts of presentations, and that was a rule they came up with.

The Place Is The Message

This happened on my way to describing how foolish it is to go to something like Occupy Wall Street and expect them to have a handy list of demands that various ticket-punching types can use to check off how compliant they are with the movement. Or something like that. The basic point of demonstrations is to explain to politicians that you're tired of them not getting done whatever it is you need done, and anyone who couldn't see what people meant by occupying the heart of our financial sector these days probably isn't all that motivated to see.

All of which brought a smile to my face as I watched this video of Bill Black discussing what needs to happen in America in the next few years if we're to avoid a depression:




Here are the bullet points:

• Jobs now
• Jail the bankers
• Stop the foreclosures

Three bullet points, all easily written onto a bumper sticker. Sounds like the start of a great political campaign. I just wish there were politicians out there willing to implement it.

At about five minutes into the video, he also accuses the Tea Party people like the Koch Brothers of trying to destroy America, a sentiment with which I agree.

Speaking of political platforms, I keep meaning to mention this, so I'll just blurt it out here. Awhile back a diarist at Corrente came up with what they quickly started calling the Twelve Word Platform (12WP), which is:

• Medicare for All
• End the Wars
• Tax the Rich
• A Jobs Guarantee

The last of those is the first of Black's bullet points, "Jobs now". He has a good idea for how to get it done, too. I'd say that "Jail the bankers" is part of the "Tax the Rich" plank of the 12WP.

Any politician at the state or national level who wants my support will have to not only support this platform, but convince me somehow that he'll actually work for it if elected.

So far, no one has qualified. Maybe that's because it's one bullet point too many...