From the Mouths of Babes

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: May 30, 2013

Food stamps have played an especially useful – indeed, almost heroic – role in recent years. In fact, they have done triple duty.

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Indeed, estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70 – which means, by the way, that much of the money laid out to help families in need actually comes right back to the government in the form of higher revenue.

Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future – an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.

So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it.

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Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency – and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.

But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story – or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.

The Moral Calculus of the Woolwich Murder, 2013 May 27

You should read a transcript of the Woolwich murderer’s reasons.  It seems that he was offended by the fact that other Muslim civilians were routinely being murdered.  Having been taught, by the state, that murdering is acceptable, he proceeded to do so.

He, however, proved himself superior to the contemporary American and British States by murdering a military man and not a civilian.  He took far more care in choosing his victim than Obama does his.

So spare me the hand-wringing and condemnation.  He’s a bad man, to be sure, but he’s not as bad a man as the men we put in office.

When Tony Blair and George W. Bush are put in front of war crimes trials, along with Rumsfeld and many others, we can talk.  Till then, our “justice’ isn’t, it’s just tribalism dressed up in the name of justice, because it picks and chooses amongst murderers, letting the greatest of them, the ones with the most blood on their hands, walk free.

Ethical Degradation, 2013 May 28

We make distinctions between crimes, even the same crimes.  Unintentional killing is ranked lower than intentional killing, and pre-meditated (planned) killing is ranked higher than crimes of passion (finding your husband in bed with another woman and killing him.)

We also make distinctions between people who kill one person, two people, three people and so on.  A person who has killed more people, gets a longer sentence.

This is known as proportionality. All murders are not the same, nor are all thefts, nor are all acts of fraud.  The amount of harm they cause varies, and the amount of punishment they are due varies by reason: we punish the woman who kills her cheating husband when she finds him in bed with another woman a lot less harshly than we do a cold calculating murder to get the life insurance reward.

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The inability to make these sort of ethical distinctions, to say ‘well Fred killed one man, a military man, and that’s just as bad as Stalin killing millions” is an ethical failure.  It is an abominable ethical failure.  Scale matters and crime and justice are not boolean.  More to the point, it is far more important to stop the mass murderers of this world, whether they are Stalin, Mao or lesser mass murderers (note the distinction!) like George Bush and Barack Obama.

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To use one of the phrases of the day “this is why we can’t have nice things.”  Specifically, this is why we cant have a justice system that works, a just foreign policy, politicians who aren’t monsters and citizens who aren’t complicit in mass murder. If you think what the Woolwich murderer did is anywhere close to as bad as what George Bush or Tony Blair did you are unable to make even gross ethical distinctions, and are unsuited to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship.

Tens of thousands of murders are worse than one murder.  Understand this.  If you can’t, recuse yourself from the public sphere, please.

Ethics 101, Part 3: Forseeable Consequences, 2013 May 28

Since we’re on basic ethics, let’s take another basic ethical principle.  It is impossible to have a good society if you do not punish and reward people for the forseeable consequences of their actions.

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The idea of forseeable consequences is fundamental to reasoning about ethics and morality.  It is especially important in reasoning about public policy.

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Entire countries have gone in to permanent depression as a result of the forseeable consequences of their actions.  Then various countries, especially in Europe, doubled down on austerity. Austerity has never worked to bring an economy out of a financial crisis or depression, and it never will.  It does not work, and this is well known.  Engaging in austerity has forseeable consequences of impoverishing the country, reducing the size of the middle class and grinding the poor even further into misery.  It also has the forseeable consequence of making it possible to privatize parts of the economy the oligarchs want to buy.

It is done, it has been done and it will be done because of those forseeable consequences.  They are all either desirable to your masters or, if not desirable, irrelevant compared to the advantages austerity offers them.

These are, if not criminal acts, then unjust and evil acts, done to enrich a few at the expense of the many, with disregard for the consequences to the many, including death, hunger and violence.

One of the reasons I write so little these days, is that there is so little point.  Basic ethical principles are routinely ignored even on the so-called left.  Basic principles of causation are ignored.  Basic economic reality is ignored.  And virtually everyone in the so-called democracies is scrambling to pretend that they have no responsibility for anything that has happened.

If someone does something with forseeable consequences they are responsible for those forseeable consequences.  Just because an act has bad forseeable consequences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken, the alternatives may be worse, but whether the action should be taken or not, the decision has consequences.

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As a society we have in the last few decades and are today making decisions with entirely forseeable consequences (as with climate change) that will kill a few hundred million people to well over a billion people.  We know it will happen, and we’re doing it.

Ethics 101: The difference between ethics and morals, 2013 May 30

The best short definition I’ve heard, courtesy of my friend Stirling, is that morals are how you treat people you know.  Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.

Your morality is what makes you a good wife or husband, dad or mother.  A good daughter or son.  A good friend.  Even a good employee or boss to the people you know personally in the company.

Your ethics is what makes you a good politicians.  It is what makes you a statesman.  It is also what makes you a good, humane CEO of any large company (and yes, you can make money and pay your employees well as Costco proves.)

When you’re a politicians or a CEO, most of what you do will effect people you don’t know, people you can’t know, people who are just statistics to you.  You have no personal connection to them, and you never will.  This is at the heart of Stalin’s comment that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a  statistic.”  Change the welfare rules, people will live or die, suffer or prosper.  Change the tax structure, healthcare mandates, trade laws, transit spending-virtually everything you do means someone will will, and someone will lose.  Sometimes fatally.

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We call the family the building block of society, but this is nonsense except in the broadest sense.  The structure of the family is entirely socially based, generally on how we make our living.  A hundred years ago in America and Canada the extended family was the norm, today the nuclear family is, with single parent families coming on strong.  In China this transition, from extended to nuclear family, took place in living memory, many adults still in their prime can remember extended families, and were raised in them.  The wealthy often have their children raised by servants (I was for my first five years), tribal societies often put all male children in to the same tent or tents at puberty, and so on. A hundred and fifty years ago children were taught at home, by the extended family, and not by professional teachers.  They spent much more time with family until they were apprenticed out, if they were.

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For a large society, a society where you can’t know everyone, to work ethics must come before morality, or ethics and morality must have a great deal of overlaps.  By acting morally, you must be able to act ethically.

Our current ethical system requires politicians to act unethically, to do great harm to people they don’t know, while protecting those they do.  This can hardly be denied, and was on display in the 2007/8 financial collapse and the bailout after.  The millions of homeowners and employees politicians and central bankers did not know were not helped, and and the people the politicians and central bankers and treasury officials did know, were bailed out.  Austerity, likewise, has hurt people politicians don’t know, while enriching the corporate officers and rich they do know.

The structure of our economy is designed to impoverish people we don’t know.  For developed nations citizens this means people in undeveloped nations.  For the rich this means cutting the wages of the middle class.  For the middle class it means screwing over the poor (yes, the middle class does the day to day enforcement, don’t pretend otherwise.)  We are obsessed with “lowering costs” and making loans, and both of those are meant to extract maximum value from people while giving them as little as they can in return.

We likewise ignore the future, refusing to build or repair infrastructure, to invest properly in basic science, and refusing to deal with global warming.  These decisions will overwhelmingly effect people we don’t know: any individual infrastructure collapse won’t hit us, odds are, and global warming will kill most of its victims in the future.  The rich and powerful, in particular, believe that they will avoid the consequences of these things.  It will effect people other than them.

To put the needs of the few before the needs of the many, in public life, is to be a monster.  But even in private life if we all act selfishly, as our reigning ideology indicates we should, we destroy ourselves. If we all put only ourselves and those we love first, and damn the cost to everyone else, our societies cannot and will not be prosperous, safe, or kind.

The war of all against all is just as nasty when it is waged by small kin groups as when it is waged by individuals.

The Hunger Games Economy

Transcript

Democrats’ Vision for Economy is GOP-Lite

Transcript

Perhaps better known as Le Sacre du Printemps or The Rite of Spring it celebrates it’s 100th anniversary today.

At the risk of spoilers, the story revolves around pagan celebrations of the coming of spring with the most memorable part being the choice of a sacrificial victim who dances herself to death.

Yeah, like opera there are no happy endings in ballet.

But what was really controversial was Stravinsky’s Avant Guarde music which has, ironically, turned out to be one of the most influential works of the 20th century as well as one of the most recorded (though I would hold Petrushka or Firebird as being a better introduction to Stravinsky’s work and much more accessible for the average listener).

On the evening of the 29 May the theatre was packed: Gustav Linor reported, “Never…has the hall been so full, or so resplendent; the stairways and the corridors were crowded with spectators eager to see and to hear”. The evening began with Les Sylphides, in which Nijinsky and Karsavina danced the main roles. The Rite followed; there is general agreement among eyewitnesses and commentators that the disturbances in the audience began during the Introduction, and grew into a crescendo when the curtain rose on the stamping dancers in “Augurs of Spring”. Marie Rambert, who was working as an assistant to Nijinsky, recalled later that it was soon impossible to hear the music on the stage. In his autobiography, Stravinsky writes that the derisive laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction disgusted him, and that he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings. The demonstrations, he says, grew into “a terrific uproar” which, along with the on-stage noises, drowned out the voice of Nijinsky who was shouting the step numbers to the dancers. The journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten recorded that the person behind him got carried away with excitement, and “began to beat rhythmically on top of my head”, though Van Vechten failed to notice this at first, his own emotion being so great.

Monteux believed that the trouble began when the two factions in the audience began attacking each other, but their mutual anger was soon diverted towards the orchestra: “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on”. Around forty of the worst offenders were ejected-possibly with the intervention of the police, although this is uncorroborated. Through all the disturbances the performance continued without interruption. Things grew noticeably quieter during Part II, and by some accounts Maria Piltz’s rendering of the final “Sacrificial Dance” was watched in reasonable silence. At the end there were several curtain calls for the dancers, for Monteux and the orchestra, and for Stravinsky and Nijinsky before the evening’s programme continued.

This performance is by the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra and Ballet, Valery Gergiev – conductor.  Rodion Tolmachev is the featured bassoonist.

Well the big Stars Hollow parade is over.  We used to have two, one for the Fireman’s Carnival until they took the muddy ditch they used to stick it in across from the 3 Barbers I use to get my hair cut when Lydia, Emily’s stylist, is off watching her son compete in the Little League World Series and turned it into Condos that totally block the view of our only ‘Clear Channel’ billboard that masks the sight, headed South, of the Citgo Station and what used to be the the office of the best lawyer I know (best because he is the biggest asshole, my two other lawyers are RayRay who’s only flaw is he thinks he’s perfect and Jerry who never does any work himself but knows people).

Where was I?

Oh, the parade.

So anyway I marched since I was a wee Ojibway Indian Guide with hardly any feathers until I was a Euphonium toting second liner (first, they like to put the low brass up front for sonic punch and second, the 76 Trombones lead the big parade so the slides don’t knock you in the back- keep step and walk around the Horse shit).

I could talk about the gal who made the Connecticut Hurricane’s audition and had to race back to the start so she could play with them too (she convinced me my future was not Trumpet but a less stressful and competitive instrument, Leonard Falcone Himself pronouced me hopeless), but instead I’d like to focus your attention on a little prank I like to play.

I am in possesion of a number of Acme Thunderers, artifacts of a youth misspent lifeguarding (which is basically telling people they’re having too much fun and they should stop that).

However they are also used to order Chinese bayonet charges and call rolloff, which is the signal for the drummers to inform the band to get ready to play.  1, 2, 3, 4.

If you want to try this at home I suggest some simple scouting to decode the code.  It’s easy now that you know what to listen for.  Then you race to the block or two before your street and start the show (they have to do the roll off).

To me, in addition to being basically harmless, this has the added benefit of bringing the action home.  Since I live a mere 2 blocks from the reviewing stand the band was always huffing and puffing past my position.  Not anymore.

I wonder if my neighbors even realize.  The Drum Major is constantly surprised, but it’s a new one every year.

Public service in action.

Isn’t it nice to know that your Headstart and Cancer Care money is going to projects like this-

Navy Ship Can’t Meet Mission, Internal U.S. Report Finds

By Tony Capaccio, Bloomberg News

May 6, 2013 9:49 PM ET

“The LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) program today is one of our very best programs,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee on April 16. “It’s coming in under budget. It’s coming in on schedule. And it’s coming in with capabilities that we have to have.”

The Navy has 20 vessels under contract out of a planned fleet of 52. Construction costs have doubled to $440 million per ship from an original goal of $220 million.

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Key to the Littoral Combat Ship’s success is fulfilling its planned capability of switching within 96 hours the vessel’s weapons modules for missions, such as finding mines, conducting anti-submarine operations and waging surface warfare.

The confidential report found, though, that the 96-hour goal doesn’t represent the entire process of switching weapons modules. The clock only starts when the module and everything ready to support it are dockside, the report said.

One wargame demonstrated that “getting all of the right people and equipment on station to conduct the exchange could take several weeks,” according to the report, and that process “removed LCS from the tactical fight.”

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The Perez report also highlights the vessel’s limited combat capability. The Navy has acknowledged that the vessels are being built to the service’s lowest level of survivability, a Pentagon-approved decision that sought to balance cost and performance.

The ship “is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment,” Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, said in a January report.

Even in its surface warfare role, when all armaments are working as intended, the vessel “is only capable of neutralizing” small, fast-attack boats and it “remains vulnerable to ships” with anti-ship cruise missiles that can travel more than five miles (8 kilometers), according to the Perez report. Iran has 67 such vessels, according to a chart in the report.

Because they couldn’t make up their mind this new ship is being sourced from two different vendors, negating any cost saving from standardization.  Remind you of anything?  Why yes, the two engine controversy from the F-35, another boondoggle brought to you by our friendly arms merchants at Lockheed; so it’s no surprise to learn that they’re one of the 2 prime vendors with an all Aluminum trimaran which just dissolves in salt water.

But what I’d like to focus on is that 5 mile range.  You’d get better results stationing a couple of guys with Stingers on a tanker deck.  In Harpoon (favorite game ever) we had a word for ships like that-

Targets.

“Dasvidania Rodina,” (traditional salute as Russian ships begin their attack runs).

Originally posted by James Hepburn here, and reposted with express permission.

And now re-posted from Voices on the Square– ek hornbeck

Am I the only one who saw the America "being reborn" diary and it immediately conjured up images from some scifi dystopian movie you probably only saw the trailer for? Like, "It Lives II – The Rebirth"

Well, if it didn't, it should have. Let me summarize that diary's main points:

1. America was never all that – there was no heyday.

2. Shit has sucked before and so it will again.

3. Not falling apart – being reborn, into what nobody knows.

4. But it's not that bad because 3D Printers can print solar panels.

5. We're in a great revolution, shift, change – reborn into what even the powerful don't know.

6. Now is the time to steer the direction of history, these are not end times, but interesting times – "Homosexual couples can get married in America. A Black man is President. We are world leaders in a reduction of CO2 emissions."

7 The world is changing, but the powerful will "push back."

8. They will appear insurmountable, until they aren't.

This evoked cries of Yay! from many commenters extolling the virtues of optimism. 'Things aren't as bad as that. And thank you for being positive for a change.'

One commenter even asked what hole all these pessimists crawled out of. "Progressives are supposed to be about progress. Leave the "we-can't" stuff to the other guys," he said.

I have long suspected that some on this site exist in some kind of shell, and when news or information that threatens or challenges their views gets posted, or even makes it to the Rec'd List, they simply ignore it.

And I will say now, I don't blame them. Reality is depressing. Who wants to sit around thinking about how earth is in its 6th mass extinction event, or how, at the current rate, the Amazon Rainforest will be wiped out before the end of the century greatly amplifying and feedbacking the effects of climate change, or how climate change is, according to a report (PDF) sponsored by the World Bank, moving us toward conditions that could be accurately likened to an apocalypse, or how the world is running out of fresh water and our aquifers are drying up,or how, as we speak, the Fukushima reactor in Japan is leaking untold amounts of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean, or how Obama and BP's solution to the Gulf oil spill actually made it much worse, or how the real unemployment rate is actually worse and continues to get worser still, or how the same economic "policies" that have devastated Detroit and other formerly industrial cities will be devastating your city soon enough, or how our schools have become pipelines to prisons, or how our corporate produced foods have become poisonous, etc etc etc.

I get it. This shit, like, totally harshes your buzz. So it's easy to turn away – especially when a lot of it is happening somewhere else or doesn't quite effect you personally yet (except for the tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, snowpocalypses, epidemics of strange illnesses and other more normal ones like childhood asthma, health care bankruptcy, getting fired from your job, etc etc etc). So as long as we ignore all the things that are wrong, things look pretty fucking good.  As one commenter in said diary said, compared to 2nd world countries, "We're in pretty good shape."

A lot of it depends on one's perspective. My inlaws paid about 1.5 mil. for their house. It's in a gated neighborhood with water sprinklers that keep the vast acres of grass green, even in some winter months. Things look super from there. No crime. Best public schools in the state. Roads perfectly paved.

It helps to put things in perspective. I guess.

Anyway, as for the "Reborn" diary, I just want to make a couple of corrections.

It is true, there was never a heyday when all was well in America. But utopian perfection has never defined what made up the US's heyday. Trajectory does.

1930s-1970s: That was America's heyday. Not because there weren't serious wrongs during that period. But because things were getting better. We were on a progressive trajectory, established by progressives. That trajectory began to change in the early 70s. Not because of some unknowable, great global shift revolution that is "all around us."

It began to change because a few assholes figured out how to rig the system and then went about doing it. It's not a mystery. And it's not a secret. They got together with all their right wing, billionaire buddies and coordinated a campaign to change the trajectory of this country.

Their plan was pretty simple. Work together and form big lobbying groups. Buy the government. Buy up all the mass media and get it away from all those bleeding hearted liberals. And impose their pro business agenda on every major university.

It ain't rocket science.

Muskegon Critic says that America isn't falling apart. He's right. It is being disassembled, piece by piece. The shifts that are occurring aren't a result of an inevitable force. We are not being swept up in some mystical wind of change.

We are simply under attack. And it's an attack that has been ongoing for decades.

The agenda of our attackers is also quite simple, once you get past the distractions. Their agenda is to transform America from the great society vision encapsulated in the New Deal, with a high paid labor class, widespread advanced education, the expectation of a strong social safety net, and tight government controls on big businesses to prevent the exploitation of workers, the pollution of the environment, and ensurance that those who benefit most from our society pay the most to maintain it.

In place of this, they want basically the opposite. They want apeasant labor class to exploit, to weaken government by corrupting andsabotaging our democratic institutions, unfettered access to our naturalresources which, in any sane society would be consider our commonwealth, and no social safety net.

What big business figured out is that they need lots of poor people.The poorer a country is, the more corruptible it is, the moreexploitable it is, the easier it is to pillage.

The kind of society that the New Deal began to create, was unacceptable to the  corrupt parasites of the ruling class. Suddenly you had this emerging labor class, middle class, and academic class that was uber-educated, pretty well informed, and getting smart enough to demand a more just, more equal, and better managed society. Some people call it the 60s. But it wasn't just a trend or an era. And it wasn't limited to hippies or university intellectuals. They were just the cutting edge of something entirely new: the ascendency of a new class in world history. An educated, empowered, financially secure, and politically activated lower class.

The world had really never seen that before, nowhere near on this scale. And all those smart people who used to be too insecure to complain, too ignorant to know what to complain about, and to alienated by the political process to act anyway, were now becoming a big problem. They had expectations of fairness, and the political power, through unions etc, to, to leverage those expectations. They were getting too uppity to be sent off to die in Parasite wars. And they were demanding that the environment be protected. Something had to change.

When all the big business, right wing assholes came together around the Powell Memo, they weren't just acting to advance their business interests. They knew they needed to transform the American public. We needed to become a lot more like a 3rd world country.

That's what's changed. No great tides, or winds or the inevitable replacing of the old with the new. Just some assholes, who own TV networks, radio stations, newspapers, universities, think tanks and countless other little organizations, all designed to make people think what they want us to.

Nothing mysterious about the changes that have transformed our economy either. Over the last 40 years, and in response to New Deal labor laws, and then new environmental regulations passed by LBJ and Nixon, big American businesses basically said fuck America, we'll go to Indonesia, and pollute the fuck out of wherever we want. And labor will be 3 cents on the dollar.

And they and their lobbyists over at the CFR bought up our two parties and, while we were enjoying the sex revolution and Meathead on TV, then quietly began the process of dismantling the entire manufacturing sector of the country. Incredibly, most liberals still don't comprehend what happened there. But that's a huge part of what has changed. The US is now suffering varying degrees of Detroit. And it's going to keep getting worse.

Now is the time to shape history. But unless you have at least some grasp of what that change is, and who's causing it, and how they're causing it, you don't have a chance in hell of changing it.

Yes, America's being reborn alright. But you won't want to see what it's being reborn into. For those of us who have been paying attention, the end result of this re-birthing is no mystery at all. It's exactly what we've seen in other countries, where neoliberalism has been allowed to run unchecked.

And it's not pretty. Liberals generally decry notions of American exceptionalism. But we have our own brand. The "it can't happen here" brand. Are we really so different than the people in Columbia or Chile, where leftists and labor leaders are hunted and murdered?

Is the mass surveillance apparatus, much of which is controlled not by the big brother state, but by private corporations, really immune from abuse by those who wish to defeat American labor and progressive politicians?

Is it really so hard to comprehend why allowing phone calls to recorded and stored by a nameless, faceless, security apparatus is a threat to not just your privacy, but to democracy itself?

Is the trajectory of our country towards increased concentration of wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people, towards greater and greater poverty, towards poorer and poorer education, towards even more manipulation of public perception by corporate mass media, and the threat that poises for all of us, not obvious? Even to those who enjoy good paying jobs?

America has never been perfect. Not even close. But there was a time when its trajectory through history was in alignment with its promise.

Its trajectory now is toward the unthinkable. Unthinkable power, through of technology of weapons and surveillance, combined with an unthinkable absence of democratic governance or accountability.