Are You A Socialist?
No, this is not a takeoff on Jeff Foxworthy.
This is another item I found on MardyS’s Facebook page.
SteveG’s Posts
Counterproductive Behavior in Early Months of Iraq Occupation
At the beginning of the Iraq occupation by the U.S., many Iraqis were thrown out of work. In their stead, the U.S. spent billions of dollars on no-bid contracts with well connected U.S. firms. These firms did not hire unemployed Iraqis. Instead, they flew in mercenaries from the U.S. to do work at $100,000 salaries, that the Iraqis would have been pleased to do for much less. Gainfully employed Iraqis rebuilding their country are much less likely to join the insurrection than those who are unemployed while non-citizens are paid exorbitant amounts to do the same work they are willing and able to do.
I wondered how obtuse Paul Bremer would have to be to not see the damage his policies were causing. Now that I have formulated Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, it came as no surprise when I read the explanation in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
In describing a conference held by the U.S. State Department in Baghdad in the early months of the occupation, author Naomi Klein focused on one of the main speakers [page 432].
One of the main speakers was Marek Belka, Poland’s former right-wing finance minister who worked under Bremer in Iraq for several months. According to an official State Department report on the gathering, Belka pounded the Iraqis with the message that they had to seize the moment of chaos to be “forceful” in pushing through policies that “would throw many people out of work.” The first lesson from Poland, Belka said, was that “unproductive state-owned enterprises should be sold off immediately without efforts to salvage then with public funds,” (He failed to mention that popular pressure had forced Solidarity to abandon plans for rapid privatization, saving Poland from a Russian-style meltdown.) His second lesson was even bolder. It was five months after the fall of Baghdad, and Iraq was in the midst of a humanitarian emergency. Unemployment was at 67 percent, malnutrition was rampant and the only thing holding off mass starvation was the fact that Iraqi households still received government-subsidized food and other essentials, just as they had under the UN-administered oil-for-food program during the sanctions period. Belka told the Iraqis that these market-distorting giveaways had to be scrapped immediately. “Develop the private sector, starting with the elimination of subsidies.” He stressed that these measures were “much more important and divisive than privatization.”3
3. Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport,” The New Yorker, February 16, 2004
According to Greenberg’s Law, what I thought was counterproductive behavior, was really not. I just had misunderstood what the players in this sport were trying to accomplish.
One of the failings of true believers in absolute free-markets is their failure to account for the passage of time. Even if you could argue that the people would be better off in the long run, they fail to account for the fact that people could starve to death while waiting. Unlike docile Americans, starving Iraqis didn’t just sit idle and slowly starve to death. They started fighting back.
The presentation by Belka explains why the Coalition Provisional Authority could believe that it was a good thing to throw so many people out of work and not subsidize them while unemployed. That does not explain why they hired U.S. Contractors and allowed them to hire foreigners instead of Iraqis. We’ll have to look for other ulterior motives. Perhaps it was plain old greed that motivated them. Greed is supposed to be good according to absolutist free market enthusiasts.
To think that George W. Bush wondered why they hated us.
Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania
The commentary, Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania, by Robert Reich is posted on Truth-out.org.
If Congress and the President started right now to cut the federal deficit – slashing spending and raising taxes on the middle class – our anemic economy would quickly become comatose.
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.Even worse, budget-deficit mania will slow future growth if it forces government to cut the things that fuel growth – education, basic R&D, child health, improved infrastructure.
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Don’t get me wrong. America’s projected budget deficits require attention. But in addressing them we need to focus on the right solutions, and make sure we’re solving the right problem.The preliminary report of the President’s deficit commission doesn’t help. It’s another example of budget-deficit mania generating more heat than light.
Secret Campaign Money Under DOJ Investigation
Warning! Warning! Warning! Cheap Attempt At Humor Ensues!
As the newly Republican dominated House started Presidential impeachment hearings, the Department Of Justice announced criminal investigations of the spending of large amounts of money by deceptively named organizations to influence the elections of these representatives.
The DOJ is investigating whether or not there had been any illegal coordination between the organizations spending the money and the candidates themselves. Such a violation could lead to bribery charges and long prison sentences for the guilty. The Supreme Court will then decide if buying the impeachment of a President could be classified as treason by either the buyers or the sellers or both.
The impeachment hearings were quickly ended when the majority of Republicans found no grounds for impeachment.
I hope that the above warning was enough to help you judge this article.
Obama Vows To Veto Tax Cut For The Wealthy
Warning! Warning! Warning! Satire Ensues!
Today, President Obama vowed to veto any tax cut extension bill that includes extending the tax cut for the wealthy.
He said he very much wanted to extend the tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 a year, but in all good conscience he could not allow the inclusion of the tax cut for the wealthy. The need to cut trillions of dollars from the deficit over the next decade mandated the ending of the tax cut to people who didn’t desperately need it.
Although letting the tax cut for the middle class expire might have dire consequences for the recovery, the consequences of extending the tax cut to the wealthy would be far worse.
The Republicans caved into this firm stance of the President and passed a bill in the House of Representatives and in the Senate that did not include the extension of the extra tax cut for the wealthy.
Don’t get your hopes up for such a story to be true. I just made it up as an example of how the tax cut extension could be handled.
Is it possible my wish could come true? Since posting the above wish, I read the article Henry in the House: Tax man (compromise) cometh By Ed Henry.
I hadn’t known that the initial report came from Huffington Post. Is it any wonder that I no longer read the Huffington Post?
The warning at the beginning of the post was added because one of my satire challeneged readers was offended at the lack of warning.
How China Policy Squeezes Companies Anchored In U.S.
McClatchy News web site has the article, How China Policy Squeezes Companies Anchored In U.S.
“The United States faces the lack of a national and international trading strategy, or economic policy . . . we as a nation don’t have an entity that competes with other nations, and I think this harkens back to a reluctance to get into national economic policy or strategies because of the concern that it has the taint of some kind of government control and government assistance,” he said.
The free-trade debate gets bogged down in political labels, which O’Shaugnessy thinks misses the broader point.
“So you have got ‘socialists’ fighting the ‘capitalists,’ and neither side realizes the mercantilists are kicking their ass. Both of them, it doesn’t matter whether you are on this side or that side, if you are dealing with a mercantilist society, and that’s what we’re fighting in China,” he said.
While I agree that the U.S. could benefit from strategic thinking, I also warn that we need to do it with some humility. Japan was beating us severely 20 or so years ago because of their strategic efforts of their Ministry of Trade and Industry. This ministry came up with the idea of the 5th generation computer strategy to emphasize artificial intelligence. It turned out to be a poor strategic choice. The diverse efforts of private companies in the U.S. tried many different things including artificial intelligence. I think the internet, the web, inexpensive computer chips, and mobile communication and computing did a lot more to stimulate the world economy than the efforts in artificial intelligence.
It’s not that the U.S. companies were smarter at predicting the technologies of the future. It is that the diverse set of U.S. companies and diverse venture capitalists were trying many different things. Of that broad set of initiatives, some really bore fruit and established the rapidly growing industries that fueled economic growth around the world.
Just as in investing and agriculture, diversification in industry has a lot of benefits.
Fitting in with my new emphasis on this blog of the perils of extremism, I am making the point that neither extreme laissez-faire in industrial strategy nor extreme centralization of industrial strategy is the best policy. Intelligent approaches are better than doctrinaire approaches.
Has The Deficit Reduction Panel Lost Their Mind?
Why does the commission recommendation include changes to Social Security and Medicare, when just undoing George W. Bush would bring a 75% larger reduction in the deficit than the commission is getting with their drastic plan?
The Los Angeles Times has the story Panel: Deep cuts, new revenues needed to balance budget.
The plan calls for $200 billion in domestic and military spending cuts in 2015, a down payment on cuts that would reduce the deficit by nearly $4 trillion through 2020.
In a report Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers by Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney of the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities take a different look at deficit reduction
Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. 6 (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).
First Ten Lutchen Fellows Share Research Highlights
The article, Ten Lutchen Fellows Share Research Highlights, on the Boston University web site was sent to me by a proud aunt of one of the recipients.
Samuel Hoffman (ME, EE’12) highlighted his efforts to optimize the design of a “polymorphic zoom” system that improves the optical performance of standard zoom lenses.
I couldn’t figure out whether to put this on my blog here or on my famous relatives page.
I have always wondered how we might get from the typical spherical lens with its aberrations to a more parabolic lens without those aberrations. I can hardly wait to talk to Sam about whether his research is leading in that direction.
Show me a LIE from the news section [of Faux Noise]
You get into very interesting discussions on the Worcester T & G comment boards.
Finally, the discussion devolved into something I have heard from other Faux Noise devotees.
Otis-
This is getting tiring. You keep lumping political pundits and the ‘news’ section into one. Show me a LIE from the news section and then we can talk. Don’t send Youtube links of Bill O’Reily and Sean Hanity. These two have full disclosure that they are pundits that are giving their opinion of the news.
Posted by Tomass
So I entered something like “Fox News Lies” into Google and posted just about the first item I came to. (The first few minutes does seem to focus on O’Reily and his ilk, but then it gets to the so-called straight news sections.)
Actually part 2 may be the more devastating of the two parts.
Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior 3
Here is the statement of the new Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior:
If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.
Corollary 1:
If you try to use logic to argue against the seemingly obvious motive for the behavior, you will fail. You need to find an argument against the actor’s actual motive.
The use of torture to gain information has been the subject of several recent posts. Experts agree that torture does not garner reliable information. Despite George W. Bush’s repeated claims, the people conducting the interrogations that did garner the useful information Bush talks about, claim that they did not use torture to get the information. They claimed the information flow stopped when torture began.
The torture regresses the subjects to an infantile state and has a tendency to erase memories from their minds. If you want to get information from somebody, you’d think that mind erasure would be the last thing you would want.
Here is where Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior comes in. We who argue against torture have fallen into the trap of believing the motive for torture is to gain information.
As described in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the purpose of the torture is more to induce terror in the compatriots of the victims than it has to do with gaining information.
Another use of these torture techniques, according to the book, was specifically for erasing the memories of the victims. Sometimes the hope is to rebuild the victim into a person whose ideas meet the approval of the torturer. You can see this motive at work in claims by George Bush. The former president writes, “His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate.” Bush goes on to claim succcess for waterboarding in that Zubaydah, his torture victim, gave him (Bush) a direct instruction, “You must do this (torture) for all the brothers.”
In South America during the period when many countries were being ruled by military juntas, torture was used to try to change the minds of citizens who objected to the extreme free market economics that the dictators were imposing on their countries. The people who objected to these economic policies were considered to be a cancer on the society, They had to be either cured or removed.
Up until the time of the military takeovers, the University of Chicago economics department under Milton Friedman had been training South American economists to foster pure free market economics in South America. When years of these attempts had failed, they had to resort to military takeover and then brute force and torture. This is how the students of Milton Friedman finally gained the power over economic policy that they had been seeking.
When you hear today’s Republicans touting the virtues of unfettered free market capitalism, you should bear in mind what could happen if you don’t go along with the idea.