Newshoggers.com

The GDP and you

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is the measure of economic well being - but is it?  If you are part of the one percent the answer is probably yes in the short term.  Short term is the key, GDP does not take into consideration the future negative impact of growth now.  There are also a few other problems with GDP and they are explained here: Beyond GDP: New Measures For A New Economy.

So what are the problems with GDP?

• GDP does not distinguish between spending on bad things and spending on good things. By this measurement, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “positively” contributed to the economy just like the many good and services that people actually want or need.
• GDP doesn’t account for the distribution of growth. Our total national income has doubled over thirty years, and so has the share of national income going to the wealthiest households, but average households have seen little or no income gains.
• GDP doesn’t care if growth is captured by a few or widely shared.
• GDP doesn’t account for depletion of natural capital and ecosystem services. If all the fish in the sea are caught and sold next year, global GDP would see a big boost while the fishing industry itself would completely collapse.
• GDP doesn’t reflect things that have no market price but are good for our society, like volunteer work, parenting in the home, and public investments in education and research.

GDP measures things that are good short term but not so good long term.  It is the essence of our instant gratification society. 

You can check it all here (pdf).

The Enigma Of Juan Williams

Commentary By Ron Beasley

After being fired from NPR I could understand why Juan Williams would take a big bucks gig from FOX.  He had not done any serious journalism for a few years and he was not getting any younger.  The money probably looked good.  I must admit I lost a lot of respect for him never the less.  But as Ed Kilgore points out Williams is not playing by the FOX rules.

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.

But bless his soul Williams is willing to risk his FOX dollars and call it like it is.

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

The code also extends to attacks on legal immigrants, always carefully lumped in with illegal immigrants, as people seeking “amnesty” and taking jobs from Americans. 

But the code sometimes breaks down.

Last week a passionate Republican told GOP candidate Rick Santorum: “I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not [president]. He constantly says that our Constitution is passé and he ignores it. … He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president.”

Santorum did not blink. The man who recently said he meant “blah people” — when the world heard him say “black people” — as  he spoke about parasitic Americans who get better lives by taking “somebody else’s money,” did not correct the assault on the truth. Instead he agreed that Obama is attacking the Constitution and said: “Well, look, I’m trying my best to get him out of office.”

The secret code words, the creation of Lee Attwater. They have been used by many Republican candidates on FOX News from the beginning.

Good for Juan Williams - but does he have a future at FOX?

Obama Personally Approves Ex-Judicial Killings

By Steve Hynd

Via Adam Serwer at MoJo:

In an interview with CBS 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed more about the secret process the Obama administration uses to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial. According to Panetta, the president himself approves the decision based on recommendations from top national security officials.

"[The] President of the United States, obviously reviews these cases, reviews the legal justification and in the end says, go or no go," Panetta said.

"So it’s the requirement of the administration under the current legal understanding is that the president has to make that declaration, not you?" Pelley asked. Panetta replied, "That is correct."

But you and I are not allowed to know the legal justification or process for putting American citizens on a kill list without trial, it's a national secret. So all we're left with is hoping that Obama spends more time on each case than Dubya or Perry ever did in Texas death sentence appeals where there'd already been a trial.

Comforting...

Not really a laughing matter

By BJ Bjornson

Though sometimes humour is the only way you can deal with some things. Today’s news brings a UN report noting that humanity’s future, or at least the future for a good chunk of humanity, is looking quite grim.

As the world's population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.

Even by 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water, according to U.N. estimates, at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply.

And if the world fails to tackle these problems, it risks condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty, the report said.

Knowing that we’re already pushing up against the limits of some of the critical resources we would need increase food production, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a very good chance that we’re not going to reach those targets. We’re already past sustainability on a number of fronts, and increasing production by draining away aquifers, looting the ocean of fish stocks, or otherwise further destroying our chance for future sustainable uses of land and water isn’t really going to help in more than the very short-term, and lead to an even bigger crash on the other side.

But since dwelling on that fact is kind of depressing, I’ll leave you with this recent, and oddly prophetic, Onion piece,

Saying there's no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet's resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

. . .

"I'm just going to level with you—the earth's carrying capacity will no longer be able to keep up with population growth, and civilization will end unless large swaths of human beings are killed, so the question is: How do we want to do this?" Cambridge University ecologist Dr. Edwin Peters said. "Do we want to give everyone a number and implement a death lottery system? Incinerate the nation's children? Kill off an entire race of people? Give everyone a shotgun and let them sort it out themselves?"

. . .

"The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with," said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer­sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. "At this point, it's merely a question of coordination. If we can get the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Beijing, India, Europe, and Latin America to voluntarily off themselves at 6 p.m. EST on June 1, we can kill the people that need to be killed and the planet can finally start renewing its resources."

Is it too late to get on board for that moon base?

An odd lesson to pick

By BJ Bjornson

Look, as my name might indicate, I’m rather partial to stories that put the Nordic countries and their people in a good light, but I still have to shake my head at this article from Alternet about how the Swedes and Norwegians paved the way for a more equitable society, referencing events in the 1920’s and 30’s to make its point.

Why am I bemused? Well, for starters, because you hardly have to go overseas for examples of how to build a better and more equitable society. The 20’s and 30’s were the home of massive general strikes and violent suppression of the same here in North America, as well as the period when the first major advances towards a more progressive modern state took place under Roosevelt’s New Deal. What happened in Sweden and Norway were reverberations of the same movement that was wreaking havoc worldwide in the industrialized West, not some unique unfolding that had never been seen before or since.

Second, there is the not-really-small matter of the Second World War, a discontinuity event even on this side of the Atlantic, but very much more so in Europe, and particularly for the conquered and occupied Norway. That’s not to say that the events of the pre-war period were unimportant, but it might behoove the author to note just how those countries were able to pick themselves back up after the war and return to a peacetime economy that still carried on the earlier tradition.

And again, there is no need to look to Scandinavia for examples, since the post-WWII boom in the U.S. and the rise of a true middle class is practically the textbook example of how these things get done, absent a few tweaks such as a universal health care system that your northern neighbours managed to pull off during the same period.

While I don’t pretend to be professional historian, what I have read and seen is that the single most important factor in ensuring an economically fair society is a strong labour movement, something the Republicans, for all their other craziness, have maintained a laser-like focus on for decades, and work to destroy, disrupt, or outright dismantle at every turn whenever they get the chance, as can be seen most recently in Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

It may just be me, but I rarely see this kind of focus from the left on this point, and this article from Alternet is little different. It’s not that I don’t think the struggles of the Scandinavian labour movement isn’t inspirational to some degree, but it isn’t quantitatively different from the same struggle in North America or elsewhere. The real questions that needs to be asked is how the Swedes and Norwegians, and other European nations, maintained their strong labour movements while the U.S. saw its labour unions being sidelined and crumble away as a political force, and how and what it will take to bring a real labour movement back.

The article doesn’t say, and in that, it doesn’t strike me as too much different from a lot of progressive blogging these days. They know what they want to see as an end result, but seem incapable of charting or even exploring a tried and true path towards achieving it. Inspiration isn’t enough. Give working people the information they need to really organize themselves.

I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this.

Two Big Guns Shoot Their Wads

By John Ballard

One of Athen's most prized possessions, the famous Double Barrel Cannon, was cast at the Athens Steam Company in 1862 and today stands on the lawn of the City Hall in Athens, Georgia. The Athens Steam Company was renamed the Athens Foundry and Machine Works in December 1863 and most reports name the Foundry as the site of manufacture. The Cannon is a double six-pounder, cast in one piece, with a three degree divergence from the parallel between the barrels. Each barrel has its own touch hole so it can be fired independent of the other and a common touch hole in the center is designed to fire both barrels simultaneously.

The idea was to connect two cannon balls with a chain and mow the enemy down like a scythe cuts wheat. The gun is four feet eight and one-half inches long, the bore is three and thirteen-hundredths inches and the gun weighs about thirteen hundred pounds.

The gun was designed by John Gilleland who has been identified as a local house builder and mechanic, a Jackson County dentist, a private in Mitchell's Thunderbolts and as an employee of Cook's Armory. The Cannon was financed by a $350 subscription raised by 36 interested citizens and the casting was supervised by Thomas Bailey.

The Cannon was taken out on the Newton Bridge Road in April 1862, for test firing. The test was, to say the least, spectacular if unsuccessful.

According to reports one ball left the muzzle before the other and the two balls pursued an erratic circular course plowing up an acre of ground, destroying a corn field and mowing down some saplings before the chain broke.

The balls then adopted separate courses, one killing a cow and the other demolishing the chimney on a log cabin. The observers scattered in fear of their lives.

Some reports claimed two or three spectators were killed by the firing. The reports of the deaths have not been substantiated. The Watchman promptly reported the test an unqualified success.

The Cannon was then sent, at Gilleland's insistence, to the Augusta Arsenal for further tests. Colonel Rains, arsenal commandant, tested the gun and reported it a failure for the purpose intended. Colonel Rains had tested a similar weapon at Governor's Island in 1855 with the same results.

Gilleland, however, was still of the opinion that the gun was a perfect success and engaged in a heated correspondence with the Confederate Secretary of War. Gilleland contended the Cannon had been fired successfully and James W. Camak reports one successful shot. Camak also stated that the Cannon was very effective if both barrels were loaded with canister or grape shot and fired simultaneously.

More at the link.
If this historic factoid has been missing in your history classes there is a good reason.The experiment was not the success that was originally reported. Then, as today, the public were credulous and reporters slow on the uptake. But what's the point of downplaying stupidity when you have papers to sell?

Two stories this morning passing as "news" are from a couple of behind-the-scenes Republican big guns. With over-the-top idiotic pronouncements each is a bel-weather indicator of how far off the nut the GOP has drifted. If the elected leadership of the Grand Old Party don't stop letting themselves be manipulated by crazy advisors like these, they will only have themselves to thank when their house of cards comes tumbling down.

These two links are what reminded me of the double-barrel cannon mentioned above.

==>  Norquist: Republicans Will Impeach Obama If He Doesn’t Extend Bush Tax Cuts

NORQUIST We’re focused on the fact that there is this Damocles sword hanging over people’s head. What you don’t know is who will be in charge when all of this will happen. I think when we get through this election cycle, we’ll have a Republican majority, [though] not necessarily a strong majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House.
The majority in the House will continue to be a Reagan majority, a conservative majority. Boehner never has to talk his delegation going further to the right. If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, I’m told that they could do an early budget vote—a reconciliation vote where you extend the Bush tax cuts out for a decade or five years.
You take all of those issues off the table, and then say, “What do you want to do for tax reform?” Then, the question is: “OK, what do we do about repatriation and all of the interesting stuff?”
And, if you have a Republican president to go with a Republican House and Senate, then they pass the [Paul] Ryan plan [on Medicare].
NJ What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?
NORQUIST Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

==>  RNC Chairman Compares Obama To Italian Cruise Ship Captain Accused Of Manslaughter

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus compared President Obama to Francesco Schettino, the Italian cruise ship captain who took off in a lifeboat after his ship ran aground at Isola del Giglio, Tuscany and is suspected of multiple counts of manslaughter. “In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history,” Priebus said in response to a question about the brutal GOP primary, “and we are going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama who is abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.”

These two wild and crazy pronouncements by Reince Priebus and Grover Norquist together remind me of that Civil War era double-barrel cannon.
Newt isn't the only loose cannon in their ranks. They seem to have an armory full.
As they say, you can't make this stuff up. 

 

Now this is cool!

Commentary By Ron Beasley

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

The Stereogranimator from the New York Public Library Labs.

Via TPM:

This week, NYPL Labs launched Stereogranimator, a project that draws on the library’s massive archive of stereographs, a classic 19th century form where two nearly identical images are viewed side-by-side through a stereoscope to create the illusion of depth.

The Labs project uses the very old form and allows users to turn images into animated GIFs, a classic internet form. The rapid animation creates that same illusion of depth. The Labs unit itself is also a sort of collision between classic library archives and digital tools.

Old School Labour Relations

By BJ Bjornson

Seems to me that I’ve read about this kind of thing happening in North America in decades past, or at least the precursor of what made this a story, a plant manager calling in the police to beat and kill a union leader. The counterattack doesn’t seem to be quite as common.

Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in the India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with led pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.

The workers were enraged enough to kill president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast.Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours later. The next morning, at 06:00 on Friday, Murali went to the factory along with some workers and tried to obstruct the morning shift, local media reported. Long batons, known as lathis in India, were used by police who charged the workers, injuring at least 20 of them, including Murali. He died on the way to hospital, according to The Times of India. Hundreds of workers gathered outside the police station and demanded that officers be charged with homicide.

I didn’t bother commenting on the recent NYT article on conditions at Apple’s supplier factories in China a couple of days ago since that story was more than well-covered already, but it does an excellent job of showing the costs of pushing the costs of manufacturing ever downward.

Per the Forbes story above, India is the poorest of the BRIC countries and its factory workers are paid the least, so maybe it isn’t too much of a surprise that disputes between management and labour are far nastier there than elsewhere, but I do wonder sometimes if the continued “flattening” of wages worldwide might bring such scenes back to these shores one day.

When Mythology Becomes Voodoo

Commentary By Ron Beasley

As anyone who reads these virtual pages knows I'm an atheist and consider religion to be nothing but mythology.  Mormonism adds an additional layer of nonsense to the Christian nonsense but this sounds like voodoo to me.

Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as "hogwash."

Converting the dead - zombies in heaven.  Now this is too weird but not uncommon.

[A] canonical series of rituals that Mormons undergo (in life or death) in order to qualify for admission to heaven, including baptism, confirmation, "washings and anointings," endowment, and, in the case of men, ordination to two levels of priesthood. The description seems to indicate that certain family members were present for all these rituals, in which a living male would have stood in "for and in behalf of" the late Mr. Davies.

And they have received objections before although I'm not sure why.  If they convert me after I'm dead I'll still be dead.

The Mormon church has repeatedly been criticized for its practice of trawling for dead souls to convert to the faith. Catholic and Jewish organizations have expressed outrage when the names of dead popes and Holocaust victims have turned up on Mormon lists of the baptized. In 1995, the church pledged to "discontinue any future baptisms of deceased Jews" except for direct descendents of living Mormons, tacitly acknowledging that its creepy and weird to claim the souls of people who had no interest in Mormonism for their own. It's strange that the Romney and Davies families didn't accord Edward Davies' memory the same respect.

I'm not sure that anyone who believes such nonsense should be anywhere near the most powerful position in the world.  This makes the craziest of Evangelical Christians look sane.  A voodoo president?

New Hampshire Republicans against protecting domestic violence victims

By BJ Bjornson

I must be missing something here. I mean, I get that generally speaking, the Republican party isn’t exactly women-friendly by any realistic measure, but going after laws that protect domestic abuse victims? Really?

House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That's an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It's obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It's a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help.

. . .

House Bill 1608 would also almost certainly cost lives. It removes judicial discretion by severely restricting when someone who has violated a domestic violence protective order can be arrested to three offenses: committing an act of abuse or an offense against the person named in the protective order, or engaging in prohibited contact.

The bill would also, law enforcement believes, remove a judge's ability to order a defendant in a domestic violence case to relinquish weapons or prevent him or her from purchasing a gun. It would also eliminate law enforcement's ability to arrest a defendant who threatens to use physical force against a victim or her children. All are changes that could have deadly consequences and make life more frightening for abuse victims and their families.

Via ThinkProgress.

I really wish Republicans would limit their foolishness to stuff like banning the use of aborted human fetuses in our food, because when they set their sights on real issues, the results are just downright scary.