Quote of the week

Atrios aka Duncan Black has perhaps the ugliest looking blog in the world. The colors are bad, the fonts are bad, the layout is bad--no pictures, no graphics, nothing to please the eye. Seriously, would it kill the dude to bring in a high school intern for an afternoon to spruce the place up a bit?

Oh but the content! There's a reason why he has millions of readers and is one of the most influential political bloggers in the world. Good content, thoughtful content, breaking stories several times a day paired with brilliant analysis. The guy is like a Jedi meme surfer who is always ahead of the next break.

So with that, I bring you the quote of the week, courtesy of Atrios, (hat tip to Kos).

One thing you learn very quickly when you blog is that no matter how smart and knowledgeable you are (or imagine yourself to be), some of your readers are going to be smarter than you and literally every one of your readers knows more than you do about something. It's humbling at first, but then quite liberating. The "shut the hell up I know best" stuff is what grates me the most about politicians and other elites in our system because the truth is that quite often... they don't.

That is exactly what old-school folks don't get about the progressive blogosphere (and apparently it's what Senator Obama doesn't understand about the internet as well). There is always someone smarter out there. And a properly structured group can focus the wisdom of the crowd in ways that make it smarter than even the most informed expert (as Daily Kos, Americablog, and FDL all demonstrate).

'Milton Friedman wants you to be his bitch'

When the Hubble Space Telescope was first launched there was a flaw in the big mirror in the telescope and so for a few years all the photos came back blurry. So NASA sent a repair mission and they corrected the mirror and suddenly the pictures came back crystal clear.

That's how I felt reading Naomi Klein's new book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. For decades the mainstream media (and academia too) have presented us with a blurry picture about what is happening in the world. I'll give you an example: in 1973 Augusto Pinochet, with backing from the CIA, launched a military coup in Chile. Next thing you know Milton Friedman flew down to meet with Pinochet and Chile implemented a massive privatization plan. The New York Times, Washington Post and other traditional media reported on these two events (bloody coup and new economic program) as if they were unrelated events--as if we were all just supposed to scratch our heads and say, 'oh what a coinkydink.'

Naomi Klein's book fixes the flawed mirror presented by corporatist media and presents a picture that is crystal clear. Her argument goes something like this:

In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, United States economic policy was guided by the theories of John Maynard Keynes (as implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt). Keynes believed in a mixed economy--namely that some form of regulation and public services were required to mitigate the adverse effects of capitalism. Keynesianism led to the creation of the American middle class, the end of the Great Depression, victory in World War II, the GI bill, the Marshall Plan (that rebuilt Europe after the war), and the largest sustained economic expansion in history.

But in the 1950s, Milton Friedman, building on the theories of Adam Smith, became influential in the economics department at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his followers distrusted Keynesianism and advocated a new form of laissez-faire capitalism with no government regulation, no environmental regulation, privatization of all government services (including social security), and unfettered free trade (no protection for domestic industries).

The Ford Foundation and the CIA were so enamored of Friedman's theories that they started a program to bring leading economists from Latin America to study with Friedman at the University of Chicago. At one point 1/3 of all the students in the University of Chicago economics department were there as a result of this program.

The problem was, Friedman's economic theories were (and are) incredibly unpopular. Any time democratic societies got a say in whether or not they wanted to implement Friedman style privatization programs, they invariably voted them down (because, in general, people don't like losing their jobs and starving to death in the name of some macroeconomic theory).

That would ordinarily be the end of the story--bad theory, unpopular, consistently voted down in democratic societies, the end.

But unfortunately, that's not the way the world (or the U.S. government) works. Instead, the CIA figured out that Friedman's economic program could be implemented, under the cover of darkness, if a shock to the system could be introduce first. So in 1973 the CIA backed a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. As everyone from union leaders to folk singers were being tortured and executed in the former soccer stadium, Pinochet and his University of Chicago-trained economic advisers, implemented Friedman's economic theories in Chile. Similar shocks followed in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Uruguay.

Then the CIA figured out that it wasn't just military coups that could apply the literal and figurative shocks to a country--hyperinflation, natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes), and foreign debt would also do. Furthermore, the Internal Monetary Fund and the World Bank were used to implement these shocks--by tying any loans to the requirement that governments privatize their industries and completely open their borders to multinational corporations. So over the next several decades Milton Friedman-designed economic programs were implemented (without democratic consent) in Poland, South Africa, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, and New Orleans. The architects of the Iraq War (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bremer) were all followers of Milton Friedman. (I imagine Bush would have been too if he had ever opened a book or gone to class.)

For some time now, I've been curious to figure out what the relationship is between violence and wealth. Apparently, Naomi Klein was curious about that too. She writes,

"Is neoliberalism [aka Milton Friedman University of Chicago style economics] an inherently violent ideology, and is there something about its goals that demands this cycle of brutal political cleansing, followed by human rights cleanup operations?" (p. 126)

Klein's 466-page, meticulously-researched answer is, YES IT IS.

A couple other things become clear to me as a result of reading Shock Doctrine:

1.) There is no such thing as "U.S. foreign policy" or the "U.S. military." Rather, U.S. foreign policy is designed and written by multinational corporations and the U.S. military is just a private army working at the behest of multinational corporations. Furthermore, the CIA is simply a private paramilitary army/death squad working at the behest of multinational corporations.

2.) In many ways, progressives of the world have been focused on the wrong enemy for 50 years. We've focused on racism and war and the environment. But these are all products of bad economics. It all starts and ends with the economics. Fix the economic system, and lots of the other problems start to dissolve too. For Klein, a simple return to Keynesian economics would probably bring stability, democracy, and the revitalization of the middle class.

I'll leave you with another couple quotes from the book:

"Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain 'indicator species' of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections." (p. 125)

"Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war." (p. 405)

Shock Doctrine is a revelation.

You can see a short film by Alfonso Cuaron about Shock Doctrine (here).

Concern for the environment IS concern for people

The Clean Air Act mandated that lead based gasoline be phased out. 20 years later, rates of violent crime suddenly plunged. Did phasing out leaded gasoline contribute to the decline in violent crime? Amherst College economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes makes a compelling case.

Also check out Lead Action News.

Quote of the Day

For the last several months I've been reading academic works of sociology to try to get my feet wet before diving into graduate school. To my dismay, I've found that for the most part, the authors I've read violate almost every rule of good writing (such as--use short sentences, don't use a 50 cent word when a 5 cent word will do, show don't tell...) In fact, in many cases, the Wikipedia entry for a particular author does a better job of communicating the ideas than the author's own work.

Apparently, Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week, shares my concern. In an otherwise snarky op-ed republished by the New York Times in honor of her award, she makes the following observation:

"It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language."

The Chemistry of Kissing

Okay so you probably already read this on Huffington Post (which is where I saw it). It's an article from Science Daily on kissing. Usually these kinds of articles are boring as paste. But this one is definitely worth reading if you are dating, thinking of dating, in a relationship, thinking of being in a relationship--oh heck it's a good read for anyone.

The gist of the article is this:

Males tended to kiss as a means to an end -- to gain sexual favors or to reconcile. In contrast, females kiss to establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to assess and periodically update the level of commitment on the part of a partner.

Ain't that sumpthin! It's kind of a reminder to always be present and to pay attention to the message we're sending with even the little gestures of daily life.

Here's the full URL:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070830121629.htm

(So you ask, where's the hard hitting political news we've come to expect from RFK Action Front? Well, when the revolution comes, and even before, there's gonna be a whole lot of kissing!)

Kitty Not Happy: Best Cary Tennis Column Ever?

Unwittingly, this actually makes a fitting Labor Day post. Enjoy:

I'm usually not a Cary Tennis fan. (He writes the Since You Asked advice column on salon.com). I don't know what it is that usually doesn't work for me--sometimes it feels too snarky, other times it feels like his advice doesn't exactly fit the question perhaps?

But a friend forwarded this link to me, and it builds kinda slowly, but by the time I got to the end of the column, I was so profoundly moved that I had to just cheer.

Basically, a young woman wore a t-shirt to work that said, "Kitty Not Happy." (I found a similar item on e-bay--pictured on the right). And an old-school guy was writing in to ask if such attire was acceptable in the modern workplace.

Here's an excerpt from Cary's brilliant reply:

I was a very naive young man when I left school in my early 20s. The first thing I noticed when I began working was that the workplace was profoundly undemocratic. If I hadn't been so naive perhaps it would not have shocked me, but it did shock me, for I realized that people outside of the academic world spend nearly all their productive time working, and if they are not working in a democratic setting then they are not practicing democracy in the most important arena of their lives, and so, for all practical purposes, they are not living in a democracy. They are living under authoritarian rule. They vote about large issues outside of the workplace, true, but in their daily lives they have no vote. They have no vote over who will lead them in the office or what the rules will be under which they labor.

...if in our daily lives we deny the humanity of our fellow workers, we are not living in the country we say we are living in. We are lying to ourselves.

And we have lied enough as a nation already. We have gone already too far in the direction of authoritarianism. We have strayed already too far from democracy. It is time we began acknowledging the tiny individual voices of simple human dissent among us.

Shortly after I read this post, another friend sent me a link to the wikipedia entry for Pierre Bourdieu--the French sociologist who coined the phrase "cultural capital." What struck me about the entry on Bourdieu was his idea of symbolic violence--that is "forms of coercion which are effected without physical force." It seems to me that symbolic violence is also what Cary Tennis is talking about in his column. Like Cary Tennis, too often that's been my experience of the modern workplace--it seems to me that way too many places where I've worked have been profoundly undemocratic and filled with symbolic violence which flowed as 'just the way things are.' But it wasn't until I read Cary Tennis' piece that I realized that the reason I am so profoundly unsettled by many modern workplaces is that, at its core, this symbolic violence is unacceptable and a violation of our stated values as a culture. (Thankfully, some other places I've worked have been fantastic--so it's not a monolithic situation--which also means that there are some solutions out there too.)

Pesticide use linked to autism--how long before corporate bioterrorism is stopped?

On July 31, the Los Angeles Times published the following info:

Women who live near California farm fields sprayed with organochlorine pesticides may be more likely to give birth to children with autism, according to a study by state health officials to be published today.

How much more likely? 6 TIMES MORE LIKELY.

So let me ask a question.

Let's say evil foreign terrorists invade
an American school and
take a classroom full of kids hostage.
And let's say that the manical terrorists
are so hell bent on destroying all that is
good and true about America that they
inject 8 of the 28 kids
with a neurotoxin so potent
that it causes permanent brain damage

How long before the SWAT team gets there?

15 minutes?
20 minutes?
Anyone bet 30 minutes?
Is your highest estimate under 1 hour?

Let's go a step further:
Imagine the terrorists start injecting additional kids
with the heinous poison
every ten minutes.
The authorities, through the use of video surveillance,
know this is happening.

How long before the SWAT team storms the building and
kills every single terrorist even at the risk of
losing some of their own members?

1 minute?
5 minutes?
Is your highest estimate under 10 minutes?

Okay, now, new question:
A study by the California Department of Public Health
finds a link between the use of 2 pesticides and autism.
(The 2 pesticides are endosulfan and dicofol which are already banned
in several countries.)

How long before the state of California bans the pesticides?

5 YEARS?
10 YEARS?

How long before the federal government bans these pesticides?

10 years?
20 years?
Never?

Is your lowest realistic estimate under 5 years?

Here we have 2 different scenarios
(terrorists take over a school and
corporate farmers spraying their fields with
endosulfan and dicofol)
with roughly the same outcome for kids
(permanent brain damage)
but 2 radically different responses from government authorities.

When the harm is caused by a brown man with a gun
the reaction is swift, violent, and total.
When the harm is caused by a poison
sold by a nice white guy in a suit who
goes home to his nice suburban house every evening,
too often the responds is years of study
(or no study at all)
blaming of the victims,
and then halting half measure that
'attempt to balance the interests of both sides.'

If you think I'm kidding check out this quote from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation about the link between these pesticides and autism:

Glenn Brank, spokesman for the pesticide agency, said officials there are "very interested" in the new autism data but say that "more work" on the potential link is needed before it can carry much weight in assessments of the chemicals' risks.

Makes you wonder if the terrorists
(the brown ones with the guns)
just need better lobbyists.
Then they could make some vague claims
about creating jobs and the importance of free enterprise.
If terrorists (the brown ones with the guns)
had better lobbyists
it might take the SWAT team years
to arrive at the school
and then they would study the problem of the school children
looking at every possible alternative explanation
before politely asking the terrorists to cut back on
the number of children they are poisoning.

By the way, endosulfan is manufactured by:
Bayer CropScience,
Makhteshim-Agan, and
Drexel Chemical Company.
Dicofol is manufactured by:
Rohm & Haas,
Hindustan Insecticides Ltd,
Lainco, and
Makhteshim-Agan.
Just thought I'd give ya'll a shout out so that the SWAT team
will know where to find you.

Post Script: Dicofol is used on cotton, oranges, beans and walnuts. Endosulfan is used primarily in tomato processing and on lettuce, alfalfa and cotton crops. Even people who are not a farm workers can be exposed to these poisons through food, water, air, and non-organic household cotton products.

Proud to be a Partisan

As you know, Firedoglake did some of the best reporting on the Scooter Libby trial of any news source in the nation (superior even to the NY Times and CNN accounts of the trial).

But just this week I've become a regular reader and find that they consistently produce really original, thought-provoking content.

This week, Jane Hamsher the founder of Firedoglake, did a brilliant piece called, I'm Proud to Be a Partisan. It describes her recent trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. with her friend Linda, who is the child of holocaust survivors. Jane describes learning about Jewish Partisans, who went underground and fought a guerrilla war against the Nazis in World War II, and what we can learn from their courage.

Please read Jane's piece (here), it's extraordinary.

Also, after Sam Waterson's ridiculous statements on Hardball with Chris Matthews this week, I'm officially calling B.S. on Unity 08.

Wacky video!

Hat tip to Donita Sparks at Firedoglake for finding this video on YouTube.

The video consists of hundreds of prisoners at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre in the Philippines recreating the dance number from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video.



These guys are incredible. Makes you wonder if crime will INCREASE in the Philippines as people try to get in to join this dance troop.

But do check out Donita's post (here) for valid concerns that she raises (and links to more CPDRC videos!).

The Wisdom of Crowds, Part 3, A Case for Impeachment

This is the final installment of my three part series on The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

In the first part of the series, I explained that, according to Surowiecki, in order for a group to be "smart," that is, in order for groups to make accurate predictions and decisions, the group needs to be diverse, independent, and decentralized.

Diversity brings in new ideas, independence insures that those new ideas get expressed, and decentralization prevents the sort of small minded group think that can lead a herd over a cliff.

Now here's where it gets interesting: In the months leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--the U.S. intelligence agencies were organized in exactly this manner--diverse, decentralized, and independent. As Surowiecki writes, the U.S. intelligence community was, "a collection of virtually autonomous, decentralized groups, all working toward the same broad goal--keeping the United States safe from attack--but in very different ways." (p. 67)

In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies had all of the necessary pieces of information to know that an attack was coming. The CIA monitored and took pictures of a 9/11 planning meeting of Al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in January 2000. The CIA knew that two Al Qaeda operatives moved to San Diego in January 2000. In fact, the Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing for August 6, 2001 was titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S" and Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft.

So if we had all of the relevant pieces of data to prevent the attacks on 9/11 then how did they happen anyway.

THERE WAS NO AGGREGATOR.

In order for diverse, independent, and decentralized groups to make smart decisions there has to be someone to aggregate the information. Think about the example of a crowd at the state fair guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar--the aggregator is the person who adds up all of the guesses and finds the average. In a stock market, the aggregator is the New York Stock Exchange which collects all of the buying and selling information and shows the price of the stock (which reflects the collective wisdom of the group). For sports betting, the aggregator is the bookmaker in the casino who sets the point spread for the game.

In every Presidency before George W. Bush, the aggregator was the President of the United States. Think about how John F. Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. He gathered all of the different viewpoints from all of the different defense and intelligence agencies in one room, had them all make their best case (which reflected the collective wisdom of their group), and then came up with a plan that reflected the collective wisdom of the entire group.

With President Bush, there simply is NO ONE at the top who is sifting through all the information to figure out the collective wisdom of all of the intelligence agencies. As former Bush administration counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke indicated, the Bush administration simply wasn't interested in counter-terrorism. Despite the warning the the Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, the President continued his vacation in Crawford, Texas.

After 9/11, again there was no aggregator of the information to figure out who did it and how to prosecute them. Cheney had already made up his mind to invade Iraq. Bush had already made up his mind to invade Iraq. Never mind that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. If you've already made up your mind, the evidence never gets examined, the collective wisdom of the group is never identified, and poor decisions are the result.

In this case, the failure to aggregate the collective wisdom of the U.S. intelligence agencies has led to 2,974 American deaths on 9/11 and 3,646 (and counting) soldiers' deaths in Iraq. For all his talk of being The Decider, Bush has never fulfilled his responsibility as The Aggregator.

Speaking of collective wisdom, a poll by the American Research Group shows that 45% percent of Americans support impeachment proceedings against President Bush and 54% support impeachment of Cheney.

Among independents, 50% favor starting impeachment proceedings against President Bush, to only 30% opposed. And 51% of independents are also for starting impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney, to 29% opposed.