Category: Politics

Some questions about US debt default

Some things that genuinely confuse me about the looming (again) threat that the US will default on its debts:

1) Why is it the Democrats’ problem? Why is it President Obama’s problem? Who is taking whom hostage? A debt default doesn’t particularly affect Democratic constituencies. I’d expect that Republican business interests would be more directly concerned. Why can’t President Obama threaten to veto a bill raising the debt ceiling unless the Republicans agree to attach an infrastructure stimulus bill and raise the minimum wage? Is it just that the president has the direct responsibility for coping with the financial shitstorm that would follow breeching the debt ceiling?

2) Why doesn’t the looming government shutdown obviate the default threat? I see political commentators making arguments that a government shutdown will purge some of the Republican bile, and so make a debt default less likely. And Matt Yglesias points out that some people seem to think (erroneously) that not raising the debt ceiling will save the government money. But a government shutdown clearly does save a lot of money. So, as long as that’s going on, presumably government outlays will not exceed its income. Maybe it’s a technical problem, preventing debt from being rolled over at all. [Update below]

3) Why is it such a big deal? I don’t mean, why is it a big deal? I mean, why is it such a big deal. The standard belief, as summarised here, is that the US breaching its debt ceiling will have long-term repercussions for financial markets, only the least important of which would be permanently raising the cost of US government borrowing. I have commented earlier about the peculiar faith the bankers have that past defaults are uniquely significant for predicting future defaults. Surely if I’m thinking of lending money to the US Treasury, the fact that two hundred Republican firebrands blatantly take no responsibility for US debt repayments and think that playing chicken with debt repayments is a great way to score ideological points should make me uneasy. The fact that they have already pushed it over the brink would marginally increase my unease, but the total effect would depend on how that exercise came out. Did they get a good warm feeling out of it, or was the outcome shocking and unpleasant, so that they would be very unlikely to choose this tactic again in the near future. If the latter, then I’d be more inclined to focus on the fundamental solvency of the US government, which is obviously very good.

Obviously, I’m not a banker, but I wonder if they’re being rational, in at least the house-of-mirrors sort of “the value of a bond is what people think people think people think people think … people think it’s worth” way. Of course, once you’ve iterated ad infinitum pretty much any answer can come out.

[Update 30-9-2013: By way of Andrew Sullivan comes a link to this explanation (from Zeke Miller at Time): Continue reading “Some questions about US debt default”

Is “open for business” fit for purpose?

One peculiarity of British political culture that I find most striking, coming to it from the outside, is the occasional coining of technocratically flavoured verbal taunts, and the incessant efforts to shoehorn as many of the old chestnuts as possible into whatever attack is currently being made.

Witness the reaction of energy companies to Ed Miliband’s proposal to freeze energy prices for 20 months (which, on the merits, sounds like a pretty awful idea, managing to be offensive both to oil tycoons and environmentalists):

The companies have reacted with fury to his plans, saying he is risking power blackouts and sending a message that Britain is not open for business.

(More quotes used the same slogan to attack proposals to fund the reduction in business energy rates by raising corporate income tax.) The phrase gets associated with Margaret Thatcher, though it’s been used intensively both by the current government, and by Tony Blair, who has been well paid to travel around the world attesting to other countries being “open for business”: Palestine, Sierra Leone, Thailand.

Public relations advice for GCHQ (from Wolf Biermann)

If you don’t speak German you probably have never heard of Wolf Biermann, who many people (I am one of them) would consider to be the greatest, or at least one of the greatest, political songwriters of the 20th century. Unfortunately, text-heavy songwriting doesn’t cross borders well, so he is almost unknown outside the German-speaking world. But he is an extraordinary poet and musician, and I’m not sure who could compare to his blend of wit, righteous anger and political sophistication.

At the moment, I’m particularly thinking of his 1974 Stasi Ballade, a sarcastic paean to the internal security service (Staatssicherheit, or Stasi) that had kept him constantly under surveillance since the early 1960s, when his communist idealism had been pegged as politically deviant. I’ve included the whole German text below (certainly a copyright sin, but perhaps a venial one). A crude translation of parts of it give a sense of Biermann’s text:

I feel myself somehow entwined
with the poignant Stasi swine
who watch my house, who come and go
in pouring rain and sleet and snow.
Who installed a microphone
to listen in on all my moaning,
songs and jokes and mild bitching
on the toilet, in the kitchen:
Brothers from Security —
You alone know all my grief!

…..

Words that would have disappeared
are stored by you on eight-inch reels,
and I know how, now and then,
you sing my songs at night in bed!
For years I’ve been depending on
the Stasi as my Eckermann.

When I come home late at night
from the pub tired, maybe tight,
And some crude peasants were to lurk
in the darkness by my door,
and they attacked most vulgarly
to do, I don’t know what, to me –
But that’s impossible today.
The comrades in their battle grey
from the Stasi would — I’d bet you! —
Prohibit an assault or battery

Because the papers in the West
Would try to blame the crime — I’d bet you! —
on the Communists …
The Stasi is — I must regard it
as my loyal bodyguard!

Or we could reflect a while
upon my foolish carnal freestyle –
My habit, such a source of strife,
that always discomposed my wife –
This monstrous, mad, and reckless tempt-lure
pulling me toward new adventure.
Since I know how Argus-eyed
the comrades watch, I haven’t tried
to pick my cherries anymore
from the trees on other shores.

I know I’d risk that such events
would be recorded, and soon be sent
to my wife with clear intent –
Such a huge embarrassment!
And so I skip these sideways swerves
so save my strength, my time, my nerves –
And there’s no question that this spark
I save redounds to fire my work!
I say, in short: the Security
Secures my immortality!

So, let’s summarise: Biermann thanks the Stasi surveillance for three services:

  1. Recording his words. Assuring that they will never be forgotten, and that someone is paying attention. Of course, it’s not clear how much attention GCHQ is allowed to pay, according to current law, but they could do a lot more to win over the hearts and minds of the public on the other score. Imagine GCHQ Backup. Never lose another file. If you have a disagreement about what was said in a telephone conversation, just use the webform to contact GCHQ’s round-the-clock service representatives, who will be happy to provide you with the recording. Maybe they’ll even get people to agree to leave their webcams on at all times, in return for cataloguing and backing up their non-telephonic conversations.
  2. Protection from crime. They’ve emphasised this so far. I’m not sure that there is more to be gotten plausibly, at current funding levels.
  3. Preserving morals. This one is delicate, but may have the greatest potential for development. Of course, it’s implicit in the argument that people make, that those who have not committed crimes have nothing to fear from surveillance. We know that the NSA has already been experimenting with the use of electronic surveillance to control sexual deviance. They could offer a service that automatically mails to your partner the content of any conversations that include certain keywords. The application is not limited to sexual morals, of course. Employers could be alerted when their employees discuss company secrets (or theft of company property). Or maybe you’re a Muslim youth who is worried that you might be tempted into islamist terrorism. The problem is, some people don’t want to be prevented from having affairs, or consorting with islamists, or whatnot. This part still needs work.

Continue reading “Public relations advice for GCHQ (from Wolf Biermann)”

Ambiguous Yids: The problem with speech bans

David Cameron has gotten himself onto the front page of the commuter newspaper Metro by commenting on the bizarre controversy over the use of the word “Yids” in English football.

Tottenham fans often chant the word, referring to themselves as “Yiddos” or “the Yid Army”. Some say it is a defensive gesture, to deflect abuse from opposition fans.
But the FA, backed by Jewish leaders, say it has no place in football and want it stopped.

The prime minister’s solomonic opinion is that the use of the word should be prosecuted only when it is used as an insult, not when people are applying it to themselves. The article quotes one Jewish supporter of a different team who says the word should be banned: “Yid is a race-hate word. It was daubed across the East End by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.” And a Jewish Tottenham supporter who says “This is part of our identity. As a Jewish person, I always find it empowering. We have turned this word into a positive.”

(I recall that when I lived in the Netherlands in the 1990s there was a similar controversy around the AFC Ajax football team in Amsterdam, that had the nickname de Joden, and whose rivals would taunt the fans with antisemitic chants like “Hamas, Hamas, de joden aan het gas” (“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”). According to this Wikipedia article, supporters of Ajax would sometimes wave Star of David flags, and at one point Hava Nagila could be downloaded as a ringtone from the club’s official website.)

Maybe Cameron should have gone the extra step, to realise that trying to come up with a sensible set of criteria for banning speech based on its content is a fool’s errand. There’s no way to deal with all the shades of meaning, when one person hurls an insult, the victim appropriates the insult as a badge of honour (as has happened with gay, queer, Black, Quaker, and impressionist), and someone else comments on the verbiage ironically.

Is bleating shrill?

Having taken on the controversial question of the significance of ascribing shrillness (shrillity? shrillth?) to ones opponents, I feel obliged to wade in on the pressing issue of “bleating”.

The occasion is an open letter by a group of British education experts, pointing out the well-established fact that the UK obsession with getting children learning arithmetic and reading at ever earlier ages — formal schooling starts at age 3 1/2 — is counterproductive, and that children would be better off with age-appropriate education. The education ministry has responded with an extraordinarily unprofessional (shrill, or perhaps “spittle-flecked” would be the vernacular description) ejaculation of mostly generic insults, including the charge that

We need a system that aims to prepare pupils to solve hard problems in calculus or be a poet or engineer – a system freed from the grip of those who bleat bogus pop-psychology about ‘self image’, which is an excuse for not teaching poor children how to add up.

I can’t fault the alliteration of “those who bleat bogus pop-psychology”, but what does it mean? It sounds like an insult, but I’m not sure what is insulting about it. Presumably it’s supposed to make you think of a flock of sheep, dumbly repeating some meaningless sounds. And, bleating is sort of a shrill sound, so maybe it also is meant to have effeminate overtones.

The term “pop-psychology” is interesting in this context. Given that the letter is signed by professors and senior lecturers in psychology and education, I have to assume that, right or wrong, what they’re talking about is real psychology, not “pop”.  So it’s interesting that the bureaucrats felt that they couldn’t take on the reputation of academic psychology directly, but only by insinuating that it is all just self-help pablum. (And is “bogus” a modifier of pop-psychology — to say, this isn’t even the top-drawer pop — or a redundant intensifier, as when one refers to “disingenuous government propaganda”?) Continue reading “Is bleating shrill?”

Tech executives still lying

Marissa Meyer, CEO of Houyhnhnm? [Correction, that’s “Yahoo!”] has faced charges that her company (and other tech companies) undermined democracy and betrayed their customers’ trust by secret collusion with US espionage. She attempts to win back this trust by telling big lies. In a recent interview she claimed that

Releasing classified information is treason and you are incarcerated.

Nine words, and two (or maybe three) false statements.

First, the easy one: Treason is clearly defined in the US constitution.

Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

She is confusing the United States government with the 18th Century British monarchy, that classed that any release of information not authorised by the state is treason.

What her company may or may not have been constrained by is called a National Security Letter (NSL), that typically comes with a gag order. (Whether this counts as “classified information” I am not sure. I’d take her word for it if she weren’t lying about everything else.) The constitutional scope of these gag orders has been challenged in court, but I don’t know what the current status is.

But is it true that if you disclose the receipt of an NSL “you are incarcerated”? In fact, the Department of Justice — not the American Society for Feelgood Antiauthoritarianism — writes in its fact sheet on the Patriot Act Reauthorization that this act

Discourages unauthorized disclosures by providing a criminal penalty for knowing and willful violation with intent to obstruct an investigation or judicial proceeding.

Until this reauthorisation, apparently there was no specific penalty legislated for disclosing NSLs. And afterward, it’s still not clear. It would clearly — and properly — be a punishable offence if Marissa Meyer found out that her college roommate was having her Houyhnhnm? account searched because she retweeted a suspicious number of posts from Sheikh Omar’s Twitter feed, and tipped her off. But to alert the public for reasons of improving democratic accountability most likely is not illegal at all, and is the sort of calculated risk that many journalistic organisations take on a daily basis. With far less money to back them up.

I don’t doubt that some investigator fed her that line about treason and incarceration. That’s what interrogators do, they help people out of their scruples. But presumably she could afford a lawyer to give her independent advice. She could even have looked up the US Constitution and the PATRIOT act, if she knows how to use a search engine.

And I don’t expect Marissa Meyer or Sergey Brin to blow the cover off government surveillance and flee to Russia. But they clearly have decided — unlike, say, the New York Times — that they are a merely commercial organisation, with no public responsibility, and that a legal struggle would hurt their profits. That is why their customers need to make sure to align their incentives, by boycotting or simply avoiding companies that don’t show sufficient civil courage on their own.

And telling lies is not a way to rebuild trust.

Outsourcing espionage

In the light of recent developments, including the vast trove of NSA documents downloaded by Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden, and the revelation from those documents that the US has been systematically violating its treaty obligations by spying on the SWIFT international financial transactions system, some comments by Janine Wedel in her book Shadow Elite take on new significance:

Through SWIFT the US Treasury Department sought and gained access to large numbers of financial and communications records. Treasury then established the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, run out of the CIA, to analyze the SWIFT data and later shared it with the CIA and FBI. It also hired Booz Allen as an “independent” auditor, which, along with SWIFT, reviewed Treasury’s logs of information searches… As Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, put it: “It is bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the US government security establishment.”

To sum up that interaction: A private company, given “government” access to sensitive and private data about citizens of the United States and other countries, not only worked alongside government to analyze the data, but then also (supposedly) oversaw the process.

Is there any surprise, then, that the self-watching watcher had no safeguards in place to prevent a newly hired employee from walking off with all these super-secret data?

There have always been those who have claimed that capitalism is inimical to tyranny. Usually some ideological affinity between capitalism and democracy, or in a practical sense that tyranny is bad for business, which depends on the initiative of many well-informed independent actors (rather in the same way that European economic integration in the early 20th century made war self-defeating for the economic elites, hence impossible; or, so it was argued). But maybe there is some truth to this claim in the Leninist sense: When we come to hang the capitalists, they will bid on the contract for the rope. Given opportunity to accumulate vast secret power through spying, or to make vast profits by outsourcing the espionage, at the risk of exposing the secret government, American elites couldn’t resist the lure of the cash. Stalin would never have made that mistake.

I suspect that Stalin would have done very well on the marshmallow test, for what it’s worth.

 

The advantage of having a queen…

… is that the prime minister can take the train.

The tabloids are trying to turn this into a scandal, because the PM’s conspicuous red box of official papers seemed to be unguarded. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. I won’t suggest that riding in the first-class carriage is exactly a recipe for inculcating modesty, but look at this photo

David Cameron working on the train
He looks so tired…

of David Cameron working while he travels. He looks more like a public servant than Barack Obama ever could, despite the fact that he is doing fundamentally the same job. And if the cost of that is that some important papers may be left temptingly out on the table occasionally, I think it’s well worth it.

Part of the cost may be maintaining a monarch, as well. I like to mock the notion of monarchy (as here and here) as inimical to democracy. I still think the idea of assigning important roles in society by heredity both ridiculous and pernicious. But there is a strong pragmatic argument on the other side that a constitutionally neutered monarchy keeps the atavistic and campy royal circuses away from the levers of power.

I’d say, far from being a scandal, this photo is one that Downing Street and the British people generally ought to be proud of. Even if he does seem to get a whole table and block of four seats to himself.

Is “shrill” gender-coded?

The Dish recently quoted a correspondent who, on his or her way to making a point about Chinese tourists wrote

This all has a cogent economic explanation. Paul Krugman, before his current role as shrill liberal attack dog, used to explain…

I found this comment irritating, for reasons that were not immediately clear to me. I have enormous respect for Paul Krugman, both in his earlier incarnation as a populariser of economic theory — particularly trade theory, but also macroeconomics — and as a blogger and twice-weekly columnist who occasionally veers away from economic issues. I think he has a healthy appreciation for his own intellectual strengths, but that he mostly stops short of egotistic attachment to his pet theories, whether defending past statements or being overly sure of his predictions. But I can’t say that there is no basis for someone to think that his tone is overly aggressive, that his political analysis is weak, that even his economic analysis may be distorted by political wishful thinking or antagonism. Those aren’t my opinions, but they’re widely held, and don’t seem to me outrageous.

But what is the role of shrill in that sentence? It’s not a word I hear often, but maybe it’s common in some circles. What does it mean? It’s clearly a free-floating insult, which somehow suggests derangement due to becoming overly emotional, and as such merely replicates “attack dog”. And yet “shrill” seems more contemptuous. What does it mean? Imagine replacing it by strident. It has the same signification with regard to the strength of advocacy, but the contempt is gone. So, is the contempt associated with high-pitched speech? Is this something like bitch, or the dialectical equivalent of “he throws like a girl”? Or is it taking the place of the free-form homosexual slurs that used to be ubiquitous, but are now no longer permitted?

Which enemy are GCHQ and NSA fighting?

Hint: They both named their major programs aimed at undermining all internet decryption after Civil War battles. (Edgehill for the British, Bull Run for the US). So they’re not thinking of an external enemy, are they?

I suspect that the huge effort the US has put into decrypting SSL — which will eventually get out into the wild, of course, and hugely disrupt commerce worldwide, will come to be seen as the information warfare equivalent of the huge investment that the US and Soviets put into perfecting sarin and other nerve agents, and making them cheap and easy to produce.