Author Archives: Yves Smith

Why Liberals Are Lame

The chattering classes of the left are encouraged by the spectacle of 14 Wisconsin state senators having the intestinal fortitude to deny the governor a quorum for a budget vote that includes provisions to strip most state employees of virtually all of their collective bargaining rights. They were in turn emboldened by large scale demonstrations in the capitol, which seemed to get their momentum from the fact that students, rather than taking the day off when teachers called in sick so they could protest, turned out in large numbers to support them.

Don’t underestimate the ability of the Democrats to trade this opportunity away. All the defecting Senators are asking for is to slow down the process and negotiate the bill. Sounds reasonable, right?

As someone who been party to deal-making, the problem with being reasonable and measured is that that only works with fair-minded and/or experienced opponents. Being non-negotiable is not only terribly effective (you throw a tantrum and then make only token concessions to let the other side save a teeny bit of face), it also takes comparatively little in the way of bargaining skills.

The right wing, for the most part, has made being unreasonable and non-negotiable part of its branding. The left, peculiarly, has not adapted. And the result is that it too often winds up ceding way more ground than it needs to.

Many readers will point out that this ineffectiveness serves as useful protective cover, particularly with the Obama Administration. It has repeatedly sought to have its cake and eat it too, by appealing to as much as possible of the traditional Democratic base (which they figure they can abuse, since it has nowhere to go) while also playing up to corporate backers. The true state of play has reached the point that even purveyors of leading edge conventional wisdom like Jeffrey Sachs are now willing to say that we have two center-right parties in the US.

But this, while true, misses an underlying pathology.

Wisconsin Governor Uses Police State Tactics (Literally) on Democratic Senators (Updated)

A major row has been under way in Wisconsin as governor Walker has been trying to push through state-union-breaking changes as part of his program to deal with a projected $3 billion shortfall in the state budget over the next two years. (Update: as reader petrograd indicates, an analysis of the state’s finances shows this shortfall to be entirely the result of spending increases planned by Walker. The state ran a modest surplus in the latest fiscal year and the projected falls in tax receipts over the next two years were less than $200 million cumulative. So this budget hysteria is a gross distortion of the state’s true condition).

His state budget plan included ending state worker collective bargaining rights and cutting pay and benefits. He not only said he would not negotiate, but announced he had alerted the National Guard in the event of worker protests (note the last time the Guard was called in to handle a labor dispute was in 1934). Walker since backed down on this particular threat, but has now sent out state police to round up Democratic state senators who are refusing to vote on the latest iteration of Walker’s proposal, From PRWatch:

Mary Bottari reports that the state capitol police are scouring the Wisconsin Capitol in an attempt to track down the Wisconsin Senate Democratic Caucus. The Wisconsin Senate was slated to vote on the budget bill today, but they were prevented from doing so because all Democratic Senators walked out denying the Republicans a necessary quorum. The Republicans issued a “call of the house” empowering the state capitol police to round up missing Senators, but the Democrats were prepared for this and promptly departed the building and may even have left the state.

Links 2/17/11

False toes belonging to Egyptian mummies were the world’s ‘earliest functional prosthetic body parts’ Daily Mail (hat tip reader May S)

Silly Humans Can’t Count: The 29% Effect Paul Kedrosky

Anonymous and the global correction AlJazeera (hat tip reader Ted L)

Desperately Seeking Search Ed Harrison

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Boeing’s Multi-Billion Outsourcing Fiasco

We’ve repeatedly said that offshoring and outsourcing are often not the big cost-savers that the industry promoting them, Wall Street, and the stenographers among the business press would have you believe.

Direct factory labor is typically just north of 10% of the cost of most manufactured goods; for cars, we are told it’s 13%. Even if you can extract meaningful savings there, you have significant offsets: the upfront cost of re-orgainzing production (which in the outsourcing scenario include hiring costly outsourcing “consultants” and paying attorneys to paper up the deals), higher ongoing managerial costs, higher shipping and related inventory financing costs. Yes, there are cases like Apple where outsourcing has been a big success, but there are also others where the benefits have been underwhelming and have come at considerable costs to US workers, communities, and the economy (see a very good long form discussion by Leo Hindery).

Moreover, these cost savings come with higher risk.

Link 2/16/11

‘Bitten or crushed by other reptiles’ Chris Hiley (hat tip Richard Smith)

Tuscon Minuteman Found Guilty of Murdering 9-Year-Old Mexican-American Girl AlerNet (hat tip reader furzy mouse)

The South Dakota Bill That Could Legitimize Murder of Abortion Providers AlterNet (hat tip reader furzy mouse) and South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers Mother Jones (hat tip Ed Harrison)

“I’m considering all possible options” of fighting back Glenn Greenwald on Radio Free Dylan

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Obama Happy to Cut Broad Range of Services to Preserve Pentagon Pork

In another manifestation of Obama’s continuing move to the right, his latest stunt has been to out-Republican the Republicans as a defender of the Pentagon. The GOP, which is out to cut $100 billion more from Obama’s version, has targeted the Department of Defense for $15 billion from an initial request of over $500 billion. From a statement released by the Administration:

The bill proposes cuts that would sharply undermine core government functions and investments key to economic growth and job creation and would reduce funding for the Department of Defense to a level that would leave the department without the resources and flexibility needed to meet vital military requirements….If the president is presented with a bill that undermines critical priorities or national security through funding levels or restrictions, contains earmarks or curtails the drivers of long-term economic growth and job creation while continuing to burden future generations with deficits, the president will veto the bill.

Contrast this stand-fast position on the military budget with Obama’s willingness to throw pretty much anyone else under the bus. John Walker provided a pithy illustration of the guns v. everything else tradeoff in a mock letter to low income Americans. Key section:

The 7 Things Really Wrong with the Treasury’s GSE Reform Plan

As readers no doubt know, the Treasury Department released its overdue plan for reform of the Fannie and Freddie, otherwise known as GSEs (for “government sponsored enterprise”) last Friday. We were surprised that some normally astute commentators, such as Mike Konczal and Felix Salmon, were taken in by this thin and misleading document. As banking expert Chris Whalen said by e-mail, “The proposal is completely disingenuous. Read 180 degrees opposite what it says.”

What is particularly striking is it is not very difficult to difficult to see through the stage management. Throughout the document, the Treasury calls its proposal a “plan” when it is anything but. Putting some stakes in the ground and then offering three mutually exclusive alternatives and no timetable for resolution is not a plan.

The reason for this failure to put forward a real proposal is that Treasury is trying to present itself as a fair broker of a politically fraught process. But that’s bunk. The outcome, unless the public wakes up to this new effort at looting, is already clear.

The fix is just about in.

Our Response to the Center for American Progress Objection to Our Post on Its GSE Reform Proposal

Readers have hopefully had the opportunity to read “The Center for American Progress Objects to Our Critique of Its GSE Reform Plan”, which contained an e-mail by David Min of the Center for American Progress presenting its bones of contention.

While we appreciate that the CAP has gone to the trouble to communicate with us directly, we are not persuaded by its arguments.

We’ll recap the e-mail and then address the issues individually:

1. You need to have some form of government guarantee to have a mortgage product that is fair to middle class consumers (his writing is a bit confused, at one point he uses “no” when he means “yes”, but this is the drift of his gist).

2. We’ve mistated who would eat “catastrophic risk” under the CAP scheme, since the Catastrophic Risk Fund and the new mortgage insurer investors would take losses first

3. Not all “banks” are behind or support the CAP proposal

4. This plan is the best option for the public and less lucrative to the financial services industry than a “privatization” model

Let’s dispatch these arguments in order.

The Center for American Progress Objects to Our Critique of Its GSE Reform Plan

We received this e-mail from David Min on February 11 about our post titled, “Wall Street Co-Opting Nominally Liberal Think Tanks; Banks Lobbying to Become New GSEs.” That piece took a dim view of a GSE “reform” proposal from the Center for American Progress, which we pointed out is “THE mainstream Democratic think tank for Congress and the administration”.

We must note that this message mischaracterizes some aspects of our post (for instance, we discussed at length in the our post why we thought the catastrophic risk fund would come up short, and this e-mail does not address our argument). Nevertheless, we thought readers would be interested in his message. From Min:

Links 2/15/11

Paper Accelerometer Could Mean Disposable Devices IEEE Spectrum

Gonorrhea Acquires a Piece of Human DNA: First Evidence of Gene Transfer from Human Host to Bacterial Pathogen ScienceDaily (hat tip reader furzy mouse)

Bill O’Reilly’s Tidal Skepticism Launches “You Can’t Explain That” Meme Geekosystem

Egypt-Inspired Protests Erupt in Bahrain, Iran, Yemen Bloomberg

Protester deaths shake Bahrain Financial Times

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Doug Smith: Social Impact Bonds – Wrong Result, Wrong Way (Part 2)

By Douglas K. Smith, Member, Board of Directors, SeaChange Capital Partners This is the second part of a two-part post on social impact bonds. Please see Part 1 for a description of how they work as well as the benefits ascribed to them by supporters such as New York Times writer David Leonhardt and Harvard […]

Shoddy Anti Derivatives Reform “Study” From Firm That Falsely Claimed Top Academics as Advisor

t’s high time that reporters start lifting the veil to look at exactly who is behind the “research” put out by think tanks. Even drug company research, which many members of the public now know to view with some doubt, at least has an actual investigation of some sort underpinning it (the doubts about them usually involve study design and/or interpretation of results). Think tank end product should be taken with even more salt, since it too often is the intellectual equivalent of a CDO: taking junk ideas and dressing it up in a structure and a brand name so that most people will regard it as AAA-rated thinking.

A piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times is an all-too-rare and badly need hard look at the less than savory process of creating impressive-looking arguments in favor of special-interest serving policies.