Why are Republicans turning to "Drill, baby, drill"?:

Natural Born Drillers, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want. ...
The irony here is that ... we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom... It’s all about the fracking... U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years,... while natural gas production has exploded.
Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed,... the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. ...
Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery...
As I said, this was totally predictable.  ... Unlike natural gas, which is expensive to ship across oceans, oil is traded on a world market... Oil prices are up because of rising demand from China and other emerging economies, and more recently because of war scares in the Middle East; these forces easily outweigh any downward pressure on prices from rising U.S. production. And the same thing would happen if Republicans got their way...
Meanwhile, what about jobs? ... Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.
Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.
And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve.

Robert Reich:

The Sad Spectacle of Obama’s Super PAC, by Robert Reich: It has been said there is no high ground in American politics since any politician who claims it is likely to be gunned down by those firing from the trenches. That’s how the Obama team justifies its decision to endorse a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited sums for his campaign. 
Baloney. Good ends don’t justify corrupt means.
I understand the White House’s concerns. ... The White House was surprised that super PACs outspent the GOP candidates themselves in several of the early primary contests, and noted how easily Romney’s super PAC delivered Florida to him and pushed Newt Gingrich from first-place to fourth-place in Iowa.
Romney’s friends on Wall Street and in the executive suites of the nation’s biggest corporations have the deepest pockets in America. ... “With so much at stake” wrote Obama campaign manager Jim Messina on the Obama campaign’s blog, Obama couldn’t  “unilaterally disarm.”
But would refusing to be corrupted this way really amount to unilateral disarmament? To the contrary, I think it would have given the President a rallying cry that nearly all Americans would get behind: “More of the nation’s wealth and political power is now in the hands of fewer people and large corporations than since the era of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. I will not allow our democracy to be corrupted by this! I will fight to take back our government!”
Small donations would have flooded the Obama campaign, overwhelming Romney’s billionaire super PACs. The people would have been given a chance to be heard. ...
One Obama adviser says Obama’s decision to endorse his super PAC has had an immediate effect. “Our donors get it,” the official said, adding that they now want to “go fight the other side.”
Exactly. So now a relative handful of super-rich Democrats want fight a relative handful of super-rich Republicans. And we call that a democracy.
The rules on campaign finance need to change. Political influence and power is too concentrated already and as noted in a part of Reich's post that I left out, president Obama hasn't done much to encourage reform. But given the rules that are in place, and my doubts that a surge of small donations would really overwhelm PACs, I'm not so sure this is a bad decision. I'd be curious to hear what you think.

This
New
York Times story, telling ugly stories of human suffering at Chinese outsourcers, isn’t about
Apple. It’s pure politics and
economics.

It’s Simple
The management of well-connected Chinese companies needn’t
worry much about regulation or law enforcement, because China is governed by a
corrupt autocracy. They needn’t worry much about unions or other worker
activism because that government has as a matter of industrial policy
disempowered labor, making
real unionism impossible.

We’ve seen this movie before. The description of 21st-century Chinese
political reality applies pretty well to 19th-century Europe. Not
surprisingly, so do the descriptions of the sufferings of
industrial laborers.

History says: The systemic pressures of capitalism will
always, in the absence of countervailing forces, lead to brutal
exploitation.
Fortunately, history also teaches that capitalism can still create
prosperity even when fenced in with safety, environmental, and labor-law
regulation.

Some will push back, pointing out that China’s policies have lifted the
best part of a billion people out of grinding rural poverty; also that people
take Foxconn jobs eagerly because they are an escape from the village.

I stand by my point; Europe’s industrial revolution’s backdrop was a mass
migration out of the countryside, and people lined up for jobs in Dickens’ dark
satanic mills because it was better than starving down on the farm.

That’s not good enough. It seems to me that it should hardly need saying
that just because there are worse alternatives, it’s not OK to brutalize
people so that people in my timezone can pay less for electronic
lifestyle baubles.

Something’s Gotta Give
In the short term, the most likely outcome is: no change. In a society
where there’s no transparency and no rule of law, it will remain possible, and
immensely profitable, to sweep the problems under the rug, dodge
accountability, and continue with Business As Usual.

But not for long, where “long” is measured in generations. I suspect that
the longer we go on with Business As Usual, the more violent will be the
inevitable breakthrough to modernity.

But I’m optimistic. Europe figured out that messy, petty, parliamentary
politics leading to a messy, petty, regulatory framework are sort of optimal,
if by “optimal” you mean “we haven’t been able to figure out anything
better”. I haven’t seen any evidence that the Chinese aren’t as smart or
courageous as my ethnic group; given the same opportunities, there’s no good
reason they shouldn’t get the same or better results.

Prediction
I totally guarantee this one: Eventually, the cost of buying anything that
requires
human intervention in the manufacturing process is going up. The sooner the
better.

The politics start with whether you say “tar sands” or “oil sands”.
Whatever you want to call them, they’re up in
Northern
Alberta.
Observers of American politics will have noticed the
Keystone XL
project, which would take the sands’ crude oil south to Texas.
Northern
Gateway, the Canadian version, would carry crude west to
Kitimat
on the Pacific coast for export to Asia; it’s in the news because the public hearings start next
week, with thousands queued up to offer opinions. I’m generally contra, and
increasingly optimistic.

Here’s a list of the things that people like me worry about:

The process of digging up the bitumen-and-sand mixture and extracting
usable oil appears to be playing hell with the Northern-Alberta
environment.

The process is also energy-intensive, such that the carbon
loading of a unit of that energy is relatively high.

The damage is not just environmental but social. The work is centered
in the city of Fort McMurray; the high concentration of single oilworkers
with money and not much to do has predictably led to a nasty set
of substance-abuse and prostitution problems.

Shipping crude oil south so that we can buy back the
refined products may not be a good economic choice for Canada.

Building a pipeline from Northern Canada to the Southern US involves
environmental risks along its route.

Building a pipeline from central Alberta to the Pacific coast involves
environmental risks along its route, some of which is across relatively unspoiled
wilderness.

Running supertankers into and out of Kitimat involves environmental
risks to the coastal region, especially given that it’s navigationally
difficult and has lousy, unpredictable weather.

Massive multibillion-dollar capital expenditures aimed at bringing
a new stream of heavily carbon-loaded petroleum online seem questionable on
energy-policy grounds, in the context of global-warming concerns.

The Case In Favor
You’d think that those in favor of slapping these megapipelines down across
the continent would be systematically and forcefully addressing these
concerns; arguing that the damage to Northern Alberta isn’t as bad as it
looks, that the pipelines’ environmental risks are manageable, that the carbon
loading is less than it seems, and that new capital-intensive carbon-intensive
petroleum is a sane energy-policy alternative.

But that’s not happening. Up here in BC, the most vocal pro-pipeline
anti-Green voice is
EthicalOil.org, which ignores all
the policy and environmental questions, focusing loudly and unrelentingly on a
single issue: that the Green and anti-pipeline forces are [gasp!]
receiving foreign funding. Follow that link and you’ll get the
flavor pretty quick.
The sources of this nefarious funding include well-known malefactors such as
the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This line of argument is finding listeners in high places. Consider the CBC’s
Harper warns pipeline hearings could be ‘hijacked’,
from which I quote: “Harper told journalists Friday he's heard concerns
expressed about the use of foreign money by interveners opposed to an oilsands
pipeline”.

And I wonder, are these people crazy? Environmentalism is
by definition a global concern; the notion that Green activism, or
the money funding it, would stop at the border, is silly. And does anyone
think that the (immensely larger amount of) money being used to promote the
pipelines is 100% Canadian? Or even that the proponents of Keystone are 100%
American? Or that it even matters?

Me, I think that if the other side is reduced to this kind of vacuous
brandishing of red herrings, that’s an acknowledgment that they’re dead on the
substance of the issues.

Thus I suspect that even with all the money and Tory groupthink behind the
pipelines, the politics of getting them built will be an uphill struggle.
Which makes me happy.

Now let’s digress a bit.

The Name
My
mother, as a
recent Albertan Chemistry graduate in the 1950s, published research on
petroleum extraction from what back then was unhesitatingly referred to as the
Tar Sands. If you’ve seen that shit, what is technically and politely referred
to as Bitumen, you’ll understand the usage. Hint: Don’t step in it if you
value your footwear.

Since then, in an effort to turn black sticky sand into clean refreshing
profits, there’s been a furious re-branding in favor of
“oil” not “tar”, ignoring what it looks like when it’s in the ground. In
practice, this means that when anyone uses the term “oil sands” you can safely
assume they’re in the pay of the pipeline promoters.

The Actual Facts
When you have businesspeople with the scent of billions
in their nostrils on one side, and Greens on the other, consensus on
verifiable facts tends to be a little thin on the ground. But if you want a
backgrounder,
Canada's tar sands:
Muck and brass in The Economist is not half bad.

I worry about this too, i.e. that the more progressive Social Security becomes (and hence the more income redistribution that is part of the system), the less political support it will have:

Should Social Security Be Progressive?, by James Kwak: ...Should Social Security be more progressive than it already is? The most common ways liberals want to make it more progressive are (a) eliminating the cap on taxable earnings altogether and (b) reducing benefits for high earners. For part of my brain the automatic answer is “yes,” but I think there is a reasonable argument for leaving things roughly the way they are.
First, there’s a straight-up political argument. Social Security is popular because people feel like they earn their benefits. If people thought it was a covert redistribution program, then the high earners would definitely be against it, and most of the middle class probably would be too because of the American allergy to welfare. In fact, there are certainly people who think it is “pure welfare”, like the author of the post I criticized last time around. But it isn’t..., the retirement program on its own is only modestly progressive. The really progressive parts of the program are disability insurance and survivors’ benefits. The fact is that there isn’t that much redistribution based solely on income level; most of the “redistribution” is based on disability or having your spouse die young, which feels more like insurance than welfare. It turns out that most Americans’ instincts are right: Social Security isn’t a welfare program. ...
Now some people ... say that Social Security should be more progressive. But I’m not so sure. Conceptually speaking, I think of Social Security as contributory pension system run by the federal government along with an insurance component to protect people against various risks—disability, early death of your working spouse, bad luck that prevents you from saving enough for retirement, living too long, etc. ... I think of this governmental function as different from the welfare function—the one that ensures that everyone person has the basic means of subsistence. (Wait, we don’t have that in this country? Well, we should.) And that’s precisely what the founders of Social Security thought; they saw it as an alternative to noncontributory old-age assistance programs, which is what the conservatives preferred. ...
So to me, it makes the most sense to have (a) a contributory pension/insurance scheme that compensates participants for losses (e.g., disability) but is not mainly about redistribution; (b) a real welfare system for the poor; and (c) a progressive tax system to fund the rest of the government. And I worry that if you make (a) too much like (b) or (c) it will become unpopular and die a slow death. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
I view Social Security fundamentally as a social insurance program, not welfare, and as noted above I think that's important for its political support. But if it comes down to a choice between raising the income cap or cutting benefits for middle and lower class households, I favor raising the cap. (I favor this over means testing benefits -- if we stop sending checks to part of the population, that will erode support much faster than increasing the income cap. Most people would hardly notice an increase in the cap, but they'd notice if the checks stopped. And I certainly favor this option over raising the retirement age.)

This weekend, Alexander Lukashenko won a fourth term as president of Belarus. Official statements that he received nearly 80% of the vote have been met by the West decrying flaws and violent clashes involving thousands of protesters that have turned out into the streets. Eight of the 10 opposition candidates are reported to have been arrested, along with hundreds of protesters. As the government of Belarus cracks down, the Web is waking up to the news. Here are online windows into what's happening.

Sponsor

Blockade and crowd photos via Charter 97

YouTube

The Neda video in Iran was one of the most politically powerful online videos in history. Look for YouTube to play a role in Belarus as well. While the government of Belarus is reported to have blocked all major social media and opposition media outlets like Charter 97, Belarus Partizan, and Solidarity, videos like the one below are likely to keep going online:

Twitter

The Belarus election is the most recent instance of where online new platforms allow new insight into a country's turmoil. While mainstream media outlets are now covering the story, Twitter provides a real-time stream of news, aggregated with the #electby hashtag on Twitter and, notably, curated by the U.S. State Department's eDiplomacy account, @eDipAtState. Along with retweeting many other accounts with relevant reports and information, @eDipState also shared an official statement: "US Embassy Minsk condemns election-day violence, excessive force by authorities."

In 2010, of course, the online audience doesn't have to rely on government accounts or blog posts to track what's happened. Using Twitter's advanced search, anyone can see geolocated #electby tweets with 500 miles of Belarus. Just click "translate" on the right sidebar to read them in English.

Ushahidi

An instance of Ushahidi, the powerful crowdmapping tool that was originally developing to track elections in Kenya, has been deployed at ElectBy.com.

Global Voices

In 2010, getting the full spectrum of information about international news means going beyond standard online mainstream media outlets or cable news. The Global Voices blogging network is an important collection of views, reports and media from around the world, including a comprehensive review of Belarus presidential Election Day protests and crackdowns.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty is also covering the aftermath of the election, including a photo gallery of scenes from the crackdown.

Storify

As Vadim Lavrusik pointed out in his predictions for media in 2011, a new role of journalists in events like the Belarus election is to act as a real-time curator of information, sifting, filtering, vetting and verifying information for a distributed audience. NPR senior social strategist Andy Carvin has been one of the best in the world at this task, as evidenced by his work during the Haitian earthquake. Below, he used Storify to curate images, links, videos and tweets from the Web.

Discuss

Paul Krugman:

Just two weeks ago, the deficit was the great evil, and all the VSPs insisted that we needed fiscal austerity now now now. Then, magically, a big tax cut — increasing federal debt by more than the original Obama stimulus, and substantially raising the probability of making unaffordable tax cuts permanent — was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Why, it’s almost as if all the concern about the deficit was a front for opposing anything progressives might want, to be dropped as soon as debt was being run up on behalf of conservative goals. But that can’t be true, can it?

Many Republicans are still playing starve the beast. The next step for the GOP is to use the deficit problems that are created by the tax cut legislation as evidence that government spending is out of control. The biggest target for cuts will be social insurance programs. I wonder how many people realize that the revenue loss from the tax cuts will be more than three times the shortfall in Social Security (the tax cuts to those making over $250,000 alone would eliminate the Social Security shortfall)?

I the tax deal a good deal?:

Block Those Metaphors, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Like it or not — and I don’t — the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, is likely to pass Congress. ... The deal, we’re told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen.
I say, block those metaphors. ... Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies. And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support. ...
What we’ve been dealing with ... is a painful process of “deleveraging”: highly indebted Americans not only can’t spend the way they used to, they’re having to pay down the debts they ran up in the bubble years. ...
What the government should be doing in this situation is spending more while the private sector is spending less, supporting employment while those debts are paid down. And this government spending needs to be sustained:... spending that lasts long enough for households to get their debts back under control. The original Obama stimulus wasn’t just too small; it was also much too short-lived, with much of the positive effect already gone. ...
But wouldn’t it be expensive to have the government support the economy for years to come? Yes, it would — which is why the stimulus should be done well, getting as much bang for the buck as possible.
Which brings me back to the Obama-McConnell deal..., the tax-cut deal is likely to deliver relatively small benefits in return for very large costs. ... Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all; even middle-class tax cuts won’t add much to spending. And the business tax break will, I believe, do hardly anything to spur investment given the excess capacity businesses already have.
The actual stimulus in the plan comes from the other measures, mainly unemployment benefits and the payroll tax break. And these measures (a) won’t make more than a modest dent in unemployment and (b) will fade out quickly, with the good stuff going away at the end of 2011.
The question, then, is whether a year of modestly better performance is worth $850 billion in additional debt, plus a significantly raised probability that those tax cuts for the rich will become permanent. And I say no.
The Obama team obviously disagrees. As I understand it, the administration believes that all it needs is a little more time and money, that any day now the economic engine will catch and we’ll be on the road back to prosperity. I hope it’s right, but I don’t think it is.
What I expect, instead, is that we’ll be having this same conversation all over again in 2012, with unemployment still high and the economy suffering as the good parts of the current deal go away. The White House may think it has struck a good bargain, but I believe it’s in for a rude shock.
 

I was shocked to see that the Virginia attorney general has filed papers against the climate researcher, Michael Mann. Mann had worked at the University of Virginia for 5 or 6 years, doing climate studies that cost the state about a half million dollars over that time. (To put that in perspective, that's a middling sized grant; big biomedical researchers can get much more than that.) Cuccinelli is claiming that Mann committed fraud, and wants to demand all that money back.

There are no grounds to consider Mann to have committed any breach of ethics. The sole foundation for his legal attack is the hacked email messages from the CRU, which contained no nefarious revelations…other than that some scientists are really pissed off at clueless denialists like Cuccinelli. Most annoyingly, Mann was already subjected to an ethics review, again driven by people complaining about the CRU emails, and was completely absolved of any wrongdoing.

This is a witch hunt, nothing more. Cuccinelli is not pursuing a scientist because he did wrong, he is pursuing a scientist because he did not like the results he honestly got. He is using the law to take a political cheap shot with no basis in substance. That can only have a chilling effect, if carried out: apparently, the only results you are allowed to get at the University of Virginia are those that fit the preconceptions of conservative ideology. If anyone has acted unethically in this matter, it's Virginia's Attorney General.
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