White Right-Wing Christian Terrorist

Tuesday, when CBS News did a segment on the man who killed seven at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, one word was conspicuously absent: terrorist. All the pieces to make that judgment were in place: Wade Michael Page had a long history in white supremacist groups. (The album covers of his white-supremacist bands are pictured at the bottom of this article, where you can easily avoid looking at them.) His victims were non-Christian and non-white, and they gathered at a non-Christian temple.

His massacre was violence against civilians, apparently for the political purpose of terrorizing the racial or religious groups they belong to. That’s terrorism.

No white Christian terrorists. But the mainstream media doesn’t often call white Christians terrorists, and even if they express their motives in Christian or white-supremacist terms, you seldom run across the phrase “white Christian terrorist”. Almost by definition, terrorists are Muslims. And conversely, violent Muslims are terrorists.

When someone does tie a terrorist act to Christianity, you can count on seeing a lot of pushback — articles begging for nuance, emphasizing how out of the Christian mainstream the terrorist’s views are, refusing to take seriously a childhood connection to Christianity, and instead demanding specific evidence of a religious motive (which hasn’t shown up yet in Page’s case). Again, these principles don’t apply when the killer has brown skin and a Muslim name.

The white killer also gets portrayed with more sympathy. The CBS report includes pictures of Page as a cute boy, and shows his step-mother describing him as “kind and gentle and loving”.

I’ll bet Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a cute child once, but this is the picture of him I’ve seen over and over.

No right-wing terrorists. You also don’t hear the term “right-wing terrorist” very often. In 2009, a report by the Department of Homeland Security called attention to the problem of right-wing violence, and identified “disgruntled military veterans” as targets for recruitment by right-wing hate groups. It quoted a civil rights organization:

large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.

The potential recruits were “a small percentage” of veterans, but a small percentage of a large number can still be disturbingly large.

Page was precisely the kind of veteran the report was talking about. But it’s too late for the report’s author (Daryl Johnson) to get credit in DHS, because he’s long gone. The report raised a furor in the right-wing media, which interpreted it as a slander against both veterans and the rising Tea Party movement.

Michelle Malkin wrote in the Washington Times:

It’s no small coincidence that Ms. Napolitano’s agency disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests.

Her column ended: “We are all right-wing extremists now. Welcome to the club.” That message was echoed by Fox News and Republican leaders: Right-wing terrorism was something the Obama administration dreamed up to slander all conservatives.

DHS responded to the furor by dissolving Johnson’s team, and Johnson himself left DHS a year after the report was published.

What I think is going on. There is an underlying narrative in mainstream culture that People Like You are threatened by People Like Them. If a story fits neatly into that frame, then OK, go with it.

But if the obvious interpretation of an event is that People Like You are the threat, that’s a problem. Nobody wants to hear that. And so Juan Cole’s Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others includes:

6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.

 Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf puts it like this:

Watching Oak Creek, that subset of Americans was put in a position to realize that a day prior they’d have identified with the terrorist more than his victims. And so they quickly looked away.

Instead, we want to hear that the Threatening One is really not like us after all. He’s not a member of a group; he’s a loner. He’s not acting on beliefs that we share; he’s crazy. And his action is not a one-sided eruption of our hate onto their innocence; he’s a tortured soul who once had the potential for goodness; the suffering he inflicts arises from his own suffering.

The same thing happens on smaller scales. A couple years ago, the director of my church’s religious education program was describing the articles she’d been reading about bullying. They all discussed how to help your child deal with being bullied. “None of them,” she told me, “addressed the possibility that your child might be the bully.”

But the bully is always someone’s child. And no one wants to hear that.

August 13, 2012 – 11:31 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To

Much ink was spilled this weekend about Paul Ryan. Here are the ten best observations I found:

1. This was Plan B for Romney.

Steve Kornacki:

The most important thing to know about Mitt Romney’s running-mate choice is this: It’s not the move he would have made if the campaign was going the way he hoped it would.

Plan A was to frame the election as Barack Obama vs. Somebody Else, and Mitt all but changed his name to Somebody Else. Beyond a few believe-in-America platitudes, the Romney campaign has been the anti-Obama campaign.

That strategy led to what Ezra Klein called a “policy gap” — not a gap between Obama’s policies and Romney’s policies, but

Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t. … Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals.

Klein gives many examples, including:

On financial regulation, Romney would ‘repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.’ That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something.

Romney’s plan to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare is equally light on the “replace” part. The Romney website lists a lot of virtues his plan will have, but only hints at how it will achieve those virtues.

Until Saturday, everything about the Romney candidacy was fuzzy, even whether or not he supports RomneyCare. He bowed to all the conservative icons during the primary campaign, but his Massachusetts record pointed the other way, and Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom indicated that Romney’s primary commitments might be null and void after the convention:

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

In hindsight, the hole in that strategy is obvious: Not only did this looming betrayal make the base edgy, but Romney’s refusal to define himself let Obama define him as the slash-and-burn financier who destroyed American industry and walked away with all the money.

All summer, Romney has been helpless against the assault. Does he want to make women bear their rapists’ children? Does he want to raise taxes on the middle class? Did he pay any taxes himself? All possible responses would force Mitt to be Somebody, when he really wanted to be Somebody Else.

The results showed up immediately in Romney’s unfavorable rating.

Romney’s overall favorable/unfavorable score remains a net negative – a trait no other modern presumptive GOP presidential nominee (whether Bob Dole, George W. Bush or John McCain) has shared.

And eventually Obama started to pull away in the head-to-head polls.

Time for Plan B.

2. Ryan’s voting record is very, very conservative.

Nate Silver notes that Ryan’s Congressional voting record gives him a DW-Nominate rating “roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann”. Ryan may not be as physically wild-eyed as Bachmann, but ideologically they’re very similar. That makes him the most ideologically extreme VP candidate from Congress since at least 1900. (See chart below.)

Given Mitt’s fuzziness and Ryan’s high-contrast definition, Ryan’s positions are now the Romney-Ryan positions. The Etch-a-Sketch option is gone.

Those Romney-Ryan policies include privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher program, and drastically cutting Medicaid. (Ryan hopes that some magic wand at the state level will create efficiencies, but the Urban Institute estimates some 14 million poor people would lose coverage.)

3. Ryan is both a Catholic and a follower of atheist author Ayn Rand.

He’s very anti-abortion but completely ignores the long series of socio-economic encyclicals that started with Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum in 1891.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote letters criticizing the Ryan budget, which Ryan falsely rejected as not representing “all the Catholic bishops”.

Catholics have a real decision to make in this election. Are they single-issue anti-abortion voters? Or does the Sermon on the Mount still count for something?

4.The Ryan pick focuses the election on the deficit.

Matt Yglesias complains:

focusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won’t be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time—mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents.

This cuts both ways. On the one hand, it plays into the popular misconception that lowering the deficit would create jobs. (Both Econ 101 and the experience of Britain say that cutting the deficit will destroy jobs.) That favors Romney.

On the other hand, Obama’s balanced plan for dealing with the long-term deficit is much more credible than the Ryan/Romney plan to cut rich people’s taxes even more, increase defense spending, and make up the difference by closing unspecified loopholes and cutting unspecified spending.

Ezra Klein explains how steep those cuts would have to be:

Ryan says that under his budget, everything the federal government does that is not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will be cut to less than 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, energy research, national parks, civil service, the FBI — all of it. Right now, that category of spending is 12.5 percent of GDP.

Another way to put 3.75% in context: Romney has already promised to put “a floor of 4 percent of GDP” under the defense budget alone.

5. Ryan’s reputation as a deficit hawk is undeserved.

Ezra Klein:

the real north star of Ryan’s policy record isn’t deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his agenda. It’s radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government.

More bluntly: The deficit is just an excuse to shrink government. If the deficit went away, Ryan would rebuild it by cutting rich people’s taxes and letting corporations skim a bigger profit out of public services.

Paul Krugman says Ryan’s budget-sausage contains $4.6 trillion in “mystery meat”: Like Romney, he claims his tax cuts for the rich will be balanced by closing loopholes, but he doesn’t identify any of those loopholes.

We’ve heard this song before: Republicans always claim their tax cuts won’t increase the deficit, but they always do. Reagan’s did, Bush’s did, and Romney’s will too.

They will try to claim that Ryan’s cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and every other non-defense program are necessary to save our children from the deficit. (MoveOn points out the ways in which the cuts harm our children — like making it harder for them to get an education if their parents aren’t rich.) The election probably hangs on making the public realize that those cuts have nothing to do with the deficit and will instead go straight into the pockets of the rich.

Early focus groups indicate that sale won’t be hard for Obama to make.

6. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. 

Ryan has benefitted from what President Bush (in another context) called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The prevailing media prejudice is for “balance”. But the reality of the last few years has been a reasonable administration facing an opposition that abandoned anything resembling facts or logic in favor of pure obstructionism and open hatred.

How to balance that? Paul Krugman explains:

What these people need is reasonable Republicans. And if such creatures don’t exist, they have to invent them. Hence the elevation of Ryan — who is, in fact, a garden-variety GOP extremist, but with a mild-mannered style — to icon of fiscal responsibility and honest argument, despite the reality that his proposals are both fiscally irresponsible and quite dishonest.

I don’t think Ryan understands this process, so I expect him to be totally floored when the media starts covering him more rigorously and asking reasonable questions.

The Republican rank-and-file also don’t understand. They believe Ryan is really, really smart and expect him to wipe the floor with that doofus Joe Biden.

I think they’ll be surprised.

7. Ryan is a creature of Washington.

Wisconsin reporter John Nichols describes him as “Dick Cheney with nice hair”.

he is a guy who went to Washington as soon as he could, rooted himself in the establishment, got himself elected as soon as he could and became a major player

Joan Walsh offers him as an example of “the fakery at the heart of the Republican project today”.

The man who wants to make the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists hasn’t spent a day at economic risk in his entire life.

If you want to make an Ayn Rand character out of him, Wesley Mouch is a closer match than John Galt. Walsh continues:

guys like Ryan … somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life. Their only tether to it is their remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of “other” people – the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand’s famous “parasites.”

8. He voted for all the budget-busting policies of the Bush administration.

According to the LA Times, Ryan voted for TARP, the unfunded Bush prescription drug benefit, the Iraq War, and (of course) all the Bush tax cuts.

Deficits only became a problem after Obama was elected

9. Obama owns foreign policy now.

Romney and Ryan look good posing in front of a mothballed battleship, but that’s the only qualification either brings to the job of Leader of the Free World. Meanwhile, Obama is the guy who finally got Bin Laden and ended the unpopular Iraq War.

Thomas Schaller observes that until now

at least one candidate on every GOP presidential ticket during the past half-century could boast at least some foreign policy, diplomatic or defense chops.

Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating comments:

Romney seems to be wagering that foreign policy will not be a major issue in the campaign.

10. Ryan would be the real power in a Romney administration. And if Romney loses, Ryan is already the front-runner for 2016.

When Romney introduced Ryan as “the next president of the United States” Steve Kornacki heard a Freudian slip:

while it will be the former Massachusetts governor who is sworn-in as the 45thpresident if the GOP ticket prevails this November, it will be Ryan who sets the new administration’s policy direction.

The New Republic’s Michael Kazin predicts Ryan would be more powerful than Dick Cheney.

Republicans have never before nominated someone for V.P. in hopes that he, and not the would-be President, would define the critical domestic policies of the entire federal government.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner agrees:

Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated
himself to a kind of head of state role … with Ryan as the actual head of government

Why? Well, Ryan has a philosophy and a real constituency in the Party and in Congress. He also carries the standard of the Koch brothers. Romney has none of that.

Already on Saturday, Nate Silver tweeted:

If Obama wins, most likely 2016 match-up is: Paul Ryan vs. Hillary Clinton. That would be pretty epic.

Kornacki describes Ryan 2016 as “the Right’s long game”.

But even if Ryan’s budget proves an albatross for Romney and the GOP ticket goes down, it’s not hard to see conservatives rationalizing away the defeat: The problem was Romney couldn’t sell the message – that’s why the next time we need Ryan at the top of the ticket!

After all, right-wingers still haven’t admitted that Palin was a liability to McCain. As Digby put it years ago: “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”

August 13, 2012 – 9:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This weekend, every pundit in the world wrote about Paul Ryan. A lot of it was repetitive and some was drivel, but I sifted through it to pull out ten points you need to understand. That article, “I Read About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To”, takes up most of this week’s Sift.

A shorter second article looks at a subtle way racism and religious prejudice seep into news coverage: The more we learn more about the guy who murdered six people at the Sikh Temple, the more tangled up he is in white supremacism. And yet the media rarely describes him as a “terrorist”, much less a “white terrorist” or a “Christian terrorist”. But it’s hard to imagine that if a dark-skinned Muslim had shot up a Christian church, he would be portrayed as a “troubled young man”. His connection to radical groups and movements would be central to the story, not symptoms of some underlying mental disorder.

I’m pretty much on schedule this morning, so I hope to get everything posted by noon.

August 13, 2012 – 7:04 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

On and On

The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

—   Robert Kennedy (1968), two months before his assassination,

Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.

— Abraham Lincoln (1863), quoted by Kennedy in the same speech

This week, we had another shooting

I hope the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin doesn’t turn out to be the hate crime it looks like. And even more, I hope it isn’t a hate crime by somebody who thought that Sikhs are Muslims because they wear turbans. It’s bad enough to die for your religion, but it would be even worse to die because somebody mistook you for some other religion.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist, so of course this incident reminds me of the Knoxville shooting at a UU church.

Until then, everybody was talking about the Olympics

Watching this Olympics is frustrating for sports fans, because we’re not NBC’s target audience. They’re covering the Olympics as a phenomenon that just happens to include athletes, and the target audience watches because that’s what you do in August of a leap year.

So an hour of coverage contains maybe 10-15 minutes of actual competition. The rest consists of athletes’ backstories, retrospectives of past Olympics, interviews with people who aren’t competing, features on English culture, post-event bouncing and hugging, medal award ceremonies, and so on.

Yes, NBC, Gabby Douglas does have a great smile. I noticed that the other 12 times you mentioned it. But there’s a Russian girl who’s actually doing something right now. Could we maybe get a look at her?

When NBC does get around to the competitions, sportscasting is an afterthought. Announcers tell the story before the fact, and if the event turns out some other way it’s as if reality screwed up by failing to fulfill their predictions. (Sunday night, the other vaulters were covered as if they were just the opening act for McKayla Maroney. What in reality was an exciting upset by the Romanian was presented as a mystifying glitch.) A long race is just a visual backdrop for a chat about the American runner. (Uh, guys, some African is coming up strong on the outside. Can you tell us who he is? Are you watching?)  And I frequently find myself yelling at the TV: “Fascinating anecdote, but what’s the score? TELL ME THE SCORE!”

Oh well, why should they care what I think when the ratings are this good?

… and about Mitt Romney’s taxes

because he still refuses to release tax returns before 2010. This week’s episode centered on Harry Reid quoting an anonymous source who told him Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.” Romney countered that he “paid a lot of taxes” every year, and challenged Reid to “put up or shut up” by naming his source. But Romney will not put up anything to support his own claims.

This exchange continues the long tradition of August as silly season. Romney and Reid are arguing about what they could prove if they wanted to, but neither is actually proving anything.

Why are we talking about this? The tax-return issue only matters if it crystalizes a pattern. Two possibilities: First, a character pattern in which Romney is not just rich, but arrogant. He has decided what voters need to know about him, and that’s that.

Second, a pattern of vagueness and shiftiness. This non-disclosure reminds voters that Romney also hasn’t released the details of his tax plan, or his budget plan, or his health care plan, or anything else. Plus he still has at least two positions on culture-war issues like abortion and contraception.

Ezra Klein makes the second link:

If [Romney’s people] thought releasing more details would make the [tax] plan look better rather than worse, they would have released them rather than letting outside organizations fill in the blanks. It’s essentially the same theory as refusing to release the tax returns.

… and jobs.

The July jobs report was a dog that didn’t bark. After a dismal June (only 64,000 new jobs), July could have signaled the onset of a new recession. But instead the economy added 163,000 jobs. That’s not enough to keep the unemployment rate from ticking up to 8.3%, but this bumpy not-quite-recovery muddles along.

Naturally, the commentary focused on how the report affects the stock market (up), and Obama’s re-election chances (also up). But shouldn’t it be about the people who either got or didn’t get jobs?

Meanwhile, I wrote about insecure software

And you might also find this stuff interesting

Courtesy of George Takei (whose service on the Enterprise must give him an in with the space program), we get the first photos from the Curiosity probe that has landed on Mars:

I spent the week in Illinois, close enough to Missouri to hear the political ads in the last week before the primary. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman has gone all-in with Sarah Palin. You’d think Palin was the candidate. She has become the face and voice of the Steelman campaign.

The NYT’s “Your Money” column addressed an interesting question: Suppose you’ve come to the conclusion that the for-profit financial services industry is rigged against you, but you haven’t taken a vow of poverty and you still want to save and invest for your retirement. What do you do?

Your first move is obvious: bank at a credit union. For IRA and/or brokerage services, use

Vanguard, USAA or TIAA-CREF, all of which are member-owned or use profits to pay dividends to customers and lower their fees.

The column offers a number of investment ideas, from municipal bonds to direct investments in real estate properties or person-to-person loans to the “slow money” movement that loans money to co-ops, organic farms, and other socially conscious ventures.

Here’s a nice clear answer to the question: Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought? Basically, climate change makes droughts more frequent and more extreme, even though you can’t say a particular drought couldn’t have happened otherwise.

I was going to use the metaphor of a weighted coin or a loaded die, but I discovered James Hansen did it long ago:

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability. … But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

No single roll proves the dice are loaded, but eventually …

it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

Disillusioned GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren has a new book out: The Party is Over. An excerpt, “Religion Destroyed My Party“, is up at Salon.

Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. … The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs.

So long, Gore Vidal. My favorite Vidal novels are the ancient-history ones: Creation and Julian.

It’s easy to forget (and people under 50 probably never knew) just how famous Vidal was in his prime. Lily Tomlin could count on everyone recognizing his mispronounced name when she made him one of the first victims of her Ernestine the Operator character on Laugh In.

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was a huge success. You’ve got to wonder if this means the Fox News model will spread to fast food and you’ll only be able to eat with people who share your politics. What if the CEO of Carl’s Jr. is thinking: “Wait a minute. I’m just as bigoted and reactionary as Dan Cathy. Why can’t I get an appreciation day?”

From a marketing POV, it makes sense: Fast-food chains don’t need a majority. If you could just get the most extreme 10% of the country to identify with you, you’d make billions.

I was looking for a striking image to end with. Is this one good enough? It’s a nighttime electrical storm over an erupting volcano in Iceland.

August 6, 2012 – 11:41 am Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

The Looming Software Catastrophe

A couple of stories this week don’t seem directly connected, but do suggest a theme: Wednesday, an automatic-trading program at Knight Capital went out of control and spewed “a torrent of faulty trades” onto the stock market for half an hour before any humans at the company figured out how to pull the plug. Knight’s losses are estimated at $440 million, which might kill the firm.

Thursday, a Republican filibuster scuttled the proposed cybersecurity bill, which

would have established optional standards for the computer systems that oversee the country’s critical infrastructure, like power grids, dams and transportation.

The Republican senators filibustered even though the bill had already been watered down to the point of being useless. A cybersecurity expert described the original bill as “all sticks and no carrots”. So when companies protested, a compromise made the sticks voluntary. We wound up with a bill that would allow masochistic corporations to submit to a voluntary binding.

Even that couldn’t pass. (The bill also had privacy and civil-liberty problems, but that’s not what brought it down.)

So here’s what we learned this week:

  • Bad software, even without any apparent malicious intent, can destroy a Wall Street firm in less time than it takes a banker to finish his second martini.
  • Software controls the power grid, oil and gas pipelines, the banking system, and a few other things that terrorists, hacktivists, hostile foreign powers, or joy-riding teen-agers might like to screw up.
  • The most toothless imaginable attempt to establish some security standards is too onerous for Congress’ corporate masters to allow.

What can you conclude from that? I think there’s a trend here that won’t stop until there’s a disaster big enough to scare the pants off everybody. And that means: There will be a disaster big enough to scare the pants off everybody.

The software culture. Our software development culture revolves around promising whiz-bang new features. If you can actually make them work most of the time, that’s even better. If they could fail without taking down the whole system, that would be nice — but hey, nobody’s perfect.

The problem is that security, reliability, and resiliency aren’t “features” that you can add to an already-existing product. They are systemic virtues that have to be designed in from the beginning and supported by a continual process of reporting, error containment, and a system-wide appreciation of rigor. Fundamentally, that’s bureaucratic and slows things down. We hate stuff like that.

That is, we hate it until some rogue application starts losing $15 million a minute. Then, slowing things down starts to sound like a good idea.

And that’s just a screw-up. What could somebody do if they really worked at it? That’s the so-called “digital Pearl Harbor” scenario, where an enemy doesn’t bother with bombs or bullets, it just takes down some key element of our infrastructure.

It could be that, or just a glitch, or some hacker’s joke that gets out of hand. But you can’t build vulnerable systems on top of other vulnerable systems forever and think that nothing is going to happen.

The political culture. Thursday’s vote made it clear that the government is not going to get out in front on this. Congress isn’t going to act until either business or the general public demands it. But how is that going to happen?

The business world doesn’t know how to think about stuff like this. Nobody knows how to estimate the odds of a software disaster, or predict the resulting damage, so there’s no box on a spreadsheet that says how much a firm is risking with its current software. Making a company’s software more secure would entail both a capital cost and an operating cost. What can a CEO compare that to in order to get a return-on-investment estimate? Without that estimate, software security just looks like a voluntary reduction of profit. What CEO is going to sign up for that?

But security could show up on a different part of the spreadsheet: not risk assessment, but marketing. Maybe the public would pay more for a secure product than an insecure one. Or, looking at it a different way, people might choose to locate their a bank or brokerage account at a firm that cared about software security.

But how is that going to work? You have no idea how the magic happens when you log into your bank account, and in the absence of a major catastrophe, you have no way to judge whether one system is more secure than another. You’re certainly not going to pay extra for a security claim you can’t judge.

And financial firms aren’t going to advertise that their risk is lower than somebody else’s, because they don’t want you to think online transactions are risky at all. They’re not going to start talking about security until after the public is scared.

A simple technique for predicting the future. Keep these two principles in mind:

  • A trend will continue until something stops it.
  • Trends that can’t go on forever won’t go on forever.

So if X is the only thing that could possibly stop a trend that can’t go on forever, sooner or later X will happen.

The trend that can’t go on forever is piling vulnerable systems on top of vulnerable systems. And I think I’ve just talked myself into believing that it won’t end until the public gets scared.

So X, in this case, is an event that scares the general public about software security. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be: a nationwide blackout, some unrecoverable loss of financial records, who knows? But it has to be big enough to break through our collective denial.

I also don’t when that’s going to happen. Tomorrow? Five years from now? But if that’s the only way for an unsustainable trend to end, it’s got to happen.

August 6, 2012 – 11:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve got to be honest: I’m still not entirely sure what’s going to be in today’s Sift. I spent this week in the Midwest managing the affairs of my 90-year-old father and considered canceling the Sift entirely until next week, but on my way home on Saturday I decided there were a few things worth posting. (BTW, those of you who follow my religious writings may feel like you know my Dad. He showed up as a major character here and here. Oh, and also in a political post here.)

This week everybody was mostly talking about same stuff as last week: the Olympics and Mitt Romney’s taxes. And then we got another major shooting, which might be a hate crime. We can’t be sure yet, because the shooter is dead and officials are reluctant to assign a motive prematurely.

The combination of a major automatic-trading malfunction Wednesday and a filibuster of the cybersecurity bill Thursday inspired me to write “The Looming Software Catastrophe”. When there’s a trend that only a major disaster can stop, you can pretty well predict that there will be a major disaster.

The Sift will be back at full strength next Monday.

August 6, 2012 – 8:01 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

What Free Market?

Do you think it’s hard to get your child into Harvard? Try getting a new product onto the shelf of a big chain of stores in the United States.

— Barry Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism
and the Economics of Destruction (2010)

 

This week everybody was talking about the Olympics

but you knew that.

… and Chick-fil-A and Mitt Romney’s foreign tour

I covered Chick-fil-A in Is That Sandwich Political?, but let’s deal with Romney’s trip here.

Romney’s tour of Britain, Israel, and Poland was designed to add foreign-policy heft to his image, but the British leg didn’t work out.

That pretty well covers it. Prime Minister David Cameron is a British conservative, but Romney exasperated him to the point where he stuck this knife in:

Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.

Some anonymous Romney adviser really did talk about the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” Obama can’t appreciate, which is even a step beyond calling him “foreign“. Why not just say, “White people shouldn’t vote for Obama because he’s black” and get it over with?

These stumbles happen abroad for the same reason they happen at home: Romney’s lack of empathy gives him a tin ear. Slate’s Fred Kaplan points out that Romney’s business experience differs greatly from previous generations of businessmen-turned-statesmen, who actually built things and sold them, and so had to learn to deal with workers and customers. But Bain’s brand of financial manipulation

is not the sort of enterprise that requires even the most elementary understanding of diplomacy, courtesy, or sensitivity to other people’s values, lives, or perceptions.

Instead, it

breed[s] an insularity, a sense of entitlement, a disposition to view all the world’s entities through a single prism and to appraise them along a single scale.

Growing up as the rich son of the governor probably didn’t help either.

I agree with Kevin Drum’s analysis the foreign-policy speech that kicked Romney’s tour off: He’s trying to cast a striking image without saying anything. What little remains beyond the I-will-be-strong-where-Obama-is-weak rhetoric is either vague, outside the president’s power, or exactly what Obama is already doing.

… but I also wrote about monopolies

  • Monopoly’s role in inequality. In my previous discussions of rising inequality, I’ve always felt like a piece of the puzzle was missing. I think I found it.

and you might also be interested in …

The death of first-female-astronaut Sally Ride put a face on the injustice of the Defense of Marriage Act. Most of us learned that Ride was a lesbian only when her obituary named Tam O’Shaughnessy as her 27-year domestic partner. Under DOMA, O’Shaughnessy will not receive the federal survivor benefits that a male husband would get.

The guy who all but invented the too-big-to-fail bank has changed his mind. Former Citicorp honcho Sandy Weill now says

What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail.

In short, let’s just pretend the last two decades never happened.

How does a bill become law? Not the way it used to.

The NYT op-ed Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay by settler Dani Dayan underlines just how intractable the Israel/Palestine conflict is. Dayan presents a we’re-right-they’re-wrong history of the conflict and says a two-state solution is unworkable because

Our presence in all of Judea and Samaria — not just in the so-called settlement blocs — is an irreversible fact. Trying to stop settlement expansion is futile

If a two-state solution is out, then what happens to the Palestinians? I can only see three options:

  • ethnic cleansing: Perhaps Israel could use the Spanish Expulsion of 1492 as a model.
  • democratic annexation: Palestinians become citizens of a democratic Greater Israel, which might not have a Jewish majority. (This is sometimes called the one-state solution.)
  • status quo: Palestinians remain a subject population ruled by Israel.

Dayan opts for the status quo, which he thinks is “immeasurably better than any other feasible alternative”. It could be improved, but only if Palestinians would accept the irreversibility of their subjugation and stop resisting.

Checkpoints are a necessity only if terror exists; otherwise, there should be full freedom of movement.

If Dayan speaks for some sizable and committed bloc of Israelis — and the NYT apparently thinks he does — then I can’t see this conflict resolving for at least another generation.

He may or may not be a reliable witness, but a Florida Republican is blowing the whistle on voter-ID laws, or, as he puts it “keeping blacks from voting”. And Harold Meyerson asks: What if it works? If Romney wins, and his margin in key states is clearly the result of voter suppression, are we all just going to go along?

Pastor Rick Warren appeared to blame the Aurora shooting on evolutionists, tweeting:

When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it.

It’s weird how people demonize animals, who aren’t nearly as nasty as humans. How do you think this young mountain gorilla (being comforted by a park ranger in the Congo after his parents were killed by poachers) feels about human morality?

The next installment of the Nuns vs. the Inquisition saga is about to start. In our last episode, board members of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious went to Rome, where Grand Inquisitor Levada said they should regard Rome appointing a man to watch over them as “an invitation to obedience”. (I think I would have issued a counter-invitation for Levada to do something impossible with his anatomy, but I guess that’s why I’m not a nun.)

This week the LCWR will meet in St. Louis to discuss

at least six options that range from submitting graciously to the takeover to forming a new organization independent of Vatican control, as well other possible courses of action that lie between those poles.

When Republicans liked the Arab Spring rebellions, they gave the credit to Bush’s freedom agenda. Now that they’ve decided they don’t like the Arab Spring, they claim it was caused by Obama abandoning Bush’s freedom agenda.

I don’t understand why everyone isn’t saying the obvious things Elizabeth Warren says: Our infrastructure is crumbling, people need jobs, and the government can borrow money at rates lower than inflation. What’s the downside?

It might even save money in the long run: If, say, we buried our power lines, we wouldn’t lose all that productivity every time the weather turned bad.

The WaPo debunks Five myths about why the South seceded. The truth is pretty simple: The southern states seceded to defend slavery; they said so themselves in their secession statements. And then Lincoln went to war to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.

To understand why articles like this are necessary, read the comments.

President Obama isn’t saying the kind of outrageous things the Romney campaign wants to run against, so they’re editing tape to create gaffes. Ezra Klein covers this issue seriously,

And Lewis Black approaches it humorously, but Mike Luckovich captures what’s going on in one image:

Finally, ABC’s Jake Tapper has solved the mystery of the Churchill bust. Will the Romney campaign stop telling the story now that we know there’s nothing going on, or is that too much to ask?

July 30, 2012 – 2:04 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

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Is That Sandwich Political?

Last week, when I was first tempted to write about Chick-fil-A, it was just another story about a religious-right one-percenter shooting off his mouth. Now, everyone from the Muppets to Sarah Palin is involved, and that waffle fry in your hand has become a weapon in the culture wars. Your gang at the office can’t go out to lunch without first debating politics and religion.

How did we get here?

For decades, Chick-fil-A has been a fast-food chain run by the founding Cathy family, a clan of conservative Christians. The Christian influence was subtle (no hellfire-and-brimstone pamphlets at the door) but real (closed on Sundays, even in food courts).

CfA has long given away a substantial portion of its profits. In recent years, a lot of that money has gone to “pro-family” or “anti-gay” organizations. This wasn’t secret, but it flew under the radar of most Chick-fil-A customers.

Then in June, CfA’s president and son-of-the-founder Dan Cathy went on the Ken Coleman syndicated radio show and said:

I think we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage. And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude that thinks we would have the audacity to redefine what marriage is all about.

[Cathy’s interview runs from 21:30 to 33:30. The religious/political part of the interview starts at 30:00. The quote above is at 31:18.]

The Human Rights Campaign responded with a pledge that went right up to the edge of calling for a boycott:

While I respect Mr. Cathy’s right to his personal opinions, I strongly urge Chick-fil-A to stop using money from customers as part of a larger effort to oppress LGBT Americans. Until then, I will have to reconsider whether I spend my money at Chick-fil-A.

(Other people have since called for a boycott.)

Then the Muppets weighed in:

The Jim Henson Company has celebrated and embraced diversity and inclusiveness for over fifty years and we have notified Chick-fil-A that we do not wish to partner with them on any future endeavors.

CfA struck back by not waiting for “future endeavors”. It pulled Muppet toys out of its meals, recalled toys already distributed, and implied that Muppet toys are unsafe.

And then … oh, I’ll let Gizmodo describe it:

Instead of owning up to the fact that The Jim Henson Company stopped doing business with them because they’re overrun with bigots, the chicken sandwich company appears to have made fake Facebook accounts to defend its honor on the social network.

(CfA has since denied creating social-network sock-puppets, but it’s clear somebody did.)

Then Mike Huckabee declared this Wednesday to be Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day and asked all right-thinking people to eat there. Rick Santorum, Mr. Man-on-Dog himself, agreed.

Not to be outdone by conservative extremists, Boston Mayor Mike Menino wrote a letter to Cathy:

I urge you to back out of your plans to locate [a Chick-fil-A franchise] in Boston.

And the Boston Herald quoted Menino saying:

If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult — unless they open up their policies.

A Chicago alderman threatened to block a Chick-fil-A there, and Chicago Mayor Emmanuel and San Francisco Mayor Lee have also been sabre-rattling, though I haven’t seen any specific threats from them.

I wish I could just take the pro-gay side, but nobody is looking particularly good right now. Let me try to sort out what I can and can’t support.

First, I support the freedom of everybody involved:

  • Dan Cathy has the right to say any stupid or bigoted thing he wants.
  • Radio shows have the right to put Cathy on the air.
  • The Cathy family can spend their profits however they please.
  • Any individual personally disgusted by Cathy’s opinions or any company that believes associating with CfA is bad for business has the right to stop dealing with CfA.
  • Cathy’s critics have the right to state their opinions in public. Calling Cathy a bigot does not in any way infringe on his First Amendment rights. When you start making moral judgments in public, you open yourself up to public moral judgment. That’s a free exchange of opinions, not intolerance.

But politicians should use their power carefully. The American Prospect’s Scott Lemieux has it right:

If Chick-fil-A had a history of denying service to people based on their sexual orientation, or discriminating against LGBT employees or job applicants, [Alderman] Moreno’s actions would be entirely justified. But … Cathy’s comments [by themselves] are not a legitimate reason to deny Chick-fil-A a permit.

I mean, do you really want Chicago aldermen vetting the political opinions of business owners? And if you do, what about aldermen in Salt Lake City or Dallas?

Specific stories of CfA discriminating are hard to find, though there is one lawsuit charging that discrimination against women. (A former manager claims she was fired because her boss thought she should be at home with her kids.)

I also want to point out that Ken Coleman’s defense of Cathy on CNN (that he is a good Christian man who is not hateful) has not been borne out by CfA’s actions. Vindictively lying about the safety of Muppet toys and creating fake Facebook identities to spread those lies is not my idea of good Christian behavior.

But none of that answers the really important question: What should you do? Can you still eat at Chick-fil-A in good conscience?

Well, not on Wednesday. After the Huckabee/Santorum nonsense, anybody at a CfA on Wednesday appears to endorse Cathy’s anti-gay opinions.

Beyond that, part of me resents the whole issue: Does everything have to be political? Can’t I just eat lunch?

But another part of me recognizes that it will be a long time before I can walk into a Chick-fil-A without remembering that its president called me “prideful” and “arrogant” on the radio (even though I’d never done anything to him), or that the company intentionally spread a vile rumor to get revenge on the Muppets. And it will be even longer before I can hand over my money without wondering how much of it will be used to take rights away from people I care about.* I expect that will darken my Chick-fil-A experience for some while, probably enough to keep me from going at all.

If that looks like a boycott, well, it’s not a very militant one.

So in general, I’m against balkanizing the economy into liberal and conservative sectors. If you really like Chick-fil-A’s food, I don’t think you should let anybody guilt you out of it (after Wednesday). But if Cathy has left a taste in your mouth that a super-sized Coke won’t wash away, don’t let anybody guilt you about that either.

You feel what you feel, so follow your heart. And enjoy your lunch, wherever you eat.

* I should probably mention that I have personal friends who benefit from same-sex marriage. Last weekend a lesbian couple was showing my wife and I their wedding pictures, which are as adorable as anybody’s. Paging through that album, the whole idea that their marriage is a threat to our marriage, to public morality, or to “the future of humanity” — it just seemed nutty.

July 30, 2012 – 12:58 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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Monopoly’s Role in Inequality

For several years I’ve been dipping into the subject of rising inequality, usually in book reviews like this one of Hacker and Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics. But all along a mystery has been nagging at me, and I think I’m finally getting to the bottom of it.

Inequality. The basic story is simple: Inequality in the United States has risen dramatically since the mid-70s. And the effect gets more extreme the farther out you go. It isn’t just that the top 10% is pulling away from the bottom 90%. The top .01% is pulling away from the top .1% even faster. The multi-billionaires are pulling away from the mere billionaires. (If you want graphs and numbers, look here.)

Obviously you can’t account for all that with education or competition from China. Maybe those factors explain why unskilled workers are having such a tough time, but they say little about the millionaire/billionaire divergence. Ditto for tax rates. Sure, the rich pay a much lower tax rate than they used to, but the explosive growth in their net worth is much bigger than tax rates can account for, and the mega-rich don’t get a significantly better tax deal than the ordinary rich. (Plus, tax cuts start with Reagan in 1982, not the mid-70s.)

Clearly something has happened to the structure of the market, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what.

Monopoly. Barry Lynn’s book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction looks like the puzzle piece I was missing. Lynn claims our economy is now full of monopolies and near-monopolies — businesses big enough to dictate terms to their customers and/or suppliers.

In the mid-20th-century industrial economy, you got mega-rich by imitating Henry Ford: You figured out how to make things people wanted for a price they wanted to pay. Now you get mega-rich by building choke-points between producers and consumers.

WalMart exemplifies the current paradigm. WalMart makes nothing, but it is big enough to dictate how its suppliers will make things and what prices they can charge. In many of its rural markets, WalMart also dictates what people can buy. If your product isn’t on WalMart’s shelves, it’s not for sale. (WalMart also drives consolidation elsewhere in the economy, which produces big fees for Wall Street. For example, Procter & Gamble bought Gillette largely to improve its negotiating position with WalMart. In slightly different ways, Amazon and Google are trying to duplicate the WalMart model in the online economy. If your book isn’t on Amazon, it’s not for sale.)

Many near-monopolies are less visible than WalMart or Amazon. Lynn begins his book with the story of a pet-food recall, which suddenly made it obvious that many “competing” brands of pet food were actually all packed in the same factory. And Ford lobbied for the government bailout of “competitors” GM and Chrysler because it feared their common suppliers would go bankrupt. Many markets, Lynn says, are hydras: The countless brands on the shelves are just heads that spring from a common body.

The ends against the middle. Reading Lynn, I’m getting a clearer vision of how markets work. The purest form of market is what you can see at any big farmer’s market: Lots of consumers dealing directly with lots of producers. It’s rare that anybody gets really rich from these interactions, but many small producers have a chance to make a living and become independent.

Obviously the global economy has to be more complicated than that. But markets are created by rules, and the rules can be structured to favor either the ends (producers and consumers) or the middle. Producers and consumers benefit from transparent markets, where the rules force middlemen to treat everyone more-or-less the same.

But markets can also be structured to give middlemen as much freedom as possible. The most profitable way to use that freedom is to create choke-points where a toll can be extracted or one producer can be played off against another. In an opaque market, the way to get rich is not to produce things, but to build middleman power that allows you to dictate terms up and down the supply chain. (I don’t have space to go into it here, but keeping the internet transparent is what net neutrality is about, and why Comcast doesn’t like it.)

In a nutshell, what has happened since the mid-70s is that deregulation of old markets and under-regulation of new markets has made our economy more opaque. The people in the best position to take advantage of this are the very rich. Meanwhile, workers and small businessmen — the middle-class people who actually make stuff and deliver services — lose out. In the short term consumers may win or lose, depending on whether the middlemen’s advantage is in raising or lowering prices. But in the long run consumers lose options, power, and quality.

The most interesting thing politically is how the rhetoric of freedom works. Freedom for the middleman leads to domination of producers and consumers. “Freedom” seldom works out to mean more options for everybody.

One worked-out example. If you’ve watched much cable or satellite TV lately, you probably saw Viacom’s ads against DirectTV, like this one.

If you’re a DirectTV subscriber, Comedy Central (and other Viacom channels) went dark for nine days before the two corporations resolved their dispute, so you had to do without The Daily Show or watch it online.

Here’s the point: Maybe you couldn’t watch Jon Stewart for a week, but the problem had nothing to do with either you or Jon Stewart. He wasn’t asking for a raise; you weren’t balking at the price of watching the Daily Show. But both you and Jon were irrelevant when two giant middlemen had a power struggle.

Each brought a lot of power to the struggle. In most of its markets, DirectTV is the only alternative to the local cable monopoly, while Viacom is one of a handful of megacorps that dominate TV content. (Disney, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, NewsCorp, and CBS are the others. National Amusements owns a big chunk of both Viacom and CBS. Comcast plays both sides of the street, being both a cable monopoly and a partner with GE in NBCUniversal.)

Viacom thought it had the upper hand, so it was demanding a bigger payout from DirectTV and insisting DirectTV carry its new Epix channel. I haven’t sorted out yet who won.

These middlemen outweigh both you and Jon Stewart. If Jon doesn’t work for one of the six big media companies, he can’t reach a major audience. If you don’t deal with either DirectTV or a cable monopoly, your TV choices shrink considerably.

Transparent markets. But it’s not hard to imagine a TV system that works differently: Cable or satellite systems could be common carriers, making a fixed amount whenever they connect a TV producer with a TV consumer. Cable and satellite would still compete, but only by changing that fixed amount or by offering more reliable service to the consumer.

With that kind of middleman transparency, small TV companies could spring up and get their shows seen, so Jon Stewart would have a lot more than six choices. You and Jon would have more power, Viacom and DirectTV less.

Even more interesting is what happens to the profit motive: The way to make money in this transparent system is to create shows people want to watch and deliver them reliably. Wheeling and dealing to amass middleman power wouldn’t accomplish much.

Government regulation would probably be necessary to bring this system about, but it would still be capitalism. The marketplace would just be structured differently, so that the benefits and opportunities of capitalism would accrue to producers and consumers rather than to financiers and empire-builders.

Probably this restructured marketplace would lead to more small companies and fewer megacorps, more millionaires and fewer billionaires.

Picture the same transparent-market principle spreading across the economy: More small businesses, more places to look for jobs, greater variety of products, and more opportunity to go into business for yourself. Less inequality.

July 30, 2012 – 11:32 am Categories: Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (21)

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The Monday Morning Teaser: Monopoly’s Role in Inequality

Today’s weekly summary is going to be called “What Free Market?”, and its quote comes from Barry Lynn’s book Cornered about the effect of hidden monopolies on the economy. It may look like the stores contain a dazzling variety of goods, but often all the brands in a sector are made by one or two companies, and even apparent rivals are likely to have overlapping supply chains. It’s much easier for an enterprising individual to build a better mousetrap than to get it onto the local WalMart’s shelves without selling the idea to some megacorp first.

What’s everybody been talking about this week? The Olympics, obviously, but I can’t improve on the nonstop TV coverage. However, I couldn’t resist joining the cacophony about Chick-fil-A and Romney’s trip to London.

This week’s other article centers on what I’m learning from Lynn’s book. One issue I keep coming back to in the Sift is rising inequality. But all along, I’ve felt like I’ve been missing a piece of the puzzle. The usual explanations — globalization, lobbyists, bailouts, tax cuts for the rich, etc. — all play a part, but I don’t think they fully explain the explosive accumulation of wealth at the very top. Maybe monopoly is that missing puzzle-piece, especially the monopolies and near-monopolies that get between consumers and the people who make or invent the products we buy.

July 30, 2012 – 8:05 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment