fracking public research:

George Mitchell, the tenacious Texas oil man who proved that gas could be drawn from shale rock at a profit. The popular telling has Mitchell spending 20 lonely years pursuing the breakthroughs to tap the Barnett Shale, an underground expanse. .... Between 1978 and 2007, the Energy Department spent $24 billion on fossil energy research. Billions more were spent through the Gas Research Institute and non-conventional gas tax credits. Those investments were widely panned as a failure during the �80s and early �90s, when gas was plentiful and cheap.

rest up yours:

Christopher Hitchens was a fucking fat slag. I can't mourn for any alcoholic who thinks the black label is par, let alone "the best whiskey in the history of the world". Tastes like tap water, blended for people who don't like whiskey.

low hanging overhangs:

I'm not at all surprised that Karl Rove is attacking Warren from the left, however rich it is. But I am kind of shocked that I missed the interview on NPR's Planet Money between Adam Davidson and Warren in May 2009, where Davidson claims he can't think of one 'serious thinker' from "left, right center, neutral" who saw "a household debt crisis":

ELIZABETH WARREN: What, if they can�t pay their credit card bills the banks are gonna do fine�Who is not worried about the fact that the Bank of America�s default rate has now bumped over 10%?

DAVIDSON: The American families are not � These issues of crucial, the essential need for credit intermediation are as close to accepted principles among every serious thinker on this topic. The view that the American family, that you hold very powerfully, is fully under assault and that there is � and we can get into that � that is not accepted broad wisdom. I talk to a lot a lot a lot of left, right, center, neutral economists [and] you are the only person I�ve talked to in a year of covering this crisis who has a view that we have two equally acute crises: a financial crisis and a household debt crisis that is equally acute in the same kind of way. I literally don�t know who else I can talk to support that view. I literally don�t know anyone other than you who has that view.

He could have just asked Adam Davidson, who on September 17th, 2008 knew exactly who and what to blame for the economic crisis:

You. For enjoying the boom years without paying attention to the potential risks. ... For loving the rapidly growing price of your house and using it to buy stuff. For spending more than you make.

Apparently, though, he changed his mind half a year later and couldn't find anybody at all talking about a debt overhang from the crash of a historic, multi-trillion dollar housing bubble that had become by then just a pet issue of a crank, and not a fundamental element of the great recession.

the individual initiative of large scale state backed collective enterprises:

1493, Charles C Mann, pg. 56, discussing the formation of Virginia Company:

"What counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity," wrote the Harvard economist David S. Landes. In his classic Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1999), Landes argued that Europe had developed ways of organizing people and resources -- private joint-stock companies, for instance -- that fostered and rewarded individual initiative, which in turn promoted those virtues. Other places did not develop them. The result of these innovations, [Douglass C.] North argued, was economic growth so robust that it led to "a new and unique phenomenon": the ascension of European societies to world power.

"Other places did not develop" "ways of organizing people" "that fostered and rewarded individual initiative". The joint-stock company at the time was little more than a limited partnership (more indentured servants passed hands than did stocks, I know of none of the latter trading at all), something introduced to medieval Europe by way of the Italian commenda in the 11th century, adopted at least in part from Islam, where it dates back to the 8th, used to capitalize the free trade networks across the Indian ocean for many centuries, until Portuguese piracy and terrorism destroyed them a century before the founding of Jamestown.

There may have been some novelty in King James' organization of the marketing campaign for such a large IPO, but these sorts of financial arrangements had been around since antiquity.

I suppose, given the topic, Mann is somewhat obligated to inform the narrative with the views of economists, and it's not his fault this is what economics departments have to offer.

Further reading:

• Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism, Jairus Banaji, 2003.
• A comparative evolution of business partnerships, Murat �izak�a, 1996.
• Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, Olivia Remie Constable, 1996.
• Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam, Abraham L. Udovitch, 1970.
• At the origins of the Western 'commenda': Islam, Israel, Byzantium?, Abraham L. Udovitch, 1969.

further evidence that Andrew Sullivan's mother spent too much time at Surrey solariums during his gestation:

He's spent much of the last week bemoaning the lack of research into correlations between race and IQ, for reasons that have quite escaped me.

It's a great mystery why Andrew Sullivan hasn't, sometime in the past 17 years, taken a few minutes to find out which genes are responsible for human pigmentation (it's not like the IQ surveys this shit is premised on are getting detailed, accurate ancestral histories of the subjects, let alone mapping subject genomes, so arguments that "race" is genetically more complex than what some proctor surmises from the color of your skin or a no less problematic self-report are preponderantly a lost cause for the "empirical data acquired from the measurement of intelligence in the 20th Century") and start by asking what, if any, role those same genes have in, say, the function of the nervous system, such that they could influence sophisticated but nevertheless arbitrary measures of some statistical artifact.

An hour or so on the internets would reveal that there is no clear coincidence between genes influencing skin color and genes that might be linked to performance on standardized tests of one's tolerance for bureaucratic bullshit, love of Mozart, and time dedicated to the mastery of Tetris.

Instead, he would have discovered the rather more complex interaction between genetics and environment in the photodegradation of folate in lighter skinned mothers in sunny regions that create selective pressures against lighter skinned sons and daughters, as they're born lacking brains, which happily explains everything.

update: Of course sunbeds weren't introduced in England until 1977, so we're left with the possibility that Surrey, England just had a particularly sunny Winter in 1963.

systematic mass murder is highly correlated with modernity:

I'm not sure what's more disturbing here: that Mittens equates US-backed genocidal juntas with modernity, that he's unaware that the US "helped" Pakistan "with new leadership" at the same time it was doing so in Indonesia with the same bloody results, or that he thinks the thing to do is to do it again:

MITT ROMNEY: What happened in Indonesia back in the 1960s, where -- where we helped Indonesia move toward modernity with new leadership. ... We need to bring Pakistan into the 21st century -- or the 20th century, for that matter, so that they -- they can engage throughout the world with trade and with modernity.

"free", as in free near beer for all my friends:

I thought Robert Reich's formulation of last week's exercise in national irony isn't quite succinct enough, so with further abbreviation:

Americans have been assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed for exercising their right to free speech and assembly to protest the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people.

But Monica Youn's post at the American Constitution Society, "The Roberts Court�s Free Speech Double Standard", hits the specific ball out of the general park:

Simply looking at the numbers, the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim in 33.33 percent of argued cases ... from 1953 to 2004, the Supreme Court supported claims of deprivation of First Amendment liberties in 53.95 percent of argued cases. Thus, at the most basic quantitative level, the Roberts Court seems to be not especially protective of free speech rights.

Disaggregated, these numbers become more dramatic. Out of the nine cases where the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim, five of those are cases in which the Court struck down campaign finance reform laws. These numbers bear out Chemerinsky�s argument that "what really animates [the Roberts Court�s ] decisions is a hostility to campaign finance laws much more than a commitment to expanding speech."

....

At the same time, the conservative majority has shown itself willing to disregard free speech claims by ... government employee whistleblowers, humanitarian aid organizations, and, most pertinently for today�s purposes, unions. Thus, it seems that the most that can be said of the conservative majority�s free speech record is that "The Roberts court strongly protects speech that it likes, while allowing regulation of speech it disfavors," as Adam Winkler has put it.

Read the rest. It's quite mind boggling.

a fundamentally center-right, fiscally conservative country that is obsessed with deficits:

12% of Americans disagree with the statement "The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich".

More than double that, 32%, disagree with the statement "The national debt must be cut significantly by reducing spending and the size of government, including eliminating some federal agencies and programs. Regulations on business by the federal government should be reduced and instead, the private sector and individuals should have greater control. The government should not raise taxes on anyone."

Agreement is 76% to 53% respectively.

NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted by the polling organizations of Peter Hart (D) and Bill McInturff (R). Nov. 2-5, 2011.

what the fuck are all these letters doing in my alphabet soup?:

Somehow every time I read Ezra Klein or Scott Lemieux and the like explain how powerless the President is on economic policy I never see the words "Department of Justice", "Securities and Exchange Commission", "Commodity Futures Trading Commission", "Immigration and Naturalization Service", "Attorneys General settlement", "bank immunity", or even "TARP".

The Troubled Asset Relief Program! The Troubled Asset Relief Program wasn't used to relieve one bank of one troubled asset. A portion was lent to re-capitalize the banks with no strings attached, then recycled to bail out GM and slash auto worker wages back to their 1930 levels, then recycled again to mug distressed home owners for the banks. Barrack Obama walked into the Whitehouse with a $700 billion dollar blank check that he could apparently do anything he wanted with, and evidently he did what he wanted good and hard. Infrastructure bank? Gosh, where will we ever find the money to capitalize an infrastructure bank.

When George W. Bush came into office the DoJ quickly set up an Enron Task Force and went after Bush's single largest campaign contributor. Disloyalty, it turns out, was one of his finest attributes as a President. If only Obama had lived up to Bush's example on prosecuting his major campaign contributors Wall Street might have gotten a message other than "continue looting, we've got your fat backs". Bush: 21. Obama: 0. It's the third Bush term except for all the good parts.

You also never see the words "Federal Reserve appointments" or "reappointing Bernanke". Even more glaringly than that, you never see the words "Department of the Treasury". This motherfucker up here is telling you he's going to bring manufacturing jobs back by playing tiddlywinks and passing more of the same trade agreements that sent the jobs overseas in the first place, and the crazy son of a bitch sets policy at the goddam Treasury. Fucking powerless he is to do anything!

You can only imagine that Obama did everything he could with the congress he was given if you ignore every single tool the Presidency has at its disposal but the power to autograph sausage. These liberalish types have been going on like this for a year and a half and even the most critical krugthulus among them can't find anything to complain about other than a long series of perceived sellouts to capital over legislation and something called an "overton window". You'll have to settle for the gomiti, sir, we're all out of the alphabet soup.

180:

Mike Konczal on the stubborn, fact free insistence that the government created the housing bubble:

The conservative think tanks spent the 2000s saying the exact opposite of what they are saying now, and the opposite of what Bloomberg said above. They argued that the CRA and the GSEs were getting in the way of getting risky subprime mortgages to risky subprime borrowers.

My personal favorite is Cato�s Should CRA Stand for �Community Redundancy Act?�, (2000, here�s a writeup by James Kwak), arguing a position amplified in Cato�s 2003 Handbook for Congress Financial Deregulation Chapter: "by increasing the costs to banks of doing business in distressed communities, the CRA makes banks likely to deny credit to marginal borrowers that would qualify for credit if costs were not so high."

Be careful, reading Peter Wallison on the CRA and GSEs' affordability programs in 2003 and then 2008 is liable to give you whiplash.

Frank Pasquale ends his exploration of the conservative values largely shared by the 99% with an old fashioned Adam Smith quote:

[D]isposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise ... persons of poor and mean condition ... is ... the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

I missed this early OWS endorsement from "tea party founder" Karl Denninger, which is funny on a lot of levels, but heartfelt enough that I would feel bad making fun of it.

Anyway, Denninger is usually credited with founding the tea party for a blog post back in 2009, a month before Rick Santelli demanded an insurrection from the floor of the Chicago futures exchange. He urged his readers to send tea bags by socialist post to the Whitehouse (he was angry that Obama's inauguration was "not a protest about our government blowing $700 billion ... so that ... Wall Street can continue to rob our nation blind"), but people had been sending tea bags to congress for a lot longer than that:

"No American troop will go without ... just so the most liberal activists in the country can be quieted," said a senior House Democratic aide. "If it means Democrats in Congress get tea bags and hate mail, so be it - we will not be irresponsible with the lives of our troops." --The Hill, 5/2007.

Denninger doesn't know how significant his own advice about not being co-opted into a corrupt political system is. Every slightly interesting thing about the tea baggers was poisoned at popular inception by FOX on their way to dying inside the GOP: if you go back far enough into the memetic womb they were a bunch of anti-war protesters.

trickle up:

David Cay Johnston, +emph:

The median paycheck � half made more, half less � fell again in 2010, down 1.2 percent to $26,364. That works out to $507 a week, the lowest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 1999. ... While median pay � the halfway point on the salary ladder declined, average pay rose because of continuing increases at the top. Average pay was $39,959 last year, up $46 � or less than a buck a week � compared with 2009. Average pay peaked in 2007 at $40,764, which is $15 a week more than average weekly wage income in 2010.

The number of workers making $1 million or more rose to almost 94,000 from 78,000 in 2009.

bipartisanship:

The Obama campaign has raised over twice as much cash from Mitt Romney's private equity firm than Mitt Romney.

everybody knows the fight is fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich:

Thomas Ferguson's institutional analysis of congress, you might call it gridlock for thee, but not for me, is a brief but necessary read:

The rivers of political money that now swirl 24/7 around Capitol Hill surely play a role in producing the great D.C. stalemate machine. But tired recitations of astronomical campaign-finance spending totals don't tell the full story. ... We need to look at the bigger picture. The tidal wave of cash has structurally transformed Congress. It swept away the old seniority system that used to govern leadership selection and committee assignments in Congress. In its place, the parties copied practices of big-box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, or Target.

Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees.

trickle up:

Robert Reich's list of whoppers deserves some counterpoint:

1. Tax cuts for the 99% trickle up to the 1%.
2. See 1.
3. Technological productivity increases in communications, extraction, and manufacturing necessarily expand the relative sector share of GDP dedicated to education, healthcare, and services. Technological progress increases the relative size of the public sector. All things being equal the government's role in the economy should appear to expand, because it takes the same amount of resources to provide police protection and childhood education as it did a generation ago while it takes considerably less to build and power, say, home appliances.
4. Deficits are constrained by inflation. We shouldn't worry about the one unless there is evidence of the other.
5. Inflated drug and administrative costs are first order contributors to healthcare inflation, because the market incentives are structured around rent seeking (patent monopolies and service retention). The simplest way to fix the market is a single payer insurance system, which a super majority of Americans have supported for over a generation. If we can't do it the simple way we could at least fix the market in a less convoluted way than throwing victims into the path of the present monstrosity created by a century of "reform".
6. The 1% are the only ones running ponzi schemes.
7. Taxation on income generated from squatting over a pile of bonds, options, stocks, and derivatives, which makes up most of the income of the top fraction of the 1%, is abhorrently, disgustingly regressive.

Dear Anti-Fed Activists:

You sound really clueless demanding an audit of the Federal Reserve at the same time the GAO is releasing audits of the Federal Reserve.

even the liberal new republic :

The New Republic is a glossy example of the intellectual limitations of a perfectly settled perspective. It knows the answers even before it has the questions. The truth about everything is completely obvious. The editors seem utterly incapable of doubt or complication, let alone mere self-reflection. Despite the fact that their worldview is a crackpot Manicheanism -- in which the world is divided between semites and anti-semites -- and it's tenuous hold on a diminishing subscription base, it's death grip around the neck of the corrupt center continues to starve minds of oxygen across the spectrum of political gasbaggery. But at least they provide a one-stop guide to the middle school pecking order of elite opinion, and that, apparently, is what it�s all about.

bofa leads #OWS teach-in:

Bank of America won't let you close your account if you walk in with a sign protesting its plan to make you pay for their toxic investments. This is why we need to restore Glass-Steagall's separation of investment and commercial banking. This is why we need to democratize the Federal Reserve, which is dominated by the banks, riddled with conflicts of interest, and the "regulator" that would have BofA flush us into its septic tank:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) ... has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren�t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people.

The bank doesn�t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

bad advice:

The only thing economists have invented in over 200 years.

occupying the space between the spearless spearman and the bowless bowman:

The only thing sillier today than the parade of groups listing their own off-topic demands at the end of tonight's Occupy Chicago march has been the parade of national security experts telling us how scared they are by some drunk used car salesman who was entrapped by the FBI.

So we march down to where activists will pitch camp at Grant Park and they broadcast this Chaplin speech from the Great Dictator. Fantastic, very clever, good call whomever. Then they followed up that smart little bit of agitprop with every separate supporting revolutionary cadre getting up to the mic (we get PA systems, here in Chicago) and making their atomized lists of demands, revolution something anti-war something universal justice in all things, oh, and fair media coverage for Ron Paul.

I'm happy the unions, some churches, immigrant organizations, ANSWER, the ISO, the Two Last Names 2012 Party, and the Communist Party are all together hip to the fact that Wall Street sucks and federal financial regulators blow, but after marching through downtown Chicago yellin, "We are the 99 percent" that was incongruous. It's hard to get 99% of anybody to agree on anything (and this list of demands is really good, but nobody breathed a word of it tonight), getting them to agree against something is impressive enough. If you haven't agreed on demands you can all demand together, fine. Listing off the same old demands of every supporting cast member, many of them inherently contradictory, is a very bad substitute.

Other than that it was great to be there, and I hope folks are safe camping past curfew, which is up in about five minutes. But why worry, with all the police protection I saw down there, how could they not be.

update: Get your own tents! Arrests started a little after 1AM. Folks are being detained at 18th and State.

no limit speculate'em:

The Obama Administration has been helpless to do anything to reign in the banks because they've spent all their political capital ignoring congressional mandates to reign in the banks.

i declare thee:

Captain Obvious. Henry Blodget has wrapped it up very nicely.

turning the heat up on the backburner:

When Marc Lynch says "the U.S. and most of the region put Yemen on the back burner" what he means is that US has escalated its military aid to that murderous, trigger happy regime from $5M in 2006 to $155M last year, an increase of 3500%. Obama's budget request for this year was up to $250M.

a kiss-up, kick-down sort of country:

Yves Smith:

One frequent and frustrating line that often crops up in the comments section of this blog is that American labor has no hope, it should just accept Chinese wages, since price is all that matters. That line of thinking is wrongheaded on multiple levels. It assumes direct factory labor is the most important cost driver, when for most manufactured goods, it is 11% to 15% of total product cost (and increased coordination costs of much more expensive managers are a significant offset to any savings achieved by using cheaper factory workers in faraway locations). It also assumes cost is the only way to compete, when that is naive on an input as well as a product level. How do these �labor cost is destiny� advocates explain the continued success of export powerhouse Germany? Finally, the offshoring,/outsourcing vogue ignores the riskiness and lower flexibility of extended supply chains.

This argument is sorely misguided because it serves to exculpate diseased, greedy, and incompetent American managers and executives. In the overwhelming majority of places where I lived in my childhood, a manufacturing plant was the biggest employer in the community. And when I went to business school, manufacturing was still seen as important. Indeed, the rise of Germany and Japan was then seen as due to sclerotic American management not being able to keep up with their innovations in product design and factory management.

But if you were to ask most people, they�d now blame the fall of American manufacturing on our workers. That scapegoating serves to shift focus from the top of the food chain at a time when executives have managed to greatly widen the gap between their pay and that of the folks reporting to them.

I'm sure it'll look less like scapegoating after a group backed by 81 major companies -- including McDonald�s, Lowe�s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills -- changes the law so that management doesn't have to report its compensation to shareholders.

debt:

Philip Pilkington interviews David Graeber at Naked Capitalism. Graeber mixes it up in the comments, which are worth reading.

these french fries are too salty, fucking unions:

This argument between education reformers Diane Ravitch and Steve Brill on Book TV is great, the host and subject spend much of the interview battling heroic internal struggles against powerful inclinations to rip the other's throat out with their teeth, which makes the otherwise dry recitation of competing facts into something more entertaining, like a boxing match or an episode of jackass.

It might even be informative, too, but my take away is that even with Brill's final chapter revisions to hundreds of pages of union bashing and the usual "break the union and privatize the schools" organized money approach to looting public education funding, he and his ilk have a thorough ideological commitment to doing nothing about childhood poverty. Impressively they place an even higher priority on that commitment than their commitment to excusing management for the outcomes of contract negotiations and blaming anything they don't like on teachers' unions.

You might notice that the deregulation of the late 1970s was about removing government imposed barriers-to-entries for new firms. But what what we see here are large firms using standardization and coordination alongside various slotting fee style programs to create private-market barriers-to-entries that exclude smaller vendors. The first version is created by the government and thus an enemy of neoliberals everywhere; the second results from the market and private agents and is passed over in silence because there isn�t any language in the neoliberal lexicon to even discuss it.

oligarchy forever:

William Hogeland:

Robert Morris' [the founding father, who declined Washington's appointment to Sec. Treasury and suggested Alexander Hamilton in his stead, etc.] ... daily effort was to crush the American popular-finance movement and elevate the bondholders. ... While Morris and the other investors (yes, "other" -- Morris was not only Congress�s Superintendent of Finance but also perhaps the biggest investor in the congressional debt he "superintended") portrayed their bondholding in terms of patriotic sacrifice, the investing class had actually turned up its nose when Congress first offered bonds in 1776, at a measly 4%, payable in Congress�s poorly managed currency. The investors came in only when Morris arranged for a French loan to underwrite federal bonds at 6%, payable in bills of exchange issued by big European banking houses and backed by their metal reserves, as good as gold. And he got Congress to accept its crap currency in exchange for the bonds! Quite a payday -- for the banking and creditor class.

Morris did manage to attract investors -- by and large the friends of Robert Morris. He kept the French deal secret but leaked it to his cronies, establishing a blue-chip sector of founding public debt held by high-finance government insiders. Morris then spent a decade trying to get that debt funded via national taxes, "opening the purses of the people," as Morris put it, in order to pay a small group of investors reliable 6%, in the equivalent of metal, tax free.

... The important point is that both liberaloid and rightist claims on founding positions are always, by nature, unnuanced, thus false, because the realities of founding positions don�t support anyone�s hopeful foregone conclusions regarding politics today.

The brain trust ... who framed the Constitution in order to grow the nation by funding a domestic national debt sought deeply regressive taxation and the consolidation of wealth.

social security is a ponzi scheme:

if it's built on a foundation of fraud.

And, he should have added, you still don't really know to whom you owe that mortgage payment. Or who legally owns the house. Doomed. There's a little grade in the road. We're going for the coasting record.

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