Resisting Hebdomania

The salient feature of the recent terrorist attack in Paris is its target: the media. The toll was much smaller than jihadist attacks in Madrid and London, and the operation was far less complex. But by going after a popular periodical, the attack sought to chill free expression, which is at the bedrock of western democracies.

French authorities are to be commended for vociferously championing free speech, and particularly for defending the especially puerile and inflammatory style of Charlie Hebdo. Charlie Hebdo is likewise to be lauded for fighting on, publishing yet another exquisitely offensive depiction of Mohammed just days after the attack. Indeed we are all indebted to the likes of Charlie Hebdo: if the protections of free speech extend to cover them, then the rest of us can be assured of ample space for our own exchanges of ideas.

Protection of free expression takes subtly (and not-so subtly) different forms in different western countries. In France, for example, you are free to show Jesus having anal sex with God and the Holy Spirit (as Charlie Hebdo did in a 2013 cover illustration) – but you can go to jail for denying that the Holocaust happened, and you can be fined for using the word software (e.g.) or other imported words in place of a French word. Most ironically, Charlie Hebdo’s predecessor, Hara-Kiri Hebdo, was banned by the French government in 1970 for making fun of Charles de Gaulle’s death. Concerning freedom of expression, more is more. The suggestion that political commentators should tread particularly lightly on religious beliefs is misguided. It is better to counsel citizens to be tolerant of different opinions – even those that are intended to offend.

Some have taken the occasion of this attack to point out the numerous flaws in French policies toward its growing Muslim population. The Kouachi brothers, after all, are not foreign nationals – they are Parisians, born and raised. This perhaps is the most frightening aspect of the attack – that it was not perpetrated by foreigners, as was 9/11, but by disaffected citizens, as was the Oklahoma City bombing.

While France should be more liberal in its policies toward Muslims, its failings should not be held up as a proximate cause of this unfortunate attack. Many citizens within France, the US, and practically every western country, have legitimate complaints about government practices, and the actions of private groups as well. They do not justify the murder of fellow citizens. France could surely deal with its Muslim minority with greater long-sightedness and sensitivity. But this observation does not lend an iota of legitimacy to last week’s attack.

We should take comfort in the fact that attacks such as these are exceedingly rare – even though they are relatively simple to carry out. (Two teenagers killed as many people in Columbine; a mentally disturbed 20 year-old killed twice as many in Sandy Hook; one intrepid Norwegian killed five times as many.) There is little a modern nation of 3, 60 or 300 million people can do to eliminate all such attacks; invariably, the price for a small amount of additional security is a lot of lost liberty.

In the fall and winter that followed Sept 11, 2001, about 30,000 Americans died of the flu – ten times the number that died on 9/11. We should be thankful that in the greater scheme of things, even the worst terrorist attack in history doesnt amount to a whole lot. The US reaction to 9/11, particularly its ill-considered invasion of Iraq, has had far more terrible and enduring consequences. We should bury our dead and mourn, but we should not let our hunger for justice or security erode our most precious liberal institutions and values.

 

Editor’s note: The Liberal Field Guide has awoken from its (blissfully) long winter hibernation – we thank you for your patience, and look forward to serving all your liberal needs in the months ahead.

 

 

 

 

Colbert’s Last Report

The Field Guide acknowledges with regret the passing of the Colbert Report, a fine, rare, intelligent satire, which ended its ten year run yesterday. Stephen Colbert, the show’s host and creator, is departing to take over for David Letterman as host of the Late Show. While we’re sure that Colbert’s satirical wit will carry over, and look forward to enjoying its new facets and forms, the end of the Report all but surely closes the book on the character Colbert has played to perfection for a decade: the quintessentially obtuse, self-righteous and self-satisfied cable-news conservative.

It is not often enough observed that among pundits, liberals and conservatives are readily distinguished by their tone alone. There has never been a conservative equivalent to Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher or Al Franken – nor could there ever be. Conservatism is tedious business, and is as much defined by its monotonous, pseduo-religious humorlessness and fury, as liberalism is defined by wit and nuance. Though in fairness to conservatives, it isnt easy to tell a joke while wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross….

Take away the pompous self-righteousness, anger and indignation of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and little is left behind but a wool suit. Conservative national candidates are worse: the likes of Palin, Bachmann, Perry and Santorum are too shallow and slow-witted to deliver a punchline, much less blow a sax or croon a few bars of Barry White. When one comes across the similitude of actual intelligence among conservatives – in Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gingrich, Will or Krauthammer – invariably is it tinged with what one can only describe as “evil” – because, we infer, one who knows much must also know better.

Most conservatives lack the sensibility to be properly envious and bemoan the fact that great political satirists have always been liberals. Those of today build on the groundbreaking work of Lenny Bruce, Richard Prior and George Carlin, among others, who opened up new realms to commentary, using humor as a subterfuge to draw attention to issues that the public would be happier to ignore. To appreciate an irreverent approach to matters delicate and-or contentious, one must have a certain remove and an intelligence that, frankly, is rarely seen among conservatives, for whom taking things too seriously is seen as a virtue. However their knitted brows are a poor substitute for genuine seriousness, which brings with it the patient diligence needed to push inquiries beyond the easy and superficial.

Conservative pundits offer excesses of solemness and anger in place of real perspicacity, and as well a fog in which to hide the internal inconsistencies of their beliefs and the mutual antagonisms of their policy positions. Likewise does the humor and irony common to so many liberal commentators flow from a common source: they are the hallmarks of intelligence itself, which readily perceives the contradiction in all things, and humanity’s manifold imperfections. With those recognitions, compassion and comprehension naturally displace anger, and the intellect is freed to enjoy the variety, for good and bad, that is the spice of life.

And so we wish Stephen Colbert success as he moves on, mournful for the close of a splendid chapter, hopeful for one he begins anew on a bigger stage.

 

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Editor’s note: the winter holidays are upon us, and the Field Guide will only be posting intermittently between now and early January. We wish you a Merry and a Happy, and hope you’ll check in with us now and again.

Swiss Sanity and Madness

American liberals might take comfort in knowing that other western countries are also beset by a conservative minority mucking up the works of government. Even Switzerland, that paragon of civility, has its very own conservative party to serve as a fount for bad old ideas. The good news is that Swiss voters were recently able to beat back two especially misguided conservative ballot initiatives.

In a country whose high living standards depend significantly on a steady supply of foreign labor, one measure sought to tightly restrict immigration. Another would have handcuffed Switzerland’s capable central bank by forcing it to dramatically increase its reserves of gold. Each initiative exemplifies the primitivism common to conservative movements worldwide: a gratuitous bias against foreigners; and a scientific illiteracy fostering debunked beliefs and practices.

To understand the failed immigration initiative, it helps to understand a bit about Swiss politics. While Switzerland is a very rich country, its conservative party, the SVP, is based in Switzerland’s poorer rural backwaters. (Sound familiar?) Though the bulk of Switzerland’s immigrants head to cities to find work, opposition to immigration is nonetheless based in less-affluent agrarian communities. (Sound eerily familiar?)

In 2009, the SVP succeeded in holding an especially disgusting referendum to illegalize the building of minarets. Horrifically, it passed – and lacking constitutional protections for freedom of expression, it is now the law of the land. Paradoxically, the Swiss government has long been a good world citizen, taking in refugees from all over the world, including predominantly Muslim countries like Iraq and Bosnia. Switzerland’s Muslim population has grown over the past 30 years, from 1% to 4.5%.

At nearly four times the US rate, immigration into Switzerland has been brisk. However the Swiss economy has had no difficulty absorbing additional workers, with unemployment under 4% for the past ten years. Beginning as an amalgam of several distinct ethnicities and four official languages, Switzerland has long been extremely diverse. The foreign-born now make up 29% of its resident population, double that of the US, and the most any major western country. Diversity has served Switzerland well: it is the wealthiest country in the West, and close to the top in per capita income and life expectancy.

There is hope that Switzerland’s economic success will temper its conservative movement – that they might be cautious about killing the golden goose. While the minaret referendum passed with 57% of the vote, the anti-immigration measure failed with just 26% in favor. And hearteningly, the gold-hoarding referendum did even worse, with the support of just 23% of voters, despite aggressive SVP campaigning.

Conservative misapprehensions of history and science notwithstanding, gold has no intrinsic value, and there are no valid reasons – geopolitical or scientific – for central banks to heavily rely on gold as a reserve asset. For good reason, virtually every country has abandoned the practice.

Conservative belief in the intrinsic value of gold is especially goofy, considering that the godfather of intrinsic-value theory is Karl Marx, who needed it to validate his notions on the value of labor. That conservatives today make the same mistake about gold that Marx made about labor does not diminish their esteem for yellow metal. Conservatism, after all, is a largely about belief in a vacuum – a hearkening back to an imaginary past, not a real world.

Swiss sanity in killing these two measures was tempered by their decision to reject a third measure that would have ended a tax regime sheltering rich foreigners, encouraging them to reside in Switzerland. Just as some countries create special tax havens to attract business, Switzerland has its own cottage industry of attracting the idle rich to live in their mountains. They buy Bentleys and chalets and negotiate an individual lump-sum tax with the canton in which they reside (for real) – passing their tax burden on to ordinary people. Several cantons have eliminated the practice, requiring everyone to pay their fair share. The measure would have forced all cantons to eliminate it, but unfortunately it only gained 41% of the vote.

While two out of three on the referenda aint bad, the SVP has unfortunately grown in popularity, and now holds a plurality of popular support and legislative representation. Its chief selling points remain xenophobia, isolationism, anti-environmentalism and opposition to government services. The latter position does not prevent them from continuing to support agricultural subsidies – farmers, after all, are the SVP’s largest constituency; and adherence to principle remains a trait unknown among conservatives.

 

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The Nation’s Business

Government spending on health, education and insurance is the path to riches. And not one of many paths – if a nation isnt lucky enough to sit atop a fortune of mineral wealth, it’s the only pathway by which modern countries have ever grown rich. And there’s ample evidence that public investment in other sectors is a must for economic development too.

For conservatives, “Solyndra” has become the poster-child for the inevitability of failure whenever government wades into the marketplace. Mitt Romney wasnt content to mention Solyndra in every other speech – in May 2012, he journeyed to its Silicon Valley headquarters, to have the shuttered building in the background as he railed against the evil of public meddling in private enterprise. Solyndra’s failure was indeed spectacular – taking with it more than 500 million taxpayer dollars when it went bankrupt in 2011.

But in the three years since Solyndra’s bankruptcy, the government program that funded it has kept right on doing what it’s been doing all along: helping out young, green-energy firms going through rough patches. And a funny thing has happened: the numbers on the government’s balance sheet have gone from red to black. The Department of Energy, which administers the program, reports that they expect it to return a profit of some $5 to 6 billion over its lifetime, on investments totaling $32 billion. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s profits in excess of 10 Solyndras! And mind you: those are only the profits expected to accrue to the government itself, as it receives interest payments from companies paying back their loans. It does not begin to express the total economic value created for shareholders, or the green tech which will benefit all of humanity, or the tens of thousand of jobs that have been created at less-than-zero cost.

Government involvement in the marketplace has a long, storied past, in the US and abroad. Countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Israel – among the greatest exemplars of rapid economic growth of the past sixty years – all have had governments deeply involved in decisions on capital allocation. Government support has been indispensable to numerous industries throughout US history, from railroads and agriculture, to education and aviation, to the internet and drug research. Looking only at the iPhone, government investment facilitated advances in microchips, cellular, touch screens, GPS and voice-recognition – not to mention the $500,000 government-backed small-business loan that helped Apple get off the ground in 1978.

With her book, The Entrepreneurial State, Professor Mariana Mazzucato of Sussex University has emerged as an authority on the importance of public investment for economic growth. Simply put, companies are leery about long-term investments. Even guys like Steve Jobs knew how the game was played. Apple has done well tying together existing technologies into consumer-friendly packages – and is often more interested in stock buybacks than R&D. Their achievements are not to be downplayed – but the business model only succeeds with a robust public sector targeting certain industries and technologies for development.

Government isnt crowding out private investment – it’s picking up the slack in areas that private investors neglect. Companies tend to have short planning horizons when it comes to research and development. Even large companies who can afford long-term investments are rarely eager to test their shareholders’ patience with projects whose returns may take ten or fifteen years to realize. And the days of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are also long gone – when tech firms collected scientists, and funded them in academic-like settings, content to wait and see what their research produced.

There will always be Solyndras. In new fields, failure always outnumbers success. But dont hesitate to let conservatives know that in the final accounting, the value of the Teslas outstrip the Solyndras by a wide margin – and always have.

 

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Refs:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-13/solyndra-program-vilified-by-republicans-turns-a-profit.html

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/13/3592107/doe-loan-program-profit/

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/07/1977001/loan-program-20000-jobs/

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/06/805001/five-things-you-should-know-about-solyndra-during-the-2012-campaign/

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363572151/after-solyndra-loss-u-s-energy-loan-program-turning-a-profit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-visits-solyndra-headquarters-knocks-president-obama/2012/05/31/gJQAAnge5U_story.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-lazonick/nine-government-investmen_b_954185.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/01/31/why-the-government-needs-to-invest-in-innovation/

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/09/entrepreneurs_or_the_state_innovation_comes_from_public_investment.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/13/debunking-the-narrative-of-silicon-valleys-innovation-might/

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/american_innovation

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21584307-new-book-points-out-big-role-governments-play-creating-innovative-businesses

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/americas-underappreciated-entrepreneur-the-federal-government.html

Staten Island Uglier

Take Ferguson’s victim, Michael Brown. Make him 25 years older and morbidly obese. Subtract the fact that he’d just robbed a convenience store. Remove conflicting claims that he initiated the attack. Now add a minute to the video recording from before the police attack began, to underscore just how banal and non-threatening the situation was. And toss in 4 more cops (!) so Brown is obviously outnumbered and surrounded – not to mention unarmed – helpless to do anything but beg for mercy.

Last, in place of two gunshots to the head, add a chokehold, with Michael Brown Eric Garner pathetically gasping “I cant breathe” – the last words he’ll utter before being asphyxiated by the combined efforts of five (5!) New York City policemen.

We’re not done. If you havent yet seen the video of Garner’s murder, please watch it to the end (linked below). As extraordinary as was the barbarity of his killing, the callousness of NYPD officers in the aftermath is no less spectacular. Garner lies on the sidewalk, not moving, not breathing and still handcuffed for more than 6 minutes. A neither-the-best-nor-brightest EMS responder encourages him to be a good sport and get on up. No attempt is made to revive Garner. From the 10 or so NYPD officers at the scene, there is no expression whatsoever of urgency, much less that a man’s life is at stake, if not already lost.

For all the ways that Michael Brown’s killing has been made to seem contentious, Eric Garner’s cannot be. Garner had neither attacked nor threatened to attack anyone. He spent his last moments civilly pleading his case to NYPD officers, asking that they leave him alone to mind his own business. Police say they suspected him of selling untaxed cigarettes – a regulatory offense! (How many BP executives were killed by the police following their little regulatory goof in the Gulf? How ’bout Enron? BOA?) Witnesses say cops only approached Garner after he’d done a good deed, breaking up a fight.

When 5 NYPD officers attacked, video shows that Garner went down – all 350 lbs of him – without taking a swing, trying to run, or resisting in any way. In fact, even when he had 4 cops on top of him, he kept a free hand outstretched, palm up, to show that he was unarmed and not trying to resist. One cop immediately goes for the throat and hangs on, despite Garner’s repeated “I cant breathe” pleas; eventually the cop releases the choke hold, pinning Garner’s face to the sidewalk instead, as the other four hold him down and cuff his hands behind his back.

The official New York City coroner’s report ruled Garner’s death a homicide, caused by “compression of his neck (chokehold), compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” It also mentions Garner’s asthma, heart disease and obesity as contributing factors.

Of course the punchline is, as with Michael Brown’s homicide, that the grand jury failed to indict any cop for any crime. Which is why New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wants his office to investigate Garner’s death. The cozy relationship between local prosecutors, and the police departments they necessarily rely on to do their work, has rightly been called into question by the Brown and Garner cases, in which unarmed black men were killed by white cops, and prosecutors failed to obtain grand jury indictments.

The larger story is that 20 people are killed by cops in America every week. The issue is greater than one of racist cops and black victims – it’s about a nation with 750,000 armed police officers, and the failed effort to see to it that they protect and serve their communities, not terrorize them.

 

Refs:

Watch the video of Garner’s killing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-xHqf1BVE4

(The actual video of Garner’s killing runs approximately from minute 1 to minute 5 – we tried but could not find a posting on youtube that was free of third-party commentary.)

Next watch the aftermath of the killing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT66U_Ftdng

(Unbelievably, Garner lies on the sidewalk, not breathing and cuffed, for more than 6 minutes – and NYPD does nothing to attempt to revive him. Dont try imagining just how long a time that is – watch it, so you can share the disgust experienced by everyone who has.)

 

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Plight of the Bidoon

The 14th amendment makes the US a special place. If you’re born in the US, you’re a citizen of the US – end of inquiry. The facts of your parents’ citizenship, the status of their legal (or illegal) residence, and other such minutia are irrelevant. While the US has had its share of underclasses, it has not in modern times had a stateless underclass (like Israel has with Palestinians). By operation of the 14th amendment, this generation’s undocumented immigrants engender the next generation of US citizens, solving lots of ugly problems before they form.

Many countries do not automatically confer citizenship upon the native-born. This is usually just a problem for individuals born in unusual circumstances. Rarely is it a problem for large numbers of people, simply because countries with significant immigrant populations are not generally foolish enough to create a giant mess for themselves by denying citizenship to the native-born.

There are several noteworthy cases however. The Dominican Republic has a sizable ethnically-Haitian population, including hundreds of thousands of individuals who were born in and lived all their lives in DR, but who are not recognized as citizens by either country. Japan has a small Korean population left over from colonial times, upon whom Japan refuses to confer citizenship. Israel, spectacularly, has some 2 million Arabs in the West Bank who, since 1967, have been living subject to Israeli authority without being afforded a scintilla of political representation in Israel’s government, much less citizenship.

And then there are Kuwait’s Bidoon. Also called “Stateless Arabs,” they are descendents of Arabs from other countries (such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq), who have been living in Kuwait since its 1961 founding – without being allowed to acquire citizenship. They have no legal right to reside in any country in the world, including Kuwait. Among Kuwait’s 4 million residents, they number about 100,000.

Kuwait has long been a majority-immigrant nation, with ethnic Kuwaitis comprising only one-third the resident population since as far back as 1975. And Kuwait’s economy has thrived for decades, relying on its enormous number of foreign workers, who hail primarily from Asia. After falling off for a few years, the foreign-born population has recently recovered, adding an additional one million in the past 10 years.

And Kuwaitis are not okay with it. Perhaps the most liberal and democratic state in the Middle East, Kuwait’s government has long had an uneasy relationship with the hordes of migrant workers that the ever-booming Kuwaiti economy requires. While it has recently weighed a few ill-conceived measures to remove a large number of its foreign workers, it has not gone through with any of them, because every enlightened Kuwaiti recognizes their utter dependence on foreign labor to maintain their extraordinarily high living standards. But one unfortunate side-effect of such anti-foreign sentiments is the ongoing mistreatment of the Bidoon.

Bidoon are Kuwaitis in all but name. But they arent merely denied political rights – they are denied access to the most basic public services, including health and education. Bidoon cant even get a drivers license. Kuwait’s latest move has been to secure Comoros citizenship for the Bidoon. While Kuwait is among the richest countries in the world (per capita GDP is 50% greater than the US), Comoros is among the world’s poorest (per capita GDP is 10% less than that of Haiti). Obviously no Bidoon will be eager to find a new home in Comoros. Rather, as citizens of Comoros, the Bidoon’s status will be normalized: as foreign nationals, they will have access to many basic Kuwaiti government services.

Clearly, this will be a major improvement for the lot of the Bidoon. As Comoros nationals within Kuwait, they effectively graduate from statelessness to disenfranchisement. However in the long run, justice demands that Kuwait recognize both the civil and political rights of its native-born Bidoon, who have lived and worked in Kuwait for all of their lives, descended from people who, likewise, for more than half a century, could call no other place their home. The Bidoon deserve nothing less than full Kuwaiti citizenship – to not merely live and work in peace, and be accorded basic human rights, but to participate as equals in their own governance as well.

 

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Eight Years Wrong

If your economic models led you to make the same bad predictions for six straight years, perhaps you’d pause to consider their validity before plunging ahead into the same mistake. But not if your Charles Plosser. The conservative head of the Philly Fed has made a fine folly of calling for inflation for six years now, repeating his time-worn shtick for the benefit of a roomful of reporters again this past Wednesday.

Plosser’s ineptitude makes for a long, sorry public record. In March 2008, during the worst US economy in 70 years, Plosser somehow opposed Fed rate cuts, expressing belief that a recovery was imminent. Fortunately the Fed blew him off and cut rates anyway – and the recession persisted for another 15 months. Plosser was just warming up. In July 2009, he said he expected the Fed would soon have to raise rates to head off inflation. That year the US posted its lowest inflation rate in 54 years, with prices actually deflating 0.4%! In May 2010, Plosser acknowledged that inflation had been unusually low (duh), but said he was still concerned about inflation risks beyond the short term. The Fed stayed the course and inflation barely budged. In March 2011, he claimed that Fed policies were raising the threat of inflation. He spent 2012 and 2013 beating the same drum, and this past July said on Bloomberg TV that the Fed risked “losing control of inflation.” As 2011, 2012 and 2013 turned out, Plosser was wrong, wrong and wrong.

Predicting inflation isnt a mere academic pursuit. When the Fed acts to head off inflation, Americans pay the price with higher unemployment. Constant, spurious calls for inflation can be extremely detrimental to an economy, putting millions out of work needlessly. One need only look at the European Central Bank, which for years has been filled with hacks like Plosser, whose conservative mismanagement of monetary policy has returned the Eurozone to recession.

It isnt merely the case that Plosser’s imagined threat of inflation never materialized. During the period 2009-14, the US experienced its lowest inflation of the past half-century! For all of Plosser’s harping, inflation has at times gone so low as to pose the graver threat of deflation. Inflation for 2013 came in at a low 1.5%; 2014 is running at a similar level; projections by better-skilled economists call for the same in 2015.

Plosser’s crowning non-achievement came in July 2013, when the Wall Street Journal ranked him dead last among his colleagues at the Fed, for his utter inability to predict the rise or fall of interest rates, inflation or unemployment. The joke about a broken clock being right twice a day doesnt quite capture the ineptitude of an economist whose models arent even borne out once per decade. His dismal record notwithstanding, Plosser remains conservatives’ go-to guy whenever they need to cite a Fed official to justify their latest unfounded criticism of Fed policy.

As a conservative, Plosser must be terribly frustrated, given that the Fed has not once raised rates during his tenure. But fortunately the end is in sight. No, the Fed isnt going to accede to conservative hysteria and raise rates. After stinking it up for eight years as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Plosser, thankfully, is retiring in March. And the Fed can get on with the business of keeping rates low, while US wages and employment continue to recover.

 

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Refs:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324144304578624033540135700

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Plosser-worst-Fed-predicter-sees-inflation-rate-hikes-where-others-dont.html?c=r

http://news.yahoo.com/plosser-says-fed-risk-getting-behind-curve-rate-201830829–business.html

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/09/22/charles-plosser-leader-federal-reserve-inflation-hawk-retire/

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/08/wrong-way-plosser/

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/04/18/fedspeak-highlights-plosser-on-inflation-and-fed-actions/

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/03/03/recession-or-slowdown-plosser-sees-mid-year-turnaround/

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2009/07/27/fed-inflation-hawk-speaks/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/09/us-economy-plosser-idUSTRE75816P20110609

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/

Detroit Gets a Treatment, Not a Cure

Sixteen months after becoming the largest-ever US municipality to enter bankruptcy, Detroit has a court-approved plan to move forward, and is poised to move ahead with several billion dollars less debt, plus new aid commitments from the state and federal governments. But nothing has been done to fix the underlying problem: that the “City of Detroit” is a legal fiction – an anachronism with no bearing whatsoever on the region’s physical and economic facts.

Detroit’s history follows both the rise of the automobile industry and the use of the automobile itself. Detroit grew from a modest-sized town in 1900 to become the 5th largest city in the US in 1950. But then the course of the city and the auto industry diverged. While the industry continued to expand, new plants were built in Detroit’s suburbs. Workers took advantage of cheap cars and better roads to head to the suburbs too.

The depopulation of midwestern cities is not unique to Detroit. Almost every midwestern city has lost between twenty and sixty percent of its population since 1950. The larger metropolitan areas have kept right on growing – it’s only the cities that have shrunk. While the city of Detroit today has about one-third the population it had in the early 50s, the larger Detroit region is now forty percent more populous.

The difference is the automobile and the US highway system. Before the age of cheap transport, economic realities forced people to live in town, close to work and needed services: schools, shops, family, etc. Since the 50s, people have had the option to live away from town, relying on cars and a modern road network to get where they need to go.

Newer American cities in the west have established their city limits in accordance with this new reality. The major cities of Texas are a good example. Austin and El Paso each have nearly the same area as New York City. Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio are all geographically larger than New York City, and Houston is twice New York’s size. But those six Texas cities combined have fewer people than New York City. Unlike older cities in the east and midwest, Texas cities were were built around the automobile, and their sprawling incorporated limits reflect that.

The urban sprawl of cities like Detroit is, today, no less extensive – however most midwestern cities have literally left their incorporated limits unchanged since the days of the horse-drawn carriage. Detroit is about one-half the size of New York City, and has been for more than a century.

The people leaving midwestern cities since the 50s have been disproportionately affluent, because they can more readily afford cars and new houses in the suburbs. The people left behind are disproportionately poor. And because of the disparity between black and white incomes, and discriminatory business and banking practices, the net result is relatively white, affluent suburbs and relatively black, poor cities. This demographic trend is common to many major metropolitan areas across the midwest, including Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cleveland.

In and of itself, this would not have been a problem if the larger metropolitan area were united within a single municipality. However suburbanites were able to escape the tax base of the city, while still using numerous city resources, from hospitals to roads to water supply and other elements of the city’s infrastructure. Detroit spent billions of dollars providing health, education and other services to people who would ultimately leave to become productive members of society elsewhere.

The real cure for cities like Detroit is the annexation of its suburbs – to bring political realities (the lines on the map) into accord with the social and economic reality: that city and suburb is a single entity, united by a common infrastructure and commerce. Detroit today is little more than the least desirable neighborhood in a much larger economic zone, of which it comprises less than 20% of the total population, and an even smaller fraction of the total land area.

Leaving the old municipal lines intact effects a ghetto, within which medical care and education are far inferior, predictably producing children who will lack the skills to be productive in a modern economy. The obstacles to incorporation of the suburbs are political, but they have been overcome in places such as Kansas City and Louisville. Detroit’s latest plan will get it out of bankruptcy, and improve things a little bit in the short term. But over the long haul it will only perpetuate an unjust and unproductive status quo.

 

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Ferguson Ugly

Michael Brown was 18 years old, 6’4″, nearly 300 lbs, and had just robbed a convenience store. He was also unarmed and, when he was shot several times and killed in broad daylight, was most likely approaching Officer Darren Wilson slowly with his hands up.

Eyewitness testimony is often contradictory, but is relatively consistent in this case. Witnesses saw Brown flee from Wilson while being fired upon. Then Brown stopped running, turned, and approached Wilson with his hands extended away from his body. Wilson fired a total of 12 shots, hitting Brown 6 to 8 times, including twice in the head. The last shot entered the top of Brown’s skull and killed him. It was taken at a range of 3 to 6 feet.

No witness has suggested that Brown was rushing at Wilson. Most agree that Brown was approaching slowly. None has corroborated Wilson’s claim that he told Brown to stop. The angle of the two headshots are especially telling. In addition to the fatal shot into the top of Brown’s head, another entered his right eye and continued downward through his jaw and into his collarbone. This is consistent with two very different scenarios: one in which Brown put his head down to charge; and another in which Brown stumbled forward. The latter case seems the most likely, given that it corroborates eyewitness accounts, and that Brown had already been shot four or five times, and had marijuana in his system.

The local prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, convened a grand jury that ultimately declined to indict Officer Wilson for any crime. However McCulloch’s grand jury tactics have been widely criticized as seemingly calculated to not produce an indictment. It has also been noted that this was the sixth time in six occasions that McCulloch failed to obtain an indictment in a police shooting. Perhaps not coincidentally, McCulloch’s father was a cop, killed in the line of duty.

Michael Brown is not a sympathetic victim. Surveillance video taken shortly before the shooting show him robbing a convenience store, using his enormous size in place of a weapon. He goes to the counter and seems to ask for something. He receives a package, which he hands off to his accomplice. Then he leans over the counter, and comes back with several more packages. Without paying, Brown turns to leave. At the shop door, he’s confronted by a clerk, who is a full head shorter than Brown. Brown brusquely pushes him away. When the clerk persists, Brown turns upon him threateningly. The clerk retreats, and Brown and his accomplice depart.

Sympathetic or not, there is reasonable evidence to infer that Michael Brown was the victim of police brutality, in a species of event that has become all-too-common in the US: the killing of an unarmed black man by the police. While local authorities seem to have disposed of the matter, US Attorney General Eric Holder continues his investigation, and it is fair to speculate that there is a significant chance that Officer Wilson will be prosecuted under federal law, which was written in part because some local governments cannot be trusted to render justice in cases involving a white perpetrator and a black victim.

This event is further a subset of an even more common event in the US: homicide by police. Remarkably, there are no official statistics on their frequency. But the best available estimates suggest that about 1000 people are killed by cops in the US each year.

The facts in Ferguson are ugly from every vantage point. Brown was a large, menacing criminal; however the evidence suggests that Officer Wilson, who is also 6’4″, used excessive force, and killed Brown without justification. Time will tell, but the process rarely affords us more than a crude approximation of what really happened.

Our best hope should be that events such as these, because they are so ugly, will force the issue of police brutality, particularly as it bears on race, into the national debate – so the US can begin to reign in its police power, to make it a better public servant, and less of a public menace. The framers and ratifiers of the Bill of Rights decided this issue 200 years ago. By bestowing fully half of the specific rights in the Bill on the accused, they made clear that an unchecked police power poses a far greater threat to liberty and security than do mere criminals.

 

 

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A Step Forward on Immigration

Few issues put the conservative disconnect with reality into as high relief as the immigration crisis. Conservative “plans” range, by analogy, from building a ladder to the moon, to rowing a boat to the moon instead. There are more than 11 million people currently residing in the US illegally. The resources to find, hold, process and deport that number of people do not exist. Nor should anyone of sound mind want to live in a country with a police force so powerful that it could round up roughly 4% of its population, with a commensurately enormous prison apparatus. Consider that all local and federal police have thus far been able to push the US prison population to 2 million, giving the US the highest incarceration rate in the world. Immigration enforcement, with perhaps one-tenth the manpower, cannot begin to round up more than five times that number of people.

The immigration crisis cannot be resolved by the police. This is the point of departure for all reality-based approaches toward easing or resolving US immigration issues – President Obama said as much in his speech Thursday night. The few conservatives who seem to grasp this reality sometimes advocate for a self-deportation fantasy instead, in which the US makes existence so difficult for its undocumented aliens, that they give up on life in America, pick up and leave. The problem with that plan is that self-deportation on such a scale has never occurred in a western country during peacetime in history.

The not-so-wise and way-too-cynical yet insist that “the laws be enforced as written.” However given the disparity between the large number of undocumented aliens and the paucity of resources available to immigration enforcement, the laws can only be enforced selectively – a fact Obama also noted in his speech. Once one recognizes that resource constraints compel law enforcement to narrow its focus, the rest of the president’s plan is common sense. Immigration enforcement should, of course, be directed at “felons, not families; criminals, not children.”

And once the decision has been made to not pursue immigration enforcement against US residents who satisfy certain criteria, it is prudent to take the next step and normalize their legal status. America’s undocumented resident population is woven into the fabric of businesses and communities nationwide. The threat of immigration enforcement is a disruptive force, thwarting market efficiency, frustrating the work of ordinary law enforcement, and undermining families, among other ills. By creating a track by which undocumented aliens can obtain work permits, the president’s new policy ushers them out of the shadows, freeing them to work, go to school, find better jobs, and organize their lives to take best advantage of their individual talents and energies. This will only increase their contribution to American society, and enrich us all.

The president’s plan is, in some respects, quite modest. More than 60% of the America’s illegal immigrants have been in the country for more than 10 years. And yet Obama’s executive orders do not grant work permits or relief from the threat of deportation based on tenure within the US alone. To be covered under the revised policy, unless brought to the US as a child, an undocumented immigrant must be a parent of either a US citizen or a permanent resident. And so even after these executive orders, the status quo will hold for some 5 million people, who will remain in the US illegally, living in the shadows, without a track toward normalization.

Tailoring limited immigration enforcement resources to achieve the greatest good is about practicality. Amnesty for people brought into the US as children, for whom the US is their true home, is about justice. Work permits and freedom from the threat of deportation for the parents of US citizens and green-card holders, who have been living and working in our midst for years, is about decency. Elaborating, at long last, a plan that begins to resolve America’s ongoing immigration crisis – it’s about time.

 

Editor’s note: Chestnuts, yams and flightless fowl beware: the Liberal Field Guide is off for the rest of the week. We’ll be back with new material next week – better fed if not better rested.