Home
|
« Liberal Outrage: February 2008 | Main | Liberal Outrage: April 2008 » Liberal OutrageChina Will Eat You Next My mom once told me a story about my great grandmother. My great grandmother always contended that those creatures on earth whose backs faced the sky were meant to be eaten by those of use whose backs do not. The emergence of China's middle class is adding hugely to demand not just for basic commodities like corn, soybeans and wheat, but also for meat, milk and other high-protein foods. The Chinese, whose rise began in earnest in 2001, ate just 20 kilograms, or 44 pounds, of meat per capita in 1985. They now eat 50 kilograms a year. Each pound of beef takes about seven pounds of grain to produce, which means land that could be used to grow food for humans is being diverted to growing animal feed. However, the Chinese aren't picky. If there wasn't enough food to go around, I think you might start to look pretty delicious regardless of where your back faced. The amount of energy and resources used to raise animals for eating is one of the big reasons for going vegan. Instead of using that land and those resources to raise animals, we could be growing food for people. How many people could you feed if you traded seven pounds of vegetables and grains for every pound of cattle raised? The article also mentions the usage of land for growing crops to be used as biofuel instead of food has contributed to the problem as well. Farmers can make more money selling palm oil for biofuel than for cooking. Money they need to buy food and other essentials for living. But in the meantime, the people are starving because all the land they used to grow food on has been commandeered for more biofuel crops. And round and round it goes. By min | March 31, 2008, 2:09 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Mukasey: At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America's anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. "We got three thousand. . . . We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure. Glenn Greenwald responds: These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention. Michael Mukasey can cry all he wants about the 9/11 attacks. But neither he nor the rest of the Bush administration are the proprietors of those attacks. There were millions of New Yorkers in Manhattan on 9/11 other than Michael Mukasey, who lived and worked there for a long time. Neither Mike Mukasey nor his tearful pleas for unchecked government surveillance power and the erosion of the rule of law are representative of them. By fnord12 | March 31, 2008, 9:49 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Quoted on Digby: Our media is sooooo broken. Go read that Digy post. By fnord12 | March 31, 2008, 9:30 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Check out these interviews by Charlie Rose and Peter Jennings, where "off message" Iraqis somehow wound up being interviewed. What's amazing is how shocked Rose and Jennings seemed to be that they somehow wound up interviewing these people. By fnord12 | March 26, 2008, 1:44 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link ...and here it is. Quick glance says no substantial change from last year's projections. On to dig through and see what's up with the assumptions... CNN: Social Security looms for next president This is the same half-baked information we've been hearing for a while. The truth, as they obscurely refer to further down in the article, is that if we do absolutely nothing, the SS office will stop being able to make 100% of payouts in 2041 (it will at that point be able to pay out at 80%). The obvious and simple solution to this is to raise the income cap at which SS taxes are paid (currently you don't pay for SS taxes over about $100,000 of your salary, assuming you make that much). This should be done (and i'd like to see a push to actually expand SS benefits) but there is certainly no crisis. If we want to worry about potentially unsolvent government programs, we can look at Medicare, but the real issue here is that there is a strong push to make people think that their Social Security benefits won't be there for them when they retire. Once people are convinced that SS is in trouble, they can push to privatize the benefit, which means putting it in the hands of the people who recently invested all of their money in worthless mortgages. By fnord12 | March 26, 2008, 1:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Link: Should take about 2 hours of our federal government's time to take the language of NY's law and turn it into a federal law, and i can't imagine it'd be a terribly unpopular law to pass. You do have to admire the balls of the airline industry in challenging a law that requires them to provide food, water, toilets, and air to people trapped on their planes. By fnord12 | March 25, 2008, 6:25 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Dick Cheney, whose intial response to the fact that the public is at this point heavily against the Iraqi invasion was "So?", has now clarified: Just like, 30 years ago, everyone was against President Ford's decision to pardon Nixon's criminal behavior, but now they are apparently in favor of it, 30 years from now everyone will approve of the Bush's decisions in Iraq. And I have the same strong conviction the issues we're dealing with today -- the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong. By fnord12 | March 25, 2008, 12:03 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Can you imagine that Hillary Clinton is proposing putting Alan Greenspan in charge of fixing our mortgage crisis? I'm all for forcing the man into doing community service for the rest of his life, but how about picking up litter on the sides of the highways instead of running an agency where his incompetence can once again screw us over. This may be pushing it a bit too much (i tend to be attracted to the most apocalyptic doomsayers), but we're going to be in big trouble for the next few years, and if the best our presidential candidates have in mind is handing the keys back to the people who got us here, things will be bad. Update: "Not only that, but the Fed didn't act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach." Awesome. Do any of our presidential candidates understand economics? By fnord12 | March 24, 2008, 3:07 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link ![]() Tom Tomorrow's comic is related to this feature in Slate where "liberal" hawks explain their rational in supporting the Iraq invasion five years ago. Tim Noah's article is the best of those, since he actually admits he was wrong and correctly wonders why the people who got it so wrong five years ago are still the ones with prominent columns and frequent television appearances. The same should apply on economic news - all the economists who discounted the warnings about the housing bubble should no longer be the go-to experts for journalists writing articles on the economy, and yet the same people who didn't predict the bubble are the ones who are now being asked what the impact will be and how long the recession will last. By fnord12 | March 24, 2008, 12:25 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage | Link
I'm a little suspicious of the motives (Wallace is no angel, he's been agitating for Obama to come on his show for a long while now, and why would Fox's producers allow this sort of infighting to happen on the air?), but it's still good and interesting to see this message reach Fox viewers. And the other anchors sure don't look happy. By fnord12 | March 21, 2008, 3:45 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link Up until just a few years ago, lawmakers would go "window shopping" for interns at the start of every legislative session. In a practice that went on for decades, the interns would be corraled in a Capitol newsstand so that legislators could pick their office help based on their looks, not their resumes. The hanky-panky even has its own lexicon: There's the "Bear Mountain Compact," which says that what goes on north of the state park just outside New York City stays there. Lobbyists, staffers and reporters who seek to enhance their influence by bedding powerful lawmakers are known as "big game hunters." And the men who sleep with the women lawmakers are "boy toys." That'll go a long way towards convincing the rest of the country that "those east coast libruls" aren't a bunch of sexual deviants. By fnord12 | March 21, 2008, 9:31 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (3)| Link By fnord12 | March 20, 2008, 5:14 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link
You've seen this video a million times, but it usually takes place in Bangladesh or Zambia or somewhere not America. By fnord12 | March 19, 2008, 10:08 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link The next steps will be up to the politicians. I used to think that the major issues facing the next president would be how to get out of Iraq and what to do about health care. At this point, however, I suspect that the biggest problem for the next administration will be figuring out which parts of the financial system to bail out, how to pay the cleanup bills and how to explain what it's doing to an angry public. The next president will be a Democrat, and he will spend the next 4-8 years cleaning up this mess that the Republicans have left him. He won't be able to initiate any major programs because all his time will be spent focusing on this financial disaster and the war in Iraq, and he will likely have to take some very unpopular actions like raising taxes and cutting benefit programs. This will ensure that in 4-8 years the Democrats will once again be very unpopular, just in time for a Republican to come in, claim credit for the recovery, and screw everything up again. By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 1:21 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link What's going on at MTV? They're airing these anti-police state commercials. Anyone know why? What is the context for this? By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 1:11 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Unless public money is used on a very temporary basis to achieve an orderly wind-down or merger of Bear Stearns this is another case where profits are privatized and losses are socialized. By having thrown down the drain the decades old doctrine and rule that the Fed should not lend or bail out non-bank financial institutions the Fed has created an extremely dangerous precedent that seriously aggravates the moral hazard of its lender of last resort support role. If the Fed starts on the slippery slope of providing massive liquidity support to non-bank financial institutions that have recklessly managed their risks it enters into uncharted territory that radically changes its mandate and formal role. Breaking decades-old rules and practices is a radical action that seriously requires a clear public explanation and justification. The finer distinctions are probably lost on me, but this doesn't seem too different than what we did in the 80s during the S&L Scandal (and we are still paying off the debt we created during that bailout). Seems the government is always there to bail out rich investors when their risky or stupid investments don't pan out. By fnord12 | March 17, 2008, 9:05 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Only one man has the experience it takes to become commander-in-chief. By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 3:55 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link In such circumstances, investors would be very reluctant to accept the credit of any of the major financial institutions. They couldn't know whether most of their assets were in fact counterfeit, and they were dealing with a bankrupt institution, or whether the counterfeit currency was only a limited share of the wealth, which would not jeopardize the institution's ability to meet its obligations. This is in fact the credit squeeze that we've have recently witnessed. The spread between the interest rates on a wide variety of assets and the interest rate on safe assets (U.S. government debt) has soared. As a result, the Fed's effort to stimulate the economy, by lowering the federal funds rate, has been largely unsuccessful because other interest rates have remained high. In response to this situation the Fed today announced that it would lend $200 billion to banks and other financial firms, accepting mortgage backed securities as collateral. This is effectively the same as saying that the Fed is going to lend money to banks and accept the counterfeit currency as collateral, treating it just as though it were real money. The intended effect of this policy is to convince other investors that the counterfeit currency is in fact real currency, or at the very least that there is a really huge sucker out there (the Fed) which is prepared to treat the counterfeit currency as real currency. So how does this story play out? Well, insofar as the Fed is successful, the counterfeit currency retains its value for a while longer. This allows Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bears Stearns and the rest of the big boys more time to dump their counterfeit currency on suckers who haven't figured out how the game is played. It is possible that they won't be able to find enough suckers, in which case these banks will end up defaulting on their loans and the Fed (i.e. the government ) has lost tens or hundreds of billions dollars paying good money for counterfeit currency. Alternatively, perhaps the big boys are successful and can offload enough of their counterfeit money to restore themselves to solvency before the music stops. Then the Fed is repaid, but the counterfeit money now sits in the hands of other, less informed, or less inside, investors. Either way, this is a policy of dubious merit. Why wouldn't we want the banks to be forced to come clean and eat their losses? This is always the policy that the economists advocate when the parties in question are not the big New York banks. Does anyone remember the East Asian financial crisis when the media was full of condemnations of crony capitalism and the IMF insisted imposed stringent conditions on South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia as a condition of getting bailed out? At that time, everyone insisted on transparency. Aren't there any economists who still have this perspective? If so, why aren't their views appearing anywhere in the news? By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 2:42 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link "Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?" Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene. "Take away all of his Federal dollars?" responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, ":-D," at the end of her January 2007 note. Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: "Let me look into that possibility." The e-mails, obtained by The Washington Post, came to light as a result of a lawsuit provoked by HUD's decision last September to strip the Philadelphia Housing Authority of as much as $50 million in federal funds. In December, it declared the agency in violation of rules that underpin its ability to decide precisely how it will spend federal housing funds. Kendrick was the official who formally notified the authority that she had found it in violation. But Eliot Spitzer slept with prostitutes! Naughty! By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 1:52 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link Ohio: That includes 931 in Rocky River, 1,027 in Westlake and 1,142 in Strongsville. More than a third of the Republicans in Solon and Bay Village switched. Pepper Pike had the most dramatic change: just under half its Republicans became Democrats. And some of those who changed - it's difficult to say how many - could be in trouble with the law. At least one member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections wants to investigate some Republicans who may have crossed party lines only to influence which Democrat would face presumed Republican nominee John McCain in November . . . . In a nutshell, here's how it's supposed to work: Ohio voters are allowed to switch party affiliations on the day of a primary election but only if they sign a pledge vowing to support their new party - and mean it. In the days following the election, The Plain Dealer interviewed more than two dozen voters - most of them Republicans who crossed over to Democrats last week. None - including five who acknowledged lying about supporting the Democrats - were challenged. And several said poll workers never asked them to sign a pledge but gave them a Democratic ticket . . . . It started a few weeks ago when conservative radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh suggested that his Republican following cross over during the primary to vote for Clinton. Clinton, Limbaugh argued, would be easier for McCain to beat in November than Obama. In Cuyahoga County, dozens and dozens of Republicans scribbled addendums onto their pledges as new Democrats: I suspect partisans on either side will draw different interpretations from it. But here's another interesting tidbit out of the Mississippi exit poll. The conventional wisdom and to a significant degree the reality in many other states has been that Barack Obama has picked up the lion's share of Republican crossover voters. Not in Mississippi. According to MSNBC's exit numbers, Republicans made up either 12% or 13% of the voters in tonight's primary. And they went for Hillary Clinton by a decisive 3 to 1 margin. Big difference between Mississippi and Ohio, of course. In Mississippi it was an open primary. In Ohio, it was illegal. But either way you have to wonder if you're a viable contender for the general if your opposition is helping you along in the primaries. By fnord12 | March 12, 2008, 10:56 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president's policy." Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?" McCain: (Long pause) "You've stumped me." By fnord12 | March 11, 2008, 10:02 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link So what should be done? I'm not sure (and I'm thinking about it, hard.) For now, I'd just say that this is really, really scary. By fnord12 | March 10, 2008, 3:34 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Don't you think that hurts the rest of us in our effort to get to the truth from the principals in these campaigns? Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to "the relationship between the press and the powerful." A journalist should never do anything that "hurts" the powerful, otherwise the powerful won't give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a "journalist" on TV so candidly describe their real function. Update: Tucker cancelled. By fnord12 | March 10, 2008, 9:28 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link Bob Somerby has been hinting at this for years, but this is the first time he's come out and said it. And, looking at the list of people, it sure seems like he has a point (scroll down to Klein's Gaffe). By fnord12 | March 4, 2008, 3:51 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link It seems the kids today don't want to build bombs anymore. It's a real shame. By fnord12 | March 4, 2008, 3:47 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link
Link (8 page article). By fnord12 | March 3, 2008, 2:01 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: February 2008 | Main | Liberal Outrage: April 2008 » |