Category Archives: Pols and Pundits

Elena Kagan, Out And Proud Neo-Liberal

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Update (May 18): As solicitor general, she intervened on behalf of Monsanto’s right to contaminate non-genetically modified food with GM food, in Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed.

Update: Just to clarify the reference to neo-liberal, Elena Kagan has extensive ties to Goldman Sachs, D.E Shaw, and to Larry Summers on her resume. In other words, her so-called progressive positions are in the service of the kleptocracy.

Update (May 15 PM):

The Boston Phoenix has this, substantiating the main point of the Cockburn piece I’ve posted below it:

“On matters of executive authority — where the judicial branch has been a vital bulwark against post-9/11 “war on terror” civil-liberties violations — Kagan’s record indicates an ideological departure from Justice Stevens, who authored watershed detainee-rights opinions and organized the five-justice majorities that struck down other Bush administration power grabs. Continue reading →

State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933

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The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why.  Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.

“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told  their stories  about concentration  camps and massacres.  The experience  was also  captured  unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”

Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………

“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”

Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.

The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.

Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.

The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”

“Compassionate” Conservatism: Statist Propaganda

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Let me put this as bluntly as possible. A state cannot be “compassionate.” Policies might have well-intentioned goals, but they are policies – that is, legal and administrative enactments, often backed by force, that must be followed by whoever falls under their jurisdiction, regardless of their state of mind.

On the other hand, compassion is  a quality of heart and intention. An involuntary A non-voluntary action consequent to a policy cannot be compassionate. Obedience to a legal requirement cannot be compassionate. Compassion can be understood only by the context and the state of mind of an individual.

Libertarianism is not..should not be…and cannot be… compassionate.

Instead, it is the attitude to government policy and law that best allows human beings to act with the compassion each is capable of. To force “compassion” on people who don’t want to be “compassionate” is simply force, just as surely as if you were forcing anything else on them that they didn’t want. What looks like “compassion” to you might, after all, look like “expropriation” to me.

“Compassionate” policies might indeed achieve some immediate goal that makes some group of people more satisfied than they previously were. But it surely makes another group unhappy in order to do so. Now, the trade off might..or might not…be worth it. But the entity making that utilitarian calculation isn’t an individual, it’s at best a committee of hacks, at worst, a mafia of thugs….or worst of all, some economic model cooked up in a Harvard professor’s study.

By transferring “compassion” to the state, “compassionate conservatism” encourages people to become less compassionate personally. People actually become meaner. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already being taxed at a third to half their money, effectively. Even the good lord only asked for ten percent.

More on the subject by Robert Ringer, The Tea Party Goes Docile:

(Note: I don’t necessarily agree with Robert Ringer’s other views on defense. I don’t see a necessity for the US to be on a perma-war footing that involves aggressive wars overseas and an extensive network of bases. As a libertarian, I endorse a strong defense but one that’s decentralized and limited to volunteers, not mercenaries. It would be based on universal ownership of and training in firearms and would refrain from interfering in foreign internal affairs. This would go along with a decentralized government, supported by state and citizen militias. Most of all, I endorse economic freedom and prosperity as our greatest defense. The more attractive the US is as a trade partner, the less foreign states are going to hurt their own economic interests by turning hostile.

Far from strengthening the country, anti-market economic policies and a perpetually intrusive foreign policy are draining money, time, and energy from it.

(Nonetheless, I don’t think we can disarm unilaterally “at one fell swoop,” without opening up a can of worms, now that the government has actually created multiple foreign threats by its belligerence).

“I repeat what I said earlier: If anything, I believe the tea-party rally on tax day was far too docile. It once again demonstrated just how intimidating the far left can be. Not only intimidating, but clever.

How so? The BHO oligarchy has managed to change the Big Question from ”Is Obama a socialist?” to ”Is the tea-party movement dangerously immersed in racism, hate speech, and violence-prone affiliations with paramilitary groups?” Never sell the Saul Alinsky crowd short when it comes to turning every negative around and pointing it in the direction of its accusers.

I honestly believe that Der Fuhrbama believes his verbal skills are so powerful that he can embarrass the tea-party people into submission. He may be a lightweight in most respects, but he’s a lightweight with an abundance of (over)confidence. The tea-party people had better take a page from Rules from Radicals and press down twice as hard on the accelerator, lest they lose their momentum long before November 2.

Docile simply doesn’t cut it. Just ask the compassionate conservatives who are now in the process of going down in flames.”

Nassim Taleb: Krugman And Friedman Are Dangers To Society

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….and Tyler Cowen is a “bull-shitter” ….and other insights, as Joe Weisenthal chats with Nassim Taleb.

With a command of several disciplines, from finance and mathematics to poetry and philosophy, Taleb knows how to state an interesting concept in clear and engaging terms.

I’m not a fan of Nouriel Roubini. But after reading this, I figured if Taleb thinks the guy is “robust,” there must be more to him…or maybe they just hang out together at Davos.

(I have recently warmed up to NR for admitting that gold could fall below $1000).

“Eliot Spitzer was not robust because a single sex scandal derailed his career.

Nouriel Roubini is robust because he has vulva castings on the wall of his apartment, and it doesn’t derail him at all.

[Actually, Taleb has it wrong here. Spitzer fell because he went after Hank Greenberg and Henry Paulson, when Paulson had the power of the Treasury behind him and Greenberg is central to the whole AIG-Goldman business, even though the MSM will tell you otherwise. Roubini, on the other hand, never said anything that got in the way of anyone powerful…..in fact, his pronouncements have served them well].

Understand this dichotomy, and you’ll begin to understand Nassim Taleb’s conception of a robust society where we wouldn’t have financial crises like the one we just came through.

Still don’t get the significance of the Spitzer and Roubini examples?

Ok, let’s use a financial example.

When Jerome Kerveil lost billions for SocGen, it wasn’t because his trades specifically cost the firm billions. It was because, in the process of liquidating $50 billion or so of assets, the bank depressed the market to such an extent that they lost billions.

Had SocGen and Kerveil been a tenth of its size, that same liquidation wouldn’t have cost the bank much at all.

Thus SocGen was not robust, but a similar firm 1/10th as big would have been.

[Lila: Is this back-handed support for “too big to fail”?]

All of the above are examples given to us by The Black Swan author during a recent night out in Manhattan.

That came about due to some interactions we had over Twitter, which Taleb is using to publish a hundreds of aphorisms that many find to be brilliant, obnoxious, arrogant, and addicting.

More than anything else, Taleb is obsessed with robustness, a topic he returned to several times during our night out.

It’s something he first started hitting on in The Black Swan, and as the Spitzer, Roubini, and SocGen examples demonstrate, it’s a very broad concept.

Norman Mailer, says Taleb, was robust, because “he had six mistresses” and nobody cared. The chairman of a large bank worth $100 million is not robust, because a blackmailer who has knowledge of some infidelities could extort him for $75 million.

[Norman Mailer’s milieu was different from the banker’s….So could we say that “robustness” is adaptability to one’s environment?]

Our conversation, over 3 plates of oysters, two servings of shrimp, and a few drinks* ranged from fitness (we both share an interest in evolutionary fitness and the teachings of fitness guru/economist Art De Vany), finance, global warming, and who is a danger to society.

One of the biggest dangers to society.

There were two names he insisted I include: Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman.

“Paul Krugman is a danger to society!“

“He uses the wrong mathematics, that’s how I knew he was a fluke.“

Why? It’s because Krugman is pushing to create a society that is less robust. Taleb, who characterizes himself as a libertarian, even goes one step further:

“The definition of a robust society: where Paul Krugman could exist without harming others.“

Even worse though is Krugman’s fellow NYT pundit, Thomas Friedman, who with his book about globalization, “is the biggest danger.”

I challenged Taleb on his anti-expert mentality, and told him my contention that much of the appeal of someone slamming these luminaries is that it makes normal people feel good about themselves.

He kind of sidestepped the question, saying that there are plenty of experts who he doesn’t slam, like, say, dentists, because their knowledge, and their arrogance isn’t dangerous. What’s dangerous is the arrogance of someone with the power to influence policy.

After dinner, we talked fitness, and he asked me how I became familiar with Art de Vany. I told him it was through the blogger and econ prof Tyler Cowen, which immediately set Taleb off.

“That guy’s a bullshitter,” noting that Cowen admits to writing about books he only reads parts of.

“How can you write a review of a book you haven’t read?” presumably referring to this Slate review.

His advice to Cowen: “Read much fewer books, read them slowly, turn off your internet connection, and then come back.”

[Lila: Ah, but Cowen has flourished academically and he might even end up in a government position, all without reading the books he writes about…how much more robust can you get than that?]

Correction: Apologies to Prof. Cowen for aspersing him unintentionally. I meant, Taleb says he doesn’t read the books he writes about, which is quite a different thing…. Taleb was apparently referring to a Salon review by Cowen of “Black Swan” that ticked off Taleb….

As the night ended, Taleb gave me a brief ride in his White Lexus Hybrid towards a better place to pick up a cab. As we left the parking garage, a couple walked in the direction of the car, and he made a comment about not wanting to run them over.

Unless the guy was an economist, in which case,  that would be a “benefit to society.”

Rick Ackerman: Headlines Misread The Market

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“Trader Rick Ackerman interprets the cheer-leading in the headlines:

“Could the newspapers simply be misinterpreting the signs? It would certainly seem that way. To take the headlines cited above, we see oil’s price surge as having absolutely nothing to do with a pick-up in demand. Rather, the push toward $90 a barrel represents speculative excesses in the futures markets, exacerbated by the reluctance of traders to take short positions.

How could they, when, on any given day, a terrorist with a missile launcher could cause the global price of crude to double instantly by scuttling a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz?

As for “bets on growth” pushing stocks higher, it is not bullish speculation that has been driving up shares for the last 13 months, but rather a vast excess of liquidity in the financial system.

As for the rise in T-Note yields to four percent, we seriously doubt this is being caused by competition from expansion-minded borrowers in the private sector; rather, it comes from the rising fear among lenders that they will be repaid in a currency whose value looks all but certain to fall precipitously in the years ahead.

If the central bankers truly believe that strong economic growth is about to trigger inflation, why do they continue to hold the federal funds rate near zero?“

Gold, Silver, and “Suspicious Foreigners”

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Mark Mitchell comments on the CFTC hearings and the manipulation of trading of gold and silver derivatives (read IOUs):

“Maguire added: “What’s going to happen, if you’re an Asian trader, or a non-Western trader, who has no loyalty, or doesn’t care about homeland security or anything else, who says, now wait a minute, if I can establish in my mind that there is 100 ounces of paper gold, paper silver for example, for each ounce of real silver, than I have a naked short situation here that I can squeeze and they can go on the spot market which is basically a foreign exchange transaction, short dollar, long silver to any amount they want – billions, trillions — whatever they want, and they can take this market, squeeze this market, and blow it up…”

In other words, the problem isn’t just that criminal naked short sellers manipulate the metals market downwards. It is that they have created a condition where a foreign entity can merely demand delivery of real metal to induce a massive “squeeze” that sends the price of metals skyrocketing, putting huge downward pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, says Maguire, with prices rising, “for 100 customers who show up there is only one guy who is going to get his gold or silver and there’s 99 who will be disappointed, so without any new money coming into the market, just asking for that gold and silver will create a default.”

This would be a point, except…except..

1. This kind of fraudulent activity in the markets in the West is going to be seen by most foreigners as a direct act of financial aggression against them, not just domestic market participants. You can’t admit that your entire market system is rigged in favor of US and European banks, and then expect that the rest of the world is just going to stand there and not retaliate in some way…with justification.

Turnabout is fair play. Defense is not offense.

2.  I doubt that Chinese, Saudis or any other foreigners are interested in squeezing the dollar, since they are the primary holders of dollars. In international markets, the dollar is still the reserve currency and most people save in it. Nor is the American middle class, loyal or disloyal, going to want a weaker dollar. They earn their money in dollars. The only people likely to attack the dollar are speculators, who will do it because they see a gain to be made from it. And the people most likely to do it successfully are the same people who are involved in manipulating it in the first place...the corrupt bankers and financiers who’ve got the most to gain in this and the least to lose.

Nothing that Paulson, Greenspan, Geithner, Summers, or Bernanke have been doing adds up to anything like a “strong dollar” policy. They’ve done everything but shout “bail” to dollar holders.

Propaganda Nation: Libertarian Labels

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Robert Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

Tyler Cowen has listed from “his gut” the 10 books that have influenced him the most. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is not on the list. None of Mises’s books are on the list. Keynes makes the list. Of Keynes, he writes:

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.

Which raises the question for me, “Why does Cowen even care what Austrian economists call themselves?” If he can’t put a Mises book on a list of ten books that influenced him,when Human Action is the greatest economic text ever written, yet finds room for Keynes and “his new ideas,” I have to classify him a Keynesian, pure and simple.”

Why does Cowen care? It’s all about subversion of language…

“Libertarianism” thus defined (or, more accurately, labeled) comes to mean something not very removed from “liberalism”….

…which today has moved so much to the left that in many areas it’s indistinguishable from communism.

Which means you get to call yourself a libertarian but still push for the same programs and policies that the left-liberals push for.

Which keeps you within the range of “respectability.”

And keeps you out of SPLC lists that have you rubbing shoulders with the Pentagon shooter and anyone else who decides to get physical with the state apparatus.

Mind you, at our little blog, we have no quarrel with communism or communists. We don’t think they’re evil. We just don’t want them turning us into guinea pigs for their experiments. When they feel an urge to test the limits of human malleability, we suggest that they try it out first on their spouses and off-spring. See how that turns out after a generation, and then give us a call and we’ll talk….

Jesse Ventura Censored On Huff Po

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You don’t have to be a fan of Jesse Ventura to ask why Huffington Post, a liberal outlet, would be so illiberal as to prevent someone from even questioning the government’s version of what happened on 9-11.

Ventura didn’t say he subscribed to any “conspiracy theory” or alternative explanation. He didn’t claim he knew what happened.

He just questioned the government. That was enough to shut him down. And shut him down not in a conservative, pro-censorship venue, but on a leading “liberal” site. An online site, at that.

What does that say about “liberalism” today?

Shocks And Doctrines: WSJ Uses Quake To Critique Klein

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Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal adds some nuance to Naomi Klein’s black-and-white picture of Milton Friedman’s contributions to the Chilean economy, noting how prosperity and effective enforcement of building codes have protected Chilean victims of the recent earthquake from the devastation that Haiti suffered:

“In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein’s tedious 2007 screed “The Shock Doctrine”—the Chicago Boys weren’t just strange bedfellows to Pinochet’s dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. “If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys’ advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.

As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.

In “The Shock Doctrine,” Ms. Klein titles one of her sub-chapters “The Myth of the Chilean Miracle.” In her reading, the only thing Friedman and the Chicago Boys accomplished was to “hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.” Actual Chileans of all classes—living in the aftermath of an actual shock—may take a different view of Friedman, who helped give them the wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew.”

My Comment:

Friedman, was, of course, from an Austrian perspective, far from being an ideal free-marketer. In a devastating piece, “Milton Friedman Unraveled,” (1971), Rothbard even questioned his claim to be called a free marketer of any kind, listing among many sins, his advocacy of withholding taxes and of an absolute dollar standard.

All true, no doubt. But the fact remains, even if it was only in a very constrained sense that he advocated more freedom in the markets, he did advocate it. And as the article above suggests, contra Rothbard, even a limited advocacy of market freedom is better than an outright assault on it.