Obama's impending impeachment

Philip Bumps assessment of "Obama's Options on Default:Impeached if You Do, Impeached if You Don't", does not press the claim made in its title. If I were a betting man, though, I'd put money on it. John Boehner is unlikely  to develop the requisite personal qualities to risk his Speakership by putting the Senate's latest proposal up for a vote. Certainly not before the Thursday deadline for the U.S. to pay its bills (ok, before the Treasury runs out of money to pay its bills). Despite his past protestations to the contrary, Obama will need to issue an executive order to avert default. This would likely be based  on the 14th Amendment's public debt clause. Although the courts probably wouldn't hear a challange to this move - you would have to have suffered an injury as a result of this move to have "standing" to bring a suit (and the dispute would probably be regarded as a "Political Question" by the courts) - the House would waste no time in drawing up and passing articles of impeachment for President Obama. Of course there would be no conviction in the Senate; the House knows this. Which illustrates the underlying forces: The House Republican caucus members have no incentive to govern. They do have an incentive to return to their districts come primary time and sing to the heavens of their part in Impeaching President Obama, thus protecting their right flank and completing the almost-ritual of shutting down the government under a Democratic President before their second-term impeachment.

"Manager's Capitalism"

Thank goodness we have John Bogle, a vigorous, mentally thriving octogenarian/titan of finance, to tell it like it is:

What we’ve done is have you know, what I call in the book, a pathological mutation of capitalism from that old traditional owners’ capitalism to a new form of capitalism, which is manager’s capitalism. The evidence is quite compelling that today corporations are run in a very important way to maximize the returns of its managers at the expense of its stockholders.

          BILL MOYERS: Its CEOs.

JOHN BOGLE:Its CEOs, well, the upper level of five or six top officers. And they get enormous amounts of pay for actually doing very little. I’m a businessman. Listen, we all– we chief executives get an awful lot of credit that we don’t deserve. Real work in companies is done by the people who are getting themselves together and doing the hard work of making companies grow– 

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, these– 

JOHN BOGLE: every day. 

BILL MOYERS: These are the people who most often get laid off, right? 

JOHN BOGLE:They get laid off. And, of course, the ironic part of that is they often get laid off — used to be called downsizing. But, of course, in today’s America, it’s called right sizing. They get laid off. That reduces expenses. That increases earnings and that means the CEO gets more. 

Just think about the country for a minute. For an agricultural economy, 95 percent, 98 percent agricultural when this country came into existence. And even by 1850, half agricultural. Now it’s about, they moved from agricultural economy, to a manufacturing economy, to a service economy. And now to a financial service economy. And the financial service economy is what troubles me. Because it’s diverting resources from the investors [. . . ] (t)o Wall Street. To the investment bankers. The hedge fund managers. To mutual fund managers. And that is a negative to our societal values.

Bogle also frames the pathology of finance as "Investment vs. Speculation":

Now 82, Bogle is finishing his 10th book, “The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation.” 

What do you think of the critiques made by the Occupy Wall Street movement? 

We have one hell of a problem in this country, and it is not badly articulated by talking about the 99 percent and the 1 percent, although if you wanted to split hairs, we’d be talking about the 99.9 percent and the 0.1 percent. That’s really where the big problems are. At least 25 to 30 percent of that 0.1 percent comes out of Wall Street. 

The classic function of Wall Street is to direct capital to its highest and best uses. Well, let’s look at that. Last year, Wall Street directed about $200 billion in capital to IPOs and other long- term investments. But Wall Street was also an intermediary for $40 trillion worth of trading volume. So only one-half of 1 percent of what Wall Street does is capital formation. Most of the rest is short-term speculation. 

Can government fix our problems?  

The government can’t create jobs, although it can make it easier for corporations to create them. There is no regulation that will make people more ethical or moral. But it is the government’s role to establish a free, unbiased playing field where the economy can work its problems out. 

However, I do think we should reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. A bank should be in either the deposit-banking business or the investment-banking business. When banks become too big to fail, everybody knows they won’t be allowed to fail, so they get bigger. The banking system worked pretty well when investment banks were private firms with unlimited liability. Believe me, Lehman Brothers never would have had the problems it had if Lehman’s partners had been on the hook.

Let's be clear

There is politics as usual in Washington. Legislators from both sides of the aisle want to keep their seats and be well situated financially once they leave them. As a rule, they will please whom they have to - or think they have to - to ensure that this happens.

And then there is the current situation. Republicans in the House have refused to fund the Federal government - and threaten to refuse to pay the country's incurred debts - unless they can avoid funding a law whose passage they failed to prevent.
These actions and threats have already damaged this country economically. An actual government default could yield "economic calamity like none the world has ever seen." And yet the G.O.P. maintains these threats.

The people behind these actions like to refer to themselves as "patriots" and accuse the President of "treason." The G.O.P. has gone from openly undermining the President to, yes, holding the economic health of this nation and the world hostage to accomplish something that it couldn't through the legislative process. My purpose in writing this is to point out the obvious, which can be difficult to see in real time: threatening your own country with dysfunction and financial catastrophe in order to further your own electoral interests is far closer to treason than patriotism.  

What is science?

I recently came across a humanities professor's assessment of science (Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty.) This person doesn't understand science at all. And maybe it's not his fault, because scientific education rarely gets into the philosophy of science. A little bit goes a long way: 

There is no certainty in science. Scientific "truths" represent a provisional consensus among those who scrutinize the relevant experiments. While it may not be the smoothest process, if a relevant experiment supports a theory, the theory will gain support if continued experiments continue to support it (and the theory is a defeasible proposition to begin with). See how the theory of general relativity came into acceptance for an example. 

Furthermore, the frontiers of scientific understanding force man to cope with experimental results beyond his intuitive grasp. Quantum mechanics gives us a world that is unpredictable, to say the least. 

 I don't want to force collegians to spend hours upon hours in a lab, but I do think that educated people need to understand that science, at its heart, is a process rather than a set of conclusions (for its conclusions only lead to more questions - questions that can't necessarily be answered through the scientific method.) 

The Guardian, First Amendment erosion . . . Journalism's endangered mission and broken spirit

Ken Auletta's profile of the Guardian's Editor and survey of its recent history illustrates conditions accounting for our currently intimidated media: regarding editor Rusbridger's decision to pursue the Murdoch phone-hacking story to its end, a Guardian reporter observes that "[Rusbridger] has a really useful piece of equipment that most editors don’t have, which is a spinal column." Here's what happens upon publishing public-interest facts (that never should have required publication in the first place): 

On July 18th, Rusbridger received a call from Oliver Robbins, the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, alerting him that agents would be coming to the Guardian’s offices to seize the hard drives containing the Snowden files. Rusbridger again explained that the files were also on encrypted computers outside England, but his reasoning did not sway Robbins. Rusbridger asked if, instead, his staff members could destroy the files themselves, and Robbins consented. That Saturday, Rusbridger told associates to take the five laptops from the bunker to the basement and to smash the hard drives and circuit boards in front of two agents from the G.C.H.Q.

Regarding the First Amendment,

 Even if the Guardian was censored, [Rusbridger] was confident that the Times would be free to publish. Abramson was less certain. “I did worry about that,” she told me. She felt that the Obama Administration was trying aggressively to criminalize leaks. In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the Administration’s director of intelligence, asked the paper’s Washington bureau to withhold certain details. Clapper warned that, if the full version were made public, the Times “would have blood on our hands,” Abramson recalls. The paper complied with the request. But, to emphasize that the government could not expect the Times to withhold information that is in the public interest, she travelled to Washington to meet with Clapper. During the meeting, he urged her not to publish the Snowden material. “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” she told him. (A spokesman for Clapper disputed this account.)

Clapper, it should be noted, has perjured himself before the Senate without even a veneer of remorse.

This spirit of The Guardian, personified in its Editor, is the spirit required for a free press to be anything more than a mouthpiece for the powerful. The paper endorses no party or organization out of course. While liberal, it is liberal in the original sense - free and discursively open. This is partly accounted for by its relative independence from financial pressures - "The Guardian doesn’t need to be profitable, so long as its losses are reduced and the trust can continue to subsidize them with its other businesses." - but its financial losses must be reduced, at some point, in order for its voice to remain heard. 


Journalists frame public conversations and debates, ideally serving as moderators between the public and the powerful. Such debates are the foundation for change, their absence the basis for inertia. In this case, the inertia regards the continued erosion of the role being described (or, to put it in Constitutional terms, the First and Fourth Amendments). But who can be counted upon to host such debates when the powerful don't want to have them? Editors and journalists with more fortitude that we might regularly be able to ask of our scribes. 

Midnight Blue, Stanley Turrentine

I love the head - harmonies, delayed gratification, casual transition into the solo.

Cut out the cut blocks

Last week 49ers defensive tackle Ian Williams had his ankle broken when "Seahawks right guard J.R. Sweezy dove at Williams’ left knee and continued to roll in his legs."

There's no place for this at any level of football. Helmet above the knees or a 15 yard penalty.