It looks obvious

A very interesting discussion, on a Canadian TV channel, about the great depression and the New Deal. Really worth the time watching:

Last summer we saw the wonderful play Frost/Nixon on broadway. The play tells the story of an interview, or a series of 4 interviews, the Nixon gave in 1975 to David Frost. Today while checking some details of Woody Ellen’s new movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which is also very good) I discovered that the play was adapted to the big screen with both Frank Langella, as Nixson, and Michael Sheen, as Frost.

I’m really looking forward to see the movie, if it as good as the play it will be a great movie.

I stumbled on this very interesting lecture about the effect of Globalization on culture diversity. In this lecture Tyler Cowen examine the effects of Globalization on music and take a very interesting look at the claim that Globalization is “flatting” culture in the lowest common denominator. Take yourself an hour and listen - if nothing else, the music is really good.

This blog should be very interesting:

Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book - a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development - to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we’ll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary - the comments posted on this blog - will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of “capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool” probably won’t be used. But we’re genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)

I’ll open this thread of links with good news, and it is coming from no other than New Jersey. There are many questions about privacy in the era of facebook, It will take time until we will be able to sort the right formulation of privacy and the limits we set on corporations like google from using the knowledge the gather about us. But it is even more important to keep the government from abusing its power and protect our privacy:

The Supreme Court of New Jersey became the first court in the nation yesterday to rule that people have an expectation of privacy when they are online, and law enforcement officials need a grand jury warrant to have access to their private information.

In state proceedings, the ruling will take precedence over what attorneys describe as weaker U.S. Supreme Court decisions that hold there is no right to privacy on the internet.

It was somewhat amusing when in France the court ordered Amazon to stop the practice of Free Shipping, in the name of protecting competition and consumers interests. This story joins it proudly . This is how you justify government monopoly on alcohol in Sweden:

Imagine that you suddenly get this question from a tourist. Perhaps you know exactly how you should answer. If not, it might be good to know what the results of a recent survey showed: The Swedish alcohol monopoly saves many lives each year. If strong beer (Note: beer with more that 3.5% alchohol per volume), wine and spirits were sold in grocery stores consumption would increase by 30%, researchers believe. And they stress that this is a conservative estimation—the increase could be more. They calculate that there will be approximately 1,600 more deaths each year, 14,000 more assaults and around 16 million more sick days.

So the monopoly makes a huge difference for a lot of Swedes. And because it will only be around as long as people want it to be, we at Systembolaget have to do everything in our power to make sure our customers are satisfied.

This has resulted in our having perhaps the world’s largest assortment of strong beer, wine and spirits. (And an assortment one not finds in Stockholm and Gothenburg, but also in Jokkmokk and Töreboda.)

But if am I already bashing the Europeans for their lack of respect for Human Rights and individual’s liberty I can’t avoid the Brigitte Bardot story. The idea that people stand a trail for insulting others and the lack of freedom of speech in France is simply sad. As a side note it is also very interesting how it is more important to some people, Bardot including, to treat animals like humans while they are treating other humans like animals…

French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred” over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers.

[...]

Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim traditions and immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.

Reading the NY Times is often upsetting, but than once in awhile it demonstrates why it is an important newspaper. This story dig deep into who are the military analyst appearing on our evening news show, what motivate them and what is the quality of the analysis we are getting. It is not a short reading, but it is highly recommended.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

And the last link for this post will focus on the true conditions of bloggers. Sometimes considered an hobby or a more comfortable for those who chose it as profession the true nature beyond the risk of blogging reveals here:

Please come to rescue me!

Today, in commemoration of the date, our collected links will be about our taxes and how they are being allocated:

When executives in the private sector engage in accounting games, resulting in loss of their investors money, they can end up in jail. However, instead of applying the same rules, or even tougher standards to the accounting standards of the public money — which was “invested” involuntarily — we have completely different set of rules:

The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it’s virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department’s brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can’t be…

Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that “material amounts” in its financial reports can’t be substantiated.

That it can’t be audited “goes to the heart of the department’s credibility,” says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. “Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren’t clean.”

The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn’t envisioned until 2016.

We can also discuss the Tax Withholding and wonder what would be the effect on the tax rate:

Did you have to write out a check to the IRS for $5,581 this past April 15? If you had to do such a thing next year, would you think of it as your civic duty or would you consider it a crime that only the government could get away with?

And we will conclude the day festivities with the Beatles Cartoon - Taxman:

Are Neoconservatism a Jewish movement? No:

It is a matter of record that a small group of Jews played a leading role in the 1970s and 1980s in originating what has come to be known as neoconservatism, and many of neoconservatism’s most prominent spokesmen today are Jewish. The sensibility or persuasion they cultivated did in some measure grow out of reflections on Jewish ideas and experiences: the biblical teaching that all human beings are created in God’s image; the importance of tradition, family, and education; the horrors of the Holocaust; the enduring need for free nations to stand ready to take action, including military action, against the enemies of freedom; and Israel’s struggles against terrorism, autocracy, and religiously inspired fanaticism.

Yet no account of neoconservatism would be respectable if it omitted mention of eminent non-Jews such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat from N.Y. state and, as assistant secretary of Labor in 1965, author of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which created a national storm by arguing that the deterioration of the black family was a central cause of black poverty; Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Democrat from Washington state and Cold War liberal around whom many emerging neoconservatives rallied in the 1970s; Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a professor of government at Georgetown who staunchly represented the U.S. at the United Nations under Ronald Reagan; Father Richard John Neuhaus, founding editor of First Things and incisive analyst of religion and public life; William Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, author of the bestselling Book of Virtues, and today host of a popular talk radio show; and James Q. Wilson, for many years a professor of government at Harvard and for decades an outstanding scholar of American politics.

More important, however, than the diversity of backgrounds of those who have elaborated it, is the fact that neoconservatism does not rest on Jewish premises. Nor does it seek to advance specifically Jewish goals.

George Will remind us that the Economy is always in ‘Crisis’ in election years and that we should keep some sober perspective:

In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its arithmetic ruthlessly: When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was 65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today’s retirement age would be 75.

[...]

So far during this “crisis,” the homeownership rate has declined just three-tenths of 1 percent since it peaked in 2004. At 67.8 percent, it remains higher than it was when President Bill Clinton left office.

Subprime mortgages are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime borrowers are not making their payments. Casting this minority of a minority as victims of “predatory” lending fits the liberal narrative that most Americans are victims of this or that sinister elite or impersonal force, and are not competent to cope with life’s complexities without government supervision.

The politics of this may, however, be more complex than the compassion chorus supposes. The 96 percent of mortgage borrowers who are fulfilling their commitments, often by scrimping, may be grumpy bystanders if many of the other 4 percent — those who found the phrase “variable rate” impenetrably mysterious — are eligible for ameliorations of their obligations.

Ed Mlavsky take a critical look at Churchill’s famous statement that “Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others.”:

The very basis of the democratic process is, of course, the one(old enough)-person, one-vote axiom, but with some de facto assumptions like sufficient literacy to cope with registration procedures and ballot forms that are frequently unnecessarily (and deliberately?) complicated. Interesting idea really, since about half of any group of people – especially large ones like electorates – are, by definition, of below average intelligence, and that lot are tacitly expected to make ‘informed decisions’, despite clear evidence that many of them – and, for that matter, no few of the above average group too – don’t have the appetite for becoming well-informed, as evidenced, for example, by the sensitivity of the polls to the latest most often basically irrelevant gaffes by each of the contenders for office. Those gaffes may prove decisive, however, but how can they be avoided during campaigns as long and tedious as that in which the current adversaries have been engaged?

The list of links I collected today have no unified theme, aside from the fact I find them interesting enough to share with other.

We read a lot of criticism about the famous OLC memo, written by John Yoo that allow the suspension of the fourth amendment in cases of “domestic military operations”, including a petition to UC Berkeley to fire John Yoo. I agree with the most of the criticism, and would argue that the “War on Terror” was used in a very generously as an excuse to increase the powers of the executive branch, and to limit our human rights, far and beyond the necessities of war time temporary needs. However it is important to think about the concept of war fought at home, and its implications for the ways the government should act, and this post trying to briefly give some other point of view:

Fourth Amendment rules are all about proportionality; by contrast, military strategy often requires overwhelming force. I don’t know how a Fourth Amendment lawyer could be expected to weigh in on questions of military strategy to try to respect some sort of Fourth Amendment constitutional values. What would the lawyer say — that the Army should break into enemy safehouses only during day time, for fear that breaking in at night could interrupt the enemy’s “period of nighttime repose”? That they should “knock and announce” their presence before the Marines take a hill? It’s hard to know how the two worlds are supposed to mix; they are just totally different.

A very interesting review of what inflation is, its causes common fallacies about it and suggestion how to fight it:

The first question to be asked today is not how can we stop inflation, but do we really want to? For one of the effects of inflation is to bring about a redistribution of wealth and income. In its early stages (until it reaches the point where it grossly distorts and undermines production itself) it benefits some groups at the expense of others. The first groups acquire a vested interest in maintaining inflation. Too many of us continue under the delusion that we can beat the game — that we can increase our own incomes faster than our living costs. So there is a great deal of hypocrisy in the outcry against inflation. Many of us are shouting in effect, “Hold down everybody’s price and income except my own.”

Dave Barry in , as always, entertaining column about taxes:

My point is that, as you do your taxes, you should remember where your tax dollars are going, and recognize that you, as a citizen, have a moral obligation to prepare your tax return with the same degree of conscientiousness that Congress exhibits in spending your money. So let’s get started on your taxes! Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Step one is to gather together your tax forms, your financial records, and, if you plan to itemize your deductions, at least two liters of vodka.

Step two is to go through all of your receipts, separate the ones that are for tax-deductible expenses, and mail them to me, because I need some. The way my accounting system works is, when I get home at night, I take off my pants. (Usually inside the house.) If I find what might be tax-related documents in my pockets, I put them into a two-ply grocery bag labeled TAXES.

At tax time, I go through this bag, hoping to find receipts that say things like, ”BUSINESS SUPPLIES TO BE USED FOR BUSINESS — $417.23.” Instead, I find some ticket stubs for Shrek the Third and several hundred wadded-up snippets of paper on which the only legible printing says ”Thank You.” Now, because I am mentioning Shrek the Third in this column, I can legally deduct the $10 cost of my ticket, plus a large popcorn, which I estimate cost $53, for a total of $63, or, rounding off, $250. But that still leaves me a little short of what I need, deductionwise.

This is where the vodka comes in. If you go to the official Internal Revenue Service site on the Internet (www.irs.gov) and start poking around among the thousands and thousands of forms, instructions, bulletins, etc., you would be amazed at the range of deduction options. For example, according to IRS Rev. Proc. 2006-50, certain individuals recognized by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission may deduct up to $10,000 for whaling expenses. Could this deduction apply to you? Think about it! I, personally, have done many things that I later could not remember; being a recognized Eskimo whaler would not be the weirdest of these. So go ahead! Find an empty box on your 1040 form and write ”Harpoons — $9,990.” (Don’t claim the full $10,000, because that might arouse IRS suspicion.)

And last, a short presentation of collected photographs taken by a very talented friend of mine.

If hell exist, they are preparing in it a special place for Prof. Henry Kissinger. That being said, this interview of Mike Wallace with Kissinger from July 1958 is nothing short than fascinating. It is fascinating not only because of Kissinger, and his answers, but also because of the high quality of the interviewer. One cannot ignore also the rather interesting position Kissinger took on his future boss…

A should be simple upgrade of the blog’s platform become a rather hectic mess today, but with the assistant of my hosting service everything seems to be in order now. In the meantime here are some links I collected today: 

A new research that checked people cooperations in different cultures had rather interesting finding:

Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.

[...]

When players had the option to punish, the groups tended to display more cooperation, which is consistent with past research showing that the ability to punish can help foster cooperative behaviour. However, in some countries, ’selfish’ players also punished cooperative players, perhaps as a means of revenge for punishments they had suffered, or maybe as a way of punishing do-gooders for showing them up. The researchers called this ‘anti-social punishment’, and the groups where this occurred tended to cooperate less.

Anti-social punishment occurred more in those countries, including Belarus and Saudi Arabia, shown by surveys to have less faith in the rule of law and less belief in civic cooperation. In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. "The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect," he wrote.

I saw two interesting stories related to Clinton’s campaign today. The first, how ironic, discuss the fact that Clinton’s campaign is failing to pay its share in its employees healthcare insurance:

Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.

Clinton, who is being pressured to end her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda.

[...]

But the unpaid bills to Aetna were at least two months old, according to FEC filings.

They show the campaign ended last year owing Aetna more than $213,000 for “employee benefits.”

During the first two months of the year, the campaign did not pay down any of that debt. In fact, it accrued another $16,000 in unpaid bills last month, and it finished the month owing Aetna $229,000.

The second story is about Clinton’s campaign manager involvement with the same sub-prime mortgages Clinton now attacking so fiercely:

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, earned about $200,000 on the board of a Long Island subprime lender that charged prepayment penalties - a practice that Clinton, a critic of the subprime industry, now seeks to eliminate.

Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records. 

[...]

Williams, 53, isn’t the only Clinton insider who made money from an industry the candidate has demonized. A month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton ally and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros grossed more than $5 million in stock sales and board compensation from Countrywide Financial, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders. 

The truth is that both stories aren’t, in by themselves, important at all. The importance of these stories, for me, is to demonstrate how during political campaign we are being distracted by flood of unimportant information that aim in creating images that have very little with the reality. We are being told that Clinton is amazing executive, which she might or might not be - her struggling campaign isn’t the best demonstration of high quality management. And we are being bombarded with guilt by association which is many times completely irrelevant.

One comment about the sub-prime mortgage is due here. The fact that Clinton, and many other politician, choose to attack the practices of lending for minorities is noting but typical hypocrisy. Well into the crisis, lender were encouraged to use easier criteria when lending to minorities and poor families, a practice that is now being called predatory and irresponsible. I’m not arguing that those lenders aren’t guilty of being horrible bankers, but the involvement of other , political, motivations played major role in the creation of those lending practices - as we can see from the occupations of those Clinton’s aides.

When discussing political campaign, and campaign rhetoric - I find this story, which I scanned from William F. Buckley book - The Unmaking of a Mayor - hilarious: