ideology

29 Nov 09

To what extent should they try to energize their electoral prospects by hitching themselves to the powerful but volatile strain of populism — characterized by anti-elitism and deep skepticism of government — that Ms. Palin has come to embody?
The renewed potency of populist conservatism has been on display since the summer,

14 Nov 09

Note to Jamie Dimon: Repeating Something Doesn’t Make It True « The Baseline Scenario

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Wall Street chutzpah ideology Wall street fear mongering

Does Jamie Dimon really believe this? Doesn’t he run a bank when he isn’t writing op-ed articles? The last time Johnson & Johnson issued debt, it used eleven underwriters. The time before that, it used thirteen. (I only chose J&J because it was the example picked by Scott Talbott, a financial industry lobbyist.) Now, do J&J’s dozens of subsidiaries around the world all get local lines of credit from the same bank? Does J&J really want to be dependent on a single source of credit? (Actually, if that single source has a government guarantee, it could do worse.) If that’s actually true, someone please let me know. But the idea that one of the world’s largest companies would need a one-stop shop for financial services is what defies basic business sense.
I still haven’t heard a good argument about why the nonfinancial world has changed in a way that requires investment banks that are larger than $270 billion. I also haven’t heard a good argument why a $270 billion investment bank needs to be attached to a $1.5 trillion domestic retail bank (think of Bank of America).
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- Just because you keep saying the same thing over and over again doesn’t make it true.

12 Nov 09

The Betrayal - Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com

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Teddy Roosevelt inequality betrayal plutocracy ideology

There was once a political party that came out against concentration of wealth. They called for regulation of food, drugs, and big corporations. Called for “square deal” for the average American. And their robust spokesman, the leader of their party, said this of his countrymen:

“There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.”

That party was the Republicans, a bit more than century ago, led by Teddy Roosevelt.

01 Nov 09

Book Review - 'Ayn Rand and the World She Made,' by Anne C.Heller - Review - NYTimes.com

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Ayn Rand redux ideology

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism,
Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review
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- Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.
- Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching.
- The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.
- Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount.
- Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet Communism to the New Deal.
- In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.
- but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche
- Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness, as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.
- The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee.
- ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Dede Scozzafava, Republican, Quits House Race in Upstate New York - NYTimes.com

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conservative strategy upstate ideology

Effective immediately, the R.N.C. will endorse and support the Conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman,” the party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, said. “Doug’s campaign will receive the financial backing of the R.N.C. and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bill Owens on Tuesday.”
Ms. Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman and former small-town mayor, was nominated this summer by Republican county leaders who quickly found their choice second-guessed by the party’s conservative wing. Many officials in the district, a vast expanse from the Vermont border through the Adirondacks to Lake Ontario, were deeply resentful of the outside involvement.
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- They’re trying to bang 435 elections across the United States into the same mold,” said James Ellis, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. “It’s a detriment to democracy.”
- The swell of opposition to Ms. Scozzafava was reflected on conservative radio talk shows and in a heavy diet of television advertising supporting Mr. Hoffman that was financed by conservative groups.
- Ms. Scozzafava did not say whom, if anyone, she would endorse. Polls in the district showed that Mr. Owens and Mr. Hoffman were each drawing about 35 percent of the vote;
- The decision by Ms. Scozzafava to suspend her campaign is a clear victory for conservatives in the party at a time when there has been a pitched battle among party leaders over whether Republicans needed to change their ideological appeal as part of an effort to recover from the losses of 2006 and 2008.
- A primary is unfolding in Florida, where Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate, is facing a challenge from a conservative, Marco Rubio, the former Florida House speaker. Mr. Crist has come under fire from conservatives for, among other things, supporting Mr. Obama on his economic stimulus package.

20 Oct 09

Vatican Plan to Oversee Conversion of Anglicans - NYTimes.com

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religion anglicans conservative strategy Vatican ideology

18 Oct 09

Digital Domain - Broadband Access, Yes, but Some Don’t Subscribe - NYTimes.com

"It also blithely overlooks the fact that the infrastructure is already in place to provide speeds of 3 to 10 Mbps to 94 percent of American households."

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broadband distribution ideology

No less than 96 percent of households either subscribe to or have access to broadband service, according to an F.C.C. task force, which presented a status report to the commission last month.
The most interesting question here is the one that the F.C.C. can’t answer: Why have 33 percent of American households that have access to broadband elected not to subscribe? The reasons “are not well understood,” the report says. A survey focusing on the nonadopters is under way.
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- But age is clearly another factor. Survey data supplied by the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that just 30 percent of Americans who are 65 or older use broadband, compared with 77 percent of the 18-to-29 age group. (Which raises an interesting question itself: only 77 percent?)
- It also suggests that several cities be selected to test the installation in every household of 1-gigabit-a-second connections — or more than a thousand times faster than the speed that the F.C.C. uses to define downstream “broadband.”
- The estimated costs for universally upgrading the minimum speed of the nation’s broadband connections to 3 Mbps would be about $20 billion, according to the report. Getting to 10 Mbps would be $50 billion. To play in the same league as Finland, with its 100 Mbps service promised to every citizen by 2015, would require $350 billion.

Column: And I'd like to thank God Almighty - Opinion - USATODAY.com

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evangelism ideology sport as religion

Questioning Sports Evangelism - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.com

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evangelism ideology sport as religion

David Rohde's insights into what motivates the Taliban - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

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hypocrisy media ideology Afghanistan rohde

Op-Ed Columnist - Misguided Monetary Mentalities - NYTimes.com

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conservative myths debunked ideology Fed ideology one year later

What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred importance of maintaining the gold value of one’s currency, but a set of associated attitudes: obsessive fear of inflation even in the face of deflation; opposition to easy credit, even when the economy desperately needs it, on the grounds that it would be somehow corrupting; assertions that even if the government can create jobs it shouldn’t, because this would only be an “artificial” recovery.
The truth is that the falling dollar is good news. For one thing, it’s mainly the result of rising confidence: the dollar rose at the height of the financial crisis as panicked investors sought safe haven in America, and it’s falling again now that the fear is subsiding. And a lower dollar is good for U.S. exporters, helping us make the transition away from huge trade deficits to a more sustainable international position.
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- And in practice the dollar’s decline has become a stick with which conservative members of Congress beat the Federal Reserve, pressuring the Fed to scale back its efforts to support the economy.
- In recent weeks there have been a number of statements from Fed officials, mainly but not only presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks, calling for an early return to tighter money, including higher interest rates. Now, people in the Federal Reserve system are normally extremely circumspect when making statements about future monetary policy, so as not to step on the efforts of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, which actually sets those rates, to shape expectations. So it’s extraordinary to see all these officials suddenly breaking the implicit rules, in effect lecturing the Open Market Committee about what it should do.

08 Oct 09

The Coburn amendment - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

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reactionaries react conservative myths ideology politics

04 Oct 09

Capitalism and financial crashes : The New Yorker

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capitalism's paradoxes cap v cap credit crisis origin NB and the beat goes on ideology

This is essentially what happened in the lead-up to the Great Crunch. The trigger was, of course, the market for subprime-mortgage bonds—bonds backed by the monthly payments from pools of loans that had been made to poor and middle-income home buyers. In August, 2007, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising, the market for subprime securities froze
a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market.
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- But then banks, which couldn’t estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse, confirming Shin’s point about the market imposing uniformity. An immediate collapse was averted when the European Central Bank and the Fed announced that they would pump more money into the financial system. Still, the global economic crisis didn’t ease up until early this year, and by then governments had committed an estimated nine trillion dollars to propping up the system.
- The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.
- Consider the freeze that started in August of 2007. Each bank was adopting a prudent course by turning away questionable borrowers and holding on to its capital. But the results were mutually ruinous: once credit stopped flowing, many financial firms—the banks included—were forced to sell off assets in order to raise cash. This round of selling caused stocks, bonds, and other assets to decline in value, which generated a new round of losses.
- A similar feedback loop was at work during the boom stage of the cycle, when many mortgage companies extended home loans to low- and middle-income applicants who couldn’t afford to repay them.
- In most cases, lenders had no intention of holding on to the mortgages they issued. After taking a generous fee for originating the loans, they planned to sell them to Wall Street banks, such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, which were in the business of pooling mortgages and using the monthly payments they generated to issue mortgage bonds
- When a borrower whose home loan has been “securitized” in this way defaults on his payments, it is the buyer of the mortgage bond who suffers a loss, not the issuer of the mortgage.
- This was the climate that produced business successes like New Century Financial Corporation, of Orange County, which originated $51.6 billion in subprime mortgages in 2006, making it the second-largest subprime lender in the United States, and which filed for Chapter 11 on April 2, 2007.
- Senior management’s primary concern was that the loans it originated could be sold to Wall Street.
- What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share.
- C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than for maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.
- Prince’s experience at Citigroup provides an illuminating case study. A corporate lawyer by profession, he had risen to prominence as the legal adviser to Citigroup’s creator, Sandy Weill. After Weill got caught up in Eliot Spitzer’s investigation of Wall Street analysts and resigned, in 2003,
- He was under pressure to boost Citigroup’s investment-banking division, which was widely perceived to be falling behind its competitors. At the start of 2005, Citigroup’s board reportedly asked Prince and his colleagues to develop a growth strategy for the bank’s bond business. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, who served as the chairman of the board’s executive committee, advised Prince that the company could take on more risk. “We could afford to seek more opportunities through intelligent risk-taking,” Rubin later told the Times. “The key word is ‘intelligent.’ ”
- Whether Prince knew it or not, he was channelling John Maynard Keynes, who, in “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” pointed to the inconvenient fact that “there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.” Whatever the asset class may be—stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities—the market will seize up if everybody tries to sell at the same time.
- Keynes wrote, “It is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs—a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops.”

02 Oct 09

Op-Ed Columnist - The Wizard of Beck - NYTimes.com

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hate radio conservative myths debunked GOP ideology

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P.

01 Oct 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Where Did ‘We’ Go? - NYTimes.com

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the enemies within ideology

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

29 Sep 09

28 Sep 09

The textbook economics of cap-and-trade - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

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reactionary hypocrisy climate policy ideology

22 Sep 09

Editorial - The Rights of Corporations - NYTimes.com

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corporations as individuals ideology law

W21st NYC's Library tagged ideology → View Popular

Republicans Eye the Tiger of Populism - NYTimes.com

Note to Jamie Dimon: Repeating Something Doesn’t Make It True « The Baseline Scenario

The Betrayal - Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com

Book Review - 'Ayn Rand and the World She Made,' by Anne C.Heller - Review - NYTimes.com

Dede Scozzafava, Republican, Quits House Race in Upstate New York - NYTimes.com

Vatican Plan to Oversee Conversion of Anglicans - NYTimes.com

Digital Domain - Broadband Access, Yes, but Some Don’t Subscribe - NYTimes.com

Column: And I'd like to thank God Almighty - Opinion - USATODAY.com

Questioning Sports Evangelism - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.com

David Rohde's insights into what motivates the Taliban - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Misguided Monetary Mentalities - NYTimes.com

The Coburn amendment - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Capitalism and financial crashes : The New Yorker

Op-Ed Columnist - The Wizard of Beck - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Where Did ‘We’ Go? - NYTimes.com

Even in Capitalists’ Bad Times, Europe’s Socialists Suffer - NYTimes.com

Even in Capitalists’ Bad Times, Europe’s Socialists Suffer - NYTimes.com

Something New on the Mall - The New York Review of Books

The textbook economics of cap-and-trade - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Editorial - The Rights of Corporations - NYTimes.com

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