Side-eye

Archives

April 30, 2013 by Rachel

Is Austerity a Mistake?

A new paper from researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogo ff, has set the wonk world ablaze by debunking a 2010 study from Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Growth In a Time of Debt. Reinhart and Rogoff claimed to have found a “main result is that…median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” According to Michael Konczal,

This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget states their study “found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.” The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that “debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.”

However, when their results were replicated by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, they discovered a trifecta of mistakes and biases that essentially invalidated the study – whimsical weighting of national economies, selective exclusion of data that didn’t support their premise, and a coding error on the original Excel spreadsheet that failed to include five countries in the overall average.

ESCANDALO! Liberal economists who had expressed serious misgivings about the study since it was released quickly jumped into the fray, from Matt Yglesias’s thorough series of critiques to Paul Krugman’s history lesson on the tumultuous love affair that number-crunchers must have with their harsh mistress, Excel. However, as exciting as it is to watch guys in glasses argue over coding and spreadsheet columns, Jonathan Chait reminds us that the Rogoff and Reinhart paper was A) the starting point for the Bowles-Simpson Commission and B) the intellectual justification for a massive, devastating rise in unemployment here, and in Europe.

However, if any politician who used the flawed Rogoff and Reinhart study as a justification for embracing austerity measures changes their position now that it has been proven to be junk science, I will mail $5.00 to your home tomorrow.*

*First come, first serve until I run out of $5 bills. So, basically one person.

Archives

April 14, 2013 by Rachel

Tokenism 101

Last week, whether you parked at the 50 Yard Line or rolled on the Informative Avenue, the GOP’s much-vaunted new Latino outreach efforts did not appear to be going well. Even Senator Don Young’s non-apology apology for casually tossing out a racial slur – “in my day, the word meant something different,” which, no it didn’t – indicated a much deeper problem.

Similarly, when Rand Paul went to Howard University last week, he offended the audience by assuming that they – elite students at a top university – did not know that Frederick Douglass was a Republican, while appearing to forget entirely about the Republican Party’s more recent racial history. According to Jamelle Bouie,

At no point did Paul acknowledge Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater’s racial demagoguery, or Ronald Reagan’s decision to denounce “welfare queens” and embrace “states’ rights” while campaigning in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil-rights workers were murdered by white supremacists. Instead, he focused his time and attention on the 19th-century history of the GOP…I’m not sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance. It would be one thing if Paul had gone to Howard eager to listen as well as speak. Instead, he condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP. “He didn’t say anything I didn’t expect,” said one student, a senior majoring in sociology and economics. I couldn’t agree more.

The modern Republican party believes that the only kind of racism that truly exists is reverse racism, and that affirmative action exemplifies this. However, this point of view results in considerable cognitive dissonance, as it requires overlooking basically any statistical or objective form of measurement (income levels, educational achievement, professional advancement, incarceration rates, political offices, and so forth) in favor of more…dubious explanations. Mitt Romney, in addition to his infamous 47% comments, offered one such insight after he was booed by the NAACP: “…if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy – more free stuff.”

“They,” meaning considerably more than 47% of the country (including 93% of black voters, 71% of Latinos, 73% of Asian Americans, 69% of Jewish voters, 67% of Native Americans, 76% of gay voters, 60% of youth under 30, and 55% of women), were not buying what the Republicans were selling. Due to these staggering deficits, Republicans find themselves with a particularly shallow bench of minority talent. Yet somehow, the powers that be within the GOP have decided that it is not their product, the actual policies, that voters have rejected; the problem lies only in the packaging.

However, with this dearth of qualified conservatives of color, over and over again Republicans have pulled up unripe backbenchers (Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson) who promptly embarrassed themselves on the national stage – because if you don’t believe in affirmative action, chances are you won’t execute it very well.

If Republicans intend to win over any voters outside of their core white male demographic, simply re-wording their mission statement more politely won’t cut it. Nor will sprinkling in a few Spanish words, or having them read by a person of color; it’s a form of condescension that is both blatant and deeply offensive. According to reporting by Buzzfeed,

One former RNC field staffer, who is Hispanic, described a culture of cynicism among his predominantly white colleagues when it came to minority outreach. He said that in his office, whenever they were notified of a new Republican outreach effort, they would pass around a Beanie Baby — which they had dubbed the “pander bear” — and make fun of the “tokenism.”
“Any kind of racially specific campaign activity was often treated with skepticism by white staffers,” he said.

I know that feel, bro.

Archives

April 7, 2013 by Rachel

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shady


Video: In this animation, see how investors can create companies and trusts in offshore jurisdictions, where an estimated one-third of the world’s worth resides. The Washington Post, April 6, 2013.

Oligarchs, politicians, and one-percenters around the world went into panic mode today as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released details from a multi-year investigation of a mammoth leak of documents that describe the dirty dealings associated with offshore companies and trusts in a number of notorious offshore tax havens.

The ICIJ’s analysis of the coordination between shady offshore banks and large, equally shady European giants like HSBC and UBS on behalf of wealthy elites from around the world uncovered a massive, methodical, and frequently illegal transfer of trillions of dollars per year from nations to individuals. While politicians in the US and Europe lament their deficits and resort to austerity, the “…cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year,” landing in one of many unregulated hideaways where both ill-gotten gains and those who scammed, stole or extorted them are shielded.

The collapse of the Greek and Cypriot banking systems, the Russian Magnitsky Affair, and a shocking variety of other scandals and meltdowns are directly rooted in this deliberate effort to shield criminals from accountability, taxation and prosecution. While the techniques used by large banks, island governments, and unethical accountants are quite complex, the ICIJ provides a comprehensive breakdown of the specific workarounds tavailable to the very wealthy.

By the numbers: economist James S. Henry claims that between $21 trillion and $32 trillion of wealth is hidden in offshore tax havens – equal to 1/3 of the world’s wealth, according to the Washington Post, or approximately the entire economies of Japan and the United States combined; ICIJ found that “Among the 4,000 U.S. individuals are listed in the records, at least 30 are American citizens accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct.” 2.5 million documents have been leaked by confidential informants to the ICIJ. 86 reporters representing The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and dozens of other media outlets in the ICIJ have been sifting through the documents, using both data mining and more traditional investigative techniques, for over 15 months.

While not every individual and corporation who banks in the Caymans is laundering money, evading taxes, or perpetrating financial fraud, every category of high-level financial crime requires an offshore account. By not recognizing the regulations, laws, or judicial rulings of any country, a network of tiny islands around the world have created a shadow system for the often-illegal flow of money from corrupt politicians, embezzling executives, and tax-dodgers.

According to the Post, these crooked dealings represent an existential threat to the ability of governments to fund themselves, and lobbying efforts by anonymously funded interests, including the banking and accounting industries and a conservative nonprofit group, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, have stymied the attempts of lawmakers to rein in the hemorrhaging of tax funds as deficits rise. Founded by Andrew Quinlan, a senior economic analyst for the Republican National Committee, and Daniel J. Mitchell, a Senate Finance Committee staffer and tax expert for the conservative Cato Institute, CF&P refuses to divulge whether their donors are based offshore. “I don’t think it matters what percentage of the money comes from which donor,” Quinlan told the Washington Post.

Thomas Ward, the cofounder of Commonwealth Trust Ltd. (CTL), one of the worst offenders on the banking rolls, shares Quinlan’s coyness. “I regard myself as an ethical person. I don’t think I intentionally did anything wrong…I certainly didn’t aid and abet anybody doing anything illegal.” Now, however, email chains in the leaked documents show that Quinlan was fully aware of many clients’ probable criminal activity.

It has long been an open secret that corrupt politicians and individuals stash legal and illegal profits in a sketchy alternate economy where they are neither required to contribute to the infrastructure that created their wealth, or answer for their crimes. It’s high time that the mask of anonymity is stripped away, and the names and actions of the ultra-wealthy are exposed to the bright tropical sunshine.

Archives

March 2, 2013 by Rachel

We’re all being trolled


Much has been made over the past few weeks of two of the younger, more attractive members of the Phelps clan publicly splitting with their mother and grandfather, Fred Phelps, and deciding that maybe God doesn’t hate dead soldiers and gay people so much after all. Per Westboro Baptist Church spokesman Steve Drain:

“‘We can’t control whether or not somebody decides, when they grow up, that they don’t want to be here,’ Drain said. ‘Those two girls were kind of straddling the idea that they wanted to be of the world but that they would also miss their family, the only thing they ever knew. If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls, yeah, they’re going to hell.'”

The girls, Megan and Grace, understandably take a less brimstone-oriented tone in their own statement, a blog post, natch, titled after a lovely song by earnest indie darlings the Avett Brothers, which begins with a Batman quote. Megan asserts that, “At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context.”

And this brings home a long-held suspicion: the Westboro Baptist Church is performance art.

I have only one piece of evidence to support this thesis, but it’s quite compelling:

This video is amazing and amusing on multiple levels, but it’s at the 4:37 mark that the jig is up. The upside down Canadian flag. It’s too perfect, right? Think about it: if a very clever pro-equality activist were to design the most offputting, ludicrous straw man to make the opposing case, could they improve upon the Phelps family? Sure, you could make them Nazis, but having them be Baptists is just much more elegant. And for a group as media-savvy and well-funded as they are (tens of thousands of protests in dozens of cities ain’t cheap), they are cognizant of the affects of their actions, and that they are widely considered to be the most hated family in America. That’s not a title you earn by accident. I’ve encountered a number of true believers in my day who are committed enough to engage in many acts well outside of general social conditioning, like plastering graphic full-color photos of mangled fetuses on the side of their vehicle, or gleefully describing their certain doom to strangers. But the one thing that none of those diehards would ever in a million years do, is to laugh at their own beliefs. The way these WBC members are giggling at the absurdity of the lyrics as they sing them? These people are in on the joke, y’all.

Furthermore, if you take into account the degree to which gay rights have advanced since 1991, when WBC first started waving fluorescent signs reading “Fags Eat Poop,” and how they have stepped up their game at crucial moments (advancing from picketing the funerals of AIDS casualties to picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, for instance, a move both designed and guaranteed to alienate even their natural allies), it’s pretty clear that they are demonstrating the reductio ad absurdem endgame of homophobia with absolute self-knowledge and clarity of purpose. What makes it art, you ask? The little touches, as when they made a weekly target of a local hardware store which sells Swedish vacuums. The reasoning behind this choice is every bit as convoluted as you might expect, because the choice itself is completely arbitrary. The sole purpose, I believe, is to discredit a specific point of view with a scorched-earth thoroughness and a delightful soupçon of whimsy.

Have you ever seen Andy Kaufman and Shirley Phelps Roper in the same place? I REST MY CASE.

Take notes, Joaquin Phoenix: this is how it is done.