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Ellsberg, Assange, Manning: The Pathetic Search for Heroes

Martin Peretz — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:31:43 +0000

I'm in Spain and my copy of the Daniel Ellsberg edition of the Pentagon Papers is in Cambridge. So I do not have access to what I recall as the five volume edition he gave us. He had inscribed in the first volume his "personal thanks for your help in ending the Vietnam War." Unlike Ellsberg, I never was for the Vietnam war. I was against it from the beginning...and worked (not so modestly) to end it. Still, I recognize the importance of Ellsberg's turning. After all, he had been in the small Washington entourage of Robert McNamara and later in the Vietnam circle of Edwin Landsdale. He was an obsessive, of course. And an obsessive on both sides of the issue.

The sudden arrival of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and his documents immediately reminded me of Ellsberg, who in very short order also arrived from wherever he was and whatever he was doing to inform us that Assange also reminded him of himself. And, of course, Pfc. Bradley Manning was hovering in the background with his leak of a rocket attack in Afghanistan. While drawing distinctions, Ellsberg relates the two others to himself.

Assange and, to a lesser extent, Manning are already heroes. So here is roughly my view of them...or at least of Assange. Well, it's not exactly my view but that of Tunku Varadarajan who writes brilliantly and regularly for the Daily Beast.

When asked at a London press conference whether he thought his leaks would compromise national security, Assange’s “visibly annoyed” response (per this report) stripped bare the adamantly adversarial quality of his mind-set: “You often hear that something may be a threat to U.S. national security. This must be shot down, whenever this statement is made.”

For the security of the numerous Afghan informants who work with U.S. troops, he cares not a jot. As The Times of London has pointed out, hundreds of names of such local collaborators in the war effort can be found in the documents in the WikiLeaks archive, including details of their villages. How does Assange justify putting these people at mortal risk? Predictably, he does not, taking refuge behind a weasel-worded insistence that he and his team had edited the material so that there was “harm minimization,” a morally teasing phrase that might, so ironically, be part of the Pentagon’s own lexicon. So are we to assume that the Afghan informants whose names were left in the WikiLeaks texts amount, in Assange’s reckoning, to an acceptable quantum of collateral damage in his Quixotic war against the warmongers?

What does Assange want? Does he really want the free world to cringe under constant threat from al Qaeda? If we fail to defeat this threat, what does Assange think will happen? Do we have any sense that he cares? Or is it the case, frighteningly, that Assange doesn’t really “want” anything, in a programmatic, civilizational sense, and that these explosive episodes of “gotcha” leaks are an end in themselves, a personal moral terminus, a sort of self-righteous, self-congratulatory onanism?

I believe that the outbursts of unfiltered history will be a big problem for the president. To be sure, there are people in his entourage who are thrilled by what will end up being an enormous embarrassment for Obama. He cannot be seen to be surrendering the whole category of military secrets. More important, he cannot and should not give up the argument about tactics and strategy impelled on us by the terrorists in whose defense the lawyers have accepted the aseptic definition of asymmetrical war.

Health Care Reform Popular? Not So Fast.

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:39:57 +0000

Democrats have been sending around a new Kaiser poll showing that 50% of Americans approve of the Affordable Care Act, while only 35% disapprove. The poll has gotten a lot of liberal play today, but a little caution is in order. Kaiser has always drawn more favorable numbers than other polls. The polling average still shows more Americans disapprove of the new law than approve:

Now, it's true that disapproval isn't very high -- the pollster.com average puts the approval gap at less than four percentage points, which means the country is basically split on the health care law. The fact that polls produce such wildly divergent results shows that health acre reform has become a low-salience issue. (You don't usually get wildly divergent poll results on questions that people have well-formed views on.) The Republican base thinks it's the Death of Freedom, but public opposition was largely related to the ugly, drawn-out Congressional debate. Now that the debate is over, most Americans are tuning the issue out.

The upshot here is that the triumphal conservative narrative that Obama's health care reform is wildly unpopular and undid his presidency is almost certainly wrong. (And letting reform die on the one yard line would have been an epic political disaster.) But it's just not accurate to pick out one poll to suggest that health care reform is actually popular.

Who’s The Happiest One Of All?

Martin Peretz — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:24:12 +0000

This is one of those slightly hokey surveys that measures the happiness of nations. Done by the Gallup World Poll and written up for Forbes by Francesca Levy, its results are not entirely surprising.

Rich countries generally do better than others, although Saudi Arabia ranks 58th just ahead of Pakistan. Almost three times as many Saudis are “struggling” than “thriving.” On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates (which is a country made up of wealthy scions and resident ex-pats) and Kuwait register respectably 20th and 23rd. So how about Egypt? It shares the 115th ranking with Zimbabwe, India, Morocco, Syria and...Afghanistan! Just ahead of People’s China which, at 125, leads a cohort of Congo (Brazzaville), Sudan and Djibouti.

Where did the Palestinian Territories show up? At the 96th spot, ahead of Turkey 103. And I thought that the Palestinians were suffering, really suffering. Of course, suffering is also a subjective category. How could you not be suffering with Israel right next door but checking in at 8th spot, just in front of Australia and Switzerland, right behind Canada. Moreover, these numbers must also take into account the Israeli Arabs whose unhappy striving surely was not ignored.

The top five are Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the paradigmatic welfare states. Then Costa Rica and New Zealand. And, yes, Canada and Israel. This is a wonderful world. I wish the U.S. were more fully in it.

Number of the Day

Alexander C. Hart — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:15:29 +0000

California may be warm, but no amount of dreaming is going to fix its budget. Governor Schwarzenegger (who is now less popular than the recalled Gray Davis) is trying to close a $19 billion budget hole--a little more than a fifth of last year's budget. He's ordered state employees to take:

3 unpaid furlough days per month

As a result, over 150,000 state employees are taking a substantial pay cut. The governor's executive order lasts only until California passes a budget, but it's easily possible that more furloughs will follow: last year, most state employees had to take 46 unpaid days off, a 14 percent pay cut. I'd write about the other steeps cuts the state is making, but California still lacks a budget, even though one was due five weeks ago. Last year, the budget fight lasted so long that the state began paying its employees in IOUs in an attempt to conserve cash. Among states with budget messes, California is king.

The All-Gain, No-Pain Conservative Fiscal Diet

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:50:43 +0000

J.D. Foster, the Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy at the Heritage Foundation, explains why conservatives should oppose tax hikes even while deploring deficits. Let me quote and respond to it, not because it's remarkable but because it's an utterly unremarkable statement of conservative fiscal dogma:

Even under normal circumstances, at just over 18 percent the federal tax burden is already too high. Opponents of even higher taxes need to keep this in mind, just as they need to remember that the excessive budget deficit for 2010 and in the following years is not the result of a shortfall in revenue but is due entirely to an attempt by Obama and friends to increase the size of government substantially and permanently. Whereas federal spending as a share of our economy is typically just above 20 percent, under Obama’s budget it hits 25.1 percent, according to his own numbers, and stays around 23 percent for the balance of the decade.

Foster begins by asserting that federal revenue at 18% of GDP is "too high." Isn't it a little bizarre that we should set an arbitrary figure for how high revenue should be? Revenue, in the long run, should be equal to spending. And federal spending ranged between 20 and 23% of GDP during the entire reign of Ronaldus Magnus:

But Foster is perfectly the view of the conservative movement that tax revenue levels do not need to bear any relationship to actual spending.

Foster's next point:

Those who fight tax increases are not weak or hypocritical about the budget deficit. The deficit is dangerously high and must come down, or else we risk a fiscal crisis, as a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report makes clear. But there is a higher priority than reducing budget deficits caused by excessive spending, and that is to protect taxpayers from the insatiable appetite of the federal goliath. Lower taxes would allow individuals to keep more of their own property. It’s their money, not the government’s money on loan or bequest.

Here we have argument #2: Taxes "belong to the people." It's a matter of abstract philosophical right, one which frees conservatives from having to consider any relation between revenues and government spending. On to #3:

Lower taxes generally mean a stronger economy. The favorite tax hikes of the big-government brigade, like higher taxes on capital income and higher tax rates on small business, are precisely those that would do great harm to the economy now and in the long run.

Some economists believe that lower taxes on capital increase growth. But those models are based on replacing the lost revenue from low taxes on capital with other revenue sources, or by reducing expenditures. There's no justification for reducing taxes on capital and financing it by deficit spending. Moreover, the most recent evidence hardly suggests that Bush-era tax rates are more conducive to growth than Clinton-era tax rates:

Finally, argument #4:

Lower taxes also mean that, deprived of sustenance, the federal goliath must go on a diet. Spending will have to come back toward historical levels to avert the crisis of which the CBO warns. This would be a victory for the economy, for workers, and for individual liberty.

Does lower revenue force spending to come down? The evidence suggests just the opposite.

Imagine a man who has to lose weight. Either he needs to eat fewer calories or burn more of them. Conservatives are arguing that he should exercise less, because this will force him to eat less food. Foster writes, "Lower taxes are evidently what the American people want, which is especially galling to the tax-increase crowd." And it's true -- Americans want to keep their spending and tax cuts too. Diets that promise to let you spend all day on the sofa and still eat lots of delicious food are also popular.

Americans Hate Everybody

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:46:24 +0000

Arnold Schwarzenegger now reviled in California even more than the hated Gray Davis:

The new survey by Public Policy Polling (D) gives Arnold an approval rating of only 19%, with a whopping 71% disapproval. By contrast, Gray Davis's personal favorable rating is a much healthier (but still awful) 32%, with an unfavorable rating of 44%. Respondents were asked: "Who would you rather have as Governor now, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gray Davis?" The answer turned out to be Davis 44%, Schwarzenegger 38%.

I suppose you could try to explain this by constructing some elaborate theory about how Schwarzenegger has bungled the politics or veered too far from the center. Or you could conclude that economic crises make incumbents unpopular.

Thoughts From Tehran

Barry Gewen — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:05:59 +0000

We were all dreamers then. When we overthrew the Shah, we thought a bright new age had dawned. Tyranny had been defeated and soon we would vanquish all the secularists, Westernizers, imperialists, and Zionists. Our glorious revolution would be the model for millions, not only in the Middle East but among Muslims everywhere. Islam would be restored to its rightful place at the center of people’s lives, and piety would replace politics. Some of us even imagined that all the prophecies of the Koran were about to come true.

Such dreams. Could we not have seen that Arabs would never follow Persians, and that Sunnis would not consider a Shia revolution to be a true Islamic revolution? We are not a vanguard, as it turns out. Instead, we are dangerously isolated, with enemies on every side. And so we have worked very hard to find allies—but what allies are these!

Bashar Assad is completely unreliable, a sheer opportunist. He would make a deal with the Zionists tomorrow if it suited him. Fortunately, he continues to hope for a Greater Syria, a Syria that strides across the world stage instead of the puny state that it is. It’s good for us that his reach exceeds his grasp. But if reality ever seized his fevered mind, he could abandon us as quickly as he has abandoned his other allies when it has suited his purposes.

Hamas? Let us not kid ourselves. They would hate us if they didn’t need us. And if the Muslim Brotherhood takes control of Egypt, the Palestinians of Hamas are certain to discover their true feelings about Persian Shiites.

In Iraq Bush did us a favor by getting rid of that atheistic dictator Saddam Hussein and bringing in a Shia government. There’s no question that our influence in Iraq is greater than when that Sunni slaughterer of millions was threatening us. And yet what kind of Shiites are these Iraqis? Did they rise up when Saddam waged war against us for eight long years in the 1980s? No, they were loyal subjects to our greatest enemy and fought by his side in his brutal war of aggression against us. They have proved one thing to us: They are Arabs before they are Muslims.

Praise be to Allah for Hezbollah in Lebanon! They are genuine friends, pious Shiites committed to ridding the region of the Zionist entity. They remind me so much of what we were like when our revolution was young, and we must do whatever we can to assure that they remain strong.

And yet we must face the truth: This is an alliance not of strength but of weakness. Hezbollah cannot stand on its own—they would barely exist without our money and arms. They will never be able to take control of Lebanon simply because no one can—the country is divided into too many sects and sub-sects. Even I can’t fathom them all. Besides, the Zionists and Western powers would never permit a Hezbollah takeover; and our great “ally” Assad would probably oppose it as well.

What’s worse, should our imperialist or Zionist enemies ever attack us militarily, we can’t be sure Hebollah would fight with us. We could ask them to fire rockets into the Zionist entity, but would they risk the inevitable retaliation and do it? It’s important to them, and to their credibility in Lebanon, that they be seen as Lebanese patriots, not proxies for us and our interests. It’s good for us that they are willing to harass the Zionists, even to the point of waging hopeless war against them (what is the Western phrase? “Useful idiots”) but we can’t ask more of them, nor can we expect them to provide more for us if it endangers their own country.

No, if we remain clear-headed, if we refuse to dream, we have to accept that in this perilous world we are alone, utterly alone. And here we can learn from the Zionists: When you are isolated and surrounded by enemies, your best friend is a nuclear weapon.

Of course our enemies want to deny us this ultimate security. I would be surprised if they said anything else. But when I read the debates in the West about how to stop our nuclear program, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The fools! Can’t they see that nothing will stop us? The Zionists have the bomb. So do the Americans, sitting to our west in Baghdad, and our eternal enemies the Russians, to the north. The Hindus have the bomb and even those unruly barbarians the Pakistanis have it. We are a great, a noble civilization, over 3,000 years old, and in our region especially, a civilization can only be great if it possesses nuclear weapons. No Iranian patriot denies this. Even President Ahmadinejad’s opponents understand that Iran needs the bomb.

This is a question of both national pride and national security. Our enemies continue to propose sanctions against us, and then even more sanctions, but they are fooling themselves if they think economic deprivation would cause us to change course. The crazier ones speak of the possibility of military action and some of the craziest demand it, because they claim that if we had the bomb we would promptly use it against the Zionist entity. This is the talk of fanaticism, of people unable to view the world from any point of view but their own. They really seem to believe that our leaders would sacrifice millions of Iranians to an inevitable nuclear retaliation, that in effect they would turn our entire country into one large suicide bomber.

But what would be the point when everyone knows that in a generation or two, Zionism will be finished? Before long, the Palestinians will outnumber the Jews, and the empty claim of democracy will be revealed as a sham. The Zionists have already lost most of their friends in Europe, and their Muslim friend, Turkey; in America the anti-Zionists are steadily gaining ground, even, we are told, among American Jews. It’s only a matter of time. All we have to do is keep the pressure on, and sit and wait.

Yet the crazies in the West could prevail. At the end of the day, perhaps after the next American presidential election, Washington and Tel Aviv could decide to bomb our facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and Arak, take out our factories and missile bases, even target universities to kill our scientists. And what will they have accomplished? They will not destroy our nuclear program, only delay it for a few years—and at the cost of a possible all-out war that nobody could win, a never-ending war that would require them to stage raid after raid year after year as we rebuilt. When I try to think of the consequences if the Zionists or the Americans bombed us, my mind reels.

Still, I cannot deny, Allah forgive me, that a part of me wishes they would bomb us. Our revolution has grown feeble. We are being forced to use ever harsher measures to suppress our opponents. The young are increasingly seduced by the hedonistic, decadent West; they take us seriously only when they experience the pain we can inflict in Evin prison. Sometimes, I think we are losing, that Islam is losing, and that everything we have worked for, sacrificed for, is coming to nothing. It’s at such moments as these that I wish for the bombs.

For if our “forms of persuasion” can’t bring the young back to the revolution, surely the bombs of the Zionists or the imperialists would. I can imagine no more effective means of solidifying public support for one, two, maybe three generations than Western aggression. Even today, after all, the fallen Mosadegh is spoken of reverently in the streets of Tehran. How much more powerful would be the memory of thousands of innocent martyrs who would lose their lives to the aggressors’ bombs?

But then another question immediately presents itself. What will happen when we get the bomb—what then? This is a formidable question indeed. Our enemies, even in the umma, would not sit back quietly. Even now, many in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States are urging the Zionists to bomb us. Certainly, an Iranian bomb would induce them to start up their own nuclear programs, and here we are truly caught on the horns of a dilemma: The effort to make us more secure could end up making us less secure. It’s a paradox, to be sure.

But perhaps it’s a paradox with a solution. What if we did everything to develop a nuclear weapon except take the final step, or what is called making the final twist of the screwdriver? Or what if we do what the Zionists have done all these years and build up an arsenal without ever acknowledging our nuclear capability? The Zionists play a parlor game in which no one is fooled. Still, it’s a game that has forestalled a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East. Why couldn’t we do the same? We will have to think all this through, and ponder very carefully. It may be that we have a great deal to learn from the Jews.

Barry Gewen has been an editor at The New York Times Book Review for over 20 years. He has written frequently for The Book Review, as well as for other sections ofThe Times. His essays have also appeared in World Affairs, The American Interest,World Policy Journal, and Dissent.

Oil Spills Everywhere

Bradford Plumer — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:33:16 +0000

BP has capped its leaking Macondo well, but that doesn't mean oil spills are now a thing of the past. Up in Michigan, a million gallons of crude have sloshed out of a pipeline into the Kalamazoo River. Governor Granholm has already declared the region a disaster area—and this may turn into the worst oil leak ever in the Midwest. According to the Michigan Messenger's Todd Haywood, this isn't a first-time offense for the pipeline owner: "Documents from the agency show that Enbridge Energy pipelines have leaked oil on 12 different occasions in Michigan since 2002."

So just how common are "smaller" spills like these? Surprisingly common, actually. The National Wildlife Federation has just released a new report tallying up the number of oil accidents in the past decade. The numbers are striking. Between 2001 and 2007, there were 1,443 offshore-drilling accidents in the Outer Continental Shelf, with 41 fatalities, 476 fires, and 356 "pollution events." Onshore, there have been 2,554 "significant" pipeline accidents between 2000 and 2009, with 161 fatalities. Kate Sheppard has a useful map charting all the incidents mentioned in the report:

What's more, there's good reason to believe the oil-spill toll is actually far higher than this. After all, it's not just existing pipelines and platforms that are a concern. A recent AP investigation found that there are nearly 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico, many of which were closed in the 1940s and 1950s, and the sealing jobs on many of these wells are in questionable condition. One key tidbit: "Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade."

Many of these abandoned wells do face the (small but real) risk of a blowout—it's not impossible for a well to repressurize, but much more typical are little leaks and natural seeps that are nearly impossible to detect. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) does sometimes spot oily patches around the Gulf, but, according to the AP, "MMS typically learns of a leak only when someone spots it by chance." And yet these tiny leaks add up in a big way—according to a 2002 National Research Council report, nearly 60 percent of the oil in North American waters comes from tiny little natural seeps like these. (Less than 8 percent comes from tanker or pipeline spills—the rest comes from runoff, airplanes, and boats.)

It'd be interesting to try to get a global picture here, too. Oil disasters are, after all, still quite frequent in developing countries. Over at Solve Climate, David Sassoon has some ghastly pictures of a massive oil spill near the Chinese port city of Dalian, where two pipelines exploded on July 16. Even though the Yellow Sea leak is smaller than BP's disaster, there seems to be a lot more oil hitting the Chinese shores—possibly because BP used so many dispersants to break up the crude and send it down to the sea floor. Worse, Chinese workers are cleaning up the oil with their bare hands (needless to say, that's not safe—as the CDC notes, coming into direct contact with the chemicals contained in oil can be hazardous):

It's a good reminder that oil accidents won't go away with a moratorium or two in the Gulf of Mexico.

Review: Obama on ‘The View’

Michelle Cottle — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:13:12 +0000

Say this for the president: He knows how to charm the ladies.

Obama’s sit down on “The View” this morning seemed to go about as smoothly as one could hope. POTUS stayed cool, confident, and charming as he answered questions ranging from “Why don’t we get out of Afghanistan?” to “Where is your message machine to combat the right’s?” to “Were you invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding?” (No. He was not.) His one clear moment of not knowing how to respond was when Joy Behar asked if Mel Gibson needed rage therapy. But refusing to wade into that mess can only redound to the president’s benefit.

In keeping with his audience, Obama played up the family stuff. He talked a lot about the adorableness of Malia and Sasha—even getting a bit feisty when asked if boys had yet entered the pictures—and brought up Michelle in a couple of humorous asides.

One overstep in this area: When explaining why he had agreed to sit down with the five yammering co-hosts, he told the group: “I was trying to find a show that Michelle actually watched.” Then he made some remark about how his wife just flips the channel on “all those news shows.”

How cute. The little woman doesn’t like hard news. Gag me.

More broadly, Obama achieved an important strategic goal by stressing again and again (and again) his focus on and efforts to shore up the economy. Asked by Barbara Walters to play The Rose and the Thorn (some game he apparently plays nightly with his family , in which they name the best and worst moments of the day), Obama started out by discussing the pain and suffering of Americans in these tough economic times. When Elisabeth Hasselback inquired if he was frustrated that, after all the hopefulness of his election, the country still remains deeply divided, he again mentioned the depth of the economic crisis and the controversial steps that had been necessary to address the problem.

He also made sure to cite specific steps that had been taken to stop the spiral toward a depression (such as the bank and auto bailouts), and he used Hasselback’s questions about how, with unemployment so high, he could claim that jobs had been “saved” to explain the difference between the ditch we’re still climbing out of and the depths to which we would have sunk without the stimulus and other measures. (Or at least, he tried to explain. From the look on her face, it was not clear Hasselback grasped how we could go from hemmoraghing private sector jobs to five months of adding them and yet still have a high unemployment. One must assume she was not the only person unable to understand, but what can you do?)

Just as important, Obama stressed legislation that his administration is currently hoping to pass to further help the situation. He mentioned his small-business aid bill more than once—making sure to toss in that he had stopped by New Jersey on the way in to sit down with a bunch of small business owners—and expressed his heartfelt hope that Washington politics wouldn’t somehow derail this effort to aid America’s entrepreneurs.

This is not to say it was all smooth sailing. The segment on Shirely Sherrod and race had me holding my breath, especially when the president commented that, while we’ve made tremendous progress, there is still a “reptilian” part of everyone’s brain that makes us “cautious” about anyone who looks or sounds different from us (which is, admittedly better than saying it makes us “suspicious,” which is where I feared he was going.) Still, my guess is that at least a few folks are going to self-righteously protest his assertion that there is none among us who doesn’t need to examine their racial attitudes now and again. Still, all things considered, he seemed to escape an absolutely no-win topic relatively unscarred.

Aside from that, POTUS hit all the points you’d expect: He praised American workers to the sky, took multiple swipes at the conflict-crazed media, and bemoaned the endless campaigning and politics-over-governing mindset of Washington.

The gals asked exactly the kind of direct but not hostile questions that most Americans are asking themselves, and Obama answered them in a way that most normal people who are neither policy wonks nor political hacks will appreciate, even if they don't agree with. It wasn't exactly must-see political tv, but neither was it an embarrassingly fuzzy gab-fest.

And, yes, he remembered to wear his American flag pin.

TV Watch >>

An Honest Question For Wehner Fallacy Advocates

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:59:05 +0000

Noemie Emery's cover story in the Weekly Standard, "Neither Roosevelt Nor Reagan," is basically one long exposition of the Wehner Fallacy. President Obama has failed, she writes, because he pursued an unpopular agenda that cost him his popularity. Had he hewed to the center he could have built an enduring majority but instead he fell victim to liberal hubris.

Now, we've heard this all a thousand times. Never mind that it's nearly impossible to find an example of a president who maintains popularity amidst an economic free-fall. Never mind that, up to this point, Obama actually is Reagan:

And never mind that Obama has already won numerous achievements of massive scale, and that it's impossible to know what he will accomplish in his remaining two and a half or six and a half years.

Forget all those things and assume that the Wehner Fallacy is utterly correct: Obama is a failed president, doomed to endure crushing defeat in 2010 and 2012 because of his liberal policies. How do you explain the fact that Republicans are even less popular than Obama?

If Obama's approval ratings stem from public opposition to his policies, then why are Republicans considerably less popular? After all, the public, emblemized by the Tea Parties, rejects Obama's big government and wants to repeal health care reform, stop new regulations, and oppose tax increases, right? That's the Republican agenda. But Americans hate the Republicans. Why is that? Is it possible to construct an explanation for this that remains true to their model of American voters as driven by ideological judgments rather than external events?

I understand that I'm dealing with propagandists, not actual analysts, so they prefer to ignore contrary evidence rather than explain it away. But I'm genuinely curious to see how they'd explain this inconvenient fact.

The Cleveland Conundrum

Jennifer Bradley — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:25:20 +0000

The Cleveland metro is an export powerhouse. Exporting industries employed more than 110,000 of the region’s workers as of 2008 (over 10 percent), and its economy is among the nation’s most export intensive.

So, if exports will be, and must be, a critical component of economic growth in the future (which is one of the messages of the new Export Nation report), Cleveland, and the other Great Lakes metros that are also intensely export oriented, are pretty well positioned, right?

Yes and no. A closer examination of Cleveland and other large metros in the Great Lakes shows the challenges they face in a global marketplace, and suggests what they need to do to compete on the world stage.

While the Great Lakes metros are generally quite strong on exports, their export growth has been lackluster. Only two Great Lakes metros (Des Moines and Madison) had better-than-middling export growth between 2003 and 2008. True, it’s harder to post big gains when your base is high, but growth rates of between 5 and 7 percent (or zero in the case of Detroit), when U.S. exports as a whole are growing at more than 9 percent, don’t bode well for future export strength.

Essentially, a lot of Great Lakes metros--and I picked on Cleveland in the title for alliterative purposes but this post could just as easily been called the Toledo, Dayton, Grand Rapids, or Great Lakes conundrum--are exporting things for which global demand is dropping or being met by other countries. Or, demand is fairly steady, but the number of workers it takes to meet that demand has taken a nose dive, which is what happened with Youngstown and the steel industry. And these metros aren’t coming up with new things (or services) for which demand is growing to export instead.

This, I think, is at the heart of the Cleveland, or Great Lakes, conundrum: Cleveland and most Great Lakes metros have unimpressive rates of innovation. Metros that aremanufacturing-oriented or export intensive (or both) tend to generate patents at much higher rates than other metros. But most Great Lakes metros underperform on innovation, given their high degree of manufacturing employment. Fifteen metros in the Great Lakes are manufacturing-intensive, meaning that they have more than 10 percent of their workers employed in manufacturing. Of these 15, only Detroit, Minneapolis, and Rochester exceeded the 5.15 patents-per-thousand-workers average of manufacturing-intensive metros nationwide. And only six of the Great Lakes metros had patent rates above the average for large metropolitan areas, regardless of their degree of manufacturing intensity.

“Innovate or die” is not just a mantra for Silicon Valley and other high-tech economies--it applies with equal or greater force to manufacturing. The region needs to ramp up its innovations within the manufacturing sector to fully realize the promise of a global-oriented export economy. The exporting industries that made them strong in the past, like autos or steel or appliances, are not necessarily the ones that will carry them to a strong future.

Breaking Down Obama's Big Education Speech This Morning

Seyward Darby — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:18:14 +0000

President Obama just delivered a major speech on education reform to the National Urban League—one of several civil rights group that, as I wrote last night, have been critical of key Obama reforms. The crowd at the Washington Convention Center welcomed Obama with a big cheer. And the president responded warmly but forcefully, devoting much of his hour-long remarks to defending the very programs the Urban League and other groups have disparaged.

Emphasizing many of the same points he’s used in previous education speeches, Obama told the crowd he supports good charter schools, although he realizes they are not a “magic bullet”; that he wants to hold teachers accountable, not punish them; that he supports standardized testing, but wants tests that don’t stifle classroom learning; that he wants to turn around the worst-performing schools, but include parents and the community in that ever-sensitive process.

Obama was particularly direct about Race to the Top, his signature program that awards competitive grants to states. Some critics say the program doesn’t do enough for, and could even hurt, minority students. Obama said that was “absolutely false.”

“Let me tell you, what’s not working for black kids … is the status quo," the president said. "What’s not working is what we’ve been doing for decades now.” Alluding to some recent congressional moves that would weaken the program, Obama said he would “fight for Race to the Top with everything I’ve got, including using a veto to prevent folks from watering it down.” (Earlier this month, lawmakers proposed slashing Race to the Top funds to pay for layoff prevention legislation, but that provision was ultimately stripped out of a war spending bill this week. Obama noted in his speech that he would keep backing efforts to find money to save teachers’ jobs.)

Obama's elevation of education reform may have been as interesting as his defense of it. He made clear he still sees it as the third pillar of a domestic agenda that includes health care and financial reform. And all three pillars, he suggested, are really part of a broader program for economic recovery. “I know some argue that, as we emerge from a recession, my administration should focus solely on economic issues,” Obama noted.

They said that during health care as though health care had nothing to do with economics. … Now, they’re saying it as we work on education issues. But education is an economic issue, if not the economic issue of our time. It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double for those who’ve gone to college.

Later, Obama added that, much like health care and financial reform, “fixing what’s broken in our education system isn’t easy. We won’t see changes overnight.” Even so, he said, he and his allies have to keep pushing: “None of this should be controversial. There should be a fuss if we weren’t doing these things.”

This much is clear: There’s still a lot of pushing to do on education policy. Not only have civil rights groups recently criticized him, but, this morning, The Washington Post ran an article about how his agenda—namely, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—is stalled in Congress. NCLB seems unlikely to come up this year, and its prospects after that, with possible Republican control of Congress, are uncertain. And that’s to say nothing of how states will act in the future. Will those that have agreed to legislative and other reforms (such as signing on to the common standards movement) in order to apply for Race to the Top deliver on their commitments? Will they make more changes that need to be made? And will those states that haven’t yet taken strides get in the game?

The president is right to get, and stay, fired up about education. Is it naïve to hope that others will, too?

Bush Memoir Frightens GOP

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:06:46 +0000

Matt Latimer reports:

Just as their once-comatose party shows some color in its cheeks again, its old doctors are back in the ward. Former President George W. Bush and his corral of Texas-based surrogates are preparing to flood the airwaves in anticipation of his new memoir, another step in a carefully crafted rehabilitation strategy. The publication date of Bush's Decision Points is set for early November, one week after the congressional elections. But, as with any likely bestseller, the details of the book are certain to leak out earlier—meaning the Bush years could be re-litigated and re-explored during the final, pivotal weeks of the campaign. ...

Some Republicans, particularly those most closely tied to the Bush regime, actually argue the book could help the party by reminding some voters of what they liked about Bush. Still, that has not stopped some Republicans, traumatized over the last two election cycles, from fearing the worst. "Monumentally bad timing" was the reaction of one former Bush aide who learned of the book release date. Another prominent conservative compared the Bushies' public-relations savvy to LeBron James. "Selfish and stupid" was another noted right-wing columnist's reaction.

They couldn't wait until December?

The Stupidity of Liberal Leaders

Jonathan Cohn — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:03:51 +0000

At the end of a blog post about getting rid of the filibuster, Matthew Yglesias answers my item about liberal apathy:

I think that if you want to talk about the counterproductive nature of progressive apathy then you have to talk about this filibuster reform effort. It’s 100 percent true that progressive policy becomes less likely, rather than more likely, if progressives become cynical, apathetic, disillusioned, and blind to the very real achievements of the 111th Congress. But at the same time, there’s an iterative relationship between political leaders and their supporters. Leaders can’t just point to the policy accomplishments of yore and say “stop whining” they need to join with activists in fighting for further change. Appointing Elizabeth Warren would boost morale, and beginning to organize for reform of Senate procedure would as well. If you tell people “we did the best we could, but the structure of the Senate hemmed us in” then people get depressed. If you say “we did the best we could but the structure of the Senate hemmed us in and that’s why I’m fighting to reform the Senate and deliver the reforms we all believe in” then people have something to hang on to.

I largely agree with this. I think liberals have unrealistic expectations of what Democratic leaders can achieve legislatively and that the resulting disappointment will serve to discourage, rather than encourage, future activity. But Democratic leaders do have to lead where they can, whether it's by organizing efforts to down the institutional obstacles to change (like the filibuster) or making the most out of the power they do have (making appointments, issuing regulations, etc.). Elizabeth Warren would seem like a perfect place to start.

The Worst of Times

Jonathan Cohn — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:42:12 +0000

Some people think Paul Krugman has exaggerated the extent of the economic crisis. Paul Krugman thinks these people should look at graphs like this one, from the New York Times' Catherine Rampell, comparing employment losses in different recessions...

...and this one depicting the standard unemployment rate:

I'm no economist, but that seems pretty convincing to me--particularly since other data, like the "economic security index" that a group of scholars unveiled last week, also suggest this recession is the worst in recent history:

Cherlie Rangel Equals Shirley Sherrod?

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:32:43 +0000

Lanny Davis wants all of us to take a step back before judging Charlie Rangel:

Have we learned nothing from the recent rush-to-judgment travesty of Shirley Sherrod?

Charles Rangel stands accused by a House ethics subcommittee, composed of both Democratic and GOP House members, of violating House rules — and of course that should be taken far more seriously than the original tape clip that led everyone to jump to a premature conclusion before taking the time to view the entire tape or even to talk to Sherrod.

Except the House subcommittee spent 18 months reviewing the evidence before officially filing charges against Rangel, which is about 17 months and 29 days longer than anyone spent judging Shirley Sherrod's case. And unlike Sherrod, Rangel has already been "admonished" by the same committee and lost his chairmanship over a previous ethics violation.

Other than that, great comparison!

Supply-Siders: 1990s Boom, Bush Recession Only A Flesh Wound!

Jonathan Chait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:58:52 +0000

Like the Black Knight in Monty Python, supply-siders fight on with a bluster utterly undiminished by two decades that have systematically cut the premises out from their philosophy one by one. First they insisted Bill Clinton's upper-income tax hike would destroy the incentive to get rich, create a recession and reduce tax revenues. Then they promised George W. Bush's supply-side tax cuts would deliver a decade of prosperity. Now they're warning that a return to Clinton-era top tax rates will destroy America's economic competitiveness. Here's Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist Daniel Henninger:

Extend the current tax rates for all and free everyone in an economy begging for the chance to be strong again. Yes, the U.S. economy will always be "strong," but it needs to be strong enough to take on all comers and win, which last time I looked was the real American way.

Advocates of keeping the Bush-era tax rates for the rich seem to write as if they have some kind of new plan. In fact, the Bush-era tax rates are currently in place. We're already "free." The question is whether to return to the slavery of the Clinton era tax regime.

I also like this bit about why raising taxes on the rich won't reduce the deficit:

The deficit is dangerous. But raising taxes to cut the deficit is a bailout for the spenders—until proven otherwise.

I think it's been proven:

The Stupidity of Liberal Apathy

Jonathan Cohn — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Activists at last week’s Netroots Nation talked about disappointment and disillusionment. The polls show a slow, steady decline in support for the president among Democrats. Neither sample captures perfectly the state of the liberal mind this summer, but you’d have to be pretty oblivious not to see that President Obama, and the Democrats, are losing the love of their base.

It’s a somewhat predictable decline, given lofty expectations for the Obama presidency and the stubbornly slow recovery. It's also a relatively modest decline: After all, it’s not like anybody is talking about starting a third party. Still, the right is energized, the left is ambivalent, and that means Democrats are in big trouble this November.

If you read this blog, then you know I see things more or less the way my colleague Jonathan Chait and some of our friends in the blogosphere do: This seems totally nuts, purely on the merits. Obama and the Democrats passed a major stimulus that cut taxes for the middle class and invested heavily in public works. They saved the auto industry, created a new regulatory framework for the financial industry, and enacted comprehensive health care reform. Compromises watered down each of these initiatives, to say nothing of the ideas (climate change!) that aren’t going to pass. And still this was the most productive liberal presidency in a generation or maybe two.

But liberal ambivalence isn't just foolish substantively. It's also foolish strategically.

The fact is that voting for these measures, particularly health care and (in the House) climate change, was tough for many members of Congress. Liberals consider the Affordable Care Act a watered-down version of a watered-down of something resembling a true universal coverage system. But in Tennessee, Idaho, and a bunch of places in between, it's a government takeover of health care. Liberals think Waxman-Markey was a conservative half-solution to a planetary crisis. In more conservative districts--and, let's face it, plenty of liberal ones too--it's higher energy bills.

But consider what happened after the climate change vote in the House last year. When Democrats went back to their districts, conservatives pummeled them--in person and on the air--while liberals just shrugged. And consider what happened after the health care bill passed: Conservatives went into overdrive about socialized medicine, while liberals kept talking about what a lousy bill it was.

Not surprisingly, members from more conservative parts of the country are pretty frustrated, particularly when they're getting attacked directly by the left. As one senior Democratic aide told me on Wednesday, expressing a sentiment I've heard many times on Capitol Hill,

Liberals have savaged these members and the lesson many will take is don’t stick your neck out because the left will kick your ass regardless.

To be clear, sometimes ass-kicking is good. Call Kent Conrad a hypocrite on the deficit. Blast Joe Lieberman for carrying water on behalf of the insurance industry. Hold Obama accountable for the bureaucratic neglect that enabled the Gulf disaster. Liberals won't get anywhere by meekly accepting every compromise that comes down the pike or looking the other way when Democrats screw up. Politics goes is a two-way street and liberals need their leaders to lead sometimes.

But if the left is going to demand action, it has to do more than sigh when action--even modest action--actually happens. The left has to show some enthusiasm, if not locally then at least nationally. (Truth be told, a Democratic member in a Republican district probably benefits more from higher Obama approval ratings than an ad buy from Moveon.org). Otherwise office-holders, even ones from relatively liberal districts, won't have much incentive to vote liberal next time around. As another congressional aide put it, via email:

I hear this stuff all the time, about climate change, health reform, financial reform--members complaining about having to vote for these things because they were forced to by party leadership with NO upside for them. ... They’re getting hit on all sides. ... these members need more than just the stick, you also have to give them the carrot every once in a while.

It'd be nice if we lived in a world where politicians voted exclusively based on the public interest. But we happen to live in a world where, to varying degrees, politicians vote based on their immediate electoral needs. If liberals don't embrace politicians who vote with them today, then liberals can't expect the same politicians, or their replacements, to vote with them tomorrow.

Update: I tweaked some language for clarity

Obama’s Education Agenda Isn’t Anti-Minority

Seyward Darby — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:39:00 +0000

When President Obama speaks to the National Urban League on Thursday about education reform, he’ll be on the defensive. On Monday, the league and six other civil rights groups—including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Rainbow Push Coalition—released a document outlining what they see as the most pressing priorities for U.S. public schools. In it, the groups issue strident criticisms of some of Obama’s key reform efforts. Their chief complaint? That Obama’s could further disadvantage minority students. “[M]ore comprehensive reforms are necessary to build a future where equitable educational opportunity is the rule, not the exception,” the document says.

There’s been some political scrambling since the document came out. Education Week reports that Al Sharpton, who had initially signed on, retracted his support. At a time on Monday initially designated for a press conference to discuss the release, some of the signatories instead met with Secretary Duncan. A follow-up press release noted: “The leaders said the meeting clarified several issues of agreement with the Obama Administration, and broadened understanding among the parties.” And then, today, Duncan addressed the National Urban League, promising to form a bipartisan commission to examine education inequities. It seems that, with Obama speaking tomorrow, both sides want to avoid any more controversy.

But, politics aside, are the criticisms of the Obama administration fair? I don’t think anyone would disagree that minority students, many of whom are also low-income, should receive better educational opportunities. And there are aspects of the document—about the importance of community engagement, the equitable distribution of resources, the possible problems with the models proposed by the feds to turn around failing schools—that I either agree with or want to ponder further. But the coalition behind this new reform framework gets some important things wrong about Obama’s approach to fixing the nation’s schools. Here, I’ll focus on two key areas: charter schools and Race to the Top.

Charter Schools

The framework says that there is “no evidence that charter operators are systematically more effective in creating higher student outcomes nationwide” and that “they are not a universal solution for systemic change.” It’s true that there is no definitive evidence that charters are better than other public schools. (Studies on this issue have been hotly debated within the last year.) But, as both Duncan and Obama have reiterated many times, they don’t support charter schools without reservation—they support good charter schools. And there are good, even great, ones: A recent report by Brookings about the relative quality of some charters in New York City, for instance, found that Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP schools are outperforming other public schools.

Moreover, despite what the framework suggests, Obama, like any reasonably minded education reformer, has never suggested that charters are the answer, or “universal solution,” to schools’ woes. Rather, they are one tool among many. This is why, for instance, converting a school to a charter is one of four turnaround models the administration has outlined for very low-performing institutions.

Interestingly, when the National Council of La Raza was asked why it—and no other—national Latino advocacy group signed onto the civil rights framework, the provisions for charter schools were the problem. The document says, “[W]e are concerned about the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities.” Raul Gonzalez, legislative director for La Raza, told the Associated Press: "To suggest that a charter school started by community members who want to help kids in their community cannot serve 100 percent Hispanic kids in a community that's 100 percent Hispanic—that they should be penalized for that or they shouldn't be allowed to open up—that doesn't make sense.”

The document's charter-school bashing, in other words, is off-base.

Race to the Top

The framework is especially harsh when discussing Race to the Top and other competitive grant programs, which are central to Obama’s education agenda. “If education is a civil right, children in ‘winning’ states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn in high-quality environments,” the document states, noting that 47 percent of the nation’s black students live in states that weren’t Race to the Top’s first-round finalists (meaning, of course, that more than half of lived in states that were). “Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.” The framework goes on to propose replacing competitive grants with “conditional incentive grants,” which would be given to all states that “agreed to meet whatever equitable and fair conditions were established.”

Put simply, this doesn’t add up.

First, and most basically, consider the numbers. Competitive grants comprise but a fraction of the federal dollars spent on education. Formula-funded efforts still make up 80 percent of the Department of Education’s K-12 programs. Meanwhile, Race to the Top, in its first two rounds, is worth $4.35 billion dollars, and proposals in Congress for a third round range from $675 million to $800 million. So the Obama administration hasn’t seized funds long-dedicated to poor schools and poured them into competitive grants—leaving millions of minority students in the dust. Rather, it has carved out a small but significant chunk of money to reward the states with the best, homegrown plans for education reform.

Furthermore, the coalition behind the framework worries that wealthier states will be able to prepare more impressive grant applications, and thus get more money than states with larger high-poverty, high-minority school populations. A few things here. First, the Department of Education has said it will evaluate applications for Race to the Top based on substance and need. Second, places like the Gates Foundation have offered states assistance in preparing their apps. (Gates has already helped 24 states, including Tennessee, which was one of two Race to the Top round-one winners.)

As I wrote back when the budget was initially proposed in February, competitive grants are critical because, if the funding status quo were the answer, we wouldn’t have the educational disparities and creative stagnation in school policy that we do. For too long, we’ve allowed states to trudge along, waiting for federal money they know will come, regardless of their will to reform. But Race to the Top, even before winners were selected, spurred important changes nationwide: States lifted charter caps, agreed to adopt common educational standards, and pledged to tie student achievement to teacher evaluations. Indeed, the program has helped create a culture of reform—a culture the country has long-needed and one that, ideally, will continue to grow and spread.

This isn’t to say that the program, or any competitive grant initiative, is perfect (see here for a good analysis of why it’s a little odd that Ohio is a current Race to the Top finalist). But it’s a cutting-edge effort that encourages states to make big changes that will help all of their students—black, brown, or white. And states should know that big ideas, imbued with initiative and excellence, will be prized.

&c

Jonathan Chait — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:55:27 +0000

-- Jason Zengerle takes on the right's hatred of Eric Holder

-- Steve Benen recalls when Republicans loved the idea of disclosure in campaign finance.

-- A new paper quantifies how the stimulus and economic rescue prevented economic catastrophe.

-- Paul Krugman explains why he always said the stimulus was too small to prevent mass unemployment.

-- Mark Halperin: "The Sherrod story is a reminder — much like the 2004 assault on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — that the old media are often swayed by controversies pushed by the conservative new media."

New Leaks, Old News

Marcus Wilford — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:34:38 +0000

Since the mega–leak of 90,000 classified intelligence documents to three news organizations, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has held a follow up press conference and several subsequent interviews, prompting a flurry of counter briefings and reaction from the White House, the Pakistani government, and others. Yet the public, seeking a better understanding of the Afghan situation, is feeling scarcely more enlightened or empowered than they did a week ago. Despite their scale and scope, the leaked documents provide little that is revelatory to those who have closely followed all the reporting on Afghanistan, filed by countless capable journalists week in week out, year in, year out, from their respective posts in Kabul, Islamabad, Washington, Peshawar, FOB Helmand and elsewhere.

True, the military intelligence reports are more prolific and detailed than the journalism on this subject over the same period. Do six years of combined articles and transcripts from American and British reporting of the Afghan war add up to the same amount of written material? Probably not quite, but then the military has more assets at work than news organizations in these belt–tightened days, many more. (Despite that, what appears to be missing from the intel is some basic second sourcing procedures that most journalists, one hopes, would be adopting from an early stage in the information gathering process.)

But if what we have learned from all this reporting on the leak itself stands up, the raw intel and the edited journalism covering the war tend to very broadly agree. The U.S. military has had a longstanding and deeply held mistrust of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and its involvement with the Taliban, and these documents provide many examples of direct links between the two organizations—in particular, Pakistani officers providing support, training, and assets to Taliban commanders. Nothing new here, was the White House response on Monday. Indeed, reports of this kind of U.S. suspicion of its ally in the war have been a running theme of Afghan war journalism (although it is also true that much of the raw intel fingering Pakistan for its links to the Taliban comes from the Afghan intelligence agency which, as one Afghan journalist has put it, would readily blame the ISI if storm clouds appeared over Kabul).

WikiLeaks has said the U.S. military might be guilty of war crimes, citing one of several apparently almost indiscriminate aerial attacks on a group of insurgents, in which many civilians were killed. True, perhaps, if difficult to prove legally in a wartime situation. But the fact that the U.S. military has, as the ground fight has become more and more deadly, taken to the air, using drones and other lethal air assets, has hardly gone unnoticed by war reporters in recent months. Duly reported, too, have been civilian deaths, their political repercussions on the fatally weak Afghan government and the free gift they bring to those recruiting for the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their war on 'the West.' Not news, either, that the United States assassinates high–value targets—remember the deck of cards in Iraq? How much due process, in the end, accompanied that list of 52?

Julian Assange stated that he hoped releasing the intel trove would highlight the high civilian death toll caused by both U.S. air strikes and Taliban IEDs and bombings alike. No news there either, most commentators appear to agree. And anyone reading media reports of the British “re–deployment” from Helmand province this month would understand only too well the growing strength of the Taliban, and Western troops’ current inability to clear and hold on the ground, or nation build amongst the mud–walled villages of southern Afghanistan.

Assange has called the leaker a "hero," and likened the scale of the exposed documents to the Stasi files of East Germany. Der Spiegel wrote that the leak countered American Military propaganda. But in fact, we can be encouraged that much of what these communications reveal has already been exposed through the journalism emanating from the war. The documents reassure us that our reporting is largely on target, and confirms the public’s sense that this is a long and brutal conflict without end in sight, one which causes thousands of civilian deaths and collateral damage. The public knew that Afghanistan is a morass of tribal rivalries neighbored by an unstable nuclear power. It can now both trust its own conclusions more readily, and celebrate the leaker ‘pour encourager les autres.'

Cap-And-Trade Is Coming To The West

Bradford Plumer — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:32:01 +0000

Don't look now, but cap-and-trade is coming to the United States—and there's nothing the Senate can do about it. Earlier today, California, New Mexico, and three Canadian provinces—Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia—unveiled a plan to set up a carbon-trading system for greenhouse gases by January 2012. This is all part of the multi-state Western Climate Initiative, a partnership that was set up in 2007, and you can read all the gory details of the new program here.

This new cap-and-trade system will be somewhat different from RGGI in the Northeast, which only covers power plants and has a fairly low price on carbon that's mainly just used to raise money for efficiency programs. This cap would be the real thing, covering most large industrial facilities as well as the transportation sector (that last is probably the biggest source of emissions in most of these states, which aren't particularly coal-heavy, and transport wouldn't get regulated until 2015). All told, the program would aim to cut overall emissions in the five participating states/provinces 15 percent by 2020—roughly in line with the U.S. Copenhagen goals.

Granted, the success of this new carbon cap will depend on the political situation in the participating states. The program is already a lot smaller than was initially envisioned: Arizona, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Manitoba are also "partners" in the Western Climate Initiative, but their governors have all opted out of the carbon-trading system for now. And it's possible that the remaining cap-and-trade guinea pigs could balk, too. If, for instance, Meg Whitman wins California's governor's race, she's already promised to delay the implementation of the state's sweeping climate law, AB 32. (There's also a fossil-fuel-backed ballot initiative this fall to kill off AB 32 entirely.)

But assuming this system does get up-and-running, it could well help seed a larger national climate program down the road. The WCI recently commissioned an economic study of the carbon cap and found that the system would save participants some $100 billion in fuel costs by 2020. If other WCI partners see that cap-and-trade isn't actually triggering economic doom and havoc, they too could join in. And suddenly you have the makings of a pretty significant system. So this is definitely a story to watch.

Spill-Liability Fight Could Kill The Energy Bill

Bradford Plumer — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:58:23 +0000

Is the Senate capable of passing anything these days? It turns out that even Harry Reid's stripped-down, near-skeletal energy bill might not survive a Republican filibuster. Here's The Hill's Darren Goode

Republican leaders said Wednesday they cannot support the bill in its current form—mainly due to language retroactively removing a liability cap for oil-and-gas producers—and also want assurances they can offer amendments.

What's this liability fight all about? A quick recap. If a big, wealthy oil giant like BP has one of its rigs go up in flames, and millions of gallons of oil start spurting into the ocean, then the company has to foot the bill for all direct clean-up costs. But that still leaves all the indirect damage to, say, fisheries and wildlife habitats in the area. In that case, under current law, an offshore rig operator is only liable for the first $75 million in damages. After that, the feds pick up the tab, via the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund paid for by a tiny tax on oil (amounting to one-tenth of 1 percent of the price). Trouble is, that trust fund is pretty tiny—it had about $1.6 billion in it at the start of the Deepwater Horizon disaster—which means the federal government is picking up the rest of the tab.

Reid's energy bill would remove this liability cap entirely (and it would apply retroactively, so it would hit BP). If an oil spill causes billions and billions of dollars in damage to surrounding areas, then the company at fault has to pony up those billions and billions of dollars. If that means bankruptcy, then so be it. Now, oil executives like ConocoPhillips' Jim Mulva are warning that this would force virtually all smaller firms out of the Gulf of Mexico—there's just no way they could get insurance to pay those unlimited costs. And, while many bigger firms might continue to operate in the area, the financial risks could push a great deal of offshore-drilling activity elsewhere—to places like Ghana or the Black Sea.

Republicans, in turn, have offered up a more subtle alternative. Under their proposal, the president could set varying liability limits on individual companies based on factors such as the depth of the drilling project or the company's safety record. Beyond that, the costs of the spill would be shared by all companies drilling offshore, up to $20 billion. And after that, the remainder of the costs are paid out of the oil-spill trust fund. This is all similar to how the Price-Anderson Act deals with nuclear-accident liability. (Meanwhile, a few oil-friendly Democrats like Mary Landrieu and Mark Begich are trying to find a compromise between the two proposals.)

There are arguments for both approaches, but it's a little ironic to see that Republicans are basically proposing a socialized insurance system for oil companies, while Democrats want to leave them to the not-so-tender mercies of the free market. Funny how that works.

(Flickr photo credit: Kris Kros)

Bush Tax Cuts Still Very Unpopular

Jonathan Chait — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:33:55 +0000

Wall Street Journal reporter John D. McKinnon thinks that opponents of tax cuts are gaining momentum:

What do voters actually think about the Bush tax cuts?

Recent survey results are mixed, and voters appear to be as divided as the politicians – maybe more. But one trend seems to be that more voters are coming around to the view that taxes shouldn’t be raised on anyone.

A Pew Research poll this month found a narrow divide – 30% said all of the tax cuts should be extended, while 27% said the tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed, and the rest maintained. That represents a deterioration for congressional Democrats’ position, and an improvement for Republicans: in October 2008, 37% of voters favored repeal of tax cuts for the wealthy, compared with 27% now, while 25% supported keeping all of Bush’s tax cuts, compared with 30% now.

But the poll also clearly reflects that concern is growing about the wisdom of maintaining any of the tax cuts – probably as a result of rising worries about deficits. In the Pew poll 31% said all of the Bush-era tax cuts should be allowed to lapse. In October 2008, 25% favored eliminating all of the tax cuts.

This is a pretty opaque way to describe the data. Here's the straightforward results of the Pew question:

Which comes closer to your view about the tax cuts passed when George W. Bush was president?

30% All of the tax cuts should remain in place

27% Tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed, while others stay in place

31% All of the tax cuts should be repealed

This is pretty clear. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters want to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Now, those who do are split between those who want to repeal the middle-class tax cuts as well -- that is, people who are to the left of the Democrats' position -- and those who want to keep the tax cuts that benefit the non-rich in place. But those who want to keep the tax cuts for the rich are a very small minority. Yes, it's up from 25%, but it's still a distinctly unpopular position.

This is a proxy for a lot of tax debates that occur. The Democrats take the centrist position, the Republicans take an unpopular right-wing position, and the equivalently unpopular position on the left is unrepresented entirely.

Number of the Day

Alexander C. Hart — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:57:09 +0000

Many states are experiencing hard times. But Illinois is nearly to the point Ray Charles described, pawning its metaphorical clothes to pay the rent. Facing a staggering deficit, Illinois is cutting its Department of Human Services Budget by:

$312.6 million

That cut, which is about eight percent of the department's budget, marks the end of mental-health services for all but the poorest of the poor. Gone too is support for the developmentally disabled. All told, 80,000 people will be affected, say Illinois advocates. These cuts don't even come close to filling Illinois's budget gap, which the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities estimates at 41.5 percent of the total budget. Even after over $1 billion in spending cuts, the state is facing a hole of $13 billion to $17 billion for fiscal 2012.