Links 9/2/2015

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1. rjs September 2, 2015 at 7:18 am

   here’s some background on it, from my post at the Economic Populist:
   But even with all the oil and products that we’re importing, there’s been an ongoing push by the frackers and their supporters to end the federal ban on crude oil exports, which was instituted in 1975, at a time when our production started to slip and domestic shortages developed. The reason the oil industry wants to export crude, even though we’re importing so much, is simple; international oil prices have been running between $5 and $10 a barrel more than US oil prices. So if they’re able to sell their crude overseas (Canada and Mexico are exempt from the export ban), US prices for oil will quickly jump to the international price, and we’ll be paying 10% to 20% more for our oil products than we otherwise would if our market remained protected. A bill to lift the ban has passed the U.S. House, and a similar bill cleared the U.S. Senate Energy Committee in July, and it will probably be taken up when the Congress returns from recess after Labor Day. A new report, published Friday by the Center for American Progress, predicted that US oil production will increase if the export ban ends, and that an average of 26,385 new oil wells would be drilled in the U.S. each year between 2016 and 2030 if the ban is lifted, 7,600 more wells per year than would be otherwise. As a result, an additional 137 square miles of land would be developed for oil each year. Over 15 years, that would be 2055 more square miles of oil drilling sites than we’d otherwise see, or a total drilled out and fracked area more than 60% larger than the area of the state of Rhode Island.. So if we want to save ourselves from that dystopian future, we’d better start pushing back against the frackers on that export issue now..
2. abynormal September 2, 2015 at 8:39 am

   that is one stoned rabbit

   re: Murder Rates Rising…”free-floating anxiety among officers”
   (careful, move over xanax)

   again, i’m confused…from 2013 The Economist:
   “But the sheer scale of the drop—and its broad persistence in the face of the deepest economic depression in a century—make a new crime wave seem unlikely. Policing is still improving; heroin and crack-cocaine consumption continue to fall; and no one is likely to reintroduce lead into petrol. The period of rising crime from the 1950s through to the 1980s looks increasingly like an historical anomaly.” http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing-less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic

   speeding into history: “Good. Illegal is always faster.”
   Eoin Colfer
3. aletheia33 September 2, 2015 at 8:51 am

   jakarta protests (some background):
   note in the photos how carefully choreographed all the protest scenes are. this comes from the history of student activism in indonesia. the last unified student movement in indonesia took place in the late 1990s; students were disappeared, kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the gov’t; the resulting outrage ousted suharto. since then, some “graduates” of that movement have put their impressive organizing skills to use organizing and, yes, brokering (“delivering,” for $$) turnout of people from various constituencies, especially from the large numbers of poor, in the street. with the onset of neoliberalism (and for historic reasons), genuine student activism, which had a long tradition in indonesia going back to the early twentieth century, is today either deeply dormant or dead. the current generation of students mainly just want to get ahead. something to keep in mind when watching indonesia.
   1. Lambert Strether Post authorSeptember 2, 2015 at 3:08 pm

      Thanks. I don’t think there are many spontaneous demonstrations anywhere in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, it’s still “out there,” as we say. And I wonder how Jokowi will react.
   2. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 6:39 pm

      More than 8,000 police personnel deployed…thousands of protesters.

      That sort of one-on-one (more or less) ratio would be very nice in our schools, say, between teachers and students, instead of, if I recall correctly, 300 to 1 (but that was my college freshman year chemistry class).
4. Dikaios Logos September 2, 2015 at 9:19 am

   re: Bloomberg

   NC readers really owe it to themselves to check out this tweetstorm about Bloomberg news and its intimidation campaign against the SPOUSE of a now former Bloomberg news employee, Leta Hong Fincher, and the related frighteningly tight editorial control of Bloomberg’s China coverage. I’ve storified this tweetstorm, you can find her twitter account @letahong.

   https://storify.com/DikaiosLogos/leta-hong-fincher-tweetstorm-on-bloomberg-news
5. Chris in Paris September 2, 2015 at 9:23 am

   The Steiner interview is quite a hoot. Not hard to see why he’s out of the diplomat business.
   1. Tertium Squid September 2, 2015 at 1:09 pm

      It was two or three in the morning and the two were, let us say, in an advanced social state.

      “Advanced social state” is the best ever euphemism for a drunken piss-up.
   2. Lambert Strether Post authorSeptember 2, 2015 at 3:06 pm

      Yeah, we had plans for nuking Afghanistan. Good to know.
      1. Tertium Squid September 2, 2015 at 5:56 pm

         Wouldn’t you say the Pentagon has plans for nuking everybody, both specifically and jointly, including all subregions of the USA?

         Which is reassuring so Afghanistan doesn’t feel singled out, but…
         1. Lambert Strether Post authorSeptember 2, 2015 at 5:58 pm

            You’re right. I should look on the bright side! That said, apparently somebody pulled the plans out of the drawer, and Condi and the rest of ’em had a look. Too much even for Dick Cheney, I guess.
6. Ulysses September 2, 2015 at 9:26 am

   From the NR piece linked above:

   “Barnett believes the Constitution exists to secure inalienable property and contract rights for individuals. This may sound like a bland and inconsequential opinion, but if widely adopted by our courts and political systems it would prohibit or call into question basic governmental protections—minimum wages, food-safety regulations, child-labor laws—that most of us take for granted. For nearly a century now, a legal counterculture has insisted that the whole New Deal project was a big, unconstitutional error,”

   Much of the New Deal has already been dismantled, the sad truth is that working people in the U.S. will have to fight again old battles, that were won in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century
7. JTMcPhee September 2, 2015 at 9:37 am

   Interesting little piece on the maybe global nature of the mutual vulnerability that selfish pursuit of personal gain and privilege and innovation, with the blithe faith that “something will turn up” and assumption of personal IBG-YBG invulnerability thrown in: “We Could See An Economic Collapse As Debt Defaults Pile Up,” (article highlights a lot more than just money debts going into default…)

   http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/We-Could-See-An-Economic-Collapse-As-Debt-Defaults-Pile-Up.html
8. Bridget September 2, 2015 at 10:07 am

   Re: NYT The Trick to Acting Heroically

   You heard it here first!
9. Jim Haygood September 2, 2015 at 11:09 am

   ‘Because monetary policy influences real activity with a substantial lag, we should not wait until inflation is back to 2 percent to begin tightening.’ — Stanley Fischer

   Bill Gross, former manager of the world’s largest bond fund, proposes in his latest column that ‘They should [raise rates], but their September meeting language must be so careful, that “one and done” represents an increasing possibility – at least for the next six months.’

   But events may have escalated beyond the point of compromise on both sides, the Fed and the market. After his Saturday evening speech, Stanley Fischer headed down to Twenty Two Tattoo in downtown J-Hole, rolled up his sleeve, and got “2%er” inked on his left bicep, backed by the brilliant rays of the sun setting behind Grand Teton.

   Back at Edificio Eccles (as the coffee cart hostesses call it), Fischer raised the ante by circulating a memo directing his colleagues henceforth to address him as “Mr. Saturday Night Special,” echoing Paul Volcker’s notorious Saturday night pronunciamento of Oct. 6, 1979: “Business data has been good and better than expected. Inflation data has been bad and perhaps worse than expected.”

   Demon inflation, comrades: somebody’s gotta snuff it.

   He ain’t good for nuffin’
   ‘Cept put a market six-uh feet in a ho-o-ole

   — Lynyrd Skynyrd
   1. Skippy September 2, 2015 at 11:25 am

      The thing you should know about Bill is he made his packet off the government, with out it, he would be a two bit scam artist.
      1. abynormal September 2, 2015 at 12:03 pm

         “would be”…
         “While laid up in the hospital after a car crash, a young Bill Gross read Ed Thorpe’s book on blackjack theory, Beat the Dealer. Bill used the newfound knowledge to pay for his college education by playing blackjack in Las Vegas.

         Although Bill Gross was a successful blackjack player, the casinos considered his techniques as cheating.”
         http://www.dailywealth.com/1255/wall-street-versus-vegas
         1. Skippy September 2, 2015 at 12:10 pm

            Um… No… Bill got money straight from the government to invest… no gambling experienced…

            Skippy… but not the only one imo…
         2. Vatch September 2, 2015 at 12:13 pm

            I’m not a card player, but I’ve never understood how the casinos can get away with their claim that card counting is cheating.
            1. hunkerdown September 2, 2015 at 2:50 pm

               When I was a kid *clears off lap, puts on seeing glasses* we used that term to call out someone for being more capable than we expected all the time, in whatever endeavor. Casinos call them “advantage players” these days, and casinos use some pretty sophisticated software to detect them in real time and bar them from the blackjack tables.

               To find who rigged the game, merely look for the winner.
               1. Oregoncharles September 2, 2015 at 4:16 pm

                  Doesn’t the house always win — at least in the long run?
            2. Antifa September 2, 2015 at 3:12 pm

               They get away with it because they argue their case before the Nevada Gaming Commission, and Nevada Gaming Control Board, and in other states before similar governing boards or legislative committees.

               These bodies are all intent on viewing and controlling gambling as a tourist entertainment, a lark, an bit of fun folks can have with some of their spare spending money. Under that rubric, all games are games of chance, never games of raw mathematical calculation where risk is removed, where the player just goes through the motions of taking a risk, all the while knowing they will win.

               That role is reserved for the casino.

               How’s the casino supposed to rape your wallet if you know how many face cards are left in a six-deck stack? If you can do that, you aren’t taking the same wide open risk that the people in shorts and flip-flops around the table are taking. You are cheating the casino of their sure thing.

               The casino knows they will win, but this somehow isn’t cheating to their controlling boards, because casinos are just providing gambling as entertainment in exchange for thievery. Depending on the game, the house has a .5% to 35% advantage over the tipplers and tourists in flip-flops and baseball caps. The casino is just plain taking their money in exchange for the fun of being in a big room full of lights, and the thrill of almost winning.

               The house never gambles.
               1. Oregoncharles September 2, 2015 at 4:19 pm

                  A neighbor used to design gaming equipment. He spent a lot of time in Reno, but would never, ever play – unless he had the key to the cashbox in his pocket, as with the one-armed bandit in his shop.
               2. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 5:07 pm

                  Life is a big casino.

                  And like those little ones in Nevada and elsewhere, in this big casino, some are guaranteed to win, and some will lose for sure, with the way it is set up right now, except the last game, where we all get the same result.
      2. Jim Haygood September 2, 2015 at 1:18 pm

         NYT:

         ‘Mr. Gross’s long-term track record is an enviable one. Over the last 10 years [through late 2014], the Total Return Fund has returned 6 percent, besting the comparable 1.4 percent gain in the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index over the same time period.

         The decade-long performance of the Total Return Fund puts the portfolio in the top 5 percent in its category, according to Morningstar.’

         http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/william-gross-leaves-pimco-to-join-janus/

         ‘If you’ve got an investment track record — you didn’t build that.’ — ‘Skippy’ Obama
         1. Skippy September 2, 2015 at 4:48 pm

            Bill believed in his own back in the day, that happens when your either surrounded with like minded sorts in Newport or heaps of adoring fans and wannabes….
10. ChrisFromGeorgia September 2, 2015 at 11:42 am

    It seems too good to be true, and probably premature to celebrate (or hold a mock funeral,) but the TPP corpse is really starting to stink.

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150827/08385132080/as-tpp-grinds-to-halt-asian-countries-start-focusing-rival-trade-agreement-rcep.shtml
11. Vatch September 2, 2015 at 12:24 pm

    Here’s the Authors United site that is mentioned in the article “Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly?”. The protest letter that was sent to the members of the Amazon board of directors is included, along with the names of the hundreds of authors who signed it.
    1. Vatch September 2, 2015 at 12:32 pm

       The web site doesn’t seem to have the letter to the Justice Department yet.
12. JEHR September 2, 2015 at 12:44 pm

    It is truly amazing to see Harper dancing various jigs to different tunes: At first, he was touting his grand ability to manage the economy: lo and behold, the economy “recessed.” What is Harper saying now: He is saying the 80% of the economy is thriving and only the oil industry is having a hard time. Yea, and I believe in the tooth fairy. Now he will have to depend on ramping up the fear factor of terrorism as that seems to be the second plank in his policy.

    There was a time when Alberta responded to the National Energy Program of Pierre Trudeau with “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” The anger exemplified by that remark led to the rise of the Reform Party which was formerly Harper’s base before he achieved power. We in the Maritimes return the compliment to him.

    It is infuriating to have to dwell on these matters when what we should be talking about are Harper’s attacks on the democratic process, his terrorism bill that shreds civil liberties, his repeals of environmental protections for water, his emphasis on a oil-centric economy, his dismissal of scientific information, his refusal to take advice from public servants and scientists who do not agree with him, his incremental power grab through the PMO, his insistence on austerity when what is needed is building up infrastructure at the municipal and provincial levels, his disdain for parliamentary procedures, and all the other corruptions that he is responsible for.
13. Jess September 2, 2015 at 12:45 pm

    Surprised to see Jonathan Alter linked here, but then again, not surprised that he’s defending charter schools. Of all the supposed progressive pundits who are really neoliberal assholes, Alter may be the worst. (Although little Ezra is in the running.) At least, Alter’s my personal “most loathsome”. Haven’t watched MS-DNC in ages, so had temporarily forgotten that he’s still polluting the environment with his presence.
    1. allan September 2, 2015 at 1:25 pm

       The other Jonathan, Jonathan Chait, is just as bad.
       In fact, has anyone seen Alter and Chait in the same room at the same time?

       How New Orleans Proved Urban-Education Reform Can Work
       1. Lambert Strether Post authorSeptember 2, 2015 at 2:57 pm

          Gruesome, isn’t it?
14. Susan the other September 2, 2015 at 1:24 pm

    The majority of the Jackson Hole participants were against the Fed raising rates. EM countries will never catch up as it is. Europe needs every last euro just to recycle debt service. China simply told the Fed not to raise rates. The Fed can’t justify their rate rise anyway. The rationale seems to be, as The Economist’s View said, they want to cap inflation below 2% – in the dead zone. The Fed either does not know what it is doing or they are determined to foist a big pretense that we still live by capitalist rules, like having a natural interest rate. So here’s a question: why should money that does not come from loanable funds carry any interest at all? And in a perpetually depressed global economy what private investor would loan anything that cannot possibly be paid back? And so tell me again, why do we even need the Fed?
    1. Jim Haygood September 2, 2015 at 2:34 pm

       New noises in the Fed’s echo chamber:

       WASHINGTON ( MarketWatch) – The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book indicated growing wage pressure in the U.S. economy. The report said that “several” of the 12 district banks “reported increasing wage pressures caused by labor market tightening.”

       Wage pressures could give Fed officials more confidence that inflation may move higher, a key condition to any rate hike.

       http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-beige-book-finds-increasing-wage-pressures-2015-09-02

       ‘The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ — Downing Street memo
       1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 3:43 pm

          Raising rates to slow down US wage pressure will only make China sell more dollars to prop up the Yuan…and more market instability.

          Maybe it’s checkmate time for the 0.01%.
          1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 6:55 pm

             “You persecute those lowly paid workers once more, by raising rates*, the markets will crash for sure.”

             *Though raising CD rates for savors and seniors should not, in theory, persecute those workers.
15. Gabriel September 2, 2015 at 1:28 pm

    Re “The Secrets from an NFL Locker Room”, for all I know piece is great, but can’t read it. Too much like what Gore Vidal called, apropos Nixon, “jock sniffing.”
    1. Jess September 2, 2015 at 1:49 pm

       Interesting that you likened Chris Kluwe’s article to jock sniffing, given that he is a former NFL player himself rather than the kind of wannabe or hanger-on normally associated with “jock sniffing” (as in, being eager to get next to the real thing).
       1. LarryB September 2, 2015 at 2:01 pm

          Yeah, but he was a _punter_ not a real player. (j/k)
    2. Lambert Strether Post authorSeptember 2, 2015 at 2:57 pm

       The headline makes it seem that way, but it isn’t, really (in my view).
16. Oregoncharles September 2, 2015 at 2:13 pm

    “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities NYT”

    Important, alarming data, but IMO, an example of very bad reporting. The murder rate rises, but instead of asking sociologists – who actually study this kind of thing – they ask POLICE CHIEFS. Who, duh, give them completely self-serving answers.

    The worst, of course, is the so-called “Ferguson effect” – the theory that police have backed off under scrutiny, and that has increased the rate of private, impulsive crimes of passion. In the first place, there is no evidence that police have backed off under scrutiny – quite the contrary, they appear to have doubled down in sheer defiance. In the second, as one police chief (New Orleans?) admits, these crimes aren’t really subject to policing.

    I think there probably IS a “Ferguson effect”: example. Police represent society as a whole (like it or not). If they set the example of ruthless impunity, people in desperate situations are quite likely to follow it. (We have no idea whether the rate of police murder has really increased, because no one was counting until very recently. But the effort to stop it has made it much more conspicuous, inevitably, and thus increased the example effect.) If police kill 1000 people a year, that’s a very powerful example – and a powerful message about the value of young black lives. If police can get away with impulse murders, killings in a moment of rage, then that sends a strong message about how you deal with conflict.

    Sociologists treat the crime rate as a measure of social cohesion. Granted, it’s hard to believe social cohesion increased over the last 30 years; something else was at work. But a sudden uptick in the murder rate suggests that the Long Recession is finally having its effect.
    1. abynormal September 2, 2015 at 3:43 pm

       i share your frustration Oregoncharles…so i’ve gone a hunt’n.

       http://sociologydiaries.com/2015/01/17/a-response-to-how-sociologist-made-themselves-irrelevant/
       “It can be argued that it’s not the lack of research findings by sociologists, that makes them unable to engage in the larger public debate, or that hey do not bring nothing to the table, instead i believe, partially, it’s those precise findings carried out by the sociologists that are difficult to digest by governments. Findings, of any sort, if they are seen to conflict with the existing ideology of the state, can be extinguished and thrown away with the rest of the heap of ‘junk thought’.”
       only the tip of an iceberg and i’m off for more…
    2. Whine Country September 2, 2015 at 4:01 pm

       With the belief that Einstein’s pronouncement that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity, I see the Police/Citizen problem and just that, insanity. Both sides are locked in a standoff (prior to political correctness it was a standoff named for a country just south of Arizona where I live), where the changes BOTH sides need to consider are met with nothing but, “You first”, “No you first”. At the same time, no one will take the time to notice that just keeping on, keeping on, is only making the problem worse. To my mind, all of the so-called reasons why things are bad and getting worse are noise and ignore the real problem. Both sides have to look very closely at the way they do things and make some changes. The fact that it is not happening and it’s not very likely that it will soon is insanity. QED
    3. abynormal September 2, 2015 at 4:16 pm

       i knew it!…i’ve found a wonderful cave! gathering kindling for a wall show…cyall

       http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/14922

       http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/category/rethinking-the-world
    4. abynormal September 2, 2015 at 5:19 pm

       Social Facts Rule Your Life (Ian fumes)
       http://www.ianwelsh.net/social-facts-rule-your-life/

       “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
       Neil Postman

       “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
       Machiavelli
17. Vatch September 2, 2015 at 2:35 pm

    Chinese environment: Ground operation FT. “Soil pollution is a $1tn problem that causes serious illnesses and contaminates crops.”

    Yet another reason why it is vital to preserve Country of Origin Labeling for food. A bill to repeal C.o.O.L. passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, and is pending in the Senate.

    https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2393

    Here’s the roll call in the House; 300 (!) voted in favor of repealing C.o.O.L.

    http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2015/roll333.xml

    If you haven’t already, you might consider asking your Senators to preserve Country of Origin Labeling by voting against this bill.

    http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 3:37 pm

       If every human traveler needs a country of origin on the passport, so does everything else going to another country.
    2. ewmayer September 2, 2015 at 6:23 pm

       I see one obvious way for home-grown food suppliers to subvert the ‘biznis friendly’ douchebaggery in Congress – a food equivalent of the “Made in the USA” labeling scheme. As a consumer, you treat absence of the label as a ‘stay away’ indicator.
18. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 3:35 pm

    Longest yard sale in the world.

    That’s a nice article.

    We need more yard sales to get rid of all the stuff we have accumulated, and will be accumulating.
    1. JTMcPhee September 2, 2015 at 4:36 pm

       …and where does all the stuff I am able to unload for pennies on the sawbuck at my yard sale go, again? Maybe to Away-land?

       Hmmm, how are yard sale transactions counted in toting up GDP…? There must be some way to leverage, short, securitize and derivatize those, too…
19. JTMcPhee September 2, 2015 at 4:57 pm

    I like the Richter article on Canada. Particularly the comments, where a person who indicates he is an independent business owner “who built that all by himself” and complains, surprise, about paying taxes, whatever the purposes of national taxation by a currency-sovereign Nation are or ought to be, and complains about govt retirees tooling around in BMWs and Land Rovers, with their golden parachutes deployed. Says he chats people up in gas stations to conduct his informal polling on vehicular provenance. It may well be the case that some CDN former bureaucrats are “comfortable.” My bet is that has more to do with the open sluicegates of apparently unregulable corruption than government-schedule pension rates.

    Good tidbits of econ intel in the comments, too, for people thinking of relocating to Harper’s Hell… How the effing few can drag all the rest of us into the tar sands pit.

    Stupid humans. “We” don’t have a clue, apparently, how to do any different, let alone better, once past a certain size and degree of complexity and vulnerability…
20. MyLessThanPrimeBeef September 2, 2015 at 6:52 pm

    Overhauling People’s Liberation Army.

    I think that will help the current president Xi, getting the armed forces on his side. And if he wants to expand his anti-corruption drive, getting, for example, that major developer in Vancouver, who is reported to be wanted by the Interpol, but apparently Canada is planning to hear his refuge case.

    “Buy a house, but I am not sure you will get a green card. We here don’t care about propping up our housing bubble.”
21. Howard Beale IV September 2, 2015 at 10:28 pm

    Selling plasma to survive: how over a million American families live on $2 per day: Dylan Mathhews, Vox.

    Pay attention: this is where the start of neoliberalism began.

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