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Selling the sizzle

Sunday, August 19, 2012

I’m back, so it's time to commence whining about the people who are destroying our society. Not that I've managed to completely forget them, but it certainly helps to be in comparatively sane Vermont.

While in that island of sanity (only one Wal-Mart in the whole state) I began reading Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Equality, in which, among other things, he debunks the idea that our overlords are overachievers of some sort. In fact, as most of us could intuit, they are simply very powerful people who have managed to game the system so that they always win. Among other strategies, they seek to avoid transparency. The less their customers understand, the more they can induce them to make a sucker’s bet. So the following, from a story in Saturday’s Times, about the Facebook and other high-tech stock offerings, struck a chord:

In times of optimism, that knowledge dearth can actually work to the advantage of technology companies. Executives fill that emptiness with promises of paradigm-breaking ways of doing business, prompting Wall Street analysts to project amazing profits. Investors get excited and flock to their stock debuts. In short, it’s all about being seen as extraordinary.

(via Finding the Facebook Magic – NYTimes.com)

In my humble little legal world, in which even the bankers are not these sorts of bankers, filling “emptiness with promises” is another word for fraud, but when you let the scam artists make the rules – well, then it’s an entirely different story-a perfectly legitimate way to do business. Results are the same as what we call fraud, of course. The folks making the empty promises walk away with billions (“millions” is so yesterday), while the suckers just walk away empty.

 

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Annals of Equal Justice

Monday, August 13, 2012

The FCC has fined Google $22.5 million dollars for willfully violating the privacy of millions of people, after it had promised to stop doing almost exactly the same thing in another context:

David Vladeck, who leads the agency’s consumer protection bureau, defended the penalty. “$22.5 million may not seem like a lot of money to Google,” he said in a conference call with reporters last week. “But we think it’s quite a substantial civil penalty … We hope this sends a clear message.”

We dug up some numbers for comparison to the Google penalty:

It’s 0.1 percent of Google CEO Larry Page’s net worth, according to Forbes.

It would take about five hours for the company to bring in that amount, based on sales from the most recent quarter.

It’s less than the gain Google’s stock saw Thursday, the day the FTC announced the settlement. Google added $39.2 million to its market capitalization that day.

(via Pro Publica)

So, to put it in numbers we can wrap our heads around, Google had to pay almost one quarter of its gross daily income for willfully violating the privacy rights of millions. One thing we don’t know: How much did Google make violating those rights, and by how much did that number exceed the fine? I.e., how much did it profit from its illegal behavior, even taking the fine into account? Did this penalty, in fact, echo the oft-sent “clear message” to corporate America that the costs of illegal behavior are dwarfed by the profits to be made before you are caught?

The fine is a joke, something the FCC and Google can get away with only because most people’s heads swim when large numbers are involved, and $22 million seems like a lot. (See here for Dean Baker's take down of a social security scare story, which also relies on big numbers to deceive.)

But lest we lose all hope, just remember that the American system of justice is more than capable of meting out retributive justice when it is truly deserved. Just consider Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset, both of whom illegally downloaded almost dozens of songs, for which, according to the Google standard of one quarter of daily gross income we might expect them to be fined a whopping $100.00 or so. But no, true justice prevailed in these cases:

Without commenting on the merits of the case, the Supreme Court this morning let stand a $675,000 jury verdict against a 25-year-old Boston University student who downloaded 30 songs nearly a decade ago and then shared them with others on a peer-to-peer network.

The court denied Joel Tenenbaum's “write [sic] of certiorari” which means his appeal of a lower court's ruling and the judgment were turned down.

(via NPR)

A new lawyer, a new jury, and a new trial were not enough to save Jammie Thomas-Rasset. In a repeat of the verdict from her first federal trial, Thomas-Rasset was found liable for willfully infringing all 24 copyrights controlled by the four major record labels at issue in the case. The jury awarded the labels damages totaling a whopping $1.92 million. As the dollar amount was read in court, Thomas-Rasset gasped and her eyes widened.

(via Ars Technica)

So you see, despite the fact that the actual damages suffered in both of the above cases probably could have been covered by one quarter of the daily gross income of the respective defendants, the American system of justice pulled through.

To paraphrase Mel Brooks “It’s good to be the Google”.

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The Ryan Pick: A gift from the gods

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Romney has grooved a fastball right over the middle of the plate. The question is, will the Democrats smash it out of the park, or pop it up?

I agree the Ryan choice is all about nailing down the right-wing base, and that Romney is still not sure of their support. I'm also sure that no matter how hard Romney tries, he won’t be able to disassociate himself from the Ryan budget, assuming the Democrats, and the Obama campaign in particular, are at all competent. I think this makes most of the salient points:

Presumably, Romney’s main reason for picking Ryan is not his early deficit-busting record but his more recent rise to celebrity as a crusading policy wonk determined to tame the federal government. Romney, who has been extremely vague about what he would do if elected, will now own Paul Ryan’s ideas, which include privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher program, bloc-granting and drastically cutting Medicaid, and reducing discretionary spending to levels that would affect every popular government program. This Ryan agenda will now fill the vacuum created by Romney’s unwillingness to lay out the specifics of his own plan. Even before this (apparent) announcement, Democrats were planning on tying Romney to Ryan’s policy platform. Now Romney has done it for them.

(via Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker)

It would help had Obama been a true champion of the middle class during his first term, but in fact, his administration’s loyalty was to the banks and bankers, who have abandoned him anyway for one of their own, in light of the fact that he hurt their feelings with some mild criticism every once in a while. But here, Obama benefits, for while he has really been ineffectual in many respects (consider the hopelessly inadequate mortgage relief program), he has been demonized as a radical so much by the plutocrats and Republicans that he can plausibly claim to be the champion of the middle class, as indeed and alas, he is, for he’s all we have.

I’m optimistic that the Democrats can get the bat on this ball. There’s a good possibility that Ryan will make the Palin pick look like a stroke of genius. For all her clownishness, there was never any impression that she would drive policy, unless, of course, McCain dropped dead. But this pick is a very clear signal, whether Romney admits it or not, of the direction in which he will be taking the country. It’s a direction in which virtually no one wants to go, and if the Democrats can merely convince most Independents of the truth, the election is in the bag, at least for Obama. This is also a signal that the Romney team, from the man at the top down, is singularly incompetent.

 

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I’m with Harry

Friday, August 10, 2012

I have to take issue with Kevin Drum, who believes Harry Reid is, let us say, stretching the truth in his charges about Romney’s taxes:

Politically, of course, Reid’s ploy has worked like a charm. Romney’s taxes are back in the news and Romney’s ham-handed handling of the whole affair has kept it there. And that gives everyone a fifth reason to cheer on Reid: the end justifies the means.

Take a deep breath, folks. This is contemptible stuff and it’s not just business as usual. We’ve spent too many years berating the tea partiers for getting on bandwagons like this to get sucked into it ourselves the first time it’s convenient. It’s time to quit cheering on Reid and get off this particular bus.

(via Mother Jones)

He may be right about what Reid is doing, but I think he’s wrong when he prescribes that we return to the days when we reflexively condemned our own when they were accused of bad behavior. For one thing, we often just played into Republican lies (think Acorn).

Many years ago I read an article in Scientific American that argued, and I think persuasively, that the best way to stop someone from engaging in bad behavior is to adopt a tit for tat strategy. If a bad actor knows that he or she will be subjected to the same treatment he or she is dishing out, that actor will think twice about dishing in the first place. Well, Republicans have been titting for years, with nary a tat from Democrats in response. The result has been a ratcheting of bad behavior, to the point that it is now considered perfectly acceptable for them to lie about the citizenship of the president of the United States, or the military service of a decorated hero, to give but two examples. Compared to those lies, Harry’s, if it is a lie, is of the little white sort, since it has the redeeming quality of having a certain amount of truthiness to it. If we want to stop this sort of behavior, we have to show there’s a price, and while it may offend the pure of heart, tit for tat appears to be the most efficacious way to impose that price.

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Vermont Ramblings

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Pleasant times here in Vermont, blessedly removed from almost any exposure to what is happening out there in the world, though I do get the impression that the richest man to ever run for president, a guy who quite probably has paid taxes at a lower rate than I, has decided to attack the poorest people in the country as a campaign tactic. What a guy!

But I digress.

Before we came to Vermont I was interested to see how well they had managed to deal with the devastation visited upon them by Hurricane Irene. To be honest, though there are small things I’ve noticed, just because I was looking, for the most part it’s fairly hard to tell that so much of the state was underwater. This is probably the most dramatic example, and I suspect it hasn’t been fixed only because it wasn’t being used even before the hurricane.

Here's another picture, in context. The stream bed alongside the barn is, to the best of my recollection, at least twice as wide, and probably more, than it was last year.

 

Just a note. Part of the reason that they’ve come back so well is because at times like that, people do realize that we’re all in this together. When we pull together, we can overcome quite a bit, but when we persist in thinking, as some appear to do, that whatever success we achieve is due solely to our own efforts, then it’s a lot harder to overcome disasters. Maybe that’s why we haven’t been able to come back from the financial disaster gifted to us by the financial wizards who did it all for themselves (except when they needed to be baled out by the rest of us, but what of that?).

But I digress again. No politics.

I rode my bicycle to Ascutney, Vermont today. Here's the Mount of that name, dramatically rising from an otherwise almost flat terrain.

 

 

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Friday Night Music, and a bit more

Friday, August 3, 2012

Okay, so we’re beginning our annual Vermont vacation a bit early this year. My sister is renting the place we rent every summer this week, and our rental begins tomorrow, so we’ve been her guests since yesterday, and she’ll be our guest starting tomorrow. Political blogging will be sparse, though who knows, I may inflict more than I normally do up here, as, Allah or whoever be praised, our rental has wireless this year. No need to go to the Long Trail brewery to check email, a development that is decidedly a mixed blessing.

On our way up yesterday we stopped, as we always do (traditions are important) at the Vermont Welcome Center, where we saw an exhibit about the Vermont Institute of Contemporary Arts, newly opened in our second home town (very long story…we own property there) of Chester. The pictures on display featured Jim Morrison, Amy Weinhouse, and Jimi Hendrix, by an artist named Jack Dowd. So, we had to check it out.

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The exhibit, titled Jack Dowd’s 27, features portraits of 27 rock starts that died at age 27, apparently a popular age for rock stars to die, when they choose to die young. Actually, from what I gathered from one of the very friendly folks at the gallery, there are more than that that died at that age, and Dowd hasn’t actually finished the full 27 he has in mind, but let’s not quibble.

P8035361

Starting from the left that’s Jim Morrison, two that I can’t remember and can’t see well enough to jog my memory, then Jimi, (Janis is hidden behind the projecting wall, then Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, Brian Jones of the Stones, and Robert Johnson, who I didn’t realize died so young.

Speaking of Canned Heat, here’s our musical interlude, since I don’t think I’ve every posted anything by them. This features Wilson, who apparently was a highly talented but also highly depressed guy.

So, back to the art. I thought the Morrison portrait was the best. Unfortunately, this photograph is not that great, as the Wilson portrait is reflected in the glass covering Morrison.

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Finally, another dead artist, who didn’t die when he was 27, greets visitors in triplicate as you enter and exit.

P8035356

We were happy to learn that Chester has, at least for now, staved off a threat from the Dollar Store chain, which has been trying to open a store in town. We got a mailing a few months ago about the threat, and sent some money to the folks fighting against it, and it was good to learn that they have so far been successful. Apparently it’s too early to declare victory, but things are looking good.

What is also quite impressive is how well the Vermonters have come back from the flooding last year. Our agent told us a fairly hair-raising story about her own adventures, when she almost got swept away by the flooding. So far, we’ve seen only a few signs of the devastation.

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Serial Liar

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

One of the rules of American politics is that we are not supposed to remember things, at least we are not supposed to remember bad things about Republicans or disparate treatment meted out by the “liberal” media based on the political affiliation of the person being treated. Some of us do remember, though, and one of the things I remember with some bitterness is the press’s insistence on branding Al Gore a liar based on the flimsiest of evidence. Exhibit 1, you may recall, was his claim that he invented the internet. The fact that he never made such a claim was deemed of no importance, inasmuch as it ran contrary to the meme created by the people who spread the lie in the first place.

Now we are engaged in yet another election, and we have a candidate running on the R side of the ledger for whom lying is the default response whenever it suits his purposes. It allows him to say one thing to one audience, and then to deny he said that very thing when he must justify his statements to the rest of the world, without a bit of real blowback from the press. Consider this latest:

Mitt Romney caused a stir in Jerusalem by suggesting Israel’s economic superiority over the Palestinian territories was a product of “culture” and “providence,” but the Republican candidate insists that he was misunderstood.

FOX News’s Carl Cameron grilled Romney on his remarks, which top Palestinian officials immediately denounced as “racist,” in an interview from Poland on Tuesday. The Obama campaign also accused Romney of needlessly inflaming tensions in the region.

Romney responded that he “did not speak about the Palestinian culture or the decisions made in their economy,” while adding broadly that a nation’s “choices” affect their outcomes.

…

Romney’s insistence that he was not addressing Palestinian culture seems at odds with his lengthy and detailed speech at a fundraiser in which he offered up a direct comparison between the per capita GDP of Israel and the Palestinian territories before launching into an explanation of why he thinks culture and perhaps a little divine help are so important to the stronger Israeli economy.

“I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries,” Romney said at the time. “As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.”

…

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.” One of the additional factors he cited was “the hand of providence.”

(via Talking Points Memo)

Now, Romney’s denial was not an exaggeration, or dubious but somewhat plausible spin. It was, as the article makes clear, an absolutely direct lie about something that happened the day before the lie was uttered; not long enough for Romney to even plausibly claim forgetfulness, unless he lives in the eternal now.

So, eager Democrats with memories want to know: where is the meme? When will the Romney as liar narrative come front and center as it did with Gore? After all, this time the meme is true. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?

Addendum: Romney's GDP figures were wrong too, whether, in this instance, because he was lying or just making things up (pretty much the same thing, really) is not clear.

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Scalia: don’t blame me, the founders were crazy

Monday, July 30, 2012

Has there ever been a Supreme Court justice quite as crazy as Scalia? Maybe. Has there ever been one that just sort of made it up as he went along quite like Scalia does? I really rather doubt it. Yet the man truly thinks he has some mysterious power to get into the heads of the mostly reasonable founders and extract insanity therefrom. Now he pronounces from on high that the founders quite obviously intended that the right to bear arms means one has the right to bear any arm that a single person could carry:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday said that even “handheld rocket launchers” could be considered legal under his interpretation of the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

In the wake of a massacre in Colorado that left 12 dead and 58 wounded, host Chris Wallace asked Scalia if the Constitution would support assault-type AR-15 rifles and 100-round clips.

The justice explained that under his principle of originalism, some limitations on weapons were possible. Fox example, laws to restrict people from carrying a “head axe” would be constitutional because it was a misdemeanor when the Constitution was adopted in the late 1700s.

“What about these technological limitations?” Wallace wondered. “Obviously, we’re not now talking about a handgun or a musket, we’re talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute.”

“We’ll see,” Scalia replied. “Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that can not be carried. It’s to ‘keep and bear’ so it doesn’t apply to cannons.”

“But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to — it will have to be decided,” he added.

(via Hullabaloo)

It is not immediately clear why cannons are excluded. Perhaps Scalia is actually attempting to be intellectually consistent (a first for him), for, having read the introductory clause out of the amendment, he can’t use it to justify the right to bear cannons. For, in fact, some well-regulated militia did have cannons.

I won’t belabor the almost obvious point that this “originalist” school of legal “thinking” is merely a cover for reactionary, almost precedent free decision making. Hamilton and Madison joined together on the Federalist Papers and then never agreed again. They were both original, but which do we follow? Scalia opts to follow neither, for neither of them was so insane as to even consider sanctioning a right for any individual to acquire a rocket launcher, just because it could be carried. By Scalia’s logic, I guess if you can fit an a-bomb in a suitcase, everyone has a right to have one.

But I’m intrigued. I didn't know it was a misdemeanor in those far ago days to carry a head ax, whatever that is. Isn’t the obvious lesson that the founding generation was perfectly comfortable with regulating the private ownership of weapons, or is there some implied distinction between firearms and other, less destructive arms, that those of us who can read only English can’t see?

 

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A close legal question-only in 21st century America

Sunday, July 29, 2012

I read Dean Baker’s blog religiously. One can argue that he is repetitive, but I think he rightly feels that he must keep repeating himself, since what he has to say, usually so obviously true when you read it, never seems to sink in. It’s not just him, of course. It’s the same for Krugman and like minded economists-you know, the ones who recognized the coming disaster before it happened.

Not a week goes by that Baker doesn’t lament our broken patent system, or in which he fails to point out that our long term budget woes are almost solely attributable to the far higher costs imposed upon us by our broken health care system.

Here’s a story in which those memes collide:

It would seem a business executive’s dream: legally pay a competitor to keep its product off the market for years.

Congress has failed to stop it, and for more than a decade generic drug makers and big-name pharmaceutical companies have been winning court rulings that allowed it.

Until this month. On July 16, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia issued a decision that the arrangement is anticompetitive on its face. It potentially sets up a confrontation before the United States Supreme Court. If it were to accept the case, the outcome could profoundly affect drug prices and health care costs.

The Philadelphia ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals conflicted with decisions from at least three other federal circuit courts, giving the Supreme Court a strong reason to hear the case within the next few years.

“The Third Circuit has rebalanced the issue and teed it up for the Supreme Court,” said Eleanor M. Fox, an antitrust expert and professor at the New York University Law School. The agreements between generic and branded drug manufacturers “are cases of competitor collaboration, which the Supreme Court has called ’the supreme evil of antitrust.’ ”

The stakes are enormous for brand-name drug makers, which would face lower profits, and for pharmacies, insurance companies and patients, who could benefit from the savings.

In the case of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic with annual sales exceeding $1 billion, Bayer paid $400 million to a generic drug maker, Barr Laboratories, and other companies. In exchange, the generic makers said they would withhold their own lower-priced generic versions of the drug until 2003, when Bayer’s patent on the brand-name drug expired.

(via New York Times)

Now, if the market works as advertised, this must mean that the price of this drug, already at monopoly levels, will be increased by an amount, in the aggregate, greater than the generic manufacturer’s could make if they refused to take these payments. So, rather than forcing prices down, the existence of the generic manufacturers, who are basically now not manufacturing but getting by on bribes, results in an increase in already swollen prices in an amount greater than the savings would be if the generics were truly competing.

Why is it not surprising that the Congress has done nothing to stop this? Why, after years of court packing by Republican presidents, with only nominal pushbacks by the Democrats, is it not surprising that until now every court in the land has ruled in favor of a practice that on its face is monopolistic, price fixing behavior? Is it any surprise that the only surprise is that one court has seen the obvious?

I’ll be shocked if this ruling is upheld. It’s such a quaint throwback to that brief moment in history when this country was not a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.

 

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Top 20

Sunday, July 29, 2012







A few days ago the Apple blogs to which I go were abuzz about the fact that Time magazine chose Steve Jobs as one of the 20 most influential Americans of all time. Apparently, the criteria excluded those whose influence was evil (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, who would otherwise be right up there).

Of course, this sort of list is always highly subjective. My first reaction when I scanned it was amazement at the fact that Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark all made the list (separately, not as a group). The definition of influence must be rather strained, as, if memory serves, the broader public never heard of Sacagawea until years after the expedition, when the Journals were finally published. I'm not picking on her necessarily, though the choice is almost glaringly PC, because it's also really hard to make the argument that either Lewis or Clark deserve to be on the list.

The list says more about its compilers than it does about who was or wasn't truly influential. What I found interesting was the fact that there was not a single literary figure among the 20. Neither Thoreau (who influenced both Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the latter of whom justifiably made the top 20), Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Poe, Dickinson, Stowe (the “little lady who started [that] big war”) nor any other writer made the list, so we are to believe, I must assume, that none of those worthies was as influential as Louis Armstrong, who I admit, played a mean trumpet, but…well, but ..top 20? Really?

Nor, for that matter, did any other artist make the list, other than the aforementioned Armstrong. No painter, no dramatist, filmmaker, or, perhaps more justifiably, journalist. No one, except two scientists (who inhabited a different intellectual realm than the people to whom I refer), whose primary influence was in the world of ideas.

What are we to make of this? Has America really been so untouched by the ideas of its intellectuals and artists that not one has been more influential than a boxer? Is it really the case that their works have been so unimportant that not a one deserves placement on such a list? I think we can safely say that the answer is “no”, and that the self appointed list makers at Time just weren't up to the task.

Addendum: for the record, I'm a big Apple fan, but I don't think Jobs should be on the list either.


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