Salazar says drilling companies made “some very major mistakes”; Expert reviewer finds well’s cement seal “was probably faulty” and inadequately tested (to save money); Explosion occured while BP executives were on board “celebrating the rig’s safety record”!
We now know with pretty high confidence the three main, interrelated, underlying causes of the BP’s oil disaster: Hubris, recklessness, and arrogance. So the metaphor is as much Goldman Sachs as that other great maritime disaster — the Titanic.
And if BP turns out to be guilty of malfeasance, too — violating its federal permit — as the NYT suggested — then you’d have the Four Horseman of Oilpocalypse.
Reporting over the weekend has also given us a pretty good idea of the proximate cause, which, as we’ll see, appears intimately tied to the underlying causes.
Via James Fallows, a neat utility from Paul Rademacher helps you understand the scale of the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico by superimposing an image of the spill over a Google Earth shot of the metro area of your choice. Here’s the spill covering New York City, its New Jersey and Westchester suburbs, and also a nice swath of the Long Island Sound:
A number like 2500 square miles doesn’t mean much to most people intuitively. These images make a real impression.
Senate Republicans have been obstructing the confirmation of President Obama’s appointees to an “unprecedented” degree, taking longer to process his nominees than those of the three previous administrations, often for dubious reasons. Now, Republicans are “determined to block” Obama’s pick for the ambassador to El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, “because of questions about a long-ago boyfriend,” who was baselessly accused of trying to recruit Aponte to spy for Cuba. She had dated the Cuban-American businessman from 1982 to 1994 and “attended some social functions with Cuban diplomats” with him, but the FBI gave Aponte “a clean bill of health” when President Clinton nominated her to a position in 1998, and she has received top security clearance twice since her relationship ended. The Senate Foreign Relations committee approved her nomination late last month, and Cuban-American Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) — who has been a “strong supporter of anti-Castro legislation” — “strongly defended Aponte” during the committee vote:
But Menendez came to Aponte’s defense at the business meeting and said, “If I thought that after having reviewed the file that Miss Aponte would be a security risk to the United States in any context, but particularly in the context of the Castro regime having access to her, I would oppose her. But that is simply not the case.” [...]
Chairman John Kerry, D-MA, noted that she has received top-secret security clearance twice since the alleged affair. Not having an ambassador in El Salvador hurts American interests, he added.
“After an exhaustive investigative process, with the entire U.S. intelligence community looking at this twice since these allegations appeared about her former boyfriend, she has been given top-secret clearance,” Kerry said. “Either our intelligence community is completely incompetent in looking at these things, or we have to trust them.”
Citing congressional staffers, the Miami Herald reports that “Republicans will put a hold on her nomination when it comes up in the full Senate, meaning it will need 60 votes for confirmation.” Opposition to Aponte’s confirmation has been led by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who has also blocked at least two other would-be ambassadors to Latin America, and spearheaded a misguided attempt to intervene in Honduras’ political system after a disputed election there last year.
Raising the question of whether she’s actually been paying attention to the news this week, this morning on Fox News Liz Cheney attacked the Obama administration’s handling of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad as “insufficient,” insisting that the administration’s “first instinct is to inform him [Shahzad] that he’s got the right to remain silent”:
CHENEY: When the administration captures a terrorist and their first instinct is to inform him that he’s got the right to remain silent, that is exactly the wrong way to win this war. When we capture a terrorist, our first instinct has got to be: How do we understand the networks to which this terrorist is connected? How do we understand where he was trained? How do we understand who the leadership is? The administration is approaching this, and again this morning you had John Brennan saying, “Well, this was one-off because he drove the truck alone.” That doesn’t even make sense, it’s inexplicable. But if you aren’t willing to acknowledge that you’re facing a committed network of terrorists as your enemies, and that it’s radical jihadist Islam, then your response to that is gonna be, by definition, insufficient time and time again.
Watch it:
What’s inexplicable is why Liz Cheney is treated as a national security expert. First of all, informing a suspect — in this case, a U.S. citizen — of his or her right to remain silent is the law. It says an enormous amount (none of it good) about Cheney’s understanding of and respect for that law that she thinks that the administration’s concern for it should be grounds for attack.
Second, the fact of the matter — which by now should be well known by anyone claiming to be interested in keeping America safe — is that when Faisal Shahzad was apprehended (just over 53 hours of having parked his vehicle in Times Square), the arresting agents invoked the “security exception” in order to immediately question Shahzad about imminent threats before informing him of his right to remain silent.
Asked on Friday whether Mirandizing Shahzad had impeded the ongoing investigation, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “No, it did not. As we have seen in prior investigations, the giving of Miranda warnings has not deterred people from talking to us, and Mr. Shahzad is, in fact, continuing to cooperate with us.” But, in Liz Cheney’s world, this represents a failure.
There’s really no mystery as to why Cheney says these things. She’s a political hack trying to boost her career and her father’s tragic legacy, for whom no attack on Obama is too specious or dishonest. The question is whether she’ll ever agree to appear on a forum where her arguments can actually be challenged, or stay within the safe confines of the Fox News bubble. Rachel Maddow has repeatedly invited her on her show, but Cheney has, unsurprisingly, yet to accept.
My personal sense is that the skeptics about the viability of China’s economic performance are mistaken, that essentially people don’t like the idea that the lesson of the Chinese economy in the 2008-2010 period is that better policy could have helped other countries weather the storm much better than we have. But as I’m trying to expose myself to the contrary view and not just get sucked into groupthink, so I linked to this bearish article last week. Today, though, I’d like to link to Scott Sumner’s rebuttal which strikes me as convincing.
Clearly the Chinese economy doesn’t walk on water and it’s not going to deliver 10 percent growth per year every year forever. It especially won’t do that if Europe slides off the cliff and drags the US into a double dip. But the outlook continues to be good. For most of the 20th century, China suffered from terrible policy. Recently, the policy has become much better and it’s paying off big-time.
Lawrence MacDonald talks to Chris Blattman for a Global Prosperity Wonkcast on Blattman’s work:
According to his research, only about 10% of former child soldiers suffer debilitating psychological symptoms or have serious problems functioning within their communities. More typically, these youth take on leadership roles, and they are more likely to vote in elections than peers who were not abducted. With this in mind, Chris argues, programs to help the returnees should be structured to target psychological counseling to those who need it, while offering broader opportunities—such as education and job training—to former combatants whose psychological scars are less severe.
Chris and I also discuss a more basic question: why does child soldiering happen at all, and how can it be prevented? Chris explains the basic theories for why armed groups target children. To break this pattern, he says, countries should continue stiffening the penalties for recruiting children, to create a stronger deterrent effect. They should also better prepare children to resist and to escape if they are seized, for example, by publicizing amnesty laws, creating better educational and job opportunities for youth, and teaching children how to find their way home if they are abducted and run away.
I wonder how much of this might be relevant to the issue of criminal gangs in the United States and other western countries. In particular the idea of “stiffening the penalties for recruiting children” while offering amnesty to the children involved themselves seems to me to have some promise.
Conservatives have responded to the massive economic crisis in Greece — which is spreading to the rest of Europe — by trying to score political points against President Obama’s domestic economic policies. This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace and Liz Cheney pushed the myth that the United States was “bailing out” Greece, and Cheney even suggested that America adopt Greek-like austerity measures to counter the budget deficit:
CHENEY: When you look at the question over whether the US tax payer ought to be contributing to bailing out Greece, I think you also got to say wait a second at the same time that we are looking to put $7 billion to bail out Greece… we’ve got the same types of policies being put in place here in the United States that frankly are much more likely to lead us down the path that we see Greece on.
Mara Liasson pushed back, noting that the notion that the U.S. was bailing out Greece was nothing more than a great conservative “talking point.” Watch it:
The U.S. — along with many other countries– is a contributor to the International Monetary Fund, which serves as a lender of last resort to countries in crisis in order to prevent these crises from spreading worldwide. By Cheney’s standard every Administration in the last 60 years since the IMF was created, including the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations, have “bailed out” countries.
Cheney’s suggestion that the United States adopt the kind of “austerity” measures being enacted in Greece, moreover, would lead to absolute economic catastrophe. Greece is expected to experience massive economic contraction and if the U.S. were to follow that approach, it would fall back into a deep recession.
Still, Cheney contends that America’s deficits will lead to a Greek-like tragedy. But as Marshal Auerback notes, the problem isn’t Greece’s debt per say but its inability to service that debt, because it both doesn’t control its currency (the Euro) and because its economy is contracting. The United States is in no danger of defaulting — the American economy is growing and due to fears over the Euro, investors are boosting the value of the dollar.
In fact, what the crisis has actually shown is the failure of conservative approaches to economic crises. Contrary to most conceptions, Germany’s leadership has long adopted a conservative approach to the crisis, resisting economic stimulus or providing economic support to other European countries. As a result, the crisis has gotten worse and now threatens to spread to other Southern European countries, putting the Euro currency and the entire global economy at risk. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally awoken to the danger and has now belatedly agreed to a massive bailout for Greece – one that is considerably larger than what would have been needed if she acted sooner.
But conservatives in America are still holding on to their failed economic dogma. As Dave Weigel notes, “Greece is the new France” meaning that “Greece is now the nation whose name Republicans invoke to make the case against Democratic policies.”
I appreciate that environmentalists don’t like super-simplistic economic models that assume perfect competition and perfect information. I don’t like them either. And consequently, I agree that though a “cap and dividend” scheme in which you auction CO2 emissions permits and then rebate the money to taxpayers makes sense in a simplistic model it’s not the optimal policy for the real world. That said, a lot of environmentalists seem to me to take this far too far in the other direction, and start arguing that these models don’t tell us anything about human behavior and that price incentives won’t do anything without explicit subsidies and regulatory mandates.
Because a tax on your competitor does not make you wealthier. This is so obvious it shouldn’t need repeating. And yet it is perniciously present in the cap-and-dividend debate. Raising the cost of generating power from coal does not suddenly enhance the economic incentives to build a solar panel any more than losing your job makes it easier for your neighbors to finance an addition to their home. If we want to provide an incentive for carbon reduction, make an explicit payment per ton of carbon reduced; don’t simply bank on hopeful theories about how costs will ripple through the system as higher prices and profit margins. Maybe that happens in the long run — but in the long run, we’re all dead.
This is nuts. Consider ways I might create economic incentives to build more Pepsi plants. One thing I might do is offer a subsidy—”if you open a Pepsi plant, I’ll give you some money.” Another thing I might do, however, is slap a $0.50 tax on Coke products. If you do that, some people will just increase their Coke expenditures and decrease their spending on non-Coke items. But some people will decrease their Coke consumption. And some of those people will replace their Coke consumption with close substitutes for Coke—Pepsi, in other words. That increased demand for Pepsi creates the incentive to build more Pepsi plants. And this incentive isn’t created “in the long run” it exists from the minute the new policy is announced. The only lag involved is simply that it may take a while to actually build the new plant, but the logistical issues involved with that will exist with any policy tool. The point, however, is that taxing Coke and rebating the money to the public is a perfectly workable way of reducing Coke consumption.
Back to climate policy, the main issue with price-only policies is that if you want to inspire substantial changes in behavior through this lever then the tax is going to have to be quite high. But for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons, any kind of greenhouse gas tax is very likely to be phased in rather slowly over time. Which means that in the short term it’s vital to take advantage of all the low-hanging fruit that’s out there in terms of efficiency and other things a cap-and-dividend plan isn’t going to capture. On top of that, any realistic view of the market for electricity & heat or the forces impacting people’s decisions about housing & transportation will immediately lead you to the conclusion that the status quo does not consist of unregulated competitive markets so it’s insane to not look at changing the regulations in a more ecologically sustainable direction.
This morning, Liz Cheney criticized the Obama administration’s handling of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad as “insufficient.” Speaking on the Fox News Sunday’s panel, Cheney insisted that the administration’s “first instinct is to inform him [Shahzad] that he’s got the right to remain silent”:
CHENEY: When the administration captures a terrorist and their first instinct is to inform him that he’s got the right to remain silent, that is exactly the wrong way to win this war. When we capture a terrorist, our first instinct has got to be: How do we understand the networks to which this terrorist is connected? How do we understand where he was trained? How do we understand who the leadership is? The administration is approaching this, and again this morning you had John Brennan saying, “Well, this was one-off because he drove the truck alone.” That doesn’t even make sense, it’s inexplicable. But if you aren’t willing to acknowledge that you’re facing a committed network of terrorists as your enemies, and that it’s radical jihadist Islam, then your response to that is gonna be, by definition, insufficient time and time again.
Watch it:
In reality, Faisal Shahzad was questioned before being Mirandized. When Faisal Shahzad was apprehended53 hours after having parked his vehicle in Times Square, the arresting agents invoked the “security exception” in order to immediately question Shahzad about imminent threats before informing him of his right to remain silent — a right he is legally entitled to as an American citizen.
Asked on Friday whether Mirandizing Shahzad had impeded the ongoing investigation, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “No, it did not. Reading suspects their Miranda warnings has not deterred them from speaking to investigators, and Mr. Shahzad is, in fact, continuing to cooperate with us.” But, in Liz Cheney’s world, this represents a failure.
UPDATE: As noted below, Rehm’s show always made clear that this show would be trumped by an Obama announcement on his Supreme Court nominee. And so it goes.
Thanks for all your suggestions. They will be put to good use. And the show may get reprised in the future.
We now know with pretty high confidence the three main, interrelated, underlying causes of the BP’s oil disaster: Hubris, recklessness, and arrogance. So the metaphor is as much Goldman Sachs as that other great maritime disaster — the Titanic.
Senate Republicans have been 
