Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Egypt’s Sisi selflessly offers to be leader forever

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fake-time-magazine-egypt-200In the least convincing denial yet that he is building a cult of personality and permanent personal dictatorship, Egypt’s General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has told voters there that they should vote for his new constitution in this week’s referendum if they want him to run for president:

“If I run, then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army,” General Sisi said at a military seminar, according to the website of the state newspaper, Al Ahram. “I can’t turn my back on Egypt.”

 

Sisi added that it would be embarrassing for him if they didn’t vote for it, and you don’t want to disappoint the Dear Father.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the world,” he said, “not me personally but the military, because in the military we are as united as one man’s heart, and we adhere to democracy.” He noted that the new charter authorizes the military to “protect the will of the people” and he vowed, “We will protect it in any circumstances.”

 

Fortunately for Sisi, campaigning against the proposed constitution is not allowed. Seems like a pretty fair way to check on public opinion before you run for something, right? And just to be sure, the state propaganda engines are grinding away toward victory:

The state news media and Egyptian private television networks, all supportive of the military takeover, are effusive in their endorsements of the new charter and contain scarcely a word of criticism. A group of Egyptian movie stars has recorded a television commercial singing a song in praise of the new charter, ending with a call for a thousand yeses to the new Constitution. And the military itself has produced a television advertisement in which a group of children sing their own endorsement to a martial theme.

“It’s to be or not to be,” the children sing, warning listeners that they will be judged by God for their vote and urging them not to “leave my country for destruction.”

 

So, to recap: If you vote against this, you’ll embarrass the national armed forces and its leader and then God will smite you. This seems compelling.

Feds have questions about NJ tourism ads

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More trouble for Christie in New Jersey. CNN via Daily Kos:

In the new probe, federal auditors will examine New Jersey’s use of $25 million in Sandy relief funds for a marketing campaign to promote tourism at the Jersey Shore after Sandy decimated the state’s coastline in late 2012, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone told CNN. […]

Pallone wrote that he was concerned about the bidding process for the firm awarded the marketing plan; the winning firm is charging the state about $2 million more than the next lowest bidder. The winning $4.7 million bid featured Christie and his family in the advertisements while the losing $2.5 million proposal did not feature the Christies.

 
I saw those ads a lot while I was in Delaware (unsurprisingly) but it never occurred to me that they were funded with Federal relief aid, let alone through a sketchy contract awards process. This is the kind of waste that makes Gulf Coast and inland Republicans suddenly look righteous instead of monstrous for trying to block Federal disaster relief to New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. (They’re still monsters, of course. They just look less so.)

Anyway, with these scandals coming out into the open, it’s increasingly clear to the public why Romney passed on Christie as a running mate between the final two picks. In the words of Double Down, “The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record.”

Giuliani recalls scandal that never happened

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Rudy Giuliani (who is still a thing?) was on TV today trying to compare Chris Christie’s bridge scandal to “the IRS scandal.” You may remember this as the firestorm whipped up by the House Republicans on one of their many Oversight Committee witch-hunts, led by Darrel Issa, which asserted that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups unfairly for heightened scrutiny. Giuliani feels that Christie could have not known about the bridge closures by his senior aides, like how President Obama didn’t know what the IRS was up to.

Did someone forget to tell Rudy that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal. The Port Authority closing part of a major bridge to punish a political opponent of the Governor of New Jersey is.

Will “smarter” cars start snitching on us?

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After a Ford exec in a panel talk raised a (supposedly) hypothetical scenario whereby the company could collect live driving data like speed and relative location from embedded GPS and other services linked back to headquarters by satellite, and noted that it would include illegal/dangerous driving behaviors, Eugene Volokh of TVC started thinking through the legal implications of such a world. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Ford could technically gather this information, and could use it to prevent injuries. For instance, if GPS data shows that someone is speeding — or the car’s internal data shows that the driver is speeding, or driving in a way suggestive of drunk driving or extreme sleepiness, and the data can then be communicated to some central location — then Ford could notify the police, so the dangerous driver can be stopped. And the possibility of such reports could deter the dangerous driving in the first place.

Ford, then, is putting extremely dangerous devices on the road. It’s clearly foreseeable that those devices will be misused (since they often are misused). Car accidents cause tens of thousands of deaths and many more injuries each year. And Ford has a means of making those dangerous devices that it distributes less dangerous; yet it’s not using them.

Sounds like a lawsuit, no? Manufacturer liability for designs that unreasonably facilitate foreseeable misuse is well-established. And the fact that the misuse may stem from negligence (or even intentional wrongdoing) on the user’s part doesn’t necessarily block liability, so long as the user misconduct is foreseeable. I should note that I’m not wild about these aspects of our tort law system, and think they should likely be trimmed back in various ways; but there is certainly ample legal doctrine out there — whether one likes it or not — potentially supporting liability in such a situation.

 

The full piece is pretty long and gears gradually toward the technical side, for legal professionals, as it progresses, but the opening sections are for a more general audience. It’s certainly thought-provoking — the idea that companies might be able to use increasingly computerized and data-rich vehicles to monitor driving behavior and report it to the police (or to insurers, or… who knows where it ends).

Might they even make the data signals go two ways so they could control someone’s vehicle to slow them if they’re speeding out of control (or aid the police in controlling it, to stop a high-speed chase for example)? After all, some of these cars already have automated lane-finders and swerve-correctors as well as numerous other safety features. But those are locally-run by the onboard systems. Does the company have an obligation to control or report its vehicles when they’re being used dangerously or illegally? If they don’t, will they be sued? Interesting (and troubling) questions from a brave new world…

Does the US still have leverage in South Sudan?

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South Sudan: This is the house that Jack built. If the house is a new state in sub-Saharan Africa and Jack is the United States.

The New York Times identifies one of the more pressing problems in the current crisis:

The problem, analysts say, is that the United States does not have the influence it had before 2011. Then, the South Sudanese needed American aid and support for a referendum. Now they have independence and more than $1 billion a year in oil revenue that used to go to the north.

“Very quickly after independence, we saw increasingly authoritarian instincts, not just on the part of Salva Kiir, but all the members of the South Sudanese political elite,” said Cameron Hudson, a former State Department official who is now the policy director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This time around, powerful neighbors like Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are taking a lead role in trying to broker peace.

 
south-sudan-map-ciaOn the one hand, I think that reinforces the need for oil purchase partner China to get involved — particularly as I don’t trust those regional powers to be fair brokers.

On the other hand, it’s also a cautionary tale for the United States in future. That’s a point explored in more depth in the key read from The Guardian, How Hollywood cloaked South Sudan in celebrity and fell for the ‘big lie’.

A thought on student debt

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He’s my “Thoughtpinion” of the day: It’s criminally irresponsible to be pushing massive, undefaultable loans to 17 and 18 year olds. Due to underdeveloped decision-making and judgment brain centers, we don’t trust them to drink, we barely trust some of them to vote, and we (as a society) more or less don’t trust them to be having sex — let alone to start families. Why? Because these are big decisions with potentially huge and permanent consequences.

But let’s have them sign giant loans they might not be able to repay so they can go to a school they can’t afford to attend because it was well marketed to them? That’s a decision we trust them to weigh?

And then when they get there, all the vulture scammy credit card deals — often backed by the school — help these teens get hooked into unrepayable consumer debt cycles for life.

Later they will be told it was their fault for being so irresponsible and for making bad choices. At age 18.

A higher minimum wage would mean higher demand

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Since I worked closely on it during the editing process (and because it’s a great piece) I wanted to present some key highlights from a new article on the U.S. minimum wage in The Globalist by George R. Tyler, author of “What Went Wrong: How The 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class and What Other Countries Got Right” and a former deputy assistant U.S. treasury secretary under Bill Clinton:

In both the United States and EU, insufficient aggregate demand has replaced the business cycle as the bugaboo of economists, underemployment its hallmark. And the only place to find inflation is in history books and full employment awaits the next bubble. “We have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression,” is how Paul Krugman puts it.

The traditional macro tools seem unhelpful: monetary policy is all-in and fiscal policy remains hampered by politics and excessive public debt. Others solutions such as inflation, negative interest rates or public investment should be pursued, but are not sufficient remedies.
[…]
The most promising option is to raise real wages. That proposition won’t puzzle European scholars familiar with the Australian and northern Europe wage determination mechanisms. For decades, these countries have effectively and providentially linked real wages there to productivity growth.
[…]
The relatively high marginal spending propensities of lower income Americans suggest the demand impact would be maximized by raising the minimum wage.

Germany will soon be imposing a nationwide minimum wage of €8.50 an hour ($10.50 or so), which will spur domestic demand. The latter would be a step in the right direction of moderating its hot-button current account surplus.

In Australia, the minimum wage exceeds U.S. $11 adjusted for purchasing power. Yet, its growth in GDP has exceeded the United States for years and Australia has an unemployment rate of 5.8%, below that of the United States. Labor participation is also higher than in the United States. Clearly, a high minimum wage has not destroyed jobs or crippled growth.

The United States should similarly support demand by raising its nationwide minimum wage, now set at $7.25 per hour, which is well below rates abroad. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists have concluded that a $1 increase in minimum wages would raise incomes in affected households by $250 per quarter and spending even more the following year.

Raising the minimum wage floor will ratchet up wages for as many as 30 million other employees. Moreover, research by economists such as Arindrajit Dube is concluding that raising minimum wages can even have a tiny positive impact on employment, with employer costs ameliorated by reduced labor force turnover.

Importantly, both Germany and the U.S. should adopt the Australian and French policy of indexing minimum wages to productivity growth as well as inflation.

That step would also see the bizarre American taxpayer subsidy to low-wage employers like McDonalds or Walmart wither away. A Democratic Congressional study found that last year public healthcare subsidies alone averaged $3,015 for each Walmart employee in the typical state of Wisconsin. Other subsides raise the total to as much as $5,800 per employee.
[…]
Raising labor costs will slow job creation, but an extensive analysis by economists at the International Labor Organization recently concluded that the impact on aggregate demand in the European Union (EU) of a broad one percentage point real wage increase was nonetheless sufficient to raise employment on balance.

Above all, the weight of decades of evidence in Australia and northern Europe document that linking wages to productivity growth in this fashion will not jeopardize U.S. competitiveness or engender wage drift.

The piece, which I encourage you to read in full, is both an argument for a higher minimum wage in the United States and a rebuttal of arguments against the idea of a minimum wage.