A note on why I persist

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101812189#.

GOP: Dangerously Close to Nihilism

Opinions

This July 4, governing in the spirit of revenge

EUGENE ROBINSON Opinion writer  / Washington Post

July 3

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party?

George Washington distrusted all political parties. He warned in his farewell address that, as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy.

For most of U.S. history, the major parties, even while differing sharply on philosophy and policy, have acted in a spirit of shared enterprise. There are significant exceptions — notably the years leading up to the Civil War. There was no possible compromise on an issue so fundamental as slavery.

Today, we face no question of such magnitude. Yet Republicans have decided not to collaborate with President Obama in fulfilling the most basic obligations of government, preferring to let “disorders and miseries” fester rather than address them.

Perhaps the House Republicans who block Obama’s legislative proposals and the Senate Republicans who block his executive and judicial appointments are acting in narrow political self-interest. Perhaps, as much of the overheated GOP rhetoric suggests, they are acting with the vengeful animus that Washington feared.

Whatever the motivation, Republicans have paralyzed our government in a way that would have shocked and depressed the Founders. Compounding the outrage, Republicans have the temerity to criticize Obama for using his executive powers in the national interest. This is dangerously close to nihilism.

Witness the humanitarian crisis along the border with Mexico: Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America have entered the United States. Many of these boys and girls are fleeing predatory criminal gangs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala and thus may qualify for asylum. Some may have been sent to establish a foothold here for their parents.

The influx of children cannot be meaningfully addressed without considering the larger suite of immigration issues. An estimated 11 million people are living and working here with no papers. A real solution must involve not only increased border security but also a way for the undocumented to achieve residency and citizenship. There also must be a revamping of the formal immigration system so that crossing the border illegally is not the only option for economic migrants.

The Senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill a year ago, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) refuses to bring it to the floor because he knows it would pass. Since most of the House GOP caucus opposes the reform bill, the votes to approve it would come from Democrats plus a few dozen Republicans.

Think about this for a moment. Urgently needed legislation has been passed by the Senate, is supported by the president and has enough votes in the House. Yet it goes nowhere, as chaos on the border worsens and thousands of children remain in limbo. Is this what the Founders had in mind?

Lord knows the Democratic Party is far from perfect. But House Democrats, when they were in the majority, at least understood that the government had to function, even if its policies were not those they preferred. When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was speaker, for example, she made certain that bills funding the occupation of Iraq made it through the House, even though a majority of Democrats bitterly opposed the war.

Today’s Republican Party opposes the Affordable Care Act, so it refuses to work with the Obama administration in legislating technical fixes that would make the law work more smoothly. Is this in any sense patriotic? Having lost battles over the law in Congress and the Supreme Court, don’t Republicans have an obligation to make it serve their constituents as well as possible?

Both parties used to understand the need to invest in infrastructure for reasons of competitiveness and safety. Both parties used to understand that there could be no serious threat to send the Treasury into default. Both parties used to cheer the kind of good economic news we heard Thursday —288,000 new jobs in June, unemployment down to 6.1 percent.

But now, one party — the GOP — cares more about ideology, reelection and opposing Obama’s every initiative than about the well-being of the nation. It is scant comfort, on Independence Day, to remember that the republic has survived worse.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.

Obamacare is a Success Story

The Incompetence Dogma

So Much for Obamacare Not Working

June 26, 2014 Paul Krugman - New York Times - OpEd

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website.

What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is, they made at least six distinct predictions about how Obamacare would fail — every one of which turned out to be wrong.

“To err is human,” wrote Seneca. “To persist is diabolical.” Everyone makes incorrect predictions. But to be that consistently, grossly wrong takes special effort. So what’s this all about?

Many readers won’t be surprised by the answer: It’s about politics and ideology, not analysis. But while this observation isn’t particularly startling, it’s worth pointing out just how completely ideology has trumped evidence in the health policy debate.

And I’m not just talking about the politicians; I’m talking about the wonks. It’s remarkable how many supposed experts on health care made claims about Obamacare that were clearly unsupportable. For example, remember “rate shock”? Last fall, when we got our first information about insurance premiums, conservative health care analysts raced to claim that consumers were facing a huge increase in their expenses. It was obvious, even at the time, that these claims were misleading; we now know that the great majority of Americans buying insurance through the new exchanges are getting coverage quite cheaply.

Or remember claims that young people wouldn’t sign up, so that Obamacare would experience a “death spiral” of surging costs and shrinking enrollment? It’s not happening: a new survey by Gallup finds both that a lot of people have gained insurance through the program and that the age mix of the new enrollees looks pretty good.

What was especially odd about the incessant predictions of health-reform disaster was that we already knew, or should have known, that a program along the lines of the Affordable Care Act was likely to work. Obamacare was closely modeled on Romneycare, which has been working in Massachusetts since 2006, and it bears a strong family resemblance to successful systems abroad, for example in Switzerland. Why should the system have been unworkable for America?

But a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.

It wasn’t always thus. If you go back two decades, to the last great fight over health reform, conservatives seem to have been relatively clearheaded about the policy prospects, albeit deeply cynical. For example, William Kristol’s famous 1993 memo urging Republicans to kill the Clinton health plan warned explicitly that Clintoncare, if implemented, might well be perceived as successful, which would, in turn, “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” So it was crucial to make sure that reform never happened. In effect, Mr. Kristol was telling insiders that tales of government incompetence are something you peddle to voters to get them to support tax cuts and deregulation, not something you necessarily believe yourself.

But that was before conservatives had fully retreated into their own intellectual universe. Fox News didn’t exist yet; policy analysts at right-wing think tanks had often begun their careers in relatively nonpolitical jobs. It was still possible to entertain the notion that reality wasn’t what you wanted it to be.

It’s different now. It’s hard to think of anyone on the American right who even considered the possibility that Obamacare might work, or at any rate who was willing to admit that possibility in public. Instead, even the supposed experts kept peddling improbable tales of looming disaster long after their chance of actually stopping health reform was past, and they peddled these tales not just to the rubes but to each other.

And let’s be clear: While it has been funny watching the right-wing cling to its delusions about health reform, it’s also scary. After all, these people retain considerable ability to engage in policy mischief, and one of these days they may regain the White House. And you really, really don’t want people who reject facts they don’t like in that position. I mean, they might do unthinkable things, like starting a war for no good reason. Oh, wait.

The Gall of Dick Cheney

The Gall of Dick Cheney

JUNE 18, 2014

Charles M. Blow   / New York Times OpEd


The situation in Iraq is truly worrisome, as militants threaten to tear the country asunder and disrupt
the fragile, short-lived period absent all-out war there.

We have strategic interests in preventing Iraq from unraveling, not least of which is that we don't need the country to become a haven for terrorists, particularly those who might see America as a target. And of course, there is the uneasy subject of oil: Volatility in the region has already sent global oil prices soaring. On Wednesday, militants were said to have taken control of Iraq's largest oil refinery.

We have to tread carefully here. There are no saints to be seen in this situation. Everyone's hands are bloody. And, we don't want to again get mired in a conflict in a country from which we have only recently extricated ourselves.

As we weigh our response, one of the last people who should say anything on the subject is a man who is partly responsible for the problem.

But former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the administration that deceived us into a nine-year war in Iraq, just can't seem to keep his peace.

In an Op-Ed published with his daughter, Liz, in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the Cheneys
write:  "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."
This, from the man who helped lead us into this trumped-up war, searching for nonexistent
weapons of mass destruction, a war in which some 4,500 members of the American military were killed, many thousands more injured, and that is running a tab of trillions of dollars.

During the lead-up to the war, Mr. Cheney said to Tim Russert: "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Even if it were indeed rare to be "so wrong," as Mr. Cheney puts it, he was vice president in an administration that was much more tragically wrong. His whole legacy is wrapped in wrong.
At one point in the article, the Cheneys state:

"Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing."

Mr. Cheney must think that we have all forgotten the scene from "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael
Moore's 2004 documentary, in which President George W. Bush, brandishing a club on a golf course, looks into the camera and says, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you." That is quickly followed by, "Now, watch this drive," and a shot of Bush swinging at the ball.

In fact, on one of the rare occasions that Mr. Cheney was actually right, in 1994, he warned about the problems that would be created by deposing Saddam Hussein:

"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire."

That was quite prescient. And yet, the Bush administration pushed us into the Iraq war anyway, and the quagmire we now confront.

That's why it's so galling to read Mr. Cheney chastising this administration for its handling of the disaster that Mr. Cheney himself foresaw, but ignored.

I know that we as Americans have short attention spans, but most of us don't suffer from amnesia. The Bush administration created this mess, and the Obama administration now has to clean it up.

The Cheneys wrote: "This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies," Mr. Cheney seemingly oblivious to the irony. George W. Bush may well have been a disaster of a president (in a 2010 Siena College Research Institute survey, 238 presidential scholars ranked Bush among the five "worst ever" presidents in American history), but at least he has the dignity and grace - or shame and humility - to recede from public life with his family and his painting, and not chide and meddle with the current administration as it tries to right his wrong.

Mr. Cheney, meanwhile, is still trying to bend history toward an exoneration of his guilt and an expunging of his record. But history, on this, is stiff, and his record is written in blood.
   
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e­mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

"An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier."

Paul Krugman

The Fix Isn’t In

Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement

JUNE 12, 2014 The Opinion Pages| Op-Ed Columnist |​​NYT Now

 

How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

 

I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

 

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.

 

To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.

 

In return for this service, businesses and the wealthy provided both lavish financial support for right-minded (in both senses) politicians and a safety net — “wing-nut welfare” — for loyalists. In particular, there were always comfortable berths waiting for those who left office, voluntarily or otherwise. There were lobbying jobs; there were commentator spots at Fox News and elsewhere (two former Bush speechwriters are now Washington Post columnists); there were “research” positions (after losing his Senate seat, Rick Santorum became director of the “America’s Enemies” program at a think tank supported by the Koch brothers, among others).

 

The combination of a successful electoral strategy and the safety net made being a conservative loyalist a seemingly low-risk professional path. The cause was radical, but the people it recruited tended increasingly to be apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction.

 

That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.

 

It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.

 

And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry — he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street — the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.

 

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

 

In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.

Correspondence: Netflix Responds to Verizon's Legal Demands [text]

                                                              [Netflix Letterhead]                                      

Sent Via Email

June 9, 2014
Randal S. Milch
Executive Vice President - Public Policy
& General Counsel
Verizon Communications, Inc.
140 West Street, 29th Floor
New York, New York 10007

           Re: Response to Demand Letter

Dear Randy,

I am in receipt of your letter dated June 5, 2014.

Your interpretation mischaracterizes our messaging. The message you cite to in your letter
merely lets our consumers know that the Verizon network is crowded. We have determined this
by examining the difference between the speed at which the Verizon network handles Netflix
traffic at peak versus non-peak times. The messaging is part of our ongoing transparency
efforts to let consumers know their Netflix experience is being affected by congestion on their
broadband provider‘s network. We are testing this type of messaging across the U.S. with
multiple providers.

Furthermore, your attempt to shift blame for our customers’ experience on the Verizon network
“squarely to Netflix itself’ disregards Verizon's responsibility to provide its customers with the
service it has promised them. Verizon sells residential Internet access to its customers. In fact,
it is my understanding that Verizon actually upsells customers to higher speed packages based
on improved access to video services, including Netflix. Verizon's unwillingness to augment its
access ports to major Internet  backbone providers is squarely Verizon's fault. As an ISP, you
sell your customers a connection to the Internet. To ensure that these customers get the level of
service they pay you for, it is your responsibility to make sure your network, including your
interconnection points, have sufficient capacity to accommodate the data requests made by
those customers. To try to shift blame to us for performance issues arising from interconnection
congestion is like blaming drivers on a bridge for traffic jams when you’re the one who decided
to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.

As you are well aware, Netflix, for more than two years, through its Open Connect Program, has
been willing to bring the data ISP subscribers request directly to any ISP's network for free,
including Verizon. Despite our willingness to do so, you have chosen not to participate in the
Open Connect Program, but instead have allowed your network connection to Netflix to degrade

______________________________________________________________________


Randal S. Milch
June 9, 2014

Page 2

until we agreed to pay for augmented interconnection. We brought the data right to your
doorstep... all you had to do was open your door.

We hope that our recent agreement will soon result in a better Netflix experience for our mutual
customers. The current transparency test to which your letter relates is scheduled to end June
16 and we are evaluating rolling it out more broadly. Regardless of this specific test, we will
continue to work on ways to communicate network conditions to our consumers. We’re also
happy to work with you on ways to improve network transparency to our mutual customers.

Sincerely,

David Hyman
General Counsel

Yes, Your Internet Is Getting Slower

 

Your provider likes it that way. And the government doesn’t care.

By David Auerbach / Slate

 

The ongoing battle over broadband network neutrality is confusing, and the stakes for consumers and businesses are high. What’s the worst that can happen if network neutrality doesn’t prevail? Yes, you will pay more for worse service, but just how bad will it get? To answer that complicated question, there’s one easy analogy available: the California energy crisis of 2000.

In the late 1990s, the deregulation of the California utilities—which forced them to sell off their power supplies to independent electricity wholesalers—proved to be a disaster. The magic hand of the market was supposed to bring down energy fees for all. What happened instead was that “efficient markets” turned out to be nothing of the sort. In 2000, market manipulation, artificial scarcity created by shutting down power plants to reduce supply, and deliberately inferior service resulted in blackouts and brownouts, an 800 percent rise in energy prices, and lucrative profiteering by Enron. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric went bankrupt, and the whole crisis cost somewhere upward of $40 billion.

Electricity wholesalers such as Enron are akin to Internet service providers such as Time Warner and Comcast in important ways. The electricity wholesalers had incentives to starve the energy market in order to extract greater fees from utilities and consumers. ISPs have similar incentives to manipulate their bandwidth in order to extract fees from websites (such as Netflix and YouTube), as well as not build out any infrastructure that would make bandwidth cheaper or make your Internet faster.

This is, in fact, what is already happening. Ars Technica reports that gigabit broadband could easily become a reality, but the ISPs have no interest in pursuing that path. Instead, ISPs like Time Warner repeatedly try to switch to capped bandwidth plans, despite widespread customer opposition to what is basically price gouging. In the face of actual competition, they wouldn’t dare.

Many customers are already living with a virtual Internet brownout. Tier 1 Internet provider Level 3, which provides top-level “backbone” services that reach the entire world, has posted several scary updates on the state of affairs. General counsel Michael Mooney observes that the ISPs are playing a game of chicken by demanding content providers pay them before they build out any further infrastructure. “These ISPs break the Internet by refusing to increase the size of their networks unless their tolls are paid,” Mooney said. Worse, they don’t even use the capacity they have, artificially starving their customers and slowing down the Internet. (Which explains why Game of Thrones is always buffering on your HBO Go, for example.) Level 3 Vice President Mark Taylor provided evidence that five U.S. ISPs (and one European ISP) are refusing to upgrade their infrastructure despite their connection ports being saturated. In other words, these ISPs are intentionally letting their service degrade because they’re cheap, like a city not fixing potholes in its roads.

If your Internet connection and streaming seem to have slowed down over the last year (as mine certainly has), Taylor has an answer: “permanent congestion” that has been in place for “well over a year,” because your ISP “refuses to augment capacity.” These ISPs, according to Taylor, “are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.” He provided a graph showing one Dallas ISP in constant saturation, effectively an Internet brownout for its customers.

Dallas’ Internet brownout: a week of ongoing bandwidth saturation and hundreds of millions of dropped and delayed packets for an unnamed Dallas ISP refusing to upgrade service.\  Courtesy of Level 3

Taylor did not identify the ISPs, but Time picked up on some clues, pointing to AT&T, Charter, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. (Time Warner and AT&T both serve Dallas, incidentally.) These titans exist in a market with very little competition, and it’s only getting worse: Time Warner is set to merge with the equally giant Comcast to form a behemoth that would cover 40 percent of the broadband market and 30 percent of the cable market. If network neutrality is weakened, as the Federal Communications Commission has been trying to do, ISPs will now be able to slow down traffic on a case-by-case basis. As “Future Tense” writer Marvin Ammori put it, “Once the court voids the nondiscrimination rule, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason. Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all.”

Where is competition broken? / Courtesy of Level 3

Alongside the terrible level of customer satisfaction with broadband ISPs, these existing abuses by ISPs with near-monopoly power should have policymakers raring for action. Yet regulatory capture is clearly in place. The head of the FCC, Obama appointee Tom Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for the very cable companies and telecoms he purports to regulate. Wheeler has done nothing to address existing problems while seeking to loosen what regulations there are by allowing ISPs to give preferential treatment to content providers. ISPs will be able to privilege—or deprivilege—traffic purely arbitrarily, creating Internet “fast lanes” for content providers who pay up and “slow lanes” for those who don’t … or just for content providers they don’t like. It’s payola, basically, wherein YouTube and Netflix will have to pony up (as Netflix just did to Comcast) so that customers can get the speeds they’re supposedly already entitled to.

Whatever your overall opinion on Obama, both left and right can agree that he sometimes embraces crony capitalism and corporate socialism at its worst, with Wheeler’s appointment as just one example. Just as IBM and Microsoft lost their footholds, uninnovative dinosaurs like Time Warner and AT&T should be flailing rather than thriving in our supposedly innovation-driven economy. But with Wheeler trying to chuck net neutrality even in the face of mounting protests, the dinosaurs probably have nothing to worry about.