Against Fracking

Last summer the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) announced plans to approve seven toxic fracking waste injection wells for a single site in our county. Many citizens were alarmed by this, and at the time I posted on some of our fruitless attempts to get ODNR (in the person of geologist Tom Tomastik) to have a public hearing during the comment period. Instead we were promised an informational meeting at some point.

ODNR finally held it this last Thursday – nine months later, and about a 50 minute drive from the community where the wells will be permitted. Department officials assured residents that they really tried to find a good place:

Mark Bruce of ODNR’s Office of Communications, said the state tries to make such information sessions “as convenient as possible.” He said Wingfoot Lake State Park was the closest state facility with adequate meeting space.

The meeting really should have been held in the impacted community. Even if some technicality in the bowels of the Ohio Revised Code might justify having it so far away, it really is not in the spirit of public service to require citizens concerned about a major event in their town to travel far outside it to attend a meeting. (It also raises the question of who the rules are written to serve.)

In addition, ODNR does not appear to know our area very well. In last summer’s post I noted how they printed their public notice on the Soinski wells in the largely unknown Portage County Legal News rather than the county’s largest daily newspaper, the Record Courier. We are a friendly people here in Portage county; if ODNR had trouble locating a suitable facility in Nelson we would have been happy to help find one.

The department also made it clear that those who did make the trek would not be welcome:

ODNR is also stressing that crowd size and activities will be strictly controlled.

The release notes that only small personal items and purses will be allowed in the lodge, that all bags may be subject to inspection by law enforcement, and that no video cameras, demonstrations, signs or banners will be allowed inside. The fire marshal’s room occupancy limit will be enforced.

Because nothing says “transparent and citizen-friendly public office” like strict control of residents and not allowing them to take pictures at a public meeting. Also, the “no signs or banners” verbiage looks like a response to the informational meeting held in Athens last November. Citizens there objected to the format when it was announced:

Critics of injection wells have argued that the open house format, in which various informational booths are made available to the public, is inferior to the public hearing format, in which citizens can stand up and voice their opinions to state officials and the rest of the crowd in attendance. (ODNR still takes written comments even under the open house approach, however.)

In a news release, the Athens County Fracking Action Network and Appalachia Resist!, two groups opposed to hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas, and to new injection wells to store the wastewater from such operations, slammed ODNR for not holding a genuine public hearing.

“An ‘open house’ is no substitute for a public hearing,” the release maintains. “At a public hearing, residents bring their concerns publicly before ODNR and all assembled, speaking one at a time in an organized fashion so that every comment can be heard by all. Most importantly, at a public hearing, public comments are entered into the legal record and can thus help hold ODNR accountable to the public.”

By contrast, the release alleges, at an open house citizens “are asked to mill around a large room, talking to various ODNR representatives in a casual one-on-one manner,” and comments don’t become part of legal record, “so ODNR cannot be held accountable to objections raised.”

When the event was held, people showed up with signs and yelled, which sounds awful. But consider: State Republicans are vocally in favor of fracking. Democrats – with a handful of exceptions – use a rhetoric of strategic ambiguity. The regulatory agency is, well, you’re reading about it now. The industry is flush with cash and can air as many “natural gas: America’s clean energy future!” commercials as it wants. When all you’ve got is your voice, you’ll use it as best you can.

So ODNR responded by making the information sessions even less useful by banning anything that might register or document strong opposition.

Our session began, as the one in Athens did, with a set of tables in the back that had ODNR officials on hand to talk, and some placards next to the tables. They had titles like “Seismic networks. Monitoring seismic activity across Ohio,” “Proposed class II injection wells (Portage) in relation to existing Ohio wells,” “Class II injection well surface facility. Components and checklist,” and other generalities.

One of the tables did look relevant, with a groundwater yield map in relation to proposed injection wells. But without the ability to sit down and study it, check it against other resources, maybe consult local experts, and so on, we couldn’t really do much more than look at it.

What we really wanted was to have our questions addressed, and one of the strongest impressions from the meeting was citizens trying to get answers and being turned away. The audio clips below are some of the exchanges between ordinary Ohioans and ODNR officials. Except for the county commissioner at the end the cast of characters is just regular citizens.

The first two clips have a lot of background noise and are hard to hear – we don’t have high end equipment and typically bring along our own humble devices or what we can borrow from someone else. But citizens can clearly be heard asking about the Soinski wells and being assured that they will be discussed in detail during the presentation (transcript).

Also listen to how the clip ends – with officials trying to stop the audio recording. This, along with the ban on video recording, may have been a violation of Ohio’s Sunshine Laws. The manual states (p. 89):

A public body cannot prohibit the public from audio or video recording a public meeting. A public body may, however, establish reasonable rules regulating the use of recording equipment, such as requiring equipment to be silent, unobtrusive, self-contained, and self-powered to limit interference with the ability of others to hear, see, and participate in the meeting.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

Will the makers of e-book readers follow the music industry in dropping DRM?

The music business was probably the first big segment of the entertainment industry to need to figure out the Internet. Napster forced the industry to think about it because Napster’s original version used peer-to-peer technology, which allowed users share their own music files and copy others’.

Napster was shut down in 2001, but if nothing else it showed the pent up demand for music that could be easily accessed on the Internet. This was initially taken by the industry to mean consumers wanted everything for free. But in 2003 Apple managed to get the major players to buy in to a digital music store that used digital rights management (DRM).

Listeners hated DRM because it restricted their ability to enjoy the music they paid for. Towards the end of the last decade businesses began to realize that DRM could be a headache for them as well, so eventually they wised up. By the end of 2011 all the major music stores were DRM free.

Short version: It was a hassle and there were some growing pains, but in the end the industry figured out how to deliver its product in a way consumers were happy to pay for. Lessons learned, all’s well, hooray!

The lessons haven’t been learned as widely as some of us hoped; the book industry seems to have spent the last fifteen years in a state of suspended animation. It is in the process of making exactly the same kinds of mistakes the music industry was making a decade ago.

I learned that last week when author Barry Eisler had a big blowout sale. I enjoy his writing, so I clicked over to his site when I found out about it. Eisler is very tech savvy. He has embraced digital distribution, has a full store on his site, offers his books in multiple file types (including MP3), and seems to get this brave new world we’ve entered. As I’ve aquired new technology I’ve been able to find his work in compatible formats. It’s a very reader-friendly stance.

(He also maintains a thoughtful political blog and has enthusiastically embraced the netroots – even naming characters in his stories after bloggers. [He has not named one of them after me though, a personal slight I am not at all bitter or resentful about.])

The sale in question was a Kindle exclusive: the e-book required either a Kindle device or app. The Kindle app is pretty ubiquitous, but I happen to have one of the few e-readers (Nook) where it is not available. Amazon’s desire for an exclusive ended up excluding some potential customers. That will probably always be the case with DRM – no device will be able to do everything.

The tech industry right now is churning out lots of different devices, operating systems and form factors in an attempt to get the One True Gadget – the thing you’ll take with you everywhere and use for everything. That’s a lovely aspiration, but I don’t see it happening.

What I see instead is people wanting to only carry around one thing at a time, and rotating through several: Smart phone for everyday use, tablet for the beach, laptop for the road, etc. If you can’t get the book you paid for on each of those devices, it’s a pain. As a reader I want to be able to put a book on everything as soon as I buy it so I always have a local (non-Internet dependent) copy – no matter which thing I run out of the house with.

That’s what I do with music. When I buy an album I immediately put it on my PC, MP3 player, laptop and so on. I want to put it on my existing stuff, and new stuff as I acquire it. I want to be able to use it, in other words.

The book industry isn’t there yet; it’s at odds with its customers. Readers want to be able to read the books they buy, publishers want locked down exclusives, and creators (even forward thinking ones like Eisler) are left to navigate those waters as best they can.

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see where this all goes. Users will hate DRM because it will be a hassle, it will depress sales, in a few years publishers will begin to have technological and public relations headaches associated with maintaining it, and some time around 2018 or so they will realize (as some of their more enlightened peers already do) that the best solution is to keep it off everything. It would be nice if we could just save everyone the trouble and fast forward to the happy ending right now.

UPDATED

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

Earlier this week I had a brief and unproductive Twitter exchange with Libby Spencer over leaks, whistleblowers and journalists. It was prompted by this from BooMan:

We need to get our heads around the distinction between a whistleblower, who observes criminal or unethical behavior by government officials, and a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security. Sometimes these two things can overlap, as when we learned that the NSA was conducting warrantless wiretaps in violation of current law. Bradley Manning revealed official wrongdoing, too, but he also did so with no discrimination.

Libby supported this point of view, I disagreed, and it quickly became obvious we wouldn’t get anything productive done 140 characters at a time. So here is the post-length treatment. The summarized version of her position (correct me if I’m wrong Libby!) is to side with the government in cases where, as BooMan writes, a leaker provides information without discrimination, or when outlets engage in irresponsible journalism.

I think the distinction between a “whistleblower” and “a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security” is specious (though he allows that “these two things can overlap”). My whistleblower may be your criminal who leaks etc. It largely depends on whether you support the leak in question.

BooMan’s post starts out looking at the recently revealed Justice Department (JD) investigation of James Rosen. Coming on the heels of the AP phone records seizure, it immediately became linked to that scandal. (That’s very fortunate timing! I wonder how the WaPo managed to unearth that “newly obtained court affidavit” at such a critical moment.)

There seem to be two big differences between them, though. The first is that Rosen was more narrowly targeted than the AP was, the second is that Rosen appeared to want to force a change in US policy as part of his reporting. So at least some the details on this particular case seem to support the JD’s actions.

The problem is that BooMan is not content to stay with the details of that one particular case. He moves on to some pretty troubling generalizations instead – his condemnation of indiscriminate leaking, for example.

Whistleblowers typically approach journalists in part because they want an organization with experience and resources to comb through the documents and figure out what to publish. Daniel Ellsberg indiscriminately leaked 7,000 pages to The New York Times. Do Libby and BooMan consider him a criminal?

We can debate whether WikiLeaks is a media outlet (I think it is, or at least it was at the time of its Afghan war diary coverage), but Manning’s smuggled documents were published simultaneously – and with the cooperation of – The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. Did those outlets engage in irresponsible journalism?

This debate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Those who have been on the receiving end of the surveillance state’s attention tend to look at a story like Rosen’s in the broader context of the government attacks on the First Amendment. If national security reporting is now fair game for government attack, there’s no reason to think it will remain confined to sketchy characters like Rosen. Scoops like those from Charlie Savage and the New York Times will also presumably receive more scrutiny as well.

The American government’s sordid history of deception with highly classified intelligence goes back a long way. It’s somewhat astonishing to read someone uncritically pass along government claims that something endangers what BooMan calls “our” precious bodily fluids national security given its track record. One of the most visible tools used to keep information from the public has been the state secrets privilege (SSP), which was literally founded on a lie:

Although the state secrets privilege has existed in some form since the early 19th century, its modern use, and the rules governing its invocation, derive from the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). In Reynolds, the widows of three civilians who died in the crash of a military plane in Georgia filed a wrongful death action against the government. In response to their request for the accident report, the government insisted that the report could not be disclosed because it contained information about secret military equipment that was being tested aboard the aircraft during the fatal flight. When the accident report was finally declassified in 2004, it contained no details whatsoever about secret equipment. The government’s true motivation in asserting the state secrets privilege was to cover up its own negligence.

Of course, we didn’t find that out until fifty years later. When the government engages in objectionable and secretive behavior we only find out haphazardly. There is no mechanism that allows this stuff to make its way to the public domain. For the instances we are fortunate enough to discover, taking national security claims at face value has not been a good bet. For instance, even the judicial review in Reynolds was crucially dependent not on evidence but on earnest assurances from the executive branch (emph. added):

In the majority opinion, the court, having not seen the documents in question, relied on the Air Force affidavit to conclude that certainly there was a reasonable danger that the accident investigation report would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission.

The SSP has remained a popular way for presidents – previous and current included – to cloak dubious activities in secrecy. Given that decades-long pattern (and the aggressive post-9/11 buildout of the surveillance state), it requires a pretty ahistoircal outlook to swallow whole the charge that James Rosen is “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” We should expect more than government-furnished email excerpts, at least.

Those who defend the status quo deserve similar scrutiny. For instance, BooMan’s claim that “[t]he report relied on sources in the North Korean government” is sloppy. The story cites “sources inside North Korea,” not inside its government. I haven’t seen any reporting that the source was an actual government official, but those who are defending the JD’s actions (BooMan and see also the Mediaite story) have made that claim. Maybe that is a trivial distinction, but maybe it is something the JD is willing to have people infer.

The problem with all this cloak and dagger stuff is that ordinary citizens cannot reliably inform themselves on the issue. The quick way to choose whom to believe is to pick the side you like better. But after that first snap decision, it helps to look at the various parties’ credibility. This may be where Libby and I part company, because I have become so distrustful of government snooping and deception that I no longer believe its national security claims without some sort of independent corroboration. She still seems willing to. Maybe that makes me cynical or her gullible; who knows.

What I do know is that we are now in the twelfth year of a war that we are told encompasses the entire globe and that by definition will never end. And war corrupts democracy: It prevents citizens from becoming educated on one of the most important issues a nation can engage in. It turns political opponents into traitors and adversarial reporting into treason. Those who push back on a wartime president are endangering (our) national security. Those who question the wisdom of our policies are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. War does not, to put it mildly, promote a culture of free and open inquiry in the country that wages it. In an environment like that, I’ll err on the side of skepticism.

UPDATE: Libby responds here.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

We’ve had three big stories this week, each showing how the right plays the scandal game better than the left. Of the three, one is a non-scandal (Benghazi), one is a minor scandal with the potential to turn into more (IRS),¹ and one is an honest-to-God scandal right now (AP). Republicans don’t bother with such fine distinctions though, and that’s why they are better at playing it than Democrats: when they get something they can run with, they do.

Fainting Couch

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous – and much less overtly political – than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time – they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, the business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause – and before the press is mentioned, incidentally – the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal which resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal. He refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class and the icy reception he received from journalists in the capitol. Apparently he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

It can be difficult to write about activism in an open-ended effort like the one against fracking. It isn’t like a campaign where all the activity is geared toward election day, at which point everyone will know who won and who lost. It’s different even from an issue like the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a single (continent-spanning) contiguous piece of infrastructure, and which will ultimately get a definitive yes or no.

Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern.

Another issue with coverage is that developments tend to move slower than the news cycle. Activists like our group might start something like a monthly water monitoring program, but after kicking it off there really isn’t much new to report on it. You can’t make much of a story out of: We’re still monitoring!

This week there was an interesting new development though. Our county had not approved an increase in funding to our health district since 1955. We’ve had lots of renewals, but no increases. Counties and other regional bodies are capable of providing valuable services to residents, but those services cost money – paid through taxes. Asking people to raise their taxes is a pretty heavy lift, as our track record on this issue shows.

Because of the contacts and knowledge our group has gained through our water monitoring program, we knew about the replacement levy coming up and invited someone from the board to speak. He talked in general terms about what the department was doing, what its challenges were, and so on. We raised our concerns about fracking to him, and he said the department would look into subsidizing the cost of its water testing program if the levy passed.¹

So we ordered a batch of signs and put them out on our lawns:

We also talked up the issue with friends and neighbors, and generally tried to promote the issue as we could. We weren’t in any way prime movers in the effort, but we pitched in as we were able to.² And miracle of miracles, it actually passed.

There are a couple of interesting notes in the article. The eye popping one for me is this: voter turnout of 8.87 percent. My experience at the polls was certainly congruent with that. I got there about a half an hour after polls opened and I thought I’d gone to the wrong place. It was deserted.

Inside, I initially went to the wrong room (misplaced signage – not my fault!) and found out I was the first voter to show up. I then made my way to the correct room and found out I was the first voter there as well. By contrast, last November I arrived about ten minutes after polls opened and there was already a long line. It was quick inside the booth as well – the health levy was literally the only item on the ballot. That wasn’t true county wide, of course, but it’s safe to say there were considerably fewer issues than in November.

These two factors make an interesting dynamic: Lower voter turnout means each voter who does show up gets more bang for the buck. Your vote has more weight if it’s one of ten than it does if it’s one of a million. And the thinner ballot means the election results generally were something of a referendum on the levy itself. Last November’s replacement levy defeat was bundled with votes for president, Congress, and so on. But Tuesday’s replacement levy success was close to an endorsement of the levy, plain and simple.

There are potentially some good lessons for activists. The first is that action on a controversial issue like fracking can be taken through less contentious avenues like health department funding. Lots of people enthusiastically support the oil and gas industry, but the population opposed to local health department funding is pretty much limited to anti-tax zealots.

Second, a group that believes it has popular support on an issue might do well to look to special elections to get on the ballot. There is less chance of the issue getting diluted or obscured by other issues, and activists can translate their support into maximum leverage at the polls.

Finally, the process of identifying issues and reaching out to key players is a great way to build social capital. It gets you in touch with people you wouldn’t have been in touch with otherwise and find ways to support a related issue in ways that might not have been obvious. And every now and then it all translates, as it did on Tuesday, into a surprising and pleasant victory.

1. Technical/legal note: we refer to our program as water monitoring and not water testing, because we don’t want anyone to think the handful of metrics we look at is in any way equivalent to the far more extensive testing done by the county or the EPA. We are very careful about our word choice.
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2. This sort of purely grassroots effort is exactly the kind of situation where a third party could make hay. One would think that a party like, say, the Greens would be strongly in favor of, say, adequate funding for health departments. To the extent they are absent, they are missing out on party building opportunities. They may not have the time, resources or inclination to do so in my neck of the woods, which is fine. But I will be decidedly unimpressed with their guilt trips about supporting the awful two party system when the next presidential election rolls around.
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Cyprus and its banks

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

The economic crisis in Cyprus began with a depressingly familiar story: bank gambles on risky debt, loses its bet, goes bust and needs a bailout. It very quickly took what was to me¹ a bewildering turn: Instead of a central bank cranking up the money printing machines until smoke billowed from them creating sufficient reserves to keep the banks going, the so-called troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank had another idea: take money from individual depositors.

This seemed like an astoundingly stupid idea. It was wrong on matters of simple equity. Those who were innocent of any wrongdoing or incompetence should not have been on the hook for remediation. But it was also wrong for a much more practical reason: raiding customers’ deposits would utterly destroy confidence in the entire country’s banking system. No one would ever trust a Cypriot bank again; only those forced to use them would do so. Which, since banking is (was) the largest industry in the country, meant that Cyprus’ economy would be wrecked.

As all this unfolded I really had trouble wrapping my mind around the relative equanimity with which it was being received. Paul Krugman even referred to the seizing of assets as a haircut. Now, just to be clear: I’m an economics layman and Paul Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in it. He has probably forgotten more about economics than I will ever know.

But my understanding of a haircut is that it refers to the reduction in value of a security; bonds are the most common examples I’ve seen. Are bank deposits used as collateral or otherwise treated as investments? Sure – by the institution receiving them, but not by the depositors themselves. At the very least, describing what’s happening in Cyprus as a haircut seems to require a somewhat, um, flexible understanding of the concept.

There has been a certain kind of distasteful resignation in the financial reporting on this, as though everyone recognizes it’s a bad situation but unfortunately this is the best way out of it.² And I read those reports and analyses almost with incredulity. This is going to destroy an entire country’s economy and cause an unfathomable amount of misery for its citizens. Don’t any of the major players know that?

A couple weeks in I got my answer: Of course they did. Destroying the country’s banks was by design. In a remarkably candid analysis Tyson Barker led with this:

The architects of the euro had one primary strategic goal. It was, to play on Lord Ismay’s famous quip about NATO, to keep the Americans out, the Germans in and the Mediterranean states down

Later in the article Barker casually refers to the nation’s banking sector being halved.³ With finance and real estate representing a quarter of the country’s entire economy, this is a ruinous development. It does not occur in a vacuum either. Tourism represents another quarter of its economy, and because of the chaos it too is taking a huge hit. In other words, half the Cyprus economy just got whacked.

The remaining half is on the fault line of this quake, too. As Karl Denninger noted, many businesses will be crippled:

There were branches of the Cypriot banks that were open in London during the time that they were closed in Cyprus. So if you were Russian that have great deal of money in these banks, or you were some kind of other off-shore person, who had money in these banks and you had some cash, you get on the plane, go to London and then you take all your money out. While the small business person in Cyprus who has his money there and needs to make payroll has his stolen.

In other words, this across-the-board seizure of money isn’t (or isn’t just) going after obscenely wealthy foreigners who have stashed their loot in Cypriot banks under sketchy circumstances. Local businesses that kept their operating funds at local banks are now seeing those funds disappear too. So even if, for example, the external factors causing the nosedive in tourism get resolved, there will be a far less attractive industry to cater to foreigners on holiday. No wonder the forecast for the country is bleak.

Such brutal tactics were not necessary. Even assuming that Germany (which appears to be setting the direction for the troika) is sincerely on the warpath against tax evasion, its efforts closer to home have been far more diplomatic and targeted. Barker describes German efforts to nab tax evaders in Liechtenstein and Switzerland through a process he delicately refers to as “shadowy data acquisition.” Why not use that same kind of surgical approach to Cyprus? Taking a wrecking ball to the banking sector just supports the thesis that it’s about keeping the Mediterranean states down.

Barker’s theory was substantially reinforced last weekend when the New York Times reported: “A key demand of a recent bailout deal announced for Cyprus was that the nation drastically shrink its role as a financial center and, many in Germany suspect, a haven for money laundering.”

It may well be that Germany is going after money laundering as its primary goal, but it is using remarkably crude means to achieve that end. Since there will be such blindingly obvious and disastrous consequences, it seems only fair to say that it is also ultimately responsible for the human effects of it. Some in the troika appear to know as much and already sound defensive about it:

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

I’m a big rock music fan, so a couple recent articles on it have stuck with me. The first was from a couple weeks ago, and for the life of me I can’t track it down now. The gist of it was that the era of great guitarists is passing. The most celebrated are all old in rock and roll years; even the youngest among them, Jack White, is 37. And so on.

Lamentations about the awful state of rock music have been around about as long as rock music, of course. They are typically rooted in the belief that music was at its zenith when the writer in question was about 16, has been in decline ever since, and can only be rescued by going back to that golden era and entering a perpetual state of suspended animation.

Guitars

I obviously don’t think much of that. Music changes; either deal with it or stop listening. Composers work with what’s available, and as that evolves so do the sounds they create. Forty years ago Thom Yorke might well have been a guitar virtuoso, but the possibilities electronic music opened up are clearly more intriguing to him. So instead of Who’s Next we get Kid A. Wondering where all the great guitar players went makes only slightly more sense than wondering where all the great Gregorian chanters have gone.

That said, there actually are a lot of great rock groups out there, they just aren’t front and center. Guitar-driven rock and roll doesn’t dominate the contemporary musical landscape, or get served up to the casual listener, the way it used to. But if you’re willing to go off the beaten path (and wade through a certain amount of uninspired crap) you can find some pretty amazing stuff. But you won’t hear Aladelta by L’Hereu Escampa, Amok by Bohemian Betyars or Meet My Maker by Howl Griff on the radio any time soon.

Still, the ability to hear such artists is an almost unimaginable improvement to anyone who grew up listening to a handful of local stations. Even better, you don’t have to go all the way to Spain, Hungary or Wales to find great rock bands. No matter where you are, you are almost guaranteed to have at least a couple fine ones in your backyard. Finding ways to discover and support them is important – regardless of what you (or anyone else) might think of their prospects for finding a wider audience.

Near the end of his “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” Steven Hyden makes the case for a group near his hometown:

Part of me thinks we’d all be better off as rock fans to unplug and go local. I live in Milwaukee, and there are at least a half-dozen rock groups here that I love and can see for next to nothing at a corner bar. A couple years ago, a local band named Call Me Lightning put out a record called When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free that sounds like The Who if Steve Albini had produced Who’s Next. It’s maybe my fifth or sixth favorite rock record of the decade so far….I have a small hope that by mentioning Call Me Lightning just now, at least a few of you will be inspired to check out When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free and have your heads torn off.