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. Read the rest of this entry →

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: Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

The sharp exchange between Ted Cruz and Dianne Feinstein at last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing produced somewhat typical partisan reactions: conservatives thought Cruz had the better of the exchange; liberals, Feinstein. There was a definite gender angle as well though. A number of women noted Cruz’ condescending attitude towards Feinstein and wondered if a man would have had his qualifications and experience so breezily dismissed. Some on the right obliged in supporting this point by breezily dismissing Feinstein’s qualifications and experience.

Steve M, a liberal at No More Mister Nice Blog, wrote a minor dissent from the left. Before continuing, though, I would like to make the FOLLOWING QUALIFICATION IN BOLD AND ALL CAPS: These observations are general and not meant to be taken as categorical. Writing that men gravitate towards one kind of argument or women another is not meant to be taken as meaning that all men or all women think a certain way.

Here is the generalization. Men generally gravitate towards (and find more persuasive) arguments that proceed from abstract principles, whereas women generally gravitate towards (and find more persuasive) arguments that proceed from lived experience. That’s not to say men don’t value lived experience or women don’t value abstract principles, just that they seem to be more persuaded by one than the other.

OK, so Steve writes that “Feinstein [came] off as dodging [Cruz'] opening question,” that “faced with the opportunity to trump what Cruz regards as his ace, Feinstein fails,” and concludes: “Democrats have to be able to refute this cloacal tsunami of bad ideas on their own terms. If a guy like Ted Cruz is going to go all ‘constitutional’ on Dianne Feinstein, then she and her fellow Democrats need to know precisely how to throw the way the Constitution has actually been applied in the real America (as opposed to Tea Party Fantasy America) back in Cruz’s face.”

Also note how he frames Feinstein’s response:

“I’m not a sixth grader,” she told the freshman Tea Party favorite. “I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it … it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture.”

He omits some key comments between “I’m not a sixth grader” and “I’m not a lawyer” though (emph. added):

I’m not a sixth grader. Senator, I’ve been on this committee for 20 years. I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in, I saw people shot. I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I’ve seen the bullets that implode. In Sandy Hook, youngsters were dismembered. Look, there are other weapons. I’ve been up — I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it. This doesn’t mean that weapons of war and the Heller decision clearly points out three exceptions, two of which are pertinent here. And so I — you know, it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture.

When Cruz makes his argument from a purely Constitutional perspective, he is arguing from abstract principle – and choosing his preferred rhetorical ground. If Feinstein answers in the same language she is ceding the rhetorical advantage to him. Instead she answers in the way the issue is rhetorically pertinent to her, which denies Cruz the advantage he tries to seize.

Feinstein’s highlighting the impact of those principles in the real world is not (as Steve M. suggests) dodging the question or responding with a non sequitur. She is answering in the language that is most persuasive to her. Perhaps as a man Steve would have liked an answer from abstract principle, but Feinstein’s answer seemed to resonate pretty widely.

In any debate where both of those weigh heavily I suspect the public will ultimately side with whichever seems more compelling. Feinstein’s answer struck me as very compelling since the human cost of our gun violence is so horrific, and Cruz’ appeal to the Constitution dry, and even somewhat callous, by comparison We’ll have to see how it plays out though.

That is an eloquently stated principle. But it is also one that would extend First Amendment protection to a book full of child pornography. Ted Cruz did not voice any kind of qualification, so evidently he believes Congress ought never, under any circumstances, say that a book or category of books lies outside the protection of the First Amendment.

Principles by themselves do not have values; invoking something on principle is ethically neutral. A principle is simply “a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption.” For instance, here is a principle: African Americans are more ignorant and criminally inclined than other Americans. It is a bigoted principle, one unsupported by any reputable research, one contradicted by the research that does exist, and one that has been used to justify a staggering amount of evil throughout our history. But it’s a principle!

Similarly, “state’s rights” is a principle. Is it a good one or a bad one? Well it doesn’t have to be either, but it has been invoked to defend some of the most morally abhorrent practices in our nation’s history. So no matter how fine it may sound in the abstract, in our lived experience it drags a considerable amount of freight behind it.

That’s what is happening now in the gun debate and the broader debate about the Constitution. Some people, apparently unlike Ted Cruz, believe that the First Amendment is not absolute and doesn’t, for instance, protect child pornography. Similarly, some people believe that assault weapons are the Second Amendment equivalent of child pornography and therefore are not eligible for that Amendment’s protection.

Those who believe otherwise and wish to invoke the principle of the thing are welcome to do so. But they will need to counter those like Feinstein who remind everyone of just how much blood has been shed in support of that principle. They will also need to accept that there are certain downside risks to the pure invocation of principle, and that even a well formed one is not a shield against all arguments. Some principles are bad; others can lead to inconvenient places. That would be the case if, for example, Ted Cruz’ positions on assault weapons and child pornography are different from the ones logically implied by his stated principles.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

Years ago there was a criminal case where a crooked cop planted evidence against the suspect even though prosecutors already had a pretty tight case against him. One observer described the police officer’s actions as “framing a guilty man,” and I’ve found that to be a useful phrase from time to time since. Sometimes the case against someone or something is strong enough without embellishment, and piling on can actually have the opposite effect.

I actually thought that was the case back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was unable to name a newspaper she read. Sure it was fun to laugh at her when she answered “all of them,” but my reaction was: Hell, how would I answer that question? Twenty years ago I would have been able to, but the rise of the Internet (and the scaling back of newspaper coverage) has led to a situation where instead of subscribing to one source that aspires to give a full snapshot, I pick and choose individual stories from a multitude of sources.

I bring up Palin’s answer because I was reminded of it yet again last Saturday. I read a long article in the City Journal about California’s pension system, and another on the effects of incarceration in the Chicago Reporter. Both were far, far too long for inclusion in the newspaper I used to subscribe to, and in any event I don’t think any kind of syndication deal exists with either outlet.

The City Journal article showed up in the Naked Capitalism link roundup; the Chicago Reporter article showed up in my Twitter feed. I check in with the Stop Fracking Ohio page on Facebook several times a week for the latest there, I get several daily emails from different sources, RSS feeds that let me skim through headlines and just read the posts I want, and so on. In other words, just like Sarah Palin I would not be able to tell Katie Couric what newspapers I read.

That will only be reinforced if recent stories about newspaper consolidation into the hands of the wealthy represents a trend. I sure as hell won’t pay for a rag put out by the Koch Brothers or Rupert Murdoch, and even if the buyer is someone I have a higher opinion of such as Warren Buffett, the concentration of newspapers into fewer and fewer individuals’ hands strikes me as problematic.

Lest anyone start concern trolling about the specter of epistemic closure, a well chosen group of sources offers just as many opportunities for encountering opposing voices as newspapers do. For instance, the City Journal is run by the Manhattan Institute – a notably right wing group. Just because I want to dodge the propaganda catapulted by a plutocrat’s house organ (or the regurgitated conservative talking points that the right wing in Washington has been disgorging for the last thirty years) doesn’t mean I refuse to consider contrary ideas. It just means I refuse to consider thoroughly debunked bullshit. That’s Paul Krugman’s job.

It can also mean piecing together stories from different sources and reviewing competing narratives. For instance, an outlet that uses a City Hall based model of reporting on a police sweep will highlight the police chief’s characterization:

“We called them in, and we gave them a simple message,” said Oakland Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Breshears. “The message was ‘Stop the violence, change your lives or law enforcement will relentlessly make all efforts to shut down or dismantle your gangs.’ Today was the follow through of that promise.”

Here, on the other hand, is the view from someone in the neighborhood:

Later this morning, a neighbor who lives next door to the raided house came over to help with a blue vacuum cleaner, a broom, and willing hands.

Sweeps of all kinds going on this morning in Oakland. Sweeps of all kinds.

One story leads with the Tough On Crime narrative while the other goes into some detail on what exactly that entails. Residents don’t seem nearly as well served in the latter.

Those of us with a keen interest in a particular issue are now able to assemble a fuller picture by analyzing accounts from different perspectives. For instance, there was a protest at a fracking waste storage site in southeastern Ohio a few weeks ago. There’s a local newspaper’s account of it, a pro fracking post that among other things called it “a terrorist action,” and an account from the group that staged it.¹

As new sources for this kind of reporting and analysis multiply, people have the ability to weigh the merit of competing versions and decide for themselves what seems right. Sometimes there will not be a local media outlet to report stories. In cases where there is, the outlet might float above the fray as a kind of neutral arbiter; in others it will have its thumb on the scale.

(Bias is often revealed by how much coverage the outlet gives an issue, how prominent the coverage is, what views get represented in the coverage, and where those views are placed in the coverage. For instance, an industry friendly headline with a dissenting voice ten paragraphs in is not balance.)

In an environment like that a newspaper does not exist as a monolith. Many people who would once have been subscribers will increasingly turn to it only when it carries stories of interest. The rest of the time they will cobble together their information about what’s happening in the world from many new and nontraditional sources. What newspapers do you read? Who can tell anymore?

1. From the News And Sentinel article:

some of the protesters, many wearing masks, stormed the GreenHunter office, on Ohio 7 along the Ohio River, said Chief Deputy Mark Warden of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. The facility serves as a storage site for the waste generated during the process of hydraulic fracturing. “They (took) some keys, tried to clog up some of the toilets, scared quite a bit of the employees,” said Warden.

From an activism perspective, wearing masks is a bit too close to black bloc for my comfort. If you aren’t willing to show your face while you protest you may want to think twice about the nature of that protest. Also: entering the office and confronting unsuspecting employees gets filed under Definitely Not Cool. And minor vandalism just discredits the action. That said, the office was soon vacated and apparently no worse for the wear:

Using the GreenHunter office as a sort of command center, GreenHunter employees would use binoculars to identify a culprit from the raid and police would travel across the road to where the group of protesters had eventually congregated in the front lawn of a local resident.

Still, direct action and civil disobedience need to be very well organized and disciplined. It looks like this one could have used quite a bit more of both, and the lack of it is precisely what gave opponents the opportunity to make the activists look like extremists. They could have disrupted business there and drawn attention to the proposed transport of toxic fracking waste via barge without giving the pro-fracking side the opening they did. Sloppiness like that is not helpful.
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Read the rest of this entry →

Natural Gas Fracking

Freelance journalist Phelim McAleer has a new film called FrackNation that has been getting positive notice on the right, though it is flying under the mainstream radar to a certain extent. It does not appear to have had a theatrical release, and aside from an airing on the satellite channel AXS TV in January it hasn’t been before the general public in any substantial way.

The main channel of distribution seems to be conservative groups. This past weekend the local Tea Party (which is still alive and well despite recent pronouncements of its death) sponsored a screening. Pen and paper in hand, I attended and made some notes as it played. (I believe that all the quotes below are verbatim, but since I was scribbling in a darkened room with no chance to rewind, some may be a word or two off. Even if that happened, though, the context and intent have been preserved.)

Through many encounters with pro-fracking individuals I have learned to spot one particular argument that causes my brain’s real-time bullshit detection software¹ to pop up a huge red alert: the claim that fracking has been going on for a long time. It’s not the only discrediting claim pro-frackers make, but it is definitely one of the most common. And it is such a piece of rhetorical flim-flam that anyone who uses it is either not knowledgeable on the subject or is trying to put something past the audience.

What is generally thought of as fracking is the deep and horizontal drilling that has only been in widespread use for the last decade or so. That technology did not exist until the late 90′s, where it was first used in Texas’ Barnett Shale. After several years of development it made its way east, initially to Pennsylvania. FrackNation focuses primarily there, and it was not until 2004 that Range Resources drilled the first Marcellus Shale well. These new wells are fundamentally different from shallower, vertical wells because the industrial activity they require is much more intensive.

Here are just two examples. Horizontal wells require enormous quantities of water, and after mixing the water with toxic chemicals the flowback must be disposed of. The competition for water, and the hazards posed by getting the waste to some final, reliable resting place is a substantial difference from vertical fracking.

Second, horizontal fracking is much more damaging to the air than vertical fracking. Chemical release on site combines with diesel fumes from the fleets of trucks required to transport materials to create ozone. (There are other effects from this as well: Noise pollution created by the constant traffic and the associated degradation of roads and other infrastructure – which, it should go without saying, the industry does not compensate communities for.)

A speaker who says we’ve been fracking for decades has just gone a long way towards discrediting himself on the subject. So when, early on in FrackNation, McAleer says fracking has been around since 1947 and is “not new technology,” he tips his hand as to just how straight he aims to be with his audience. The rhetorical slipperiness of the “we’ve been fracking since the 40′s” line is characteristic of much of the film.
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Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

I will admit to having had a snobbish view towards local TV news for most of my adult life. I think it is at least somewhat justified; local TV news frequently has a disreputable whiff. Whether it’s the “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos, sweeps week stunts (this item is in almost all American households AND IT COULD KILL YOUR CHILDREN), large doses of pabulum delivered as News You Can Use, and so on – there is a lot to look down on.

(I won’t even go into the disturbing tendency of weather forecasters to insist to viewers that the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists are charlatans.)

That perception seems to be fairly common. Maybe it’s a demographics issue; this study (PDF) from Pew shows (p. 37) daily newspaper readers with higher aggregate educational levels than local TV news viewers. It also shows (p. 38) newspaper readers having higher incomes. So to put it crudely, newspaper readers are smarter and richer than TV news viewers.

Without even seeing such statistics I definitely internalized a sense of newspapers’ superiority over the years. That bias is silly though; TV, like newspaper, is a medium. It’s what you do with it that matters. The New York Times is printed on newsprint, and so is The Onion.

The degree to which my assumptions about print and TV are faulty has been brought home over the last year or so as I’ve become more involved fracking-related activism. For instance, Youngstown NBC affiliate WFMJ has done a very thorough job covering the issue. When a company illegally dumped toxic fracking waste in a waterway, reporter Michelle Nicks filled her report with detail: Not just the event itself, but the response (such as it was) from regulators, from state political leaders and national ones as well.

Even more impressively, CBS affiliate WKBN filed public records requests and discovered the company in question has received dozens of citations, violations and injection well suspensions stretching back to the eighties. WKBN is doing exactly the kind of investigative journalism we normally associate with newspapers – not just reporting the news but really digging into it in order to give viewers a better understanding.

In Cleveland, NBC affiliate WKYC has set up an entire section of its web site for fracking and done a great deal of reporting on it. Multiple reporters there, including Monica Robins, Dick Russ and Lynna Lai, have reported on the issue from a variety of angles. While you could say that flaming water from a tap is the kind of arresting visual that conforms to the worst stereotypes of local TV news, there’s nothing especially dramatic about a cracked foundation or a politician’s legislative proposal. If it was all about sensation they wouldn’t have run most of those reports.

Newspapers have a spotty record on this issue. Some reporters cover it well. In northeast Ohio, Bob Downing of the Akron Beacon Journal has been on it for a while now (recent reports here, here and here). In other fracking-intensive regions I’ve found reporters like Bruce Finley at the Denver Post doing similarly admirable work (here, here and here for example).

But the largest newspaper in our area – the Cleveland Plain Dealer – has been considerably less thorough. There is less coverage overall, and the stories tend to center around fracking initiatives or headlining industry propaganda. While they occasionally look at the political fight over the issue, they rarely look at the effect it is having on local communities. (Perhaps the publishers don’t feel the concerns of blue collar-skewing populations in rural or semi-rural areas are of interest to their more (sub)urban and upscale readership.)

This is especially striking because the paper has repeatedly touched on an issue that seems ready made for a little Truth To Power type initiative. Jimmy Haslam, the new owner of the Cleveland Browns (and brother of the Tennessee governor, incidentally), owns a trucking company that stands to handsomely profit from fracking. Shortly after buying the Browns he stepped down as CEO of the company. Or didn’t. (“I’m still going to be CEO of Pilot Flying J.”) That detail was never ironed out exactly.

He’s definitely back in the saddle now though – which raises the same question his heading the company originally raised: Should the owner of such a high profile and beloved franchise be profiting by visiting environmental hazard on a significant portion of his fan base? There are lots of Browns fans in Youngstown. Maybe they wouldn’t be too crazy about knowing the team’s owner is a key part of the industrial chain that just befouled their community.

The PD is not going there, though. For whatever reason the community impact of fracking has been of zero interest. Again, this lack of coverage is not characteristic of all newspapers; some are doing a really good job. My point is that on this urgent, substantive issue, newspapers have been a mixed bag – as have local TV stations. (In Cleveland, WKYC is head and shoulders above its on-air competition at the moment.) In general the reporting matrix doesn’t break along expected lines. Sometimes papers provide better coverage. But in some cases the supposedly low-rent local TV stations have left their ostensibly more respectable print counterparts in the dust.

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Flying Blue Tarp

On last Sunday’s “Up With Chris Hayes” there was a discussion about political calculations for Republicans. The question was whether to work with Democrats or go with straight obstructionism. At one point Hayes said:

Bob Bennett was a fairly conservative senator from Utah, right, of long standing, he was not some super lefty heterodox guy, right? And his huge heterodoxy was that he had cosponsored a health care bill with Ron Wyden. It was not the health care bill that actually got passed. It was called the Wyden-Bennett, and in fact, a lot of Republicans later said, well, we really like Wyden-Bennett, right? But what happened to Bob Bennett just for cosponsoring this health care bill? He went back to Utah and got booted out in that state’s Republican convention after serving, what, two or three terms, OK.

Something really big is missing from Hayes’ observation: TARP. Granted, he was talking about Republican political strategy and not giving an overview of Bennett’s career. The exact details of the unhappiness of Utah’s GOP base is not central to his point, and their unhappiness over Bennett’s partnering with Wyden serves Hayes’ point adequately. Hayes could probably say (with good reason) that it would have sidetracked the discussion to go into details about Bennett’s defeat when it was merely being used to give a brief illustration of a larger point. Fair enough.

Still, I notice when a national-level analyst fails to mention TARP when the opportunity arises. TARP is unique in our recent history: A moment when activists on both the left and the right united in furious opposition to something happening in Washington. Over the last generation or so, the issues that have drawn the most passionate responses – protests in the run up to the Iraq war, opposition to immigration reform, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement (the latter two in part a response to the corruption represented by TARP), etc – all of them were predominantly driven by either the left or the right. With one exception.

Everyone hated TARP. It was not left versus right, but outsider versus establishment. Democrats and Republicans in the capitol supported it. DC-based reporters and analysts assured audiences that it was distasteful but necessary. (This was typically accompanied with a false choice of doing nothing or letting civilization collapse.) All the players inside the Beltway were heavily invested in it, but outside the hothouse it was loathed and reviled. It was unpopular across the political spectrum. On what other issue has that been true?

TARP was unpopular in part because it was terrible policy (see below) but also because it was symbolic. It stood as the tip of the iceberg, the visible part of a much vaster body of sketchy deals. Few knew the details, in part because much of it was done behind the scenes, but in part because of obfuscation. Those who weren’t experts in high finance (i.e. almost everyone) were left with a sense that something wasn’t right, but we couldn’t keep our eye on the queen of hearts.

This 2011 exchange (PDF) between Congressman Sean Duffy and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is a great illustration – a classic of the “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance” genre:

Mr. DUFFY. …Let me move on to a different question. We had talked about the QE2 with Dr. Paul. When you buy assets, where does that money come from?
Mr. BERNANKE. We create reserves in the banking system which are just held with the Fed. It does not go out into the public.
Mr. DUFFY. Does it come from tax dollars, though, to buy those assets?
Mr. BERNANKE. It does not.
Mr. DUFFY. Are you basically printing money to buy those assets?
Mr. BERNANKE. We are not printing money, we are creating reserves in the banking system.
Mr. DUFFY. In your testimony – I only have 20 seconds left – you talked about a potential additional stimulus….

What jumps out at me is not that, as some have noted, Bernanke repudiates our central political myth that government can only spend money it raises through taxes. (Government, unlike households, can print more money when it wants to.) Nor is it that Bernanke’s “we are not printing money” line directly contradicts his recent position on the matter.

Instead, note the ease with which Bernanke shoos Duffy away from an inconvenient line of discussion. Duffy could have shot back, “‘creating reserves’ being 21st century bankerspeak for printing money, right?” He could have stayed on that and gotten Bernanke to admit that adding zeroes to balance sheets is just a high tech way of printing money, then excoriated Bernanke for his weaselly parsing of language. But Duffy, like most of his fellow citizens, doesn’t understand finance well enough to pounce on Bernanke’s evasive euphemism. Instead he just says, well I’m almost out of time so on to other topics.¹
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Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

Two of the more loaded words in contemporary politics are independence and freedom. Despite their similarities in meaning they get used in very different ways. Independence is used in a more national sense, which might be natural because of its prominence in what is arguably our founding document. It doesn’t seem like it is possible to disparage independence in our discourse. Even a word like patriotism, while generally well regarded, has qualifications. Independence is all good though, so anything you can attach to it is improved by the association.

This has played out for years now with the much-invoked phrase “energy independence.” The latest calls for it began in the wake of 9/11 as a way to argue for policies that would remove our need to import oil from abroad. It made sense on the face of it: We send our money to oil-rich states, states that in some cases fund groups hostile to America. Buy from them and you’re funding the terrorists, went the argument. (This is simply a description of what leaders put out for public consumption, not an endorsement of it.)

The initial prescriptions for energy independence were relatively full, or at least fuller than they would become. An increase in domestic production was the favored proposal, but was supplemented with calls to encourage conservation and discourage consumption. As late as the spring of 2008 it was possible for a conservative in good standing like Charles Krauthammer to call for a heavy tax on gasoline. But by that fall Michael Steele made the infamous call to drill baby drill, and from then on it was all about resource extraction.

The curiously elusive goal of energy independence is now being pursued through fracking, or so its proponents claim. There is lots of natural gas just waiting to be forced up to the surface of the earth, we are told. In fact, the Barnett Shale in Texas has enough reserves to supply Texas for the next 200 years. There’s also enough nationwide to supply America for the next 200 years. And 200 years for China! And India! The world! It’s the fossil fuel equivalent of Ulysses Everett McGill’s geographical oddity.

Of course, abundance does not mean independence – at least not long term. That only happens if we take some additional steps. For instance, any resource vital enough to merit a policy of independence is too precious to export. We should flat out ban the removal of any item that receives such an important designation. Selling it to foreigners is downright seditious, isn’t it? Doesn’t doing so hinder our quest for energy independence? We should be keeping it all here. Yet the industry is doing just the opposite – pushing for new ways to get it out of the country. Why does the oil and gas industry hate America?¹

Similarly, we should create a substantial strategic reserve of any such resource. If natural gas truly is so important to America’s future then it is reckless to deprive ourselves of a great store of it in case of emergency. And of course there’s Krauthammer’s price floor proposal. We should just set a minimum price on it and levy whatever tax is necessary to reach that level.

The fact that none of the people making all the noise about energy independence are taking such a comprehensive view on the issue can only be explained a few ways, none of them flattering. Have they not thought the issue through? Are they uninterested in thinking about it beyond empty slogans? Or is the noble-sounding “energy independence” really just a cynical euphemism for catering to a favored political constituency? Those who trumpet energy independence should be expected to either address these issues or lose credibility.

From a citizen’s perspective, the current vision of energy independence might be a bit of a mixed blessing. What price should we be willing to pay to achieve this? Aside from the environmental impact of ongoing fossil fuel dependence(!), what good does it do the average person to give preferential treatment to wildly profitable industries?² Or ones that cripple the democratic process? If you trade rule by a tyrannical king for rule by soulless plutocrats how much have you really gained? This might be a kind of independence we would be better off without.

Freedom, unlike independence, drags a little bit of freight behind it. Over the past few years it has become a rallying cry of the right, invoked in absurd ways (Fox link!) to decry just about anything conservatives don’t like. That has made it something of an object of ridicule on the left; this link should give you a decent look at whatever the outrage du jour is in the fever swamps.

The debasing of the word freedom is a shame, because it can be very useful to liberals in some cases – like energy. Energy independence may not be all it’s cracked up to be, but energy freedom could be very appealing. The idea of individuals enjoying energy freedom could draw primarily on distributed generating capacity. Household generation of electricity through wind and solar energy, aside from the environmental impact of ramping up the use of renewables(!), promises huge benefits.

The main one is reducing dependence on the grid. Our model has always worked on centralized generation, and the obvious flaw with that approach is that it has a single point of failure. If the power plant, and all the pieces connecting it to your house, are not up and running, you’ve got no electricity. The ability to supplement the grid with local generating capacity would not just save money, it would give families a form of backup – maybe compromised or lower scale but still usable – during outages.

That might be a modest convenience when a spring thunderstorm downs a line, but it could be much more than that in the aftermath of a major event. What if in the wake of a Katrina or Sandy people in the affected areas had some electricity during daylight hours? It’s not as good as being fully operational, but it could be the difference between remaining at home and being a refugee.

(A hurricane obviously might rip off solar panels or crash turbines, but any generating capacity retained is better than none. And maybe these local generators could be engineered with redundancy and durability in mind for just such an occasion.)

People who enjoy energy freedom, as opposed to energy independence, would see direct benefits. Instead of a long, convoluted and dubious process that somehow ends up enriching industry executives more than anyone else, we would see direct monetary benefits to ourselves. It would also serve the very national security that energy independence types love to trumpet: An electrical grid with distributed generation is far more robust than a centralized one – and incidentally is far better able to recover from the occasional whoopsie. We’ve had empty talk about energy independence for decades. It’s time for some substantive action on energy freedom.

1. See how patriotic I am?
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2. By the way, shouldn’t the production of such a vital resource be done by the state and not private companies?
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