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Op-Ed Columnist - Boiling the Frog - Creeping Disasters for the Economy and the Planet - NYTimes.com

 

July 13, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Boiling the Frog

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog?

I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.

And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.

I started thinking about boiled frogs recently as I watched the depressing state of debate over both economic and environmental policy. These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect — a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet — yet in which it’s very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold.

And right now, both the economic and the environmental frogs are sitting still while the water gets hotter.

Start with economics: last winter the economy was in acute crisis, with a replay of the Great Depression seeming all too possible. And there was a fairly strong policy response in the form of the Obama stimulus plan, even if that plan wasn’t as strong as some of us thought it should have been.

At this point, however, the acute crisis has given way to a much more insidious threat. Most economic forecasters now expect gross domestic product to start growing soon, if it hasn’t already. But all the signs point to a “jobless recovery”: on average, forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal believe that the unemployment rate will keep rising into next year, and that it will be as high at the end of 2010 as it is now.

Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.

To head off this outcome — and remember, this isn’t what economic Cassandras are saying; it’s the forecasting consensus — we’d need to get another round of fiscal stimulus under way very soon. But neither Congress nor, alas, the Obama administration is showing any inclination to act. Now that the free fall is over, all sense of urgency seems to have vanished.

This will probably change once the reality of the jobless recovery becomes all too apparent. But by then it will be too late to avoid a slow-motion human and social disaster.

Still, the boiled-frog problem on the economy is nothing compared with the problem of getting action on climate change.

Put it this way: if the consensus of the economic experts is grim, the consensus of the climate experts is utterly terrifying. At this point, the central forecast of leading climate models — not the worst-case scenario but the most likely outcome — is utter catastrophe, a rise in temperatures that will totally disrupt life as we know it, if we continue along our present path. How to head off that catastrophe should be the dominant policy issue of our time.

But it isn’t, because climate change is a creeping threat rather than an attention-grabbing crisis. The full dimensions of the catastrophe won’t be apparent for decades, perhaps generations. In fact, it will probably be many years before the upward trend in temperatures is so obvious to casual observers that it silences the skeptics. Unfortunately, if we wait to act until the climate crisis is that obvious, catastrophe will already have become inevitable.

And while a major environmental bill has passed the House, which was an amazing and inspiring political achievement, the bill fell well short of what the planet really needs — and despite this faces steep odds in the Senate.

What makes the apparent paralysis of policy especially alarming is that so little is happening when the political situation seems, on the surface, to be so favorable to action.

After all, supply-siders and climate-change-deniers no longer control the White House and key Congressional committees. Democrats have a popular president to lead them, a large majority in the House of Representatives and 60 votes in the Senate. And this isn’t the old Democratic majority, which was an awkward coalition between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives; this is, by historical standards, a relatively solid progressive bloc.

And let’s be clear: both the president and the party’s Congressional leadership understand the economic and environmental issues perfectly well. So if we can’t get action to head off disaster now, what would it take?

I don’t know the answer. And that’s why I keep thinking about boiling frogs.

Op-Ed Columnist - Boiling the Frog - Creeping Disasters for the Economy and the Planet - NYTimes.com

Talking Points Memo | Breaking News and Analysis

 

07.12.09 -- 11:43AM // RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (70)

Ground Zero

In case you're wondering, ground zero of the current round of Sarah Palin supplication is this article by Carl Cannon in AOL's Politics Daily, the upshot of which is that the true villain of the almost-year-long Sarah Palin train-wreck is the media itself, whose collective liberal bias led them to have it in for Palin from the beginning and strive from the beginning to take her down.

How soon we forget how hard reporters worked at first at grading Palin on a curve and talking around her manifest disqualifications for high office. My only question on reading the piece is whether Cannon actually believes this malarkey or whether he's like all those other conservative talking heads who talk Palin to the stars on camera and then more or less lavishly concede she's manifestly unqualified for high office.

Certainly, the press in collective scandal mode is often an unpretty thing. But the reasons for what eventually became Palin's titanic bad press stemmed from three causes -- 1) her rapidly demonstrated lack of grounding or familiarity with almost every major policy question facing the country, 2) the fact -- which took reporters a bit longer to get a handle on -- that her governance of Alaska had amounted almost to one string of ethics violations and possibly illegal behavior. Time and again she showed a signal inability to grasp that executive power was not to be used to pursue personal vendettas or enrichment. And then 3), growing from the recognition of items #1 and #2, that Palin was simply a liar, even judged against the frightfully generous standard customarily applied to the truth-telling abilities of elected officials.

We must apparently resign ourselves to the fact that special-pleading for this deceptively talented political huckster will simply never cease.

--Josh Marshall

Talking Points Memo | Breaking News and Analysis

Dave Zweifel: Put blame for deficit where it belongs -- on Bush

Dave Zweifel  —  7/10/2009 12:22 pm

Republicans in Congress think they've got the issue to bring down President Obama: the federal deficit.

If the deficit does indeed negatively impact Obama and the Democrats, it will be testimony to why the rest of the world perceives that we Americans have very short memories.

While it's true that the stimulus packages and the bank and automobile bailouts are adding to the national debt that our grandkids and their kids will have to pay someday, let's not forget how we got into this mess.

Truth be told, all of Obama's spending so far hasn't added as much to the national debt as did George W. Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut for our country's wealthiest people -- and that's not counting the contrived war that he started.

When Bush left office he left the country with a $10.6 trillion national debt and an economy that was falling off the cliff. In fact, he began the bank bailouts several weeks before the end of his term and demanded no oversight of what they were getting.

That $10.6 trillion was more than two and a half times the debt that Bill Clinton had left him in 1993. The $4 trillion debt at the time was being whittled down by a federal budget that was actually in the black. Then along came Bush, who like Ronald Reagan before him thought he could fix the economy by spending tons on the military and cutting taxes at the same time.

Funny, but the Mitch McConnells and John Boehners of the Republican hierarchy in Congress weren't complaining a bit about all that red ink back then.

The national debt stands at about $11.4 trillion today and unless the economy turns around quickly, which is highly doubtful, it will grown substantially larger in the coming years. Obama thinks the deficit will start coming down in a couple of years; others fear it will take much longer.

Such a huge national debt is not good, but it wasn't good at $10.6 trillion either, especially when it was brought about by foolish tax cuts and spending close to a trillion dollars on a war in Iraq.

Today's deficits are necessary to save the economy from plummeting even further and hurting millions more people than the millions who have already been hurt.

Perhaps the GOP thinks it can blame Obama, but the American people hopefully have longer memories.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  7/10/2009 12:22 pm

Busby Campaign, Supporters And Allies Publicly Mobilize Against Sheriff's Raid | TPMDC

 

Democratic Congressional candidate Francine Busby (CA-50) and her allies have been embarking on an extensive public relations campaign in the wake of a raid on a campaign house party by the San Diego Sheriff's Department -- due to a noise complaint that is believed to have come from a person who heckled the event -- which ended in multiple people being pepper-sprayed and the full complement of deputies, including a dog unit and helicopter, coming in to arrest one of the hostesses and a guest. On Monday, three of the women held a press conference, blasting the arresting officer, Deputy Marshall G. Abbott. "He had a raged look in his eyes and his head was bobbing from side to side," said Kimberley Beatty, who said that she had called 911 to report that he "appeared to be out of control." And last night, the San Diego ACLU put out a press release, which was forwarded to us by Busby herself, lambasting the Sheriff's Department for all manner of improper behavior here, and calling for greater transparency as the process of investigating this whole mess goes forward. The opening paragraph of the press release is essentially a dry narration of the reported events -- ending with an extraordinary closing sentence, emphasis ours: On Friday, June 26, 2009, according to press reports and witness statements, a San Diego County Sheriff's deputy, responding to a noise complaint, entered the home of Shari Barman who was hosting a political gathering to support Francine Busby, a candidate for Congress. When the homeowner questioned why she had to provide her date of birth, the deputy grabbed her arm, put it behind her back, and brought her to the ground. Feeling intimidated by a group of mostly middle-aged women, he pepper-sprayed a number of guests and arrested Barman. The San Diego Sheriff's Department has launched an internal investigation into the matter, and as a result they are not publicly commenting. The District Attorney's office is also examining the matter as it has been put before them, as it weighs whether to actually press charges against the two women who were arrested. In an interview with TPM on Monday, Busby said that the original noise complaint clearly had a political motivation. "The deputies were telling people that they were taking statements from, that the call came in about noise from a Democratic rally, or Democratic demonstration," she said. She also lambasted Abbott's performance: "He was not listening; there was no controlling this person. The people who asked him to stop hurting this woman were pepper-sprayed without warning, there was no talking to this man." And Busby also immediately set out to parlay this development into some good for her campaign, putting out a fundraising e-mail about the incident. "I am going to fight even harder to stop this hateful intimidation," she wrote. "I hope that I can count on you to fight this battle with me." Shari Barman, the homeowner who was arrested, also released a statement Monday night: "He told me I was under arrest, grabbed my right arm, twisted it behind me and threw me on the ground. Some of the 25 or so people who were still in attendance observed what was happening and started asking the deputy what was going on. My partner, Jane Stratton, asked him to please be careful as I had recently had right shoulder surgery. His response was to knock her to the ground.

Busby Campaign, Supporters And Allies Publicly Mobilize Against Sheriff's Raid | TPMDC

AMA does not speak for all physicians!

Posted on Jun 15, 2009

Dr. Margaret Flowers and Dr. Carol Paris

As the American Medical Association begins its annual convention in Chicago, we want to take this opportunity to make it clear to the American public, to the media, and to the president and members of Congress, that the AMA does not represent us. It is a common misconception that this organization speaks on behalf of most American physicians but that is a misconception with very serious consequences at such a critical time in the health care reform debate. So long as the public, the media and our elected officials lump all physicians together as “the AMA,” then we are guilty by association of a failure of our Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm.” 
In fact, the AMA represents less than one-third of America’s physicians, and half of those are retired. In fact, the American Medical Student Association endorses universal health care reform.
The AMA’s longstanding opposition to every effort to change health care financing, including Medicare in the 1960s, has resulted in decades of needless and countless morbidity and mortality. Sixty people die every day in this country simply for lack of access to health care. And instead of being an advocate for the only solution that accomplishes the goals of universal coverage and fiscal viability, the single-payer option, the AMA continues to be primarily a trade association looking out for the financial interests of its members. 
But who, then, is looking out for the interests of patients?  Certainly not Congress and the president. If that were so, the United States would long ago have relieved itself of the dubious distinction of being the only developed country in the world that does not have a universal system of health care. No, the evidence is clear that our Congress and our president are looking out for themselves and continuing the tradition of pay-to-play politics. How else would a reasonable person explain the fact that our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans combined, have accepted $12 million in campaign contributions since 1998 from the American Medical Association?
We would suggest that the American people, the media, President Obama, and the members of Congress need look no further than PNHP, Physicians for a National Health Program, if they want to consult an organization that represents the interests of patients and has been doing so for 22 years.
We are proud members of PNHP. We’re waiting and eager to be consulted. And our physicians are willing and able to continue to engage in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Health care reform is the civil rights issue of the decade. 
The AMA does not represent us.

Dr. Margaret Flowers and Dr. Carol Paris are members of Physicians for a National Health Program.

You can find information on the PNHP or contact the organization on the Web site here.

More Far-Right Violence? Anti-Immigrant Suspects In Arizona Killing Have Ties To White Supremacists | TPMMuckraker

 

“….But there's increasing evidence that something about the current climate -- the election of a pro-choice, African-American president, the economic downturn, or perhaps the ever-more unhinged flavor of even a lot of mainstream conservative rhetoric -- is prompting a greater number of confused and dangerous Americans to act out their bizarre and violent fantasies. And that's worth paying attention to, whether it makes sense or not…”

More Far-Right Violence? Anti-Immigrant Suspects In Arizona Killing Have Ties To White Supremacists | TPMMuckraker