Year: 2013

Cohn expects it to do real harm:

[T]he sequestration cuts are likely to damage the economy even if Congress ends up repealing them outright. In fact, they are probably damaging the economy already. Furlough notices started going out to some federal workers on Friday, according to news accounts. People who get them are going to react. Some will take the threat more seriously than others, obviously, but given the uncertainty—not to mention the real possibility that some cuts stay in place—some people are likely to change their financial behavior. Maybe they’ll rethink a major purchase or delay maintenance that can wait a few more weeks. And what’s true of individuals is even truer of large organizations, including those in government and those outside.

Cassidy doesn’t foresee a deal any time soon: 

How likely do you think it is that, between now and March 31st, the Republicans will soften their stance on raising taxes by eliminating some loopholes and deductions? And if they stick to their hardline position, how likely do you think President Obama is to drop his calls for a “balanced” approach to replacing the sequester, and to agree to a package of spending cuts without any revenue increases? In my view, the only plausible answers to these questions range from “not very likely” to “not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

How Stan Collender understands the sequester fight:

It was never about cutting spending or reducing the deficit; the fight always was about keeping or winning control of the House of Representatives in the next election. It wasn’t about dueling economic philosophies and it definitely wasn’t about the deficit.

After watching Redemption, an Oscar-nominated HBO documentary on New York’s “canners,” Nicola Twilley considers state cash incentives for recycling, known as Bottle Bills:

Various studies have shown that they do increase recycling rates dramatically: the United States’ overall beverage container recycling rate is estimated at thirty-three percent, while states with container deposit laws have an average rate of seventy percent. As watching a documentary like Redemption makes clear, however, a lot of this extra recycling and sorting is not being done by the consumers of canned or bottled beverages; instead, the state has outsourced its acts of environmental virtue, at far below minimum wage ($2.50 an hour at best, by my rough calculations), to some of its most marginalised populations.

Financial incentives to recycle bottles and cans don’t always work this way: in Germany, my friends and hosts have always been religious about returning bottles to the shop to claim their “Pfand,” and I, who have never pursued a single cent of redemption value in California or New York, have happily followed their lead. Of course, in Germany, the standard deposit amount is €0.25, which is quite a bit more than a nickel.

Finn Arne Jørgensen notes how little has changed in the US:

 As early as 1953, Vermont introduced a bottle bill banning non-refillable bottles, but the law lasted only four years due to heavy lobbying from the beer industry. In 1971, Oregon implemented the first bottle bill requiring a deposit. This deposit was five cents, just like it is today. How many other prices have remained the same over 42 years? Vermont followed in 1973, and Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, and New York had followed by the early 1980s. A number of proposed bottle bills in other states had been struck down by industry opposition. The beverage industry fought the new bottle bills tooth and claw, seeing them as a “direct and politically motivated infringement on the free market and a threat to profits,” as geographer Matthew Gandy wrote in Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste.

Co-director Jon Alpert reveals what he learned from following canners around – upending his expectations:

I think some of the stereotypes that were upturned for me, and are upturned in the film, is that I thought most people collecting bottles and cans were going to homeless, wrestling with mental illness or drug addiction, or that kind of archetype of a bum. But the truth and the reality, is that in this economy these are working New Yorkers. They’re the marginalized working poor. There’s a lot of ink being spilled and breath being spent on the middle class, in political conversations right now and in newspaper columns, but nobody is talking about the large population below the middle class. These are the people who are living on the absolute edge of society. What impressed me was that they’re not asking for a hand out and they’re not looking for anybody to give them anything. They want to work.

An Army officer writes:

Benkler’s piece about Bradley Manning is deceptive. Manning is being charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice because he is an American soldier who was entrusted with dealing with American intelligence. He’s not being punished as a whistleblower. Do we really want to empower soldiers and intelligence analysts with personal or institutional grudges (as Manning admits he had) with unleashing hordes of classified material that can damage the United States?

It should be noted that the UCMJ’s secondary purpose, in addition to providing a system of justice in the unique jurisdiction that is the military, is to uphold good order and discipline among the troops. As a commanding officer, you can’t uphold good order and discipline in a military intelligence unit, such as Manning’s, if you’re constantly on the lookout for potential ‘whistleblowers’ among your soldiers who’ve been entrusted with national or operational secrets, as Manning was. He should not be compared to a Wal Mart manager who deplores her inequitable salary and job prospects due to her gender and blows the whistle on corporate misbehavior.

I agree. Another reader goes further:

Bradley Manning is not a whistleblower.  Whistleblowers expose illegal activities that would otherwise be covered up.  Manning is a political activist who went too far.

Even taking him on his word that he reached out mainstream American media to no avail, he still had 500+ plus members of Congress from which to pick any number of whom would have jumped at the chance to properly expose some of what was leaked in order to affect policy change.  And had Manning never heard of the Justice Department?  If there was a cover-up of illegal activities, the DoJ is the proper authority to investigate and prosecute.  What Manning did instead was send bulk US secrets to an organization known for virtual hostage taking – making demands of governments in exchange for the safe keeping of such information.

No matter one’s distaste for our government’s actions in the Middle East, we still have to adhere to some basic rules.  For people like Manning and organizations like Wikileaks, there are no ground rules.  They make up the rules as they go along.  Despite all of its faults, our democracy is still intact.  Defending Manning and allowing him to get away with such reckless acts only invites more of the Wikileaks attitude of deciding that “Only we are the supreme moral arbiters and custodians of justice in the world!” Start multiplying that out, and anarchy follows shortly thereafter.

Manning is a traitor not only by rule of law, but to the very notion of democratic and representative government.  He should be convicted of these serious crimes and spend a significant amount time in prison for what he did.