Month: October 2013

A finding that may surprise you:

In the forthcoming December 2013 issue of Justice Quarterly, Michael Benson and his co-researchers argue that white-collar offenders adapt to prison just as well as other types of offenders, and in some categories, do even better.

One reason they adapt:

“Prisons are bureaucracies that have rules and regulations,” Benson says. “People from middle-class and white-collar backgrounds understand rules and bureaucracies. I did an interview for my dissertations where I talked to a small number of white collar offenders. Before they went they were scared to death. They imagined all these bad things happening. Once they get there, after the initial shock passed, they realized it’s just a big organization. Follow the rules, be polite to people, don’t go outside your space, and you’ll be fine.”

Alan Greenspan is making the TV rounds in support of his new book, and Daniel Dayen is baffled by his warm reception:

So far [on his media tour], he’s gone virtually unchallenged. He has said the 2008 financial crisis “was the first time ever that markets were broken and could not fix themselves” (ever hear of the Depression?), and that he “could have caught a number of different crises” during his tenure at the Fed (which begs the question of why he didn’t). Journalists have asked such penetrating questions as, “You were knighted. Does that come with a title or anything?” …

[A]nyone who’s paid attention to the economy the past few years knows how ridiculous it is to fete Greenspan, the main architect of the policies that led to the Great Recession. If we lived in a just world, we would put him on trial, not on television. And his penalty should be to scrounge up the funds to pay JPMorgan Chase’s $13 billion fine with the Justice Department. After all, that fine penalizes JPMorgan Chase for duping investors into purchasing mortgage-backed securities it knew were stuffed with garbage loans. And nobody in America duped more people – investors, homeowners, you name it – into buying bad loans than Alan Greenspan.

That’s a little too harsh, it seems to me. Greenspan has, after all, admitted his own errors – which is more than most on the right have done. He has been extremely candid about his intellectual blindspot. He is in some degree responsible for the economic collapse, but not in the same way as those bankers who knowingly deceived their customers, and took on risks no one should ever dream of taking on. There is a difference between sins of omission and commission.

And besides, writers have been more critical: Yglesias calls Dayen “too soft” on Greenspan, while Krugman describes The Map and the Territory as “a really terrible book on multiple levels.” Plus, the NYT and WaPo reviews have hardly been complimentary. In some ways, I think going out there with a book is an act of minor courage. Better then refusing to concede error, and throwing spitballs at others dealing with the mess.

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty)

A President whose team was heralded as one of the most tech-savvy & open didn't even complete #ObamaCare web tests http://t.co/8mk3mgVb2A

— Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) October 22, 2013

Drum wonders whether Republicans can capitalize on the Obamacare fiasco:

There’s plenty of meat available in an investigation of the Obamacare rollout. But a good investigation will go slowly, taking pains not to drown officials in a blizzard of subpoenas while they’re in the middle of fighting a fire. A good investigation will also focus a lot of its effort on real issues of procurement and how the federal government handles IT projects. It won’t be just a fishing expedition for emails that might be embarrassing to Obama staffers. …

Can Issa restrain his attack dog personality enough to understand that? Will the tea party caucus allow it? Or will the whole thing quickly devolve into a barrage of subpoenas that are so obviously politically motivated that no one takes them seriously anymore? We’ll see, but I’d put my money on the latter right now.

Waldman places the same bet:

If you’re a Republican member of Congress, this is coming at a critical time, because it’s around now when your potential primary opponents are deciding whether they want to run against you in next year’s election. That gives you an incentive to prove to the folks back home that you’re as conservative as the nuttiest Tea Partier. It isn’t hard to do, really—all that’s necessary is to go on television and tell the Fox News host that you’re deeply concerned that Healthcare.gov was intentionally made to work improperly as a pretext for the socialist Obama administration to collect all our DNA to facilitate herding us into FEMA concentration camps (or something like that). Which helps make your primary challenge less likely, but doesn’t serve the party’s larger purpose of convincing the American public that the GOP is not, in fact, a party of extremists who don’t care about governing.

“Our side is winning on gay marriage for a very simple reason, which is that millions of mothers think, ‘I didn’t choose for my kid to be gay, but since he is, I hope he settles down with the right person.’ I have never, ever heard a mother say ‘I didn’t choose for my kid to want multiple mates, but since he does, I hope he settles down with the right three or four women.” Isn’t it time writers like [Mona] Charen and [Ryan] Anderson dropped this trope?” – Wally Olson.

Like Bernstein and Yglesias, Nate Cohn suspects so:

Marijuana legalization may be increasingly popular, but it’s not clearly an electoral bonanza. Support for legalization isn’t very far above 50 percent, if it is in fact, and there are potential downsides. National surveys show that a third of Democrats still oppose marijuana legalization. Seniors, who turnout in high numbers in off year elections, are also opposed. Altogether, it’s very conceivable that there are more votes to be lost than won by supporting marijuana. After all, marijuana legalization underperformed President Obama in Washington State.

Even so, Democratic voters will eventually prevail over cautious politicians, most likely through the primary process. Any liberal rival to Hillary Clinton in 2016 will have every incentive to support marijuana legalization.

But David Harsanyi sees few signs that legalization is becoming the new marriage equality:

Where you stand on gay marriage has become something of a bellwether in Beltway circles, indicative not only of your cultural awareness and political IQ, but your prospects. Either you get 21st century America or you don’t.

Well, what about the Drug War?

As far as I can tell, not a single elected official in Washington actively supports marijuana legalization. Not a single governor. Not a single Senator. And, moreover, few of them have been asked, much less seriously pressed, to explain where they stand on the issue. Some unlikely counterintuitive voices pop up here and there – Tom Tancredo, former congressman, anti-immigration activist and candidate for governor of Colorado and Sen. John McCain are to examples of politician who, to varying degrees, have been open to marijuana legalization – but, despite the growing popularity of the position generally, it’s basically a non issue.

Jonathan Bernstein adds:

Politicians “evolving” on marriage were only worried, really, about current opinion. I’m pretty sure they didn’t worry about a backlash if marriage equality was enacted, and certainly not that if marriage equality took place that newspapers might start running gay marriage horror stories … But politicians will worry that if they support legalization that they could be held responsible for any weed horror stories that emerge — and everyone knows that the press is capable for concocting those, true or not.

Rothkopf is in the camp that feels the NSA’s snooping has gone too far:

Yes, many governments spy. But so too do all countries have armies, police forces, and tax codes. In each instance, the question is not whether to pursue the activity — it is how to do it, how to limit it, and what values should underpin it. Our spying has overreached. We took risks we shouldn’t have for rewards that were too limited. Even when there were perceived threats that seemed to warrant these activities (and that cannot be the case in some of the recent examples we have encountered of spying against friends and companies), many of those threats may themselves not have been so great to warrant the risks associated with spying. What if the NSA scandals result in a more fragmented global Internet? What if they are used as an excuse by repressive regimes to violate their own citizens’ privacy? What if they are used as an excuse to deny U.S. companies access to their markets? What if they are used as an excuse to justify similar actions against the United States?

Keating doesn’t think we can brush off the NSA’s wiretaps as spying as usual: