Tag: Premium

The Eight Billion Dollar Store

On Monday, the national discount store chain Dollar Tree announced that it would buy out its competitor Family Dollar for $8.5 billion in cash and stock:

Both Dollar Tree, which sells items $1 and less, and Family Dollar, which sells $1 items but also higher priced goods, have struggled amidst a weak economy. While years ago recession boosted deep-discount stores’ sales, Family Dollar reported in April declining second-quarter profits while announcing that it could cut jobs and close nearly 400 underperforming stores. Earlier this month, its third-quarter report noted a 33% drop in profit. Difficult economic conditions have become financial headwinds for discount store shoppers, who are forced to choose between discretionary and necessary items. … [A]verage shoppers have an annual income under $40,000, and 50% receive government assistance.

But the recession bonanza for discount stores has faded, Annie Lowrey observes, and now some of these chains are struggling:

So what’s happening in the consumer economy that might help explain the malaise? The answer is “not much” — that is, not much is happening, and that’s hurting retailers.

Unemployment is dropping, but consumers from the very low end of the market all the way through the middle remain skittish. Wages aren’t rising. Government support for strapped households has faded. As a result, retailers are struggling mightily to juice sales. The low end of the market is also seeing more competition for the penny-pinching customer, a result of the expansion of brick-and-mortar dollar stores through the Great Recession, retailers across the board offering lower-cost options and amped-up competition from online giants like Amazon.

To Matt Phillips, the Family Dollar/Dollar Tree merger is a perfect illustration of Thomas Piketty’s critique of contemporary American capitalism:

Let’s start with the backdrop: Essentially, the lower-income Americans that are the target customers of dollar stores have gotten too poor to buy anything other than food (a vivid illustration of Piketty’s point about income inequality). That has depressed margins and profits at these discount retailers. The fact that these poor Americans—and the retailers that serve them—are doing so badly attracted the attention of some of the richest and best-connected investors in the world. Funds associated with the activist investors Nelson Peltz and Carl Icahn have snapped up significant chunks of Family Dollar in recent months—as has the hedge fund manager John Paulson.

And they have been pushing for a sale. Which makes sense, from their point of view: Combined, they stand to earn hundreds of millions on the deal, at least on paper. (Again, the fact that financiers have done well on the deal, even as low-income folks struggle, squares with Piketty’s view that large fortunes tend to grow faster than overall income, resulting in mounting piles of capital owned by the wealthy.)

Extensive Dish cover of Picketty’s book here.

The Hard Work Of Working From Home, Ctd

Readers – not to mention Dish staffers – can relate to a recent post:

I’ve worked from home for 15 years and I can’t imagine working any other way. The thought of having some middle manager keeping tabs on when I enter or leave the workplace, how long my lunch is, and when I choose to take off early for the day is now repugnant to me.

As a self-employed home-based freelancer, exactly the type reviewer Jenny Diski is describing, I decide how much my time is worth. When I want to take a few days off, I take them. When I’m finished with work at 2pm, I don’t sit in front of my computer trying to look busy for someone else – I go outside to play with my kids. If I want to take a vacation or pay off a credit card, I don’t have to figure out how to slice up a fixed monthly income differently; I can just take on an extra project or two, spend a couple weeks working longer hours, and get a fat check for my efforts.

I admit I’m extremely fortunate; I’ve been working this way for a long time and have a large stable of clients and steady work. Building up to that from nothing can be a tenuous and nerve-wracking prospect. And there are, of course, downsides.

You experience a kind of existential angst when you don’t get new jobs for a couple of weeks. I do take on too much work at times because it’s hard to say no. And it took me a long time to learn how to create boundaries between my work and home life, because I was the only one who could enforce them.

But those downsides are far outweighed by positives. The vast majority of us did work a normal job once and have chosen this path with eyes wide open. Whatever sense of stability a non-freelance job might offer, we’ve decided that being in control of our time and our money and our lives is infinitely more valuable.

Another nods:

Not everybody working from home is taking on small projects for an ever-changing list of clients. I’ve been working out of my house for more than 10 years now as an independent software developer. I have two long-term clients who pay me well to create and maintain software for them. I spend very little time networking and I enjoy the flexibility that I get from working out of my house.

I make more money, and because of the tax laws I’m able to dump a huge percentage of my income into my retirement plan tax-free while making a number of tax deductions not available to the average full-time employee. My car is 10 years old with only 100,000 miles on it because I’m not commuting 50 minutes each way to work each day. As for stability – I’ve survived a number of layoffs that full-time employees did not.

That being said, I know that this could all end tomorrow and I’d be back out looking for another client or two or even a full-time job. For the last 10+ years, however, I’ve been enjoying the independent contractor deal.

Another suggests that working from home is a different experience for mid-career professionals than for entry-level employees:

I’m a filmmaker who’s been working from home as a freelancer since 2008, mainly as an editor or producer of web content and the odd documentary film. At this point I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but I’ve had it good because I didn’t jump into it without a plan.

I’d been employed at a commercial production company prior to working for myself. That production company immediately became one of my primary clients, unloading work on me that they were too busy to handle. Additionally, I had built relationships with some of their clients, who – once they found out I’d gone into business for myself – were quick to throw work my way (and, more importantly, to recommend me).

So I made the jump from the baseline of having already built a solid professional network. I wouldn’t advise someone coming into the job market to try this without having already established themselves professionally. Desirable clients (meaning the ones willing to pay a premium for skilled craftsmanship, rather than the clients prowling Craigslist for discount labor) will always work with someone they know over taking a chance on a newbie. Acquaintances who have tried to make the jump to the freelance work without having an established network have invariably ended up working too many low-pay gigs, and eventually returned to the comforts of a 9-to-5.

Bearing Witness, Or Wearing Us Down?

The firehose of social media allows both reporters and citizen journalists to reach massive audiences in real time. David Carr weighs the ups and downs of this immediacy when it comes to war reporting:

Bearing witness is the oldest and perhaps most valuable tool in the journalist’s arsenal, but it becomes something different delivered in the crucible of real time, without pause for reflection. It is unedited, distributed rapidly and globally, and immediately responded to by the people formerly known as the audience. It has made for a more visceral, more emotional approach to reporting. War correspondents arriving in a hot zone now provide an on-the-spot moral and physical inventory that seems different from times past. That emotional content, so noticeable when Anderson Cooper was reporting from the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has now become routine, part of the real-time picture all over the web. …

So now that war comes to us in real time, do we feel helpless or empowered? Do we care more, or will the ubiquity of images and information desensitize us to the point where human suffering loses meaning when it is part of a scroll that includes a video of your niece twerking? Oh, we say as our index finger navigates to the next item, another one of those.

Mathew Ingram’s take:

Although Carr doesn’t get into it, the other downside that some have mentioned is that the news environment has become much more chaotic, now that everyone with a smartphone can upload photos and report on what is happening around them — including the terrorist groups and armies that are involved in the conflict that is being reported on, and the ultimate victims of their behavior. Hoaxes and misinformation fly just as quickly as the news does, and in some cases are harder to detect, and those mistakes can have real repercussions.

At the same time, however, there are some fairly obvious benefits to the kind of reporting we get now, and I would argue that they outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, as Carr notes, we get journalism that is much more personal — and while that personal aspect can cause trouble for reporters like Mohyeldin and Magnay when they stray over editorial lines, in the end we get something that is much more moving than mainstream news has typically been.

But Micah Zenko fears that this environment has encouraged “chicken-littleism” to run rampant in the media:

The long-standing phenomenon of “if it bleeds, it leads” is now significantly amplified and spread in near real time via social media. For example, virtually anyone who uses Twitter for news gathering will notice that tweets run overwhelmingly toward the alarming, negative, or just horrific. Social media also makes this bad news more intimately personified, since a photograph of human suffering will generate more clicks, retweets, and favorites than a 140-character description alone. Incredibly brave activists, researchers, and journalists in conflict-prone countries wittingly feed this insatiable demand with emotional stories of intense heartbreak or tragedy, and an occasional story of personified heroism in the middle of all the chaos.

Dismal descriptions and perceptions of the world are reinforced by the near absence or minimization of positive international news stories. Now if it doesn’t bleed, it isn’t even newsworthy.

The New (And Improved?) Paul Ryan, Ctd

Jordan Weissmann responds to McArdle’s criticisms of his criticisms of Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan:

If your overriding policy goal is to shrink federal spending over time, then yes, drastically redesigning an enormous chunk of the safety net in order to (maybe) move a relatively small group of people who seem to be stuck in intractable poverty toward work might make sense. But if your policy goal is, instead, simply to design a safety net that works for most Americans who come into contact with it, and cost isn’t your No. 1 worry, then burning down and replacing the one we have is just rash. …

To completely redesign programs that already work well (such as food stamps), while forcing every single person who needs a hand through a rough patch to submit to a new and intrusive bureaucratic regime, is simply overkill. Doing so might not even move many people out of poverty and could have any number of unintended consequences. (Would anybody be shocked if having to sign a life contract scared off some poor parents from trying to get benefits that they really needed?) Looking for specific places where the safety net is weak, and then fixing it in a targeted way, is the more responsible choice.

Ross, on the other hand, defends the plan from critics who call it paternalistic:

For conservatives who support the “conditional reciprocity” embodied in tying welfare benefits to work or job seeking or life planning or anything else, there are two responses to this critique. The first is that certain prominent middle-class entitlements do, in fact, impose stringent conditions on their beneficiaries. Specifically, what you get from them depends on whether you’ve worked and paid taxes across your adult life: Seniors aren’t required to attend “water aerobics” to get Medicare or Social Security, but by the time they receive benefits from those programs they have usually paid out a lifetime’s worth of payroll and Medicare taxes. …

Meanwhile, there are, yes, lots of other programs and credits and subsidies in our system that aren’t built on conditional reciprocity, except in a sense so loose as to be meaningless. But here’s the thing: Conservatives often and increasingly favor capping, cutting or doing away with those giveaways entirely! Lowrey and Bruenig write as if it’s a hypothetical or a reductio ad absurdum to imagine the government demanding “action plans” from corporate welfare beneficiaries or trying to wean rich households off the mortgage-interest deduction. But the assumption behind every recent draft of tax reform on the right, from Mitt Romney’s 2012 plan to Mike Lee’s family-friendly proposal to Dave Camp’s blueprint (in ascending order of fiscal precision), is that a range of “welfare state for the rich” provisions in the tax code should be straightforwardly eliminated.

Nonetheless, in Frum’s view, Ryan’s plan reflects “a way of thinking about poverty that made excellent sense a decade ago – but that is not equal to the more difficult circumstances of today”:

In the late 1990s, a booming U.S. economy created jobs at a rate not seen since the 1960s. Wages even for less-skilled workers rose handsomely. Pretty much anybody who wanted to work could do so, and full-time work offered a path out of poverty. An enhanced Earned-Income Tax Credit topped up wages; a new federal health benefit for children extended health care to families who earned just slightly too much to qualify for Medicaid.

It made sense in those days to think of poverty not as a social or economic problem but as an expression of some more personal affliction or burden: mental illness, adult illiteracy, addiction, family breakdown. That was very much the assumption behind the “compassionate conservatism” advocated by George W. Bush when he sought the presidency at the end of the 1990s. Poor people needed more than a check! … But does it remain true in the context of 2014 that poverty is grounded in behaviors, as seemed to be the case in 1999-2000? The 45 million Americans who rely on food stamps: Do they really need caseworkers to set goals for them? Or have those goals been moved out of reach by economic circumstances?

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Nolan Brown is disheartened that the plan’s proposals for criminal justice reform are getting so little attention, particularly from liberals who ought to be cheering them:

To me, these are by far the most exciting parts of Ryan’s agenda. When is the last time an American politician brought up criminal justice reform in the context of poverty policy proposals? And yet a huge part of what keeps people poor is our draconian criminal justice system. As of 2008, one in every 100 people in America was in prison. We throw people in jail for the most insane reasons—possessing pot, having sex, street vending without proper paperwork—thereby already putting them (and their families) in economic jeopardy. And then we release them into a system where over-eager cops, parole officers, and bureaucrats are on the ready to issue fines or haul them back into prison should they fail to meet any number of labyrinthian requirements.

The Dish’s complete coverage of Ryan’s plan here.

Boehner’s Border Bill

The House has introduced a bill to deal with the migrant children crisis, offering far less money than the $3.7 billion Obama had requested and focusing mainly on tightening border controls:

The House bill attempts to relieve backlogged immigration courts by allowing those Central American children to be treated as if they were Mexicans, who are screened more quickly by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid oppose changing that provision, arguing it would grant the unaccompanied minors fewer legal protections and that there are other ways of speeding up immigration cases. The Obama Administration supports the policy change.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers broke down the House bill into three pots of funding: border control, temporary housing and foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The majority of the money, $405 million, is set aside to boost the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another $197 million would be allocated for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is charged with taking care of the migrant children until their family members or guardians can be found while the minors’ immigration cases are handled. There’s also $22 million in funding to hire judges and speed up judicial proceedings, $35 million to send the National Guard to the border and $40 million to support uniting the families in the aforementioned Central American countries. The bill would cover the costs through the end of September.

But with anti-immigration hardliners like Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions pushing for the bill to include language blocking deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), Sargent questions whether even this bill can pass the House:

GOP leaders are resisting the inclusion of such language. But it needs to be stated once again that Cruz, King, and Sessions are not outliers in this debate. Broadly speaking, their position on this crisis — and on immigration in general – is the GOP position writ large.

Republican leaders don’t want to include any measure against Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in the current border plan because the politics are terrible. That would entail responding to a crisis involving migrating minors not just by expediting deportations (which the current GOP bill would do), but also by calling for still more deportations from the interior. But the GOP leadership’s position is only that they don’t want any anti-DACA language in their current response to the crisis. The GOP position writ large is still that we should deport all the DREAMers, block Obama from any further executive action to ease deportations, and not act in any way to legalize the 11 million.

Cruz et al. aren’t the only ones trying to advance their agendas through the bill, though. Senate Democrats are looking to tack on the “Gang of Eight” comprehensive immigration reform package, though Boehner says “no way”. Allahpundit quips:

He can’t turn around in the middle of a border crisis, three months out from the midterms and with Dave Brat having nuked Eric Cantor on immigration, and agree to amnesty. Try him again next year, though!

Public opinion, meanwhile, may be breaking in favor of a generous response to the underage migrants. Emma Green flags a new poll that seems to suggest as much:

How does America see the children who arrive at its border? According to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, the answer is “sympathetically.” The survey found that 69 percent of respondents thought these kids “should be treated as refugees and should be allowed to stay in the U.S. if authorities determine it is not safe for them to return to their home country,” and roughly the same percentage said the government should provide them with shelter and support. Only 27 percent said they “should be treated as illegal immigrants and should be deported back to their home countries.”

But the respondents were more ambivalent about immigrants in general. While 56 percent agreed that Central American families are trying to keep their kids safe in “very difficult circumstances,” another 38 percent said they are “taking advantage of American good will and really seeking a back door to immigrate to our country.” And 42 percent said that immigrants are a “burden on the country” because “they take our jobs housing and healthcare”—a seven-point increase compared to another poll that asked the same question in early July.

Diversity Hires Punished For Valuing Diversity

Rachel Feintzeig flags a recent study that “found that women and non-whites executives who push for women and non-whites to be hired and promoted suffer when it comes to their own performance reviews”:

A woman who shepherds women up the ranks, for example, is perceived as less warm, while a non-white who promotes diversity is perceived as less competent. Both end up being rated less highly by their bosses, according to the paper, which is set to be presented at an Academy of Management conference next month. … Often, having women or minorities atop a company is perceived as a marker of progress for diversity efforts, but [David] Hekman’s research suggests their presence might not have a large impact on the rest of the organization. If they believe it’s too risky to advocate for their own groups, it makes sense that successful women and non-white leaders would end up surrounded by white males in the executive suite, he said.

The study also discovered that “White men, on the other hand, actually got a bump in their performance review scores from valuing diversity.” Amanda Hess considers why “white male managers who promote women and people of color aren’t penalized”:

Perhaps that’s because, when a white man recruits a diverse group of people to work beneath him, he’s improving the company’s optics without disrupting the composition of its upper rungs. But when a woman or person of color does it, she’s threatening the system. As the authors put it: “Minority and women leaders’ engagement in diversity-valuing behavior may be viewed as selfishly advancing the social standing of their own low-status demographic groups.”

This is why “token” female and minority managers are particularly valuable to their companies—they allow executives to point to their commitment to promoting women and people of color (or rather, a woman and a person of color) without actually fostering widespread diversity in the ranks. Women and people of color who succeed in being seen as warm or competent (by disavowing a commitment to diversity) are then coded by their companies as what the researchers call “social outsiders” from their gender and race. Most of the bosses included in the study were white men (no duh), but female and minority bosses surveyed rated their diversity-minded colleagues similarly—perhaps because reinforcing the status quo is a requirement for cracking the glass ceiling.

Bryce Covert connects the study to related research:

The research could also help explain why some countries that have rules in place to increase gender diversity haven’t seen it trickle outward. Norway passed a quota requiring company boards to be 40 percent female, and women now make up 41 percent of public company boards. But 32 of the largest companies don’t have a female CEO and just 5.8 percent of general managers at public companies are women, suggesting the board quota hasn’t led to the hiring of more female executives. Other Nordic countries with board quotas also have small shares of big companies with female CEOs. Another study of Norway’s system found that the increase of women on boards hasn’t meant anything for women working below the C-suite level.

If white men could be counted on to be champions of diversity, the numbers might change faster. But unfortunately while today’s discrimination doesn’t look like outright exclusion or hostility, it takes the form of favoring people who are similar to you.

Trophy Children, Ctd

Lots of reader pushback on Molly Knefel’s case for participatory awards:

Instead, that kid [who doesn’t get a trophy] is supposed to get the message: If you didn’t score a lot of points, no one gives a shit about you. And if that makes you sad, or if you feel that it’s not fair, get used to it. The world is a sad and unfair place. Score more goals next time. This message has always felt at odds, to me, with the equally ubiquitous platitude that children are the future. If children are the future, then why are we so gung ho about preparing them to be treated unfairly?

I don’t know, maybe because the world IS unfair and we’re realists and not delusional purveyors of utopian fantasy?

So kids who ARE good at something have to live with the satisfaction that scoring a goal is enough, but the kid who sucks (like me) NEEDS a trophy to keep him from feeling bad about himself more than the kid scoring the goal? NO. Why can’t we celebrate the exceptional? When a kid does something well we’re supposed reinforce it by telling him it’s just what’s expected so don’t get too excited because there’s no awards in life for being exceptional? But, um … there are. From the Oscars to the Olympics to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another adds, “Knowing that life is not fair, and that your achievements are not handed to you, makes earning them sweeter.” Another key point:

Giving trophies to everyone is practically like giving away none, because with the ubiquity comes devaluation.

I’m a lifelong mediocre jock. Somehow my spirit has never been broken when I come in 14th out of 25 in a bicycle race, or my soccer team fails to make the playoffs. I do it because it is fun, and that is its own reward. I keep one 35-year-old trophy on display. It’s for being “most improved” on a wrestling team. It was one of two trophies given out that year, along with “most valuable” which went to a Columbia-bound stud. I earned that sucker because I worked my ass off that year – and was lucky. If the rest of the team got trophies as well, I guarantee you that they would all have ended up in landfills long ago.

Another asks Knefel:

Do you really think kids are unaware they’re being patronized? Do you think they’ll value a participation trophy, or feel a sense of accomplishment?

I was a mediocre baseball player as a kid. I got many participation trophies, which I promptly forgot. They’re probably in a box somewhere in my parents’ basement. I knew I wasn’t a great athlete and the trophies were just a pro forma thing, so I didn’t value them. On the other hand, I was always one of the top students in my class. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment at high grades because I felt I had earned them, not simply been given them.

Participation trophies may be fine for three year olds, but as kids get older we should stop trying to GIVE them self esteem, or teach them that they’re entitled to their desired result, and not getting it means they’ve been treated “unfairly.”

And another:

Expecting a child who has made no notable contribution to a soccer team to be moved by the receipt of a trophy is to assume that in addition to being a poor soccer player, that he is also daft. I was a non-athlete as a child who was nonetheless forced onto the occasional youth sports team. Getting a trophy would have been an absurdity. What I do remember fondly was 15 minutes that a substitute coach once spent with me trying to improve my skills at connecting bat and ball. And with some success. But then, trophies are easier than actually spending time with kids improving skills, aren’t they?

Another shares an excellent idea:

Having coached youth baseball and basketball for several years now while being staunchly opposed to participation trophies, I’ve adopted a solution my coaching mentor came up with. I create personalized mementoes for every player by taking a baseball (or miniature basketball) and writing the year, team name, player name and number and a personalized message about the season. I often get assistant coaches to write something as well. It doesn’t take long, but it is an appropriate way of acknowledging participation and more importantly, team membership. Giving a trophy for participation is like using a crescent wrench as a hammer. It does a sub-par job and devalues the tool for its intended purpose.

A lone dissenter so far:

I was glad to see Molly Knefel defend giving trophies to an entire team.  Major pet peeve for me when people trot this out as one more thing that is wrong with kids (parents) today, mostly from people who don’t have kids.  These days children are fast tracked into a sport as early as age 5.  Little Tommy is on travel baseball, and little Sally is spending 8 hours practicing gymnastics.  And then there are the kids who are still “just rec”, as in they are on the recreational team, as in they are not good enough for a competitive team, or their parents can’t get them to all the the practices (often held while working parents are, well, working).  These kids KNOW they aren’t as good, or as lucky, and they don’t need a trophy withheld to beat it further into their heads that they are less than.

So give the kids a break. A participant trophy for an 8 year old does not destroy the fabric of society.  It just makes a kid feel special for a moment, for finishing what he or she started, for being a member of a team, or for doing their best despite challenges.  Let’s spend more time criticizing the parents who must boastfully remind others that their kid IS on a competitive team while they look down their nose at other children or are simply participating in a recreational team.

One such parent cries:

Bullllllllshhhiiiittttttt.

Look, I’m probably the most Liberal of all your readers, but as the father of an insanely talented 12-year-old daughter, I cannot abide this Everyone Wins mentality. And not because I’m against the theory of “Hey, you showed up and kicked that ball and your leg didn’t fall off, have a trophy!”, but because I hate to see the dilution of true talent in the face of egalitarian praise.

Case in point: My daughter is a genuinely talented singer (said no other proud parent, ever) who was excited to compete in her school’s talent show. Having just come off a local theater run of “Annie” in the lead role, she was sort of feeling badass and wanted another chance to shine before an audience. But this was less a talent show in the traditional sense and more a Display of Talent For Its Own Sake, where EVERYONE WAS A WINNER and even the truly crap acts (sometimes especially the crap acts!) got raucous cheers of support from their peers. So when my TRULY talented and extra-special daughter (said no other proud parent, ever) sang her song and killed it, the applause level was exactly what it had been for the kid whose mother had dressed him in a homemade snowman suit and sent him out to sing “In Summer” from Frozen, an act that would, in my day, have gotten me beaten half to death by bullies outraged by my daring to offend their ears with such a tragic display.

So I asked my daughter, afterwards, if her peers had been coached ahead of time to whistle and hoot and clap and shout and rave for every act, and she confirmed my suspicion: The music teacher had indeed required that everyone be treated as American Idols and wildly applauded, regardless of how badly they stank the place up. “How do you feel about that?” I asked my TRULY talented daughter. She shrugged, trying to be diplomatic about it, but said, “What was the point?”

Indeed. There is excellence (like my Truly Talented Daughter), and there is mediocrity, and if we as parents continue blending the two in a blinding array of ecstatic applause, the gifted among us may just all wonder what the point of shining is.

But seriously, my daughter kicks ass.

Chart Of The Day

Capital Flight

Tim Fernholz wonders whether sanctions are increasing capital flight from Russia:

Russia’s had a real problem with capital flight in recent years, as its wealthiest citizens and corporations have moved assets to tax havens and wealthy economies to avoid instability and political interference in Russia. (The erstwhile shareholders of Yukos, the oil company that the Kremlin seized and broke up in the mid-2000s, just won a $50 billion compensation claim in the Hague.) That left Putin plaintively asking oligarchs to bring back their cash, please. No dice: Capital flight has increased this year, already exceeding each of the last two years in preliminary data for the first two quarters of 2014. Is that the fault of the sanctions? In part—few investors want their money to be trapped if a new iron economic curtain is raised.

Our “Best Hope” To Rein In The NSA?

Jason Koebler offers a primer on the new bill that has tech companies and some civil libertarians excited:

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would completely end mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act – a loophole in the law that effectively let NSA agents scoop up metadata and other information about American citizens. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because earlier this summer, the House of Representatives also passed the USA Freedom Act – after a House committee completely gutted any teeth it had and also added in new loopholes that would let bulk surveillance continue unscathed. Leahy’s bill looks much closer to the one that many civil liberty groups initially endorsed before the House had at it, and it’s expected to go straight to the Senate floor, where it will have less chance of being ruined by back room White House dealings or in closed committee hearings.

Andrea Peterson details the bill’s contents:

The legislation would curb bulk collection of domestic phone records, provide new transparency measures and add an adversarial component to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Senate bill would replace bulk collection with the ability to collect call record details within two hops on a daily basis when the government can demonstrate a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that search terms are associated with a foreign terrorist organization under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This would limit the government from being able to broadly collect information by geographic region, such as by Zip code or area code, which critics feared might be the case in the version of the Freedom Act that passed the House earlier this summer. …

Leahy’s new version of the Freedom Act would require the government to report how many individuals’ information has been collected under certain surveillance authorities and how many of those are likely Americans – as well as the number of queries run on Americans in some databases, with exceptions for figures not possible to generate with current technology. It also expands how private companies can publicly report on government requests for information.

Russell Brandom is among the enthused:

Even before the bill was public, it was hailed by the New York Times as “a breakthrough in the struggle against the growth of government surveillance power,” and being named by reformers as congress’s best hope for a meaningful response to NSA overreach. Looking at the bill itself, you can see why. The table of contents is a laundry list of the major NSA authorizations detailed in the Snowden leaks. Leahy’s bill puts major restrictions on the FISA court, pen registers, and business records requests (the method used to collect bulk metadata from phone companies, among other things). It would also add new transparency measures to National Security Letter requests, allowing companies to report how many customers have been affected in more detail than ever before.

But political scientist H. L. Pohlman sees reason for concern:

[T]here is one crucial provision that the civil libertarians that support Leahy’s bill have overlooked. Namely, that the bill includes the same language contained in the House bill that created a “backdoor” authority to collect phone records that evade all the limitations just listed. I noted this provision in a post on this site last May, and called it my “most serious concern” with the House version. … The bottom line is that Leahy’s bill is a continuation of the intelligence community’s efforts to at best confuse – and at worst, mislead – the American people (and perhaps their legislative representatives) through the clever use of legalese.

Similarly, Jennifer Granick notes:

As surveillance reform followers know, one of the most serious problems with content surveillance taking place under section 702 is that the NSA, CIA and FBI use selection terms connected to US persons to search through repositories of data collected from targeting foreigners, a practice called “back door searches,” since ordinarily investigators would need a particularized warrant based on probable cause to get access to that information.

USA Freedom would not end back-door searches. It would require NSA and CIA to count the number of times they do it and report to Congress. But it exempts the FBI from the reporting requirement. Wha?! As the public recently learned, FBI is searching these databases for evidence it uses in criminal prosecutions, the FBI doesn’t currently count how often it searches for Americans, and the number is, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, substantial.

Meanwhile, Dustin Volz evaluates the the bill’s political future:

[I]t remains unclear if Leahy has the votes in a historically gridlocked Senate that will have most of its attention diverted to the midterm elections when lawmakers come back to Washington. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has been an influential backer of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and early indications are that she and other defense hawks are less than receptive to Leahy’s new proposal. The California Democrat, according to several sources, wants to push a data-retention mandate that would require phone companies to keep customer data for a certain amount of time that would exceed current requirements set at 18 months. Multiple privacy advocates said such a mandate would amount to a “poison pill” and would likely prompt a cascade of groups to drop their support for the Freedom Act.

However, Leahy has several factors working in his favor. For one, the administration is on board with his version of the Freedom Act, an alliance that could undercut protests from Feinstein’s cohort. And Sen. Ted Cruz is among the 13 original cosponsors, marking a partnership that could shore up GOP support. The Texas Republican and potential 2016 presidential hopeful has been remarkably quiet on NSA spying before endorsing Leahy’s measure.

And Julian Hattem observes, “One way or another, Congress has to pass some kind of NSA bill”:

The legal authority for the agency’s phone records program expires next June. Without reauthorization, that leaves the possibility that the program could be cut off entirely, an outcome that intelligence officials have said would leave the nation vulnerable to attacks. The looming deadline could force lawmakers to put their heads together over the August recess and find a way to advance the bill before the end of the year.

The Fruits Of Liberal Intervention, Ctd

Frederic Wehrey cautions against buying into the conventional wisdom about what’s going down in Libya:

Outside observers are often tempted toward a one-dimensional reading of Libya’s turmoil. It is easy to trace Libya’s breakdown as a political struggle between Islamists and liberals: The Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Construction Party and more rejectionist, jihadi factions like Ansar al-Sharia versus the “liberals” under the National Forces Alliance (NFA). Another level of conflict seems to be regional: A contest between the towns of Zintan and Misrata for economic power and political leverage in Tripoli, or amongst federalists and their opponents in the long-marginalized east. Yet an additional layer is between remnants of the old order – ex-security men, long-serving and retired officers, former Gaddafi-era technocrats – and a newer, younger cadre of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” often Islamists, who were either exiled and/or imprisoned during the dictator’s rule.

Elements of all these dimensions are at play, but none of them alone has sufficient explanatory power. At its core, Libya’s violence is an intensely local affair, stemming from deeply entrenched patronage networks battling for economic resources and political power in a state afflicted by a gaping institutional vacuum and the absence of a central arbiter with a preponderance of force. There is not one faction strong enough to coerce or compel the others.

Meanwhile, Friedersdorf lays into the hawks who supported our role in overthrowing Qaddafi:

When Ivo H. Daalder and James G. Stavridis declare that the cost of intervening in Libya was “$1.1 billion for the U.S. and several billion dollars overall,” I can’t help but think that GiveWell estimates that one of the most efficient mosquito-net charities saves a life for every $3,400 that it spends. That’s 882,352 lives saved for the cost of the Libya campaign. Given present conditions in Libya, how confident are we that the NATO-aided ouster of Qaddafi saved even half that many lives? Development aid is far from perfect, but my instinct is that it saves lives more reliably than wars of choice and virtually never results in violent blowback.

Most of all, I am struck by the willingness of prominent interventionists to have publicly declared their instincts in Libya vindicated when the country’s future remained very much in doubt, as if they couldn’t conceive of an intervention that would result in more lives lost than the alternative even as the possibility of that outcome was extremely plausible. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington, D.C. foreign-policy establishment seemed to perform no better at foreseeing how events would unfold than non-expert commentators who simply applied Murphy’s Law. At the very most charitable, the common interventionist claim that Libya vindicated them in their dispute with non-interventionists was wildly premature. Perhaps the lesson to take from the NATO campaign is that even the most thoughtful interventionists have no idea how geopolitical events will unfold.