Michael Pollan: Forget Nutrition Charts, Eat What Grandma Said Is Good for You
The author of ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ says science has supplanted cultural wisdom as a guide in telling us what to eat.
The author of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' says science has supplanted cultural wisdom as a guide in telling us what to eat.
A Crisis of Governance
This post was originally published on Hullabaloo.
Fareed Zakaria interviewed Paul Volcker yesterday:
ZAKARIA: When you look at this crisis, there are many regulatory problems. There are many issues that the bankers did wrong. There are many issues government regulators did wrong.
But many people argue that the one key issue, the biggest weapon the United States government has to slow down, to tamp down excesses, is to have raised the interest rate.
Do you believe, during this period, if interest rates had been higher, some of this would have been — some of this froth would have subsided?
VOLCKER: Well, I have certain rule that ex-chairmen of the Federal Reserve don’t comment on monetary policy of their successors. I’ll tell you how good monetary policy was 30 years ago, but I don’t want to comment on it now.
But I don’t think there’s any question that the Federal Reserve — and the other regulators, it wasn’t just the Federal Reserve — were not on the top of this housing picture, or they weren’t on top of the regulatory picture. And unfortunately, you know, when this was all going up, where was the SEC? And you ask, where was the Federal Reserve? Where was the comptroller of the currency?
There was a whole attitude, a kind of philosophic attitude that the market would take care of itself. And that became quite ingrained. The complexities, the so-called “financial engineering,” a whole school of thought said you don’t have to worry about a breakdown. These smart mathematicians are taking care of it. And all the risks have been dispersed to the point where they won’t upset anything.
Well, when the screws became loose, we found out a lot of the risks were pretty concentrated.
ZAKARIA: All in AIG, for example… VOLCKER: And AIG was one case.
ZAKARIA: … insuring almost all the risk.
VOLCKER: Part of the problem was that it got so complex, that a lot of the management, you know, couldn’t understand it, and didn’t understand it. But they were kind of reassured that somebody down in the bowels had it under control. But there was just a complexity which made it very opaque.
ZAKARIA: Is it true that you once said that the only financial innovation that you believe has added any real value in recent years is the ATM machine?
VOLCKER: I have said something like that to make the point, yes. And I guess I’ll have to add the ATM machine was a mechanical innovation.
ZAKARIA: Not a financial…
VOLCKER: But I’ll tell you, it is a very useful innovation. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Heavily used, efficient, saves you a lot of money.
ZAKARIA: Let me ask you a final question.
What is the crisis you’re worried about now? Because one of the things people talk about is, does the United States still have the credibility to continue borrowing at the quantities we borrow? The people who — you know, the rating agencies are now saying our AAA creditworthiness might be in doubt.
Is it something that we need to worry about? Larry Summers says…
VOLCKER: I hate to give you this answer…
ZAKARIA: … can the world’s greatest power be the world’s greatest borrower?
VOLCKER: I hate to give you this answer, but the crisis I most worry about is the crisis in governance.
ZAKARIA: In government.
VOLCKER: In governance, yes. Have we got the capacity to develop programs, get them enacted and in a constructive way?
And that — it’s not just a political problem. That will underlie your question about the confidence in the United States, and confidence in American leadership.
ZAKARIA: And your basic concern is, can our democratic system make the hard choices that it needs to make…
VOLCKER: Yes. ZAKARIA: … the reform — to push these reforms forward?
VOLCKER: Yes.
True. And I think this is one area in which the punditocracy really gets it wrong. They seem to think this is a result of partisanship. And it’s true that one party is politically feckless and ineffectual and the other is politically reckless and radical and that’s causing gridlock and frustration. At this point it seems to me that it’s likely the second will end up back in charge and that will ease the logjam for obvious reasons. But will that make financial “reform” more likely? I don’t think so. There are many problems with governance right now. However the inability to enact financial reform is not caused by the differences between the two parties, but rather their similarities. That’s a much, much bigger problem.
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1 Million Remain Homeless in Haiti, Yet the U.S. Ambassador Brags It’s ‘Going Really Well’
Ambassador Ken Merten is going around touting the Haiti rescue disaster as a ‘model.’ 
Ambassador Ken Merten is going around touting the Haiti rescue disaster as a 'model.'
How Tax Cuts Killed California
This post was originally published on the Booman Tribune.
Once upon a time, there was a Golden State which had the arguably the best public schools and the best public higher education system of state colleges and universities. People longed to move there for its natural beauty, its climate, its good schools, its many jobs in the entertainment, defense and high tech industries, etc. Was it a perfect state? Far from it, but it did seem to be the place everyone wanted to be — once upon a time.
Now? Not so much. You might even call it an unmitigated disaster, a failed state, one that is, for all practical purposes, ungoverned and ungovernable.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled an $82.9 billion state spending plan today that calls for no tax hikes but envisions pay cuts for state workers, reductions in services to California’s neediest residents – and relies on the benevolence of the federal government.
Well, the economy is bad. Times are tough. Yet I live in a state (New York) which, despite its fiscal problems, still manages to fund social services, good public schools, a good public higher education system, and provide all the other essential government assistance without massive layoffs or cuts. New York State has an $8 Billion deficit this year, but that’s less than half of the budget deficit faced by California. New Yorkers suffer from high unemployment, but the values of our homes (at least those among us who don’t live in super rich enclaves like the Hamptons or own condos in Manhattan) haven’t gotten flushed down the toilet.
How did this all come to pass? How did New York manage to avoid a California budgetary collapse? Well, for starters, New York wasn’t subjected to the grand conservative social experiment known as Proposition 13, a provision that, once approved, altered California’s Constitution making it impossible to raise tax revenues and thus do what Government needs to do — provide for the general welfare of its citizens.
Under Republican Gov. Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown, California epitomized the postwar American dream. Its public schools, from kindergarten through Berkeley and UCLA, were the nation’s finest; its roads and aqueducts the most efficient at moving cars and water — the state’s lifeblood — to their destinations. All this was funded by some of the nation’s highest taxes, which fell in good measure on the state’s flourishing banks and corporations. […]… With the state sitting on a $5 billion surplus, frustrated Californians grumped to the polls and passed Proposition 13, which rolled back and then froze property taxes — effectively destroying the funding base of local governments and school districts, which thereafter depended largely on Sacramento for their revenue. Ranked fifth among the states in per-pupil spending during the 1950s and ’60s, California sank to Mississippi-like levels — the mid-40s — by the 1990s.
Since 1978, state and local government in California has been funded chiefly by personal income taxes. Bank and corporation taxes have been steadily reduced. In the current recession, with state unemployment at 11 percent, tax revenue has fallen off a cliff.
But the problem with Proposition 13 wasn’t merely that it reduced revenue. It also made it very difficult to increase revenue. Raising taxes now requires a two-thirds vote of the legislature, though in 47 other states a simple majority suffices. California has become overwhelmingly Democratic in the past two decades, but Republicans have managed to retain footholds — representing just over one-third of the districts — in both houses of the legislature.
So what was a bad situation for the rest of the country (brought about by the Federal Government’s deregulation the financial industry — but that’s another story) was made much worse in Sunny California. Because a bare minimum of legislators, ideologues for the most part, is all you need to turn hard times into a financial catastrophe of epic proportions. All because of a myth that Government is always bad and taxation is always evil.
The current Republican crop has refused in good times as well as bad to raise business or other taxes (increasing the tobacco tax, for instance, has failed each of the past 14 times it has come up for a vote). Abetted by little local Limbaughs who inflame Republican brains, they protest that the state already has the nation’s highest taxes. In fact, California ranks 18th among the states in percentage of personal income paid to state government, and its presumably beleaguered wealthiest 1 percent, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, pays just 7.4 percent of their income to the state, while the poorest Californians pay 10.2 percent.But the myth of soak-the-rich high taxation persists among Republicans — so much so that the GOP front-runner to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger in next year’s gubernatorial election, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, is calling for cuts in business tax rates even though the state is staring at a $21 billion deficit that it somehow has to close. In short order, unless the federal government steps in with a bridge loan, the state will throw 940,000 poor children off its health-care rolls and lay off tens of thousands of teachers.
In a way I pity Arnold Schwarzenegger. By most standards he is a fairly moderate Republican. But he’s hamstrung by his own party, which is far more radical than he is, and by the effects of Proposition 13 which makes it impossible for him to deal with California’s present economic crisis in an effective manner.
He can’t raise taxes to provide spending to stimulate the economy because it would never pass the legislature. So he is forced to look for tricks to get around the budget crisis he faces — cruel tricks for all the people who are employed by the state of California, or the kids that attend its schools, or the people who rely on social services for their health care — while also hoping (and begging) for assistance from the Federal Government led by President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress, will come riding in on it’s white horse to save the day, or at least keep California from drowning in its own self created sea of red ink for another year.
And you wonder why Progressives laugh at Tea Baggers and other Conservative Republicans who mindlessly continue to repeat their mantra that cutting taxes is the only way to save the economy? Hey, we’ve seen that disaster flick played out in real life in the state that gave us Hollywood, and frankly the story doesn’t have a happy ending.
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Has F/X Hit the Jackpot With Racy New Animated Series ‘Archer’?
It’s a spoof of the James Bond-type spy genre, which doesn’t sound too good, but never underestimate what Adam Reed of Sealab 2021 can do with moldy genre spoofs.
It's a spoof of the James Bond-type spy genre, which doesn't sound too good, but never underestimate what Adam Reed of Sealab 2021 can do with moldy genre spoofs.
Media outlets are reporting that conservative Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) has decided against running for a third term this year, a move that comes “
