The Ash Twins Blog

We discussed David Barstow’s article on the Tea Party movement in a previous post. Barstow, a New York Times reporter, spoke at a conference that I attended last Thursday. I summarize his words here.

While Barstow is best known for his work on the Pentagon military analyst propaganda program, the subject of his speech was journalistic access to government information. He said in his speech that  the Bush administration took radical steps to stonewall journalists that were trying to get information about government activities. FOIA requests were to be delayed as long as possible, and any provisions allowing agencies to withhold information were to be construed broadly. For the military analyst program, for example, Barstow and Times lawyers endured two years of litigation to get access to documents that were, by the law on the books, public record. Dick Cheney, meanwhile, wouldn’t even tell reporters relatively innocuous things like where he would be at various times, or how many people worked in his office.

The unavailability of public documents about government officials forces journalists to cultivate cozy, conflicted relationships with anonymous government sources in order to gain any timely information about government activities. This was a crucial part of the strategy where, for example, Bush officials leaked to the New York Times that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were for nukes, even though several groups of nuclear scientists had already told the government that they couldn’t be used for nukes. The journalists didn’t have access to those documents, though, so they just reported the leak. Then Cheney goes on Meet the Press that Sunday and says, “Look, the Times is reporting that Iraq has nukes.” Citing the Times gives the assertion a sheen of objective authority, notwithstanding that it was probably Cheney or one of his aides that anonymously talked to the reporter.

The good news, according to Barstow, is that Obama has done away with a lot of these stonewalling tactics. A lot of government data has been put online or is being put online. Another reason to be pleased with Obama, notwithstanding his failures to end the war and close Guantanamo, can be observed in the following video. See, especially, the part beginning at the 6:00 mark:

The other interesting aspect of these populist movements is that their bedrock premises are irrational. I can’t help but empathize with these just-plain-folks being shaken out of their anesthesia and wanting to stick it to the man. I think this emotional resonance draws people in to the cause.

Unfortunately, the movements’ plans for improving society are informed by obvious falsehoods (take your pick: global warming is a hoax, Barack Obama is a terrorist, death panels, socialism would lead to societal destruction+the current government is moving towards socialism, etc etc etc). This situation should prevent a reasonable person from supporting their cause. For those within the movement, emotional support comes first, and belief systems come second. Individuals become involved for emotional reasons, and take on the beliefs of their compatriots. Tragically, these belief systems are fundamentally corrupt.

Commentators in the public sphere (like Glenn Beck) may not induce the original emotion to become a part of these movements (socioeconomic loss is probably a major origin), but they do perpetuate the emotional intensity. They also perpetuate and introduce novel false premises, which prevents the movements from developing into an engine for social change. The corporate interests which drive the intellectual castration of these movements benefit from the castration, as they are motivated to maintain the status quo (from which they are profiting handsomely).

I read some articles this week about the Tea Party Movement. The first was in the New York Times by David Barstow (previously mentioned on the blog). The second was sent to me by my dad, from prisonplanet.com.

The excessive emotion in these debates is fascinating. Subjects as innocuous (to me)  as meteorology, clinical diagnosis, or income taxes gain an emotional charge that I would think would be reserved for coup d`etats or CEOs making billions of dollars a year.

There is a strong bias in the sort of person who becomes an actor in the public sphere, and I think the main selection factor is emotion. Subjects to which people can develop a strong (usually negative) emotional response gain dramatically disproportionate traction in the public sphere.

Why bland subjects like the average temperature of the Earth can become so emotionally charged is an important question. Is it due to the fact that we do not really have anything to complain about, so as a society we manufacture things to argue over? Are these debates instead manufactured by corporate interests to disrupt engagement of actual legitimate social problems (e.g. corporate greed)? Or are human beings cognitively unable on average to understand (and take a position on) genuine social problems, and thus debate simpler issues instead?

The scariest possibility – and most reasonable to me – is that the last two reasons are major contributors. The upside is that debates in the public sphere do not accurately represent public opinion. These issues that appear so important to those involved are paltry in the long run, so these raging debates probably don’t influence the course of history too drastically.

The following is an excerpt from Stone (2004) about the Pentagon Papers:

Although most of what was in the study was common knowledge, it shed important light on key aspects of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It documented, for example, that at the end of World War II President Truman had rejected urgent appeals from Ho Chi Minh for American assistance; that while the 1954 Geneva conference was still in session, the United States was actively planning paramilitary operations in Saigon against the North; that President Kennedy’s “advisers” in Vietnam had not merely advised the South Vietnamese but had participated directly in military operations; that the U.S. government had knowingly publicized false South Vietnamese intelligence reports about the extent of Communist infiltration; that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been rammed through Congress under blatantly false pretenses; and that the U.S. government had concealed from the American public the fact that extensive bombing of North Vietnam had done little to impair the Communists’ military capacity, but had killed tens of thousands 0f Vietnamese civilians.

Why wasn’t this paragraph in my U.S. History textbook?

This 2009 paper by Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh discusses “the GDP Paradox,” which refers to the popularity of GDP as a measure of social welfare. GDP, which stands for “gross domestic product,” is defined as “the monetary, market value of all final goods and services produced in a country over a period of a year.” There are two main problems with using it as a measure of happiness, however, as I explain briefly:

1. GDP measures the money paid to purchase a good rather than the benefit accrued for using the good. This means that the relative happiness (“social welfare”) gained from different goods might not be equivalent to the relative prices paid for them. GDP only measures the latter. For example, my dad, brother, and I only had to pay $10 each for Civ 4, but that has given the three of us many many hours of happiness. Meanwhile, a relative spends $10 on a shitty gift that gives you zero happiness. These goods have different welfare value, but GDP treats them as equivalent.
2. GDP excludes externalities. Pollution is a good example. Two countries might have identical GDP in terms of how many manufacturing goods they sold, but they might have different levels of pollution. In the polluter country, people get cancer more often, which by most accounts significantly reduces happiness. But that difference is not included in GDP. In fact, purchases of the medical gizmos used to help the people with cancer would count toward GDP. So the less-happy country would have higher GDP.

Two other examples:

1. The military-industrial complex.The USA’s massive arsenal doesn’t really generate happiness for anyone, and generates death for thousands of others. But the $~1 trillion a year in our defense budget is counted in most measures of GDP.
2. Public vs. private media. Frontline is the best news show and generates immeasurable happiness in entertainment as well as sociopolitical effects. But it counts zero toward GDP. Fox News is ruining everything but its ad sales count toward GDP. (By the way, Fox is the most trusted source by Americans, according to opinion polls.)

According to this excerpted interview with Janine Roberts, author of Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel, diamond monopolist De Beers invented the tradition of a diamond engagement ring:

Diamonds became engagement stones around the end of the recession. Ernest Oppenheimer, who was in control of De Beers in the 1930s, was shutting down diamond mines to control supply and keep the price of diamonds high. He sent his son Harry to New York to meet with advertisers, because he realized that he couldn’t have diamonds being bought up just by rich people. They needed something that would appeal to everyone.

Well, everyone has to get engaged. So they spent a million pounds a year (about $1.7 million) to establish the diamond engagement ring as a sacrament — a spiritual thing. “Diamonds are forever.” They invented that and advertised it at every high school at the time. They got Paramount Studios involved by having the female stars wearing diamonds and by creating diamonds films. Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” and such. That advertising campaign created the myth.

This is an epic example of the power of advertising. De Beers invented a social norm requiring newlyweds to purchase an expensive diamond ring from De Beers. As of today, what was once an advertisement has become an institution of American culture, and its status as consumer manipulation is invisible. Even worse for us (but even better for De Beers), the manipulation has become self-enforcing: With the myth internalized, the receipt of a diamond engagement ring is rewarded with verbal approval, while the absence of a diamond engagement ring is punished by verbal disapproval and gossip.

David Barstow at the New York Times recently published a great article on the “Tea Party” movement. One of the interesting things, which might just be a product of Barstow’s reporting choices, is that elderly women are some of the most important activists in the movement:

As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.

“I would not hesitate,” she said, perfectly calm. . . .

He felt compelled to do something, so he decided to start a chapter of Mr. Beck’s 9/12 Project. He reserved a room at a pizza parlor for a Glenn Beck viewing party and posted the event on Craigslist. “We had 110 people there,” Mr. Stevens said. He recalled looking around the room and thinking, “All these people — they agree with me.”

Leah Southwell’s turning point came when she stumbled on Mr. Paul’s speeches on YouTube. (“He blew me away.”) Until recently, Mrs. Southwell was in the top 1 percent of all Mary Kay sales representatives, with a company car and a frenetic corporate life. “I knew zero about the Constitution,” Mrs. Southwell confessed. Today, when asked about her commitment to the uprising, she recites a line from the Declaration of Independence, a Tea Party favorite: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” . . .

[Tea Party author Richard Mack] said he has found audiences everywhere struggling to make sense of why they were wiped out last year. These audiences, he said, are far more receptive to critiques once dismissed as paranoia. It is no longer considered all that radical, he said, to portray the Federal Reserve as a plaything of the big banks — a point the Birch Society, among others, has argued for decades.

People are more willing, he said, to imagine a government that would lock up political opponents, or ration health care with “death panels,” or fake global warming. And if global warming is a fraud, is it so crazy to wonder about a president’s birth certificate?

“People just do not trust any of this,” Mr. Mack said. “It’s not just the fringe people anymore. These are just ordinary people — teachers, bankers, housewives.” . . .

A popular T-shirt at Tea Party rallies reads, “Proud Right-Wing Extremist.” . . .

[66-year-old Tea Party organizer Pam] Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

A lot of the anger in the Tea Party movement stems from the mass political voicelessness imposed by the two-party political system. The Republicans and Democrats are often in agreement on issues that many people have highly divergent views about. Meanwhile, voting for a third-party candidate often helps the mainstream candidate that is farther away from you ideologically. I have a limited knowledge of the history in this area, but it seems like right-wing third-party movements have been more successful and durable in American politics. This phenomenon is counterintuitive to the extent that  right-wing attitudes are associated with authoritarian attitudes, which would predict support among right-wing individuals for the extant political hierarchy.

The following bullet points summarize the results from recent empirical work on the effects of religion:

• Eskin 2004: “Suicide ideation was more frequent in adolescents undergoing secular education than in those undergoing religious education. The secular group was more accepting of suicide than the religious group. Those from the religious group, however, were more accepting of a suicidal close friend than their secular counterparts.”
• Lehrer 1995: Religious denomination has a significant effect on the choice of women whether to enter the labor market. Women in interfaith marriages are more likely to enter the labor market.
• Evans & Schwab 1995: Attending a Catholic school is associated with a 13-percent increase in the probability of finishing high school and going to college.
• Brown & Taylor 2007: Church attendance in adulthood is associated with higher educational attainment.
• Gruber 2004: Government subsidies to charitable giving reduce religious attendance, suggesting that charitable giving and religious attendance are substitutes.
• Torgler 2006: Religiosity is associated with a higher intrinsic motivation to pay taxes.
• Hoxby 1994: There is some evidence that the competition provided by private schools improves the quality of public schools as measured by the success of alumni.

Carassius carassius, better known as the goldfish, is another fish of interest to comparative neuroanatomists. The fish has an exceptionally large vagal lobe, a brain stem structure which mediates swallowing, among other things.

Aside: the name vagal comes from the vagus nerve, which is the major input and output nerve of the vagal lobe. Vagus, which means ‘wandering’ in Latin (think vagrant), refers to the fact that the vagus nerve is the only cranial nerve [of twelve] which ‘travels’ outside the cranial cavity to mediate sensation and motility of the viscera. In fact, the vagus nerve, also known as the tenth cranial nerve, is the primary way that the brain communicates with the heart, stomach, and intestines.

Figure 1 demonstrates the vagal lobe in a partially dissected goldfish.

As you have may have noticed at some point at the pet store, goldfish eat by iteratively swallowing and spitting out big chunks of food. This feeding behavior is more subtle than it looks: goldfish are able to take in large mouthfuls of pebbles mixed with a bit of food, sort through the contents, and selectively eject the debris. This ability is mediated by the vagal lobe.

Under the microscope, the vagal lobe is quite impressive (Fig. 2a). It is comprised of 15 distinct layers (compare this to the mammalian neocortex’s 6 layers), with the 11 superficial layers mediating gustatory sensation (taste), the middle two layers allowing entry and exit of axon fibers, and the deep layers controlling contraction and relaxation of the throat (pharyngeal) muscles. The vagal lobe is a topographic map of the goldfish’s throat (pharynx) – that is, different parts of the lobe represent different parts of the throat (superficial layers sense taste in that patch of throat and deep layers control muscle tone in that patchof throat), and adjacent parts of the vagal lobe represent adjacent parts of the throat in neural tissue.

As schematized in Fig. 2b, when edible material touches one side of the goldfish’s throat, taste information from chemoreceptors on that patch of oral epithelium is communicated in the vagus nerve to the superficial layers of the vagal lobe. Superficial vagal lobe neurons integrate this information and project straight down into the deep motor layers of the same patch of vagal lobe. These projections make excitatory glutamatergic synapses onto inhibitory GABAergic interneurons in the deep layers of the vagal lobe. The inhibitory interneurons in turn inhibit the motor neurons which project back to the muscle fibers at the same patch of throat that the edible material touched. These motor neurons rhythmically drive the contraction of the throat muscles to expel debris, so when they are inhibited, the muscle lining this fraction of the throat will stay relaxed, and material in this fraction will be selectively retained.

This impressive sensorimotor reflex allows goldfish to vacuum heterogeneous debris from the lake bottom and efficiently sort the chum from the chaff. The vagal lobe’s topographic laminar architecture minimizes the wiring necessary to mediate this spatially-localized sorting function.

Second aside: Note that in mammals, the vagal lobe homologue is bifurcated into separate sensory and motor nuclei. Gustatory sensation (along with visceral sensation to the gut) is localized to the nucleus tractus solitarius, whereas motor output to the throat (and the rest of the gastrointestinal tract) is localized to the nucleus ambiguus. That these nuclei lack the intricate layering of the goldfish vagal lobe comports with their less complex and noninteracting functions.

Sources

Finger (2007) “Sorting food from stones: the vagal taste system in Goldfish,Carassius auratus”

Striedter (2008) Principles of Brain Evolution.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone provides a concise history of how the investment banks became the prime beneficiaries of the government response to the financial crisis.

First, the government’s peculiar bailout of AIG precluded it from entering normal bankruptcy procedures, which would have reserved an equitable amount of AIG’s assets for all of its creditors:

As AIG headed into a tailspin that fateful summer of 2008, it looked like the beleaguered firm wasn’t going to have the money to pay off the bogus insurance. So Goldman and other banks began demanding that AIG provide them with cash collateral. In the 15 months leading up to the collapse of AIG, Goldman received $5.9 billion in collateral. Société Générale, a bank holding lots of mortgage-backed crap originally underwritten by Goldman, received $5.5 billion. These collateral demands squeezing AIG from two sides were the “Swoop and Squat” that ultimately crashed the firm. . . .

When a company like AIG is about to die, it isn’t supposed to hand over big hunks of assets to a single creditor like Goldman; it’s supposed to equitably distribute whatever assets it has left among all its creditors. Had AIG gone bankrupt, Goldman would have likely lost much of the $5.9 billion that it pocketed as collateral. “Any bankruptcy court that saw those collateral payments would have declined that transaction as a fraudulent conveyance,” says Barry Ritholtz, the author of Bailout Nation. Instead, Goldman and the other counterparties got their money out in advance — putting a torch to what was left of AIG. . . .

[A]ccording to the terms of the bailout deal struck when AIG was taken over by the state in September 2008, Goldman was paid 100 cents on the dollar on an additional $12.9 billion it was owed by AIG — again, money it almost certainly would not have seen a fraction of had AIG proceeded to a normal bankruptcy. Along with the collateral it pocketed, that’s $19 billion in pure cash that Goldman would not have “earned” without massive state intervention.

Second, the investment banks were allowed to masquerade as commercial banks, which gave them access to loans from the Federal Reserve at zero-percent interest:

Less than a week after the AIG bailout, Goldman and another investment bank, Morgan Stanley, applied for, and received, federal permission to become bank holding companies — a move that would make them eligible for much greater federal support. The stock prices of both firms were cratering, and there was talk that either or both might go the way of Lehman Brothers, another once-mighty investment bank that just a week earlier had disappeared from the face of the earth under the weight of its toxic assets. . . .

When Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley got their federal bank charters, they joined Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the other banking titans who could go to the Fed and borrow massive amounts of money at interest rates that, thanks to the aggressive rate-cutting policies of Fed chief Ben Bernanke during the crisis, soon sank to zero percent. The ability to go to the Fed and borrow big at next to no interest was what saved Goldman, Morgan Stanley and other banks from death in the fall of 2008. . . .

In fact, the Fed became not just a source of emergency borrowing that enabled Goldman and Morgan Stanley to stave off disaster — it became a source of long-term guaranteed income. Borrowing at zero percent interest, banks like Goldman now had virtually infinite ways to make money. In one of the most common maneuvers, they simply took the money they borrowed from the government at zero percent and lent it back to the government by buying Treasury bills that paid interest of three or four percent. It was basically a license to print money — no different than attaching an ATM to the side of the Federal Reserve.

“You’re borrowing at zero, putting it out there at two or three percent, with hundreds of billions of dollars — man, you can make a lot of money that way,” says the manager of one prominent hedge fund. “It’s free money.”