Monthly Archives: March 2013

View 768 Friday, March 29, 2013

GOOD FRIDAY

Today’s LA Times has a story that has me going over my mobile phone bills.

FCC needs to stop ‘cramming’ on cellphones

The agency took steps against third-party charges on landline bills, but cellphone users still get hit by unauthorized charges — and phone providers get a cut.

David Lazarus

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20130329,0,2277464.column?page=1

Wen Chao received a text message on her iPhone the other day from something called Ringtunecloud.com. It offered mobile content, such as ring tones, for $9.99 a month.

Chao, 43, ignored it.

About an hour and a half later, she received a more ambiguous text: "You play the peacemaker for others when two friends go to war. Suggest a new activity to the parties involved, and you will get peace."

Figuring it might have been from a friend, Chao clicked it open and — what do you know? — it, too, was from Ringtunecloud.com.

So she did exactly what wireless companies advise customers to do. She called her provider, Verizon Wireless, and asked that Ringtunecloud.com be blocked from sending any more texts to her phone.

The Verizon rep agreed to do this, but informed Chao that a $9.99 monthly service charge already had been applied to her account — just because she had clicked on the text.

Phone companies are being asked why this is possible. Shouldn’t subscribers be required to opt in rather than opt out of paying fees for added services? Particularly if they never heard of the service and never wanted it? AT&T answered :

"Making it more difficult for a customer to purchase and consume third-party content not only risks cutting off customers from innovative products and from the convenience of their portable devices, it also potentially subjects a burgeoning industry of entrepreneurs and job creators to financial distress," AT&T said in its own comments to the FCC.

Verizon told the FCC that it would be too much of a hassle for people to have to lift the block any time they actually wanted a third-party service.

"This additional step would be inconvenient for customers and could deter them from participating in the mobile marketplace," the company said.

Of course the phone companies are getting a cut of the action, although they have declined to say how much of the fee they add on to the subscriber’s bill is paid to the “service provider” (which might be a subsidiary of the phone company itself) and how much the phone company retains as a fee for collecting it.

The FCC is conducting hearings on this matter with a view to creating regulations. My first inclination in cases like this is to leave it to the states, but that’s not possible here since the FCC has co-opted that domain. The FCC is holding hearings on the matter. I tend to agree with the conclusion Lazarus ends with:

Let the FCC know how you feel. Its email address is fccinfo@fcc.gov. And if you’re going to be in Washington, the FTC will hold a conference on wireless cramming May 8.

I also suggest you look at your mobile phone bill. Perhaps you don’t really care if you subject a burgeoning industry of entrepreneurs and job creators to financial distress, and would want to end paying for some service you don’t know you signed up for.

The United States sent B2 bombers from Whiteman AFB in Missouri to South Korea to bomb a target on an island off shore . As part of the demonstration of capability, the usually invisible B2 flew quite visibly over South Korea.

This came after a spate of threats from North Korea to put paid to American aggression. North Korea has long threatened to withdraw from the truce that ended the Korean War along with its non-aggression pact with South Korea. The NK fearless leader has now formally done so. In theory both South Korea and the United States are at war with North Korea, at least as I read the NK announcements.

Under the circumstances, sending the B2 flight falls under the definition of saber rattling. So, of course, do most of the North and South Korean actions. In the nasty old Imperial days this sort of thing might lead to a duel between officers chosen to represent their regiments, or some other symbolic resolution, but we don’t seem to have evolved anything to replace silly symbolic customs we got rid of. Perhaps we will have to have a battle, a la the Lion and the Unicorn, but it’s difficult to see how the town would survive when the Lion chases the unicorn all around the town. There might be neither plum cake nor drums.

North Korea held another war rally a few minutes ago.

I don’t know what will happen here. I do know it is insanity to stand by and take the first blow if an armed conflict is inevitable. The first rounds in an artillery duel – and classic air supremacy actions are very similar to artillery duels – are often decisive. It is unlikely that Israel would have been victorious in the 6 Day War if they had waited for a joint Jordanian-Syrian air and artillery strike before taking action. One you have taken out the other side’s forward air fields you have a great advantage in an air war. It can even be decisive. The same applies to artillery duels – if you can isolate the battle areas so that troops in them cannot be resupplied, you often win.

All that is historical observation. I am surely glad that I am not within range of North Korean artillery.

Sources in South Korea tell me that South Koran think tanks are already planning on how they can rebuild North Korea after NK starts the war and a SK-US alliance wins it.

On the other hand, a number of major SK corporations have quietly moved their headquarters out of Seoul to the south well out of range of the massed NK artillery along the border. The question becomes which side is most vulnerable to the mass destruction of war? War is a contest of will. Whose is strongest? And you might want to read Stefan Possony’s essay on surprise in war. It is a chapter in The Strategy of Technology.

Some problems solve themselves. There has been a mild spate of stories about armed police being asked to leave coffee shops and restaurants – at least one a Denny’s – because the establishment has a no-gun policy. I suggest that the simplest solution is to require that any such gun-free establishment be required to warn everyone, including the police, that this establishment doesn’t want them. A large sign saying “THIS IS A GUN FREE ZONE. POLICE NOT WELCOME INSIDE” would solve the problem. Potential armed robbers would of course obey the sign, so there would be no need of police, who could improve their own health and safety by ignoring any calls for succor from inside the shop. The problem, if it is a problem, would soon go away without expenditure of public resources.

And a serious warning from a long time reader/contributor:

Jerry,

Subj: Don’t become too dependent on the Internet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21954636

Global internet slows after ‘biggest attack in history’

If/when the poop hits the rotary air circular you can count in this sort of thing being "normal". How many of you DEPEND on "Internet Banking" to pay your bills? Banks won’t have any better connectivity than anyone else. Cell phone? Same situation, just different "details". "Bundled" phone service? That uses the Internet. Now let’s add an EMP air burst over Iowa. You might have Internet (highly doubtful since "servers" are computers), but no home computer… and your car probably won’t run either.

By coincidence in the same batch of email was an invitation to participate on a seminar of science fiction writers on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence: is it the greatest threat to humanity (including asteroid strike)? I have to think about this question. Suppose all the AI in place now were to vanish?  Now imagine in one hundred years.

View 768 Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Continuing some themes from yesterday’s View, all related even if the relationship is not obvious. First, continuing yesterday’s theme about Iraq’s past, present and future. Note that Colonel Couvillon was there before Bremer:

More on Iraq

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20130327.aspx

The tribal question is key.

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

For those interested, the Strategy Page account of the history and complexity of the Iraqi situation is worth your time. It is very complicated and more detailed than the summary I gave in yesterday‘s View. A key passage:

Both the terrorists and U.S. troops knew that victory was defined as several weeks with no bombs going off in Baghdad. The media was keeping score, and they used their ears and video cameras. No loud bangs and no bodies equals no news. That’s victory.

Not really. The real war is within the Iraqi government. The terrorists lost by 2005, when the relentless slaughter of Moslem civilians turned the Arab world against al Qaeda. Journalists missed that one, but not the historians. The war in Iraq has always been about trying to show Arabs that they can run a clean government, for the benefit of all the people, not just the tyrants on top. So far, there have been lots of victories and defeats in this, and no clear decision overall. Elections have been held several times, but the people elected have proved to be as corrupt and venal as their tyrannical predecessors. Everyone admits that this bad behavior is not a good thing, but attempts to stop it have been only partially successful. Changing thousands of years of custom and tradition is not easy. The clay tablets dug up in the vicinity of Baghdad, reveal similar scandal and despair over four thousand years ago. Most Iraqis realize, however, that if the chain of corruption is not broken, the dreary past will again become a painful present. [Emphasis mine]

The key question is how to extract the US from Middle East affairs without further loss to US interests. I was of the opinion that we are not experts in such affairs and never have been, and our best policy would be to secure energy supplies without further expenditure of blood and treasure. That’s not isolationism, it’s realism. Britain and France have far more interest in Arab, Kurdish, and Persian affairs than we do, and between them they still have considerable resources. It’s not our sphere of influence except for the oil; and there are ways we can get energy supplies for less treasure and far less blood than keeping expeditionary forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on the Arabian peninsula. But then I have always thought that. I have considerable sympathy for Christian Arabs but we haven’t been very careful of their interests, and indeed they are probably worse off than they would have been had we not intervened – or if we had withdrawn after Saddam was deposed with a warning that we could be back if need be, and left things to cook for themselves. The same goes for Afghanistan. Once the Taliban was out so we should have been also. Our intervention in the Balkans contributed heavily to the ripening hostility between the US and Russia. It’s hard to see what good it did, for us or anyone else really. The invasion of Iraq was justified and perhaps necessary; staying there after Saddam abdicated and we determined there were no stores of weapons of mass destruction was not necessary. When President Bush landed on that carrier and proclaimed Mission Accomplished, we ought to have believed him and brought the troops home. I suppose that’s hindsight but in my defense I will say I never wanted to send them in, and certainly did not think we could rebuild that place. We could have demanded reparations for the cost of delivering the Iraqis from Saddam…

Jonah Goldberg in yesterday’s LA Times. If the background is unfamiliar, go find Goldberg’s article, which explains it well. Murphy Brown was played by Charlie McCarthy’s sister…

Goldberg: The wisdom of Dan Quayle

His 1992 speech criticizing ‘Murphy Brown’ stirred controversy, but he was right about the importance of marriage in raising children.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg-murphy-brown-families-20130326,0,4906956.column

Quayle mentioned "Murphy Brown" once. "Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong, and we must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but … it’s time to make the discussion public."

Quayle succeeded in launching a public discussion. His side lost. Feminists, Hollywood big mouths and the usual suspects went ballistic. "Murphy Brown’s" producers made the execrable decision to write a show in which Quayle had attacked the "real" Murphy Brown, not a fictional character. In full martyr mode, the make-believe Murphy Brown said, "Perhaps it’s time for the vice president to expand his definition and recognize that, whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes."

There were some who spoke up for Dan Quayle, who had gone in one day from being “the respected junior Senator from Indiana” to an idiot who couldn’t find his feet with both hands in the instant that he was chosen as the Vice Presidential candidate by George H W Bush. I had not known Mr. Quayle but as VP he was Chairman of the National Space Council, which had some power in those days, and when General Graham, Max Hunter, and I went to Washington to present our SSX concept, he asked intelligent questions and when informed by some of his advisors that what we proposed was impossible, commissioned the RAND corporation to do a restudy of the concept: they concluded that it was possible and through Quayle’s influence the Air Force began the DC/X project. I never heard Quayle say anything stupid. He was a lawyer, not an engineer, so he relied on technical advisors, but in my judgment he chose competent advisors.

In any event he was excoriated for his statements about unmarried mothers.

Quayle, of course, never said that families don’t come in all shapes and sizes. What he said was that children raised by married, responsible parents do better than those who aren’t. And that’s where Whitehead came in. Marshaling the still-gelling social science at the time, she put numbers behind Quayle’s assertions.

Back then, Whitehead’s essay was heretical. Today, it’s conventional wisdom. Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a widely respected liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post titled "20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms."

Sawhill noted that kids raised by married parents — not just parents living together, never mind single mothers — simply do better. They do better academically and are less likely to get arrested, get pregnant or commit suicide. They’re also much less likely to be poor or stay poor.

None of these claims are particularly controversial among social scientists. And none of this is particularly aimed at gay marriage, pretty much the only kind of marriage liberal elites want to celebrate now.

But where Quayle was wrong — though only partially — was putting the blame on Hollywood.

The black family was falling apart decades before "Murphy Brown." And since then, the white family has been breaking down even as the majority of Hollywood fare continues to romanticize traditional marriage or does an adequate job of showing how hard single motherhood is.

I don’t know why marriage for all but the well-off and well educated continues to disintegrate; maybe it would help if elites "preached what they practiced, " to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray. Forbes writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that being married correlates about as positively with a person’s wages as going to college does. But experts hammer the importance of college while ignoring marriage.

Maybe after the debate over gay marriage settles down, elites could focus on the far more pressing marriage crisis unfolding before their eyes.

It is difficult to know what the value of laws protecting marriage and the family are, or what those laws should be. There is very little scientific evidence, and of course applying science to generate rules is the job of a legislature, not a court.  The Constitution leaves such matters to the states.

Almost 50 years ago, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the national out-of-wedlock birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%. According to the CDC, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white children was just 2% in the 1960s. Today it is 30%. Among black children, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has skyrocketed from 20% in the 1960s to a heartbreaking 72% today. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock rate, which has been measured for a much shorter period, was below 40% in 1990 and stands at more than 50% as of the 2010 census.

Juan Williams, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578366882484600710.html

The times they are a-changing. 

The black family was falling apart decades before “Murphy Brown.” And since then, the white family has been breaking down even as the majority of Hollywood fare continues to romanticize traditional marriage or does an adequate job of showing how hard single motherhood is.

I don’t know why marriage for all but the well-off and well-educated continues to disintegrate; maybe it would help if elites “preached what they practiced,” to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray. Forbes writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that being married correlates about as positively with a person’s wages as going to college does. But experts hammer the importance of college while ignoring marriage.

Maybe after the debate over gay marriage settles down, elites could focus on the far more pressing marriage crisis unfolding before their eyes.

Juan Williams says

Juan Williams: Race and the Gun Debate

The No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34: being murdered with a gun.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578366882484600710.html

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34. But talking about race in the context of guns would also mean taking on a subject that can’t be addressed by passing a law: the family-breakdown issues that lead too many minority children to find social status and power in guns.

The statistics are staggering. In 2009, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 54% of all murders committed, overwhelmingly with guns, are murders of black people. Black people are about 13% of the population.

The Justice Department reports that between 1980 and 2008, "blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide."

. . .

This awful reality explains why support for gun control in the black and Hispanic community is overwhelming (71% among blacks and 78% of Hispanics, according to a recent Pew poll). That is a marked contrast with national polls on new gun laws. Those polls show 46% of Americans of all races backing the right to own guns versus 50% who agree to the need for more limits on gun owners. Apparently, the heart of opposition to new gun regulations is in the white community. Yet white people face far less daily violence with guns.

Of course the usual remedy proposed is to disarm everyone.

Bureaus are eternal, and bureaucrats make them hard to kill.

Raisins in the Sun

The Supreme Court is skeptical about federal farm ‘takings.’

[Editorial; no byline.]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578358331242863520.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Taxpayers are wary of government programs that confiscate private property—witness outrage over the 2005 Supreme Court Kelo decision that let government take homes via eminent domain for private use. Now the High Court is considering another program that orders citizens to surrender their assets—or else.

U.S. raisin farmers have been required for nearly 80 years to turn over a share of their crops to the federal government every year, often at below-market prices. Last week the Supreme Court heard oral argument on whether, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan, this annual raisin heist is "a taking, or just the world’s most outdated law."

Horne v. USDA turns on a Great Depression "price stabilization" program that established a Raisin Administrative Committee to control raisin supply. The committee acts as a cartel, setting raisin prices and recommending through "marketing orders" how many tons of raisins must be sold to the feds at a steep discount. The Department of Agriculture enforces the orders.

Raisin growers have to give a certain amount of their product to the Committee which is staffed by civil servants who would lose their jobs if this needless activity were to cease. Those who don’t cooperate are fined heavily and then put out of business. Some growers have sued, and the case is making its way through the courts, at great expense to the growers and of course to the benefit of the government lawyers and the court facilities employed in keeping this going.

For small businesses, these routine confiscations are a special burden because so few can afford to defend their property rights. Similar federal marketing orders cover produce including apricots, avocados, kiwis and olives. The effect is to impose a tax on farmers.

As Justice Antonin Scalia put it, so it’s "your raisins or your life, right? . . . you don’t have to pay the penalty if you give us the raisins." No, Mr. Palmore explained. "They have to give the raisins . . . It’s not a choice." Which is why the Justices should find these takings to be unconstitutional.

If President Obama needs to cut some government programs in order to keep the Parks and the White House and Air Traffic Control towers open, I think the nation might be able to do without the entire Raisin Administrative Committee and all its employees and lawyers and their clerks. In fact I suspect they never would be missed.

View 768 Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Today has been partly devoured by locusts, including a pair of skillful plumbers who replaced my kitchen sink disposal grinder. I had thought the one we had was new, but they showed me the installation sticker from 2005. I gather that for modern appliances, even those requiring professional installation, eight years is quite old. Nothing is intended to last now. I bought our first microwave oven after Robert and Ginny Heinlein showed me just how handy theirs was. Roberta and I came home and bought one immediately, an Amana, and it lasted for something like twenty years before Roberta had to report that a family friend had died: the Amana had to be replaced.

We have had two since.

Anyway the plumbers came early , before I had left the breakfast table, so I had plenty of time to read the papers this morning; which is as well because there was an unusual number of important stories. At least important to me. I probably can’t comment on them all, but I’ll try to give links to them and make a few remarks. The subjects are different but they’re all important, or at least I thought so.

Iraq’s great divider

Prime Minister Maliki’s actions may lead to the country’s breakup, as the U.S. stands idly by.

Henri J. Barkey

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barkey-iraq-dissolution-20130326,0,1208434.story

Iraq is on its way to dissolution, and the United States is doing nothing to stop it. And if you ask people in Iraq, it may even be abetting it.

With very few exceptions, an important event in Iraq went unnoticed in the U.S. media this month. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki sent a force that included helicopters to western Iraq to arrest Rafi Issawi, the former finance minister and a leading Sunni Arab opposition member. Issawi, who was protected by armed members of the Abu Risha clan, one of post-2003 Iraq’s most powerful Sunni tribes, escaped capture.

This action came on the heels of Maliki’s telephone conversation with Secretary of State John F. Kerry and took Washington by surprise. Had a confrontation ensued, the results would have been calamitous. It could even have provided the spark for the beginning of a civil war. Still, Maliki’s actions represent another nail in the coffin for a unified Iraq. Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, had previously accused Vice President Tariq Hashimi, a leading Sunni political figure, of terrorism, forcing him to flee Iraq in 2011. Hashimi was subsequently tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

Maliki’s policies have significantly raised tensions in the Sunni regions of Iraq. There are demonstrations in many of the Sunni provinces that seek to emulate those of the Arab Spring. They are one reason Maliki has targeted Issawi. He wants to contain the dissent before it spreads.

Maliki’s confrontational and increasingly dictatorial style has also alienated Iraqi Kurds, who, unlike the Sunnis, have succeeded in having the Iraqi Constitution recognize their federal region and the Kurdistan regional government. The Kurds, for all intents and purposes, run an autonomous area with its own defense forces. However, the relationship between Baghdad and the Kurdish regional capital of Irbil has become severely strained as the central government has made cooperation difficult, if not impossible. Baghdad, ostensibly, is angry at the Kurds’ attempts to make independent deals with foreign oil companies.

There is considerably more all worth your attention.

When the US first went into Iraq I pointed out that there was no such thing as the nation of Iraq. There were three provinces of the Ottoman Empire which were put together into a Kingdom for the displaced Hashemite clan being displaced because of promises made to Ibn Saud by Lawrence of Arabia. The Hashemites had long been Protectors of Mecca and had always been important since a Hashemite uncle became the guardian of the man who would become the Prophet. If Saud got Mecca, the two senior Hashemite patriarchs must have kingdoms, so the Kingdom of TransJordan was created for the one, and Iraq was glued together out of Turkish provinces to accommodate the other. TransJordan became a success, more or less, building the Arab Legion which triumphed over the Zionist founders of Israel in the Foundation Wars, taking Jerusalem and what is now known as the West Bank. Iraq was more dependent on the British government. TransJordan became Jordan when the king incorporated the West Bank territories into his realm. When he lost Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six Day War, Jordan became in effect TransJordan again but the name didn’t change.

King Faisal, brother of the King Abdullah who got Jordan, first became King of Syria, but that didn’t work for a number of complex reasons having as much to do with Anglo-French politics as anything else, so Faisal became King of Iraq. At one point after the founding of Israel, Jordan and Iraq federated as the United Arab Kingdom, as Egypt and Syria briefly became the single United Arab Republic. Neither federation lasted.

The Hashemites were overthrown in Iraq, and after some unrest the secular Ba’ath Party took control. One of its officials was Saddam Hussein, who eventually became head of the party and chief of state, remaining until the United States threw him out.

The Hashemites are important because of their unbroken history back to the time of the Prophet. They are Sunni. This presents no problem in Jordan, where about 90% of the population is Sunni, but in Iraq it’s a different story. The majority of the Arab population of Iraq is Shia. The Kurds, however, are Sunni, which is one reason the non-Arab Saladin was able to unite much of the Muslim world after he defeated the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem established by the First Crusade, and become “The Light of the World” in the time of King Richard Lionheart. If you have never read Scott’s The Talisman it is a quite readable novel of the time. The Kurds are thus a double minority: they are not Shia and they are not Arabs. They are Aryan. Iraqi Kurds are overwhelmingly Sunni, and many supported the Hashemite monarchy. Note that Iran is Shiite, but most Iranians are not Arabs; they too are Aryan and more closely related to Kurds than to other Iraqis.

The point being that Iraq never was a nation, and the dream of building a stable democratic republic in a land divided by race and religion was never well founded in reality. The Sunni Hashemites ruled Iraq with the cooperation of the Sunni but not Arab Kurds. Note that across the border in Syria, most of the population is Arab, and most of the people are Sunni, but the non-royal dictator is Shiite.

Finally, the only ally the United States has in that region is Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds love us. They also have a stable government – but of course they dream of a Kurdistan that includes several regions now part of the nations of Iran and Turkey, neither of whom have any intention of letting them go.

The essay cited above concludes

The answer is for Iraq to further develop its federal structures, make Baghdad a federal district and devolve power to the provinces. Then it needs to create a stake for all to want to remain within such a federation. Decentralization with a promise of equitable sharing of the country’s oil revenue is the only glue that will hold the country together.

Not everyone agrees that this is possible. Europe’s religious wars didn’t end until the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, and it was a peace of exhaustion. Of course I said all this before we invaded Iraq.

Mortimer Zuckerman: The Great Recession Has Been Followed by the Grand Illusion

Don’t be fooled by the latest jobs numbers. The unemployment situation in the U.S. is still dire.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323393304578364670697613576.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Great Recession is an apt name for America’s current stagnation, but the present phase might also be called the Grand Illusion—because the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially regarding jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify.

The country isn’t really advancing. By comparison with earlier recessions, it is going backward. Despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in American history and a trillion-dollar expansion to the money supply, the economy over the last three years has been declining. After 2.4% annual growth rates in gross domestic product in 2010 and 2011, the economy slowed to 1.5% growth in 2012. Cumulative growth for the past 12 quarters was just 6.3%, the slowest of all 11 recessions since World War II.

And last year’s anemic growth looks likely to continue. Sequestration will take $600 billion of government expenditures out of the economy over the next 10 years, including $85 billion this year alone. The 2% increase in payroll taxes will hit about 160 million workers and drain $110 billion from their disposable incomes. The Obama health-care tax will be a drag of more than $30 billion. The recent 50-cent surge in gasoline prices represents another $65 billion drag on consumer cash flow.

February’s headline unemployment rate was portrayed as 7.7%, down from 7.9% in January. The dip was accompanied by huzzahs in the news media claiming the improvement to be "outstanding" and "amazing." But if you account for the people who are excluded from that number—such as "discouraged workers" no longer looking for a job, involuntary part-time workers and others who are "marginally attached" to the labor force—then the real unemployment rate is somewhere between 14% and 15%.

There is a great deal more, all depressing, but all important. One may quarrel with the analysis, but if you are not aware of the facts it presents you may be reasoning from false premises.

A Commission for the Fed’s Next 100 Years

The central bank’s centennial offers a valuable opportunity to rethink its mandate.

By SETH LIPSKY

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324103504578379020635729326.html

As the Federal Reserve approaches its 100th anniversary in December, the focus of monetary reform centers on a bill called the Centennial Monetary Commission Act. Introduced this month in the House of Representatives by Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee Kevin Brady, the bill would "establish a commission to examine the United States monetary policy, evaluate alternative monetary regimes, and recommend a course for monetary policy going forward."

Mr. Brady’s bill is not the kind of direct attack on the Fed that has been launched by, say, Rep. Ron Paul, who has called for eliminating the central bank altogether. But the bill—noting that a National Monetary Commission, established after the panic of 1907, led to the Fed’s creation on Dec. 23, 1913—would set up a new commission at the start of the Fed’s second century.

The Centennial Monetary Commission would start with a formal review of the Fed’s performance across the decades, including how its policies have affected the economy in terms of "output, employment, prices and financial stability over time." The commission would also evaluate a range of regimes, including, in the bill’s language, price-level targeting, inflation-rate targeting, nominal gross-domestic-product targeting, the use of monetary policy rules, and the gold standard.

There is considerably more, including some thoughts on the price of gold, and some of the history of the Federal Reserve. It won’t take long to read.

I wanted you to read the history of the Federal Reserve so that you’d have a bit of context for the next one. It was a letter to the editor in today’s Wall Street Journal.

The Unfortunate Postwar Legacy of Harry Dexter White

Both Benn Steil, author of "The Battle of Bretton Woods," and reviewer James Grant are to be commended for their excellent discussions of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that resulted in the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and, more importantly, the less-than-stellar outcomes of IMF policies since then ("Review—Books: A Fateful Meeting That Shaped the World," March 16).

Kudos to both for revealing that America’s chief delegate to the conference, assistant secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, was a spy for the Soviet Union. One of White’s most egregious actions—which, fortunately, was never implemented—was recommending that postwar Germany be flooded with counterfeit money in order to destroy its economy.

In 1945, White got another opportunity to betray his country: He was named as senior adviser to the U.S. delegation to the conference in San Francisco that founded the United Nations. In this capacity, he funneled information to his handlers as to how the U.S.S.R. could get veto power and kept them apprised of the U.S. position on significant issues. White’s perfidy was coupled with that of another high-ranking American spy for the Soviets, Alger Hiss, who presided over the U.N. conference. Hiss served as a top adviser to FDR at the Yalta conference, where Roosevelt and, yes, Winston Churchill ceded Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin.

Another NGO formed at Bretton Woods was the World Bank, which consisted of two major divisions, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association. The former is indicative of the World Bank’s initial mission: providing loans to war-torn Western Europe to rebuild its shattered infrastructure. Once that objective had essentially been achieved by the late 1960s, the World Bank decided that it needed to do something to assure its continued existence. The new mission would be eradicating world poverty, to be achieved by providing social services, building schools and hospitals, improving primary education, promoting gender equality, reducing the rate of infant mortality, enhancing maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS and malaria, and promoting environmental stability. (I saw numerous examples of these programs—usually applied to developing nations—when I had the opportunity to peruse a number of publications in the World Bank’s Paris office.)

Richard T. Hise

College Station, Texas

A version of this article appeared March 26, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Unfortunate Postwar Legacy of Harry Dexter White.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323419104578372540542933804.html

There is more. The point Hise makes is that the Iron Law of Bureaucracy has governed much of the financial structure of the world…

There was more in today’s paper, but this is enough. It’s late and past my bed time. Quayle and the raisins will have to wait until tomorrow.