Trying to strengthen their Twitter game! Follow @BasicBooksUK and retweet! Very much worth doing, if there is going to be a Twitter in a year!... Learning from Past Fights with Inflation.... Lean...
Yglesias/Debt Ceiling; I wish that Biden would at leas go through the motions of proposing defect reduction through more progressive taxation in the context of the debt ceiling. It ought to help a tiny bit at least in the politics of the stand off and sets up the issue in the funding debate in September. The actual resolution ought to be Biden reluctantly has to ignore one of two contradictory laws.
The Russian influence campaign was an issue for American counterintelligence. It is worth pausing to understand why, since it helps us to see the centrality of McGonigal and the meaning of this scandal. Intelligence is about trying to understand. Counterintelligence is about making that hard for others. Branching out from counterintelligence are the more exotic operations designed to make an enemy not only misunderstand the situation, but also act on the basis of misunderstandings, against the enemy's own interests. Such operations, which have been a Russian (or Soviet) specialty for more than a century, go under the name of "provocation," or "active measures," or "maskirovka." It is the task of counterintelligence to understand active measures, and prevent them from working. The Russian influence operation on behalf of Trump was an active measure that the United States failed to halt. The cyber element, the use of social media, is what McGonigal personally, with his background and in his position, should have been making everyone aware of. In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section ...
... There were two moments, late in the presidential campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump. The first was when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7 October). The second was FBI director James Comey's public announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails (28 October). The reason Comey made that public announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that the matter was likely of great consequence. On his account, it was that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it anyway ...
It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New York who wanted Trump to win. Comey has now confirmed this, although his word choice might be different. And I did wonder, back then, if those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played. It was no secret at the time that FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton. Making emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited. For people working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to do. The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's active measure. Someone else will take advantage of your known vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that feels like your own decision.
[...]
The charges have not been proven. If they are, it would be a bit surprising if the two offenses with which McGonigal is now charged were isolated events. There is a certain danger, apparently, in seeing them this way, and letting bygones be bygones. A U.S. attorney presenting the case said that McGonigal "should have known better"; that is the kind of thing one says when a child gets a bellyache after eating too much cotton candy at the county fair; it hardly seems to correspond to the gravity of the situation ...
Sirota: Progressives have not been saying much about the cap of the capped wage tax that FDR came up with to fund social insurance. [OK the VAT had not been invented back then, but still ... :)] It HAD been invented in the Regan era and that was a missed opportunity. If Democrats had pushed it, Republican might have gone along. With the current crop of troglodytes, [did the Greeks have a word for people who live in bubbles?] it will be more difficult.
Hauseman: What he (and as far as I know only he) means by "industrial policy" should never have been away to BE back. It's just plain old [That Which Cannot Be Named] economic policy.
Yglesias/Debt Ceiling; I wish that Biden would at leas go through the motions of proposing defect reduction through more progressive taxation in the context of the debt ceiling. It ought to help a tiny bit at least in the politics of the stand off and sets up the issue in the funding debate in September. The actual resolution ought to be Biden reluctantly has to ignore one of two contradictory laws.
Timothy Snyder has a longish substack about the FBI corruption scandal which is worth reading: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016.
[...]
The Russian influence campaign was an issue for American counterintelligence. It is worth pausing to understand why, since it helps us to see the centrality of McGonigal and the meaning of this scandal. Intelligence is about trying to understand. Counterintelligence is about making that hard for others. Branching out from counterintelligence are the more exotic operations designed to make an enemy not only misunderstand the situation, but also act on the basis of misunderstandings, against the enemy's own interests. Such operations, which have been a Russian (or Soviet) specialty for more than a century, go under the name of "provocation," or "active measures," or "maskirovka." It is the task of counterintelligence to understand active measures, and prevent them from working. The Russian influence operation on behalf of Trump was an active measure that the United States failed to halt. The cyber element, the use of social media, is what McGonigal personally, with his background and in his position, should have been making everyone aware of. In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section ...
... There were two moments, late in the presidential campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump. The first was when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7 October). The second was FBI director James Comey's public announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails (28 October). The reason Comey made that public announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that the matter was likely of great consequence. On his account, it was that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it anyway ...
It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New York who wanted Trump to win. Comey has now confirmed this, although his word choice might be different. And I did wonder, back then, if those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played. It was no secret at the time that FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton. Making emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited. For people working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to do. The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's active measure. Someone else will take advantage of your known vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that feels like your own decision.
[...]
The charges have not been proven. If they are, it would be a bit surprising if the two offenses with which McGonigal is now charged were isolated events. There is a certain danger, apparently, in seeing them this way, and letting bygones be bygones. A U.S. attorney presenting the case said that McGonigal "should have known better"; that is the kind of thing one says when a child gets a bellyache after eating too much cotton candy at the county fair; it hardly seems to correspond to the gravity of the situation ...
Sirota: Progressives have not been saying much about the cap of the capped wage tax that FDR came up with to fund social insurance. [OK the VAT had not been invented back then, but still ... :)] It HAD been invented in the Regan era and that was a missed opportunity. If Democrats had pushed it, Republican might have gone along. With the current crop of troglodytes, [did the Greeks have a word for people who live in bubbles?] it will be more difficult.
Hauseman: What he (and as far as I know only he) means by "industrial policy" should never have been away to BE back. It's just plain old [That Which Cannot Be Named] economic policy.