Book Notes: Maxed Out

I finished reading Maxed Out the other day.  Extended thoughts are here.  I remember watching the documentary maybe a year ago and not thinking much of it, reading the book today has more (a lot more) salience.  Recommended reading for those who think the finance companies should not have been bailed out.

POW: James Bamford

C-Span's Book TV has a podcast interview of James Banford, author of "Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". This book broke the story about how the NSA listened to phone sex between soldiers in Iraq and their spouses at home.

Bamford says some bad things about General Hayden, then head of the NSA and now DCI.

Food for thought: The NSA now and in the future is going to regularly confront messy issues over when and who they can eavesdrop on. Given that fact, wouldn't it make sense for the agency head to have some experience with the legal framework covering domestic surveillance? That is opposed to someone experienced with surveillance in foreign countries, where such activities are necessarily outside the law. Put another way, if you want a legal domestic surveillance product then you might look for someone who knows how to do legal domestic surveillance. Just saying...

The other thing I'd want to remember- Bamford's sources describe targeting people for assassination based on intercepted conversations in languages they don't even understand. Death by Bureaucracy!

Fall 2008 Berkeley Podcasts

Two courses looked interesting in the Fall 2008 Catalogue:

Economics 113, American Economic History taught by Brad Delong!
Geography C110, Economic Geography of the Industrial World

I'm looking for perspective on the current economic crisis...

I'm also trying a video cast course,
International and Area Studies 180

Good Op-Ed

I don't have as much time for reading as I used to, but this piece by Andrew Bacevich stood out enough that I remembered it a week later. As good a short wrap up of Bush's administration as I've seen.

Context and Brooks, an Op-Ed

David Brooks has an op-ed in the NY Times pooh-poohing Obama's rhetoric during his recent trip abroad. Brooks sniffs because

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an
era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter.
What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This
was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have
arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has
clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to
address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their
name in Obama’s lofty peroration.

First off, Brooks has a pathetic memory if all he remembers of the 90's is Francis Fukuyama. That text served more as an instructional punching bag then a foundation for policy, it was interesting to think about how and why it was wrong. It was certainly not relevant to resolving the Bosnian civil war, the most prominent foreign policy challenge of that decade.

Second, Brooks' list of what changed since the 90's is garbage. Autocracies have always been around. Chavez now runs Venezuela but Milosevic is dead. Russia has tightened, China has loosened. Iran is on the march now? When was it not on the march? Doesn't seem like they move very fast, does it? Brooks can't bring himself to note the biggest change in the world since the 90's was in America's foreign policy, even as he claims the difference is as stark as an acid trip compared to reality.

What is naive is to think American policy could undergo such a shift without radically changing the rest of the world.

So much for the new SOFA...

A lot of people were concerned about this agreement tying the hands of the next president. My thinking was that if Bush didn't get it passed through Congress then it wasn't binding in any material sense, and that it would be entirely appropriate for presidential candidates to speak to how they would deal with such an agreement. Sadly, they did not.

Looks like it didn't stop the Iraqis however from using common sense- a contract with only Bush's name on it isn't worth the paper it's printed on, so why concede anything?

Wow

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.