August 3, 2008
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The Trolls Among Us
By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.
One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.
/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.
Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.
But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.
Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address and phone number from the Internet. “Anyone who knows who and where you are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”
While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later. “I checked you out,” he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin, with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works in front of a screen. He’d been chatting with an online associate about driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. “We decided it would be too much work.”
A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”
“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”
In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. “Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.
This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. “What’s he going to sue me for?” he asked. “Leading on confused people? Why don’t people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”
Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. “He commands you to kill!” he cackled. “Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone laughed.
Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site. Trolls had flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.
WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.
HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins intentionally left enabled is hacking?
WEEV: it’s hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral line somewhere.
Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. “Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.”
“So the message is ‘buy a helmet,’ and the medium is a bat to the head?” I asked.
“No, it’s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you’re on the Internet, you need to take precautions.” A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.
On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on the hill.
We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.
“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”
“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”
“What do you mean? What did I do?”
“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll me if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just deleted it.”
The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll fame by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan — adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori Drew a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail to the emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.
“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”
Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.
Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.
We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.
“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”
And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car’s plush chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front seat sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.
I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and hacking.
“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”
“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.
“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”
Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”
“I was just thinking of Kali!” Claudia said with a giggle.
Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he “dropped docs” on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a month later, he sent me mine.
Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights, always meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their friend Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for racist slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians. Kate checked my head for lice and kept calling me “Jew.” Relations have since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it was her apartment.
Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?
One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.
Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.
So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.
That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.” In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.
Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.
If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message. A broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas dissenters. Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously. “People know to be deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a supermarket tabloid,” says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for Citizen Media. “It should be even more so with anonymous comments. They shouldn’t start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It should be more like negative-30.”
Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.” Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming.” He continued: “It’s not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to save them.”
Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with “moot,” the young man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym for five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses of /b/. “Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards,” he said. “All we do is provide a general framework.” He was optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination of human and machine moderation. Users who make “unoriginal” or “low content” posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen with each offense.
The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls, 4chan had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste. Somebody tried to start a chess game: “I’ll start, e2 to e4,” which quickly devolved into riffage with moves like “Return to Sender,” “From Here to Infinity,” “Death to America” and a predictably indecent checkmate maneuver.
Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:
“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”
Which prompted this:
“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”
And this:
“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”
There were echoes of antiquity:
“good: pleasure; bad: pain”
“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”
And flirtations with postmodernity:
“good and bad are subjective”
“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”
Books were prescribed:
“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”
And then finally this:
“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”
Mattathias Schwartz last wrote for the magazine about online poker. He is a staff writer at Good magazine and lives in New York.
A troll's philosophy in brief: I was abused, so now I abuse other people because I am trying to protect / save them.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Recession - Q4 07?
U.S. Recession May Have Begun in Last Quarter of 2007 (Update2)
By Timothy R. Homan
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy may have tipped into a recession in the last three months of 2007 as consumer spending slowed more than previously estimated and the housing slump worsened, revised government figures showed.
The world's largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.
The revisions now reinforce measures such as employment and production that already signaled the economy was shrinking. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based arbiter of economic cycles, defines a recession as a ``significant'' decrease in activity over a sustained period of time. The declines would be visible in GDP, payrolls, production, sales and incomes.
``We're in a recession,'' Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ``It's going to widen, it's going to deepen.''
The government also said incomes grew less than previously thought, raising the risk that consumer spending will again stumble after getting a temporary boost from the tax rebates last quarter.
Previous Contraction
The prior time the economy shrank was in the third quarter of 2001 during the last recession, when it contracted at a 1.4 percent pace. Growth from January through March was revised down to a 0.9 percent pace from 1 percent. Initial jobless claims increased by 44,000 to 448,000 in the week ended July 26, from a revised 404,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.
The revisions of growth are part of the government's annual adjustments to gross domestic product based on additional information from surveys and Internal Revenue Service data.
For 2005, growth was cut to 2.9 percent from 3.1 percent, and the rate of expansion for 2006 was reduced to 2.8 percent from 2.9 percent. The economy grew 2 percent last year, down from a previously reported 2.2 percent.
Nine of the 13 quarters under review were revised down, three increased and one was unchanged.
The largest downward revision was for the last three months of 2007, as the previously reported 2.3 percent gain in consumer spending was reduced by more than half, to 1 percent. Americans cut back on the use of electricity and gas as fuel bills soared.
Upward Swing
The largest upward swing, from 3.8 percent to 4.8 percent, was for the second quarter of last year.
The figures also showed the housing slide that began in 2006 was worse than previously thought. Residential investment fell 32 percent in the two years ended in December 2007, compared with a prior estimate of 29 percent.
The popular definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters during which the economy shrinks -- isn't always fulfilled.
``While everyone focuses on GDP, keep in mind that it is not the only barometer of economic activity,'' David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York, said in a July 28 note to clients. Growth ``is subject to huge historical revisions.''
The four other factors that the NBER takes into account, Rosenberg said, peaked between October 2007 and February 2008. The NBER usually declares a recession has started between six to 18 months after it's begun, according to its Web site.
Less Income
American workers also earned less in the last two years than the government previously estimated. Employee compensation was reduced by $69 billion, or 0.9 percent, in 2007. Figures for wages and for benefits were reduced about equally. The reduction in benefits reflected smaller contributions by employers to health insurance plans.
The income reduction for last year was smaller than the drop in the spending estimate, leading to an increase in the savings rate to 0.6 percent from 0.5 percent.
In contrast, companies did better than previously thought for all three years. Corporate profits were boosted by $75 billion for 2005, by $115 billion for 2006, and by $47 billion last year.
There was little change on the inflation front. The price measure tied to consumer spending rose 3.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared with the same period the prior year, up 0.1 percentage point from the prior estimate. Excluding food and fuel, the Federal Reserve's preferred measure, it rose 2.2 percent, also 0.1 percentage point higher.
To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy R. Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: July 31, 2008 09:12 EDT
By Timothy R. Homan
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy may have tipped into a recession in the last three months of 2007 as consumer spending slowed more than previously estimated and the housing slump worsened, revised government figures showed.
The world's largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.
The revisions now reinforce measures such as employment and production that already signaled the economy was shrinking. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based arbiter of economic cycles, defines a recession as a ``significant'' decrease in activity over a sustained period of time. The declines would be visible in GDP, payrolls, production, sales and incomes.
``We're in a recession,'' Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ``It's going to widen, it's going to deepen.''
The government also said incomes grew less than previously thought, raising the risk that consumer spending will again stumble after getting a temporary boost from the tax rebates last quarter.
Previous Contraction
The prior time the economy shrank was in the third quarter of 2001 during the last recession, when it contracted at a 1.4 percent pace. Growth from January through March was revised down to a 0.9 percent pace from 1 percent. Initial jobless claims increased by 44,000 to 448,000 in the week ended July 26, from a revised 404,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.
The revisions of growth are part of the government's annual adjustments to gross domestic product based on additional information from surveys and Internal Revenue Service data.
For 2005, growth was cut to 2.9 percent from 3.1 percent, and the rate of expansion for 2006 was reduced to 2.8 percent from 2.9 percent. The economy grew 2 percent last year, down from a previously reported 2.2 percent.
Nine of the 13 quarters under review were revised down, three increased and one was unchanged.
The largest downward revision was for the last three months of 2007, as the previously reported 2.3 percent gain in consumer spending was reduced by more than half, to 1 percent. Americans cut back on the use of electricity and gas as fuel bills soared.
Upward Swing
The largest upward swing, from 3.8 percent to 4.8 percent, was for the second quarter of last year.
The figures also showed the housing slide that began in 2006 was worse than previously thought. Residential investment fell 32 percent in the two years ended in December 2007, compared with a prior estimate of 29 percent.
The popular definition of a recession -- two consecutive quarters during which the economy shrinks -- isn't always fulfilled.
``While everyone focuses on GDP, keep in mind that it is not the only barometer of economic activity,'' David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York, said in a July 28 note to clients. Growth ``is subject to huge historical revisions.''
The four other factors that the NBER takes into account, Rosenberg said, peaked between October 2007 and February 2008. The NBER usually declares a recession has started between six to 18 months after it's begun, according to its Web site.
Less Income
American workers also earned less in the last two years than the government previously estimated. Employee compensation was reduced by $69 billion, or 0.9 percent, in 2007. Figures for wages and for benefits were reduced about equally. The reduction in benefits reflected smaller contributions by employers to health insurance plans.
The income reduction for last year was smaller than the drop in the spending estimate, leading to an increase in the savings rate to 0.6 percent from 0.5 percent.
In contrast, companies did better than previously thought for all three years. Corporate profits were boosted by $75 billion for 2005, by $115 billion for 2006, and by $47 billion last year.
There was little change on the inflation front. The price measure tied to consumer spending rose 3.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared with the same period the prior year, up 0.1 percentage point from the prior estimate. Excluding food and fuel, the Federal Reserve's preferred measure, it rose 2.2 percent, also 0.1 percentage point higher.
To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy R. Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: July 31, 2008 09:12 EDT
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Then and now: 1971 and 2008
1971
Popular Music: Brown Sugar (Rolling Stones), I feel the Earth Move & Its Too Late (Carole King), Joy to the World (Three Dog Night), Just My Imagination (The Temptations), Me and Bobby McGee (Janis Joplin), One Bad Apple (The Osmonds).
Best Movie: The French Connection
Best Actor: Gene Hackman
Best Actress: Jane Fonda (Klute)
Dow Jones: 890.2
Gallon of gas: 44c
Gallon of Milk: 1.32
Average Income: 9111.00
On my birthday (today and my first as a US Citizen), I got a interesting letter from Smith Barney highlighting the things that were happening in the year of my birth. I have always had a special fondness and affection for Janis Joplin (especially the song Me and Bobby McGee) and actor Gene Hackman.
Popular Music: Brown Sugar (Rolling Stones), I feel the Earth Move & Its Too Late (Carole King), Joy to the World (Three Dog Night), Just My Imagination (The Temptations), Me and Bobby McGee (Janis Joplin), One Bad Apple (The Osmonds).
Best Movie: The French Connection
Best Actor: Gene Hackman
Best Actress: Jane Fonda (Klute)
Dow Jones: 890.2
Gallon of gas: 44c
Gallon of Milk: 1.32
Average Income: 9111.00
On my birthday (today and my first as a US Citizen), I got a interesting letter from Smith Barney highlighting the things that were happening in the year of my birth. I have always had a special fondness and affection for Janis Joplin (especially the song Me and Bobby McGee) and actor Gene Hackman.
Goldman to buy Retail Bank? Yes / No
Goldman `Highly Unlikely' to Buy Retail Bank, Whitney Says
By Christine Harper
July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the largest and most profitable U.S. securities firm, is ``highly unlikely'' to acquire a retail banking operation, Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Meredith Whitney said in a note to investors.
``While much speculation has been made about Goldman's interest in acquiring a retail bank, we believe the chances are less than slim,'' she wrote after a meeting yesterday with Goldman executives. ``Management stated frankly that it was highly unlikely given the current regulation.''
Whitney's note comes just days after Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Guy Moszkowski told investors they shouldn't ``rule out'' a bank acquisition by Goldman. While Moszkowski said a transaction seemed unlikely if it forced the firm to exit businesses such as commodities, he noted JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank by market value, was allowed to keep commodity business it gained in acquiring Bear Stearns Cos.
Merrill's sale of collateralized debt obligations this week for $6.7 billion, or 22 percent of face value, may give Goldman an opportunity to buy similar assets, Whitney added in her note today. She met yesterday with Goldman Chief Financial Officer David Viniar, Co-President Jon Winkelried and Investment Banking Chief David Solomon.
``Last year, Goldman raised a several-billion dollar fund to buy distressed mortgage assets, yet to date has put little to use,'' Whitney wrote. After the sale by Merrill, ``it is likely in our opinion that more portfolios are put on the market.''
Goldman's executives said the current market creates ``strong headwinds to earnings growth,'' Whitney wrote. The company has cut the bottom 10 percent of its employees instead of the usual bottom 5 percent, she wrote.
Whitney rates Goldman shares ``perform.''
Goldman Willing to Consider Buying a Bank, Merrill Analyst Says
By Christine Harper
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. may buy a bank to gain deposits to fund itself, although a deal won't happen if regulators force Goldman to exit a business such as commodities, Merrill Lynch & Co. wrote in a research report.
``Don't rule out a bank acquisition,'' Merrill Lynch analyst Guy Moszkowski wrote in a note to investors today after meeting Goldman executives including Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and Co-President Jon Winkelried.
Goldman, the biggest and most profitable of the U.S. securities firms, has ``done extensive analysis'' on the potential for funding its divisions with excess deposits from a bank, Moszkowski wrote, citing Viniar. Regulations that prevent bank holding companies from owning assets such as pipelines and power plants may present a hurdle, although JPMorgan Chase & Co. seems to have won approval from regulators, Moszkowski said.
Goldman management ``made it clear that such a deal was unlikely to be pursued if it meant that other traditional, attractive GS businesses could not be continued. Commodities being the obvious example that comes to mind,'' Moszkowski wrote. ``However, regulators appear to have OK'd JPM's participation in physical commodities via its acquisition of Bear Stearns.''
The biggest earnings opportunity that Goldman managers see is in buying and trading mortgages, the note added. Goldman hasn't yet raised a fund to invest in distressed mortgages and doesn't think all the assets have been marked down sufficiently yet, the note said.
``The gulf between what potential distressed-mortgage buyers are willing to pay, and where holders have marked the assets, remains too wide,'' Moszkowski wrote.
A ``private-market solution'' to the mortgage market turmoil is more likely than a government-sponsored type solution such as Resolution Trust Co. in the 1980s, Moszkowski wrote.
``Whenever this happens, GS will be ready to bid on significant portfolios, and when the scale of a package exceeds GS's comfort level, it expects to be able to round up co- investors quickly,'' he wrote.
By Christine Harper
July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the largest and most profitable U.S. securities firm, is ``highly unlikely'' to acquire a retail banking operation, Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Meredith Whitney said in a note to investors.
``While much speculation has been made about Goldman's interest in acquiring a retail bank, we believe the chances are less than slim,'' she wrote after a meeting yesterday with Goldman executives. ``Management stated frankly that it was highly unlikely given the current regulation.''
Whitney's note comes just days after Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Guy Moszkowski told investors they shouldn't ``rule out'' a bank acquisition by Goldman. While Moszkowski said a transaction seemed unlikely if it forced the firm to exit businesses such as commodities, he noted JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank by market value, was allowed to keep commodity business it gained in acquiring Bear Stearns Cos.
Merrill's sale of collateralized debt obligations this week for $6.7 billion, or 22 percent of face value, may give Goldman an opportunity to buy similar assets, Whitney added in her note today. She met yesterday with Goldman Chief Financial Officer David Viniar, Co-President Jon Winkelried and Investment Banking Chief David Solomon.
``Last year, Goldman raised a several-billion dollar fund to buy distressed mortgage assets, yet to date has put little to use,'' Whitney wrote. After the sale by Merrill, ``it is likely in our opinion that more portfolios are put on the market.''
Goldman's executives said the current market creates ``strong headwinds to earnings growth,'' Whitney wrote. The company has cut the bottom 10 percent of its employees instead of the usual bottom 5 percent, she wrote.
Whitney rates Goldman shares ``perform.''
Goldman Willing to Consider Buying a Bank, Merrill Analyst Says
By Christine Harper
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. may buy a bank to gain deposits to fund itself, although a deal won't happen if regulators force Goldman to exit a business such as commodities, Merrill Lynch & Co. wrote in a research report.
``Don't rule out a bank acquisition,'' Merrill Lynch analyst Guy Moszkowski wrote in a note to investors today after meeting Goldman executives including Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and Co-President Jon Winkelried.
Goldman, the biggest and most profitable of the U.S. securities firms, has ``done extensive analysis'' on the potential for funding its divisions with excess deposits from a bank, Moszkowski wrote, citing Viniar. Regulations that prevent bank holding companies from owning assets such as pipelines and power plants may present a hurdle, although JPMorgan Chase & Co. seems to have won approval from regulators, Moszkowski said.
Goldman management ``made it clear that such a deal was unlikely to be pursued if it meant that other traditional, attractive GS businesses could not be continued. Commodities being the obvious example that comes to mind,'' Moszkowski wrote. ``However, regulators appear to have OK'd JPM's participation in physical commodities via its acquisition of Bear Stearns.''
The biggest earnings opportunity that Goldman managers see is in buying and trading mortgages, the note added. Goldman hasn't yet raised a fund to invest in distressed mortgages and doesn't think all the assets have been marked down sufficiently yet, the note said.
``The gulf between what potential distressed-mortgage buyers are willing to pay, and where holders have marked the assets, remains too wide,'' Moszkowski wrote.
A ``private-market solution'' to the mortgage market turmoil is more likely than a government-sponsored type solution such as Resolution Trust Co. in the 1980s, Moszkowski wrote.
``Whenever this happens, GS will be ready to bid on significant portfolios, and when the scale of a package exceeds GS's comfort level, it expects to be able to round up co- investors quickly,'' he wrote.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Another Republican Senator in trouble
July 30, 2008
Alaska Senator Is Indicted on Corruption Charges
By DAVID STOUT and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.
Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of failing to report income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.
The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Mr. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him.
The Justice Department announced the charges at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. The document says that, from the spring of 1999 through the late summer of 2007, Mr. Stevens failed to report “things of value” that he received in connection with his home in the ski resort city of Girdwood, about 40 miles south of Anchorage.
Prosecutors say Mr. Stevens, who referred to his home as “the chalet,” accepted goods and services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, ranging from an outdoor grill to extensive home remodeling and architectural advice. Not only did Mr. Stevens fail to report the items on his Senate financial disclosure form, as required, but he took active steps to conceal the receipt of the goods and services, the indictment says.
All the charges are felonies. Justice Department officials declined to discuss how long a prison term a conviction on the charges might bring, noting that the maximum sentences allowed by law are rarely imposed. Mr. Stevens was in Washington on Tuesday, and was allowed to turn himself in for paperwork processing.
The business executive at the center of the affair is Bill J. Allen, a longtime friend of the senator’s and the founder of VECO, a company that builds pipelines and does other construction work for oil companies. Mr. Allen pleaded guilty in May 2007 to making $243,000 in illegal payments to a lawmaker, who was later identified as State Senator Ben Stevens, Ted Stevens’s son. Ben Stevens, who was once president of the Alaska State Senate, is one of a half-dozen lawmakers under scrutiny for their relationships with Mr. Allen and his company.
Republicans on Capitol Hill were already jittery over a lobbying and influence-peddling scandal related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is now in prison. Mr. Stevens’s troubles are not linked to that affair. Instead, they stem from his ties to an oil executive whose company won millions of dollars in federal contracts with the help of Mr. Stevens, whose home in Alaska was almost doubled in size in the renovation project.
Under Senate Republican party rules, an indictment on felony charges compels a member to temporarily give up his leadership posts, and Republican senators were told at their weekly luncheon on Tuesday that Mr. Stevens would do so. Mr. Stevens has been the ranking minority member on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Mr. Stevens is a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is still on the panel. As chairman, he wielded huge influence, and did not hesitate to use it to steer money and projects to his state.
“No other senator fills so central a place in his state’s public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska,” the Almanac of American Politics says. “Quite possibly, no other senator ever has.”
Mr. Stevens, one of only a handful of World War II veterans left in the Senate, grew up in Indiana and California and moved to Alaska in 1950, before it was a state, according to the political almanac. He first ran for the Senate in 1962, losing to Ernest Gruening, a Democrat. He was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate in 1968 by the governor at the time, Walter Hickel, and has been re-elected six times since then.
Word spread through the Capitol like an electric current, prompting whispers among senators and staff. The Democrats were gathering in a room near the Senate chamber for their weekly conference lunch. Republicans, meanwhile, moved their lunch to the headquarters of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, a common change of venue when the primary topic of discussion is politics.
Mr. Stevens is seen as a legendary, even heroic, figure in Alaska, who played a crucial role in its achievement of statehood, which became official in 1959. According to Senate Republican rules, Mr. Stevens will have to give up his leadership positions, which include some hugely powerful posts, as the senior Republican on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee.
The long-running federal corruption investigation in Alaska has been hanging over Mr. Stevens as he faces his toughest re-election contest in many years. Mr. Begich was expected to mount a strong challenge even before word of the indictment spread.
Alaska, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1974, is one of several seemingly unlikely states where Democrats believe they have a strong chance of pulling off upset victories in the November elections.
The indictment comes nearly a year after federal agents raided Mr. Stevens’s home as part of a continuing investigation into corruption that had already ensnared the senator’s son.
Though lawmakers have been aware of the Justice Department inquiry for some time, the news of an indictment still came as something of a shock this week, as both houses of Congress are trying to wrap up legislative business before the monthlong August recess.
Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said Mr. Stevens should be presumed innocent unless and until he is proven guilty.Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens’s ability to work in the Senate.
Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.
Alaska Senator Is Indicted on Corruption Charges
By DAVID STOUT and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.
Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of failing to report income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.
The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Mr. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him.
The Justice Department announced the charges at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. The document says that, from the spring of 1999 through the late summer of 2007, Mr. Stevens failed to report “things of value” that he received in connection with his home in the ski resort city of Girdwood, about 40 miles south of Anchorage.
Prosecutors say Mr. Stevens, who referred to his home as “the chalet,” accepted goods and services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, ranging from an outdoor grill to extensive home remodeling and architectural advice. Not only did Mr. Stevens fail to report the items on his Senate financial disclosure form, as required, but he took active steps to conceal the receipt of the goods and services, the indictment says.
All the charges are felonies. Justice Department officials declined to discuss how long a prison term a conviction on the charges might bring, noting that the maximum sentences allowed by law are rarely imposed. Mr. Stevens was in Washington on Tuesday, and was allowed to turn himself in for paperwork processing.
The business executive at the center of the affair is Bill J. Allen, a longtime friend of the senator’s and the founder of VECO, a company that builds pipelines and does other construction work for oil companies. Mr. Allen pleaded guilty in May 2007 to making $243,000 in illegal payments to a lawmaker, who was later identified as State Senator Ben Stevens, Ted Stevens’s son. Ben Stevens, who was once president of the Alaska State Senate, is one of a half-dozen lawmakers under scrutiny for their relationships with Mr. Allen and his company.
Republicans on Capitol Hill were already jittery over a lobbying and influence-peddling scandal related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is now in prison. Mr. Stevens’s troubles are not linked to that affair. Instead, they stem from his ties to an oil executive whose company won millions of dollars in federal contracts with the help of Mr. Stevens, whose home in Alaska was almost doubled in size in the renovation project.
Under Senate Republican party rules, an indictment on felony charges compels a member to temporarily give up his leadership posts, and Republican senators were told at their weekly luncheon on Tuesday that Mr. Stevens would do so. Mr. Stevens has been the ranking minority member on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Mr. Stevens is a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is still on the panel. As chairman, he wielded huge influence, and did not hesitate to use it to steer money and projects to his state.
“No other senator fills so central a place in his state’s public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska,” the Almanac of American Politics says. “Quite possibly, no other senator ever has.”
Mr. Stevens, one of only a handful of World War II veterans left in the Senate, grew up in Indiana and California and moved to Alaska in 1950, before it was a state, according to the political almanac. He first ran for the Senate in 1962, losing to Ernest Gruening, a Democrat. He was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate in 1968 by the governor at the time, Walter Hickel, and has been re-elected six times since then.
Word spread through the Capitol like an electric current, prompting whispers among senators and staff. The Democrats were gathering in a room near the Senate chamber for their weekly conference lunch. Republicans, meanwhile, moved their lunch to the headquarters of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, a common change of venue when the primary topic of discussion is politics.
Mr. Stevens is seen as a legendary, even heroic, figure in Alaska, who played a crucial role in its achievement of statehood, which became official in 1959. According to Senate Republican rules, Mr. Stevens will have to give up his leadership positions, which include some hugely powerful posts, as the senior Republican on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee.
The long-running federal corruption investigation in Alaska has been hanging over Mr. Stevens as he faces his toughest re-election contest in many years. Mr. Begich was expected to mount a strong challenge even before word of the indictment spread.
Alaska, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1974, is one of several seemingly unlikely states where Democrats believe they have a strong chance of pulling off upset victories in the November elections.
The indictment comes nearly a year after federal agents raided Mr. Stevens’s home as part of a continuing investigation into corruption that had already ensnared the senator’s son.
Though lawmakers have been aware of the Justice Department inquiry for some time, the news of an indictment still came as something of a shock this week, as both houses of Congress are trying to wrap up legislative business before the monthlong August recess.
Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said Mr. Stevens should be presumed innocent unless and until he is proven guilty.Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens’s ability to work in the Senate.
Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.
Dance!
A good friend of mine - Vinnie (thanks!) send me this link. You have to check it out. Turn of the HD if it doesnt load fast.
"Where in the hell is Matt?" by Matthew Harding
http://www.vimeo.com/1211060
wherethehellismatt.com
Enjoy! I certainly did.
"Where in the hell is Matt?" by Matthew Harding
http://www.vimeo.com/1211060
wherethehellismatt.com
Enjoy! I certainly did.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Record deficit expected in 2009
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The White House has increased its estimate for next year's deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office, a report due out Monday shows.
The projected deficit for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 is being driven higher by the continuing economic slowdown and larger-than-anticipated costs of the two-year, $168 billion fiscal stimulus package passed by Congress, said two senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the report. In February, President Bush predicted the 2009 deficit would be $407 billion.
The budget update shows this year's deficit headed under $400 billion, at least $10 billion less than projected, according to the two officials. That's partly because tax revenue held up reasonably well despite the weaker economy.
The rising deficit for 2009 marks a sharp turnaround for Bush's fiscal legacy. He inherited a $128 billion surplus when he came into office in 2001. It soon turned to red ink because of a recession, the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism.
Curbing the deficit will fall to Bush's successor and the next Congress following a time when taxes were cut and major spending initiatives were undertaken, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, transportation projects, farm subsidies, Medicare prescription drug coverage and a recently passed expansion of veterans' education benefits.
The actual 2009 deficit could climb still higher because the new projection does not reflect full funding for the wars. In addition, a worsening economy could add to the red ink by reducing tax revenue and increasing safety-net payments, such as jobless benefits and food stamps.
Both presidential candidates have proposed tax cuts that could further swell the deficit. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates that Republican John McCain's cuts would cost $4.2 trillion and Democrat Barack Obama's $2.8 trillion over 10 years. Neither candidate has specified major spending cuts he would make to reduce the deficit.
"The picture's looking pretty dark out there," said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. He credited Bush's tax cuts with creating six years of economic growth but "on the spending side, their record is not good."
White House budget director Jim Nussle said that despite the surplus Bush started with, he faced a deficit in defense, intelligence and homeland security that had to be bolstered after 9/11.
"This is not just a mathematical exercise," he said in an interview with USA TODAY. Nussle said an economic recovery and a renewed effort by Congress to control spending could rein in the deficit.
Bush proposed in recent years to slow the growth of spending in programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those efforts were ignored by Congress — most recently last week, when the House voted to sidestep a provision of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law that would have required lower Medicare spending.
The biggest budget deficit recorded to date was $413 billion in 2004. In today's dollars, that would be about $478 billion. As a share of the economy, the 2009 deficit would be 3% to 4%, below the post-World War II record of 6% set in 1983.
and from calculatedrisk.blogspot.com
First, this is the Unified Budget deficit. By these projections, the General Fund deficit (the President's responsibility) will be around $600 billion this year, and $700 billion next year. Second, these projections are probably optimistic.
The costs of bailing out F&F are not included in these projections.
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The White House has increased its estimate for next year's deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office, a report due out Monday shows.
The projected deficit for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 is being driven higher by the continuing economic slowdown and larger-than-anticipated costs of the two-year, $168 billion fiscal stimulus package passed by Congress, said two senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the report. In February, President Bush predicted the 2009 deficit would be $407 billion.
The budget update shows this year's deficit headed under $400 billion, at least $10 billion less than projected, according to the two officials. That's partly because tax revenue held up reasonably well despite the weaker economy.
The rising deficit for 2009 marks a sharp turnaround for Bush's fiscal legacy. He inherited a $128 billion surplus when he came into office in 2001. It soon turned to red ink because of a recession, the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism.
Curbing the deficit will fall to Bush's successor and the next Congress following a time when taxes were cut and major spending initiatives were undertaken, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, transportation projects, farm subsidies, Medicare prescription drug coverage and a recently passed expansion of veterans' education benefits.
The actual 2009 deficit could climb still higher because the new projection does not reflect full funding for the wars. In addition, a worsening economy could add to the red ink by reducing tax revenue and increasing safety-net payments, such as jobless benefits and food stamps.
Both presidential candidates have proposed tax cuts that could further swell the deficit. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates that Republican John McCain's cuts would cost $4.2 trillion and Democrat Barack Obama's $2.8 trillion over 10 years. Neither candidate has specified major spending cuts he would make to reduce the deficit.
"The picture's looking pretty dark out there," said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. He credited Bush's tax cuts with creating six years of economic growth but "on the spending side, their record is not good."
White House budget director Jim Nussle said that despite the surplus Bush started with, he faced a deficit in defense, intelligence and homeland security that had to be bolstered after 9/11.
"This is not just a mathematical exercise," he said in an interview with USA TODAY. Nussle said an economic recovery and a renewed effort by Congress to control spending could rein in the deficit.
Bush proposed in recent years to slow the growth of spending in programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those efforts were ignored by Congress — most recently last week, when the House voted to sidestep a provision of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law that would have required lower Medicare spending.
The biggest budget deficit recorded to date was $413 billion in 2004. In today's dollars, that would be about $478 billion. As a share of the economy, the 2009 deficit would be 3% to 4%, below the post-World War II record of 6% set in 1983.
and from calculatedrisk.blogspot.com
First, this is the Unified Budget deficit. By these projections, the General Fund deficit (the President's responsibility) will be around $600 billion this year, and $700 billion next year. Second, these projections are probably optimistic.
The costs of bailing out F&F are not included in these projections.
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