The Constitution Revisited

THE ABSURD TIMES

Above: A photo we managed to take through a hidden camera, transmitted to a moving vehicle, encripted, and then retransmitted. We also managed to capture part of the audio, summarized above.


I have no idea why I could not make the font size larger on the first sentence below. Tough.

We the Corporation of the United States, in Order to Form an more Perfect Union-free Workplace, Establish a Just Profit, Insure Workforce tranquillity, Provide for the common Stock sale, Smote the general Welfare State, and secure the Blessings of Liberty and Prosperity unto Ourselves and our Shareholders, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the U S of A Inc.

We hold these Truths to be self-Evident, that all Corporations are to be considered as an Individual with all the rights heretofor ascribed to such, but lacking the legal hinderances the citizenry is subject to. To wit, no suits may be brought forth in any Courts of the Land against any Corporation for any cause of harm, from polution, disease, poisoning, accidents, sickness and death, being carryied out in the name of larger profits. That all Corporations shall have the right to declare bankruptsy and be cleared of all debt owed, while a citizen shall not have that right and must repay all debts. That the only Good Welfare is Corporate Welfare. Bring it on!

This is now our Constitution.

Actually, it always has been. In other words, about the only thing that the recent "Supreme Court" Decision accomplished was to make reality more transparent. How can we expect our corporate owned media to criticize our corporate owned government?

What are some of the differences between Obama and Bush? After all, we have given a year for things to develop. Well, Bush is white and Obama doesn't look white. Obama has a larger vocabulary, higher IQ, and uses better syntax. He also doesn't have the "negro dialect" that Bush does.

He also acted faster in reaction to Haiti. The way things are progressing, we will soon have Haiti were we want it -- a pre-Castro Cuba. Lots of fun.

Is anything going to make a difference? No. As Thoreau pointed out, once you know the pattern, you have no need for further examples.

For over two years, we have covered just about every aspect of contemporary political activity. There is little else to say on the subject. In fact, things are so predictable that recently we have only to re-post the writings of others as so many are aware of things.

NeoBohemia is coming. Today, on the eve of Mozart's 250th birthday, other pursuits are becoming more attractive.

The court

the absurd times
or
the neo-bohemian

"Let's hear it for pubic hair in my Pepsi!"

Nothing seems to have as much potential destructive power as the latest ruling by the Supreme Court, overwhelmingly Republican, as the most recent decision. This decision seems to give Corporations all the same constitutional protections as citizens. A question that immediately occurs to me is this: If a corporation has caused the death of even one single person as a result of greed, negligence, or whatever, isn't it now subject to the death penalty? How would that be enforced?

Anyway, both Keith Olberman and Juan Cole have their own takes on the decision:

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And here is another view:

Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Friday, January 22, 2010

Is the Supreme Court Decision so Important in a Web 2.0 World?
Can Corporations Compete in 'Pull' Media World Anyway?

Of course, I-- like many social critics-- am dismayed at the Supreme Court ruling striking down elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and essentially giving corporations carte blanche to pay for attack videos against candidates they do not like and to release them late in a campaign.

But some of the hand-wringing about the decision seems to me excessive for a number of reasons. Here I am going to put on my hat as a blogger and as someone who has been deeply involved in the rise of internet communication, if in the narrow corner of foreign policy blogging.

The first thing to say is that it is not as if corporate interests were not already deeply involved in the electoral process. For instance, it has come out that five insurance companies funneled big money into attack ads against insurance reform. How? They just gave it to the Chamber of Commerce, which shares their view that 37 million Americans shouldn't get sick and if they do they should die quickly (as Rep. Alan Grayson correctly put it). Since there are so many already-existing work-arounds, the SCOTUS decision is less of a change than it might seem.

Moreover, the difference between Goldman, Sachs making a video and buying time for it on television, and a group of middle managers at firms like Goldman, Sachs forming a PAC and doing the same thing is not entirely clear to me. Because the top one percent of individuals in the US owns over 40% of the country's privately held wealth and takes home 20% of its income every year, those roughly 1.3 million persons already had lots of means of influencing campaigns. Videos are not that expensive to make and even television time is inexpensive for executives in a firm that gives out $40 billion in Christmas bonuses. In other words, given the extreme maldistribution of wealth in the US, the corporate sector already had things stacked in its favor through wealthy persons employed by corporations. Jeffrey Toobin on CNN pointed out that in a congressional race, a million dollars is a lot of money, but would be chump change for a corporation. But it would be chump change for a lot of corporate executives, too.

Then, corporations don't all agree with each other. We still have Net Neutrality in part because Google lobbied for it even as some of the telecoms lobbied against it. Some industries have an interest in polluting, others have an interest in a clean environment. They will fight each other with their political infomercials. But I think most Americans like their drinking water sludge-free, so over time the pro-pollution commercials will let us say lose a certain persuasiveness.

I agree that the danger is greatest where, e.g., war industries have an interest in an Afghanistan surge whereas few other corporate sectors care about it one way or another. But the public can still after all vote on whether it likes continued war.

Under the ruling as I understand it, corporations cannot give more money than before directly to candidates. They can just produce commercials, whether in favor of a candidate or attacking her opponent.

But there is a real question about the influence of commercials even in traditional television. At most, some experts estimate that only 19% of traditional advertising shows a return on investment. The conclusion is that great numbers of insecure corporations are wasting billions on those ads. Lots of wealthy people have entered politics and spent a great deal of their own money on commercials, and lost. That large numbers of voters are going to be swayed by infomercials flies in the face of what we know about how few people actually buy those fancy Japanese knife sets advertised at 3 am.

And then there is the question of the future of the commercial. Nowadays, 90% of viewers who can TiVo or DVR television shows do so, and more than half then skip through the commercials. Knowledge of this practice is increasingly taken into account in the ratings. NBC's Heroes increased its ratings by 22% when delayed viewing was taken into account. I share Businessweek's skepticism that 46% of TiVo viewers are watching the commercials, and my suspicion is that younger more media savvy viewers are less likely to be so passive. The future of the television model of local broadcast affiliates of big networks, with the whole thing driven by commercials, is in real question. As it is, 'push' media like television is becoming a thing of the past.

In Web 3.0 consumers will likely download content via the internet at will. Media is becoming pull media-- individuals pull down what they want when they want it. Television may have to go to an iTunes model of charging per episode. In a pull-media world, for advertisers of any sort, whether pushing products or candidates, to get their message out and control it will become more and more difficult. Pull-media allows a fracturing of viewership (or participation-- many consumers will be playing games rather than watching passively). The fact is that viewership for the 4 networks has already plummeted, and the advertising rates that companies now pay them to air commercials are unrealistically high, and appear to be a function of habit. What else could you do? There are hundreds of channels, then you add in the video blogs, the online gaming, and the blogs. Even if a network only pulls in a household share of 9 for the evening rather than the household share of 65 that that Gunsmoke used to on CBS, at least you've got that many households in one place, which is rarer and rarer. One of the few things Rupert Murdoch is right about is that there is not enough advertising to spread throughout the internet so as to support any particular newspapers or magazines.

The buy of a half-hour attack ad by e.g. Morgan Stanley on CBS dissing Obama on October 25, 2012 just may not mean then what it would have meant in 1960 when CBS had a large proportion of television viewers and most Americans were television viewers, and there were only 3 networks. And if the attack ad is inaccurate, it will be shredded on social media or just ignored. All the vicious attacks on Obama, after all, did not prevent his landslide victory, since voters were tired of Republican shenanigans. Reality is still more important than media depictions of it.

In a world of pull media, Morgan Stanley may just not be able to get our attention very easily (as if we like them much anyway).

Moreover, in an internet society, organizations such as Moveon.org can provide means of accumulating small sums into very large ones. The 99% still do have marginally more money than the 1%. A mobilized public has the potential to at least compete seriously with corporate advertising money. A group of middle class but extremely influential twitterers might be better positioned to get a message out than a corporate boardroom.

For all these reasons, a much greater danger to the republic than the anointing of corporations as persons with the right to flood our airwaves with propaganda is any attack on Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the principle that my blog is inexpensive to publish and to access, so that I and my readers have the same advantages in this regard as a corporation would. If the Right Wing ever manages to scale the internet and make me pay $70,000 a year to put up this blog and have it easily available to my readers, it will kill it and would signal a return to push media like the networks. And a push-media world where corporations own the Web and can push at us what they please, including their weird ideas about political reality, really would be Orwellian and dangerous.

This horrible ruling, bad as it is, is not the Waterloo of democracy. The abolition of Net Neutrality would be.


End/ (Not Continued)

posted by Juan Cole @ 1/22/2010 02:00:00 AM

Truth about Haiti

THE ABSURD TIMES



Illustration: Aristide of Haiti -- we got HIM outta there quick.

One would hope that, with all the coverage of Haiti lately, we would be told WHY it was so poor and had "no infrastructure." Finally, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now got down there and got a very succinct and clear, accurate, interview which sums it up very well. After a week of sensationalism by ALL mass media in this country, finally some reporter has the guts to tell the truth.

Here it is:

ANJALI KAMAT: We’re going to go back to Amy Goodman in Port-au-Prince. We reached her just before the broadcast. She was in an open field right next to the airport, where hundreds of relief and rescue workers have set up camp.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m standing here near the airport in Port-au-Prince. I can’t exactly say my feet are firmly planted on the ground, because this morning, just about 6:00, here in Port-au-Prince, we were in our room and just getting ready to leave for this broadcast, and the earth started to tremble. The floor, the walls, you feel the shake. It is that moment of just extreme panic when everyone in the house, everyone, starts running for their lives out of the house, making their way through rooms, jumping over—holding whatever it was you were holding at that moment. Outside, people hold each other, they weep, or they just breathe a sigh of relief. Although, not really, because you never know when the next aftershock will happen.

And while our house still stood, what about others? Sometimes the earthquake, which destroyed so much of Haiti, can leave a house standing, but it only takes a lesser aftershock to take it down. So who got hurt this morning? Who was lost in the rubble? These are the questions we have every day.

And as we walk down the streets of Port-au-Prince, seeing the bodies, the smell, the stench of death everywhere. Yesterday the piece that we just brought you, the hospital, across the street, the main pharmacy, where patients, where doctors go to get their drugs, is pancaked, is total rubble. And it was many floors. People were standing by. The way you know perhaps where bodies are buried—a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse, a patient who had come over, a customer—is you see the flies swarming over areas.

There was a man laying on the street just across from the General Hospital. And then when we looked carefully in the rubble, we could see another’s head, and we could see the fingers that—curling over a board, as if the person was trying to get out. This is the face of Haiti.

But right now we’re joined by Kim Ives. We’ve been traveling together. Kim writes for Haiti Liberté, and he has been working with us through this week. He has been living in Haiti for years, in and out, traveling in and out.

Kim, I can’t say, “Welcome to Democracy Now!” since you’ve been with us all through this trip, but welcome to the broadcast of Democracy Now!

KIM IVES: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about this major catastrophe, this devastation. Now, of course, it’s a natural catastrophe, but can you talk about how this catastrophe fits into Haiti? The level of destruction we’re seeing today is not just about nature.

KIM IVES: No, not at all. In fact, this earthquake was preceded by a political and economic earthquake with an epicenter 2,000 miles north of here, in Washington, DC, over the past twenty-four years.

We can say, first of all, there was the case of the two coups d’états held in the space of thirteen years, in ’91 and 2004, which were backed by the United States. They put in their own client regimes, which the Haitian people chased out of power. But these coups d’états and subsequent occupations, foreign military occupations, in a country whose constitution forbids that, were fundamentally destructive, not just to the national government and its national programs, but also to the local governments or the parliaments, the mayors’ offices and also the local assemblies, which would elect a permanent electoral council. That permanent electoral council has never been made—it’s a provisional—and hence Préval, and just before the earthquake, was running roughshod over popular democracy by putting his own electoral council in place, provisional, and they were bringing him and his party to domination of the political scene.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, when you talk about the two coups, the one in 1991, the one in 2004, both were of them were the—led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

KIM IVES: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: And you talked about US involvement with those.

KIM IVES: Right. And Aristide, in both cases, was taken from Haiti, essentially by US forces, both times. The first time he ended up spending it in Washington, but now he’s presently in South Africa, where he’s been for these past six years.

But along with this political—these political earthquakes carried out by Washington were the economic earthquakes, the US policy that they wanted to see in place, because Aristide’s government had a fundamentally nationalist orientation, which was looking to build the national self-sufficiency of the country, but Washington would have none of it. They wanted the nine principal state publicly owned industries privatized, to be sold to US and foreign investors.

So, about twelve years ago under the first administration of René Préval, they privatized the Minoterie d’Haiti and Ciment d’Haiti, the flour mill, the state flour mill, and the state cement company. Now, for flour, obviously, you have a hungry, needy population. You can imagine if the state had a robust flour mill where it could distribute flour to the people so they could have bread. That was sold to a company of which Henry Kissinger was a board member. And very quickly, that flour mill was closed. Haiti now has no flour mill, not private or public.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does it get its flour? This is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

KIM IVES: It has to import it, and a lot of it is coming from the United States.

The other one is—and even more ironic, Amy—is the cement factory. Here is a country which is mostly made of limestone, geologically, and that is the foundation of cement. It is a country which absolutely should and could have a cement company, and did, but it was again privatized and immediately shut down. And they began using the docks of the cement company for importing cement. So when we drive around this country and we see the thousands of cement buildings which are pancaked or collapsed, this is a country which is going to need millions and millions of tons of cement, and it’s going to have to now import all of that cement, rather than being able to produce it itself. It could be and should be an exporter of cement, not an importer.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté who also just put out another issue of Haiti Liberté here in the aftermath of the earthquake. You talked about the cement company, the flour company, privatization. You know, one of the most painful problems now, especially for the Haitian diaspora, and for people who have, overall, loved ones here in Haiti, is that they haven’t been able to find out if they’re alive. They haven’t been able to communicate with them.

KIM IVES: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And this goes to the telephone company.

KIM IVES: Exactly. Teleco was the crown jewel of the Haitian state industries. During the first coup d’état, from ’91 to ’94, it was in fact the revenues from Teleco that sustained the government-in-exile of President Aristide. And now we see today, one week before this earthquake, the telephone company Teleco was privatized. It was sold to a Vietnamese company, Viettel. And if we had in this country a robust, agile, nimble national telephone company, a lot of the problems of communication could have been avoided. Instead, all the communications today are practically in the hands of the three private cell companies, Digicel, Voila and Haitel.

AMY GOODMAN: But those—some people might say, well, if it was just sold a week before, then the fact that it was weak was due to the previous owner.

KIM IVES: No, it was—that’s precisely the case. It was the Haitian government who was, in fact, with the leadership of René Préval and his prime ministers, who were undermining and sabotaging. We spoke over the years. I remember, thirteen years ago, we were doing a delegation here to talk to the unionists. That’s how long this struggle against privatization has been going. We were speaking to the unionist at the telephone company, at Teleco, a certain Jean Mabou. And Jean Mabou, the union leader, took us to a room where it was filled with new, brand new, modern telecommunications equipments, boards, all sorts of things. He said, “We’ve got these, and they won’t allow us to install them. They are deliberately undermining the state company so they can sell it.” And this is the irony, is that you have the fox guarding the chicken coop. And the people are, in that way, undermined in their ownership of their own state companies.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, you know, unfortunately, at times like these, in global catastrophes, that’s when the world pays attention, and in this case, it’s attention to Haiti. You started in 1991 with the two coups against Aristide. A very brief thumbnail history of Haiti, going back to 1804, if you will?

KIM IVES: OK, thumbnail—1804, the first and last slave revolution in history, the first black republic in the world, the first independent nation of Latin America, which became the touchstone of all the other revolutions. It wasn’t until sixty years later that it was recognized by the government of Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War.

Then, in 1915, US Marines invaded the country and took control of the bank, took control of the government. They stayed there for nineteen years, ’til 1934. After that, they put in place an outfit called the Garde d’Haiti, the Guard of Haiti, which acted as a proxy force to maintain US interests in Haiti. And then that finally gave birth in 1957 to the dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He became president for life, passed on his title of president for life to his son Jean-Claude Duvalier when he died in 1971.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of US in that?

KIM IVES: And the US was essentially supporting those governments all the time, for geopolitical reasons. Haiti was the principal bulwark against the eastward push of, quote-unquote, “Communism” coming from neighboring Cuba. And so, therefore, the Duvalier regimes, hugely unpopular, were propped up, given military support by and economic cooperation from the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: A kleptocracy, the dictators getting richer and the people getting poorer?

KIM IVES: Exactly. And then, in 1986, they started to see that this particular paradigm was creating too many Che Guevaras, too many revolutions in Latin America, and they switched over to these facade elections of putting supposedly democratic leaders in, but they were purchased elections.

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to foil this US-engineered election scenario by electing a poor parish priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to the presidency. And at the time of his inauguration on February 7, 1991, he declared the second independence of Haiti, because Haiti was going to become independent of the imperial domination of the United States and France. And they quickly responded with a coup d’état eight months later. He was sent into exile. And again, the earthquake centered in Washington and Paris of the past twenty-four years began.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the first coup against Aristide. He’s kept out for three years. The coup happened under George H.W. Bush, but continued through President Clinton. By the way, one of the major platforms of President Aristide when he first came to power was to increase the minimum wage.

The second time he was elected, in 2004, immediately pushed out, taken out by US military and security, this was a story Democracy Now! listeners and viewers might remember well, because I followed a delegation to the Central African Republic, where he and Mildred Aristide were dumped, were essentially being held. And Maxine Waters, Congress member from Los Angeles, Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica, I covered them going to the Central African Republic, and they brought back the Aristides to this hemisphere nearby Jamaica. Ultimately they ended up in South Africa, where they are today. They could not come back to this country. Tremendous pressure from the United States, the officials. It was Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time, Condoleezza Rice, saying he was not to return to this hemisphere.

Now, from exile in South Africa, President Aristide held a news conference. He issued a statement saying he wants to return. I’ve put this question to a number of people here in Haiti. In Washington, President Obama immediately appointed President Clinton and President George W. Bush to spearhead the fund-raising effort to help the people of Haiti—three presidents, a united front, saying this is not partisan. And so, here in Haiti, the question of Aristide’s return now. I mean, the US controls the airport. Prime Minister Préval ceded the control of the airport to the United States. But Aristide has asked to return. What about that image of, not to mention the resources of Prime Minister Préval, prime minister—previous prime minister Aristide—both presidents, rather—standing together and saying, this is beyond politics, we have to rebuild our country?

KIM IVES: Well, that’s exactly it. I was standing in front of the General Hospital yesterday after we went through and saw the horrors there, and I was speaking to a crowd of people outside on the corner. And that very question came up. Why can’t President Aristide come back? He wants to. He has said so. The government hasn’t given or renewed his diplomatic passport, which has expired. They haven’t given him a laissez-passer to come to the country. That’s all that’s needed.

If the government of Barack Obama or any other government wanted to really provide support here, even maybe more than all the C-130s we see offloading not just food and medical supplies, but guns, and lots of them, this would be—to send a plane to South Africa and bring Aristide here, it would create such a tremendous groundswell, a counter earthquake, if you will, of popular hope and pride and victory, that it would go a long way to rebuilding the necessary moral balance needed to weather the storm.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kim Ives, I want to thank you very much for being with us and ask one last question, and that’s about popular organizations in this country. Who has the power here? How are people organizing? This whole issue of security that has been raised over and over again to explain why aid hasn’t come from this area—we’re in the area of the airport where there is so much aid that has been stockpiled—and gone out to communities, so why the UN has said, for example, Léogâne, epicenter of the earthquake, that they would only come there after they could guarantee security.

KIM IVES: Like you said, Amy, this is the nub of the question. Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.

It’s not now that a bunch of Marines have to come in with big M-16s and start yelling at them. Watching the scene in front of the General Hospital yesterday said it all. Here were people who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there were a bunch of Marine—of US 82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it weren’t so tragic.

Here is—they had no business being there. Sure, if there’s some way where you have an army of bandits, which we haven’t seen, on any mass scale going and attacking, maybe you might bring in some guys like that. But right now, people don’t need guns. They need gauze, as I think one doctor put it. And this is the essence of—it’s just the same way they reacted after Katrina. It’s the same way they acted—the victims are what’s scary. They’re the other. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave revolution in history. What could be more threatening?

AMY GOODMAN: And the community organizations in place here?

KIM IVES: Oh, and the community organizations, we saw it the other night up at Matthew 25, where we’re staying, the community. A shipload—a truckload of food came in in the middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular organization, Pity Drop [phon.], was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN. They didn’t need any of these things, which we’re being told also in the press and by Hillary Clinton and the foreign ministers that they need. These are things that people can do for themselves and are doing for themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, thanks very much. Kim Ives writes for Haiti Liberté.

Related stories
o Report from Haiti: Desperate Call for Aid with Rescue Equipment, Medicine, Food & Water in Short Supply
o Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again
o “The Sound of Screaming Is Constant”–Haiti Devastated by Massive Earthquake, Desperate Search for Survivors Continues
o ICE Officials Accused of Covering Up Immigrant Deaths in Detention
o Haiti Devastated by Largest Earthquake in 200 Years, Thousands Feared Dead

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TRUTH ABOUT HAITI

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Aristide of Haiti -- we got HIM outta there quick.

One would hope that, with all the coverage of Haiti lately, we would be told WHY it was so poor and had "no infrastructure." Finally, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now got down there and got a very succinct and clear, accurate, interview which sums it up very well. After a week of sensationalism by ALL mass media in this country, finally some reporter has the guts to tell the truth.

Here it is:

ANJALI KAMAT: We’re going to go back to Amy Goodman in Port-au-Prince. We reached her just before the broadcast. She was in an open field right next to the airport, where hundreds of relief and rescue workers have set up camp.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m standing here near the airport in Port-au-Prince. I can’t exactly say my feet are firmly planted on the ground, because this morning, just about 6:00, here in Port-au-Prince, we were in our room and just getting ready to leave for this broadcast, and the earth started to tremble. The floor, the walls, you feel the shake. It is that moment of just extreme panic when everyone in the house, everyone, starts running for their lives out of the house, making their way through rooms, jumping over—holding whatever it was you were holding at that moment. Outside, people hold each other, they weep, or they just breathe a sigh of relief. Although, not really, because you never know when the next aftershock will happen.

And while our house still stood, what about others? Sometimes the earthquake, which destroyed so much of Haiti, can leave a house standing, but it only takes a lesser aftershock to take it down. So who got hurt this morning? Who was lost in the rubble? These are the questions we have every day.

And as we walk down the streets of Port-au-Prince, seeing the bodies, the smell, the stench of death everywhere. Yesterday the piece that we just brought you, the hospital, across the street, the main pharmacy, where patients, where doctors go to get their drugs, is pancaked, is total rubble. And it was many floors. People were standing by. The way you know perhaps where bodies are buried—a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse, a patient who had come over, a customer—is you see the flies swarming over areas.

There was a man laying on the street just across from the General Hospital. And then when we looked carefully in the rubble, we could see another’s head, and we could see the fingers that—curling over a board, as if the person was trying to get out. This is the face of Haiti.

But right now we’re joined by Kim Ives. We’ve been traveling together. Kim writes for Haiti Liberté, and he has been working with us through this week. He has been living in Haiti for years, in and out, traveling in and out.

Kim, I can’t say, “Welcome to Democracy Now!” since you’ve been with us all through this trip, but welcome to the broadcast of Democracy Now!

KIM IVES: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about this major catastrophe, this devastation. Now, of course, it’s a natural catastrophe, but can you talk about how this catastrophe fits into Haiti? The level of destruction we’re seeing today is not just about nature.

KIM IVES: No, not at all. In fact, this earthquake was preceded by a political and economic earthquake with an epicenter 2,000 miles north of here, in Washington, DC, over the past twenty-four years.

We can say, first of all, there was the case of the two coups d’états held in the space of thirteen years, in ’91 and 2004, which were backed by the United States. They put in their own client regimes, which the Haitian people chased out of power. But these coups d’états and subsequent occupations, foreign military occupations, in a country whose constitution forbids that, were fundamentally destructive, not just to the national government and its national programs, but also to the local governments or the parliaments, the mayors’ offices and also the local assemblies, which would elect a permanent electoral council. That permanent electoral council has never been made—it’s a provisional—and hence Préval, and just before the earthquake, was running roughshod over popular democracy by putting his own electoral council in place, provisional, and they were bringing him and his party to domination of the political scene.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, when you talk about the two coups, the one in 1991, the one in 2004, both were of them were the—led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

KIM IVES: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: And you talked about US involvement with those.

KIM IVES: Right. And Aristide, in both cases, was taken from Haiti, essentially by US forces, both times. The first time he ended up spending it in Washington, but now he’s presently in South Africa, where he’s been for these past six years.

But along with this political—these political earthquakes carried out by Washington were the economic earthquakes, the US policy that they wanted to see in place, because Aristide’s government had a fundamentally nationalist orientation, which was looking to build the national self-sufficiency of the country, but Washington would have none of it. They wanted the nine principal state publicly owned industries privatized, to be sold to US and foreign investors.

So, about twelve years ago under the first administration of René Préval, they privatized the Minoterie d’Haiti and Ciment d’Haiti, the flour mill, the state flour mill, and the state cement company. Now, for flour, obviously, you have a hungry, needy population. You can imagine if the state had a robust flour mill where it could distribute flour to the people so they could have bread. That was sold to a company of which Henry Kissinger was a board member. And very quickly, that flour mill was closed. Haiti now has no flour mill, not private or public.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does it get its flour? This is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

KIM IVES: It has to import it, and a lot of it is coming from the United States.

The other one is—and even more ironic, Amy—is the cement factory. Here is a country which is mostly made of limestone, geologically, and that is the foundation of cement. It is a country which absolutely should and could have a cement company, and did, but it was again privatized and immediately shut down. And they began using the docks of the cement company for importing cement. So when we drive around this country and we see the thousands of cement buildings which are pancaked or collapsed, this is a country which is going to need millions and millions of tons of cement, and it’s going to have to now import all of that cement, rather than being able to produce it itself. It could be and should be an exporter of cement, not an importer.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté who also just put out another issue of Haiti Liberté here in the aftermath of the earthquake. You talked about the cement company, the flour company, privatization. You know, one of the most painful problems now, especially for the Haitian diaspora, and for people who have, overall, loved ones here in Haiti, is that they haven’t been able to find out if they’re alive. They haven’t been able to communicate with them.

KIM IVES: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And this goes to the telephone company.

KIM IVES: Exactly. Teleco was the crown jewel of the Haitian state industries. During the first coup d’état, from ’91 to ’94, it was in fact the revenues from Teleco that sustained the government-in-exile of President Aristide. And now we see today, one week before this earthquake, the telephone company Teleco was privatized. It was sold to a Vietnamese company, Viettel. And if we had in this country a robust, agile, nimble national telephone company, a lot of the problems of communication could have been avoided. Instead, all the communications today are practically in the hands of the three private cell companies, Digicel, Voila and Haitel.

AMY GOODMAN: But those—some people might say, well, if it was just sold a week before, then the fact that it was weak was due to the previous owner.

KIM IVES: No, it was—that’s precisely the case. It was the Haitian government who was, in fact, with the leadership of René Préval and his prime ministers, who were undermining and sabotaging. We spoke over the years. I remember, thirteen years ago, we were doing a delegation here to talk to the unionists. That’s how long this struggle against privatization has been going. We were speaking to the unionist at the telephone company, at Teleco, a certain Jean Mabou. And Jean Mabou, the union leader, took us to a room where it was filled with new, brand new, modern telecommunications equipments, boards, all sorts of things. He said, “We’ve got these, and they won’t allow us to install them. They are deliberately undermining the state company so they can sell it.” And this is the irony, is that you have the fox guarding the chicken coop. And the people are, in that way, undermined in their ownership of their own state companies.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim, you know, unfortunately, at times like these, in global catastrophes, that’s when the world pays attention, and in this case, it’s attention to Haiti. You started in 1991 with the two coups against Aristide. A very brief thumbnail history of Haiti, going back to 1804, if you will?

KIM IVES: OK, thumbnail—1804, the first and last slave revolution in history, the first black republic in the world, the first independent nation of Latin America, which became the touchstone of all the other revolutions. It wasn’t until sixty years later that it was recognized by the government of Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War.

Then, in 1915, US Marines invaded the country and took control of the bank, took control of the government. They stayed there for nineteen years, ’til 1934. After that, they put in place an outfit called the Garde d’Haiti, the Guard of Haiti, which acted as a proxy force to maintain US interests in Haiti. And then that finally gave birth in 1957 to the dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He became president for life, passed on his title of president for life to his son Jean-Claude Duvalier when he died in 1971.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of US in that?

KIM IVES: And the US was essentially supporting those governments all the time, for geopolitical reasons. Haiti was the principal bulwark against the eastward push of, quote-unquote, “Communism” coming from neighboring Cuba. And so, therefore, the Duvalier regimes, hugely unpopular, were propped up, given military support by and economic cooperation from the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: A kleptocracy, the dictators getting richer and the people getting poorer?

KIM IVES: Exactly. And then, in 1986, they started to see that this particular paradigm was creating too many Che Guevaras, too many revolutions in Latin America, and they switched over to these facade elections of putting supposedly democratic leaders in, but they were purchased elections.

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to foil this US-engineered election scenario by electing a poor parish priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to the presidency. And at the time of his inauguration on February 7, 1991, he declared the second independence of Haiti, because Haiti was going to become independent of the imperial domination of the United States and France. And they quickly responded with a coup d’état eight months later. He was sent into exile. And again, the earthquake centered in Washington and Paris of the past twenty-four years began.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the first coup against Aristide. He’s kept out for three years. The coup happened under George H.W. Bush, but continued through President Clinton. By the way, one of the major platforms of President Aristide when he first came to power was to increase the minimum wage.

The second time he was elected, in 2004, immediately pushed out, taken out by US military and security, this was a story Democracy Now! listeners and viewers might remember well, because I followed a delegation to the Central African Republic, where he and Mildred Aristide were dumped, were essentially being held. And Maxine Waters, Congress member from Los Angeles, Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica, I covered them going to the Central African Republic, and they brought back the Aristides to this hemisphere nearby Jamaica. Ultimately they ended up in South Africa, where they are today. They could not come back to this country. Tremendous pressure from the United States, the officials. It was Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time, Condoleezza Rice, saying he was not to return to this hemisphere.

Now, from exile in South Africa, President Aristide held a news conference. He issued a statement saying he wants to return. I’ve put this question to a number of people here in Haiti. In Washington, President Obama immediately appointed President Clinton and President George W. Bush to spearhead the fund-raising effort to help the people of Haiti—three presidents, a united front, saying this is not partisan. And so, here in Haiti, the question of Aristide’s return now. I mean, the US controls the airport. Prime Minister Préval ceded the control of the airport to the United States. But Aristide has asked to return. What about that image of, not to mention the resources of Prime Minister Préval, prime minister—previous prime minister Aristide—both presidents, rather—standing together and saying, this is beyond politics, we have to rebuild our country?

KIM IVES: Well, that’s exactly it. I was standing in front of the General Hospital yesterday after we went through and saw the horrors there, and I was speaking to a crowd of people outside on the corner. And that very question came up. Why can’t President Aristide come back? He wants to. He has said so. The government hasn’t given or renewed his diplomatic passport, which has expired. They haven’t given him a laissez-passer to come to the country. That’s all that’s needed.

If the government of Barack Obama or any other government wanted to really provide support here, even maybe more than all the C-130s we see offloading not just food and medical supplies, but guns, and lots of them, this would be—to send a plane to South Africa and bring Aristide here, it would create such a tremendous groundswell, a counter earthquake, if you will, of popular hope and pride and victory, that it would go a long way to rebuilding the necessary moral balance needed to weather the storm.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kim Ives, I want to thank you very much for being with us and ask one last question, and that’s about popular organizations in this country. Who has the power here? How are people organizing? This whole issue of security that has been raised over and over again to explain why aid hasn’t come from this area—we’re in the area of the airport where there is so much aid that has been stockpiled—and gone out to communities, so why the UN has said, for example, Léogâne, epicenter of the earthquake, that they would only come there after they could guarantee security.

KIM IVES: Like you said, Amy, this is the nub of the question. Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.

It’s not now that a bunch of Marines have to come in with big M-16s and start yelling at them. Watching the scene in front of the General Hospital yesterday said it all. Here were people who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there were a bunch of Marine—of US 82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it weren’t so tragic.

Here is—they had no business being there. Sure, if there’s some way where you have an army of bandits, which we haven’t seen, on any mass scale going and attacking, maybe you might bring in some guys like that. But right now, people don’t need guns. They need gauze, as I think one doctor put it. And this is the essence of—it’s just the same way they reacted after Katrina. It’s the same way they acted—the victims are what’s scary. They’re the other. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave revolution in history. What could be more threatening?

AMY GOODMAN: And the community organizations in place here?

KIM IVES: Oh, and the community organizations, we saw it the other night up at Matthew 25, where we’re staying, the community. A shipload—a truckload of food came in in the middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular organization, Pity Drop [phon.], was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN. They didn’t need any of these things, which we’re being told also in the press and by Hillary Clinton and the foreign ministers that they need. These are things that people can do for themselves and are doing for themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Kim Ives, thanks very much. Kim Ives writes for Haiti Liberté.

Related stories
o Report from Haiti: Desperate Call for Aid with Rescue Equipment, Medicine, Food & Water in Short Supply
o Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again
o “The Sound of Screaming Is Constant”–Haiti Devastated by Massive Earthquake, Desperate Search for Survivors Continues
o ICE Officials Accused of Covering Up Immigrant Deaths in Detention
o Haiti Devastated by Largest Earthquake in 200 Years, Thousands Feared Dead

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A Deal with the Devil

THE ABSURD TIMES I want to thank one of you for sending this along. It was particularly apt given the nut-job Xtian for one thing and the fact that I've just finished reading both parts of Goethe's Faust in German and then looking back through Marlow's version made it particularly fun. I hope all of you enjoy it as well. By Frank James The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a letter from Satan to evangelist Pat Robertson, responding to his comment that Haiti's persistent troubles, including the earthquake, are due to a pact the nation made with Mephistopheles. Actually, it wasn't Satan who wrote the letter but Lilly Coyle of Minneapolis writing in the persona of the hellish one. I think she got it down pretty well. What say you? Dear Pat Robertson, I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll. You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract. Best, Satan LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

What about 60 seats?

THE ABSURD TIMES

1.18.2010

The Coakley-Brown Intangibles

by Tom Schaller @ 1:07 PM

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I don't doubt or have anything to add to Nate's various polling analyses, but as he noted to me by email, there remains a very real chance of non-response bias in these polls. Still, the swirl of last-minute reports about this or that external or internal poll result confirms that we can be certain tomorrow's results will not be a typical Democratic blowout in Massachusetts.

So what will win or lose this tight race for either Martha Coakley or Republican Scott Brown?

A lot of the chatter surrounds intangibles. And on balance, most of the intangibles in the contest seem to point to a Brown victory:

*Coakley's fumbles. She's made two--not one, but two--Red Sox-related gaffes. Though most people who get their political information from Curt Schilling were probably not going to vote for Coakley anyway, calling Schilling a Yankees fan is beyond dumb. And in a short-sprint, low-information race, such moments are ideal fodder for "out-of-touch" narratives. Knowing who the heck Curt Schilling is won't lower healthcare premiums or pay for grandma's medication, but geez. One Sox gaffe ought to be enough to shut up a candidate on the subject. (Unless I missed something, John Kerry didn't compound his "Manny Ortiz" blunder in 2004.) But a second gaffe?

*Brimming conservative confidence. Conservatives are also chirping about big buzz at Brown rallies. And however much liberal nerves are soothed by President Obama's last-minute visit to the state, his inability to draw crowds like those he did 2008 is causing further crowing.

*The combination of anti-incumbent sentiment and anti-Democratic sentiment. Coakley is not literally an incumbent, of course. But as a stand-in for Teddy Kennedy she actually has it worse than an incumbent because at least endangered incumbents have deep connections to voters, a track record of porkbarreling and constituent service to point to, and related brand name advantages.

*A chops-licking opportunity. As if all the above were not enough to stoke conservative excitement, taking Kennedy's seat at a moment when the healthcare package is still not passed would for Republicans be like finding both a bike and a pony under the Xmas tree. The fact that voting is taking place in a mid-January special election in an midterm election season helps, too. This is a perfect storm for Massachusetts Republicans.

So...stick a fork in Coakley, she's done--right? Not so fast.

First of all, any chance Brown had of sneaking up on her is now gone. The closeness of the race is generating high passions--cautious excitement on the right, worry bordering on panic on the left. But in Massachusetts you don't want high passion and level of attention on both sides if you're a Republican; you want an asymmetrical level of passion favoring your side. You want to catch the Democrats napping all the way through to Election Day. That almost happened. But Coakley and state Dems--especially the unions--and the White House all awoke before it was over. We'll see if they rose from their collective slumber too late.

Second, intangibles make for good copy but campaign media narratives tell an incomplete tale. Whatever unions and the Democratic machine are doing, and whether it will be enough or not, their actions are simply less newsworthy than a Sox-Yankees comment, or a Schilling blog post, or whatever Scott Brown did or said at a Tea Party rally.

Third, we'll finally get a certifiable test of whether the Obama political machine has applicability for Democrats other than himself. As Mother Jones' Nick Baumann reports, the White House has gone all in with the Organizing for America list Obama built in 2008.

All of which is not to say Coakley will pull this out. I think it would be crazy to make a wager either way. There are too many unknowns. At this point, a Coakley victory would be the "surprise" outcome, which shows how much the tables have turned in the Bay State. But it would not be that surprising. Intangibles matter but they aren't everything.

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Obama Approval Under 50 Percent Among Massachusetts Likely Voters?

by Nate Silver @ 10:07 AM

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The National Review's Jim Gergahty tweets: "Can Obama really save Coakley if PPP puts his approval/disapproval split at 44/43?"

If the electorate which turns out tomorrow is this indifferent about Obama, I have little doubt that Coakley is headed for defeat. But I think we have to place into context just how lopsided turnout would be if indeed we see an electorate that is split 44/43 on Obama. Here are some of the relevant numbers, both in Massachusetts and nationally.



Three pollsters -- Suffolk, MRG and PPP -- all place Obama's approval between a net +1 and a net +5, and each have the raw approve number under 50 percent. Those numbers are basically identical to how Obama's polling nationally at the moment -- and this is Massachusetts.

Of course, some of those national polls are of registered voters or adults rather than likely ones, which is the whole rub. But in New Jersey this November, the electorate which turned out was +15 on Obama, basically identical to the +16 margin by which he carried the state in 2008. The news was much worse for Democrats in Virginia; Obama was a -3 there, after having carried the state by +6 -- producing a 9-point "turnout gap".

Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points in November 2008. (His approval among registered voters there also appeared to be about +24 as of November 2009). So, if Democrats suffered from the same turnout gap in Massachusetts that they had in Virginia (which was billed as catastrophic at the time), Obama would be at a +17 or so. Instead, you have several pollsters showing him at a +1 or a +5 -- which would imply a turnout gap of 20 or 25 points, more than twice as bad as the one Democrats suffered from in VA.

Sure, a lot has happened since November. But Obama's approval ratings are basically unchanged since then, both among all voters nationally and the liberal ones who populate Massachusetts.

Of course, there are other differences between Massachusetts and NJ/VA. In particular, special elections generally have lower turnout than odd-year ones, and Coakley is arguably a worse candidate than either Jon Corzine or Creigh Deeds, which is quite a feat to pull off.

Nevertheless, if Coakley loses, I tend to think it will be more along the lines of the Rasmussen scenario, where Obama's approval rating is somewhere safely into the 50s but a lot of voters are just turned on by Brown or turned off by Coakley and don't want to reward her for having run such a lousy campaign. It's fine to ask whether Obama can save Coakley if his approval split is 44/43 -- but in addition to using polls to ask questions about the political environment, we should also use the political environment to ask questions about the polls.

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A Hung Parliament? (From the Gallows, Perhaps?)

by Renard Sexton @ 7:00 AM

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Coming off three straight electoral victories in 1997, 2001 & 2005 under the leadership of Tony Blair, the governing Labour party in the U.K. is in real trouble. Behind in the polls by about 9-10 points and limping along with their smallest majority since they took power of the House of Commons in the 1997 landslide, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just a few months to engineer a radical turnaround. Indeed, some observers have remarked that the real question is not whether Labour will win (they won't, many say) but instead how long they will be out of power.

At the same time, the Tory opposition has had a relatively difficult time capitalizing on the weakness of Labour. Opinion polling numbers for the Conservatives have been steadily rising since the end of 2007, following the close of Gordon Brown's honeymoon with the British public after he became P.M. in June of that year. However, the 2009 expenses scandal, which triggered a cratering of public support for both the big parties, slowed most of the Tories' momentum. In addition, the leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, has yet to "seal the deal" with many British voters. Born, bred and educated in quite privileged environs (he's an Eton & Oxford man), Cameron's charismatic style often comes across as suspect to the voter. Though clearly a talented leader, he nonetheless sometimes seems very much the snake-oil salesman.

This post launches FiveThirtyEight's coverage of the U.K. general election, where we will follow the campaign numbers and narrative from Her Majesty's domain for the next few months. Of course, we must intentionally be vague regarding the time frame for the election and our coverage, as the date of the polling has not yet been set.

By law, the current Parliament must end by midnight on the 10th of May and a general election must be held within 17 days (not including weekends or official holidays). This means that 3 June is the latest that the 2010 election could occur, barring unforeseen official days of mourning or celebration (luckily the USA v. England World Cup match will not take place until 12 June). On the other hand, though quite unlikely, Brown could call a snap election today and with the Queen's consent, the UK public would be voting mid-February.

The new Members of Parliament (MPs) will be elected to the House of Commons from 650 geographic constituencies (up from 646 in the 2005 election), a system that was mimicked in the creation of congressional districts in the United States. Based on population distribution and allocated by a series of "Boundary Commissions," 533 MPs will come from English districts, 40 from Wales, 59 from Scotland and 18 from Northern Ireland.

About 65 thousand people are represented by each parliamentarian, with the MPs from the smaller UK nations -- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- tending to have slight overrepresentation. In contrast, in the United States, the average district of a member of the House of Representatives contains more than 650 thousand people, with smallest states also having significant overrepresentation. The last time population per Representative in the U.S. Congress was as low as it is now in the House of Commons was after the 1840 census.

Similar again to the U.S. (or should we say, the U.S. system is similar to this), the House of Commons districts use a "first past the post" system, where only the vote totals in each constituency are considered, as opposed to any national vote share number. As seen in systems of this sort, first past the post voting tends to push out third parties except where they are highly regional, sometimes called "Duverger's law." Accordingly, British politics have long been dominated by the push and pull between the Labour party and the Conservatives.

However, with strong regional identities (including language and national boundaries), third parties have an important role to play in U.K. elections. Unlike in the U.S. Congress, third parties hold a significant number of seats in the House of Commons; currently 104 MPs (16 percent) come from parties other than Labour or the Conservatives.

The largest third party, and indeed the most influential, is the nationally-competitive Liberal Democrats. Established in 1988 through a merger of the Liberal party and the Social Democratic Party, the "Lib Dems" regularly pull 20 percent or more of the national vote in general election, as compared to 30 to 40 percent for the big parties. However, they have never won more than 10 percent of the seats.
Other minority parties that are more regionally centered have been able to capitalize on their small level of support because it is focused in just a few districts. Here are the 2005 numbers for all the parties who got at least 100,000 votes and won a seat (the far-right British National Party and the Greens both got about 200,000 votes but no seats for the above reasons).


With the two biggest parties under-whelming the voting public with their programmes and politics -- for example, a few rogues in Labour recently tried to remove Gordon Brown as the head of the party -- the chances of result where no party has a majority of the chamber's seats is increasingly possible. If the Lib-Dems creep above 20 percent, regional parties perform strongly, and the race between Labour and the Tories tightens further, the chances of a so-called "Hung Parliament" are increasingly likely. This has not occurred since the 1974 election, where a botched coalition building attempt by the Conservatives allowed the Labour government to remain in power, call and narrowly win a new election and govern until the end of the decade.

At the same time, huge anti-incumbent sentiment among the public, particularly after the messy expenses scandal, major economic impacts of the recession, and general frustration with the two big parties, has prompted a huge wave of retirements, particularly from Labour. More than 120 members are expected to retire, nearly 20 percent of the chamber. I guess they are trying to avoid being part of a hung Parliament -- that is, Parliament hung out to dry by the voters.
---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Trendspotting in Massachusetts

by Nate Silver @ 5:33 AM

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Charles Franklin has a typically articulate analysis up at Pollster.com which comes to a somewhat different conclusion than mine about the state of play in Massachusetts. His analysis works by lumping polls together into different bundles (e.g. "non-partisan", "Republican + non-partisan") and producing the following graph:



This certainly looks persuasive. But I'm not sure if it's as robust as it appears. What happens, for instance, if instead of bundling together different types of polls, we instead let each poll speak for itself?



Clearly, Scott Brown is in a much better position than he was two weeks ago, and probably in a better position than he was one week ago. But otherwise the story is somewhat more ambiguous. There are two pollsters, Coakley and Pajamas, that in fact show some kind of movement back toward Coakley in the last couple of days (note that I'm taking advantage of one data point that Franklin didn't have, which is that Coakley is supposedly now up by 2 in her own internals, according to the Boston Herald).

Yes, in Pajamas' case it's from a -15 to a -9 and is possibly just reversion to the mean; and no, I'm not entirely comfortable with taking Coakley's internals at face value (that holds for the Pajamas numbers too). But keeping those caveats in mind, it's not that difficult to draw an übertrendline that is roughly consistent with the story told by each of the individual trendlines. It would probably look something like this:



This would have Coakley losing ground fairly steadily through about the 14th, and then perhaps having added back 2 or 3 points since then. It does a good job of staying parallel with all four trendlines formed by the individual pollsters. Note, for instance, that the decline in Coakley's PPP numbers actually wasn't that significant (-4 points) considering that there was a 9-day gap between their polls; if you buy the übertrendline's story, this may be because they didn't poll at Coakley's bottom.

The übertrendline is less successful at tracking the red diamonds, which are the orphans -- the pollsters that have only surveyed the race once. But, for varying reasons -- turnout is hard to model in special elections; a lot of these pollsters are dodgy; some of them are partisan -- we have seen very large house effects in the polls of this race and some of what looks like a trend may just be different pollsters with different slants on the race happening to have weighed in at different times. What's unusual is that, if you took the orphan polls and drew a trendline through them, it would be about twice as steep as the übertrendline, which a composite of actual trendlines. In other words, those orphan polls make Franklin's trendline both appear both steeper and more linear than it perhaps actually is.

The concept of the übertrendline -- the trendline of trendlines -- is pretty much exactly what our Presidential election model attempts to calculate. What it's trying to discern, essentially, is this: if every pollster surveyed every state every day, what would the average look like? If, for example, the Boston Globe, which previously had the race at Coakley +17, weighed in on the race this morning, what we expect it to show? Surely not Coakley +17 again -- you'd have to subtract some points for the übertrendline and possibly also for reversion to the mean. But I'm guessing that it would probably show Coakley ahead, and possibly outside the margin of error. Conversely, if Pajamas, which has a huge house effect in the other direction, had polled the race back on January 4th when the Globe did, what might they have found then? Perhaps something close to a dead heat, I'm guessing.

Guessing, guessing -- I'm using that word a lot, guessing. When we're looking at a Presidential race, we don't have to guess as much, because we can look not only at polls in a particular state, but also at polls from other, similar states, as well as national polls, including several daily trackers. Under those circumstances, this method can be quite robust. Here, it is less so.

But this is also true for the Pollster.com approach. If you take the Pajamas Media polls out of their average, for instance, their characterization of the race goes from Brown +7.9 to Coakley +1.2! That's not especially robust, either.

This race and NY-23 have been exceptionally challenging to polling analysts; I unapologetically hedged about as much as I could in NY-23, and that's my attitude again here. There is definitely more than one storyline that you can tell about the polling in this race, as well as more complicated storylines that involve figuring out in which direction the polls might be off. That is why I continue to characterize the race as a toss-up. It's not necessarily that I'm predicting a super close finish or recount or anything like that -- there's certainly a decent possibility of that, but I I could envision a double-digit win for either candidate. It's more that our point estimates of where the race stands is swamped by the uncertainty.

As the remaining polls come in, you should image how they might impact the übertrendline. If the Rasmussen poll comes in somewhere between Brown +1 and Brown +3, that would tend to validate that the übertrendline is correct. If they come in at Brown +6 or something, that would suggest that the any late uptick in Coakley's numbers is probably illusory, and something closer to Franklin's impression of a more linear decline may be correct. And if they hold at Coakley +2, that would obviously be a good data point in her favor.

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Massachusetts Model Mayhem

by Nate Silver @ 12:50 AM

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Here is what my "traditional" Senate model now says, updated with new polling from PPP and the potentially dubious firm known as CrossTarget.

Scenario 1:


Under its original assumptions, the model now projects a very slight Brown edge, 49.3-48.7, which maps to a 55 percent chance of winning. Earlier today, it had given Coakley a 57 percent chance of winning. However, because the odds are under 60 percent, we still call this race a "toss-up" per our nomenclature, as we did before.

But what if we made different assumptions?

Here's one that Democrats will like: let's remove the CrossTarget poll and keep everything else the same. This is basically the best defensible Democratic case.

Scenario 2:


That brings Coakley's odds up to 68 percent.

But now, let's do a couple of things that Republicans will like instead. We'll put the CrossTarget poll back in the mix. We'll place more weight on more recent polls, reducing the half-life of a poll from 14 days to 7. And we'll get rid of the result from the regression model (the reason you might not want to do that is explained here.)

Scenario 3:


Coakley drops all the way down to 17 percent!

Next, let's make a middle-ground set of assumptions that I'm personally somewhat inclined toward. We'll keep the half-life at 7 days to place more weight on the most recent polls, but leave the CrossTarget poll out and the regression result in. We'll also increase by 50 percent the uncertainty parameter, owing to the fact that special election polling is harder than regular Senate polling. Coakley bounces back up to 58 percent under these assumptions:

Scenario 4:


However, even if we're emphasizing the more recent polls, Coakley is still benefiting from sort of middle-aged Rasmussen and Research 2000 polls, when some pollsters have observed a further decline in her numbers since those surveys came out. Suppose that both pollsters come out tomorrow (as both are rumored to be in the field) with a new poll showing a 5-point decline in her numbers. That would mean Rasmussen shows Brown ahead by 3 points (rather than trailing by 2), and R2K shows Coakley ahead by 3 points (rather than 8). Warning: the following two charts contain hypothetical polls that don't yet exist. I have no idea what the Rasmussen and R2K polls might say, or whether they're in the field at all.

Scenario 5:


Now that's really a toss-up: Coakley at 52 percent to win and Brown at 48.

Finally, let's restore the original assumptions of Scenario 1, but include the hypothetical polls that we introduced in Scenario 5.

Scenario 6:


Coakley down to 41 percent to win, Brown up to 59, putting the contest just on the fringe of "toss-up" and lean GOP.

To state the obvious, one's assumptions matter a lot! Any of these are reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions. And I'm sure that you some the more creative among you could come up with other wholly reasonable and defensible sets of assumptions, including some that fall outside the goalposts of the scenarios contained herein.

On the heels of the PPP poll, the consensus of other analysts is liable to be that Scott Brown is favored (which I might agree with in the most literal sense), and favored by a large enough margin to characterize the race as something other than a toss-up (which I don't yet agree with.) That's fine; I can see how they get there. The only thing I'd really caution against is that, because our minds are wired to detect patterns, and the story of this race has been Brown! Momentum! Rawwr! it's perhaps easy to forget about some of the polls that did show Coakley ahead, like the Research 2000 poll (which is no less recent than the Suffolk or ARG polls), the Rasmussen poll (at least until they come out with a fresh one), and the Boston Globe/UNH poll, which is definitely old but showed a 17 (!) point lead. It's also easy to forget that all of these polls have their hitches: with the possible exception of Ann Selzer's polling in Iowa, there's no poll anywhere that should be thought of as the gold standard.

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