iowa underground blog

From the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: But if reform has to come from the people who are benefiting from the system, are we going to get reform?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: We’re going to get reform if and when they believe that the public will have the tar cooking and the feathers waiting if they don’t do reform. We’re not there yet, Bill.

THOMAS FRANK: Can I say two things about this question? First of all, the people who are in charge now have a vested interest in increasing our cynicism. They are the party of cynicism against government. And when they do these things, that’s just an added benefit that they’ve managed to get the cynicism numbers up where they have. That’s good for the Republican Party, the party that tells you that what? Remember what President Reagan used to say about government, you know? It was a joke, the idea that they were here to help you, all that stuff.

The second point I want to make is go back to the 19th century, the sort of parallel experience to what we’re going through now. You had a series of reformers come up in the 19th century. And every single one of them from, you know, Horace Greeley all up to the 1890s failed miserably, you know, were rejected in huge sweep. I mean, the corruptionists just whipped these guys. It was a piece of cake. It was easy. The only thing that—what really changed it is when reform became a broader thing, when it became Progressivism. And when it became, you know, look at society as a whole. We’re going to change the entire direction that we’re moving in. When—I’m talking about here people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. That’s when this stuff started to abate. Not before that.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: You know, one problem we have here is what we really need is politicians. Politicians understand the nature of politics and the importance of the institutions. How to do give and take and compromises in an effective fashion. What’s happening now is where this flame of cynicism in the public, somebody pops up and says, “I’m not a politician.” And we say, “Okay, great. We’ll elect you.” And what we get are people who are on an ideological crusade, people who have a contempt for politics and believe that it is all sleaze, everybody does it. So bribery is a way of life.

BILL MOYERS: Is there hope when money trumps everything else today?

THOMAS FRANK: You don’t want to ask me that. I’m, you know, I’m a very pessimistic guy. And I don’t think there is because, you know, earlier we were talking about the Democrats and their reaction to all this, and I think their reaction has been lukewarm to feeble. No, they want that money, too. You know, they want to turn this around—-

BILL MOYERS: I saw the other day a very powerful House member, Democrat, saying, you know, “We’re going after some uncharted sources of money in the financial community. And we’re telling them that the next majority leader might be a Democrat.”

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Yeah. You know, we’ve had a telecommunications bill that’s been up and pending in Congress for a long time, and they’re going to keep it pending for a long time. And every once in a while they say, “It’s going to pass, going to pass.” So then each side keeps throwing more money into it. Some of this stuff is difficult to deal with. It’s an ages-old problem. We have to constantly be at it to keep the money system from careening out of control.

In the short run, we’ve got a big problem here. We have a sharply polarized political system. We called the book The Broken Branch because Congress is thoroughly dysfunctional. It isn’t going to change overnight. We need new leadership, including a presidential campaign that may bring it. But we’ve got a process that’s going to take us years to reconstruct. I have long-term hope. We’ve always done it before. But short term, I’m very pessimistic.

BILL MOYERS: Does history, Mr. Historian, give us any reason for hope?

THOMAS FRANK: Sure. Absolutely. But in the very long term, I’m sorry to say.

BILL MOYERS: George Bush came to office in 2000, vowing to clean up Washington. And I just looked at one of his speeches this morning. “We’re going to clean up Washington,” he said. What happened?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: They cleaned up in Washington.

More discussion on the forums.

• sousy

We didn’t comment much about the Secretary of Agriculture races leading into the primary, but there is an interesting contrast in the approaches to developing a strong agricultural economy between Denise O’Brien (D) and Bill Northey®.

In particluar, Bill Northey during the primary discussed growing Iowa’s agricultural sector through greater exports:

World promoter of Iowa products

Realizing that Iowa’s future depends on its exports, Bill has traveled with the WTO and the U.S. Grains Council promoting corn & specialty soybeans. His travels have taken him to 16 countries including Japan five times, and the UK six times.

The idea that we’ll be able to export more and more is… well… a bit of orthodoxy that has been consistently overstated. Alan Guebert writes:

Former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman couldn’t stop for a cup of coffee in farm and ranch country without waxing romantically on how “1 in 4 acres of American farm production is exported.”

Her replacement, Secretary Mike Johanns, a trained technocrat, often makes the same point with more precision. “Twenty–seven percent of U.S. farm receipts come from trade,” Johanns told a May 8 Chicago luncheon crowd.

The trouble with Veneman’s oversimplified number and Johanns’ overcooked number is that both are wrong, wrote Ed Maixner in the April 28 issue of the Kiplinger Agricultural Letter.

The actual “value” of ag exports to farmers and ranchers, noted Maixner, Kiplinger’s editor, is neither 27 percent nor 25 percent. “Analysis shows the portion is 8 percent,” he explained, when “measured by value …”

The difference, he went on to explain in the Letter, is “the government doesn’t account for extra value that gets added to goods after they leave the farm … shipping, processing, packaging and more. Ignoring such markups greatly overstates the exported share.”

For example, Maixner told Keith Good in a May 13 interview (which can be heard at http://agpolicysoup.blogspot.com/), steaks exported to Japan might carry a $15 per lb. price tag at the export terminal, but the rancher gets less than a $1 per pound from the packer when the animal is sold.

Likewise, $3 North Dakota wheat may fetch $5.50 when it leaves Washington State for Shanghai, but the grower still only received $3 when he sold it in Jamestown.

As such, counting the steak’s $14 markup or the wheat’s $1.50 price boost as “farm value” is “logically ridiculous,” Maixner continued. What USDA actually is tabulating, he added, is “added export value, not farm value.”

Ed Maxiner sums up how 30-odd years of policy geared around ag exports should change:

“When developing farm policy,” Maixner told Good, “it’s probably good to start somewhere near the truth. We don’t export everything … Maybe the first thing we need to take care of is our domestic agriculture economy.”

• Sousy

 Welcome to another installment of ‘As Our  Banana Republic Turns’. How many years have  we known about Diebold machines and security  vulnerabilities now? How much longer do we  continue to allow Diebold, a private corporation,  such power and control over our election process  while simultaneously maintaining a suspicious   degree of secrecy and giving us no paper trail??

 Story via InsideBayArea.com.

 (You’ll have to forgive abccbsnbccnnmsnbcfox for  continuing to pay short shrift to this fundamental  concern to our democracy. They’re hot on the   trail of the missing white woman’s killer.)

New security glitch found in Diebold system
Officials say machines have ‘dangerous’ holes
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.

The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.

Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.

“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.

“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”

This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.

...

California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.

...

Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa’s Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.

“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.

BradBlog has much more on this here.
Story originally found on this metafilter thread.
See also: Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent elections
Yet more from The Smirking Chimp

• pdx