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Beyond Earth – Charles Wohlforth & Amanda R. Hendrix, Ph.D.

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Beyond Earth

Our Path to a New Home in the Planets

Charles Wohlforth & Amanda R. Hendrix, Ph.D.

Genre: Physics

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: November 15, 2016

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


From a leading planetary scientist and an award-winning science writer, a propulsive account of the developments and initiatives that have transformed the dream of space colonization into something that may well be achievable.   We are at the cusp of a golden age in space science, as increasingly more entrepreneurs—Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos—are seduced by the commercial potential of human access to space. But Beyond Earth does not offer another wide-eyed technology fantasy: instead, it is grounded not only in the human capacity for invention and the appeal of adventure but also in the bureaucratic, political, and scientific realities that present obstacles to space travel—realities that have hampered NASA’s efforts ever since the Challenger disaster.   In Beyond Earth, Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R.Hendrix offer groundbreaking research and argue persuasively that not Mars, but Titan—a moon of Saturn with a nitrogen atmosphere, a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy, where we will even be able to fly like birds in the minimal gravitational field—offers the most realistic and thrill­ing prospect of life without support from Earth. (With 8 pages of color illustrations) 

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Beyond Earth – Charles Wohlforth & Amanda R. Hendrix, Ph.D.

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Fossils, Finches and Fuegians – Richard Keynes

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Fossils, Finches and Fuegians

Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle (Text Only)

Richard Keynes

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 23, 2017

Publisher: HarperCollins

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A narrative account of Darwin’s historic 4-year voyage on the Beagle to South America, Australia and the Pacific in the 1830s that combines the adventure and excitement of Alan Moorehead’s famous (and now out of print) account with an expert assessment of the scientific discoveries of that journey. The author is Charles Darwin’s great-grandson. • In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote: ‘The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose. I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were already fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play.’ No biography of Darwin has yet done justice to what the scientific research actually was that occupied Darwin during the voyage. Keynes shows exactly how Darwin’s geological researches and his observations on natural history sowed the seeds of his revolutionary theory of evolution, and led to the writing of his great works on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. About the author Professor Richard Keynes is the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. A Fellow of the Royal Society since 1959 and a former Professor of Physiology at Cambridge University, Richard Keynes has edited a number of Darwin publications – including The Beagle Record and Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary. He lives in Cambridge.

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Fossils, Finches and Fuegians – Richard Keynes

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Ditch the deodorant, save the planet?

When Monsanto introduced a new kind of seed that wouldn’t die when exposed to the herbicide dicamba, it triggered a crisis in the southeastern United States. Farmers planted the seed and started spraying dicamba, and it worked great! Except that it drifted onto other farmers’ fields and killed their crops.

And the dramatic plot twists keep coming. One farmer gunned down another in a confrontation over his withered crops. Then, states began to restrict the use of dicamba, with Arkansas completely banning it last summer.

Monsanto wasn’t happy about that. In the latest development, the agribusiness company sued the Arkansas State Plant Board, which regulates pesticides. It also sued each of the individual board members — who, for the record, are just local, agriculture-minded folks who volunteer their time.

One board member, Terry Fuller, told NPR’s Dan Charles: “I didn’t feel like I was leading the charge. I felt like I was just trying to do my duty.”

But farmers on the other side of the debate, who think the ban is way too strict, are demanding at least limited access to dicamba. What a mess.

Original link – 

Ditch the deodorant, save the planet?

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A town hit hard by Hurricane Harvey may never fully recover.

The mayor of the coastal town of Rockport, Texas, said on Tuesday that the community will likely suffer permanent damage from the Category 4 storm.

It’s been nearly two months since Hurricane Harvey tore through Texas, leaving behind decimated buildings, torn-up infrastructure, and thousands of displaced people. While most national media attention focused on Houston, Rockport, population 10,645, suffered some of the hurricane’s worst wind and storm surge damage.

During a panel discussion in Victoria, Texas, Mayor Charles Wax said that approximately one-third of the town was destroyed in the hurricane, and a significant portion of that will be impossible to rebuild.

Only 300 of Rockport’s 1,300 businesses have reopened since the storm, 856 of Rockport’s 2,400 students have left the school district, and the town lost most of its trees in the storm. Disaster relief crews have cleared almost 800,000 cubic yards of vegetation felled by hurricane winds and rain. 

Wax, along with three other coastal Texas mayors coping with staggering devastation from the hurricane, said he has received more help from the state government than from FEMA. The agency is definitely spread a bit thin, it seems.

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A town hit hard by Hurricane Harvey may never fully recover.

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These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

If the government ends up approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust—affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities—reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the US The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as US Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be. But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.

A late Obama administration push to scrutinize major deals notwithstanding, the government over the past several decades has pulled back on merger enforcement. In part, this shift reflects the influence of Carlton and other economists. Today, lawyers still write the briefs, make the arguments and conduct the trials, but the core arguments are over economists’ models of what will happen if the merger goes ahead.

These complex mathematical formulations carry weight with the government because they purport to be objective. But a ProPublica examination of several marquee deals found that economists sometimes salt away inconvenient data in footnotes and suppress negative findings, stretching the standards of intellectual honesty to promote their clients’ interests.

Earlier this year, a top Justice Department official criticized Compass Lexecon for using “junk science.” ProPublica sent a detailed series of questions to Compass Lexecon for this story. The firm declined to comment on the record.

Even some academic specialists worry that the research companies buy is slanted. “This is not the scientific method,” said Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economist known for analyzing the effects of mergers. Referring to one Compass study of an appliance industry deal, he said, “The answer is known in advance, either because you created what the client wanted or the client selected you as the most favorable from whatever group was considered.”

In contrast to their scholarship, the economists’ paid work for corporations rests almost entirely out of the public eye. Even other academics cannot see what they produce on behalf of clients. Their algorithms are shared only with government economists, many of whom have backgrounds in academia and private consulting, and hope to return there. At least seven professors on Compass’s payroll, including Carlton, have served as the top antitrust economist at the Department of Justice. Charles River Associates boasts at least three.

“There are few government functions outside the CIA that are so secretive as the merger review process,” said Seth Bloom, the former general counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

One evening in 1977, University of Chicago law professor Richard Posner hosted a colleague from the economics department and a young law student named Andrew Rosenfield at his apartment in Hyde Park. The leading scholar of the “Law and Economics” movement, Posner wanted to apply rigorous math and economics concepts to the real world. “Why not see if there are some consulting opportunities?” he mused. The three of them agreed to form a firm, throwing in $700 for a third each. They called it “Lexecon,” combining the Latin for law with “econ.”

The trio then shopped their services to a dozen law firms, which all turned them down. “If you had to value the firm at the end of the tour, you’d have to say it was zero,” said Rosenfield.

They went back to their academic work. Not too long after, AT&T called Posner to ask if he could consult on its antitrust defense. The government was trying to break up Ma Bell. Posner agreed. So began a long and mutually beneficial relationship between AT&T and Lexecon.

Soon after its founding, Lexecon hired one of Chicago’s most promising young economists: Dennis Carlton. He had grown up in Brighton, Mass., earning degrees from a trifecta of elite local institutions: Boston Latin High School, Harvard, and MIT, where he would later endow a chair. He played basketball in his spare time. “Backaches have temporarily sidelined me from embarking on my second career as a basketball player in the NBA,” he joked in a 40th reunion report to his Harvard classmates in 2012. (After a short interview with ProPublica, Carlton subsequently declined comment, citing client confidentiality.)

Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the federal bench in 1981. Posner left Lexecon. “Andy and I were young,” Carlton said. “Gee, we wondered: Is the firm going to survive? Not only did it survive, but it did very well.”

Lexecon capitalized on the Eighties merger explosion. M&A was rising to cultural prominence as the domain of swashbucklers. Corporate raiders enlisted renegade lawyers and brash investment bankers to take on stalwart names of American industry.

Behind the scenes, the less-flamboyant economists gained influence. From the time antitrust laws began to be passed, in the late 19th century, until the 1970s, courts and the government had presumed a merger was bad for customers if it resulted in high concentration, measured at thresholds much lower than the market shares for the dominant companies in many sectors today.

Led by University of Chicago theorists, a new group of scholars argued that this approach was overly simplistic. Even if a company dominated its industry, it might lower prices or create offsetting efficiencies, allowing customers more choice or higher quality products. In 1982, William Baxter, Reagan’s first head of the Justice Department antitrust division, codified the requirement that the government use economic models and principles to forecast the effect of mergers.

Lexecon seized the opportunity. “We were not just going to talk about economic theory but show with data that what we were saying could be justified,” Carlton said. By the late 1980s, the top four Lexecon officers were each making $1.5 million a year, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

Any merger over a certain dollar size—currently, $78 million—requires government approval. The government passes most mergers without question. On rare occasions, it requests more data from the merging parties. Then the companies often hire consulting firms to produce economic analyses supporting the deal. (Sometimes the government hires its own outside academic.) Even less frequently, the government concludes it can’t approve the merger as proposed. In such cases, the government typically settles with the two companies, requiring some concession, such as sale of a division or product line. Just a handful of times a year, the government will sue to block a merger. Recently, the Obama administration has filed several major suits to block mergers, as companies in already concentrated industries propose bigger and bigger deals. According to a tally from the law firm Dechert, the government challenged a record seven mergers last year out of a total of 10,250.

Recent research supports the classic view that large mergers, by reducing competition, hurt consumers. The 2008 merger between Miller and Coors spurred “an abrupt increase” in beer prices, an academic analysis found this year. In the most comprehensive review of the academic literature, Northeastern economist John Kwoka studied the effects of thousands of mergers. Prices on average increased by more than 4 percent. Prices rose on more than 60 percent of the products and those increases averaged almost 9 percent. “Enforcers clear too many harmful mergers,” American University’s Jonathan Baker, a Compass economist who has consulted for both corporations and the government, wrote in 2015.

Once a merger is approved, nobody studies whether the consultants’ predictions were on the mark. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission do not make available the reports that justify mergers, and those documents cannot be obtained through public records requests. Sometimes the companies file the expert reports with the courts, but judges usually agree to companies’ requests to seal the documents. After a merger is cleared, the government no longer has access to the companies’ proprietary data on their pricing.

The expert reports “are not public so only the government can check,” said Ashenfelter, the Princeton economist who has consulted for both government and private industry. “And the government no longer has the data so they can’t check.” How accurate are the experts? “The answer is no one knows and no one wants to find out.”

Compass Lexecon itself is the product of serial M&A. A Michael Milken-backed company bought Lexecon for $60 million in 1999. Then it sold Lexecon to FTI Consulting, an umbrella group of professional consulting service firms, in 2003 for $130 million. In the deal, Carlton received $15 million through 2008 in non-compete payments, according to a Chicago Crain’s Business story. He also has held an equity stake in the firm. In 2006, FTI bought Competition Policy Associates, another consulting firm that had also built itself through combination, merging it with Lexecon to form Compass Lexecon. FTI Consulting had $1.8 billion in revenue in 2015, of which $447 million came from economic consulting. The economic consulting division has 600 “revenue-producing” professionals who bill at an average hourly rate of $512 an hour, the highest of all the company’s segments. Charles River Associates brought in about $300 million in revenue last year, led by antitrust consulting.

So few top consulting firms and leading experts dominate the sector today that economists wonder mordantly whether excess concentration plagues their own industry. In 2013, the government granted a waiver to Joshua Wright, the law professor and economist who was a consultant for Charles River. The waiver permitted him to serve as an FTC commissioner and review deals his former consulting firm advised on, as long as he didn’t deliberate on matters that he had directly worked on. Otherwise, the commission’s business might have ground to a halt because Charles River was involved in a third of all merger cases that came before the agency. Wright declined to comment.

Jonathan Orszag, senior managing director of Compass Lexecon, came up with a solution to allow Compass experts to work on more mergers. He is a well-known figure in Washington circles, and the brother of Peter Orszag, the vice chairman of investment bank Lazard and former high level Obama administration official. Jonathan’s social media teems with his globetrotting adventures. Brides magazine featured his destination wedding in the Bahamas. In August 2015, he celebrated on Twitter that he had played on all of the top 100 golf courses in the world. Although he does not have a Ph.D. in economics, he serves as an expert himself and is respected particularly for his expertise on global deals. He declined to comment on the record to ProPublica.

At Orszag’s urging, the firm relaxed its conflict of interest rules, according to multiple people who have worked with or for Compass. Now, Compass Lexecon experts can, and do, advise both sides in disputes. (Under Compass policy, the parties need to consent to such arrangements.) Separate teams of staffers, who cannot communicate with the opposing side, run the cases. The arrangements require on occasion that experts with adjacent offices must stop talking to each other during cases.

Compass economists can reach very different answers to the same question, depending on who is paying them. In 2012, the federal government and a group of states sued Apple for conspiring with several major publishers to fix prices on e-books.

The states hired American University’s Jonathan Baker, the Compass economist, as one of its experts. Baker’s report concluded that e-book prices cost 19 percent more than they should, as a result of the price-fixing. Another government expert arrived at the same 19 percent estimate, and calculated that consumers had been overcharged by $300 million.

Apple later hired Orszag, also of Compass, to do the same calculation. Orszag first came to the conclusion that the effect on prices was lower than the government side’s estimate, around 15 percent. Then he argued there were offsetting benefits to consumers that knocked the number all the way down to 1.9 percent, or just $28 million.

“The actual harms suffered by consumers … are modest,” Orszag concluded.

A federal judge slapped Orszag down for that work. Denise Cote, of the Southern District of New York, threw out part of Orszag’s report in the Apple case. The judge assailed Orszag’s study as “unmoored” from facts and “unsupported by any rigorous analysis,” criticizing a calculation of his as “jerry-rigged.”

Lawyers for the states found out Orszag was working for Apple only when he filed his expert report in the case. The news shocked them, two of the lawyers said, because they felt Orszag had been privy to their legal strategy. Orszag had personally negotiated and signed the contract when the states retained Compass and Baker to do the expert work attacking Apple, now Orszag’s client. The contract prohibited Compass from working on both sides of the case without permission, which had not been obtained.

The states, which had paid Compass and Baker $1.2 million for their work, later sued Compass for breach of contract. They found out that two of its staffers, an administrative assistant and an entry level researcher, had worked for both of the opposing economists. In a deposition, Orszag defended his firm, saying that he believed the Compass contract with the state governments “had been suspended” when he signed on to work for Apple.

Compass settled with the states, paying back some of the money. A person familiar with Compass’ position says that its conflict-of-interest rules didn’t apply to the low-level employees who helped both economists.

The premier economists in the field move back and forth from consulting firms to the top positions at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. In 2006, Carlton joined the Bush Department of Justice for a 17-month stint as the highest-ranking department economist, before returning to the firm.

Carlton and the other luminaries in the field keep busy. From 2010 to 2014, Carlton consulted on 35 cases, according to his declaration in one case. That total includes his help for companies not only in front of the government but also in private litigation. Mostly he works on the defense side, fending off accusations of price-fixing or anti-competitive behavior. His clients have included Verizon, Honeywell, Fresh Del Monte, and Philip Morris. Because top experts get bonuses based on what the firm generates in billings, their annual incomes can run up to $10 million in a very good year.

Like other top consultants, Carlton devotes hundreds of words in his expert reports to describing his academic credentials, scholarly publications, and journal affiliations. Corporate clients value him not just for his prestige and point of view but for his skill as a witness. Unlike some of his colleagues, he is never bombastic or arrogant. With small eyes, puffy cheeks crowding his soft, wide nose, and hair that sweeps above his brow, Carlton looks as intimidating as a high school guidance counselor. But his calm, unassuming demeanor, even under intense cross-examination, makes him the perfect champion for his corporate clients.

“If you needed one guy for one deal and price didn’t matter, I’d take Dennis,” said a partner at one top New York corporate law firm. “He is the best.”

Carlton also knows just how far he can go. When he speaks, he proceeds deliberately, in a nasal accent, displaying a wariness that comes from decades of being questioned in court. Economists often argue that a merger will produce efficiencies, allowing companies to make more widgets for less money, an overall boon for society. But for an efficiency to count as an argument in a merger’s favor, it must be a result of the merger itself. Carlton sometimes says the cost-savings are “merger related,” according to a former Justice Department economist. “He is very careful about language. He won’t say ‘merger specific.'”

An off-the-cuff comment at a recent conclave illustrated Carlton’s prominence in the hidden world of antitrust proceedings. One evening in April, lawyers, government officials, and economists gathered in Washington for the spring meeting of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Section. Held at the JW Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue, the gathering is the prime marketing event of the year for the economic consulting industry.

After a mind-numbing day of panels on issues like “Clarifying Liability in Hub-and-Spoke Conspiracies,” the consultancies hosted competing cocktail receptions. The Charles River Associates event featured a generous spread of Peking Duck. Berkeley Research Group hired a live jazz band. Justice Department staffers sipped drinks with once-and-future colleagues now at white-shoe law firms, and Ivy League economists.

Earlier in the day, during a discussion of new theories about the damage caused by concentration in the airline industry and the overall economy, antitrust attorney John Harkrider shrugged at his fellow panelists. “I’m sure if you paid Dennis Carlton a million bucks, he’d blow up all these things,” he remarked.

Carlton’s rosy forecasts about the impact of proposed mergers haven’t always proven accurate. In the summer of 2005, Whirlpool, the appliance giant, decided to take over Maytag, a storied name that had gradually faded. The combination would leave three companies—the other two being GE and Electrolux—in control of more than 85 percent of the market for clothes washers and dryers. They would have 88 percent of the dishwasher market and 86 percent for refrigerators. In addition to the namesake brands, the newly enlarged Whirlpool would own Amana, KitchenAid and Jenn-Air, and manufacture many Kenmore appliances. The companies hired top law firms to persuade the Bush administration Justice Department to allow the deal. And the firms brought in Carlton.

Despite the combined entity’s powerful position, Carlton argued in his report that it still faced a threat from foreign competition. The possibility that a big box retailer might switch to LG or Samsung would prevent the newly combined company from raising prices, he asserted.

The companies did not persuade Justice Department officials, who proposed blocking the merger. An outside economic expert of their own, University of California at Berkeley’s Carl Shapiro, backed the staff’s analysis. The Bush appointee who headed the antitrust division, Assistant Attorney General Tom Barnett, resisted the staff’s conclusions. Right after Shapiro provided his analysis, Barnett wrote to the companies’ law firms, outlining the arguments that Shapiro and the staff made against the merger. Barnett, who declined comment, provided a roadmap to how to respond to the government’s claims, a person familiar with the letter said.

After months of deliberation, in March 2006, Barnett overruled the staff recommendation, allowing the merger to go through with no conditions. Shapiro and American University’s Baker later called it a “highly visible instance of under enforcement.”

Carlton’s predictions did not pan out. Whirlpool raised prices. Five years after the deal, Princeton’s Ashenfelter and an economist with the Federal Trade Commission found that, contrary to the Compass Lexecon pre-merger forecasts, the takeover resulted in “large price increases for clothes dryers” and price increases for dishwashers. In addition, the companies reduced their offerings, giving consumers fewer choices. By 2012, LG and Samsung had grabbed some market share mostly from second-tier players. Whirlpool and Maytag’s combined shares dropped just over two percentage points in washers and dryers, according to Traqline. But the competition had not brought down prices. Antitrust experts say that a scenario in which companies raise prices despite losing market share to competitors can be evidence that a merger hurt consumers.

The Whirlpool-Maytag merger was revisited in 2014 when GE tried to sell its appliance division to Electrolux, a Swedish manufacturer. Electrolux hired Jonathan Orszag. In December 2015, government officials questioned Orszag’s expert report on the possible effects of the GE-Electrolux merger. Contradicting Ashenfelter, Orszag had submitted a study asserting that the Whirlpool-Maytag merger had not raised prices, conclusions he based mainly on the washer and dryer market.

Justice Department staff economists studied backup material to his analysis and they found something troubling. Buried there was an acknowledgment that the Whirlpool-Maytag merger had resulted in price increases in cooking appliances, the very sector of the market that government officials worried might be affected by the GE-Electrolux combination. The Justice Department filed suit to stop the deal and GE pulled out during the trial.

In a speech in June, outgoing deputy attorney general David Gelfand warned about gamesmanship by economic consultants. While much economic work is good, “we do see junk science from time to time,” he said. As an example, Gelfand pointed to the GE-Electrolux case, though he did not name the company or Orszag. He said the inconvenient data “should have been disclosed and presented with candor” in the expert report supporting the merger.

Orszag did allude in a footnote to the other data, and provided backup materials that disclosed the higher prices in cooking appliances. He contended in his testimony that these price increases were due not to the merger itself but to other factors such as rising costs of raw materials. He said that Ashenfelter’s conclusions were wrong because, unlike Orszag, the Princeton economist did not have access to Whirlpool’s costs for making appliances.

Ashenfelter stands by his study. “My concern with Orszag’s deposition as evidence is that all this is done behind a curtain of secrecy. None of us know just what he did, how the cost data were constructed,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica. “Orszag’s results would only have been presented if they favored his client. Our paper had no clients and we would have been happy to find no price effect.”

In a bright conference room at Fordham Law School on a warm day this past September, an economist realized she had made a mistake in a deposition.

A WilmerHale partner seized on the error. A group of people, seated at blond wood tables in sleek, ergonomic black chairs, took notes as light streamed into the room, reflecting off the columns of Lincoln Center across the street. The economist, Michelle Burtis of Charles River Associates, turned to the audience and, letting out a laugh, broke character.

“And at this point, I would definitely start obfuscating,” she said, smiling.

Burtis was presenting a mock deposition to train lawyers and economists on the pivotal role economists can play in antitrust matters. Charles River and another consulting firm, Cornerstone Research, sponsored the conference.

Burtis, who has short, chin-length brown hair, oversized glasses, a friendly demeanor, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, continued to guide the attendees toward “what is helpful in a situation like this,” where the economists had erred but still needed to push the client’s line. “You’re never going to get me to admit this is a mistake,” she explained.

The government’s reliance on economic models rests on the notion that they’re more scientific than human judgment. Yet merger economics has little objectivity. Like many areas of social science, it is dependent on assumptions, some explicit and some unseen and unexamined. That leaves room for economists to follow their preconceptions, and their wallets.

Economists have an “incentive to get a reputation as someone who will make a certain type of argument. People will hire you because they know what testimony you will give,” said Robert Porter, an economist from Northwestern who has never testified on behalf of a corporation in an antitrust matter.

In a 2007 interview, Carlton maintained an expert witness shouldn’t be biased. “It is the job of the economic consultant to reach an expert opinion in light of all the evidence, both the good and bad. I think it destroys an expert’s credibility to present only the supportive evidence,” he said.

Economists who do a lot of consulting on antitrust cases say it is not in their long-term interest to shill for a corporate client. Carlton says consulting is tougher than writing for peer-reviewed journals. For scholarship, “it’s not required for the editor to re-run your numbers. In litigation, the expert on the other side has reviewed to make sure I haven’t made errors. The scrutiny is good and leads to a higher quality of report,” he told Global Competition Review, an antitrust trade publication in 2014.

While the data is hidden from outsiders, what matters to Carlton is that there are no secrets between the companies and the government. “When economists are speaking to each other, it’s transparent. They are discussing the economics. The data is turned over to the other side. It’s your model vs. theirs,” Carlton told ProPublica.

Several former employees of consulting firms describe their jobs differently. They say they understood that clients wanted them to reach favorable conclusions. The job was “to go through analyses of market data and try to suggest that this merger doesn’t raise antitrust concerns,” said David Foster, who left Compass Lexecon in 2014, after working as a young analyst there for a year and a half.

The companies and lawyers that rely on economists as witnesses aren’t looking for neutrality. At the Fordham conference, a panel moderator asked Katrina Robson, a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers, what she sought in an expert. “To be able to be an advocate without seeming to be an advocate,” she replied.

Companies and their lawyers shop around for amenable economists, looking for the reports that provide the answers they are looking for. Karen Kazmerzak, a partner at Sidley Austin, told attendees that she likes to hire two economists if the client can afford it. “It often comes out that one economist is not prepared to deliver the conclusions you need them to deliver,” she said. In those cases, the law firm can fire one economist and go forward with the other, more malleable consultant.

When an expert concludes that a merger won’t pass muster with the government, the corporate client typically either backs out of the proposed deal, figures out concessions to offer the government, finds a more supportive economist at the same consulting firm, or switches firms. Sometimes, according to a prominent antitrust lawyer, unwelcome predictions are locked in a drawer, protected by attorney-client privilege, never to be seen by the government or the public.

On occasion, Carlton has told companies that their deals are unlikely to be approved. He’s walked away from at least one merger: H&R Block’s 2011 takeover of TaxAct, a software firm. The government challenged it, and Carlton pulled out a few months before the trial. The companies hired a new expert from a competing firm, who defended the merger in court. The Justice Department used Carlton’s departure to cast doubt on the credibility of the new consultant and won the case.

In 2011, when AT&T sought to take over the cell phone company T-Mobile, the government balked. T-Mobile, a smaller and scrappier rival, often tried out new and innovative offerings to keep cell service costs low. Carlton represented AT&T. Based on data the company provided, he predicted that the cost of cell phone service would explode if AT&T couldn’t take over T-Mobile and use its network to meet rising demand. Without the acquisition, Carlton and his Compass colleagues concluded, AT&T would be forced to charge higher prices.

When government officials looked closely at Carlton’s model, they realized that it was implying that prices would rise so high without the merger, the cell phone market would shrink by 90% within a few years. Justice Department officials viewed this as wildly implausible. “We find that the applicants’ economic model is deficient,” the government wrote of the work by Carlton and other Compass Lexecon consultants. Soon after the companies announced their deal, the Department of Justice sued to block the transaction and after several months of wrangling, the companies dropped the transaction in late 2011.

Even though AT&T was not able to complete its takeover, cell phone usage in the US has not collapsed by 90%.

Shortly after AT&T withdrew its offer for T-Mobile, the top economist at the Justice Department, Fiona Scott Morton, held a dinner at the Caucus Room, a Washington eatery, for several economists who worked on the deal. The restaurant provided an intimate and comfortable setting for a post-mortem. “Everyone is friends,” recalls one attendee. “It was fun.”

They debated who had the better case. Carlton conceded that AT&T and T-Mobile would have found it hard to win at trial, according to an attendee. But he wished it had gone to court. He was eager to try out a new and provocative argument for mergers: That even though prices would have risen for customers, the companies would have achieved large cost savings. The gain for AT&T shareholders, he contended, would have justified the merger, even if cell phone customers lost out.

Carlton’s expert report predicted that T-Mobile was doomed to failure without the merger. “Our review indicates that T-Mobile USA’s competitive significance is likely to decline in the absence of the proposed transaction,” he and two other Compass Lexecon economists wrote.

Five years later, T-Mobile’s stock price and market share are up and its colorful CEO, John Legere, has been credited by the business press for “singlehandedly dragging the industry into a new era” with innovations such as abolishing cellular contracts. In 2014, Bill Baer, then the head of the antitrust division at the Justice Department, claimed victory: “T-Mobile went back to competing to win your business,” he said in a speech. “And T-Mobile’s competitors were compelled to respond.”

Today, AT&T’s much grander takeover of Time Warner will be an early test case for president-elect Trump, who feuded during the campaign with CNN, a Time Warner property. It will also be a boon for Compass and the small army of academic economists mobilizing for the multi-front battle waged by the government, competitors and the merging companies.

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These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers

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Breaking: The climate is changing because a Koch brother said so

Breaking: The climate is changing because a Koch brother said so

By on 12 Apr 2016commentsShare

The climate is officially changing, as the eternally wise petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch, a notorious climate denial funder, has declared it to be so.

Koch Industries’ Environmental, Health and Safety Director Sheryl Corrigan made the comment about Koch’s climate beliefs at a recent event hosted by The Wall Street Journal, reports Environment & Energy Publishing. So sayeth Koch, and it shall be true:

“Charles has said the climate is changing. So, the climate is changing,” Corrigan said. “I think he’s also said, and we believe, that humans have a part in that. I think what the real question is … what are we going to do about it?”

Koch has been see-sawing over climate change for years. At one point, Koch acknowledged that “it’s been warming some” to The Washington Post in 2015, then quickly qualified his statements an interview with Forbes, saying he believes “it’s not certain” that humans are to blame for climate change. This statement seems to be the first time Koch has been said to attribute human activity to global warming.

But throughout it all, Koch has been actively supporting lobbyists and climate skeptics. While blasting “crony capitalism,” he and his political network has said they plan to spend nearly $900 million during the 2016 presidential election race. His roster of climate-related fundees includes scientists who are critical of climate science and members of Congress who signed a pledge promising to vote against climate legislation in 2013.

Koch hasn’t publicly commented on Corrigan’s statements just yet, so we can’t be sure that the climate will still be changing tomorrow.

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Breaking: The climate is changing because a Koch brother said so

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And the Prize for Ebola Fearmongering Goes to Louisiana

Mother Jones

Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell has a plan to stop Ebola: file a restraining order. Caldwell, a Republican, called the proposal to dispose of Dallas Ebola victim Eric Duncan’s incinerated belongings at a Lake Charles landfill “absurd” and pledged to use the legal process to stop the transfer. WBRZ Baton Rouge reports:

“We certainly share sadness and compassion for those who have lost their lives and loved ones to this terrible virus, but the health and safety of our Louisiana citizens is our top priority. There are too many unknowns at this point,” Caldwell said. The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office is in the process of finalizing the application for temporary restraining order and expects it to be filed as early as Monday morning.

Additionally, the office is sending a demand letter to Texas state and federal officials, along with private contractors involved seeking additional information into the handling of this waste.

Caldwell, whose decision was quickly supported by GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal, didn’t offer any details on how burying the incinerated materials would affect the people of his state. It’s hard to see any risk—Ebola is transmitted only through bodily fluids, and Chemical Waste Management Inc., which operates the storage facility, sees no problem. And it’s not as if the ashes are going particularly far, anyway—Lake Charles is just a quick jaunt over I-10 from Port Arthur, Texas, where Duncan’s belongings were burned.

But Caldwell’s stance is especially bizarre in light of the great lengths Louisiana lawmakers have gone to position the state as a repository for every other kind of waste. Fracking-waste disposal, for instance, has become a $30-billion industry nationwide over the last decade. Much of that waste water has been dumped into old wells in Louisiana. Louisiana may also soon begin accepting thousands of tons of other states’ shale waste-water, which will be shipped down the Mississippi on barges. In Louisiana you can even store radioactive materials in an abandoned salt cavern, and then, after the salt cavern collapses, creating a massive sinkhole and forcing hundreds of people to permanently relocate, pour wastewater directly into the sinkhole. Just don’t try to truck the ashes of an Ebola victim’s belongings across the Sabine.

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And the Prize for Ebola Fearmongering Goes to Louisiana

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“I Still Live.” A Remembrance of Charles Bowden

Mother Jones

Charles Bowden at the 2010 Texas Book Festival Photo: Parker Haeg

“Clara, I still live…The story here is simple. The silence is not.”

That he died in his sleep, and not at the hands of the cartels, or the coyotes, or dirty cops on either side of the border, is something. There were times when he’d sit with his back to the door and travel with a former member of the Federales for protection. But in the end, it wasn’t one of the long line of people he pissed off and laid bare that finished him off. A flu likely did, probably with the help of hard living: the chain smoking and the sequential all-nighters and the alternating binges of black coffee and red wine. Charles Bowden was 69.

Chuck—never Charles—didn’t write for money, one reason he wrote for me so often at both Harper’s and Mother Jones. He didn’t write for fame, either, though he’s revered among people who cover the border and crime, and among writers who like voice and metaphor and can forgive occasional romantic excess. He would sometimes take an assignment an editor dreamed up, or one you’d discussed along the way, but just as often he’d dump 20,000 words on you out of the blue. Sure, you had to cut it in half somehow, and ground passages where the jazz got too free. But he was gracious about editing—”Oh hell, do what you want, I trust you”—and fact-checking (no small undertaking). He was a champion of the underdog, which included the migrants and dirt farmers, the maquiladora girls and asylum seekers he wrote about, but also the writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, or artists whose careers he helped. He respected hard work, which could be work that was dangerous or epic in scope, but also hard in another way: tricky, gutting, soul-baring, a high-wire act.

Classic Chuck Bowden stories from the MoJo archive.


“We Bring Fear”


Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America


Outback Nightmares & Refugee Dreams


Charlie Kernaghan, Keeper of the Fire


Dennis Kucinich: Little Big Man

Chuck was gifted to me by Colin Harrison, then deputy editor of Harper’s. They’d worked on a piece before I came to the magazine in late 1995. “But I think a woman would be a better editor. It’ll be interesting, anyway,” I recall Colin saying. And maybe that’s true—Chuck’s writing was better when a few layers of machismo were pared away—but also Colin warned me that no conversation with Chuck came in under two hours. Once, I finally pulled the old-style receiver from my ear only to find that a vacuum seal had formed around it. “Bowden ear,” I warned the fact-checkers.

But oh! Those calls! He’d range from how the rain sweeps down an arroyo to the works of Weegee to the proper preparation of veal bolognese. Gangsters, classical poets, the Keating Five, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gary Webb, things he’d covered or read or heard about, all coming together in one glorious baritone rumble punctuated by deep drags and sips of coffee or wine, depending on the time of day. If you devoted yourself utterly to following along, you might get about 80 percent of the allusions—wait…Nikola Tesla? Davis, meaning Miles or Angela or…—”Look, you follow? Look, you follow?” It was hard, sometimes, to say, “Uh, not really.”

The first piece we worked on was “While You Were Sleeping.” It begins with him contemplating a picture of a mummified corpse of a maquiladora worker likely raped, certainly killed and dumped in the desert outside Juárez. Chuck was one of the first American writers to document the women hunted by person or persons unknown as they made the long journey from their homes to the US factories brought into being by NAFTA. His writing is heart-wrenching, but it was his decision to tell the story through the eyes of the street photographers—Manuel Saenz, Jamie Bailleres, Gabriel Cardona, and Julian Cardona (who’d later accompany him on other reporting trips)—documenting the carnage ripping through Juárez that gave the piece real power:

Over the past two years, I have become a student of their work, because I think they are capturing something: the look of the future. This future is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. We have models in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure. Juárez doesn’t look like any of these images and so our ability to see this city comes and goes, mostly goes…These photographs literally give people of picture of an economic world they cannot comprehend. Juárez is not a backwater, but the new City on the Hill, beckoning us all to a grisly state of things.

When editors say stuff like “find your Virgil, find the figure that will help you tell the story behind the story,” writers should take a page from Chuck Bowden, who had a novelist’s eye for characters that could stand in for so much more. Take “Ike and Lyndon,” perhaps the most esoteric piece of his I ever edited. In it he somehow used a man institutionalized for murdering his grandmother who spends his days painting portraits of the presidents to tell the story of a doomed president and the ghosts of Vietnam that haunt us all. Well, you’ll just have to read it. (Harper’s pieces are here behind a paywall. These essays and others are also in The Charles Bowden Reader, co-edited by his former partner, Mary Martha Miles.)

If I had to describe Chuck to somebody, not physically, necessarily, but the essence of him, it might be something like: part Bogart, part Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski, no small dose of Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, the kind of guy who’d regale you with tales in a dive bar, and then walk you to your car—”always walk a woman to her car, no matter the time of day or night”—and then tell you where to get the best tacos before leaving you with a journalistic koan. Long before he’d made the border his life’s work, he’d covered dark, dark things and was scarred by them. In “Torch Song,” which was included in Best American Essays, he wrote of covering sex crimes and murders of little kids (for which he was a 1984 Pulitzer finalist), and how he retreated into a world of sex and drinking and suicide hikes through the desert, and discovered that the line between commonplace betrayals and kinks and those deeper, darker horrors is not as brightly demarcated as you’d thought, knowledge that was something you can never recover from, not really.

Somewhere in those hours my second marriage ends. I know why. I too, tend to say yes. The marriage ends because I do not want to live with her anymore, because she is a good a proper person and this now feels like a cage. I do not want to leave my work at the office. I do not want to leave it at all. I have entered a world that is black, sordid, vicious. And actual. And I do not care what price I must pay to be in this world.

That piece is largely about how people can’t bring themselves to face the realities of rape and abuse, despite them being the hidden back story of so many lives. It was hard to edit; I sometimes dreaded our calls. I didn’t have a child then. I tried to read it through yesterday and couldn’t.

It is, of course, reporting on the border for which Bowden is best known. His book Down by the River (one of many) recalls how two DEA agents search for the truth behind the murder of their brother at the hands of a 13-year-old from Juárez and destroy their family in the process—all while telling the story of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the (now dead) kingpin of the Juárez cartel who haunts so many of Bowden’s stories. In Exodus, which first appeared in Mother Jones and later became a book, he traveled back and forth across the border to tell the story of the migrants:

Here is the basic script: You get off a bus you have ridden for days from the Mexican interior, increasingly from the largely Indian states far to the south. This is the end of your security. On the bus, you had a seat, your own space. Now you enter a feral zone. With money, you can buy space in a flop ($3 a night) and get a meal of chicken, rice, beans, and tortillas (about $2.50). You stare out on an empty desert unlike any ground you have ever seen. Men with quick eyes look you over, the employees of coyotes, people smugglers. On the bus, you were a man or a woman or a child. Now you are a pollo, a chicken, and you need a pollero, a chicken herder.

You will never be safe, but for the next week or so, you will be in real peril. If you sleep in the plaza to save money, thugs will rob you in the night or, if you are a woman, have their way with you. If you cut a deal with a coyote’s representative (and 80 to 90 percent do), you still must buy all that black clothing and gear, house and feed yourself. Then one day, when you are told to move, you’ll get in a van with 20 to 40 other pollos and ride 60 miles of bumps and dust to la línea. Each passenger pays $25. The vans do not move with fewer than 17, prefer at least 20, and do, at a minimum, three trips a day. A friend of mine recently did the ride and counted 58 vans moving out in two hours…In this sector of the line, the 262-mile-long Tucson Sector, a few hundred will officially die each year. Others will die and rot in the desert and go uncounted. A year ago, a woman from Zacatecas disappeared in late June. Her father came up and searched for weeks to find her body in the desert, a valley of several hundred square miles. He stumbled on three other corpses before finding the remains of his own child.

In “We Bring Fear,” his last piece for Mother Jones, he told the story of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a Mexican journalist fleeing north for his life, not from the cartels per se, but the Mexican Army units working with them. In “The Sicario,” his last piece for Harper’s (edited by the amazing John Jeremiah Sullivan Bill Wasik), he told the tale of a former cartel hit man who’d dismember and bathe people in acid while keeping them alive via adrenaline shots just to torture them a bit more. There was the story for Esquire where he attempted to and largely succeeded in redeeming Gary Webb, the journalist who came under attack after claiming the CIA had aided inner-city drug dealers in a ploy to help fund the Contras. (Despite that piece and others vindicating much of his reporting, Webb killed himself, something that Bowden never got over.)

Bowden got all these people to open up to them because he liked a good story, even if it came from a “bad” person, and besides, there’s no good or bad on the border, “there is only this fact: We either find a way to make their world better or they will come to our better world.”

I got the call from Scott Carrier on Saturday, near midnight. Scott, who’s a writer and radio producer—if you’ve ever heard “Running After Antelope” or any of his other This American Life pieces, you’ll remember them—and Chuck had been friends and mutual admirers for years. He’d once interviewed Chuck talking about writing in a short film by Lisa Miller, every writer should watch it (posted below, as are links to other eulogies). I’d seen Scott just a few months before. Had he seen Chuck recently? I’d asked then. Scott hadn’t. He’d been dealing with some hard times, he explained, and didn’t want to burden his friend. I told him I’d heard Chuck was not doing well, and maybe Scott would go see him? I put this to Scott because I knew he’d do it—when my car broke down as I made the cross-country trip moving to California, he drove me from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, took a nap, and turned around to drive the 736 miles back—and because I was still a little angry by proxy for Chuck’s former partner, another “nice and proper” woman who’d been left behind. Mostly, though, I was probably just feeling ashamed that I’d let so much time elapse since the last time I’d enjoyed “Bowden ear.”

Scott did go see Chuck, on assignment from High Country News to write a profile of him (due out next month). And so Molly Malloy, Chuck’s current partner—a journalist behind the border news site Frontera List who’d who’d helped Chuck (and our fact-checkers) with the story of Emilio—called Scott within a few hours of finding Chuck’s body.

There’s a pending autopsy, but does it matter exactly what killed him? There was a lot of hard living, though less of late, Molly says. But Scott believes and I believe that it was the toxic residue of what he saw and reported—which he sometimes claimed he’d quit trying to do, before going on another binge of reporting and writing—that was the underlying cause. “A literary career should be not a career but a passion. A life. Fueled in equal parts by anger and love.” So wrote Edward Abbey in “A Writer’s Credo,” one of Chuck’s touchstones. Chuck kept going because he loved to write. And because he kept hoping his work would lead to change, but it never did, not really, not in a big way, not enough. He’d write about how the migration, the globalization, the forces of addiction and lucre and deviance were as unstoppable as hurricanes. But part of him needed to believe that he’d stop at least some of it. If not him, who?

“He wanted me to do it, he wanted other people to do it, because he didn’t want to be alone out there,” says Scott. “I’d ask: ‘Why do you do this?’ And he was like, ‘Why the fuck don’t you?’ He didn’t say that out loud. He never did. To me or to anyone. But I think he thought that all the time.”

Here’s a collection of eulogies and pieces about Chuck Bowden:

Jim Nelson and other editors at GQ
Molly Molloy, Mary Martha Miles, and former colleagues via the Tucson Sentinel

NPR
Tom Zoellner and Luis Urrea via the Los Angeles Times

Bill Conroy of Narco News

Drawing of Chuck Bowden courtesy of the artist Alice Leora Briggs

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“I Still Live.” A Remembrance of Charles Bowden

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Quick Reads: "This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed" by Charles Cobb

Mother Jones

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This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed

By Charles E. Cobb Jr.

BASIC BOOKS

In this challenging book, Charles Cobb, a former organizer, examines the role of guns in the civil rights movement. Looking beyond the conventional narrative (“Rosa sat down, Martin stood up…”), he finds that the nonviolent struggle against Jim Crow was often backstopped by armed supporters keeping the threat of white violence at bay. The title paraphrases a Mississippi farmer’s admonition to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who turned the other cheek in public while keeping guns at his home after it was bombed. Cobb’s thesis may thrill Second Amendment enthusiasts, but he argues that truly standing your ground means scaring off white thugs in hoods—not gunning down a black teen in a hoodie.

This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed" by Charles Cobb

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Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch: He "Considers Himself Above the Law"

Mother Jones

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Cross-posted from Kochology, where Daniel Schulman is releasing exclusive documents and other materials gathered in the process of reporting his new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

Long before Charles Koch became the left’s public enemy number one (or two, depending on where David Koch falls in the rankings), some of his most vocal detractors were not liberals but fellow libertarians. None of his erstwhile allies would come to loathe him more fiercely than Murray Rothbard, one of the movement’s intellectual forefathers, with whom Charles had worked closely to elevate libertarianism from a fringy cadre of radical thinkers to a genuine and growing mass movement.

In the 1970s, Charles helped fund Rothbard’s work, as the economist churned out treatise after treatise denouncing the tyranny of government. Rothbard was a man with a plan when it came to movement-building. Where some libertarians had bickered over whether to advance the cause through an academic or an activist approach, Rothbard argued that the solution wasn’t to choose one path, but both. Charles was taken with his strategic vision.

Rothbard dreamt of creating a libertarian think tank to bolster the movement’s intellectual capacity. Charles Koch made this a reality in 1977, when he co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane, then the chairman of the national Libertarian Party. This was a high point for libertarianism, when a busy hive of libertarian organizing buzzed on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, home to Cato and a handful of other ideological operations bankrolled by Charles Koch.

But the relationship between Cato’s co-founders soon soured.

Rothbard, who was feisty by nature, chafed under the regime of Crane and Koch—the libertarian movement’s primary financier at that time. His breaking point came during the 1980 election, when David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. Rothbard and his supporters felt that, in a bid for national legitimacy, David Koch and his running mate, Ed Clark, had watered down the core tenets of libertarianism to make their philosophy more palatable to the masses. Americans today would consider their platform—which called for abolishing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and eliminating federal agencies including the EPA and the Department of Energy—a radical one. But to Rothbard and his circle, it wasn’t radical enough. For instance, the Clark-Koch ticket stopped short of calling for the outright repeal of the income tax. And Clark, to Rothbard’s horror, had even defined libertarianism as “low-tax liberalism” in a TV interview.

Following the 1980 election, in which the Clark-Koch campaign claimed a little over one percent of the popular vote, Rothbard did not hold back. He penned a scathing polemic titled “The Clark Campaign: Never Again,” in which he wrote that Ed Clark and David Koch had “sold their souls—ours, unfortunately, along with it—for a mess of pottage, and they didn’t even get the pottage.” Thanks in part to Rothbard’s rabble-rousing, factional feuds and recriminations splintered the libertarian movement just as it was gaining momentum. A few months after Rothbard’s diatribe, Charles Koch and Ed Crane tossed him out of the Cato Institute and voided his shares in the think tank (which was set up, under Kansas law, as a nonprofit corporation with stockholders), a rebuke that turned their libertarian brother-in-arms into a lifelong adversary.

Rothbard would later play a cameo role in the messy battle between the four Koch brothers. In 1988, when Bill and Frederick Koch sued their brothers over control of the family foundation that had been established by their father, they dredged up Rothbard as a possible witness, seeking to depose him in the case. They hoped his testimony would damage Charles Koch’s credibility and support their contention that their brother was a tyrannical control freak who used nonprofit entities to advance his own aims.

A document summarizing Rothbard’s anticipated testimony was filed in the case, and I came across it as I pored over thousands of documents at the district court house in the Koch family’s hometown of Wichita. Rothbard, it seemed, was only too eager to denounce his onetime benefactor.

Charles Koch, Rothbard planned to testify, “involves himself in the minutest details related to the non-profit foundations with which he is associated…. He insists on personally approving even the minutest matters, such as $100 grants, stationery design and color of offices.” Rothbard contended that Charles would go “to any end to acquire/retain control over the nonprofit foundations with which he is associated” and “considers himself above the law.” And the economist further alleged:

Charles Koch has a practice of misusing nonprofit foundations for his own personal ends. Charles Koch wants absolute control of the non-profit foundations, but wants to be able to spend other people’s money not his own. He wants to spend that money on things that will enhance his personal image and goals, even it these expenditures are not consistent with the publicly stated goals of the foundation. Amongst other things, Charles Koch uses his involvement with non-profit foundations to aquire access to, and respect from, influential people in government and elsewhere.

Rothbard died in 1995, taking his grudge to the grave. By then, Charles and David Koch had abandoned the libertarian movement and struck out on their long path to becoming Republican powerbrokers. As their influence has expanded within the broader GOP in recent years, I’ve heard echoes of Rothbard’s past criticisms in the conservative nonprofit world by recipients of Koch network funding who complain of micromanagement by the Koch brothers’ political adjutants. “Nobody really works with them,” said the leader of one conservative group. “They work for them or not at all. They are kind of creating a monopoly” and attempting to “make the conservative movement theirs.”

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Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch: He "Considers Himself Above the Law"

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