Courtesy of Atrios, on why we are backing banksters rather than ordinary people:
This would never happen because it would grossly unfair to help some people so we’ll do the fair thing and just give money to rich assholes.
Category: Good Writing
Brains…Brains…Brains…Brains…
Paul Krugman laments the fact that failed economic ideas are now the conventional wisdom:
When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?
……
Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.
Go read.
It is a good analysis, but I think rather incomplete.
He seems to think that Barack Obama, in his attempts to appease Republicans, has given them cover to promulgate these failed ideas.
I think that this is too Byzantine an explanation. The simpler explanation is that Barack Obama gives lip service to these failed ideas because he actually believes in these ideas.
It explains his unwillingness to prosecute the banksters, their fraud against consumers in the HAMP, their attempts to water down financial reform, etc.
This is not cowardice. This is corporatist thinking to a degree that makes Bill Clinton looks like Karl Marx.
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Jane Hamsher:
It’s hard to “fight” when the head of your party runs his political operation with the emotional maturity of an overheated teenage boy in the latest installment of Twilight.
Positively brutal, but true.
Ms. Hamsher has come to the same conclusion as me, that Barack Obama wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone, because ……… I don’t know why, but my guess is because in his heart of hearts he makes Bill Clinton look like “Red” Ken Livingston.
Added to the List of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off,
My sincerest apologies for not mentioning the Rude Pundit earlier.
He is a very profane genius.
One of his more recent gems is about the Republican response to Obama’s capitulation, “Senate Republicans Have a Celebration Orgy“:
The Senate Republican cloakroom was filled with whores yesterday. No, not the senators themselves, who were taking the afternoon off from letting the Chamber of Commerce sodomize them, the better for their assholes to regain some elasticity. There were real, actual, non-metaphorical prostitutes there, female and male, paid for by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads GPS and its billionaire donors.…
In the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I implore you tor ead the rest.
I’m With Bruce Schneier On This
If we we are so damned terrified of terrorists that we have to erect airport style scanners to get into the Washington Monument, then we should close the structure to the public until we have grown a pair.
It’s Back
Get Your War On!
There are 21 strips at the link.
I’m With Jane Hamsher on This
Barack “I suck up to Wall Street Like 1000 Hoover vacuum cleaners” Obama is not folding on tax cuts for the hyper-rich, he wanted them to keep their tax cuts all along:
It’s been clear for some time that President Obama made the political calculation that he does not want any of the Bush tax cuts to expire. He doesn’t want to be the guy in 2012 running for President on having “raised taxes during a time of recession.”But the President also doesn’t want the political blowback of angering people who cheered him on the campaign trail when he promised to let the tax cuts expire. And so rather than just come out and just say that, he’s been actively trying to kill a Chuck Schumer deal to keep them from expiring on income of more than $1 million a year. It was a plan that put the GOP in an awkward position, and had thrown them off message in recent days — hard to be the people fighting for the 315,000 families who fall into that category over the 2 million set to lose their unemployment benefits by the end of the year.The President argued against the Schumer deal, we are told, because he was concerned about “the cost [to the deficit] and the risk of redefining the middle class as those making over [should read under] one million.”
The President’s argument is, of course, pure crap.
I think that when we look at Barack Obama’s performance on issues of real reform, it’s clear that he falls short of his rhetoric because he does not want real reform.
Financial reform was mostly smoke and mirrors, with small steps, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, being driven by a need to avoid totally alienating his base in 2012.
The same goes for taxes, or for the give-away to health insurers that is laughably called healthcare reform.
Go read the rest.
Why is it that Only Comedians Report the Truth
In Comedy, Veritas
This time, it’s Saturday Night Live, who issue a devastating take-down of last year’s stress tests by the US Department of the Treasury.
H/t Naked Capitalism for pointing me to the video.
Headline of the Day
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Zach Carter:
So Paul Krugman’s prediction of zombie banks creating a drag on the economy has not come true. The reality is, in fact, much worse. Krugman foresaw zombie banks that didn’t lend due to capital concerns, preventing the recovery from getting off the ground. We’re seeing plenty of that, but we’re also seeing zombie banks actively prey on the economy through the foreclosure process in an effort to repair their balance sheets. The zombie banks aren’t just failing to boost the economy, they’re actively sabotaging it.
Go read the rest.
Tweet of the Day
Economic Quote of the Year*
Final thoughts from an economist on Armistice Day:
There are plenty people out there (I’ve just seen a documentary on Channel 4 presented by one) who don’t believe in Keynesian economics, but who think that the Great Depression was ended by the Second World War. In other words, paying men to dig holes and fill them in again is a ridiculous policy, compared to the sensible and effective course of action of paying men to dig holes and die in them.
H/t Mithras.
Giving Great Hed
As in headline, not oral sex, is Barry Ritholtz, who, writing for Bloomberg, notes that one should, “Kiss Your Assets Goodbye When Certainty Reigns.”
His basic thesis is that when you have unanimity of opinion, the markets are almost always disastrously wrong:
History teaches that whenever the opposite occurs — when certainty overwhelms uncertainty — the herd tends to be wrong. In rare instances, when there is a near-total lack of uncertainty in the market, the outcome is usually a spectacular disaster.
It’s a good read, and probably a very good investment strategy.
What the Nobel Laureate Says
No, not Paul Krugman, George Akerlof:
As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.
And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. See this, this and this.
OK, that’s one Laureate, but here is a second, Joe Stiglitz:
An institutionalized system of skewed incentives allowed Wall Street bankers and other corporate executives to gamble with America’s wealth and then get away largely scot-free after the house of cards came tumbling down, plunging the U.S. into the worst economic crisis in decades and destroying trillions of dollars of wealth worldwide.
That’s the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz, an internationally renowned economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. ………
Of course, this will not happen unless the politicians are forced to, because in general, the establishment believes that the big Wall Street Banks must be free to rape and pillage innovate, and in the specific case, Obama likes Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, and any investigation of the fraud would doubtless have at least one, and possibly all three, of them in the dock facing criminal charges.
Just Go Read Matt Taibbi
His latest, on the corrupt Florida “rocket docket” special foreclosure courts is a thing of beauty.
Go read.
A Very Nice Take-Down of Treasury View Economic Blather
Click for full size
The Numbers Do Not lie
But David Henderson Does
Economist Mike Kimel does a masterful job of taking down another right wing economist, one David Henderson, who asserts that the government spending actually suppressed economic activity during WW II, and when reduced, we experienced an unprecedented boom in GDP.
Only we didn’t.
Henderson also claims that the relaxation of economic controls under Truman lead to a much larger increase in private investment.
Only it didn’t.
The giveaway that Henderson is writing to reflect his opinions, rather than the facts is that he published his article at the Geroge Mason University Mercatus Center, which is another one of those right wing “think” tanks.
In any case, both of Kimels articles are worth a good read.
It is a very well done, and very well deserved, “Fisking” of a charlatan.
H/t Angry Bear.
This is a Metaphor for Halloween
Click for full size
Did I mention that it was illustrated?
It is a very funny essay on what happens when a child is separated from cake.
Taking candy from a baby, my ass.
Go read, it is brilliant, at least it is if you have children.
No Predictions from Me
My record sucks, and I will take Abraham Lincoln’s advice, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
But I will leave you with a political quote on the horror that is Republicans the man who best understood horror in the 20th century,* Howard Phillips Lovecraft:
As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
H/t Fafblog for the quote, which is being circulated by movie director, and Lovecraft fan, Joe Dante.
*Or at least pre Holocaust, since I believe that it fundamentally redefined horror in the Western world by putting the lie to the myth of man’s moral progress..
Maybe the Blue Dogs Aren’t the Worst Democrats in Congress
I think that the Blue Dogs are wrong, but I get the sense that they are motivated by values and ego.
I think that many of them legitimately believe that women cannot be trusted with their bodies, that rich people should not be taxed, and that idiot sons of rich people are entitled to be rich ad infinitum.
The larger New Democratic Caucus (Melissa Bean who The Onion excoriates is a senior member of the caucus), however, is just a bunch of people who want to suck at the tit of big business, as Sebastian Jones and Marcus Stern ably document:
As Congress entered the final weeks of its struggle to overhaul regulation of Wall Street in May, several hundred friends and colleagues slipped out of Washington for a private weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Most were lobbyists for large banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, and big-ticket trade groups. However, 28 were members of Congress, and 29 were legislative staffers, all part of a coalition of House Democrats with a business-friendly agenda.
The retreat was held in honor of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists has made their organization one of the most successful political money machines since the Republican K Street Project collapsed in 2007. In the past year and a half, New Democrats have pulled in more than $18 million in campaign contributions from their lobbyist fundraising network. The lobbyists, in turn, have mingled with lawmakers and their staffers at least 850 times during fundraising events and informal get-togethers.
…………
These folks were hamstringing Barney Frank at every turn during work on financial reforms because they worked for the banks, and not the American people.
The Blue Dogs get the press, but when push comes to shove, it’s the New Dems who f%$# us.
Read the rest of the article. It’s long, but it’s long because it is exhaustive.
I Hate The Onion
Click for full size
Not only does the truth hurt, it leaves a nasty mark!
Their headline, “Democrats: ‘If We’re Gonna Lose, Let’s Go Down Running Away From Every Legislative Accomplishment We’ve Made’“:
WASHINGTON — Conceding almost certain Republican gains in next month’s crucial midterm elections, Democratic lawmakers vowed Tuesday not to give up without making one final push to ensure their party runs away from every major legislative victory of the past two years.
Party leaders told reporters that regardless of the ultimate outcome, they would do everything in their power from now until the polls closed to distance themselves from their hard-won passage of a historic health care overhaul, the toughest financial regulations since the 1930s, and a stimulus package most economists now credit with preventing a second Great Depression.
“There’s a great deal on the line, and we know it isn’t going to be easy for us,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), speaking from the steps of the Capitol. “But if we suffer defeat, we will do so knowing we cowered away from absolutely anything we produced that was even remotely progressive or valuable in any way.”
If you’ll excuse me, I will now hit myself in the head repeatedly with a hammer, because that is more pleasant than facing this reality.
Here is a hint for the Democrats: If The Onion is writing an article, and it describes your campaign strategy, you are being a f%$#ing moron.