May 2013
9 posts
4 tags
The Bush gambit and the Press
The press and Republicans kept the 2000 Presidential election close enough for the Supreme Court to steal it for George W. Bush thanks a great deal to Bill Clinton’s abdication under fire. The Justice Department stopped trying to enforce the voting rights act - facilitating Florida and other states gross vote theft operations. The FBI was basically handed over to the Republicans and spent...
4 tags
Liberal libertarianism and the Associated Press
@root_e I don’t care. Govt, any govt, vs freedom of press, there’s only one honest side.
— JeffSharlet (@JeffSharlet) May 15, 2013
And I immediately think about El Mercurio in Chile in 1972 and Radio Rwanda when it was urging its listeners to kill the “cockroaches”. Or perhaps when Rush Limbaugh refers to liberals as cockroaches. To me, the Allende government should...
3 tags
The USA can reduce budget deficit and use...
The budget of the United States is so bloated with give-aways to the wealthy, subsidies of dirty, obsolete industries, waste and inefficiency that it could be brought into balance rapidly while still increasing both investment in infrastructure and the kind of economic stimulus Keynes showed will boost economies out of recession.
Keynsian stimulus is a simple idea based on the observation that...
5 tags
Tomasky and Charles Pierce battle for hysterical...
I’m inclined to award this to Michael Tomasky for his “Fire Holder” article in which he gives the following hilarious advice to President Obama:
And if Obama permits these things to linger, they’ll poison the situation on Capitol Hill, which hardly needs any more poisoning, and the substantive bills he wants to pass will be at risk because the GOP base will be that much more...
4 tags
You can't borrow your way out of debt - what?
Suppose I’m in debt, have no car, and get a job offer for a good job that I can’t reach by bus or train. If I could borrow money to buy a car should I stay unemployed and hope for a miracle?
Suppose my company gets an order for 100 widgets at $1million dollars and it will cost me $1/2 million to get the raw materials and pay for the labor and shipping to make those 100 widgets....
4 tags
Why do right wingers hate Keynes so much?
It’s not because they don’t believe “Keynsian stimulus” works - although they pretend otherwise. Listen to Republicans talk about Federal spending on the military or state spending on roads - they know that government spending can create jobs and wealth even if they usually say the opposite. What Republicans and Hayekians and the other right wingers hate about Keynes is...
2 tags
The overweening arrogance of the progressives
The Dem base—even its big donors—are in a real uproar over Keystone. As they should be—it’s a fateful decision washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-pol…
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
May 10, 2013
So Bill McKibben claims to speak for the Democratic Base even though the AFL-CIO President supports the pipeline. The sheer arrogance and smug self-righteousness of the Pro-Left...
1 tag
Henry Farrell, Colin Crouch, and why the old line...
Crouch sees the history of democracy as an arc. In the beginning, ordinary people were excluded from decision-making. During the 20th century, they became increasingly able to determine their collective fate through the electoral process, building mass parties that could represent their interests in government. Prosperity and the contentment of working people went hand in hand. Business...
1 tag
Taxpayers help banks, Apple, stock investors,...
Apple just borrowed $17,000,000,000 (seventeen billion dollars) even though it has $145,000,000,000 (one hundred forty five billion) in cash. Why borrow when you have so much cash sitting around? Apple, Apple Stockholders, bond investors, Goldman-Sachs and Deutsche bank all benefit from this strange deal because - yes you guessed it, the American taxpayers love to give away money for corporate...
April 2013
9 posts
2 tags
George W. Bush kept us safe
This is what Republicans were saying last week: After 9/11, George W. Bush kept us safe. The slick con-man “after 9/11”, as if the President who ignored a national security briefing with the title “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US” was somehow not responsible for his own inaction is so offensive you might not notice the really sickening part - the Republican...
4 tags
How does the world change?
In 1860, the cash value of the slaves in the cotton belt of the United States was more than the value of all the railroads and factories in the USA. The technology employed to move cotton down the Mississippi and goods up it was the leading edge of modern technology. The financial system that advanced credit to slavers and moved cotton bales to British factories was sophisticated and powerful and...
2 tags
Please take your disappointment with President...
If you are disappointed that President Obama always speaks civilly and keeps reaching out to the ill-mannered, ignorant, and often badly intentioned racist Republicans, grow the fuck up and put a sock in it. President Obama repeatedly explained that this would be his strategy from the day he ran for US Senate. He discussed this strategy in his books, in articles, in speeches and even in a fucking...
2 tags
Process versus Substantive Civil Liberties and...
The purpose of the Miranda warnings is to discourage police from coercing confessions or self-incriminatory statements from people in police custody. Let’s note two important facts:
The warning is far from completely effective. For example, the Central Park 5 were coerced into confessing rape and assault and spent many years in jail until someone else confessed the crime and DNA evidence...
3 tags
Criticism from the left
Suppose you were a left liberal, what we used to call a “progressive” writing about President Obama’s proposed 2014 budget. You might write something like this:
A. The 2014 budget makes some steps towards: fixing the economy, with a $50B infrastructure investment fund, to a healthier society with things like universal Pre-Kindergarten, and to tax fairness by cutting outrageous...
4 tags
The kind of sharp political analysis you find at...
The DailyKos analysis of the Chained CPI dispute starts from the premise that the President has alienated older voters:
Except it’s not the base of the party that’s (57+ / 0-)
upset. It’s the majority of Americans, especially elderly voters, whose votes Democrats need in the 2014 elections. The President really doesn’t care about the electoral future of the Democratic...
3 tags
Wall Street Journal Capitalism for the Entitled
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal today contains two insightful glimpses into the minds of the Entitled Capitalists who think big fat government subsidies are the natural right of the rich. The first is a very sympathetic news story about Sheep Farmers who have a special government program that allows them to import impoverished sheep-herders from places like Peru and pay them a generous...
4 tags
The big union win that nearly nobody has noticed
This is mostly true:
Put a union label on the new American Airlines because it never would have happened without labor.
The airline’s own employees pushed the company into bankruptcy, drove out the hated leaders and escorted their own white knight onto the property. On Thursday, as US Airways announced its merger with American at a crowded media event at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport,...
1 tag
Talk about an entitlement: Wall Street Journal...
The invaluable Wall Street Journal editorialists provide a clear explanation of the kind of free market that the entitled 1% want: one where all risks are on the backs of the people who work for a living while all rewards are reserved for “investors”. Stockton California is moving towards bankruptcy and, grab yer hankies ‘cause this is sad:
… leaves the city’s...
March 2013
7 posts
4 tags
Standing with Rand back through history
Some paragraphs from Rand Paul’s speech and speeches from a couple of decades ago. There are some easy give-aways, especially at the end and the first paragraph, but take a look.
The President says, I haven’t killed anyone yet. He goes on to say, and I have no intention of killing Americans. But I might. Is that enough? Are we satisfied by that? Are we so complacent with our rights...
4 tags
The modern GOP is shaped by Nixon's treason
The recent confirmation that Richard Nixon secretly conspired to sabotage peace talks President Johnson was holding with Vietnam also confirms the modern Republican party as a party of treason against the United States. Nixon secretly told the government of South Vietnam it would get a better deal from him than from the President of the United States and that it should walk out of peace talks. He...
3 tags
Obamacare's third anniversary
Markos Moulatsis on Twitter 2009
My position on #HCR — kill it if it includes mandate. Strip out the mandate, then what’s left is inoffensive. Not reform, but inoffensive. about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
RT @xxxxxx: What is irksome, and deadly, is that individual mandate is not off the table. So this turns into a bad ins. subsidy bill about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck...
3 tags
Digby haz a sad
Using this precedent [the bombing of Cambodia - root] to justify the current covert war across the globe is truly astonishing. That it’s being done by the president who most people see as the most liberal since FDR is just sad.- Digby
Tsk tsk.This is a variant of a favorite Greenwald complaint about how liberal Obots have zombie trampled muddy boots over their most heart-felt principles...
4 tags
The Progressive Libertarians fall for Rand Paul's...
Why I don’t call myself a progressive #billion. The funniest thing about the “filibuster” is that it didn’t actually delay the vote. Under the Senate’s idiotic rules, the closure vote had to “ripen” for 30 hours anyways. So the whole thing was just a media stunt. But this didn’t stop our Progressive Savants from cheering on Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco...
4 tags
Progressive finance hysteria from 2011
Published in People’s View in 2011.
Bank of America moved some derivatives from its Merrill-Lynch subsidiary to its depository bank and the so-called “progressive” blogs became very upset. One problem with their reporting is that apparently none of the “Progressive” financial experts understands what”notional” means so they really over-state how much...
5 tags
Who speaks for progressives?
Congresswoman Barbara Lee and David Sirota on the health care bill
Sirota this is a telling indictment of the health care law itself, strongly suggesting that it was constructed by the Obama administration - as some progressives argued - as a massive taxpayer-financed giveaway to private insurers like Wellpoint.
Congresswoman Lee: our vote tonight carries significance similar to the passage of the...
February 2013
6 posts
3 tags
The Supreme Court versus the Constitution: again
The Constitution says that there is a process to amend the Constitution and the amendments passed according to this process then “shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution”.
Article. V. The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of...
4 tags
Confessions of an ex-leftist who became a mindless...
Years ago I heard Professor Cornel West speak in New York. It was a virtuoso performance, drawing on Sartre, Marx, Dubois, Douglas, and Dewey and many others I am too ignorant to cite, and in a spectacular style that swung from AME preacher testifying to Malcom X’s cold precision to Ivy League dryness without a false note. I could never have imagined that the same Professor West would say...
3 tags
The Supreme Court's Campaign for the Republican...
In 2000, the Democrats win a decisive victory in the Presidential popular election and clearly were the intended choice of a majority of voters in Florida. The GOP majority on the Supreme Court violates all precedent and invokes the 14th Amendment which was intended to protect the rights of black citizens as grounds for giving the election to GW. Bush and ignoring the votes of black citizens. Bush...
4 tags
All that's left melts into air: How the left...
This post has been incorporated into an even better one !
Who could have expected Revolutionary Marxist Professor Cornel West, a brilliant scholar who combined hip-hop with Marx and Sartre, to say of President Obama “He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination”? DERACINATION?!! Comrade Brother West went on to lament - “He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class...
3 tags
Why do we need private depository banks? II
During the fiscal crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury stepped in to take over many of the functions of the banking system. They showed they could do the job cheaper, better, and at less risk to the public. Extending this service would free up the rest of the market economy from our bloated financial sector and reduce the size and complexity of the regulatory system.We do not need...
3 tags
Geithner and his pseudo liberal critics
Gretchen Morgenstern of the NYTimes joins the list of people writing critical summations of Geithner’s term at Treasury as if the economy consisted only of Wall Street banks and as if the major proposition of neoclassical economics was self-evidently true instead of being clearly false:
For everyday Americans, his major tasks included responding to the home foreclosure mess, unwinding...
January 2013
11 posts
4 tags
Were the Savings and Loan Prosecutions all of...
1982
‘‘All in all I think we hit the jackpot.” Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden after signing the bill deregulating Thrifts and Savings and Loans
and
2010
If you go back to the savings and loan debacle, we got more than a thousand felony convictions of the elite. These are not, you know, tellers or something.
Bill Black to Bill Moyers
and
1990
Sen. Alan J. Dixon...
3 tags
In defense of Goldman-Sachs, sort of: PBS...
The Frontline PBS “expose” of the financial crisis has an indignation set-piece on everyone’s favorite villain Goldman Sachs and their cartoon bad guy CEO Lloyd Blankfein. It’s worth a look just to see why so many of the “obvious” fraud prosecutions that journalists, pundits, and grandstanding politicians yell about are nothing of the sort. The key segment is a...
5 tags
PBS Untouchables is unbelievably naive on the...
The producers of the PBS “expose” on the Financial Crisis are at their most hapless when they allow GOP Senator Chuck Grassley to pretend to be outraged by the lack of prosecutions after the financial crisis. Grassley has spent 30 years in the Senate, he was the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 2003 until 2006 (during the peak of the mortgage abuses), and tried his best to...
4 tags
Simon Johnson and the Libertarian Critique of...
Much of what has been billed “criticism from the left” of the Obama Administration ( or criticism from the progressive point of view) has actually been criticism from the Libertarian point of view. Like every other “progressive” who has attempted to write an obituary for Tim Geithner’s term as Treasury Secretary, Simon Johnson is silent about Geithner’s ...
3 tags
Dear Progressives: Keynes was not a supporter of...
Absolutely nothing in Keynes work implies that reducing government spending and/or reducing the government deficit necessarily reduces economic activity. The so-called liberals or progressives who keep claiming otherwise are confusing themselves. For example, the government spent $122,000,000,000 in Afghanistan last year. If we immediately withdrew from Afghanistan at a cost of...
3 tags
Black cats and white cats
First posted on The People’s View in 2011.
Here’s a story about the work of Ron Bloom, President Obama’s manufacturing adviser and what he heard from executives at manufacturing firms in Northeast Ohio.
In some cases, they called for a more expansive government role in manufacturing, along the lines of China, Germany or Japan.
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” said Andre...
4 tags
Marcy Kaptur's rhetoric
First published in DailyKos June 2011. (minor edits in this version)
A Daily Kos diary implicitly asks the question - why don’t President Obama and other Democratic politicians say the things that Marcy Kaptur says - the kind of “down and dirty” attacks on the plutocracy that so many “progressives” want to hear? That kind of question is pretty common on progressive...
1 tag
Who is naive
Previously published in the People’s View. and then in the DailyKos.
You know, if you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research then you should want our fiscal house in order so that every time we propose a new initiative, somebody doesn’t just throw up their hands and say more big spending, more...
4 tags
The Reactionary Left and Financial Market Reform
Suppose that Congress took a step to channel low cost Federal loans to small community banks and community lending institutions - like micro-lending non-profits that specifically make capital available to people shut out of the normal banking system. And suppose that reform had already increased small business lending.
Or suppose the laws were changed to allow small business to sell shares and...
4 tags
The politics of Matt Tabbi's big con
Aside from racism, the most important source of political power for the far right in the United States is apathy and despair. The same political forces that murdered people for registering to vote in Mississippi just a few decades back and that are still desperately working on voter suppression tactics today also work hard to convince “the wrong kind of voters” that there is no purpose...
4 tags
Matt Taibbi's big con
Matt Taibbi is so good at whipping up indignation about the evil bankers that it’s easy to overlook the crackpot and diversionary nature of the story he is telling. It would be useful if there was public pressure, for example, to provide a postal bank that would give people an alternative to commercial banks or if the government made low cost loans available to businesses or municipalities...
December 2012
5 posts
3 tags
A modest proposal for free market bank reform
The reason we have this huge, complex, and inefficient bank regulation system is that history shows there will be bank panics. If there is bank panic in an industrial economy, the effects are devastating and long-lasting. Bank collapse triggers bank collapse in a spreading circle that, in the absence of deposit insurance, destroys consumer savings and business clearing accounts ( so businesses...
Philosophy for us rats
If we believe we came out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make syllogisms. These are among the powers of the unknown, and if, as may be, it has still greater powers that we cannot understand … why should we not be...
4 tags
Low wages, social insecurity
Conservatives are now hardly bothering to disguise their political objective - destroying the middle class. Here’s Politico explaining the consensus of official Washington on Medicare. The thing to notice is that they don’t care about cutting costs - the benefits are what they want to cut.
They will also tell you Medicare, which is on pace to be insolvent in 12 years, is a much,...
3 tags
Cheery holiday thoughts
For Schopenhauer, suffering is an ineliminable feature of this worst of all possible worlds. Here the nastiness of experience makes it such that, for each of us, it would have been better not to have been born. Indeed for Schopenhauer, our world can be described quite accurately as hell, and we “are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.” Eddie S....
5 tags
Keynes versus usury
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. For a little reflection will show what enormous social changes would result from a gradual disappearance of a rate of return on accumulated wealth....
November 2012
8 posts
1 tag
Basketball metaphor updated
Suppose liberal/progressive pundits called a basketball game:
Chalmers takes the ball upcourt - that’s incredibly stupid, he’s not a scorer
He passes to Wade - Basketball 101: You can’t score if you don’t put the ball in the hoop, all this passing bullshit is pure cowardice.
Wade in traffic, passes back out to Haslem - this is amateur hour, the hoop is that way...
5 tags
Color and class blind "progressives"
The professional “left” in the USA, the left of intellectuals, professors, lobbyists, and “progressive media” is now mostly a suburb of Libertarianism - a suburb that has preserved only certain habits of speech and some historical myths from the old left. By way of illustration consider Corey Robin’s 3500 word essay on Federal budget deficits posted in the...
3 tags
Negotiation 101 Revisited: a primer
Here’s what happens when you make a bunch of concessions before negotiations begin: your compromised stance becomes the *baseline*.
— David Roberts (@drgrist) November 8, 2012
Why is it that progressive pundits are so eager to make pronouncements about things they know nothing about? Political negotiations are not like buying a car, no matter what the progressives keep saying. A car...
