Once the health care fight is over, the next big fight is the battle over financial regulation. As challenging and frustrating as healthcare has been, at least reformers have been in the game in terms of a decent bill. The odds have never been even, but a decent bill, in my view, is a possible ending. With the financial regulation fight, the odds are much tougher because the Wall Street lobby is so powerful, and the forces on the other side are still relatively weak, and the Obama proposals overall are a weaker starting place than in health care. As important as it is, though, the financial regulations fight is only a pre-cursor to the massive economic policy debates that we will be engaging in for the next four years. These fights are symbolized by a phrase that the President and his economic advisors repeat too often, a phrase that is both politically tone deaf and potentially indicative of a much deeper problem in their thinking. It's the phrase, "jobs are a lagging indicator" of our recovery. I worry less that they say it, though, and more that they might actually believe it.
That "jobs are a lagging indicator" thing is a phrase that conservative economists (which is most of them) like to use because in their neo-classical economic models about recessions and financial crises, first the bankers regain confidence and their economic health, then they start loaning to businesses again, then businesses get healthy - and finally at the end of the happy cycle - they start hiring workers again. Of course, as the brilliant Paul Krugman piece on the economics profession in the NYT magazine pointed out, many of the same economists said both a real estate bubble and a financial panic were actually impossible because they didn't correspond to their free-market-cures-all-problems-and-provides-perfect-equilibrium models.
If the basic ideas behind the jobs being a lagging indicator phrase sound vaguely familiar, it's because they are essentially another version of the trickle-down economics we have been hearing for years from the two Presidents Bush and President Reagan: give those rich people and corporate CEOs more money, and it will eventually trickle down to the rest. There are a great many problems with this theory, but they can be summed up rather simply with the fact: pretty much nothing ever trickles down. In all the years of the Reagan and Bush presidencies, 20 years in all, the income of middle class workers stagnated (or worse), while the income of the rich skyrocketed.
So now we see one article after another on the economy reporting some version of the news that banks have recovered, businesses are starting to do better, but workers are getting left behind. You can grab any article on the economy at random written over the last couple of months, and find the same kind of quote, such as this one from a WP article from September 1st: "The emerging economic recovery suffers from a great contradiction: Even as factories seem to be cranking out more stuff, the job market remains terrible."
Now I am not suggesting that Obama's economic philosophy is the same as the right-wing Republican trickle-down philosophy of Reagan and the Bush kin. There are lots of things to like about what he has done and proposed so far. The stimulus was classically liberal Keynesian, with hundreds of billions in job-creating public capital investments, and it is clearly helping prop up the economy right now. Even the tax cuts that were included in the stimulus bill were considerably more progressively structured than any tax cuts ever passed or proposed by Republican Presidents. Obama's budget proposal was also very progressive: the most money for poor people of any federal budget in history, even LBJ's War on Poverty budgets, for example. He has generally argued strongly for a more progressive tax system than we have seen in the Bush or Reagan years. Although we don't know what we will get in the end, his initial health care and energy proposals included solid policy ideas with lots of good progressive notions in them. And he clearly does believe in a stronger regulatory hand than Republican Presidents whose lack of support for even basic regulation is so much of the reason we are in the economic mess we are in today.
In spite of all this though, I do have a couple of deep worries about Obama's economics, and neither of them are small things, they go to the very core of whether the "lagging indicator" ever catches up to the happy days the Wall Street bankers are experiencing right now. One worry is about the President and his economic team's core belief system, and the other is his tactical mindset.
On the economic belief side, I worry that he doesn't fundamentally get that the neo-classical theories that have dominated the economics profession over the last couple of decades are just flat out wrong, and that our economy, despite the recent uptick in some statistics because of the stimulus and the trillions of dollars the Fed injected into the system over the last year, is on some level truly broken. Neo-classical economics assures that once we stabilize the banking system, more credit will go to businesses to invest, and they will all eventually start hiring people. The problem is that this economy is still fundamentally weakened, that the cracks and bruises it suffered in its sudden fall last year made it vulnerable to other problems that will sap its strength. If the neo-classical economists are wrong again- just like they were about the housing bubble, just like they were about deregulating finance and the financial crisis in general- and the economy stays soft, will the jobs ever start getting ginned up again, especially after all that stimulus money runs out in the middle of 2011? (What a delightful time for the economy to turn south for an incumbent President gearing up for his re-election campaign.)
The other thing I worry about with President Obama is on the tactical level. I give him huge credit (in fact of all the things I like about him, what I like best is this) for his willingness to swing for the fences, to try to do big things, transformational things: health care reform, climate change, financial reform, immigration reform. His ambition and desire for big change is his best quality. But when it comes to how you get things passed, his instinct seems to be to follow Rahm Emanuel's more conservative lead and stay carefully within the cautious conventional wisdom lines: rather than being as gutsy on his tactics as he was on his big change agenda, he seems to be pulling back. In order to break through the power of DC special interests, I think Obama is going to have to take them on directly, pick fights with them, and beat them decisively. Because not only is the economic system broken, the political system is broken as well. He needs to think big about programs that create jobs directly, and think bigger than he's done so far about taking on Wall Street.
In the 1930s, FDR figured out that the economic theories that he studied in college were no longer working, and needed to be directly challenged. He put money directly into jobs and income for the poor and working class people rather than doing bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy. He took the fight to the big special interests, the "economic royalists", with pride and with gusto. And the American people supported him. Now is the time for President Obama to take FDR's example, and to fully embrace bottom-up policies rather than the trickle-down variety.
New income, poverty, and inequality data has just recently been released by the US Census. Over at DKos, Meteor Blades reported on it, drawing on an excellent presentation by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. The title of her presentation was, "New 2008 poverty, income data reveal only tip of the recession iceberg." And this is certainly true. After presenting the data for 2008, including a loss of $1,756 in average income for the middle 20% of households, she writes:
We find that the average income for the middle 20% of households will likely decline by $2,456 in 2009, and by an additional $601 in 2010, for a total decline of $4,813 from 2007 to 2010. This is a decline in income of 9.3% for the typical household over these three years. Given the decline in income over the weak business cycle from 2000 to 2007, this means that after reaching an all-time peak in 2000, by 2010 real incomes for the typical household will likely have declined by $5,729, or 10.8% - truly a lost decade.
And here's one of her charts that Meteor Blades reproduced:
I advice everyone to go read her presentation. This are really going to get ugly before they get better. But I want to take a somewhat different focus for this diary, extending an analysis I did a couple of weeks ago, "Forget The Recession--Bush Economy Sucked BEFORE Then". I want to compare the 7-year and 8-year records with a view toward arguing that things have been economically lousy throughout the Bush years, and the media have been doing a terrible job of informing the American public all along. More charts, and very little text need to tell the story on the flip.
This is a bit of the flip side of the earlier diary on fascism.
There was quite a flap this week over Tom Ridge's revelation that terror alerts had (gasp!) been politicized! Marc Ambinder made a fool of himself and Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald smacked him down.
In part, Glenn wrote:
Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.
This is fine as far as it goes, but there's a number of larger points that need to be made here:
(1) What the Bush Administration did with these manipulations was itself terrorism. They terrorized the American people in order to manipulate the political process and coerce a political outcome favorable to themselves in a manner that was inherently destructive to civil peace and the democratic process.
(2) This was only the tip of the iceberg, however. The entire Bush response to 9/11 was a form of terrorism, from start to finish. They never let off terrorizing the American people, repeatedly scaring them out of their wits, and frightening them into doing things that they would never do if free from threats and coercion. 9/11 was a terrible screw-up on Bush & Cheney's part. It was nowhere near an existential threat to America. But because it was such a terrible screw up, Bush/Cheney had to vastly inflate al Qaeda's purported prowess. And so they went all in on terrorizing the American people. The vast majority of the Versailles press went there with them, and that press continues to defend Bush/Cheney to this day, precisely because they are complicit in terrorism against the American people, and the Republic.
Why won't Obama prosecute Bush and his friends for war crimes?
Because Obama and his friends are committing exactly the same crimes.
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission released its assessment of an American aerial attack in the western province of Farah on May 4, saying American forces demonstrated "a disproportionate use of force" that might have killed up to 97 civilians, most of them children.
That number is lower than the Afghan government's figure of 140 civilians killed but higher than the American military assessment of 20 to 30 civilian deaths in an attack it said singled out Taliban fighters.
In its statement on the American aerial attack in Farah, the human rights commission said that in addition to 11 adult male civilians who were killed, "available records suggest that 21 were women and 65 were children, 31 of whom were girls and 34 boys."
Exactly the same crimes...
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.
Exactly the same crimes...
IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them -- sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.
Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture -- and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal -- IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
And that's why Obama won't prosecute Bush and his friends for war crimes...
Because Obama and his friends are committing exactly the same crimes!
Students at Stanford stood still as they listened to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice speak. As the scholars pondered the words of the prominent woman who presented her case for waterboarding, many mused; "Is it Richard Nixon, or Condoleezza Rice? Which person thinks a President is above the law?" One might wonder. Those who viewed a video taped classroom conversation with Secretary Rice, today express astonishment as well. In her defense for actions she took to advocate for this extreme interrogation techniques Condoleezza Rice both blamed her former boss, George W. Bush and justified his decision.
"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."
Earlier today, Alren Specter said that the Democratic Party is being taken over by extremists
But we find, I think regrettably, that the extremes of both parties are taking over.
A senator like Joe Lieberman can't win a primary in Connecticut. I had a 1 percent primary for 2004. And, to repeat, the word that I use is "bleak."
Yep, it's "bleak" that Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter have to face difficult primary challenges from the extremes. Arlen Specter is excellent at repudiating extremes, which is why only four weeks ago he introduced flat tax legislation in the Senate:
Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) today introduced legislation that would scrap the 17,000 pages of current IRS code in favor of a 20 percent flat tax for all individuals and businesses. The revenue-neutral legislation would allow tax-payers to file returns on a postcard that could be completed in 15 minutes.
"My flat tax legislation would make filing a tax return a manageable chore, not a seemingly endless nightmare, for most taxpayers," Senator Specter said. "This legislation will fundamentally revise the present tax code, with its myriad rates, deductions, and instructions."
He also ran this campaign ad with Rick Santorum back in 2004:
More on Specter sticking it to the extremes:
''I'm here to say it as plainly as I can: Arlen Specter is the right man for the United States Senate,'' Mr. Bush said at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburg speaking to a crowd of cheering Republicans who raised $400,000 for Mr. Specter's campaign.(...)
Mr. Specter, the president said, is ''a firm ally when it matters most.''
Mr. Specter in turn piled accolades on Mr. Bush.
It is worth noting that this, pro-Bush version of Arlen Specter actually supported the Employee Free Choice Act.
What happens to the Democrats if there's another major terrorist attack within the United States, during the administration of Barack Obama?
Cheney has already made Obama the fall guy for another 9/11, and Republicans will probably continue to reinforce the meme that Democrats have weakened national security by ending "enhanced interrogations," withdrawing "prematurely" from Iraq, and so on.
Tons of cocaine pour across our borders non-stop, and there's absolutely no way to prevent biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons from following the same channels.
Democrats could make the argument that "enhanced interrogations" wouldn't interrupt the supply of cocaine, or prevent weapons of mass destruction from crossing the Mexican or Canadian borders, and every relatively intelligent person in the United States already knows this...
All 30% of us.
Meanwhile, the same 70% percent who thought Saddam had sponsored 9/11, just because Bush kept saying "Saddam....9/11....Saddam....9/11..." in disconnected sentences...
That 70% would never vote for another Democrat.
So how can Democrats avoid getting swept into the dust-bin of history by another major terrorist attack within the United States?
There's obviously a downside to making it crystal clear that our borders are too porous to defend, because the bad guys are also listening, and even if the relatively intelligent 30% of them already comprehend the porosity of our borders in detail, Republicans could still claim that anyone who discussed border-security had given terrorists a blue-print for terror.
Tax time is reason enough to reflect on our budgets, personal and national. How realistic are our expenditures? Do we spend more than we earn? Does our income allow for a few irrational indulgences? Do discretionary dollars exist? Might we consider our ample debt. Does this represent a temporary deficit, easily resolved, or an obligation that cannot be paid promptly. We may wish to rethink our reality. At home, families have taken scissors to credit cards. More than the minimum payment is made. The intention is to lessen liabilities and increase savings. In the month of April, after we pay Uncle Sam, most of us concluded, it is time to clean our own fiscal house. Next, we move to the nation's ledger.
Expenses The largest share of our moneys go to military operations. The terror tax has become a tremendous burden of American household and communities. Yet, few wish to rethink this "duty."
Not using the word "narcissism" (though she has before), digby is instead focusing on the issue of temperament in a recent brief post, "Finger On The Button", but the two are clearly related. She begins:
I think one of the things I find most reprehensible about the Republican Party and their Big Money backers is that they think it's ok to play Russian Roulette with the country (and the world) by nominating people to power who have completely inappropriate temperaments for it. George W. Bush, with his thin skinned, shallow understanding of the world, bottomless need for flattery, is a good case in point.
She then quotes from a Think Progress account, about another prominent example, "Report: 'Angry' McCain Referred To Hispanics As 'You People' During Outreach Meeting ". The most revealing part:
At one point, McCain reportedly began referring to Hispanics as "you people":
"He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."
McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people - you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that.
Some "outreach" huh? But that's how it's done amongst the narcissistic set. "You may kiss my ring.... No, on second thought, you're not worthy!"
So many times when we get together you have to put up with me complaining about something...and there are lots of other times when it's me warning about events that are looming in our future.
Even though they're conversations we need to have, they're often not very emotionally satisfying.
Today we depart from that pattern, in a very good way.
It's "follow-up day"; and the conversation takes us to three "happy places": two "problem" stories that have recent positive progress to report-and, just because I care about you, Gentle Reader, an exclusive preview of the George W. Bush autobiography, obtained with considerable effort from an unnamed and particularly well-placed source.
There's a lot to cover, so let's jump right in and tell you what you need to know.
I supported Wesley Clark and Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, and for bloggers driven by ideology and idiots on Daily Kos intoxicated by TV charisma, this pairing was more or less incomprehensible, but for anyone looking around for an honest candidate, it was obvious. Kucinich and Clark were the only honest Democrats in the race.
Did it really matter?
Suppose there's a candidate (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton) who bullshits almost constantly (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), but promises low taxes, world peace, free medicine, cheap gas, new frontiers in renewable energy, tolerance for gays, more jobs, better jobs, better schools, a huge defense establishment, and ... did I mention low taxes?
Doesn't it make sense to vote for a candidate who promises you a package of wonders for cheap, in the hope that the laws of physics and economics and even the axioms of mathematics will undergo a miraculous transmogrification immediately after election day, and our elected Messiah will transform five loaves and two fishes into a feast for everybody?
No.
It makes about as much sense to elect Obama or Clinton or Bush or McCain or that other Clinton or Reagan or that other Bush as it makes to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to a candidate who promises to simplify the laws of physics into one easy-to-remember formula that any idiot can understand, on the basis of mathematics that everybody knows is bullshit.
The Presidency of the United States really is a job for a rocket scientist, meaning somebody outstandingly more intelligent than you and me, and if we can't find anybody more intelligent than you, at least we have to try, and the obviousness of this maxim for almost everybody is convincingly demonstrated by the fact that we haven't elected a President without an Ivy-League diploma since 1984.
So almost everybody more or less accepts the fact that we live in a monstrously complicated world, and nobody but a genius can sort out all the conflicting advice that constantly rains down on every President, and somehow maintain the equilibrium of our monstrously complicated nation. But genius expresses itself in an infinite number of categories, and because we are weak, foolish creatures, we keep electing geniuses in the category of bullshit.
It gets worse.
As recently as 1996, we could still find a genius-bullshitter who was also appealing enough on TV to get himself elected, but no such individual appeared in 2000, and the era of Siamese Presidents was inaugurated by the mutant-hybrid Howdy-Doody-and-the-Devil frontman-puppetmaster combination of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, now replaced in the Oval Office by David Axelrod and Barack Obama.
These new twinsies have already managed to dump trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into black holes only thinly disguised as stimuli and bailouts, with no end in sight, and nothing like an honest explanation of any of it even expected by anybody except a few out-and-out drool-buckets at the very bottom of the category of idiots who elected the current monstrosity-hybrid of a bullshit genius.
I also like voting for geniuses, as long as they're honest, and only a few months before the beginning of the Democratic primary season, I still had two to choose from, although the Rhodes Scholar Wesley Clark fit a lot more obviously into that high-falutin' category than the indomitable little ex-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, but Dennis Kucinich is so honest, and his honesty keeps so much bullshit from getting in his way, that now his incredible clairvoyance about the many boondoggle-bailouts looks infinitely more like genius than the bullshit-twin-geniuses we foolishly installed in the Presidency, along with all their fumbling, bumbling Ivy-League assistants.
[TOM] DELAY: Excuse me, but the economy from 2001 to 2007 was going quite well, thank you, but people were pushing especially Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into loaning-making loans to people that couldn't afford them. That caused the housing strike (ph). And we can all go through that. But the economy most of the years of Bush was going just fine and we were fighting a war on terror in two different countries and we were keeping the homeland safe and we were not on a spending spree, like Obama is putting us on with his budget.
Economy going quite well, thank you? Er, not so much (all in constant dollars):
As can be seen above, the economic growth experienced by all income groups during the Clinton years came to a screeching halt when Bush took office. Incomes stagnated completely, all across the board. Numbers on the flip.
One of the main pillars of Republican thought is that LBJ's spending on social programs and his relatively modest federal deficits caused the hyperinflation and economic stagnation of the 1970s and early 1980s. The problem with this theory which largely goes unopposed is that the much larger deficits of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Georhe W. Bush stubbornly failed to cause inflation. LBJ managed to produce a b udget surplus in his last year in office, as well. I f federal deficits cause inflation, this record makes no sense.
In fact, I patiently waited for Regan's deficits to run into hyper inflation and lo and behold, we never had it. The same thing held with George W. Bush. Were larger Republican deficits kept in check by complicit bankers and Wall Street types or was there something else at work here. Well, it turns out that price inflation remarkably correlates with rise in oil prices rather than with federal deficits. Following the Arab-Israeli War OPEC applied an oil embargo to countries considered friendly to Israel. prices zoomed from $3 a barrel in 1971 to over $12 a barrel and the prices at the gas station went above $1 per gallon. A scond shock followed with the Iranian Revolution (1979-80) and the Iraq-Iran War which mostly cut off Iranian exports until Iran started winning in late 1981 or 1982. By 1981, oil prices rose to $35 a barrel.
Reagan exacerabated hyperinflation and stagnation by secretly supporting Iraq as retaliation of the hostage crisis. It was Dick Cheney who first armed Saddam Hussein while working for reagan. But Reagan got the politically credit by deliberately engineering a steep recession (10 straight months with unemployment over 10%) which broke the back of both our own economy and oil demand. Future deficits, which were huge, were paired with falling oil prices (and therefore) falling or stable cost of living stats. This economic malpractice tranferred the blame from the Nixon-Ford era to LBJ and "social programs." Social programs were tarred and feathered semi permanently while the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts were deified. Only the tax cuts really didn't produce much growth and the social spending does not appear to be the real cause of infalation. Nonetheless, this is politically effective and has seeped into conventional wisdom.
This frightens me. I'm sorry, but I just can't ignore it any longer. I need to ask this question. Is President Obama considering privatizing Social Security and/or Medicare?
We all make mistakes, some more than others. But Republicans prefer the sizzle to the steak. And thus we have the inevitable: GOP mis-sizzles. Here's a good example from earlier this month. On Feb. 4, Inside Edition reported:
After a rough day at the office on Tuesday, 2/3, President Obama's fashion style is now coming under attack. Former George W. Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card says the Obama dress code is way too laid back.
"There should be a dress code of respect," Card tells INSIDE EDITION. "I wish that he would wear a suit coat and tie."
Card is the first member of the Bush administration to bash Obama, and he's going after him for forgoing a coat and tie.
"The Oval Office symbolizes...the Constitution, the hopes and dreams, and I'm going to say democracy. And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it's appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the President."
The clear implication here--it wouldn't make sense any other way--is that Bush would never have taken off his jacket in the Oval Office, mush less let anyone else do the same. A Bush high official lecturing anyone about respecting anything is always good for a laugh. Picture Al Capone lecturing Elliot Ness. Bush, after all, turned the Oval Office into the central office of Lies, Inc., and millions of people are dead as a result. Respect?
So, of course, it's only fitting that Card's canard was quickly exposed by Huffington Post. It was not just another GOP absurdity. It was another Bush/GOP lie.
Today the New York Times discusses whether the government should buy hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic "assets" from failing banks at the market price, or...
Should the government pay a lot more than the market price?
If a bank says their junk is worth 97% of face value, Standard & Poor's says it's worth 87%, and it's selling for 38%...
What kind of fucking idiot would pay more than the market price?
That would be you and me, acting through our duly elected representatives, encouraged by the New York Times and hundreds of half-witted professors who predicted nothing and now explain everything on network TV.
Except that nobody has really bothered to explain anything beyond a few talking points repeated ad nauseam by corporate media and the shills for Goldman Sachs who happen to be running the federal government.
Question: How did we get in this mess, and how bad is it?
Answer: Garble-arble gib-gab!
But now that the screeching panic incited by Hank Paulson and his pals to stampede $700 billion out of the US Treasury and more trillions out of the Fed has subsided a wee bit, a few reasonable and even conservative economic researchers have begun to question the basic assumptions of this humongous honking boondoggle.
One reason things didn't fall apart when Congress didn't immediately act as Paulson and Bernanke demanded, may be that there wasn't any danger of a meltdown in the first place. So say three senior economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who in October examined the Fed's own data, and concluded in an article titled Facts and Myths About the Financial Crisis of 2008 that the claims that interbank lending and commercial lending had seized up were simply not true.
"Bank lending to consumers and to non-financial companies had not ceased, and banks were lending to each other at record levels," says V.V. Charri, an economist at the Minneapolis Fed. "Maybe Bernanke and Paulson had information that they were not making public, but the available data simply did not support what they were saying." Charri and his colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Christiano and Patrick Kehoe agree that with companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citigroup foundering because of toxic debt instruments, there was a sense of a financial crisis brewing, but they say it wasn't a credit freeze.
"This was a lot like the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003," says Charri. "You had people in government saying: `We're smart guys, trust us.' But they were either wrong or they were lying."
Adds Kehoe: "Normally, when you're going to spend a lot of money, you present the data and the economic theory to support it, yet here's the biggest non-military government intervention in history since the Great Depression, and there was no evidence presented to support it, and no detailed economic argument made about what market failures this $700 billion was going to fix."
So if you turn off your TV, cancel your subscription to the New York Times, and stop listening to a mob of self-interested shills for hedge-funds and megabanks...
The meltdown looks more like a collapsing bubble than a credit crunch, and all those trillions that were supposed to ease credit have simply vanished into thin air.
To put it another way...
We gave the economy a gigantic laxative, when what it really needed was a square meal.
We need jobs and mortgage relief and $2 trillion to repair our infrastructure, but Bush-Obama-Goldman-Sachs have already bled out the Treasury and Federal Reserve with useless giveaways to dying megabanks, and all that's left for the rest of us is the dregs.
The theory behind this diary is that the experiences of being amember of Congress are fundamentally different from the experiences of being an ordinary citizen. When I was born, Harry Truman was President. I have no memory of him as President except the films or books that I read much later. Truman was gone while I was still an infant (age 1). The memories of Ike are far more distinct but certainly not those of an adult. I actually saw the man in the early 60s when I was a child. Kennedy is more distinct but Johnson and Nixon were real.
The working memories of those who served in Congress are different from those who merely watched on TV or even donated or worked in campaigns. Those memories, I would strongly suspect, shape the concept of what it is to be in power or to be in opposition.
For House Republicans, the notion of opposition is pretty much shaped and exemplified by their experience when Bill Clinton was President. Only five current Republican House mebers served while Jimmy Carter was President (Bill Young of FL-10; Don Young of Alaska; Jerry Lewis of California; Jim Sensenbrenner of WI-5; and Tom Petri of WI-6). Three of the five served one term or less (2 years) under Carter. None are now in Republican leadership although both Sensenbrenner and Lewis were committe chairs as recently as 2006 and are now ranking members but the two Youngs and Petri have no official leadership roles and the Youngs seem to have been put out to pasture.
9. Do you think Obama has a mandate to work for
(major new social and economic programs)
or for (only small policy changes)?
Major new Small policy No
programs changes opinion
1/16/09 71 22 7
Nonsense:
Compare to: Bush
Major new Small policy No
programs changes opinion
1/15/01 47 38 15
We would all be so much better off if the only mark that the slob Bill Clinton had deposited on the history of the world was the famous semen-stain on Monica Lewinski's blue dress.
But unfortunately he didn't spend his whole Presidency getting blow-jobs from interns, and somehow found time to sign the Telecom Act of 1996 into law, enabling an unprecedented concentration of media into a few giant corporations, and likewise with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a combination which almost totally deregulated banking and consequently destroyed the American economy.
We would all be so much better off if the sadistic little punk George W. Bush had never been born, much less promoted on the basis of nothing but his name through oil companies and baseball teams and a governorship all the way to the White House, thanks largely to abject media treatment by networks and newspapers that are nothing but the playthings of billionaires. So Sumner Redstone bitch-slapped Dan Rather for finally exposing Bush as a nasty little coward who never stopped cheering for the same war that he ran away from himself, and that gave us four more years of torture, crazy wars, and oceans of blood sucked out of the national economy to feed a few parasites like Sumner Redstone.
After those two shining examples of American democracy in action, now we get the freak Barack Obama, a sociopathic con-man created out of nothing by sub-prime banking and already busy accelerating the biggest payoff in the history of the world for his billionaire creators, advised by none other than the same Larry Summers who pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act through Congress for Bill Clinton.
So the torch has been passed from a slob to a punk to a freak, and all that's left for the rest of us to do is hee-haw our amazement while Obama pays off the Clintons with the Department of State and pardons Bush/Cheney, even before the formality of his splendiferous inauguration.
Politics vs. Justice: Spotlighting The Holder Confirmation Hearings by buhdydharma at Docudharma, Wed Jan 14, 2009
If you wish to repost this essay you can download a .txt file of the html here (right click and save). Permission granted. Docudharma Tag: petition for a special prosecutor for background
First let me say that we want Eric Holder confirmed as Attorney General. We want him confirmed because of statements like this...
Washington, D.C. -- Eric H. Holder Jr., Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton administration, asserted in a speech to the American Constitution Society (ACS) that the United States must reverse "the disastrous course" set by the Bush administration in the struggle against terrorism by closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, declaring without qualification that the U.S. does not torture people, ending the practice of transferring individuals involuntarily to countries that engage in torture and ceasing warrantless domestic surveillance.
"Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the 'War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe," Holder told a packed room at the ACS 2008 Convention on Friday evening. "For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights."
We want the man who said those words to be our next Attorney General. Because in truth and in a logical world the best way, perhaps the only way, to "reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights".....is to investigate and then prosecute those who have criminally destroyed that standing. They destroyed it by using torture.
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