Here’s an interesting video from a Texas-based libertarian, John Barksdale (my spelling may be incorrect), who calls himself order9066. I’m impressed with the research he put into this subject, and I take his point very well that it was not just Republicans who were responsible for throwing out the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which prohibited financial holding companies insured by the FDIC from owning other companies engaged in financial speculation such as Wall Street investment firms or insurance companies, with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999.
While this video does serve as a corrective for the idea that Democrats share little or no blame in the gutting of New Deal protections that set-up the disaster of 2008, it goes overboard in pushing Republicans into the background of the blame picture. After all, the three authors and main sponsors of the bill were all Republicans, and both houses of Congress were, in fact, controlled by the GOP. But it does highlight two main points: The fingerprints of “Third Way” Democrats in Clinton’s White House (including Clinton himself, of course) are as much in evidence on the financial deregulation of the late 1990s as the Republicans’ are; and Congressional Democrats were ineffective, at best, in preventing (and, at worst, complicit in bringing on) Glass-Steagall’s demise. Continue reading →
US Chamber of Commerce's major contribution to jobs creation dialog: A giant banner taunting the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue.
What’s wrong with this rosy picture of entrepreneurship painted by the Manhattan Institute’s Edward L. Glaeser in his article “Unleash the Entrepreneurs” at City Journal?:
Three years have passed since the financial crisis of 2008, and unemployment rates remain painfully high. As of August 2011, America employed 6.6 million fewer workers than it did four years earlier. To try to fix the problem, the Obama administration has pursued a variety of Keynesian measures—above all, the huge stimulus package of 2009, which included not only direct government spending but also such features as tax credits for home buyers and temporary tax cuts for most Americans.
Such policies ignore a simple but vital truth: job growth comes from entrepreneurs—and public spending projects are as likely to crowd out entrepreneurship as to encourage it. By putting a bit more cash in consumers’ pockets, the tax cuts in the stimulus package may have induced a bit more car- and home-buying, but the next Steve Jobs is not being held back by too little domestic consumer spending. Tax credits for home buyers and the infamous program Cash for Clunkers encourage spending on old industries, not the development of the new products that are likelier to bring America jobs and prosperity.
Unemployment represents a crisis of imagination, a failure to figure out how to make potential workers productive in the modern economy. The people who make creative leaps to solve that problem are entrepreneurs. If we want to bring America’s jobs back, our governments—federal, state, and local—need to tear down barriers to entrepreneurship, create a fertile field for start-up businesses, and unleash the risk-taking innovators who have always been at the heart of our economic growth.
Isn’t the default position of American economic policy precisely what Glaeser is selling as the solution to the nation’s economic problems? It looks to me like advocating hitting oneself in the head with a baseball bat to prevent injuries caused by hitting oneself in the head with a hammer. Glaeser and all “free marketers” are slaves to the notion that entrepreneurship in itself is a panacea for all economic and social ills. What they seem to ignore is that some entrepreneurship can cause economic and social ills. As an example, consider the many franchise-based companies (think food-service) that pay their employees unlivable wages with flimsy benefits packages, forcing many to supplement their incomes with public services like food stamps or to use emergency rooms as primary doctors offices. Continue reading →
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein brought to light the neoliberal tactic of crisis capitalism, unleashed in circumstances (as in Chile, Argentina, Poland, Russia, South Africa) where political powers have exploited (or even created) extreme conditions–such as coups, natural disasters, or economic crises–during which the local population is disoriented and their defenses are down, to instigate corporation- and “investment”-friendly policies like lowered taxes and the cutting and privatization of government services. The justification given for such maneuvers is to bring the target economy in line with the global economy, but, of course, very few people (only a tiny few) in the world actually benefit from these capitalistic incursions. One of the most obscene instances of the Shock Doctrine in action resulted in the rape of the former Soviet Union”s assets by the oligarchs in the name of Boris Yelstin’s economic “reforms.” But that’s only one of the most obvious and well known cases.
Catherine Austin Fitts
During the Clinton years, as former communist apparatchiks were helping themselves to radically discounted oil fields and other rich resources in Russia, Catherine Austin Fitts says she witnessed a similar feeding frenzy much closer to home. A former managing director and board member at the Wall Street firm Dillon Read who served as Assistant Secretary at HUD in the first Bush administration, Fitts started a financial company of her own, The Hamilton Securities Group of Washington, D.C., to help communities make the most of federal monies and improve their standing in what she calls the Popsicle Index, which measures the confidence families in a community feel to send a six-year-old by herself to the corner store and back. Fitts witnessed firsthand the collusion between Washington and Wall Street insiders (often the same people on opposite sides of a revolving door) to employ crisis capitalism techniques in the US as part of the daily repertoire of government actions (my emphasis):
Our efforts at The Hamilton Securities Group to help HUD achieve maximum return on the sale of its defaulted mortgage assets coincided with a widespread process of “privatization” in which assets were, in fact, being transferred out of governments worldwide at significantly below market value in a manner providing extraordinary windfall profits, capital gains and financial equity to private corporations and investors. In addition, government functions were being outsourced at prices way above what should have been market price or government costs — again stripping governmental and community resources in a manner that subsidized private interests. The financial equity gained by private interests was often the result of financial, human, environmental and living equity stripped and stolen from communities — often without communities being able to understand what had happened or to clearly identify their loss. This is why I now refer to privatization as “piratization.”
One of the consequences was to steadily increase the political power of companies and investors who were increasingly dependent on lucrative back door subsidies — thus lowering overall social and economic productivity. Hence, the doubling of FHA’s mortgage recovery rates from 35% to 70-90% ran counter to global trends and ruffled feathers…. Continue reading →
As I said in previous articles, IF we participate in the system, I’m not opposed to it at all. How could I be? I’d be a tyrant if I wanted to force hundreds of millions of people to change their behavior. And the fact is, that “IF” was answered long ago. We Americans have chosen the material benefits of being managed by the financial system for generations. We like demand-side freedom, i.e. choosing between Coke and Pepsi, but don’t want supply-side freedom. We like the supply-side to be taken care of for us. We love the benefits that come from it being imperially run—the credit card always works, the gas station is always open, our water faucets and light switches do what they’re supposed to do, the markets keep going up (oops…maybe not). All of our economic needs are outsourced to others, so we have the luxury of spending our time pursuing wants. And if these types of benefits are good for us, they’re good for the rest of the world. We have no moral authority to stand opposed just because we’re now going to lose our privileged position—a rather childlike perspective.
Do I detect some sarcasm? Many of the items Vrabel ticked off as buying our disinterest in changing the imperial system are, of course, threatening to stop working in the near-long term, if they haven’t already stopped working for many of us, which is why, I suspect, #OWS has resonated so deeply so fast.
In any case, perhaps responding to the Arab spring and certainly responding to questions from viewers of Renaissance 2.0, Vrabel returned to YouTube with a new series titled “Debunking Money.” Again, I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to understand how the world really works and why we, the people (or the peasantry, as the case may be), are experiencing a diminution of our liberties. In this series, Vrabel makes explicit his rejection of various ideas from the left and right, including Austrian school economics and Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism.
The lesson below is particularly interesting as it debunks the notion, popular among Libertarians and popularized by Ron Paul, that “ending the Fed” is a viable solution to the problem. Vrabel says the American people would be “cutting their own throat.” If you have difficulty following this, I strongly suggest starting from the first video and hanging on his every word, if possible. Not to say this is the ultimate truth, of course, but it is certainly much closer to the truth than anything you will be hearing from Republicans or Democrats:
Picking up where we left off yesterday, The New Republic has now offered its official two cents on the protests on Wall Street and, as one would expect of the stuffy self-appointed organ of the liberal power elite inside the Beltway, it disapproves.
[T]o draw on the old cliché, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Just because liberals are frustrated with Wall Street does not mean that we should automatically find common cause with a group of people who are protesting Wall Street. Indeed, one of the first obligations of liberalism is skepticism—of governments, of arguments, and of movements. And so it is important to look at what Occupy Wall Street actually believes and then to ask two, related questions: Is their rhetoric liberal, or at least a close cousin of liberalism? And is this movement helpful to the achievement of liberal aims?
This task is made especially difficult by the fact that there is no single leader who is speaking for the crowds, no book of demands that has been put forward by the movement. Like all such gatherings, it undoubtedly includes a broad range of views. But the volume of interviews, speeches, and online declarations associated with the protests does make it possible to arrive at some broad generalizations about what Occupy Wall Street stands for. And these, in turn, suggest a few reasons for liberals to be nervous about the movement.
The Editors responsible for the unsigned editorial then go on to outline the differences between #ows’s radicalism and TNR’s proper liberalism (the former is dreamy, “group-thinky” and utopian, the latter skeptical, pragmatic and pro-capitalist) , before urging liberals to stay the hell away. Continue reading →
A blogger calling himself Mark America demonstrates the fear-sodden ideology of the right that is disabling many conservatives’ ability to think clearly about what is really going on:
On Saturday, the “Occupy DC” contingent of the greater “Occupy Wall Street” movement clashed with guards and police outside the National Air and Space Museum. At least one was pepper-sprayed, and one was arrested. They’re now combining with the even more radical October2011 group, the object of which is to overturn our system of government. All of these groups have direct ties to Barack Obama from his years in the left-wing community organizing movement, and to the Democrat party structure reaching back two decades. Let’s be honest: These are the shock-troops of the communist movement in America.
For those of you who don’t yet understand what this is all about, it’s time to clear it up. These people aren’t protesting for reform. They are protesting for the absolute destruction of the United States of America of any description by which you’ve known it. I once thought that to believe this, a person would need the tin-foil hat and the basement computer terminal and be a conspiracy kook, but this is simply not the case any longer. These people have powerful, well-heeled backers, and they are acting in concert with Barack Obama and the extreme leftist fringe of American politics.
They make the mistake of believing the Republican Party is the United States. Big, big mistake. It misleads them into making mistakes of thinking all around. Continue reading →
This is what democracy looks like when it works: media dialoguing with a rational person telling the truth about what’s wrong and what needs to change:
This is just over 22 minutes, but it’s 22 minutes well spent.
Info from the YouTube video on Sachs:
Watch Jeffrey Sachs, leading environmentalist and economist, and a respected Professor at Columbia University, speak out at the growing, inspiring Occupy Wall Street movement. Sachs is one of many professors, celebrities, community leaders, spiritual leaders and public figures who are speaking out in support of the OWS movement and what it stands for.
Erin Burnett’s snide putdown of #OccupationWallStreet on her new CNN platform OutFront included some sniffing over the fact that the protesters (like other Americans) drink bottled water, eat “catered lunch,” (actually slices of pizza from a local pizzeria, probably courtesy of anonymous online supporters), wear designer clothes, use Apple computers and Blackberries. The implicit “argument” in Burnett’s patrician sniffs, which we’ll no doubt be hearing over and over from the protest’s sideline critics in the days to come, is rendered explicit in this ironic photo art found on Twitter:
So on this account, if you consume any of the products of corporate capitalism, it’s hypocritical to protest against corporate capitalism. What, then, do the Burnettists think is the correct attitude of consumers toward corporate capitalism? Obedience? Submission? Worship?
We are not only consumers–not only economic animals, but also political animals. The fact that we consume the products of the predominant economic system doesn’t disqualify us from criticizing the political system that serves the interests of the “captains” of the system at the rest of our expense, does it? The protest is not about the economic behavior of corporations–not about capitalism per se, in other words–but about their social, political and moral behavior.
Burnett pretends to be a journalist, which of course she is not. (Seriously, Erin, a journalist?!) She is an apologist for the 1%. But anyone who is not in the role Burnett has chosen to play ought to pay closer attention to what the occupation is about, ought to use their minds to examine what the occupiers are actually saying. I think most Americans will tend to get it if they give it a little thought, because I think most Americans can see that the system does not favor their own interests any more than it favors the protesters.
The media have repeated over and over that the protesters in Zuccotti Park have no coherent position. Belying that common narrative, the group’s General Assembly put the document below up for a vote as representing the sense of the occupation’s aims and it was accepted. I found it here, but am posting it in full on my blog as I consider it both historic and newsworthy enough that it belongs to the world now, not just the document’s authors. Is it worthy of a revolution? I think so. I think it makes clear that #occupywallstreet understands who our King George is and they intend to speak truth to the actual power. Continue reading →
When I read pieces by eminent conservative economists like the Hoover Institute’s Robert J. Barro’s Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics, I get the sick feeling in my stomach that the rift between left and right is becoming less and less bridgeable by day. It becomes clearer and clearer to me that, while the left may be going through a prolonged crisis of self-confidence, the right is becoming more deeply mired in an ideological morass and their project is to drag the rest of us down into it whether or not we want to go. Continue reading →
Tragic Farce 