Have you become sick of hearing about it? The Mayan End of the World is less than three weeks away and the people on the teevee keep talking about the Fiscal Cliff. I’m still waiting for Comet Kohoutek. For those of you who are too young to remember, here is what Wikipedia tells us about Comet Kohoutek:
Before its close approach, Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the “comet of the century”. However, Kohoutek’s display was considered a let-down, possibly due to partial disintegration when the comet closely approached the sun prior to Earth flyby.
Our next media-hyped non-event was the infamous Y2K story. Thousands of people started hoarding canned food, building shelters and preparing for a Cro-Magnon lifestyle because the computers thought that every year began with the two digits 1 and 9. Yeah, that happened.
This week, everyone is talking about the Fiscal Cliff. By now, there have been enough sober reports (and lawsuits by the Mayans) to force people into the realization that the world will not end on the 21st day of this month. The country has found a better focus for its consensual panic: The Cliff. Concerns voiced by Ben Bernanke and others brought our attention to the possibility that if our government resumes its budget standoff – after the can was kicked down the road last summer – our government’s credit rating could face another cut. As a result, Bernanke invented the cliff metaphor and everyone ran with it – despite the fact that it is not appropriate.
The best Fiscal Cliff Smackdown came from Barry Ritholtz, who wrote a great piece for The Washington Post entitled, “How important is the fiscal cliff for investors? Hint: Not very.” The explanation of the cliff contained in the article was quite helpful for those unfamiliar with the details:
Let’s start with a definition: The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate. The “sequestration,” as it is known, calls for three elements: tax increases, spending cuts and an increase to the payroll tax (FICA). The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120 billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax breaks and other programs.”
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The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is really a misnomer. As several analysts have correctly observed, the effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event. The impact of the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time. A fiscal slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is invariably wrong. Because of the inherent complexity of economies and markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by merely looking at just one variable.
Ritholtz brought our attention to a great article about the fiscal cliff hype, written by Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review. Chittum blamed CNBC’s “Rise Above” publicity campaign as the primary force driving fiscal cliff anxiety:
Any time you see Wall Street CEOs and CNBC campaigning for what they call the common good, it’s worth raising an eyebrow or two.
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You’ll note that CNBC has not Risen Above for the common good on issues like stimulating a depressed economy, ameliorating the housing catastrophe, or prosecuting its Wall Street sources/dinner partners for the subprime fiasco. But make no mistake: even if it had, it would have been stepping outside the boundaries of traditional American journalism practice into political advocacy. And that’s precisely what it’s doing here, at further cost to its credibility as a mainstream news organization instead of some HD version of Wall Street CCTV.
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Last but not least is the hypocrisy of CNBC in talking about Rising Above politics. This is the network, after all, that kicked off the Tea Party, an austerity push that was one of the more damaging political movements in recent memory.
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It’s just not CNBC’s job, institutionally, to campaign for anything. Cover the news, as they say, don’t become it.
December 21 will come and go with nothing happening. It will be January 1, 2000 all over again. The fiscal cliff “deadline” – January 1, 2013 – will come and go with nothing happening. The budget can will be kicked down the road again by the “lame duck” Congress.
In the mean time we can entertain ourselves by learning how celebrities are preparing for Armageddon. After all, they’re here to entertain us.
Comments Off on Wisconsin Bogeyman Will Help Obama
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate will do more so solve President Obama’s voter apathy problem than it will do to boost the enthusiasm of Republican voters. While the Tea Party branch of the Republican Party complains that “Massachusetts moderate” Romney is not a significant alternative to Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s base complains the bank-centric Obama administration is indistinguishable from a Romney administration. Criticism of the Obama administration’s domestic surveillance program comes from across the political spectrum. One need look no further than the Business Insiderto find disappointment resulting from the Obama administration’s efforts to turn America into a police state.
As the Democratic Party struggled to resurrect a fraction of the voter enthusiasm seen during the 2008 campaign, Mitt Romney came along and gave the Democrats exactly what they needed: a bogeyman from the far-right wing of the Republican Party. The 2012 campaign suddenly changed from a battle against an outsourcing, horse ballet elitist to a battle against a blue-eyed devil who wants to take away Medicare. The Republican team of White and Whiter had suddenly solved the problem of Democratic voter apathy.
I recently expressed the opinion that the only logical candidate for Romney to select as his running mate would have been Ohio Senator Rob Portman. In the wake of Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, a number of commentators have emphasized that Portman would have been a smarter choice. Polling wiz Nate Silver recently voiced a similar opinion:
Politics 101 suggests that you play toward the center of the electorate. Although this rule has more frequently been violated when it comes to vice-presidential picks, there is evidence that presidential candidates who have more “extreme” ideologies (closer to the left wing or the right wing than the electoral center) underperform relative to the economic fundamentals.
Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
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Because of these factors, a recent analysis I performed placed Mr. Ryan 10th from among 14 potential vice-presidential picks in terms of his immediate impact on the Electoral College. If Mr. Romney wanted to make the best pick by this criterion, he would have been better off to choose an alternative like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, or Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia.
Nate Silver was not alone with his premise that Romney’s choice of Ryan was made out of desperation. At the Right Condition blog, Arkady Kamenetsky not only emphasized that the Ryan candidacy will help galvanize Obama’s liberal base – he went a step further to demonstrate that the Ryan budget is a “smoke and mirrors” pretext for preserving the status quo. After highlighting Ryan’s support of TARP, Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, Arkady Kamenetsky performed a detailed comparison of the Ryan budget with the Obama budget to demonstrate a relatively insignificant difference between the two. Kamenetsky concluded the piece with these observations:
So this of course begs the question, why did Romney do this? Why select a VP that will provide such easy ammunition for the Left with virtually no reward? The answer is quite simple. Romney and Ryan represent exactly the same problem even if one appears to be a moderate and the other appears to be an epic fiscal warrior. The Republican party fights for and pushes through the status-quo. The images you see up above and the Ryan record is the status-quo. No doubt about it.
Yet Romney is counting on the ignorance of Republican base to run with the facade of Ryan’s conservatism. If that illusion holds then Ryan’s image will invariably boost Romney’s own image as many will view Romney’s decision as courageous and bold despite Obama’s willingness to distort Ryan’s budget. In other words, you are witnessing a most fantastic and glamorous circus. A bad Hollywood movie, except that ending will be quite real and not something you can pause or turn off.
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Romney and Ryan will lose in November and the image of the heartless Conservative killing granny will resonate with America, the tragedy of course is that neither Ryan or Romney are willing to actually cut anything! The tragedy will become even more amusing as we will witness a nasty and partisan fight further dividing Americans as they fight and defend differing policies with the exact same results.
During the coming weeks, watch for efforts by the mainstream news media to portray this election as a close contest – in their own desperate attempts to retain an audience for what will probably turn out to be the least exciting Presidential campaign since Reagan vs. Carter.
Comments Off on Scientists Bust the Top One Percent
Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement began last fall, we have been hearing the incessant mantra of: Don’t blame the rich for wealth inequality. In fact, Herman Cain’s futile bid for the Presidency was based (in part) on that very theme. Last January, James Q. Wilson (who passed away on Friday) wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post entitled, “Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich”. Paul Buchheit of the Common Dreams blog rebutted Wilson’s essay with this posting: “So say the rich: ‘Don’t blame us for having all the money!’ ”. How often have you read and heard arguments from apologists for the Wall Street banksters, upbraiding those who dared speak ill of those sanctified “job creators” within the top one percent of America’s economic strata?
Finally, a group of scientists has intervened by conducting some research about the ethics of those at the top of America’s socioeconomic food chain. Stéphane Côté, PhD, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, worked with a team of four psychologists from the University of California at Berkeley to conduct seven studies on this subject. Their paper, “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior” was published in the February 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here is the abstract:
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
The impact and the timing of this article, with respect to the current debate over income inequality, have resulted in quite a bit of interesting commentary. I enjoyed the perspective of Peter Dorman at the Econospeak blog:
The tone of the first wave of commentary, as far as I can tell, is that we knew it all along – rich people are nasty. I would like to put in a word, however, for the other direction of causality, that dishonesty and putting one’s own interests ahead of others are conducive to wealth.
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The reason I bring this up is because there is a constant background murmur in our society that says that greater wealth has to be a reward for more talent, more effort or more contribution to society.
Most of the commentary written about the PNAS article has been relatively non-partisan. Two-day access for reading the article on-line will cost you ten bucks. For those of us who can’t afford that (as well as for those who can afford it – but are too greedy to pay for anything) I have assembled a number of excerpts from articles written by those who actually read the entire scientific paper. The following passages will provide you with some interesting details about the research conducted by this group.
Christopher Shea of The Wall Street Journal gave us a brief peek at some of the specific findings of the studies conducted by this team.
It went so far as to show that higher-class people will literally take candy from the mouths of children.
An excerpt quoted by Shea illustrated how the group expanded on an observation made by French sociologist Émile Durkheim:
“From the top to the bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused,” Durkheim famously wrote. Although greed may indeed be a motivation all people have felt at points in their lives, we argue that greed motives are not equally prevalent across all social strata.
Brandon Keim of Wired offered us more research data from the article, while focusing on the observations of team member Paul Piff, a Berkeley psychologist:
“This work is important because it suggests that people often act unethically not because they are desperate and in the dumps, but because they feel entitled and want to get ahead,” said evolutionary psychologist and consumer researcher Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the work. “I am especially impressed that the findings are consistent across seven different studies with varied methodologies. This work is not just good science, but it is shows deeper insight into the reasons why people lie, cheat, and steal.”
According to Piff, unethical behavior in the study was driven both by greed, which makes people less empathic, and the nature of wealth in a highly stratified society. It insulates people from the consequences of their actions, reduces their need for social connections and fuels feelings of entitlement, all of which become self-reinforcing cultural norms.
“When pursuit of self-interest is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to socially pernicious outcomes,” said Piff, who noted that the findings are not politically partisan. “The same rules apply to liberals and conservatives. We always control for political persuasion,” he said.
For Thomas B. Edsall of The New York Times, the research performed by this group helped explain the rationale behind a bit of Republican campaign strategy:
Republicans recognize the political usefulness of objectification, capitalizing on “compassion fatigue,” or the exhaustion of empathy, among large swathes of the electorate who are already stressed by the economic collapse of 2008, high levels of unemployment, an epidemic of foreclosures, stagnant wages and a hyper-competitive business arena.
Compassion fatigue was fully evident in Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC denouncing a federal plan to prop up “losers’ mortgages” at taxpayer expense, a rant that helped spark the formation of the Tea Party. Republican debates provided further evidence of compassion fatigue when audiences cheered the record-setting use of the death penalty in Texas and applauded the prospect of a gravely ill pauper who, unable to pay medical fees, was allowed to die.
Jonathan Gitlin of Ars Technica reported on some of the juicy details from a few experiments. When reading about my favorite experiment, keep in mind that the term “SES” refers to socioeconomic status.
Study number four involved participants rating themselves on the SES scale to heighten their perception of status; they were then answered a number of questions relating to unethical behavior. At the end of the experiment, they were presented with a jar of individually wrapped candy and told that, although it was for children in a nearby lab, they could take some if they wanted. At this point you might be able to guess what the results were. High SES participants took more candy.
Gitlin concluded his review of the paper with this thought:
The researchers argue that “the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society’s elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing.” However, they point out that their findings aren’t absolute, and that philanthropic efforts such as those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet buck the observed trend, as does research which has shown a relationship between poverty and violent crime.
Meanwhile, the debate over economic inequality continues to rage on through the 2012 election cycle. It will be interesting to observe whether this scientific report is exploited to bolster the argument that most of the one-percenters suffer from a character flaw, which not only got them where they are today – but which is shared by their kleptocratic comrades, who have facilitated a system of legalized predation.
Comments Off on Wall Streeters Who Support The Occupy Movement
Forget about what you have been hearing from those idiotic, mainstream blovaitors – who rose to prominence solely because of corporate politics. Those bigmouths want you to believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is anti-capitalist. Nevertheless, the dogma spouted by those dunder-headed pundits is contradicted by the reality that there are quite a number of prominent individuals who voice support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the fact that they are professionally employed in the investment business. I will provide you with some examples.
On October 31, I discussed the propaganda war waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement, concluding the piece with my expectation that Jeremy Grantham’s upcoming third quarter newsletter would provide some sorely-needed, astute commentary on the situation. Jeremy Grantham, rated by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, finally released an abbreviated edition of that newsletter one month later than usual, due to a busy schedule. In addition to expressing some supportive comments about the OWS movement, Grantham noted that he will be providing a special supplement, based specifically on that subject:
Meriting a separate, special point are the drastic declines in both U.S. income equality – the U.S. has become quite quickly one of the least equal societies – and in the stickiness of economic position from one generation to another. We have gone from having been notably upwardly mobile during the Eisenhower era to having fallen behind other developed countries today, even the U.K.! The net result of these factors is a growing feeling of social injustice, a weakening of social cohesiveness, and, possibly, a decrease in work ethic. A healthy growth rate becomes more difficult.
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Sitting on planes over the last several weeks with nothing to do but read and think, I found myself worrying increasingly about the 1% and the 99% and the appearance we give of having become a plutocracy, and a rather mean-spirited one at that. And, one backed by a similarly mean-spirited majority on the Supreme Court. (I will try to post a letter addressed to the “Occupy … Everywhere” folks shortly.)
Hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation and the publisher of one of the most widely-read financial blogs, The Big Picture. Among the many pro-OWS postings which have appeared on that site was this recent piece, offering the movement advice similar to what can be expected from Jeremy Grantham:
To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation.
I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:
1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative process
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You will note that these three goals are issues that both the Left and the Right — Libertarians and Liberals — should be able to agree upon. These are all doable measurable goals, that can have a real impact on legislation, the economy and taxes.
But amending the Constitution to eliminate dirty money from politics is an essential task. Failing to do that means backsliding from whatever gains are made. Whatever is accomplished will be temporary without campaign finance reform . . .
Writing for the DealBook blog at The New York Times, Jesse Eisinger provided us with the laments of a few Wall Street insiders, whose attitudes are aligned with those of the OWS movement:
Last week, I had a conversation with a man who runs his own trading firm. In the process of fuming about competition from Goldman Sachs, he said with resignation and exasperation: “The fact that they were bailed out and can borrow for free – it’s pretty sickening.”
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Sadly, almost none of these closeted occupier-sympathizers go public. But Mike Mayo, a bank analyst with the brokerage firm CLSA, which is majority-owned by the French bank Crédit Agricole, has done just that. In his book “Exile on Wall Street” (Wiley), Mr. Mayo offers an unvarnished account of the punishments he experienced after denouncing bank excesses. Talking to him, it’s hard to tell you aren’t interviewing Michael Moore.
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I asked Richard Kramer, who used to work as a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs until he got fed up with how it did business and now runs his own firm, Arete Research, what was going wrong. He sees it as part of the business model.
“There have been repeated fines and malfeasance at literally all the investment banks, but it doesn’t seem to affect their behavior much,” he said. “So I have to conclude it is part of strategy as simple cost/benefit analysis, that fines and legal costs are a small price to pay for the profits.”
Mr. Kramer’s contention was supported by a recent analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission documents by The New York Times, which revealed “that since 1996, there have been at least 51 repeat violations by those firms. Bank of America and Citigroup have each had six repeat violations, while Merrill Lynch and UBS have each had five.”
At the ever-popular Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden provided us with the observations of a disillusioned, first-year hedge fund analyst. Durden’s introductory comments in support of that essay, provide us with a comprehensive delineation of the tactics used by Wall Street to crush individual “retail” investors:
Regular readers know that ever since 2009, well before the confidence destroying flash crash of May 2010, Zero Hedge had been advocating that regular retail investors shun the equity market in its entirety as it is anything but “fair and efficient” in which frontrunning for a select few is legal, in which insider trading is permitted for politicians and is masked as “expert networks” for others, in which the government itself leaks information to a hand-picked elite of the wealthiest investors, in which investment banks send out their “huddle” top picks to “whale” accounts before everyone else gets access, in which hedge funds form “clubs” and collude in moving the market, in which millisecond algorithms make instantaneous decisions which regular investors can never hope to beat, in which daily record volatility triggers sell limits virtually assuring daytrading losses, and where the bid/ask spreads for all but the choicest few make the prospect of breaking even, let alone winning, quite daunting. In short: a rigged casino. What is gratifying is to see that this warning is permeating an ever broader cross-section of the retail population with hundreds of billions in equity fund outflows in the past two years. And yet, some pathological gamblers still return day after day, in hope of striking it rich, despite odds which make a slot machine seem like the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In that regard, we are happy to present another perspective: this time from a hedge fund insider who while advocating his support for the OWS movement, explains, in no uncertain terms, and in a somewhat more detailed and lucid fashion, both how and why the market is not only broken, but rigged, and why it is nothing but a wealth extraction mechanism in which the richest slowly but surely steal the money from everyone else who still trades any public stock equity.
The anonymous hedge fund analyst concluded his discourse with this point:
In other words, if you aren’t in the .1%, you have no access to the derivatives markets, you have no access to the special deals that hedge funds and other wealthy investors get, and you have no access to the resources, information, strategic services, tax exemptions, and capital that the top .1% is getting.
If you have any questions about what some of the concepts above mean, ask and I will try my best to answer. I’m a first-year analyst on Wall Street, and based on what I see day in and day out, I support the OWS movement 100%.
You are now informed beyond the influence of those presstitutes, who regularly attempt to convince the public that an important goal of the Occupy Movement is to destroy the livelihoods of those who work on Wall Street.
Comments Off on Obama Backpedals To Save His Presidency
President Obama’s demotion of his Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, has drawn quite a bit of attention – despite efforts by the White House to downplay the significance of that event. The demotion of Daley is significant because it indicates that Obama is now trying to back away from his original strategy of helping Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. This move appears to be an attempt by Obama to re-cast himself as a populist, in response to the widespread success of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In September of 2010, I wrote a piece entitled, “Where Obama Went Wrong”. Despite the subsequent spin by right-wing pundits, to the effect that voters had been enamored with the Tea Party’s emphasis on smaller government, the true reasons for the mid-term disaster for the Democrats had become obvious:
During the past week, we’ve been bombarded with explanations from across the political spectrum, concerning how President Obama has gone from wildly-popular cult hero to radioactive force on the 2010 campaign trail. For many Democrats facing re-election bids in November, the presence of Obama at one of their campaign rallies could be reminiscent of the appearance of William Macy’s character from the movie, The Cooler. Wikipedia’s discussion of the film provided this definition:
In gambling parlance, a “cooler” is an unlucky individual whose presence at the tables results in a streak of bad luck for the other players.
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The American people are hurting because their President sold them out immediately after he was elected. When faced with the choice of bailing out the zombie banks or putting those banks through temporary receivership (the “Swedish approach” – wherein the bank shareholders and bondholders would take financial “haircuts”) Obama chose to bail out the banks at taxpayer expense. So here we are . . . in a Japanese-style “lost decade”. In case you don’t remember the debate from early 2009 – peruse this February 10, 2009 posting from the Calculated Risk website. After reading that, try not to cry after looking at this recent piece by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture entitled, “We Should Have Gone Swedish . . .”
Back in December of 2009, Bill Daley – a minion of The Dimon Dog at JPMorgan Chase – wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, which resonated with Wall Street’s tool in the White House. Daley claimed that Obama and other Democrats were elected to office in 2008 because voters had embraced some pseudo-centrist ideas, which Daley referenced in these terms:
These independents and Republicans supported Democrats based on a message indicating that the party would be a true Big Tent — that we would welcome a diversity of views even on tough issues such as abortion, gun rights and the role of government in the economy.
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All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, Obama was pre-disposed to accept this rationale, keeping his policy decisions on a trajectory which has proven as damaging to his own political future as it has been to the future of the American middle class.
On November 8, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece for New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, wherein he explained that the demotion of Bill Daley revealed a “course correction” by Obama, in order to a pursue a strategy “in line with the realities of public opinion”. Jonathan Chait explained how the ideas espoused by Daley in his 2009 Washington Post editorial, had been a blueprint for failure:
Daley, pursuing his theory, heavily courted business leaders. He made long-term deficit reduction a top priority, and spent hours with Republican leaders, meeting them three-quarters of the way in hopes of securing a deal that would demonstrate his centrism and bipartisanship. The effort failed completely.
The effort failed because Daley’s analysis – which is also the analysis of David Brooks and Michael Bloomberg – was fatally incorrect. Americans were not itching for Obama to make peace with corporate America. Americans are in an angry, populist mood – distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business. In the most recent NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll, 60 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the following statement:
The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.
At the website of economist Brad DeLong, a number of comments were posted in response to Jonathan Chait’s essay. One can only hope that our President has the same, clear understanding of this situation as do the individuals who posted these comments:
Full Employment Hawk said:
. . . The defeat of the Democrats was due to the fact that the Obama administration did too little, not because it did too much.
Daley’s view that it was because the moderately progressive policies of the Obama administration were too far left for the center was totally wrong. And listening to Daley’s advice to further shift from job creation to deficit reduction was a major blunder that reinforced the blunder of the first two years of dropping the ball on making the economy grow fast enough for the unemployment rate to be coming down significantly by the time of the Fall election.
In reply to the comment posted by Full Employment Hawk, a reader, identified as “urban legend” said this:
Obama should have been making the point over and over and over and over that getting more money into the hands of more Americans — principally right now by creating jobs — is the most pro-business stance you can take. Continuing to let the 1% dictate everything in their favor is the most anti-business thing you can do. We are the ones who want demand to rise for the goods and services of American business. Right-wingers don’t care much about that. What they do care about is maintaining their theology against all the evidence of its massive failure.
At Politico, Jonathan Chait’s essay provoked the following comment from Ben Smith:
It is entirely possible that no staff shift, and no ideological shift, can save Obama from a bad economy. You don’t get to run controlled experiments in politics.
But it does seem worth noting that this argument pre-dates Daley: It’s the substance of the 2008 debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama, with Clinton portraying Obama as naive in his dream of bipartisan unity, and the Republicans as an implacable foe. It’s the Clinton view, the ’90s view, that has prevailed here.
Indeed, it would be nice for all of us if Obama could get a “Mulligan” for his mishandling of the economic crisis. Unfortunately, this ain’t golf.
The propaganda war waged by corporatist news media against the Occupy Wall Street movement is rapidly deteriorating. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began on September 17, the initial response from mainstream news outlets was to simply ignore it – with no mention of the event whatsoever. When that didn’t work, the next tactic involved using the “giggle factor” to characterize the protesters as “hippies” or twenty-something “hippie wanna-bes”, attempting to mimic the protests in which their parents participated during the late-1960s. When that mischaracterization failed to get any traction, the presstitutes’ condemnation of the occupation events – which had expanded from nationwide to worldwide – became more desperate: the participants were called everything from “socialists” to “anti-Semites”.
Despite the incessant flow of propaganda from those untrustworthy sources, a good deal of commentary – understanding, sympathetic or even supportive of Occupy Wall Street began to appear in some unlikely places. For example, Roger Lowenstein wrote a piece for Bloomberg BusinessWeek entitled, “Occupy Wall Street: It’s Not a Hippie Thing”:
As critics have noted, the protesters are not in complete agreement with each other, but the overall message is reasonably coherent. They want more and better jobs, more equal distribution of income, less profit (or no profit) for banks, lower compensation for bankers, and more strictures on banks with regard to negotiating consumer services such as mortgages and debit cards. They also want to reduce the influence that corporations – financial firms in particular – wield in politics, and they want a more populist set of government priorities: bailouts for student debtors and mortgage holders, not just for banks.
In stark contrast with the disparaging sarcasm spewed by the tools at CNBC and Fox News concerning this subject, The Economist demonstrated why it enjoys such widespread respect:
So the big banks’ apologies for their role in messing up the world economy have been grudging and late, and Joe Taxpayer has yet to hear a heartfelt “thank you” for bailing them out. Summoned before Congress, Wall Street bosses have made lawyerised statements that make them sound arrogant, greedy and unrepentant. A grand gesture or two – such as slashing bonuses or giving away a tonne of money – might have gone some way towards restoring public faith in the industry. But we will never know because it didn’t happen.
On the contrary, Wall Street appears to have set its many brilliant minds the task of infuriating the public still further, by repossessing homes of serving soldiers, introducing fees for using debit cards and so on. Goldman Sachs showed a typical tin ear by withdrawing its sponsorship of a fund-raiser for a credit union (financial co-operative) on November 3rd because it planned to honour Occupy Wall Street.
The Washington Post conducted a poll with the Pew Research Center which compared and contrasted popular support for Occupy Wall Street with that of the Tea Party movement. The poll revealed that ten percent of Americans support both movements. On the other hand, Tea Party support is heavily drawn from Republican voters (71%) while only 24% of Republicans – as opposed to 64% of Democrats – support Occupy Wall Street. As for self-described “Moderates”, only 24% support the Tea Party compared with Occupy Wall Street’s 45% support from Moderates. Rest assured that these numbers will not deter unscrupulous critics from describing Occupy Wall Street as a “fringe movement”.
The best smackdown of the shabby reportage on Occupy Wall Street came from Dahlia Lithwick of Slate:
Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity. Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.
By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance. The rest of America has little trouble understanding that these are ragtag, complicated, and leaderless times. This may not make for great television, but any movement that acknowledges that fact deserves enormous credit.
Too many mainstream news outlets appear to be suffering from the same disease as our government and our financial institutions. Jeremy Grantham’s Third Quarter 2011 newsletter will be coming out in a few days and I’m hoping that he will prescribe a cure. My wilder dream is that those vested with the authority and responsibility to follow his advice would simply do so.
This was bound to happen. Now that the Occupy Wall Street protest has become a big deal, the Democrats are trying to claim it as their own franchise. Fortunately, the protesters aren’t interested. My October 6 posting focused on the hypocrisy of the pseudo-populist Democrats, who – as of that time – had failed to express any support for this new movement:
The Occupy Wall Street protest has exposed the politicians – who have always claimed to be populists – for what they really are: tools of the plutocracy. Conspicuously absent from the Wall Street occupation have been nearly all Democrats – despite their party’s efforts to portray itself as the champion of Main Street in its battle against the tyranny of the megabanks. As has always been the case, the Democrats won’t really do anything that could disrupt the flow of bribes campaign contributions they receive from our nation’s financial elites.
The party-crashing Democrats are now attempting to advance their status from interlopers to hosts. At the Occupy Wall Street website, this question was posted with an invitation for comments:
“Are you cool with the Democrats taking ownership of OWS?”
Not surprisingly, the responses were overwhelmingly negative. Here are a few examples:
WorkingClassAntiHero (Manchester, NH):
Anyone thinking about this thing in the old terms of left, right, Democrat, Republican, etc…is either not paying attention or isn’t really involved.
IndpendentTX:
There needs to be more visible demonstration that this is not a Democrat movement but a movement by a non-partisan group against the corporate political machine. More signs protesting Democrats people!
Also make more signs that clearly state that both parties can get lost. They’re BOTH part of the problem.
1zouzouna:
We no longer accept the idea of political ownership. It is the corporate media wolves trying to define us as Republicrat’s, because they want to deny there is a Revolution happening here and all over the globe. They so desperately need to define us because they are scared shitless of us. They pretend to not comprehend our agenda, they keep saying we don’t know what we want. They only see in Republicrat terms. Both parties Rep. and Dem. alike have had a direct hand in passing legislation that has aided in this ponzi scheme whereby we, the 99% have been robbed of our wealth and savings and dignity. This is a global societal movement/revolution, which I am proud to be witnessing and participating in. Together with all our brothers and sisters of the world we will effect global change so we can all enjoy our right to abundance.
Glenn Greenwald of Salon did a thorough job of trashing the notion that Occupy Wall Street could be turned into a Democratic Party movement:
Can the Occupy Wall Street protests be transformed into a get-out-the-vote organ of Obama 2012 and the Democratic Party? To determine if this is likely, let’s review a few relevant facts.
In March, 2008, The Los Angeles Times published an article with the headline “Democrats are darlings of Wall St“, which reported that both Obama and Clinton “are benefiting handsomely from Wall Street donations, easily surpassing Republican John McCain in campaign contributions.” In June, 2008, Reuters published an article entitled “Wall Street puts its money behind Obama”; it detailed that Obama had almost twice as much in contributions from “the securities and investment industry” and that “Democrats garnered 57 percent of the contributions from” that industry. When the financial collapse exploded, then-candidate Obama became an outspoken supporter of the Wall Street bailout.
After Obama’s election, the Democratic Party controlled the White House, the Senate and the House for the first two years, and the White House and Senate for the ten months after that. During this time, unemployment and home foreclosures were painfully high, while Wall Street and corporate profits exploded, along with income inequality. In July, 2009, The New York Times dubbed JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon “Obama’s favorite banker” because of his close relationship with, and heavy influence on, leading Democrats, including the President. In February, 2010, President Obama defended Dimon’s $17 million bonus and the $9 million bonus to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein – both of whose firms received substantial taxpayer bailouts – as fair and reasonable.
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Would it not be a bit odd for a protest movement to “Occupy Wall Street” while simultaneously devoting itself to keeping Wall Street’s most lavishly funded politician in power?
At Washington’s Blog, we were informed about an attempt by the Democratic-aligned MoveOn organization to wrest control of Occupy Wall Street:
David DeGraw – one of the primary Wall Street protest organizers – just sent me the following email:
Top MoveOn leaders / executives are all over national television speaking for the movement. fully appreciate the help and support of MoveOn, but the MSM is clearly using them as the spokespeople for OWS. This is an blatant attempt to fracture the 99% into a Democratic Party organization. The leadership of MoveON are Democratic Party operatives. they are divide and conquer pawns. For years they ignored Wall Street protests to keep complete focus on the Republicans, in favor of Goldman’s Obama and Wall Street’s Democratic leadership.
If anyone at Move On or Daily Kos would like to have a public debate about these comments, we invite it.
Please help us stop this divide and conquer attempt.
DeGraw – who is wholly non-partisan [like the writers at Washington’s Blog] – tells me that there are many political views represented, and that Occupy Wall Street is very diverse with opinions across the political spectrum (and see this.)
This mirrors what some of the original organizers of various “Occupy” protests in other cities have said as well: MoveOn attempted to take credit for the events.
Everyone’s trying to cash in on the courage and conviction of the Wall Street protesters.
People are trying to associate Occupy Wall Street with their pet projects, in the same way that advertisers try to associate the goodwill of the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, World Series or Olympics with their product.
But I hear from OWS organizers that the protesters come from totally diverse political affiliations. Many protesters support Ron Paul, many like Obama, others are for other parties or candidates or don’t vote at all.
The protesters themselves are having none of it, tweeting today:
We don’t want to be the democratic tea party or liberal tea party. We want to be our own movement separate of any political affiliation.
Just as President Obama disregarded the opportunity to turn the economy around in 2009, his party scoffed at the opportunity to rehabilitate its tattered reputation in the wake of its failure to enact meaningful financial reform legislation. The efforts by Democrats to jump the OWS train at this point are transparently specious. They aren’t fooling anyone.
Comments Off on Occupy Wall Street – For Some Reason
Back in July, the Canadian-based, activist network known as Adbusters, announced plans to organize an occupation of Wall Street on September 17, 2011. Their July 13 announcement revealed that the ultimate goal of the occupation was deliberately left open:
On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.
Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?
The most exciting candidate that we’ve heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It’s time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we’re doomed without it.
This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind.
A website specifically dedicated to this event was created: OccupyWallSt.org. The site has a Mission Statement, proclaiming that on September 17, a tent city will be established in lower Manhattan:
Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices and we will not leave until that demand has been met.
As for that mysterious demand, the website provides a hint as to how it will be determined:
What we demand from our government is for the people to decide through democratic consensus, not this website. A Facebook poll started by Adbusters suggests the demand might be an end to corporate personhood.
So, will the Facebook poll serve as the vehicle for reaching that “democratic consensus”?
On August 23, Adbusters announced that the Internet hacktivist group, Anonymous had joined #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. Anonymous prepared this one-minute, promotional video for the cause. Once Anonymous got on board, the Department of Homeland Security became interested in the event (if it had not done so already). Computerworld magazine reported that on September 2, a bulletin was issued by the DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC):
The DHS alert also warns of three cyber attacks and civil protests it says are planned by Anonymous and affiliated groups.
The first attack, dubbed Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is scheduled for Sept. 17.
The so-called ‘Day of Rage’ protest was first announced by a group called Adbusters in July and is being actively supported by Anonymous. The organizers of OWS hope to get about 20,000 individuals to gather on Wall Street on that day to protest various U.S. government policies.
It sounds to me as though the Department of Homeland Security is getting revved-up for a mass-rendition to Guantanamo and a busy schedule of “Full Roto-Rooter” cavity searches. It could get scary. The camoflauge-attired attendees probably won’t be interested in hearing my explanation that “I’m just here to demand the dismissal of Kathryn Wylde from her post as a Class C Director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.”
My favorite commentator for MarketWatch, Paul Farrell, predicted that the turnout could be a bit larger than anticipated:
Given today’s intense anger against America’s totally dysfunctional government, no one should be surprised if 90,000 arrive for Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity allies at other financial centers across the world, armed with their rallying cry to stop “the corruption of our governments by Wall Street money.”
After discussing the potential for historic change Occupy Wall Street seems to offer, Farrell posed the simple question: Will it work?
In the final analysis, this may be a bad case of “too little, too late:” Back in 1776 our original 57 revolutionaries also “had enough” when they signed the Declaration of Independence. They also risked everything, family, fortunes and lives. They actually had “one simple demand,” to be free of a tyrannical ruler, George III.
Today, the new ruler is greedy, corrupting democracy. But it’s locked deep in the American soul. Maybe they’re asking the wrong question: Not “Is America Ready for a Tahrir Moment?” Rather ask: “Is America Past That Moment, Buried Too Deep in a Culture of Greed to Change?”
If so, Wall Street wins, again. And America loses, again.
The promoters of the Tea Party movement were able to channel the outrage experienced by taxpayers, who watched the Federal Reserve hand trillions over to a small handful of ineptly-managed megabanks. The Tea Party promoters redirected and exploited that anger as a motivating force, which provoked those citizens to vote against their own interests. The attempt to tame the beast with regulation (as had been done after the Great Depression) was sabotaged. Could the Occupy Wall Street effort bring justice back to defeat financial anarchy? It would be nice if it worked, although I gave up on “hope” in early 2009.
After his disappointing loss to Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Straw Poll, Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty officially withdrew from the 2012 Presidential campaign. Pawlenty finished third with 14% of the votes. Bachmann picked up 28% and Congressman Ron Paul was right behind her with 27%. Despite the fact that Rick Santorum finished fourth with a paltry 9.8%, the Pennsylvanian has not discussed abandoning his own Presidential bid.
Santorum has not held public office since his humiliating defeat in the 2006 election, at which point he lost his Senate seat to Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. by a 59%-41% margin – the worst defeat for an incumbent Senator since 1980. One might assume that such a bidetory washout would forever purge Santorum from that zone within the Beltway. Nevertheless, Santorum apparently believes he will have greater success with a national campaign in post-Tea Party America.
Strangely enough, Santorum’s fourth-place finish in the Ames Straw Poll is being spun as a victory. Dan Hirschhorn reported for Politico that Santorum’s fourth-place showing helped grease the candidate’s fundraising efforts:
Still underfunded, the campaign enjoyed its strongest overnight online money haul in the hours after the straw poll, and is planning to step up its fundraising efforts in Pennsylvania, his financial home base after two Senate terms.
Nevertheless, as Daniel Larison discussed in The American Conservative, Santorum’s fourth-place finish was solely a result of the candidate’s persistent, lingering presence in Iowa:
The reality is that Santorum has been living and campaigning full-time in Iowa for weeks, he ought to be rallying social conservatives to him in much larger numbers than he does, and his fourth-place finish out of a field of six direct competitors is confirmation that his campaign is going nowhere. Beating out Herman Cain and Thad McCotter on the ground does not mean much at all. His presidential bid has always seemed to be a vain effort to re-fight the battles of his failed 2006 re-election campaign.
Michael Falcone of ABC News observed that Santorum “has been languishing near the bottom of national polls”. The question remains as to whether a candidate, whose agenda is so tightly focused on conservative “values voters” could gain momentum in a campaign dominated by financial issues. As George Will pointed out, Santorum has repeatedly emphasized that “… America’s debt crisis is, at bottom, symptomatic of a failure of self-control …”
Dan Hirschhorn noted at the conclusion of his Politico report, that Santorum’s “end game” remains a mystery. I suspect that Santorum’s true objective could be to secure the number two place on the Republican ticket as the GOP’s Vice-Presidential candidate.
It’s reasonable to assume that the presence of Santorum on the back end of the Republican ticket could provide their campaign with a frothy mixture of enthusiasm, including support from social conservatives who would not otherwise vote for a less-polarizing Presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, Santorum continues to swim upstream, while jumping down the throat of the hard right’s newest rising star, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who refused to advocate a relativistic interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. Governor Perry provided this response to Santorum’s blast:
“You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don’t,” Perry told reporters after a bill signing in Houston Wednesday. “You can’t believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues and then [for] something that doesn’t suit you say, ‘We’d rather not have states decide that.’”
You can probably see the problem exposed by this dust-up. If the Republican Party can’t wash out Santorum, the remaining GOP Presidential hopefuls will begin to appear liberal.
It seems as though every time some venal politician breaches a campaign promise while attempting to grab a payoff from a lobbyist, the excuse is always the same: “I’ve decided to tack toward the center on this issue.” “The Center” has become stigmatized as the dwelling place of those politicians who lack a moral compass.
I get particularly annoyed by those who persist in characterizing Barack Obama as a “centrist”, who is mimicking Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. During his campaign and throughout the early days of his Presidency, Obama successfully posed as a centrist. Nevertheless, his track record now demonstrates a policy of what Marshall Auerback described as “gutting the Democratic Party of its core social legacy.” I particularly enjoyed reading the comments to Auerback’s above-quoted piece about Obama entitled, “Worse Than Hoover”. Most of the commentators expressed the opinion that Auerback went way too easy on Obama. Here are some examples:
Sandra:
We have to stop comparing Obama to these iconic American figures. Obama is an opportunistic corporatist. There is no there there.
Rex:
I’m beginning to wonder if we are still giving Obummer too much credit. Common view seems to be trending toward he’s a manipulative scumbag.
Wasabi:
He’s very useful to the plutocracy. A Repub president could never persuade Dems to cut SS, Medicare, and Medicaid and all sorts of other essential programs.
Z:
He got the glory and the thrill of winning the election to become the 1st black president and I suspect that’s all the narcissio-path ever really wanted as far as the presidency is concerned. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself right now. I think he’s ready to cash out and is trying to create a scenario where he becomes an untenable candidate. He also wants to maintain his celebrity appeal so he’s going to try to posture as the adult of adults that was just too good for dc …
Steelhead23:
From a more technocratic perspective, I tend to see Obama as a consummate politician – able to inspire – but sadly lacking in intellectual curiosity and overflowing with ego, thus unable to quench his ignorance. This leaves him extremely susceptible to “experts” whom he parrots with enthusiasm. It was experts who helped him pick his advisers and now his expert advisers are misleading him and making him complicit in this quest toward neo-feudalism.
Keep in mind that those comments were not posted at Fox News or some right-wing website. They were posted at Naked Capitalism, where the publisher – Yves Smith – offered a comment of her own in reaction to Marshall Auerback’s “Worse Than Hoover” posting.
Yves Smith:
Obama is an authoritarian narcissist, an ugly combination.
He also seems unaware of the limits of his knowledge. That can render many otherwise intelligent people stupid in their decisions and actions in their blind spots.
Obama’s foremost critic from the Left is Glenn Greenwald of Salon. Mr. Greenwald has frequently opined that “… Obama wants to be attacked by liberals because of the perception that it politically benefits him by making him look centrist, non-partisan and independent . . . It’s not merely that he lacks a fear of liberal dissatisfaction; it’s that he affirmatively craves it.” Greenwald emphasized the foolishness of following such a course:
But that’s a dangerous strategy. U.S. presidential elections are very closely decided affairs, and alienating the Left even to some degree can be lethal for a national Democratic campaign; shouldn’t the 2000 election, along with 2010, have cemented that lesson forever?
I doubt that Obama is attempting to follow anything similar to Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. If Obama had been attempting such a plan, it has already backfired to an embarrassing degree, causing irreparable damage to the incumbent’s reelection prospects. Barack Obama has lost his credibility – and in the eyes of the electorate, there is no greater failing.
To get an appreciation for how much damage Obama has caused to his own “brand”, consider this article written by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs for the Huffington Post:
Thus, at every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class. He refused to tax the banks and hedge funds properly on their outlandish profits; he refused to limit in a serious way the bankers’ mega-bonuses even when the bonuses were financed by taxpayer bailouts; and he even refused to stand up against extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich last December, though 60 percent of the electorate repeatedly and consistently demanded that the Bush tax cuts at the top should be ended. It’s not hard to understand why. Obama and Democratic Party politicians rely on Wall Street and the super-rich for campaign contributions the same way that the Republicans rely on oil and coal. In America today, only the rich have political power.
* * *
America is more militarily engaged under Obama than even under Bush. Amazing but true.
* * *
The stimulus legislation, pushed by Obama at the start of his term on the basis of antiquated economic theories, wasted the public’s money and also did something much worse. It discredited the vital role of public spending in solving real and long-term problems. Rather than thinking ahead and planning for long-term solutions, he simply spent money on short-term schemes.
Obama’s embrace of “shovel-ready” infrastructure, for example, left America with an economy based on shovels while China’s long-term strategy has given that country an economy based on 21st-century Maglev trains. Now that the resort to mega-deficits has run its course, Obama is on the verge of abandoning the poor and middle class, by agreeing with the plutocrats in Congress to cut spending on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and discretionary civilian spending, while protecting the military and the low tax rates on the rich (if not lowering those top tax rates further according to the secret machinations of the Gang of Six, now endorsed by the president!)
* * *
America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites. Until that happens, the political class and the media conglomerates will continue to spew lies, American militarism will continue to destabilize a growing swath of the world, and the country will continue its economic decline.
The urgent need for a third-party movement was also the subject of this recent piece at The Economic Populist:
If the country had a legitimate third party to vote for, the Democrats and Republicans would be in serious trouble. Of course, the political system is geared to prevent third parties from emerging, so the country flounders about, looking for leadership from pusillanimous Democrats or ideological Republicans who consider raising taxes a mortal sin. The voters are probably a few steps away from concluding what is meant to be hidden but by now should be obvious: American democracy doesn’t exist, and the political system in Washington is beyond repair. What is worse: there are people and organizations who like things just the way they are and will fight any attempts at reform.
* * *
None of this suggests that Barack Obama is even considering abandoning his servitude to corporate interests. He’s merrily going along from one fundraiser to the next, raising millions of dollars each week from hedge fund managers and corporate lobbyists, so that he can get reelected as a “centrist” and bipartisan deal maker. This is based on his reading of what The People want – an end to the divisiveness in Washington – but Obama is fundamentally misreading the problem in Washington. It isn’t the rancor, name-calling, and petulance that is constantly on display which worries the American people. It is the backroom deals, the hidden bailouts, the tax evasions, the deregulation initiatives, the lack of prosecution for criminal behavior, that is more than frustrating Americans, because the beneficiaries of all this are wealthy people and corporations who have shifted power and money to themselves. Voters want this system overthrown – even the Tea Party voters, who keep searching for Republicans who will finally say no to corporate money.
In the mean time, we are stuck witnessing America’s demise. If you think that Obama’s critics from the Left are the only people voicing a dispirited attitude about our country’s future, be sure to read this essay at Counterpunch, “An Economy Destroyed”, written by Paul Craig Roberts – Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan Administration and the co-creator of Reaganomics:
Recently, the bond rating agencies that gave junk derivatives triple-A ratings threatened to downgrade US Treasury bonds if the White House and Congress did not reach a deficit reduction deal and debt ceiling increase. The downgrade threat is not credible, and neither is the default threat. Both are make-believe crises that are being hyped in order to force cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
* * *
The US economy is driven by consumer demand, but with 22.3 per cent unemployment, stagnant and declining wages and salaries, and consumer debt burdens so high that consumers cannot borrow to spend, there is nothing to drive the economy.
Washington’s response to this dilemma is to increase the austerity! Cutting back Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, forcing down wages by destroying unions and offshoring jobs (which results in a labor surplus and lower wages), and driving up the prices of food and energy by depreciating the dollar further erodes consumer purchasing power. The Federal Reserve can print money to rescue the crooked financial institutions, but it cannot rescue the American consumer.
As a final point, confront the fact that you are even lied to about “deficit reduction.” Even if Obama gets his $4 trillion “deficit reduction” over the next decade, it does not mean that the current national debt will be $4 trillion less than it currently is. The “reduction” merely means that the growth in the national debt will be $4 trillion less than otherwise. Regardless of any “deficit reduction,” the national debt ten years from now will be much higher than it presently is.
The longer you think about it – the more obvious it becomes: We really need to sweep all of those bastards out of Washington as quickly as possible and replace them with intelligent, honest individuals who are willing to represent this country’s human inhabitants – rather than its corporations, lobbies and “special interests”.
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.
