Line ‘em up, take their pictures, and then somebody PLEASE get rid of these motherfuckers, each and every one. Over the weekend, they all sat down and guaranteed that anyone who hadn’t been fleeced in the Bank Crisis of 2008 would get fleeced in the Double-Dip Recession of 2010…all except the bankers, of course, who continue to rob the industrialized world blind with the silent approval of these assholes (in return, I’m sure, for a few crumbs from the bankers’ tables). They all nodded their heads about reining in deficits by slashing desperately needed economic stimulus, even as the U.S. prepares to waste another $33 billion on Afghanistan.
At least they had the decency not to be photographed in silly costumes this time, The wall of black-suited men (pace Angela Merkel) is appropriately funerary for the death sentence they all signed off on.
A selection of news articles and op-eds:
Paul Krugman has already come up with a name for what is about to happen to us all: “The Third Depression”
Naomi Klein, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, reminds us how the original G7 came to be expanded into the G20 in the first place as brainchild of Larry Summers and Canadian finance minister Paul Martin while they were setting up the conditions that caused all this mess a decade ago
Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was the guy who first sounded the alarm back in 2008, wrote this op-ed in the British newspaper The Independent over the weekend about the new Tory-LibDem government’s austerity budget and how it will devastate the weakest segments of British society.
Economist and member of Parliament Robert Skidelsky posted this article about Keynesian economic ideas and social democracy on the commentary site Project-Syndicate.org, which puts a little context on the current situation and also tries to separate traditional notions of Keynesian economics from the ideological blinders of the current debate.
Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.
This piece from OpenLeft.com blogger David Sirota tries to further parse out the differences between the more common left-leaning political labels “liberal” and “progressive” in the context of American politics. Because the conservatives were so thoroughly successful in their effort to make the word “liberal” a pejorative (which is what brought them to having to call Obama a “socialist” in the first place), many liberals rebranded themselves as “progressives”, but Sirota argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the two, although he finally concludes that you cannot have one without the other.
A similar distinction is at the core of this article at Dissent Magazine by the noted scholar Michael Bérubé, wherein he describes a correspondence with someone over his latest book (via 3QuarksDaily. The person made the distinction between the “liberal” mainstream leftism of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the clearer traditional “leftism” of Noam Chomsky. Bérubé refutes his correspondent’s observation, putting Chomsky more in the camp of contrarianists, citing the social theorist Stuart Hall as perhaps a better example of the left as alternative to the right rather than just a critical mirror (Hall was influential in British Labour Party politics in the Thatcher era), but I think his refutation helps further refine the spectrum.
It is a damn good thing that the Bush Administration chose to announce their agreement to pay the $700 billion ransom demand made by Wall Street over the weekend. If this had happened during the work-week, the pressure on Congress to Just.Do.Something. would have been overwhelming, especially after Ben Bernanke used the “nuclear option” on Congress to tell them just how serious this problem is. And, given that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bend over for Geroge Bush more than a Greenwich Village tranny during Fleet Week, they would have gone along in a snap. But the weekend gave every pundit known to humanity a chance to take a deep breath, sort out the details, and come to the conclusion that the bailout plan, as proposed, is FUCKING WACK.
If the Bush bailout plan were put into place without modification, you might as well cancel the November election, because Hank Paulson would be the de facto Ruler Of The Free World. With a blank check, zero accountability, and virtually unlimited authority to do whatever he wants to the American economy, and thus by extension the entire world, he might as well declare himself King Henry the First and be done with it. It was apparently not enough to hand over a trillion dollars to Halliburton, not to mention $9 billion(UPDATED: make that $23 billion)IN CASH to the gang posing as the Iraqi government, but with less than six months remaining in their administration, they needed to make sure that Paulson’s buddies on Wall Street got their welfare checks AND the option to buy up all the failing banks in America at a deep discount.
You know it’s a bad idea when even such Republican lickspittles as William Kristol go on record in the New York Times as calling it a duck. I have been collecting links all morning to the various and sundry politicians, pundits and other bloviating gasbags and here’s the lineup I have so far of people who have said the bailout is a Bad Thing:
Speakng of Kucinich, he has picked up on Krugman’s “Cash For Trash” line, and says he will introduce a counter-proposal to distribute the remaining good assets of the failed banks to each and every American citizen to the tune of the $2,300.00-per-person figure that has been bandied about as the per-capita cost of the bailout.
Meanwhile, Kucinich’s chief economic adviser from his primary campaign, University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson, spoke about the crisis in this interview last week (pre-bailout announcement) with DemocracyNow.org (video here if you’re interested). He doesn’t even think the AIG bailout is a good idea…and he’s right.
At least Barack Obama isn’t ready to hand over all the money so easily, but he isn’t exactly stepping up to the plate yet either. The Boston Herald reports that he spent some time this weekend meeting with Warren Buffet, Larry Sanders, Paul Volcker and a bunch of other Serious People to get a better handle on the situation and maybe come up with something. But, seriously, Barry, you need to pull something out of your ass that isn’t just some rhetorical flourish on top of a wishy-washy do-nothing plan like the rest of your platform. Somebody tell me again why you think he’s better than McCain, because I still just don’t feel the love for him that you do. Running on “I’m not John McCain” isn’t much of a change, you know.
Much has been made of this e-mail from an unnamed Democratic congressman who isn’t too happy with the events of the last few days. He’s ready to vote for anything that “…would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling… That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me. I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them. I think he’s on the right track myself, but over at MetaFilter the user named “Pastabagel” has a very salient reminder about spreading the blame for all this around. While I feel the Congress-critter’s pain, Pastabagel has a very valid point: we gave the Democrats back the majority to take care of this bullshit and they have let us down immensely. Republicans and Democrats alike need to be thoroughly beaten with sharp and pointy objects for their complicity in this clusterfuck.
And the general public? Well, we’ve been enjoying our bread and circuses, of course. The Pew Research Center’s weekly analysis of news content says that in the week of September 8-14, which is the week before the market tanked and people started to get nervous, 42% of all news coverage was devoted to some aspect of Sarah Palin, with nearly 25% of that coverage being about the “lipstick on a pig” comment, while the crumbling economy got 4% of the newsmedia’s attention. Forty-two fucking percent of their seemingly limitless time thrown away on some white-trash “hockey mom” who can “see Russia from her house”, while the millionaires line up for their bags of money taken directly from our pockets. We, the people of this country, also deserve a full measure of blame for this. And we’re going to get it. Soon.
