Henwood Sees What Solid Sees

All this is to SolidCitizen's point about the weird emergence of anti-Fed sentiment amidst all the OWS dramaturgy.

On OWS and the Fed « LBO News from Doug Henwood

On the Federal Reserve

I have noticed some strange, Ron Paul-ish stuff about the Federal Reserve around Occupy Wall Street. I do want to file a complaint about those.

The Federal Reserve is admittedly manna for conspiracists. It’s a fairly opaque institution that does work for the big guys. But it’s not their puppet exactly. A friend who spent many years at the New York branch of the Fed once told me that within the institution, the thinking is that bankers are short-sighted critters who come and go but the Fed has to do the long-term thinking for the ruling class. So it has more autonomy than the popular tales allow.

The founding of the Fed is also a great subject of mythmaking—like secret meetings involving more than a few Jews. (The conspiratorial mindset often overlaps with anti-Semitic stories about rootless cosmopolitans, their greed and scheming.) There were some secret meetings, but the creation of a central bank was a major project of the U.S. elite for decades around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. There’s a great book on that topic by James Livingston that I urge anyone interested in the topic to read. It was a long, complex campaign, and not the task of a secret train ride to a remote island.

Although the Fed does put U.S. interests first, it is internationally minded, and consults constantly with its foreign counterparts. This is also rich soil for conspiratorial thinking—that, plus, of course the Jews. (Greenspan. Bernanke. You’d almost forget that 1980s Fed chair Paul Volcker’s middle name is Adolph.) You know the story—dastardly plots involving foreign financiers (with names like Rothschild) whose victims are good patriotic Americans. As anyone who watches the Fed closely, like me, could tell you, that’s just not the case.

And it’s tempting to see this body as controlling everything—it’s complicated and messy to think about how financial markets work, and the Fed’s relationship to those markets. Much easier to think of the Fed controlling everything. But in fact the Fed sometimes reacts to the markets, sometimes leads them, and on occasion fights with them.

In the 1980s, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker ran a very tight ship. It deliberately provoked a deep recession in 1981-82 by driving up interest rates toward 20% to scare the pants of the working class. It was a very successful class war from above that led to a massive upward redistribution of income. More recently, the Fed handed out massive amounts of money—I’m not citing actual figures since they’re vague and mind-boggling, but they’re very big—with no strings attached to major banks. Something like this was necessary to keep everything from going down the drain, but it didn’t have to be done so secretly and with no accountability. Banks were basically given blank checks to restore the status quo ante bustum. That’s terrible. You could say the same for the TARP bailout—massive giveaways with no accountability or restrictions. This is all odious.

But more recently, Fed chair Ben Bernanke has been about the only major policymaker in the world pushing for more stimulus for the U.S. economy. He’s not a partisan of austerity, like the Republicans or much of the pundit class. For this he’s earned some criticisms on the right. The right would be happy to let things go down to prove a point. They think we need a “purgation.” I was recently on a panel with a Fed-hating libertarian who invoked the concept of “purgatory,” as if we’ve all sinned. But that would create far more misery than we know now.

There’s a video (#OWS Protester Nails It! Federal Reserve) of an Occupy Wall Street protester calling for an end to the Fed and urging a vote for Ron Paul. It, and the comments, are straight out of the right-wing critique of the Fed. I’ve seen signs calling for that around the occupation. This is bad news. Ron Paul has a coherent political philosophy. He’s a libertarian. He may hate imperial war, but he also hates Social Security and Medicare. The reason he wants to end the Fed is that he wants to get the state out of the money business and return to a 19th century gold standard. A gold standard is painfully austere. The gold supply increases by less than 2% a year. That means tremendous pressure on average incomes. It’s great if you’re a big bondholder, but hell if you’re a regular person. When we were on a gold standard in the 19th century we had frequent panics, crises, and depressions. Almost half of the last three decades of the 19th century was spent in recession or depression. It put both rural farmers and urban workers through the wringer.

We need to democratize the Fed, open it up, and subject money to more humane and less upper-class-friendly regulation. But let’s not sign on with Ron Paul, please. And let’s not join with the simple-minded right-wing critique that blames all of capitalism’s systemic problems on government institutions.

It's a little known fact that newspapermen have been competing for centuries to see who can publish an editorial of such vacuity that the reader is left with the exact same amount of knowledge about a subject that he had when he began reading. (I will use the male pronoun throughout this article, as is the tradition in the newspaper business; women being a source of revenue, but suspect).

Of course, there are rules and traditions, controversies and feuds. All great endeavors are thus. As a college student, Thomas Jefferson once killed a man before he could publish an essay on the rhythmic nature of tides in the Williamsburg Gazette. This act established Jefferson as a "go-getter" and set him up for a life in politics.

The trick in the endeavor is not leave the reader dumber than when he began - a Goldberg as it is known today - nor to give him even one interesting tidbit to which he could say to himself "I did not know that." It is harder than it may seem, as the average reader is a font of a lack of knowledge. As easy as it may be to impress a college teacher thusly, your man on the street is much harder to not educate.

As long as the competition has gone on, day after day, editorial after editorial it is semi-surprising that the achievement has been obtained by Jack Wilson of the Register Guard, a paper printed in the bucolic burg of Eugene. While he didn't write the editorial, he had the foresight to have it published, which wins him the prize, much like a producer taking home an academy award for Best Picture. The actual author is Douglas Vaughan of the Lutheran board for higher education and ministries.

The article in question is, of course, too boring to read in it entirety. As you would expect, it makes outlandish claims and does not even begin to back them up. It posits nostrums without explanations. It hints at allegations. It ends with a sentence that does not make sense. It has nothing, which means it has it all.

The topic is accountability in the schools, or, to be precise, the lack there of.

Accountability is truly the No. 1 crisis facing public education today.

How do we know this? Well, it seems that the United States' children so not do well on test scores compared with their international cohort. It is clear that what is needed is accountability. You need further examples?

The Civic Stadium debacle is a prime example of the continuing mismanagement of public resources. Another is this year’s University of Oregon’s salary increases, in defiance of common sense.

It is a clear fact that the mismanagement of pubic resources in the form of unused stadia and raises to university educators have depressed the nation's school children preventing them from excelling in standardized testing. The inability of so-called responsible adults to sell property in a timely manner and deny educators raises is our number one problem.

Still another stumbling block for accountability is the political shell game so skillfully managed under so-called grass-root organizations such as Stand for Children and Strong for Schools. Such organizations serve merely as window dressing for collective bargaining.

Not is not possible to actually derive a point from that sentence, but it seems ominous. The reader is left to infer his own inference, which is a nifty trick, as it provides the reader with the experience of feeling like he is thinking, without actually informing him of anything. At best a reader could say to himself, "I bet I know what I think he means by that."

Of course any editorial must, by definition, offer some sort of solution to the problem it has raised, in this case accountability.

Oregon must embrace major changes, too numerous to detail here. However, some future changes need to include full support for many more charter schools, creative incentives for home-schooling and additional opportunities for parochial schooling.

The greatest change must come in our public system from top to bottom. We need term limits for school board members and state representatives, regardless of party. New laws are needed to end the cozy monopoly enjoyed by members of the school board, collective bargaining teams and politicians at the direct expense of public education.

Nothing can remain off the table — including the unsustainable mounting cost of PERS, as well as the over-the-top cost of Cadillac health insurance benefits and compensation. All these will have to be changed.

Charter schools, home-schooling, parochial schools, new laws, cutting retirement and health benefits for teachers. There are your ideas for ending the crisis of accountability.

Lastly,

Accountability begins with everyone when the realities of public education are seen for what they truly are — an abysmal failure of oversight.

There, aren't you exactly the same as you were before you read that? Congratulations Jack Wilson, of the Register Guard, you go-getter you.

We've got a long way to go

“I’m still trying to figure it out,” said Pete McCarthy, a pinstripe-suited lawyer who represents a financial services firm, studying the protesters on his way to work. “What are they saying, ‘People Instead of Profits’. What does it mean?”

The Obama Doctrine In Action | ThinkProgress

Do we or don't we except Yglesias' thesis here?

there’s a tendency, which I think is somewhat misguided, to take all of Obama’s “hawkish” actions and fold them into a narrative about continuity with Bush administration policies since Bush was also “hawkish.” There are some real continuities, but I think this business is actually an example of discontinuity.

The difference—and I think it’s a big difference—is that the Bush administration took a very ideological view of “the war on terror.” They viewed the United States as broadly in conflict with a vast-yet-hazily-defined array of Muslim Bad Guys such that Saddam Hussein and the government of Iran were somehow part of the same problem as Osama bin Laden. The conceptual alternative to this that Obama offered (and I think you see it in early coverage of Obama’s national security thinking from Spencer Ackerman and yours truly) was to think of al-Qaeda as a specific, narrow thing that ought to be obsessively targeted and destroyed. His team viewed the Iraq War as a catastrophic distraction from that task, and also repeatedly clashed with John McCain over the need to more forcefully disregard Pakistani government views about hitting targets in Pakistan. You see in the rising body count that this all wasn’t just talk. There’s been some kind of meaningful reallocation of national resources away from Bush’s geopolitical vision in favor of a much more literal global effort to identify, locate, and kill members of al-Qaeda. This whole suite of undertakings is in significant tension with the administration’s desire to pursue a rules-based global order and if Obama asked me I’d tell him he’s tilted too far against his own big picture ideas. Still, world affairs doesn’t exist on a two-dimensional hawk/dove axis and this militaristic aspect of Obamaism should be seen as a departure from Bush’s view of the terrorism problem.

Simplicity Itself

Obama is blinded by a ‘pathology’

President Obama says secretaries pay higher tax rates than the millionaires who employ them and he believes that’s unfair. OK, fine. Lower the secretary’s tax rate until it matches the millionaire’s. Problem solved, fairness achieved.

Of course, a lower tax rate for anyone would mean diminishing Obama’s ability to redistribute wealth as he sees fit. After all, that would mean less revenue for the federal government and we simply can’t have that, can we? That might force Americans to be charitable to one another, and the government to spend less.

Empowering citizens by confiscating less of their equity is not an option for a president who is blinded by liberal pathology and a hatred for vintage American culture.

Not being able to make such a choice also reveals the truth about the president’s intolerant, hate-filled abettors. Residing in the cultish tenet that it’s OK for Obama to implement a doctrine of post-modern economic justice, they seek nothing less than full control over the value of other peoples’ lives as vengeance for demographic disparity.

If you don’t agree that lowering the tax rate for secretaries is fair and still believe Obama has a bleeding heart for them, answer this: Why does Obama refuse to provide incentives through tax code modifications so millionaire employers will pay their secretaries more?

Pat Du Gard

Eugene

It's Simple, Really

I think that what Ezra fails to understand is that it is Harry Reid that is practically forcing Boehner to play "My way or the highway" politics by not passing the House bill.

If Democrats would just do what they are told, then Republicans would not have to resort to these tactics.

Not Enough, but Not UnBallsy

The Fed’s four announcements - The Washington Post

But there was much that the Fed didn’t do. It didn’t release a statement saying it would swing its policy toward lowering the unemployment rate. It didn’t say it would strive for a period of catch-up inflation, nor that it would stop paying interest on bank reserves. It didn’t, in other words, really try anything it wasn’t already trying, and as such, there’s no reason to think the effect will be anything but modest.

Clearly, Ben's our kind of Republican.

Jams, Kicked Out

He's Right, You Know

From the RG mailbag:

Postal worker concessions unlikely

I would bet all the stamps in my stamp drawer that if the U.S. Postal Service defaults — or more likely, eventually goes to three- or four-days-a-week delivery — because it owes $10 billion it doesn’t have, two things will happen.

I will take this bet. What are we talking, $10 worth of stamps? Are they forever stamps?

First, mailing a letter from Eugene to Boise will take 10 days because the federal government will prove, once again, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it cannot run anything efficiently.

Ok, I will mail a letter to my father in Boise after the US Postal Service goes to three or four days. If the letter takes less than 10 days, I get those delicious stamps. If the letter takes 10 days or more, we move on to step two.

Before we move on, though, a question. How would the failure to deliver an envelope to Boise in less than 10 days prove anything about the efficiency of government? Is there some private entity out there that will come to my house, pick up the letter, and deliver it to my dad's house in Boise in less than 10 days for 44 cents?

[I'm also ignoring the fact that sentence was worded so that you have the government failing to make in 10 days so as to prove that they are inefficient, not because they are inefficient. This seems like a strange thing for the government to want to prove.]

Secondly, all the Postal Service’s union members still will receive full benefits, and sooner or later will strike for more. God forbid a federal employee should pay more for health insurance or not get a pay raise or take a pay cut.

The "sooner or later" would normally put a crimp in our bet-related plans, but since US postal workers are legally barred from striking, I'm confident that one day I will be collecting those delicious stamps. Maybe you could just concede this point?

The real heart of the letter, of course, is your demand that postal workers make concessions in their pay and benefits. never pass up an opportunity to call for someone else to take a pay cut, even if it means that it might lengthen the life of a quasi-socialist, inefficient, government program you obviously hate.

I wonder what kind of cuts postal workers would need to make to make up that $10 billion. There are 574,000 postal workers in the US, so that's a mere $17,421 each. Jerks. Of course, most of the $10 billion is for a payment to their retirement fund, so they will get it back. Hopefully no such future concession will be necessary.

What’s their silver bullet for every problem? We can be certain that higher taxes are the only solution, now and forever. I am, sadly, utterly convinced that a majority of government union workers would bite and then devour the hand that feeds them.

Well, the U.S. Postal Service does not get a regular subsidy from Congress, so the demand for higher taxes would be odd, but the point holds. Government workers should love pay cuts and less health care because the wealthiest 1% needs their tax cuts. They are, after all, the job creators. Not in this particular case, because we're talking about government jobs, but, you know, in general.

Brian Palmer

Eugene

Let me know in the comments where I can pick up those stamps.

This Made Me Cry

Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;

But when asked how 'bout something to eat

They will answer in voices so sweet

Chorus

You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay,

You'll get pie in the sky when you die

And the Starvation Army, they play,

And they sing and they clap and they pray,

Till they get all your coin on the drum,

Then they tell you when you're on the bum

(Chorus)

Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out

And they holler, they jump and they shout

Give your money to Jesus, they say,

He will cure all diseases today

(Chorus)

If you fight hard for children and wife-

Try to get something good in this life-

You're a sinner and bad man, they tell,

When you die you will sure go to hell.

(Chorus)

Workingmen of all countries, unite

Side by side we for freedom will fight

When the world and its wealth we have gained

To the grafters we'll sing this refrain

(Chorus)

This Made Me Laugh

Didn't Even Mention Abortion

After having watched 1.1 GOP debates [just. couldn't. do. it.], I have come to the conclusion that there are some issues on which all the candidates [except Ron Paul, he doesn't count] can agree. Which ever candidate gets the GOP nomination, rest assured he or [extremely unlikely to happen] she will agree with these five things:

1. The poor need to pay more taxes.
Did you know that it is a literal fact that 50% of working Americans do not pay taxes? [Here "taxes" is defined as federal income taxes. Almost all working Americans pay payroll taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, fees, etc. but let's not let facts get in the way of a perfectly reasonable justification for raising taxes on the poor. Of course, if the National Parks Service puts out so much as a donations box at a national monument, you'll never hear the end of "Another Obama tax hike!" from the GOP.]

Right now, the poor have no "skin in the game" [so far my favorite phrase of the debating season. Nothing like watching some old men talk about getting some skin in the game], so they love them some big government - everything from missile defense shields to subsidized school lunches. If we could skin the poor, they'd realize that those programs aren't free, but are paid for by taxes. Then the poor would love them some missile defense [take that Gorby!], but realize that subsidized school lunches are stealing.

2. The wealthy pay too much in taxes.
It is a simple fact that for every tax dollar the federal government collects, that is one more dollar a man with a dream cannot use to start a new business. Or an already wealthy person cannot use to give to a man with a dream to start a new business. You want to solve the unemployment problem? Cut taxes on men with dreams the wealthy.

It's worse than that, though. Why should a man with a dream [and isn't that what America is all about?] work hard to fulfill his dream if he knows that the government is going to come along and take all his dream money? He won't. He just won't. As Shakespeare said, 'tis better to be a poor man with an unfulfilled dream than a successful man who has to pay a slightly higher tax rate.

3. Corporations should pay no taxes at all.
The fact of the matter is that the US economy loses $1.2 trillion dollars a year because our corporate tax rate is too high. Corporations are forced to move their headquarters overseas, just to avoid paying the unconscionable tax rate. [Nothing is more patriotic than avoiding taxes]. If the US tax rate was 0%, then US corporations would bring their money home boosting the economy. As Americans, US corporations have a duty to strangle our economy until we let them pay zero taxes. The shareholders demand it.

4. We need to drill for oil, harvest the clean coal, frack the shale, pipe the line and achieve energy independence.
It is the stupidest thing in the world that the US is going through a recession while we sit on the universe's richest energy reserves outside of the sun. If we could just unlock this vast potential and get the US off of the world commodities market, this recession would be over [in 7 to 10 years] and we'd never have to look at an Arab without spitting on him again.

5. Ron Paul is an idiot.
Ron Paul takes conservative positions to their logical conclusions and says idiotic things. He's not a serious candidate and should not even be on the same stage as the likes of Jon Huntsman [he was the governor of Utah!], Rick Santorum [the poor's favorite Republican!] and Herman Cain [9-9-9!].

Punk Rock Mondays

Wilson & Nolan, God Bless

Like the rest of America, I thank the writers of Rex Morgan, M.D. for not thinking that only one week of Spider trying to talk Kelly into going to a party "tomorrow" night would be enough. I need two full weeks of that hot action.

My Fridays

Don Kahle* writes a Friday column for the Register Guard. It's on the political page and he writes about politics, but from one of those "everyman, if I've offended everybody, I must be doing something right" perspectives that is not quite liberal and not conservative, but rather unhinged from reality. Anyway, he says some crazy shit, which is fine, we all say crazy shit. Some people have said that the Stones are better than the Beatles. Generally, his craziness is just kind of random, WTF? kind of stuff. Let me give you an example:

Everyone would like a solution that celebrates our strengths and distributes our burden. The president of the United States can claim a decade, can announce a moon shot. But not if Americans think he’s “mailing it in.”

“Mailing it in” has stopped working, literally. Technology has replaced “snail mail,” and the United States Postal Service response has been slow. Without a bailout or significant structural changes, mail delivery could cease this winter.

Thanks to some questionable punctuation, that's six sentences that have little to nothing to do with each other. They had nothing to do with the rest of the column, either, sort of. Not sure any of them are accurate.

So, with Kahle, you sort of expect column inches of random statements that give your brain plenty of leeway to wonder how he got this column and you, too, could get a regular gig at the RG.

Yesterday, however, he wrote something crazy enough that it has stuck with me. His column was, ostensibly, about how Barry Hussien needs too be more of a leader, rather than a legislator, in order to fix the economy. (Kahle's suggestion? 32 hour work week. Boom, economy fixed. Also, BHO needs to go around the Republican leadership and get the support of the rank-and-file GOP Congressmen.)

Here's what he wrote that had me re-reading for signs of irony:

The cataclysms that collectively are known as the Great Recession have replaced our hierarchal systems of job security with a meritocracy. We reward those who get better, not those who stay longer.

Unemployment has risen, but American worker productivity has risen faster.

Welcome to the new America, it's a meritocracy. If you're unemployed, you kind of deserve to be. Slacker.

He continues:

While construction industries have declined precipitously, a few home builders in each market are busier than they’ve ever been. Office workers are being replaced with technology, except those who have mastered those technologies are getting raises and promotions. The University of Oregon and PeaceHealth each made headline [sic] recently by giving raises to their most prized employees.

If you're guessing that the raises at the UO and PeaceHealth went to the administrators, give yourself a raise, you meritorious son-of-a-bitch.

He finishes this line of thought with this mind bender:

In this “new economy,” those at the top — in skill as well as income — are rising faster. President Obama represents the pinnacle of that meritocracy.

There you have it, a very unique take on the modern world where America is now a meritocracy and those with the skills and income are (finally!) allowed to flourish, led by the fastest riser of them all, Barack Obama!

Again, how do I get a regular gig at the RG?

*Some of you may remember Kahle as the editor and publisher of the Comic News. It's the same sort of thing, you read it and say to yourself, "Wait, is this supposed to be funny?"

The argument on the left - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

The argument on the left - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

I asked a senior Democrat who's long defended Obama on this point about it, and he emails the condensed case for Obama:

We didn't lose this fight. Barack Obama was in law school when this fight was lost.

The role of Democrats should not be to convince people that government is great; it should be to help people reach their potential -- and government is a tool to do that. There has been a strain of skepticism about the government in the American character since the founding. Only the New Deal changed that significantly, but we have been returning to the norm ever since then.

This is the core of the left's critique -- the country doesn't agree with us, so take what political capital you have and use it to convince people to agree with us. But the presidency is not a Brookings lecture series; it's about governing the country and making a difference.

Blair Digs Leon

from VersoBooks.com

Blair puts The Prophet trilogy by Isaac Deutscher on his list of 'Desert Island Books'

By Andrea D'cruz / 27 June 2011

While George W. Bush may be a touch disappointed to find his Decision Points omitted, we're sure Isaac Deutscher would have been more than a bit alarmed to find his sympathetic three-volume biography of Trotsky listed among Tony Blair's 'Desert Island Books.'

Mitt Romney the Throwback | Democratic Strategist

Mitt Romney the Throwback | Democratic Strategist

It's one thing for a presidential candidate to be forced to reshape his or her record to fit a new environment or a national as opposed to a local or regional context. That happens all the time. But it's another thing altogether to be forced to deny the very accomplishments that made the candidate noteworthy in the first place. And that's Mitt Romney's main problem today.

Trumka Wants “Independent” Labor Movement, Divorced from Party | FDL News Desk

It’s practically a rite of passage for a labor leader to stress their independence from the Democratic Party. In the end, the alarm bells almost always go off, and labor runs back into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Not to mention that labor is intimately intertwined with the Democratic Party. They have seats on the DNC, fercryinoutloud. So will this time be any different? [cont'd.]

One change from previous years is that labor faces an existential crisis in the states. To the extent that they won’t focus their work on national Democrats, it’s because they’re trying to save themselves in Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida and New Hampshire and across the country. They don’t have much of a choice.

The second thing is that it’s been pretty plain to see that labor got almost nothing for their efforts for national Democrats over the past few years. A progressive member of Congress told me this week that he would understand labor not making the same investment in the Democratic Party, because the return on that investment has been so nonexistent. This candid recognition at the highest levels signals that labor has made their position known. In addition, nobody is better positioned than labor to make the argument that the working class has lost all its traction and faces an assault from inequality, wage stagnation and an economy that only works for the rich. Democrats have abandoned that ideological battle, so labor must pick up the slack.

Macho Man, RIP!