The flight from reason that now marks American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business. The "news hook" for KCRW's "Left, Right & Center" show, which I have co-hosted for 15 years, was an absurd spate of charges from Obama's former big-business allies that he had become their enemy. If only it were so.
One of those who has been complaining is billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman, who now finds in a White House he once supported "hostility" to the business culture he credits with the country's greatness. I assume he is not talking about the belated efforts to hold BP accountable for the cost of the oil spill that our pro-drilling president once thought not possible.
And then there was Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric and once friendly to Obama but now alarmed by new regulations. He was one of the many CEOs cited by Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post as evidence of "Obama's CEO problem." General Electric is a company that got into deep trouble when it stopped worrying about making better light bulbs and came to devote much of its business through GE capital to fancy financial products. With GE having been saved by the taxpayers, one wonders what the conglomerate has to complain about. Or Wall Street donors now stiffing the Democrats and claiming Obama is hostile to them.
All this comes at the very time that Wall Street lobbyists stand poised to win a sweeping victory preventing a reversal of the radical deregulation that made the banking debacle possible. The "Volcker rule," restoration of the New Deal-era barrier between investment and consumer banking that Obama had pledged to support, is gutted. As a disappointed Paul Volcker told Louis Uchitelle in an interview for The New York Times, he would rate the reforms just a B and not even a B-plus. Leading Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman told the Times: "The legislation is a Rube Goldberg contraption, and there are long timelines before the Volcker rule is fully implemented."
Game over, Wall Street won big-time, and the Bush-Obama policy has made the financiers whole while largely ignoring the deep plight of the true victims of the economic collapse, the unemployed and the foreclosed. The argument that Obama is anti-business is nothing more than the old propaganda trick that the best defense is a good offense, so blame the victims for your crimes. The high-tone intellectual argument for that position was supplied by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, a transplanted Thatcherite, at the same Aspen, Colo., gathering where Zuckerman spoke.
At a conference on ideas paid for and attended by the rich and well-positioned, Ferguson argued that the high rate of unemployment is not due to the Wall Street high rollers whose funny-money games wiped out 8 million jobs but rather the extension of the government's unemployment insurance program:
"The curse of long-term unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they'll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time. Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy."
Yes, except that the public policy that was so terribly misconceived was that of radical deregulation, launched by the Reagan Revolution and implemented by President Bill Clinton, not the pathetic palliative of unemployment checks.
Notice that the attacks on Obama are not about his having followed George W. Bush's example of throwing money at Wall Street, the cause of the meltdown and the run-up of the national debt, but rather the much smaller amount spent on ameliorating the pain that the titans of finance caused for ordinary citizens. And of course there is never a word of self-criticism on the part of folks like Ferguson, Immelt and Zuckerman for their own roles in having cheered on the radical deregulation that made this mess not only possible but inevitable.
Not so Volcker, once the darling of fiscal conservatives when he tamed inflation during the Carter and Reagan years, and when as Fed chair and later as an influential observer he failed to stand publicly against the move to radical deregulation. As was reported in the Times interview, "In retrospect, Mr. Volcker regrets not challenging the widely held assumptions that underpinned much of this. `You had an intellectual conviction that you did not need much regulation--that the market could take care of itself,' he says. `I'm happy that illusion has been shattered.'"
Unfortunately, that illusion has not been shattered for many of the elite in this country, as evidenced by their rage against Obama's too modest steps in the right direction.
That all this has happened isn't shocking. What is absolutely breath-taking is how misinformed most people are about the workings of the kleptocracy. We have a national Stockholm Syndrome--bonding with our captors. European countries have better social programs at half the cost. We are like a nation of abused children, who lack the perspective to recognize what's happening to us. If the oligarchs succeed the Gilded Age will look like an egalitarian utopia.
Modest proposals:
1. Cut the defense budget to that of France.
2. Spend the money on jobs.
3. Raise the top income tax brackets by 20 percent.
4. Eliminate the payroll tax. (Fund entitlements with income taxes).
5. Get out of the Middle East.
6. Close most of our overseas bases.
7. End the War on Drugs (putting substance abuse under national health care).
8. Medicare for everyone that wants it.
9. Tax justice: Simplify the tax code, ultimately phasing out all deductions and exemptions.
Time: July 15, 2010 11:00 am PDT
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but glittering prizes and endless compromises
shatter the illusion of integrity....
possibly of interest: The Trees by Rush
As I have posted before, many of the people that are receiving the benefits or insurance (correct term) are augmenting that with cash jobs. The shadow economy is growing and that's not really a good thing.
We need a job making program until the economy is self sustaining.
Atticus, the political dogblogger, wrote a piece on this very subject today. "Greed is Not Good"
http://www.atticusuncensored.com/2010/07/greed-is-not-good/
I always find it amusing that these high paid CEOs needed a government bailout and after they accept the money , they feel they can criticize any of the weak rules the government tries to apply to them.
If the CEOs were smart or worth the salaries paid to them, they wouldn't have needed a government handout in the first place.
They don't even deserve the $1 dollar compensation that Mr. Liddy got to help AIG (at the request of the Treasury Dept.) after the big bonus AIG jerks ran the world's economy into the ground along with Goldman and all the other TBTF.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/nocera-hearings-that-arent-just-theater/
Hiddeee Ho Mr.Hankey!
I like the fact that in this editorial he gives credit to Clinton as implementing Regan's ideas a fact that so many touting the "party" line seem to forget.
Look you can keep shouting,"The republicans are to blame! The republicans are to blame!" just as so many democrats keep doing or you can get over it, accept that democrats aided and abetted the republicans in this mess and start working on real solutions. Not just rhetoric or empty bills meant for political gain not real and positive change.
I was totally against the Wall St bail outs. I agree deregulation is an underlying cause of our current economic mess. That does not change the face that many many democrats were on board and in bed with the very folks that facilitated this debacle. People are so upset because they see for the first time many see that the democrats have sold them out. Healthcare reform boils down to being forced to buy private insurance. The bankers and big oil have been left to do what they want. A comprehensive jobs package is still no where to be seen.
With all due respect - and that is measured in the bushel-fulls for your work - this is a dusted-off confirmation that since the 70s the bilk of increased "wealth" measured in money term goes to guess who, according to the Golden Rule.
Which says - whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Yeah, Robert, it's the rich.
Robert, you and Naomi and Dean and Kuttner and other progressives political-economists are seriously deficient in understanding that there is only way to undo the Golden Rule, it must be unlearned. Slowly. Dutifully. Purposefully.
It ain't about winning some inane fiscal argument on guns vs. butter.
It's about who owns and controls the money system.
The system of money.
The monetary system.
Here's a clue.
WE own it.
But through the Federal Reserve Act, we have leased it to the private bankers, and they are renting it back to us. At interest.
By ensuring that ever-smaller amounts of the money supply goes into wages, the banksters ensure that the majority of Amercians move deeper and deeper into debt.
If you want to let them get away with it, fine.
But don't act surprised at the results. The rich get richer.
The way to change it is at economicstability.org .
Have a read of something called A Program for Monetary Reform - written by the most renowned economists of the day in 1939, supported by most economists.
We take back the money system.
The Money System Common.
So what are the voices of the million billion people below saying?