I’m not going to tell you who wrote this, because it will just cause some of you to scream without actually reading it, but I find it rather difficult to disagree with this:
Anyone who spends 5 minutes around the halls of power in the nation’s capital knows that Washington is dominated by one party: The Money Party, and that the People Party is far outnumbered – even after this election. Look no further than votes on the bankruptcy bill, the energy bill, the class action bill, China PNTR and NAFTA to figure out which politicans who call themselves Republicans and Democrats actually belong to the Money Party and which politicians actually belong to the People Party. The Establishment pretends this paradigm doesn’t exist – they need the drama of Democrats vs. Republicans to sell newspapers, and more importantly, hiding the existence of the real power equation is in the interest of all the major for-profit corporations that own the media.
It’s kind of ridiculous how little influence the “people party” actually has. But then again, Michael Moore is fat.
Speaking of Michael Moore, he was great on KO’s show the other night.
TomG
You know, there are many libertarians who have been saying this for YEARS !!!!
but never mind, all libertarians are alike, you just keep on mocking Reason as though it is the only libertarian blog out there, don’t mind me.
The Republic of Stupidity
I’ve been saying this to anyone who would listen for DECADES, John… and told to fuck off more times than I can remember…
(And I never once felt the need to call myself a ‘libertarian’ whilst doing so… just sayin’…)
Splitting Image
Karl Marx preferred the term “Party of Order”, which he heavily used in “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
Highly recommended, if you haven’t read it.
Linda Featheringill
Karl was frequently correct.
bozack
Well, fine, TomG, and some conservatives have been, too. But every single elected conservative, and every single libertarian with any platform, has been saying, doing, and working otherwise. It’s great that Daniel Larison and TomG are out there saying something else, but alas, it isn’t part of what passes for conservative and libertarian discourse.
Judas Escargot
This.
The false equivalences John Stewart gave in his Maddow interview last night annoyed me just as much as it did some others here, but he did make one very good framing point: It’s not about Democrats vs. Republicans, it’s about corruption vs. regular people.
I think he’s right, there. But how to hammer this point home among normal people???
I get mad at the false equivalence because (IMO) it should be clear that at this point in history, one party is more corrupted than the other one. The GOP is much more top-down, for one thing, making it easier to direct to Money’s purposes, and the pro-Money memes already had a home in that party to begin with.
I’m not saying that the Dems are blameless, at all– but they’re a motley, diffuse coalition party that has to throw a little something to their base once in awhile at least.
In the grander scheme of things, it really does seem as though we’re just re-fighting the 21st century version of the battles of 1880-1940 or so: Plutocrats vs. Progressivism.
Where’s Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?
Douche Baggins
I’ve been saying this for years myself — it’s a much more accurate prism through which to view American politics, all the way back to the Hudson Bay company.
Jonny Scrum-half
What Tom G said. All the liberals on this site can keep pushing for bigger government, and let’s see how that works for the powerless.
In short, the more government touches, the more the powerful will manipulate government to serve their interests.
El Cid
The US government has always been largely controlled by the wealthiest of its society and their hired representatives.
Sometimes, though, there is strong representation of other economic sectors, especially the working middle classes. At times like the present, though, there’s no society-rooted balance to the overall domination of the super-rich.
And sometimes legislation and regulation and the like are more aimed at aiding the people in the vast majority of the population, and from time to time even its poorer members.
The wealthy always understand that victory for their interests is never assured. That’s why they spend so much time and money backing politicians and lobbyists and think tanks and news and ideological and propaganda operations to increase the odds for their interests.
That’s why so much depends now upon the voting done by the population of each area in general. (I mean, if you consider the imaginary possibilities of what people could vote for rather than real world tendencies. The super-rich and their right wing grovelers are always aware that a turn to more liberal or even strongly reformist voting is theoretically possible and thus must be continually attacked and prevented, by every means available.)
* Author and scholar G. William Domhoff is not a Marxist, but is sane and uses class analysis along with other approaches rooted in empirical evidence.
WyldPirate
John Cole sez:
Gosh, I wonder who they might be? Perhaps those that tolerate zero criticism of President
InfallibleObama?Nah. Couldn’t be them. They’re too busy ignoring reality and the desperate straits the Dems find themselves in now.
Lit3Bolt
Hey Jonny and TomG, when the libertarians rent forklifts to get them off their asses to finally exercise their 2nd amendment rights on the government, we’ll believe. Until then, whining sounds like whining.
MattR
@Jonny Scrum-half:
And the less that government touches, the more the powerful will manipulate the economy to serve their interests.
Joseph Nobles
Perhaps this fits in under Money Party: Randy Scheunemann is Sarah Palin’s foreign policy guy. His lobbying firm Orion Strategies is also a client of George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center, the specific issue being democracy promotion in Burma.
And yet somehow I do not expect this to be mentioned by Glenn Beck as he rails against Soros overthrowing governments with the Open Society Policy Center.
General Stuck
Money talks, literally, my Supreme Court tells me so. Lots of money talks the loudest. Most “people” don’t have lots of money so it’s hard to hear them. This will only become more so, until they speak with pitchforks.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Well we have been saying this here for years. And the blurb is a more accurate synopsis of American politics in 30 seconds than you could get in in 30 weeks or 30 months of watching the manure pile that is cable tv news.
What really kills me is not that Chris Matthews, just to pick a convenient example, doesn’t really explain this, it’s that he knows it as well as anybody does and STILL doesn’t explain it, or build his approach to his work around it.
That’s where the real story lies, in my view … why do the Matthewses of the world pretend that this other reality exists, the tv reality, when the real reality is built around money? Because is just part of the con. While he pretends now and then to be about the people, he really lives to party with the powerful. He is just one of Orwell’s pigs playing poker with the humans in the living room while we look in through the windows. Him, and thirty or a hundred others just like him.
When the revolution comes, I want to behead the pundits first. Then get the politicians.
Alex S.
About 10 minutes ago, after I had paid my daily visit to Yglesias, Klein, Chait and the like, I thought to myself that all their blogging, all their policy suggestions and analysis of politics is meaningless right now, because there will be no compromises, no new concepts and no legislation.
J sub D
No. it’s the Statist Party and the Liberty party.
The balance in congress is approximately Statist – 530, Liberty – 5.
The various members of the Statist party argue about which facets of your life they should assume control of next.
WyldPirate
@El Cid:
great post, El Cid. Sounds a lot like Howard Zinn.
homerhk
You’ll notice that this perfectly sane article came in 2006 after Dems took back Congress and does not even mention the President’s role. It’s also before Sirota became victim number 2,092,943 of Obama Derangement Syndrome.
balconesfault
Rich people who want to become richer own the media … and not a bunch of liberal commune-living flower children?
Come on … we all know that’s just wrong.
WyldPirate
@LikeableInMyOwnWay:
good observation.
I’ve noticed in watching MSNBC that both Dylan Ratigan (although he is nearly incoherent at times) and Ed Schultz (pretty bombastic and over the top but more in a “common man” way than Olbermann, both get on there economic populism horses a lot and give the uber-rich hell.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Jonny Scrum-half: Tell me, how did the early 20th century lack of government intervention work out? Families living in shanty towns on the streets of big cities, monopolies controlling everything?
You say you see the problem, but then you immediately divide it using the old rules. If all of the major power controllers in this country, government is the only one that could even theoretically be controlled by the people. The result of no government would be corporations controlling everything. And their job is to make profits for their owners.
cleek
@Jonny Scrum-half:
sorry, but no.
liberal
@Linda Featheringill:
Marx definitely bungled one thing, which is to elite the distinction between land and capital.
serge
There’s little hope on the political structural level we (sort of) maintain now. We can’t even
whinesay that we’re just a simple kleptocracy…it’s so much bigger than that.We ain’t got the money, we’re just ants to be crushed.
Alwhite
@Jonny Scrum-half: I find it interesting that it is the liberals who get credit for wanting larger government. Yeah because the Libertarians best friends, the conservatives are always shrinking government aren’t they? Nice try, please play again.
Government is the only leverage people have against the moneyed interests. There have been times in our history when these interests have taken control of the government and it has been bad for the country and bad for individuals. This is one of those times. And it has nothing to do with the size of the government, only with what the government can, and will, do to balance the interests of its citizens against the robber-barons and grifters that are with us always.
Bob L
@TomG: I’d have a shred of respect for libertarians if they didn’t so gleefully define themselves as chief boot lickers of upper the class. Exhibit A being the first libertarian elected to the Senate, Rand Paul. Or is Rand Paul a no true
ScotsmanLibertarian?j low
@Judas Escargot: Ah, the good old days when a Republican could be both imperialist and populist.
j low
@j low: and i meant to include this block quote
ruemara
@WyldPirate:
Not every fucking post is a referendum on Obama. Get used to it.
Rhoda
This is an undeniable truth: there are people in DC controlled by money. What the fuck does Sirota want to do about it?
I honestly think that most people have such a clear view about what NEEDS to happen that they can not grasp how the fuck you get there when you have insane billionaires like the Koch crew meeting in plain sight thanks to Citzens’ United to recreate the Gilded Age.
That’s what frustrates me. That this dude can see this so clearly but be disgusted by the health care bill and advocate to vote it down because it gave 30 million people subsidized private insurance when single payer is cost efficient and fair. But that ignores the fact that we are expanding coverage and moving towards a tightly regulated private insurance market that some European countries have. It’ll take longer but it’ll happen; that’s why the big money went all in for the midterms.
Health care reform is scary because it was a big change and it’s a permanent reform that will create pressure for more reform that benefits real people. This was huge. And now that Democrats got the ball to the top of the mountain, as they did with social security, it’s going to roll down creating more progressive change and benefits until fifty years from now teatards will be saying get the govt. out of my Obamacare.
Sometimes, we enact Social Security for white men and it expands gradually to include women and minorities. We take a deal on tax cuts for the rich to keep the tax cuts for the middle class.
What frustrates me is this meme that Obama is somehow one of the Money Party; he’s dealing with them IMO the best he can in a Citzen’s United world and purity trolls in his party. But I don’t believe he’s one of the money people because he’s been fighting to categorically fuck them from day one IMO. I can buy that in ignoring national security reforms and the Bush era he’s paid too high a price; but I respect he doesn’t want to fight those fights when there is a desperate need to rebuild the middle class. And I absolutely know we haven’t done enough to dig ourselves out of the hole the last eight years dug us; but given unequivocal opposition on every front and the fact he’s black and that would have created an inevitable backlash I think White House has done the best it could over the last two years. Hopefully, the economy really will rebound or we’re all pretty fucked in 2012. That’s what stopping unemployment checks and Gov refusing federal money for rails etc is about IMO; keeping the economy weak enough fro 2012.
LarsThorwald
There are two kinds of people in this world. those who like Neil Diamond…
chopper
@WyldPirate:
it’s kinda like rape, right?
Pangloss
When they do America’s autopsy, will they peg the cause of death as Bush v. Gore or Citizens United?
themann1086
@Alwhite: Can’t find the link at the moment, but Amanda Marcotte once wrote that liberals want a “larger government” only in the sense that we want a government that works for more people. The size of the government is only a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
Nylund
Its funny to see all the Libertarians here screaming, “we said this first!” when this is also basically the stump speech Ralph Nader gave in 2000 and pretty much the same argument being made by any “populist” group from the hippies and teabaggers to the black bloc anarchists that like to throw trashcans through windows whenever the WTO meets. Groups from across the political spectrum have all claimed for years (if not forever) that DC is little more than the moneyed class doing what is in their own best interest.
And am I the only one who finds it mildly ironic that a bunch of Libertarians are complaining about a system where moneyed Randian “producers” are buying the outcome that best suits their selfish personal interests? Aren’t these the same people that we’re suppose to placate so that they don’t all “go Galt” on us?
Napoleon
@LarsThorwald:
And here I thought it was those who liked Ginger and those that liked Maryann.
cat48
So, as usual, Michael Moore comes on to talk about the Volcker Rule in peril and instead makes the same accusations about Obama he has made since Obama was elected, that he’s in Wall St’s pocket & gave Wall St “their boys”, Geithner who has worked for the Govt, THE GOVT, his entire friggn life. What would that make Paulson? You know the one who actually worked for Wall St his entire life there and profited tremendously during it?? MM has done more to deligitamize Obama than anyone else on the left. He’s always on Cnn or Msnbc bashing Obama since he didn’t get his universal, single health care bashing Obama. The Rethugs are basically ignored by him, b/c Obama should crush them all by himself while the leftwing of our party bashes him in Unison.
He said on The Last Word last week he now has a Petition to Primary Obama unless he does the right thing? whatever that might be. I havent been to his site b/c I can’t stomach it so I’ll leave it to all the disgruntled. Basically, he can go to Hell.
Suck It Up!
@Judas Escargot:
he said corruption vs. non corruption
WyldPirate
@ruemara:
No, but i find it pretty fucking hilarious that the board owner/host obliquely mocks his own board readers for their fucking idiocy about criticism from certain points of view.
Perhaps if your reading comprehension was a little better you might have caught that.
freelancer
The American people need to hire a lobbyist.
WyldPirate
@chopper:
No, I think it’s much more similar to you kissing my ass, dickhead.
LarsThorwald
Sirota drives me batty, but he is just plain right about this.
I’m reading Robert Caro on LBJ now, and it’s been like this at least for 80 years. I understand Sirota’s beef that Obama has done nothing to change this, but honestly I would be surprised if any one President could do it without acheiving status of dictator. My problem with Sirota is he has a veritable panoply of culprits on display in the Shooting Gallery of Bad Washington Money Influence, but he keeps aiming his B.B. gun at the same milk bottle, Obama.
But whatever. He’s right. Taibbi is right. We are all right that there is too much money in Washington. The question is what do you do about it? I’dd love for Taibbi or Sirota to deeply examine the solutions, but that’s not really their jobs. Their job is to gadfly, to be iconoclasts. That’s cool, I get it. But even Hunter S. Thompson recognized that the guy to beat up on was Nixon, the bad guys. Not the allies we want to portray as frenemies.
I will say this, though. If Obama caves in on the Bush tax cuts for those $250,000 and above, I am really going to have a tough time supporting him. Because that would really be pussying out on the one thing we cannot backslide on.
Elie
@General Stuck:
And money talks loudly because in our culture, the material is everything. That is why our society’s conversion from a nation of citizens, to a nation of consumers has made this even more intractable…we are bombared 24/7 with indocrination to be consumers and that spills over into every aspect of our lives, monetarizing the most fundamental and essential aspects of our lives from core relationships to our expectations of each other and the community. We are set up to be exploited and to exploit others because that is the consumer model — get away with the most while expending the least. Grab what you can for yourself. It fits well with our overworked individualism… where what I want is all that matters and I will do anything to get that and ensure that.
All this evolved over time, but in the 60’s, highlighted in the series Mad Men, the separation of the constructs for citizen and consumer really took off. First radio then teevee and now the internet propogate and amplify the messages.
We have to make ourselves over in a context that is foreign and not the dominant instinct in biology either — though some will argue that there is a role in biological systems for altruism. I don’t think that this sort of profound change could happen outside of a catastrophic failure of the current reward and social structure around the consumer and material wealth. We are still little squirrels hording our nuts and running around looking for others’ nuts to rip off. We do not get yet that if all the squirrels pooled their nuts, there would be enough for everyone and they wouldn’t have to kill themselves to amass the store. The squirrels could then spend their days thinking deep thoughts and creating art… The hard wiring though is for the competition, not the sharing.
Suck It Up!
Used to be that when billionaires, millionaires, an entire party, and Wall Street comes after a pol, that pol was not viewed as one of the money party. They are coming after Obama with all they’ve got, but Obama is accused of being one of them.
ChrisNYC
Relatedly, seven of the ten richest counties surround DC.
http://wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2115275
Maryland is the richest state which is surprising to me. Poor Baltimore.
Lewis Carroll
Sirota’s right. Now somebody please tell Obama.
Ed Marshall
@J sub D:
Ohhhh, that’s deep! No one here has ever heard libertarian tautologies before!
cckids
@ruemara:
This. Please god & FSM, this.
Jonny Scrum-half
AlWhite — You’re right, to some degree. I shouldn’t have limited my statement to “liberals” who want big government, because certainly conservatives have greatly increased the size of government, as well. The difference is that conservatives don’t appear to be looking to help the powerless, so it’s not inconsistent for them to, for example, support the military-industrial complex.
Belafon — I don’t have all the answers, but I’m not pushing for a circa-1870 hands-off government. I don’t have a problem with social safety nets, for example, and while I’m not smart enough to know how to reform health care, I do know that it needs to be changed and I’m not necessarily opposed to a European-style system. By the way, I’ve read “Road to Serfdom,” and Hayek wasn’t opposed to any of that, either, despite how current “conservatives” like to spin things.
I guess that my point is that we need to be suspicious of increasing government power, for any reason — wars, domestic policy, or whatever — because the end result is often a lot different than what’s intended.
ware
This was the great opportunity to undercut the teabagger appeal that was lost. Teabaggers are all about resentment — against immigrants, against the lazy poor, against the not-white, against the rich, against the bankers, against the unions, against the corporations. Yes, some of these resentments got overpowered by their corporatist funders, but the resentments are still there. Progressives could have peeled off a lot of teabaggers by framing congress as the Money Party vs the People Party and channeling that resentment.
Lewis Carroll
And to those defending Obama (who I voted for, donated to and volunteered for, only to be horribly disappointed), is this really ‘the best he could do’?:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-k-galbraith/obamas-probelm-simply-def_b_779711.html
Did the scary Republicans MAKE him put these economic arsonists in charge rather than, say, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, Paul Volcker, Robert Reich or Galbraith himself?
Believe what you want, but no sale here.
Paula
Is it unintentional hippie-punching that the article Cole posted is 4 years old?
R-Jud
@Pangloss:
The first was a cancer. The second the infection that finished the patient off.
hildebrand
@Suck It Up!: This is a rather important question, and one that I would like to see answered by the most ardent of Obama critics around here – why is it that the President is getting killed by big business if he is theoretically so deep in their collective pocket?
Alwhite
@themann1086:
Exactly – it is not the size of government that is the problem it is what the government is doing – or not doing.
Its like Disney World – they could make it cheaper to get in but then the park would not be as neat and clean or have so many rides. If you want cheaper you can go to cheaper parks. However, too many people seem to want to live in Disney World but think it should be free (at least for them). I will gladly pay for my share of police/fire/military/FDA/SEC/whatever as long as the benefits are worth the cost. I am not foolish enough to believe the free market can protect me from tainted foods/ponzi schemes/many others.
bemused
@chopper:
rotfl
DaBomb
@Lewis Carroll: Yeah, becuase Huff n Puff is just the best resource there is for valid information?!
Right….
chopper
@WyldPirate:
so it isn’t like rape? then how are you going to possibly be able to describe it in any meaningful way? without the ‘rape analogy’ you’ve got nothing.
liberal
@Suck It Up!:
IIRC, Obama did get more money from Goldman Sachs than any other candidate in the 2008 field.
Yes, Obama’s pissed off Wall St. Because he gave them 98% of what they wanted, instead of 200%. That doesn’t mean he’s not a money man.
liberal
@cat48:
You can argue that the NY Fed is “the government.” But regardless of formal designation, it certainly represents the interests of the banksters.
Kryptik
But remember folks, this whole problem and why Democrats lost is because Obama just didn’t listen to those poor Republicans enough. It’s all his fault for not being properly bipartisan and giving Republicans 150% of what they ask for.
Fuck it, bipartisanship as its defined these days is a joke.
liberal
@J sub D:
LOL. Because without the state, we all will have so much liberty—liberty to enjoy murdering each other.
liberal
@DaBomb:
Argument ad hominem.
liberal
@hildebrand:
Because while he’s 99% in business’s pocket, the Rethugs are 500%.
liberal
@TomG:
Sure, there are some “good” libertarians out there. But if we’re talking about an average, statistical measure, not so much.
MTiffany
@Judas Escargot:
But if they’re both corrupted beyond redemption, then the only difference is the stench.
liberal
@Rhoda:
That’s an empirical question. I think both sides of the question—that HCR was a sellout to insurance interests, and that HCR is a small beachhead towards reining in the private market—are positions people can take in good faith.
LOL. F*cked the banksters? If you think that, you have a giant hole in your head.
Montysano
@Rhoda:
There’s really only one thing to do about it: convince 40% of the country to stop believing the garbage that grifters like Beck, Palin, and Limbaugh feed to them. As long as 40% is offering full-throated lockstep support to The Money Party (who goes to work every single day with the goal of screwing these rubes), we’ll never fix it.
Once you’re done with that little task, you can set to work convincing another 40% that hitting the “Like” button on a Facebook page does not = a movement.
Bitter partisan division is the goal; it’s crucial to the ability of The Money Party to hang onto power. There can be nothing that They fear more than a bipartisan grassroots movement whose goal is to vote them out of office.
John Bird
Please check out John Dean’s piece on the Tea-Party-planned government shutdown.
I know this is kind of my pet Cassandra issue here, but this is a sober investigation of the facts behind the Republican Party’s stated plan to shut down the federal government. The story links to a few cogent analyses of previous shutdowns.
Most worrisome to me is that during the 1995-1996 Republican-led shutdown, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was forced to halt disease monitoring. Anyone who follows this issue knows we have spent too little time and money preparing for an outbreak of contagious disease in the country and have repeatedly dodged bullets with influenza, hepatitis C, and other risks.
A government shutdown that prevents detection of a serious epidemic could cripple the United States.
rickstersherpa
Well, all humans are corrupted beyond redemption, But sometimes for a period we find grace. FDR for the Democrats, Lincoln for the Republicans.
t Listen, as imperfect and half-way as the reforms of the last two years are, they literally got the foot in the door (Affordable Health Care Act and Consumer Financial Protection Agency), and that has caused much of the right-wing rage of the last 24 months. The thing is to keep fighting, even when one is tired and discourage. It is then the most important thing in the world to fight the good fight.
Obama’s corruption, and most Democrats corruption, is subtle corruption of mind, apparent in the Democratic administrations since Carter. It is the adoption of a free market ideology that was once at home among moderate Republicans and shares much with libertarianism.
Lewis Carroll
@Hildebrand:
Because they are a bunch of rent-seekers who will whine and moan about ANY curtailment of their ability to fleece this country?
Does this seem like an opinion that I should sit back and ponder seriously?:
“It’s war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
– Private equity chairman Steve Schwartzman, commenting on Obama’s proposal to increase the tax on carried interest.
How about some of the drivel coming out of the Chamber of Commerce?
Saying Obama is taking $hit from someone forty yards to the right of the fifty-yard line is meaningless for reality-based argument.
I’ll judge for myself whether what Obama is pursuing, what his priorities are, and who he chooses for key positions, rather than outsourcing my opinion to how it’s received in the most reactionary quarters.
Osama bin Laden also thought that Bush invading Iraq was an abomination, so since OBL is scum, that must mean that Bush was doing something right.
Somebody who’s a lowlife opposes Obama, so therefore what he’s doing must be right. Impeccable logic.
TomG
liberal @63 “liberty to enjoy murdering each other”
– you really need to read some Albert Jay Nock. This notion that the state is all that keeps us from murdering each other is a straw man. And considering that the 2 primary instigators of wars (i.e. mass-scale murder) are (a) states or (b) states using religious justifications, I would argue the shoe is very much on the other foot.
Montysano
@J sub D:
A Mark Levin listener. How adorable. Thanks for helping redefine “liberty” downward to = “mah monee!1!”
J sub D
@Ed Marshall:
And this is the first time you’ve ever heard the deep insight that the wealthy control the politicians?
hildebrand
@Lewis Carroll:
Ah, but I didn’t say that. You may actually be right but that doesn’t mean that the case has been proven, I am looking for actual evidence, for the particulars that show that Obama is actually a corporatist stooge. Asserting that he is a plaything of Wall Street because of the people that he brought into the administration is not evidence.
All I want is for you, or someone who shares your opinion, to lay out the specifics of the case.
Then, and yes I am asking for quite a great deal, I want someone to articulate (without mocking me for having the audacity to ask such questions) how one would actually turn this around. For bonus points, it needs to be politically feasible.
DaBomb
@liberal: I not talking to you teabagger. And it’s not.
Huff n Stuff isn’t a relaible “progressive” source.
KG
@Jonny Scrum-half: as a libertarian, let me give you this advice: go back and read the Federalist Papers, and maybe some Hobbs and Locke as well. It’s not liberty vs tyranny. It’s tyranny (which can take many forms, from theocracy to absolute monarchy to oligarchy to military junta) vs license (anarchy). Day to day, there isn’t much difference between the two. Neither is a free or liberal state of being, life is short cruel and brutish in both. Ordered liberty (to use Hamilton’s term) is, ultimately, a fulcrum point between the two extremes and in order to exist it needs a competent and just government.
How to apply these principles to the modern world is debatable. What the best policies are to accomplish ordered liberty in the modern world is also open for debate. But the idea that government is inherently bad is so incredibly stupid that I can’t even fathom the words necessary to explain how incredibly stupid it is.
DaBomb
@rickstersherpa: FDR and Lincoln were period of grace?
FDR: Blacks and the Japanese might have a slight disagreement with there.
Lincoln: Civil War?!
DaBomb
@DaBomb: Epic typing fail today.
Lewis Carroll
I won’t take your bait, since you are vague about what constitutes ‘evidence’.
Whom you populate your administration with in key positions is IMO a huge indication of what your mindset is. James Galbraith laid much of this out, in addition to an alternative way to handle the pig stye that is the financial sector, in the essay that I linke to earlier.
There is also who Obama’s choices were for the ‘Deficit Commission’,
And ‘corporatist stooge’ is your term not mine. However, there are varying degrees to which one can be a tool of moneyed interests. There is the unwitting one, whereby one internalizes the worldview of people like bankers and financiers – this was explored extensively in Simon Johnson’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s most recent books.
There is abundant evidence that Obama has internalized the mindset that the health of the US, and more specifically its economic health, derives from the health of the FIRE sector. When in fact, believing that is to believe that the tail should wag the dog.
DaBomb
@Lewis Carroll: Aren’t there several “progressives” on Obama’s commission?
What does that say?
FlipYrWhig
@DaBomb: A legitimate criticism might be that the (6, right?) people Obama himself picked for the commission skewed in one direction or another. The 6 Congressional Republicans picked are going to be execrable by nature. The 6 Congressional Democrats picked are going to be a mixed bag.
But, in general, it seems to me that anything that can win the agreement of 14 out of 18 people chosen in such a way might actually be worth pursuing. If by doing nothing more than hanging together 5 progs can veto anything, so deadlock is the most likely and easiest outcome… and even under those conditions one of them chose to cave, that’d be a very dramatic sign that something interesting had happened, or that something much closer to “consensus” had in fact emerged.
Larry Van Goethem
Lord love a duck. Michael Moore–him with the scruffy billed hat and no degree. The National Treasure of a liberal almost without portfolio among we libs because he just doesn’t fit the stereotype. “A wit’s a feather, a chief’s a rod. An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” Pope.
I love that guy but he gets no respect from the left. Maybe he could be sent to liberal finishing school before his next piercing documentary. But Vonnegut used the Money Party first. Obama is of the latter species.
DaBomb
@FlipYrWhig: I agree. I just think it’s interesting that there’s all of this fallout from a draft proposal for consideration by other commission members.
It is not even the final proposal, other haven’t looked at it. It’s just the first of many steps and the finalized report could look completely different. But that doesn’t stop the outrage.
Lewis Carroll
Well, daBomb, in my opinion the only genuine ‘progressive’ that Obama actually chose for the commission is Andy Stern.
But I can see that since the Overton Window has been moved so far to the right, someone like corporate whore Erskine Bowles might be perceived as ‘progressive’.
DaBomb
@Lewis Carroll: And yet again, we really don’t know what the final report will contain, and we are talking about how corrupt Obama is?
Please…
Mnemosyne
@Lewis Carroll:
Andy Stern said “all entitlements are on the table,” so by your count now you’re down to zero on “progressives.”
Brachiator
The two best rejoinders to this came from the late Jesse Unruh, a formidable politician who was speaker of the California Assembly and state treasurer in the 1970s.
and
jake the snake
Semi off topic, but not really.
Rumors of a remake of “They Live” to be released in 2011.
Somehow I suspect they will screw it up, but if they should
keep the original theme and attitude, it would be a good counter to the tea party,
http://www.scifimoviepage.com/upcoming/previews/theylive-remake.html
ornery curmudgeon
@Nylund: “… this is also basically the stump speech Ralph Nader gave in 2000 …”
You are not allowed to remember or know this, and absolutely not to say it. The Dems need the scapegoat.
Nick
@TomG:
Really? because I would think this is exactly what libertarians want.
Nick
@liberal:
Obama got more money from almost everyone than anyone else in this field.
Nick
@Lewis Carroll:
ironically, you’ll judge based on the opinions of others.
Nick
@LarsThorwald:
I don’t get this, he spent the last two and a half month going from state to state arguing to get rid of them. I’m not really sure what more people want him to do.
At what point does it become ok to lose a battle? Is it ever ok to lose a battle?
Elie
@Montysano:
.
Well said and at the heart of our frustration. Doing something effective rather than just bitching or wanting a magical easy solution won’t do it. Look at this string — everyone pointing out accurately some aspect of the situation but no convergence on the reality of what it will take to change it. Answer: nothing.short.of.a.revolution. Period
We can make improvements, align incentives better, enhance transparency and a host of other legal and regulatory changes, but the basic framework will remain.
Doesnt mean we don’t keep working, but I don’t thing this is going to fall into the incremental change category.
Elie
Also:
After we have labeled the current administration as corrupt and beyond redemption, then what? Lets give in to the Palinites? What are you folks really proposing? I get the criticisms and some are apt, but then what? You think we can get someone further than he is on the left by some fantasy scenario?
Please — PLEASE explain your plan — not your observations, your opinions, but your plan to repace him with someone who will do the revolution that you want to mail in from the comfort of your home with no further sweat on your brow but the every couple of year journey to the voting booth? ..and maybe a donation or two and some phone banking — nothing too stressful…
Too many folks commenting are not in reality
Nick
@liberal:
You know what I don’t get about liberals. for such an educated bloc of people, why they can’t realize that the effect of the last 30 years of deregulation and neocon economic policy has let to a situation where Wall Street and Main Street are not mutually exclusive entities. They’re not competing interests. They never were.
In the perfect capitalist society, they rely on each other to survive. In our system, Main Street is a subsidiary of Wall Street. Wall Street can survive on its own, Main Street needs Wall Street. It’s a corporate dictatorship that has existed long before Pelosi, Reid or Obama came to power. Created through stuff like 401ks and a population of Dow Jones watchers who take the economic temperature by seeing how many points the market went up or down today.
He can do no more than try to make the best of it, unless he…no…we, destroy it ourselves. And if we do, we’re in for a long duration of suffering that would make the last two years look like New Years Eve on the Queen Victoria, so we don’t and we make the best of what we got. Destroying and replacing the system is not an easy thing to do and quite possibly wouldn’t even be possible.
Of course he didn’t tell you this. If a Democrat told you this, would you have voted for him?
Now, none of you are going to believe what I say, or even consider it, because it doesn’t jive with your ideas that fixing the world is easy if we just hold hands and fight the bad guys like in the movies in a united front arguing for “common people” and all the “common people” will come together in harmony and take back the country from the rich, wedge issues be damned, but Good luck with that. Really, I mean it.
priscianus jr
@TomG:
Lewis Carroll
@Nick,
No, not based on the opinions of others, but the experience of others. This is not the first financial / economic crisis ever.
Do you think Obama’s actions, where he has had the ability to wield power, resemble say, FDR’s in any way?
Or for a more recent example, those of (right-of-center) Swedish banking regulators?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_banking_rescue
The very fact that it was cited by an actual widely-respected economist (Galbraith) as a better alternative makes it someone else’s ‘opinion’ in only a superficial way.
The fact is that Obama’s economic team did everything it could to keep the banks from eating the shit sandwich they created. In fact, they’re still going to great lengths to allow them to play mark-to-fantasy accounting games to hide their stinking piles.
Mnemosyne
@Lewis Carroll:
You mean like when FDR agreed to oppose legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime so he could get the votes of Southern Democrats for the New Deal? Or was it when he agreed to structure Social Security in such a way that the majority of African-Americans were left out?
FDR got things done, but he sacrificed Americans’ civil rights to do it in a way that would be completely unacceptable to Democrats today.
ChrisNYC
@Mnemosyne: Yay! I love FDR but this weird hagiography of him and of LBJ really has become a fetish. It is fun though to see “true progressives” pining for the good ol’ days of the 1930s — when everything was fair and right. Ever backward!
Lewis Carroll
Yes, because we all know that recent presidents so closely followed the letter of the law and never sacrificed anyone’s rights to get things done…
But at any rate, what bedrock civil rights would Obama have had to sacrifice to effectively do what was done in Sweden?
The so-called banks were bankrupt. Instead of making their shareholders and management take haircuts and lose positions of power while their institutions were bleeding out on the table, the Obama team chose to treat them with kid gloves. Compare to what happened in the GM bailout. Would the Treasury have had to recruit some southern racists to go along with the cause, or some other similar such deal with the devil to treat the banks the same as GM and Chrysler?
And still they let them extend and pretend…
And to get back to hildebrand’s original point, neither my opinion, nor those of the economists I cited, are supportive of our narrow self-interest, such as those of the parasitic bankers.
Mnemosyne
@Lewis Carroll:
He probably would have had to give up the DADT repeal, and agree not to support any attempt to pass ENDA or repeal DOMA. If he had done that, he probably could have peeled off at least a few reluctant Republicans.
You also have not presented any evidence that what you wanted Obama to do is actually legal. The banking laws of Sweden allowed the government takeover. US banking laws do not have the same provisions. So, yes, if we had the same laws as Sweden and Obama refused to take the same action, you might have a point. But we don’t have the same laws, and Congress was not about to pass one to allow Obama to shut down the banks.
Lewis Carroll
Not to mention that it’s obvious how much Obama values core civil rights, as evidenced by his claim to be able to order the extra-judicial killing of American citizens, and refusal to even investigate our institutional torture. A regular MLK.
ChrisNYC
@Lewis Carroll: I’m not following taking haircuts. I know what that means in the context of a deal but you’re talking about less favorable repayment rates (?), dissolution of equity (i.e., bankruptcy outside the Code)? If that, does the govt become the acting bank and ferry things through to solvency or is it a Chap 7 type deal? What did you specifically want Obama to do to punish the shareholders of banks? (Keeping in mind that they were already “punished” because they were basically forced to enter into TARP. Whether from hubris or whatever, they didn’t want to take it and Paulson said they had no choice — the threat was to bring the regulators down on them and close up shop.)
Lewis Carroll
OK, I’ll show you how it would have been legal to temporarily nationalize the banks if you show me how it was legal to nationalize Fanny, Freddy, AIG and IndyMac. You first, since those guys actually, you know, got nationalized.
There’s more here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13497
including:
“By early February the call for some kind of nationalization began to emerge from various directions. The AFL-CIO raised it, but provided no definition of what it should mean. Noted economists like nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, called for it, as it NYU professor, Nouriel Roubini, whose predictions of the evolution of the crisis had proved correct for the past two years. James Baker, the main policymaker during the Reagan administration, came out for it. Greenspan reiterated that nationalization was necessary for an ‘orderly restructuring’ of the system. Key figures in the Republican party, such as Lindsey Graham, declared on public tv “if nationalization is what works, then we should do it”, as did Banking Committee chair in the Senate, Democrat Chris Dodd.
But immediately the Obama administration’s big guns responded, discouraging the idea and very talk of nationalization. Geithner, White House economic advisor, Larry Summers, and Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, all quickly debunked the idea, as did House Banking Committee chairman, Barney Frank. Dodd in the Senate backtracked and joined the denial. They sounded off in unison with big bank CEOs, Ken Lewis of Bank of America, and Jaime Dimond of JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit who declared it ‘would be a step backwards’.”
ChrisNYC
@Lewis Carroll: For Pete’s sake, it’s not extrajudicial. If Al-Awlaki wants to submit himself jurisdiction, he’ll get a trial, presumably for his role in the Christmas thing. If he wants to stay in Yemen and wants to be an operational portion of a plan against the US, then he’s fair game, as long as killing or capturing would make a difference. That’s the rules — which Congress can change. Al-Awlaki determines whether he’s a target. The last I heard from him, he said, that Muslims don’t need any religious justification to kill any Americans, civilian or military, because we’re basically tainted, all of us. That there is a civil rights hero. And, quite an appealing defendant. The analogy to black people in the South is really fitting.
ChrisNYC
@Lewis Carroll: Why is nationalizing the banks better? Didn’t Krugman (an advocate of nationalization) say he was wrong because his prediction (without nationalization), the dreaded zombie banks scenario not actually happen? The banks are Hoovering up money. Isn’t nationalization the extreme remedy to prevent banks from falsely looking like market players but actually being insolvent? Our banks are not insolvent.
Lewis Carroll
I’m talking at least about debt-equity swaps, governmental terms similar to what Buffett got from GS, the firing of management and possible clawbacks of compensation that was based on fictitous ‘earnings’.
There was also widespread fraud, and the gov should have eventually gotten around to investigating that, although it looks like several suits are going forward now to make the banks take back on their books the garbage they fraudulently sold others.
In terms of rehab, the ‘Bad Bank’ model might have worked if it was seriously tried, although the scale of it would have been very, very large. Then again, we have far greater resources than Sweden ever had.
Going forward, the Volcker rule should have been a minimum starting point. If you want to trade, fine, raise your own capital. Money is a fungible resource, and if you’re going to have your snout in the Fed window, you should be making loans and doing traditional banking, not speculating on our dime, and coming hat in hand when it blows up in your face.
Again, Obama could have been out in front on this, at least making these suggestions as a starting point, rather than starting halfway between a sane system and the banksters’ ideal world.
Lewis Carroll
Obama also could have explained why the current system is anathema to true capitalism, as was explained thusly by a Wall Street veteran here on another blog thread:
• There’s nothing “free market” about banks backed by the government speculating with taxpayers’ money.
• There’s nothing “free market” about banks borrowing from the Fed’s Discount Window at near-zero rates and then purchasing debt securities paying 2.5%+ at Treasury auctions.
• There’s nothing “free market” about investment banks threatened with insolvency magically becoming bank holding companies overnight without meeting requisite net capital requirements.
• There’s nothing “free market” about banks becoming so large thru government backing that their market risk threatens the wellbeing of entire global financial system.
Not only do these things have nothing to do with a free market or capitalism, they actually damage the free market – by crowding out nongovernment-backed market participants, by distorting the natural price discovery process, by decreasing market competitiveness and innovation, and by misallocating and centralizing risk. These are the hallmarks of a statism.
Breaking up TBTF banks and separating commercial and investment banking (Glass-Stegall type reform) is not socialism, it safeguards and preserves capitalism.”
Plus Chris, you only think our TBTF banks ‘aren’t insolvent’ because they are being supported by multiple lifelines, the most insidious of which are their continued ability to use accounting rules which allow them to hide losses indefinitely, and their implicit guarantee from the government. Paul Krugman even referenced this in one of his blog posts when he excerpted a rating explanation from some S & P rating which referenced an implicit government guarantee as part of the rationale for its rating.
ChrisNYC
@Lewis Carroll: So, your beef is marginal interest rates on terms? I’m not being nasty, I’m trying to understand. You think the Fed should have driven a harder bargain, on a loan and guarantees that they were forcing the banks to take? Ok. You wanted to recoup more than the profit the Fed got on the bailout. Smart.
On the earnings, I have to say, that I have a hard time understanding how they were fictitious. If they were, then let’s unwind all the individual deals that property owners made during the bubble, because that was all ill-gotten gains as well. We could go back to say 2006. If you lucked out and the bubble duped your buyer, you need to make them whole because the “real value” of the house was not nearly what you sold it for. So give it back.
Where was the widespread fraud? Intentional misrepresentations. On appraisers, sure but that’s been a game for a while now. Good luck collecting from those fly-by-night operators. The banks are still protected if they had a licensed guy sign off on the value — it’s not like they are going out and looking at properties — by the way, where WERE the state regulators? I guess we’ll give them a pass. Anyway, I’m not seeing how you get at the bank pockets.
So, which part should Obama have been out front on?
Mnemosyne
@Lewis Carroll:
Um, Fannie and Freddie aren’t banks. They’re GSEs (government-sponsored enterprises) with a specific mandate. AIG is also not a bank. It’s an insurance company that worked primarily with mortgages. IndyMac was a savings and loan, so it was seized by the FDIC in a very well-known process that cannot legally be used for commercial banks like Bank of America or Washington Mutual.
If you didn’t even know these basic facts, why, exactly, am I supposed to think you have any idea what you’re talking about?
Nick
@Lewis Carroll:
AIG and IndyMac WERE nationalized
Nick
@Lewis Carroll:
For the most part, yes. FDR’s biggest legislative changes did not occur until after 1934 midterms.
Sly
@Mnemosyne:
And its not exactly like every one of those “nationalizations” (I get annoyed at that term in this context… receivership, dammit! … but oh well) happened in an orderly and equitable fashion. Most of that can be attributable to a lack of authority: The FDIC can only “nationalize” entities that have deposit insurance. IndyMac, for example, was initially registered as a federal thrift. But it had to register as a federal savings bank in 2000 after it bought SGV Bancorp and became a depository institution.
So the government had authority to “nationalize” IndyMac, but not AIG. So with AIG you had a situation where the government had to “nationalize” a company the old fashioned way: buy it. But when you buy a company you’re still on the hook for all the liabilities and contracts. Though the OTS could regulate AIG, they couldn’t authorize the FDIC to place it under receivership. Thus we get the mess where AIG’s counterparties had to, under law, be paid 100 cents on the dollar.
Sly
@Nick:
Gawd. It is so unfair of you to compare Obama’s 22 months in office favorably to FDR’s 145 months in office.
Nick
@Sly:
Well, I agree that we need a President like the one who stripped an entire ethnicity of their civil rights and threw them into internment camps.
Wile E. Quixote
@Nick:
Please, call them what they were, concentration camps. If my 88 year old grandfather, who spent World War II on a submarine in the Pacific playing “Hide and Go Kill” with the Imperial Japanese Navy can cut through the bullshit and call them concentration camps then so can everyone else.
Lewis Carroll
The big difference Chris is that there was no information (theoretically) hidden in the transaction between the buyers and sellers of homes; they were arms-length transactions between the two parties. I know of no widespread movement among buyers to go after those who sold them homes at inflated values.
Not so for the deals the banks put together. The securitization process allowed them to hide the true value of the securities they were dealing in (with a big assist from the ratings agencies). A lot of the bankers knew that what they were dealing in was crap – you can read Yves Smith’s book for the abundant evidence if you don’t believe me.
And unlike in the individual home buyer – home seller model, there was a principal/agent problem in the banks in which the operating mindset was IBYYBG – by the time the shit blows up “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone”. Which is OK up to a point – they were actually fleecing the shareholders of the banks, but it’s when they’re granted every backstop the Treasury and Fed could come up with that my outrage meter rises. Unlike in the case of an individual home, the bankers were dealing not with their own money, but others’.
We’ll see how well the lawsuits go against banks forcing them to take back assets that were fraudulently conveyed.
And I can’t take seriously the arguments about the *legality* of taking over the banks, given the myriad extraordinary steps the Treasury and Fed took in the midst of the crisis. The Fed, especially, overstepped its mandate with all of the backstopping it did. Much like Sly alludes to in his comment.
Sorry I don’t have time to answer every question from everybody.
Lewis Carroll
The only other thing I would add is that the idea that these ‘commercial banks’ are beyond forced restructuring is laughable considering the biggest and most sytemically-important ones – the big 4 – all have FDIC insurance.
So since money is a fungible commodity, they are in effect using insured deposits (as well as free money from the FED) to speculate, all the while with an implicit federal guarantee.
Which is another reason there should have been efforts to reinstate some form of Glass-Steagall type separation. Although a strict form of Volcker Rule would be a good start.
And as for Chris’ suggestion that we look the other way at fraud, just because it is widespread, I agree with these people http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/11/another-nobel-economist-says-we-have-to.html
that that is a recipe for another disaster.
Lewis Carroll
In February of 2009 there was ~ $300bn left in the TARP program kitty. The combined market cap of C, BAC, GS, MS and WFC was around $170bn. Therefore, the Treasury could have BOUGHT every one and then restructured them and sold them off, effectively doing what Sweden had done.
Instead Geithner and company set about looking for ways of doing whatever it took to nurse the companies back to health in their then-current forms (*legal* or otherwise, btw: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/03/guest-post-new-bailouts-are-end-run.html).
How has that worked out for us in the past 18 months or so, both economically and politically? And how did FDR’s party do in the midterm elections of 1934, as opposed to Obama’s in 2010?
Again, I am NOT talking about what needed to be done in the heat of the moment in the fall of 2008. That I’m not happy about, but I can understand the entire credit system freezing up, your paycheck not clearing etc.
What I have a problem with is coddling the banksters and flooding them with money, which they still are not lending, except back to the Treasury, while at the same time using some of it to lobby against the very Administration that saved their bacon. To me, it’s f-cking insane.
johnny walker
@LarsThorwald:
There are no “good guys” or “bad guys.” There are a bunch of severely-flawed people out doing what they (may very well have convinced themselves to) think is best for the country, and all of them are capable of both good and bad acts.
Between this and the furor over the Stewart/Maddow interview I can see that many of us here aren’t exactly down with this concept, but there you go. It explains a lot of the “but omg why is the person on my team criticizing my team?!” agita that some of you seem to be experiencing: they aren’t on your team. They aren’t about making sure “Dems win” or whatever. They likely agree with you on more things than they disagree, but that’s not the same thing as being partisan compatriots.
And there are lotsa people here whose #1 priority is pretty clearly that things go well for and only nice things are said about the Dems, regardless of whether you’d be comfortable admitting it or not. Even our estimable host is guilty of this to a large degree; he’s pissed about both civil liberties issues with the Obama administration *and* firebaggers criticizing the administration, but at least judging from post quantity it’s pretty clear that the latter is an issue of much greater importance.
johnny walker
@Nick:
Gee, if only the post you quoted went on to say that. Perhaps in the very next sentence or something crazy like that. It’s almost as though that was part of the point he was making!