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It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Petty moves from a petty man.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

No one could have predicted…

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

You are here: Home / Economics / Austerity Bombing / Open Thread: Oligarchs Mourn At Peterson’s Austerity Summit

Open Thread: Oligarchs Mourn At Peterson’s Austerity Summit

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Let us summon up an entire orchestra of very tiny violins! Alex MacGillis, at TNR, on “The Hypocritical, Bipartisan Fearmongering of the Fiscal Summit“:

These are not happy days for the fiscal fear-mongers. The deficit has been falling rapidly even in the absence of a grand bargain to slash entitlements and raise taxes. Both sides have given up for now on the elaborate charade of super-committees and debt commissions, which, for several years now, have accomplished nothing but nudging the country toward a premature austerity that, many economists now agree, undermined our economic recovery. Instead, today’s New York Times reports that “in a shift from deficit concerns,” the Senate is on the verge of passing the extension of a whole swath of business tax breaks without finding any way to pay for them.

It is, in other words, not an auspicious moment for the annual “Fiscal Summit” hosted in Washington today by the Peterson Foundation, the organization funded by private-equity titan and Social Security antagonist Pete Peterson. But when a billionaire’s footing the bill and a former president is on the guest list, it’s not like you just call the whole thing off…

Then again, carrying the event off was perhaps not so difficult to do, given that these summits have from the start been built around a different sort of truth-avoidance. Peterson and his ideological allies promote a specific, non-unanimous agenda—prioritizing deficit and debt reduction above all else via deep reductions in Social Security and Medicare and increases in taxes (in that order of preference). That is their prerogative as advocates. But the summits they host to this end are framed as if they’re being held on behalf of some universal, noncontroversial cause—a framing that, among other things, enables the participation of straight-news journalists who would shy away from engaging in similarly slanted events on different issues. Those involved act as if the summits are but a wonkier cousin of a Take Back the Night rally or a breast cancer awareness promo. They are not…

Zach Carter, at HuffPo:

At this year’s Peterson fete, attendees seemed to recognize that their moment had passed. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — the living patron saint of American austerians — didn’t bother to show up. The most politically salient comment to contemporary Washington was former President Bill Clinton’s mockery of Karl Rove’s recent suggestion that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. And while Peterson still attracts big names — in addition to Clinton, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan all spoke — much of the discussion focused on what might have been…

“I’m concerned people will take some of this lull in the action, this drop in the deficit, as a harbinger for the future,” said Erskine Bowles, who co-chaired President Obama’s bipartisan debt commission. “My guess is nothing substantive will happen before 2017.”…

One can only hope!

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    Yatsuno

    Were there tears? Please tell me there were sweet sweet austerian tears. And that they were bottled.

  2. 2.

    Roger Moore

    @Yatsuno:

    Please tell me there were sweet sweet austerian tears. And that they were bottled.

    We could put a dent in the deficit by auctioning them off to the highest bidder…

  4. 4.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    Their glum demeanor, despite the decrease in the deficit, proves that it never really was about deficit reduction, it was about throwing a gratuitous fuck into the most vulnerable among us. I’d pay a hundred bucks per view to see them impaled.

  9. 9.

    Citizen_X

    the Senate is on the verge of passing the extension of a whole swath of business tax breaks without finding any way to pay for them.

    What the fuck? How about, you know, restoring research funding, staffing at federal agencies, aid to states, etc etc before doing this shit?

  12. 12.

    Karen in GA

    Since it’s an open thread, I’m asking this here. Ever have an idea suddenly hit you that’s either “Of course! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” or “How freakin’ stupid am I for even considering this?” and you can’t tell which one it is? I wrote a “quit smoking pep talk” blog post a while back that was fairly well-received (“Freshly Pressed” on WordPress, a professional writer friend called it “awesome”). I have this insane idea to extend it, and turn it into a full-length sarcastic self-help book. Have I ever even attempted to write something book-length before? No. Am I a good enough writer to pull it off? Ha! Probably not. How would I even start to attempt to have it published, assuming I finished it? No idea.

    Should I try it anyway?

  13. 13.

    Punchy

    OT: so I see that SCOA just said “nice try, bitchez” to the appeal for a stay of Judge Piazza’s gay marriage ruling. Bounced the appeal like a fat chick at skinny camp. Really looks like we’re gunna have equality in at least 48 states within the next 2 years (Mississippi and KS will take hostages first).

  16. 16.

    scav

    Maybe they’ll retroactively claw-back all the hedgie and banker bonuses awarded over the last decade for not breaking the economy hard enough and thus not delivering the expected results.

  21. 21.

    Karen in GA

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Um, why the fuck not?

    Ha! When you put it that way… Now that I think about it, the answer is, “Because boring life in which ‘accomplishing stuff’ is for other people,” I suppose? And now that I think more about it, that’s kind of a dumb reason.

  22. 22.

    TheMightyTrowel

    Christ, I want to print this out and paste it over the windows of the houses of the entire Australian government. We’ve just been handed an unbelievable (yet totally predictable) shit sandwich of a budget which invents a budget crisis as an excuse to gut welfare, school funding, hospital funding, university funding, research funding, environmental measures and a variety of other programs. Among the nastiest are huge cuts to welfare for young people – under 30s can only get on welfare after 6 months of unemployment with active job seeking and to keep it longer than 6 months they will need to do some form of labour for it (debt prisons, we hardly missed ye). The senate is threatening to block large chunks (possibly triggering a new election) but I’ll believe it when I see it. For now the government (Abbott the PM and Hockey the treasurer) are holding firm and responding to critics like this (from parliamentary question time, reported by the guardian):

    “Labor follows up with a question from Brendan O’Connor: Why is the PM forcing young people into a life of poverty to pay for his deceit?

    This government is not focussing on what people can’t do, it’s focussing on what people can do.”

  24. 24.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Karen in GA: Sometimes I am pithy. Just do it. If it goes nowhere, you still wrote a book. It is an accomplishment. As I used to say to my ex, it will either be really great or it will be an adventure.

  26. 26.

    srv

    @Karen in GA: You should ask our esteemed authors here. Several published people.

    Hey, AL, how about Tom hosting a live blog of BJ authors?

  29. 29.

    mai naem

    How about we pull all the government benefits from all these pigs at the fete. Eskine Bowles pension. His healthcare if he’s getting a federal one. WJC’s secret service protection. His office allowance. His presidential pension. His Arkansas pension. His healthcare. Greenspan’s pension. His healthcare. Alan Simpson’s pension and healthcare. I am sick and tired of these people.

  30. 30.

    JaneE

    It never was about the deficit. Their version of morality demands that the poor suffer.

  31. 31.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yes, I am leaning towards not going through with it on this trip. I need to know what exactly I am doing before consenting and I don’t trust her to tell me the truth. I will tell her that she can schedule her religious ritual when I come again with her son. They all speak in a language I don’t understand so I need an ally. Besides most Hindu rituals I have observed were a male dominated show, so I am really curious as to what she has planned.

  32. 32.

    Violet

    @Karen in GA:

    Should I try it anyway?

    No, you should do it anyway. Going full Yoda on you–Do. Or do not. There is no try. So do it. If it doesn’t sell, you’ve still written a book and done something exciting. And it might be great. There’s not really a downside. Only fear and inertia are holding you back.

  33. 33.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate:

    Their glum demeanor, despite the decrease in the deficit, proves that it never really was about deficit reduction, it was about throwing a gratuitous fuck into the most vulnerable among us.

    A gratuitous fuck with their own Very Serious imprimatur, as opposed to clusterfuck austerity, which is what the US ended up with.

    @Citizen_X:

    How about, you know, restoring research funding, staffing at federal agencies, aid to states, etc etc before doing this shit?

    Is that stuff going to get 60 votes to proceed? No. Which is why the Senate will give us bullshit in the hope that it will turn into gentle rainfall come election time.

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @schrodinger’s cat

    :They all speak in a language I don’t understand so I need an ally,

    I know the feeling. My ex was my translator. I learned some of her language – enough that I would be okay as a tourist, but not enough that family problems could be discussed.

  37. 37.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @TheMightyTrowel:

    The senate is threatening to block large chunks (possibly triggering a new election) but I’ll believe it when I see it.

    The squeeze on states, designed to force them to raise their part of the GST, is an especially shitty part of the shit sandwich. And don’t discount the prospect of a double dissolution. Abbott and Hockey are playing chicken with the Senate, but they also have a pretty exaggerated sense of self-worth.

  38. 38.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @pseudonymous in nc: I think they’re genuinely surprised at how angry their erstwhile allies the eastern state governors have become because of the cuts to hospitals/schools and the link to GST (for those not in the know: the govt wants to cut back federal money to hospitals and schools, forcing the states to shoulder that burden and forcing them to request a rise in GST so that the Abbott et al don’t have to be on the hook for raising GST which they want to do). Their lack of concern for state elections is really unintentionally funny. This country is governed by amateurs, children and ideologues you’ll never convince me otherwise.

  39. 39.

    Mike G

    the Senate is on the verge of passing the extension of a whole swath of business tax breaks without finding any way to pay for them.

    Which shows you how shallow their commitment to deficit reduction really is. If there’s a smidge of a chance to open up some unfunded juicy tax breaks for business or the rich, they’re on it like Rush Limbaugh on a pork chop.

    The real agenda is the authoritarian sadist’s favorite activity, dishing out punishment and pain. Gutting the safety net is a side benefit.

  40. 40.

    Tommy

    There have been some things Obama has done I am not a huge fan of, but when you ponder the Federal budget. The deficit. He has kind of gotten his arms around both. Heck if Congress would just get out of his way and let a few of his jobs programs through, we’d be in even better shape. Heck I think when history looks back at Obama decades from now the two things they will say is (1) he didn’t start any wars and ended the ones he inherited and (2) he put all of Bush’s spending on the books. He tried to balance those books. Those are not two small things ……

  43. 43.

    Debbie(aussie)

    @TheMightyTrowel:
    Yep. It’s one of those times where you think ‘how could they’ and respond with ‘because they fucking can’! Wonder how those that voted for these bastards are feeling now(the swing ones, at least).

  44. 44.

    schrodinger's cat

    I got a leather bag and my boat shoes fixed in India, both included some hand stitching and I was charged the equivalent of a quarter. I feel guilty, should I have given the shoe repair person more money?

  45. 45.

    Tommy

    @Mike G: I can’t get all up in arms about tax cuts for businesses. I really can’t. Where my frustration is when we give them tax breaks I expect them to get good “corporate citizens.” I think the tax breaks ought to be tied to them offering health care, better wages, hiring more employees. Not just pocketing the money and yelling Obama is a Socialist.

  46. 46.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @schrodinger’s cat: hence manufactured crisis. The economy is doing all right – through the bad times it was propped up by an enormous economic boom due to mining and exporting minerals (largely iron to east asia). The lab govt has run a (small by eu/us standards) deficit the last few years and the libs got in in part based on campaign drum beating about ‘restoring the surplus’. Most australians are horrendously financially illiterate and there is literally one major news source (the guardian online) which is not beholden to mining or the murdochs or the whims of govt funding (the abc is more npr than bbc). People don’t understand their economy, they get huge chunks of their news filtered through the british press and so over identify with britain (including sharing their anxieties re a shaky economy) and the local press does fuck all to illuminate the situation.

  47. 47.

    cckids

    @Karen in GA: I agree, you should go for it!

    As Maya Angelou says: “You get out there and you do it, and sometimes it really works. The rest of the time, you’re just stretching your soul”.

  49. 49.

    Karen in GA

    Thank you, all. My fatigued punchiness has served a purpose. I shall not try, I shall do. I might do embarrassingly badly, but what the hell.

    First, though — sleep.

  52. 52.

    jl

    To borrow one of Krugman’s lines: You mean we don’t have to cut social insurance now in order to avoid cutting it later? The time for that brilliant solution to our fiscal problems is past? Disaster! What about the children? I am so sad.

  54. 54.

    Tommy

    OK this is funny:

    [W]e have spent our fortunes for freedom and love of our fellow man and need your help to continue our efforts to keep all Americans free from tyranny. Please if you can spare even a few dollars for food, fuel and supplies to continue the stand against tyranny and an overbearing governtment [sic] please help.

    I guess it seems if you want to camp out at the Bundy ranch, not go to work, well money is hard to come by. I guess Bundy isn’t feeding them, like you know he doesn’t pay the government to feed his cattle.

  56. 56.

    NotMax

    Half a century later, a misty look back at the milieu of the release of Dr. Strangelove.

    One of the things the censors carped about? The mention of (gasp!) condoms.

  57. 57.

    jl

    @Tommy: On the assumption that Bundy is basically a con man, I’d say he played those dudes out for all they’re worth. Basically, free private security force for a couple of months. I read he is running a few scams up the flagpole to see if he can reel in some more marks: the NV-DC yoogjst demonstration evah for Freedoms, bragging that he’ll soon file an ironclad and historic court case and those that come to guard him will Witness History!, some other circus act I forget what it was (edit: something about everybody can come down to some local gummint office and file some nuisance BS official sovereign citizen papers).

  58. 58.

    Tommy

    @SatanicPanic: At some small level I can see how ranchers out west are not happy the Federal government owns so much land. Where I live, rural IL most of the land is still owned by farmers, not large corporations, and people farm it. How many people make their living. So yeah if the majority of the land around me was owned by the Feds it would be kind of weird.

    But then from everything I have read about Bundy, the Feds were giving him a sweat heart deal for his cattle to graze. Almost pennies on the dollar. So it is hard for me to feel very sorry for the guy. I mean right outside my front door is a 5,000 acre field. Owned by the lady that lives to the left of me. She “rents” the land to a local farmer, who farms it. It isn’t any of my business what he pays, but I assume it is a fair amount of money. If the Feds owned the land, and rented it to him for a fraction of the market value, like they did for Bundy and his cattle, I am pretty sure he wouldn’t be bitching about the Federal government!

  59. 59.

    Tommy

    @jl: I am stunned more people don’t see these individuals the way I think both of us do. Jusr con artist. I really wonder how much money he has pocketed from this. I mean how much money did Zimmerman pocket? And if some of the media reports I read after the trail, that money was supposed to cover his legals fees and he kind of stiffed his lawyers. It seems like anytime one of these folks pop up it seems the first thing they do is set-up a web site with a PayPal link.

  60. 60.

    jl

    @Tommy: Having grown up in the West, at most rational levels I can understand how ranchers should thank God for gummint big, small and in between. If it were not for big gummint there would be basically no farming and no ranching. All the stuff that makes farming and ranching work out West is based on government programs. Homestead Act, Desert Land Act, Timber and something or other act. Almost all irrigation projects are government funded and run. help from land grant universities and agricultural extensions, Government sanctioned growers and ranchers associations, Agricultural supports and subsidies. Years of subsidized foreign labor (Bracero Program).

    If it were not for government programs, there would not be much out there.

    Hell, if it weren’t for the hated environmental laws and activist judges, farmers in the Central Valley would have been out of business in the 1870s. that is when commie judges said that big corporate hydraulic mines in the Sierra couldn’t fill up the Sacramento River basin with ten feet of mud whenever they felt like it.

    Indirect government support gave a huge boost too. Namely, transcontinental railroads taking produce and meat back east quick fast at a fat profit.

    But, you have more day to day autonomy than some oppressed wage slave, so from the gut, you feel free, rugged, independent and self-made. But that is an illusion, IMHO.

    Edit: The ability of small timers to get land out west was in large part a government program that went along with railroad subsidies.

  61. 61.

    jl

    I think the deal with the government nosing in and writing very detailed regs for disposition of land that was an in-kind payment of federal land in return for railroad expansion was that the feds did not want to deal with the huge problems caused by land speculators in East and Midwest before the Civil War. One of he reasons for illegal squatters, settler/Native American problems, financial panics, and rabble rousing free soil movements before Civil War was that rich speculators locked up huge tracts of land.

    The idea that if it were not for that damn federal gummint owning all the land, then there would be lots available for the average Joe is an illusion. If the land has any potential value at all, some rich dude or corporation will find a way to buy it up.

  62. 62.

    Tommy

    @jl: No I get what government has done. It has done a heck of a lot. This is one of the things that pisses me off to no end, that many don’t understand in almost every instance government is TRYING TO HELP not harm people. And you are right, you can’t underestimate the importance of rail lines and irrigation projects. The irrigation thing is so foreign to me. Where I live we grow a lot of shit, but it rains. I don’t know anybody that uses any type of irrigation. Either it rains or it doesn’t. I am pretty sure farmers by me have the world’s smallest violin playing for folks out west bitching about this or that.

  63. 63.

    jl

    @Tommy: There is actually a lot of dry land farming in CA, but it is small relative to the big irrigated industries. The only kind I know much about has been increasing recently due to growth in farmers markets, and it is all relatively small scale. More and more dry farm truck farming, mostly tomatoes, eggplant and squash and some melons. They are very very tasty and very seasonal, and most of it does not look good enough or produced regularly enough or in large enough quantities for supermarkets to bother with it.

    Dry farmed apples and pears and some other specialty tree crops have been around for a long time, but I don’t know much about them.

    So, more farmers out here than you think sympathize with your dry farmers complaints.

  64. 64.

    NotMax

    Not an exact parallel, but still not far removed from requiring that libraries or document repositories, for example, eliminate “irrelevent or outdated” material from their collections or catalogs.

    A sticky wicket, indeed, this brave new world.

  66. 66.

    Glocksman

    @NotMax:

    Not really, as the decision doesn’t require the site with the ‘irrelevant or outdated material’ to remove it, merely for Google to remove the search results that found it.

    The article with the information the lawyer objected to is still there and still available.

    It’s not an exact analogy either, but it’d be closer to say that this is the electronic equivalent of leaving the offending book or other material on the shelf while pulling the card from the card catalog that tells you where it’s at.

  68. 68.

    Sherparick

    @jl: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner. This is just another huge plutotarchic scam to steal even more nation’s wealth, privatize it, and keep out the riff-raff.

  71. 71.

    Sherparick

    @Tommy: If one travels east to west especially after crossing the Mississippi river, on starts noticing it become drier and drier. When the Government started selling off land in the Northwest Territories and Illinois territory, those who had wealth “speculated” on western land and soon had more wealth, often by playing little games with the title of correctness of the land title, as Tom Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s father found out. indianahumanities.org/Wethepeople/301-toolkit.htm. This farm land, particularly Illinois’s well watered and deep, incredibly fertile, glacial loam, was valuable stuff. But the speculators and the chronic problem of getting a true title to this land after it passed out of Government control gave rise to the “Free land” part of the antebellum Republican Ideology where the Government would grant title to 160 acres of Government land to anyone who settled the land in person and held it for five years. This was fine in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and even eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakotas. But farther west on went, 160 acres could not support much in drier semi-arid lands. The Homestead Acts, often abused and manipulated by them who has, remain in effect until 1976 in the lower 48 and Hawaii, and Alaska until 1986. The same law that terminated the Homestead Acts basically retained ownership of the remaining Federal lands, mostly in the West since the the only land worth claiming there had been those with water on it, as a public trust. Because abusing the land until it was destroyed and useless was a great western tradition, it is no coincidence that the “Sagebrush” rebellion started within two years of this law going into effect with the attempt to regulate and mitigate that abuse.

  72. 72.

    Lee

    They buried the lede.

    At the conference, Clinton acknowledged that signing legislation to deregulate derivatives was a mistake that fueled Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown.

  73. 73.

    PurpleGirl

    @NotMax: Thanks for the link to the Dr. Strangelove article. I don’t remember the first time I saw the movie or where (how old I was) but I’ve been a fan of Dr. Strangelove for ever. I can watch it again and again. In fact, a few weekends ago, I watched twice on the same day. I think the comparison (although brief) to Fail-Safe is correct. Fail-Safe was not as successful because it is so serious and done with much sincerity. Dr. Strangelove’s wicked humor makes it watchable.

  74. 74.

    Brendan in NC

    @Mike G: If there’s a smidge of a chance to open up some unfunded juicy tax breaks for business or the rich, they’re on it like Rush Limbaugh on a pork chopViagra pill.
    FTFY

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