Every so often, something good happens on the floor of the House.
Excellent Links
Elizabeth Warren, Still Fighting the Good Fight(s)
NYMag‘s Daily Intel has the text of Professor Warren’s “classy” exit note to her colleagues at the newborn Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (” … I leave this agency, but not this fight. The issues we deal with — a middle class that has been squeezed and business models built on tricks and traps — are deeply personal to me, and they always will be. I will cheer as you open a new chapter in our ongoing push for a strong and independent CFPB. You can realize the vision of a 21st century government that holds law-breakers accountable and that enforces basic rules that make markets work honestly… “).
A one-page interview, “38 Minutes with.. Elizabeth Warren” is in NYMag‘s August 1 print edition:
… One problem is that the CFPB is not likely to get a director anytime soon. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced that he’ll filibuster any nominee until the agency is given a board designed to veto anything the CFPB might want to do. When I ask for her reaction to McConnell’s demand that it be made “more accountable and transparent to the American people,” Warren whips her head around, incredulous.
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“Oh, excuse me? Accountable?” she scoffs. “He wants this agency to be more accountable to the banks. He wants us to have a funding stream that will give the banks lobbying power over this agency. And the second thing he wants with this five-person board, he wants bankers running this place.”
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This is the kind of biting, no-apologies criticism that has so endeared Warren to her supporters, who have in turn fanned speculation that she may soon run for Senate, against Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts. But she is circumspect when asked directly about a potential run, as all Washington stars learn to be, telling me only, “I need to get back to Massachusetts”—a line she’s been using a lot the past few days. When pressed again, she repeats, “I need to go home.”
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Instead, Warren points to a shallow vase full of stones given to her this morning at Nancy Pelosi’s regular breakfast for new congressional Democrats, who would love to see her live to fight another day. “On Monday, when someone asked what I was going to do,” Warren explains, “I said, ‘Look, I’ve always done three things: I’ve taught school. I’ve worked on middle-class economic issues. And I’ve thrown rocks.’ ”
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And now? She smiles, nudging her new ammunition. “I plan to go back, teach school, work on middle-class economic issues, and throw rocks.”
Keep throwing those rocks, Ms. Warren!
Elizabeth Warren, Still Fighting the Good Fight(s)Post + Comments (64)
Rupert’s Empire: “Hack Work”
(h/t commentor R-Jud)
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In the August 1 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane has a most informative article on “a tabloid culture run amok“:
… Whatever the case, the last laugh has been his. Murdoch knows something that his assailants will seldom concede, and that renders their call for radical change, in the rapport between governance and the media, both tardy and redundant. The change has already happened; culture, media, and sport are not in Murdoch’s pocket, but the British, not least in their yen to watch soccer and cricket on Sky, have reached into their pockets and paid for his feast of wares. The country is in uproar just now, but outrage en masse functions like outrage in private: we reserve our deepest wrath not for the threat from without, which we fail to comprehend, but for forces with which we have been complicit. The British press has long revelled in the raucous and the irresponsible; that was part of its verve, and it was Murdoch’s genius, and also the cause of his current woes, to recognize those tendencies, bring the revelry to a head, and give the people what they asked for. He reminded them of themselves.
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Look at an average copy of the News of the World, from March 27th, well before the latest outcry. There are only scraps of news here, and almost nothing of the world. No woman in the first six pages wears anything warmer than lingerie. An entrant from a televised ice-dancing contest is granted a double-page spread to muse upon his newly transplanted hair. And the column on the op-ed page is by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator—a respectable weekly journal, loosely tied to the Tories, with a strong showing in arts and books coverage. Over the course of four decades, under Murdoch’s approving gaze, the lowbrow has paid no more attention to the highbrow than it ever did, while the highbrow has paid both heed and obeisance to the low—submission, in the weird wrangling of British class consciousness, being preferable to condescension. The most telling piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the hacking scandal, came from a former editor of the paper, Peter Preston, who analyzed the sales figures and showed that more ABC1 readers (that is, those with better education, employment, and pay, and thus close to advertisers’ hearts) read the News of the World than the Sunday Times—more, indeed, than the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday put together. Murdoch must have closed the Screws with a pang…
(If you don’t click the link, you will also miss an excellent Sorel cartoon.)
Over in the Guardian, ‘media critics’ Roy Greenslade and Michael Wolff play Statler & Waldorf:
Roy Greenslade: As bad as things appear to be, Rupert Murdoch could be seen to be a tremendously beneficial owner of media in Britain. He’s poured money into the Times and the Sunday Times, and kept them afloat when few other people would have done so. He launched satellite TV, increasing the range of channels available to everyone. This must surely be something to appreciate about the man.
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Michael Wolff: If you like the direction, reach and power of “big media”, you can hardly find someone who has been more beneficial than Rupert Murdoch. The downside, however, is to use it to further his own interests, create a power base, an independent state of his own. Murdoch loves newspapers. But one of the reasons he has loved newspapers is they can be very powerful and they give him a power he can use.
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RG: Isn’t it always the case that small media, if it’s successful, is going to become big media? We would say in terms of business, if we believed in capitalism, that branching out is a natural consequence. So Murdoch, as a newspaper owner, gains power, and we know there’s this amazing reciprocal relationship that goes on. He uses his political power to further his business interests, and he uses his business interests to further his political power. The point is, is there any proof that his use of political power has had any effect on the democracies of Australia, Britain, the United States? Especially the US, where it seems he has very little political clout.
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MW: Let’s take the present presidential election cycle, in which you have a list of candidates in the Republican party. [You look] at these people and think, “how did they get here? These are the strangest group of national candidates ever assembled, how did this happen?” The answer, most obviously, is because of Fox News. It has two million viewers who want to be entertained by politics, who need exaggerated figures to entertain them. You can only be a viable Republican if you speak to the Fox audience. They demand exaggerated figures, therefore we have conservatives who are unelectable in America…
It’s an epic tragedy! It’s a pie-throwing, crowd-pleasing farce! And it’s got real potential to run long enough for syndication. Just yesterday, the NYTimes reported that “a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle & Lewis” clearing Murdoch’s News of the World has “come under scrutiny“; it may be that a truly caring legal representative would have felt it wise to point out that bribing the police force was, however business-savvy, probably illegal.
Also, Gawker reports that the New York Post has “instructed its reporters not to destroy any documents ‘pertaining to unauthorized retrieval of phone or personal data, to payments for information to government officials.'”
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions…
And Now, An Update From Reality
As we head towards either the completely unforced self-immolation of default, or the almost as self-defeating response of belt tightening amidst a recession, it’s worth taking yet one more swing at the piñata: does the US have a debt/deficit crisis?
There are lots of ways to say “no.”
Here’s Kthug, debunking yet again the myth of out-of-control federal spending. DeLong reminds us (yet again)that the bond market thinks our debt is nothing to write home about. Karl Smith reminds us that the US is borrowing money at a rate that amounts to a negative real return — which is to say that right now it is cheaper for the US to borrow than to pay cash for what it buys.
Now, via Zachary Karabell writing at Time.com, we learn of a new way to parse the blunt truth: we have real policy challenges facing us — mostly how to get sufficient — hell, any — growth going in the economy that could lead to actually getting our fellow citizens back into paying jobs. But what we don’t have is an unsustainable debt burden, as revealed by perhaps the most direct metric of all: how much it costs us as a percentage of GDP to service the supposedly unprecedented, unsustainable flood of red ink in which the United States is (not) drowning:
…what matters about the debt isn’t the dollar amount per se, but how much it costs us to service it. And by that measure, the debt isn’t nearly as big a problem as it’s being made out to be.
Yes, the federal debt has grown by nearly $3 trillion dollars in the past three years. And yes, the dollar amount of that debt is quite large (in excess of $14 trillion and headed toward $15 trillion should the ceiling be raised). But large numbers are not the problem. The U.S. has a large economy (slightly larger than that debt number). And, crucially, we have very low interest rates.
Because of those low rates, the amount the U.S. government pays to service its debt is, relative to the size of the economy, less than it was paying throughout the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s and for most of the last decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that net interest on the debt (which is what the government pays to service it) would be $225 billion for fiscal year 2011. The latest figures put that a bit higher, so let’s call it $250 billion. That’s about 1.6% of American output, which is lower than at any point since the 1970s – except for 2003 through 2005, when it was closer to 1.4%.
Under Ronald Reagan, the first George Bush, and Bill Clinton, payments on federal debt often got above 3% of GDP. Under Bush the second, payments were about where they are now. Yet suddenly, we are in a near collective hysteria.
Yup…for a debt burden that in budgetary terms is about half of what Saint Ronnie dealt with, we are now contemplating dismantling the safety net and gutting the investment in education, research and infrastructure that are essential for any future economic security for our country and our kids.
The good news is that this comes from an unequivocally MSM source. The bad news is that the Village, for the most part, has failed to convey to the American people that what we are seeing is simply the smokescreen the GOP is using to hide its pursuit of policies that it could never sustain in the full light of day. Too much of our government has fallen into the hands of fools and knaves. And the press — not enough of it, even now — has left it way too late to confront that fact.
And yes, as Karabell and the others have noted, the Democrats have either gone along with too much of this nonsense, or else mounted ineffective opposition to the folly, avarice and/or pure stupidity of their opponents. But consider the alternative — and, it seems to me, we gotta work, however resentfully, as hard as it takes to hold what we have and to grab the House back fifteen months from now. “Not that bad” may be cold comfort…but your modern GOP is terrifyingly worse.
Image: Jacques de Gheyn (II), Vanitas Still Life, 1603.
Alte Kacker Open Thread
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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As a fellow Old, I second Doghouse Riley’s lament:
IS there any reason I shouldn’t just imagine that everything in this country not originally constructed of shit has been turned into shit by reverse alchemy, Republican rhetoric, and Democratic cowardice?…
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We’ve done this shit for thirty years. The greatest acting performance Ronald Reagan ever gave was his histrionic hissy fit at raising the Debt limit to $1.4 trillion, on his way to more than tripling that. We’ve lowered taxes, cut programs, and demonized the poor for three decades, and we’re worse off than ever. This is not a part of the story?…
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Look, I turned 21 at the tail end of the first Nixon administration. So I lived through two Reagan and three Bush administrations as an adult. These people don’t scare me anymore, because they’ve already done their worst; I’d just like to know why a regular paycheck and some cadged drinks convinces them they don’t need to look any further than their own reflections. A handful of connected financial institutions stole from practically every American in the country, and no one seems to give a fuck so long as he’s got a plasma teevee. House Republicans now object to raising the Debt Ceiling to pay for programs they–minus the eight or ten new ravening ideologues every high-water Republican election brings ’em–voted for, simply because they feel they now have carte blanche to blame all that on the President. As well they should, because he’s the guy who keeps insisting they can be reasoned with. [I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the little Which President Said This About The Deficit (Surprise Answer: Ronald Reagan) moment in his speech the other day, since, 1) I was trying to imagine what audience his speechwriters thought that would work on; and 2) I love the idea that a professed Christian thinks you can shame believers by quoting holy writ.] And some fuck calls this “principled” on the grounds, apparently, that it’s possible to put words together in that order and still have them recognized as English.
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There are clear, calm, level-headed solutions to our economic problems. Those three adjectives insure that they’re not going to be listened to. And this apparently disturbs no one at Politico, or Slate, or anywhere else all our Iraq War-flogging geniuses hang their shingles these days.
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Listen: my Social Security taxes went up during the Reagan administration in order to solve the “insolvency” “problem”. Take it away from me now. I’m ready. But at least one of you fucks is dying in the gutter before I go.
Grumble amongst yourselves.
Jane Says
This should be fun, but pretty much everything the Jane Hamshers of the Left says here is spot-on.
The Light Goes On
It’s so nice to see this in print:
The truth is that because Speaker Boehner cannot move on taxes (either because his caucus won’t let him, or he believes in cutting taxes to pre-New Deal levels), there is no deal. Because Speaker Boehner linked the debt ceiling to a deal, America is on the brink of a default that would impose a stealth tax increase — in the form of higher interest rates — on every American. And the country’s top priorities (initiatives to promote more jobs and faster growth) have been ignored by a Congress obsessed with shrinking government. Does this mean politicians can’t govern? Or that everybody puts politics first? No, it does not. President Obama and Sen. Coburn could make a deal today. This is not a Washington problem; it is a House Republican problem. And commentators who are obsessed with balance should remember good journalism is not “Republicans say the sky is blue, Democrats say the sky is red, experts disagree.” It is reporting — without fear or favor — what is actually happening. It means substituting moral clarity for moral equivalence.
Sadly, the message will not sink in.