Anyone watches the completely staged and controlled version of what passes for a political convention. Why do they even spend the money to have these things?
Category: Politics As Usual
Here they come again
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Pete Peterson’s pet dog, the smarmy David Walker, just appeared on MSNBC (or whatever they’re calling it these days) to try to conflate the nation’s economic problems with the debt so he can push “bipartisan” solutions like cutting Medicare and Social Security. To whip up the hysteria, he tries to compare our financial situation to that of Greece – even though any comparison is just plain old wingnut craziness. But hey, when you’re trying to steal the financial safety net of millions, whatever works!
Steve Kornacki pushes back a little, even though he makes it sound like a matter of opinion and not basic facts:
David, I think I want to challenge the premise of what you are doing here a little bit. I think some people can make a case, pretty strong case, that it is not really a deficit crisis that we have right now. It is a jobs crisis, and it is a demand crisis in the economy. People who don’t have money because they don’t have jobs or afraid of losing their jobs and they are not spending money.
If you can get the economy moving by getting people spending their money again then it is a windfall of revenue and the picture wouldn’t look nearly as bleak. I’m looking at, you know, interest rates on government bonds are kind of ridiculously low right now, which to me says if you have a demand crisis and you have the nonexistent interest rates, isn’t this the time for government to spend more money and not to be worrying in the immediate short term about deficit but to be stimulating the economy through spending so you get demand up and you get spending going again and get revenue coming in.
WALKER: We have a short term problem and structural problem and we need to deal with both. The short term we need to get economic growth up. We have to deal with our unemployment and underemployment challenges. Yes, that can justify additional target investment that are effectively implemented, even if they exacerbate the deficit in the short term as long as they are coupled with a clear credible concrete and enforceable plan to deal with the large and growing structural deficit that lie ahead driven by demographics and healthcare costs. By the way, in comparable full and fair accounting, there is only one country in Europe that has higher total government debt to GDP than we do, that’s Greece, and we don’t want it follow their example.
This is a really easy way to know someone is trying to sell you rotten fish: They compare us to Greece.
Continue reading “Here they come again”
The long goodbye
Sounds like Arlen Specter is dying.
Go Tweety
This morning on Morning Joe, Tweety lets Reince Priebus have it:
Rocky
Chris Christie
Apparently wouldn’t resign to run as VP because he doesn’t think Romney can win.
Great
Crime-ridden Camden, New Jersey – often referred to as the most dangerous city in the United States—is getting rid of its police department.
In the latest example of a cash-strapped municipality taking drastic measures to deal with swollen public sector liabilities and shrinking budgets, the city plans to disband its 460-member police department and replace it with a non-union “Metro Division” of the Camden County Police. Backers of the plan say it will save millions of dollars for taxpayers while ensuring public safety, but police unions say it is simply a way to get out of collective bargaining with the men and women in blue.
“This is definitely a form of union-busting,” Camden Fraternal Order of Police President John Williamson told FoxNews.com. “This method is unproven and untested, to put your faith in an agency that doesn’t even [yet] exist.”
Camden County Mayor Dana Redd has said layoffs of the city’s police force will begin by the end of the month. Only 49 percent of current city police officers will be transferred to the new county division, whose members will begin a four- to five-month training program.
“The officers who are getting laid off are going to have to be the ones who train their replacements,” Williamson said.
Invisible poor people
It’s just astonishing to us how long this campaign has gone on with no discussion of what’s happening to poor people. Official Washington continues to see poverty with tunnel vision – “out of sight, out of mind.”
And we’re not speaking just of Paul Ryan and his Draconian budget plan or Mitt Romney and their fellow Republicans. Tipping their hats to America’s impoverished while themselves seeking handouts from billionaires and corporations is a bad habit that includes President Obama, who of all people should know better.
Go read the rest.
School choice
Talk about letting the fox guard the henhouse! Not so surprising if you’ve been following Corbett’s privatization frenzy:
IT MIGHT HAVE once seemed unthinkable: Handing the keys to a large, troubled public-school district over to a high-profile advocate for increasing privatization, including vouchers and for-profit private schools.
But activists said that last Friday’s surprise announcement that Gov. Corbett had named the Rev. Joe Watkins – an MSNBC pundit who headed the Students First PAC, the pro-voucher group that’s dumped millions of campaign dollars on Corbett and other pols – as chief recovery officer to run the Chester Upland schools in Delaware County marks a tipping point.
They said the choice proves that the Corbett administration is accelerating its push to privatize education in Pennsylvania and benefit charter schools like the Chester Community Charter School – managed by the governor’s largest single donor, Vahan Gureghian – at the expense of traditional public schools that are losing dollars, teachers and students.
Watkins acknowledged he’d also done some recent work as a consultant for Gureghian’s school, which educates more than half of Chester Upland’s elementary- and kindergarten-age kids and has a huge stake in key decisions Watkins will make.
Nationally known education pundit Diane Ravitch – a former assistant U.S. secretary of education who once supported school-choice measures such as vouchers but now opposes them – took to her blog this week to call the choice of Watkins “so astonishing, so breathtaking, and simultaneously so disturbing that I don’t know how to characterize it.”
In a phone interview, Ravitch said that she found the choice so dismaying because “they sent in someone with an agenda” – in favor of charter schools run by for-profit companies like Chester Community, managed by Gureghian’s CMSI LLC.
The gold standard
Krugman says it looks like the Republicans will include a plank advocating a return to the gold standard in their platform. I can think of a number of reasons they would include something that freakin’ crazy: First, and most important, to attract as many Ron Paul supporters as possible; second, Ayn Rand fanboys (I mention no names!) will love the idea; and third, they would love to shut down the ability of the government to print stimulus money.
Brilliant plan! What could possibly go wrong?
But seriously, it appears that a push for a return to the gold standard — theGolden Fetters that played such a large role in propagating the Great Depression — is going to be part of the Republican platform.
Bear in mind that the incessant warnings of runaway inflation from the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet have been wrong, wrong, wrong; and that exchange rate flexibility has been crucial to most of the success stories of this crisis, from Poland to Sweden to Iceland. Nonetheless, the GOP is convinced that what we need to do is base future monetary policy on a doctrine that has totally failed in recent years. After all, Francisco d’Anconia says that it’s the only way.
A return to the gold standard would make business cycles