You ever get the idea that the smartest guys in the room aren’t that smart?
Category: The New Depression
Well played, Barry, but what about jobs?
Standing up to lying scoundrels was never your strong suit, Barry, and you hit a new low in the first debate, so it was a relief to see you kick butt when the Romneybot unleashed a fusillade of new lies in the second.
You said “What Governor Romney said just isn’t true” early on, when he lied about his reasons for opposing the bailout of the auto industry. You told him it was “offensive” to play politics regarding the death of four diplomats in Libya, and you said “Get the transcript” when he lied about what you said the day after the diplomats were killed. You nailed him on his absurd claim that he could both install tax cuts and reduce the federal deficit.
Your best moment came when you articulated what’s at the rotten core of his plan to revitalize the economy:
Romney says he’s got a five-point plan. Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector; that’s been his philosophy as governor; that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money.
Unfortunately for you and the rest of us, you revealed next to nothing about your plan…
Tinted windows (a pre-debate rant)
The Odd Man is down but not out, despite an ongoing reversal of fortune that has left him uninsured and in debt. Just thought I’d let you know, in case you wondered why I post so infrequently these days.
In a nutshell, I’m a writer who no longer gets paid to write. I’m one of millions of workers sidelined by corporate bean counters who know that cutting jobs — through outsourcing, attrition, and making each remaining employee do the work of three — is the quickest route to higher profits for the one-percenters, and so what if the long-term consequences of a permanently downsized workforce are disastrous for the economy.
To make ends meet, I work a job that’s the 21st century equivalent of selling apples in the Great Depression. The other day a passer-by wearing a STUD MUFFIN shirt told me to get a real job. “Have a nice day,” I replied. My restraint was something to feel proud of, like not spitting on the car with tinted windows that rolled past me later that same day. I can’t abide tinted windows…
Don’t buy it
I’ve been reading Anat Shenker-Osorio’s new book, “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About The Economy.” I like it, mostly because it says what I’ve been screaming about for years: The personal is political, use metaphor to make it personal:
Strategic communications consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio has a message for progressives, simple but apparently almost impossible to execute, given the movement’s history: Get personal. Get real. And for heaven’s sake, quit fighting your opponent on your opponent’s terms.
Seems like common sense, but as Shenker-Osorio discusses in her new book, Don’t Buy It, she sees progressives make these same mistakes over and over and over again. In particular, the progressive messaging on the economy—especially the metaphors we adopt in discussing it—have contributed to a massive communication failure.In a nutshell, when we insist on talking about the financial meltdown and its effects in terms of an unstoppable force of nature–like I just did with meltdown, in fact, or as many, many other well-intentioned liberals discuss it in terms of a crash, an earthquake, a “flood of bad mortgages,” “the perfect storm” of circumstances—all these terms cry out that we must hunker down and pray instead of actively work for change.
Body metaphors are little better—an “unhealthy economy,” a “sluggish recovery”—these too imply outside agency swooping in and destroying us, usually from within, like germs or cancer. But these scenarios are flatly wrong.
The economic crisis was neither an act of God nor a natural disaster, not an attack by microbes or internal organ breakdown. It was the result of choices—bad ones—made by specific human beings who benefitted from human-created policies at the expense of a majority of the population. And if our language does not reflect that this crisis is human-made, it follows that it cannot be human unmade either, which plays into the shrugging, no-fault stance of conservatives.
I think I’ve been pretty consistent: Bankers crashed the economy in a ditch, the Obama administration made matters worse by not pulling the damned car out of the ditch. Oh well!
Yep
This is taking place in an environment in which the private sector is still deleveraging ferociously from the debt binge of the previous decade; so we’re creating a situation in which both the private sector and the public sector are trying to slash spending relative to income. And whaddya know, the world economy is sputtering.
The truly amazing thing is that this calamitous error is not, for the most part, the result of special interests, or an unwillingness to make hard choices. On the contrary, it’s being driven by Very Serious People who pride themselves on their willingness to make hard choices (which, naturally, involve inflicting pain on other people). In fact, I’d argue that the desire to make hard choices, or at least to be seen as doing so, is the reason the VSPs chose to ignore the extensive and, we now know, completely accurate warnings from some economists of what would happen if they gave in to their austerity obsession.
FT Alphaville says that I’m feeling a bit “smuggish” about all this; well, I’m only human. But truly, this is a terrible thing to behold.
Nobel peace prize
For once
What Mitt and Occupy have in common
Do today’s Republicans really believe that 47 percent of Americans are “takers”, living off money confiscated from the “makers”?
No: the evidence suggests that the GOP believes that the fraction of takers/moochers is much higher, in fact at least twice that high…
…In a way, people like Romney agree with Occupy: it’s them against the 99 percent, except that they consider the 1 percent to be the people being exploited.
Helicopter Ben’s QE3
At this point, I think anything that the Fed does is like voodoo. It almost doesn’t matter if it works, as long as the market thinks it does:
The Federal Reserve said it will expand its holdings of long-term securities with open-ended purchases of $40 billion of mortgage debt a month in a third round of quantitative easing as it seeks to boost growth and reduce unemployment.
“We’re looking for ongoing, sustained improvement in the labor market,” Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in his press conference today in Washington following the conclusion of a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. “There’s not a specific number we have in mind. What we’ve seen in the last six months isn’t it.”
Stocks jumped, sending benchmark indexes to the highest levels since 2007, and gold climbed as the Fed said it will continue buying assets, undertake additional purchases and employ other policy tools as appropriate “if the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially.”
Ezra Klein seems to think the new round of quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve is a BFD, and will send an encouraging signal to the markets:
The Federal Reserve’s announcement Thursday is a big deal.
It’s a big deal because of what they’re doing. They’re buying $85 billion in assets every month through the end of the year, and then they’re potentially going to keep doing it in 2013. They’re promising to keep interest rates low through the recovery, and then keep them low after the recovery strengthens.
But it’s a bigger deal because of what they’re saying. Thursday, the Federal Reserve said, finally, that they’re not content with 8 percent unemployment and a sluggish recovery, and they’re willing to actually do something about it. If you’re an investor or a business owner trying to decide what the market is going to look like next year, you just got a lot more optimistic.
That’s the weird thing about the Federal Reserve. We don’t just care about what they do. Because their power is so vast — the ability to make as much real, American money as you want is quite a superpower — we care about what they want in the future. And, until Thursday, we weren’t getting much clarity on what they wanted in the future, or how far they were willing to go to achieve it.
Ian Welsh says no, it won’t help the people who need it the most:
The Fed has announced its third quantitative easing program. To state what should be obvious, the effect on the economy for ordinary people will be minimal, as with QE1 and 2. It will help banks, financial firms most, other large corporations will also benefit. If you work at the executive level in one of those organizations, it will help you and raise your salary or bonuses. It will not significantly raise demand for goods and services and will not do much for the rest of the economy. Remember, 93% of the gains of the Obama recovery went to the rich, and that was not by mistake.
Atrios is not quite as gloomy as Ian, but close:
So we’re going to have more goosing of financial asset prices. Bernanke said something about how we’ll all go spend money when we see that our 401Ks are doing better. So a lot more money for rich people, a tiny bit more for some of the rest of us, and some hopey that it causes the economy to go WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
The green zone
Nice catch from Marcy Wheeler regarding the Romney campaign’s new blame the media for our inability to run a campaign strategy:
One of Mitt’s advisors–hiding his own identity, but not his affiliation with the campaign of a man who has a car elevator–just said this:
The adviser, granted anonymity to criticize a press corps the campaign still relies on every day, went on to blame a “green room, green zone kind of divide,” saying the national press, most of whom live in New York or DC, “pockets of prosperity,” are isolated from the realities of the harsh economy — and therefore, unable to grasp Romney’s message.
Instead, they are preoccupied by concerns akin to war reporters relaxing in the green zone: “Too much chlorine in the pool, the parties are going on too late, why can’t we get the right flavors of Haagen Dazs? Most people aren’t living in that world.” [my emphasis]
And yes, the people who are doing rather well really are completely detached from how badly the rest of us are doing. There really is a green zone for them.
As Marcy notes in her post, there’s no denying that your librul media elite are oblivious to how the economy affects the lives of ordinary people, but really, the one person who can’t credibly complain on our behalf is vulture capitalist Mitt Romney. After all, he put so many of us in this predicament.
Not that discretion and common sense has ever stopped him from saying this sort of thing. Remember earlier this year when Romney claimed to be from the “real streets of America.”
Yeah, Easy Street!