• Elizabeth Warren Calls Out Wall Street « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: economics

  • But last month, Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote a memo laying out how Republicans could kill financial regulatory reform. “Ordinarily, calling for a new government program ‘to protect consumers’ would be extraordinary popular,” he wrote. “But these are not ordinary times. The American people are not just saying ‘no.’
  • We like to make fun of government in this country, but really, what are you and a few of your buddies going to do to fight JPMorgan Chase on your own? For all of our beloved rugged individualism (and our individual right to handguns), it doesn’t do much good when you’re up against your credit card issuer. There is no Chicago-school free market solution to an oligopoly that, on top of all its other advantages, has an implicit government guarantee that gives it a major funding cost advantage over its competitors. One of the purposes of government is to protect ordinary people from forces (hurricanes, terrorists, monopolies) against which free market forces do not provide adequate protection. This is why we need a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. And this is what Frank Luntz wants to trick people into forgetting.

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• Ezra Klein – The upside of reconciliation

  tags: policy

  • I really can’t believe this. I have been following the health care debate every day since May, and I can’t believe the Democrats wussed out at this point when they could have still got it passed. What does this leave? If the Democrats aren’t going to get things done, ….I need to find a new hobby, something that doesn’t involve thinking about or knowing anything about the news. This is too much. I can’t believe it.

    Posted by: christopherfarrell | January 26, 2010 8:25 PM

  • couldnt agree with you more christopherfarrell. whats the point. I’ve always said that our most important job as citizens is to be informed and vote. I frankly dont see the point in voting anymore. Nothing happens.

    The sad part is this is especially true of losercrats. The Republicans would have passed their entire agenda by now if they had 60 votes. While a disagree with the GOP, I am a person that would do well under their agenda so maybe I should just vote for them. At least something will get done. It is a joke. Never seen such a bunch of cowards, spineless bums.

    Posted by: fiorehoffmann | January 26, 2010 9:42 PM

  • christopherfarrell you are the spokesman for a new generation

    it’s beyond sad, it’s bewildering to understand how out of touch with their voters these politicans are, including, I finally have to conclude, Obama. For every day you’ve been watching this process I’ve been right there saying I’ll give Obama time because I think he plays a long game. But now I see no game at all.

    Now the news is on freezes and other junk that doesn’t matter today, while Rome burns.

    So the Democrats are done. The Republicans are not an answer. How will we ever save the climate from an ungodly catastrophe?

    Posted by: rosshunter | January 26, 2010 9:53 PM

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• The upside of the Supreme Court’s upsetting new decision

  tags: policy

  • Well I like the Greenwald article, he makes sense of the media’s corporate speech (Fox and MSNBC) pretty well. But I do agree with commenter jesmont at 3:51:
    “What we’re really arguing about is whether the effects are bad enough. “

    But I don’t think that’s wrong, or even new. When some speech is really bad it generally has broken some other laws or tenets of the law.

    In the famous example of falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, the LOGIC is that the right of speech is never really abrogated, but the policing duty placed on government to prevent “imminent lawless action” (which cannot be settled in court prior to its effect, such as a panic or riot resulting from inflammatory speech) kicks in with a greater force – showing that the right itself is not absolute beyond all other considerations of lawfulness.

    The point to focus on is not the long-settled situation of corporations enjoying the same protections from tyranny as natural persons. It’s that the lawless action of elected officials voting certain ways because of money being given to them should be a crime, and we need to find ways to broaden the application of this logic in light of today’s politics.

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• Paul Krugman For The Fed « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: economics

  • big global american corporations now run congress,the fed,and the presidency….they are all pushing jobs,money
    business out of this country because asia is the future for them….there is no one in this country to fight for the middle class…this country is slowly dying and no one realizes this…we all standby
    and watch the destruction of our economy and our democracy while big business is quickly leaving the country…whithin 5 years there will be anarchy here…because the people are complacent and we will pay for it

  • Well, you do realize that the financial markets have NO effect on our GDP, our employment or our market demand, right? You do know that, right?

    The stock market only reflects the preferences of those who OWN companies (stockholders). Our financial well-being is not determined by that measure. It is determined by how much stuff people want to buy — you know — the middle-class, buying groceries and clothes?

    A Fed Chairman needs to understand that. Greenspan, Summers, Geitner and Bernanke thought that somehow the stockmarket would produce jobs if they pushed enough graft and corruption into it — notice how well that worked out?

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• Obama’s First Year « The Baseline Scenario

  tags: policy

  • I feel like I am watching Jimmy Hendrix’s National Anthem play out as a historical drama. A great nation self destructs. Is that how it felt in Russia? What a terrible time to be young. God help us.

• Ezra Klein – Tom Toles gets a look at the Democratic playbook

  tags: policy

  • I don’t buy this meme that says reform is unpopular, not at all. People are confused as hell, and they don’t like that. I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s in the bill, and as everyone says, the sausage-making was more than we wanted to know.

    But the Dems were voted in to pass reform, among other things. It’s a real easy message to say that it doesn’t kick in for a few years, and we’ll be tweaking it for decades, and we finally entered the grown-up world, courtesy Dems and the voters who loved them.

    I do not understand how their nerve just shattered, or why they think it’s a bigger win to stall than to move forward. Why, in fact, they’re killing themselves.

    I agree with jeirvine rather than Toles. The football choice of analogy is useful, because it reminds us that we all know quite well as a nation how to analyze plays, the strategy and tactics of the thing. Why, out of the entire country, the politicians we gave a landslide to now doubt this is anybody’s guess.

    But it’s quite certain that the entire nation will interpret this play for the fail that it is, and surf channels for a better game.

• Ezra Klein – Can Democrats govern?

  tags: policy

  • So what’s wrong with voting green? The only reason a lot of people have placed their climate and ecology anxieties on hold has been to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority.

    If they can’t use it to pass legislation, if they show their inability to govern at the national level, then sustainability candidates are the only answer, regardless of where they come from.

    The planet’s comfort zone for human civilization is running out, quickly. This forms its own messaging, no packaging required. This issue won’t go away, it will rise in damage and immediacy month by month, unremittingly, right up to endgame.

    What is needed are people who can get things done. It won’t be the Republicans. It was always questionable if the Democrats were able to step into this requirement.

    A little more disgusting loss of nerve like this and they’re finished with progressive dialog, because the planet’s fate itself will soon take over the entire conversation.

    Oddly, even as the Dems go down, Obama may rise, on this one front, the most important of all.

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• Ezra Klein – Will bloggers profit if newspapers charge?

  tags: Sustainability

  • If there’s one lesson to be learned from recent history it’s how powerfully new things can happen when information is freely available.

    The newspapers haven’t really failed to learn this, but I agree they just can’t figure our how to make money from it. This, even after Google showed that advertising (paid information) will gladly and profitably travel along with free information.

    Raising the quality and extent of journalism to give us unimpeachably complete information doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the old school as a model to explore, sadly.

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• Drew Westen: Obama Finally Gets His Victory For Bipartisanship

  tags: policy

  • The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan. It should have started with a non-watered-down stimulus package big enough to stop the bleeding in the job market — and a smack-down of any Republican who dared to utter the word “deficit” after 8 years of reckless, unpaid Republican spending. It should have followed with stringent regulations on Wall Street and protection of homeowners and small businesses instead of with a jobs creation program inside the administration for failed bankers and failed regulators. A stimulus — including a jobs program — strong enough to prevent the hemorrhaging of 700,000 jobs a month and a muscular approach to the bad actors who had crashed the economy would have gotten the public firmly behind the President and the Democrats, demonstrating to the average voter that they have a choice between one party that’s on their side and another that’s not. Instead, the White House just blurred the lines between the parties so the average American couldn’t tell the difference.

    With all its efforts to tack to the center, the White House missed the point. The issue isn’t about right or left. It’s about whose side you’re on. In Massachusetts, the voters believe they know. It’s now up to the President and his party to convince the American people otherwise.

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• Sen. Lisa “dirty air” Murkowski now top fundraiser from utility industry

  tags: Sustainability

  • Speaking of convergence, and in case one wonders, a discussion of ethics and cruelty to animals DOES belong in a website about climate change.

    In fact Paul Hawken recently gave us the framework of reason that connects these things in commmon cause, introducing what to me was a brand-new paradigm, in his book Blessed Unrest.

    He combines the three disparate movements of environmentalism, social justice, and indigenous peoples, and shows how they are interconnected and part of the same whole.

    He cites the literally uncountable number (but in the millions) of organizations and efforts across the globe and calls them, together, the spontaneous arising of the Earth’s immmune system to defeat the great disease of industrial plunder.

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• I could train high school students to be better-than-average political pundits

  tags: policy

  • As one who voted with jkaren, I’ll say that I could WISH Obama had leaned on jobs more, passed more stimulus, forced the banks to lend us a little bridging money during this slowdown, and more.

    I’m assuming that his judgment said he couldn’t do these things, because I’m quite certain that, like any normal person here, he would want to.

    But with all the noise about why he does (or doesn’t do) things, I never read analysis from people who ask him why he’s acted the way he has. Could someone ask him please?

    I’d love to know what he thinks about his opportunity limits and opportunity costs – I’m sure it would be a great interview.

    From his few public pronouncements, he always seems quite aware of every detail of all the debates that swirl around us and through these threads. Wish somebody would ask him his opinion.

• Ezra Klein – Tab dump

  tags: policy

  • Yes – #1 is right on, brilliant analysis by Hayes, and I love his allegory of having to pay money to the protection racket simply in order to ease misery, in the first pass at least.

    Obama (and I’m a fan of his) will be around for 7 more years. Some of this protection racket will get broken up in that time. But taking sure little steps, and not to lose footing along the way, is the real challenge for him.

• System Failure

  tags: policy

  • Now, it turns out that you can raise enough money through your
    organization so that you can reliably cover the protection fees for the
    struggling shop owners operating on the margins. Whenever they can’t
    come up with enough money, you can make up the difference. The
    improvement to residents’ lives would be massive: no longer forced to
    live in fear, they would be allowed to transact their business and go
    about their lives free from the constant, degrading fear of physical
    violence. But by taking this action you would also be channeling revenue
    into the pockets of the protection racket and, perhaps more insidious,
    further entrenching its power by conceding its central premise: that all
    local businesses must pay up in order to survive.
  • So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the
    existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press
    constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the
    filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented
    workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a
    few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the
    frontiers of the possible.

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• Ezra Klein – Americans not getting fatter

  tags: Sustainability

  • alessandra_barbadoro is correct, it’s our food system that’s poisoning us – chronic illness is a main product of our unsustainable agri-business and food-processing industries.

    Cheap “food-products” are a principal cause of our health care crisis, which is what SimonCox is pointing to also I assume.

    Michael Pollan has been talking about this repeatedly lately. Try him in a short talk with Jon Stewart (pointing out that the food industry today creates patients for the health industry), and a longer one with Amy Goodman:

• THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2009— Page 1

  tags: Sustainability

  • Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

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