Month: January 2012

Bringing the nasty

by digby

Oh, Sarah. The country misses you so:

Governor Palin:Yeah how can he say he is not part of the establishment? Well look at the players in the establishment, who are fighting so hard against him. They want to crucify him because he has tapped into that average everyday American Tea Party grassroots movement that has said ‘enough is enough of the establishment.’ That tries to run the show that tries to tweak rules and law and regulations for their own good and not for our nation’s own good.

Well when both party machines and many in the media are trying to crucify Newt Gingrich for bucking the tide and bucking the establishment that tells ya something.

I say ya know ya gotta rage against the machine, at this point, in order to defend our Republic and save what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation, we need somebody who is engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn’t afraid to shake it up. Shake up that establishment.

So, if for no other reason to rage against the machine, vote for Newt, annoy a liberal. Vote Newt. Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.

I don’t know if she knows that’s an endorsement, but that’s an endorsement. (For “sudden and relentless reform” anyway.)

I’ve always thought Palin was a dyed in the wool Gingrich Republican. His appeal is a pseudo-intellectual covering for nasty liberal baiting, hers is physical attractiveness covering for nasty liberal baiting. Both of those surface appeals are things conservatives are insecure about and tend to overvalue. But more than anything else it’s really all about the nasty and both Newtie and Palin know how to bring it.

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Larry Summers Epitomizes What’s Wrong with the World

by David Atkins

Watching this Krishnan Guru-Murthy interview with Larry Summers is enough to make any decent person want to punch a hole through a wall:

Felix Salmon has a pretty good take on it:

So I was very happy to see that Krishnan Guru-Murthy at least tried to ask Summers these questions earlier this week. Krishnan starts off with standard Summers-interview questions, asking him what he thinks about UK fiscal policy, and Summers gives his standard wise-man answers. But then Krishan gets steadily tougher, asking Summers about the advice he gave the president-elect in 2008, and eventually about his deregulatory tenure at Treasury.

And Summers doesn’t even come close to apologizing, or admitting that he made any kind of mistake at all. Quite the opposite: he starts getting very touchy, telling Krishnan that he’s reducing complex questions to overly simplistic black-and-white narratives. Halfway through the interview, Krishnan asks Summers whether laissez-faire capitalism isn’t working for the middle classes. And Summers pushes back. “I’m a Democrat,” he says, adding that “I’ve long been someone who favored significant interventions to protect the environment.”

“Protect the environment?” responds Krishnan. “Didn’t you advise the president not to sign up to Kyoto?”

“No, no,” replies Summers.

“You didn’t?”

“No. I advised that an agreement be designed in order to protect the American economy, and the United States not take on obligations that would render its businesses uncompetitive.”

Summers never explains how this differs from advice not to sign up to Kyoto, nor does he give an example of any “significant interventions” he pushed for to protect the environment.

On deregulation, he’s even more disgusting. Summers’ answer to probing questions on his role in creating the bubble economy:

Would it have been better if the whole of the 2010 financial reform legislation had passed in 1999 or 1998 or 1992? Yes, of course it would have been better. But at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn’t an issue that was on the horizon… If you want to assign responsibility, If you take a market that essentially didn’t exist in the 1990s, that grew for eight years from 2001 to 2008, and then brought on a major collapse, if you were looking to hold people responsible, you would look to… officials of the Bush Administration. I’m not going to tell you that I foresaw this crisis in all its dimensions, but without sounding like Newt Gingrich here, for you to read two articles that a researcher handed you and sling this stuff is not really to give your viewers a very clear chance.

But Salmon sets the record straight:

Summers is absolutely wrong about credit derivatives not existing in the late 1990s. He was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001; Euromoney Magazine had splashed the words “Credit Derivatives” all over its front cover in March 1996. And Brooksley Born, between 1996 and 1999, was literally losing sleep over those things as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers’s response to Born? To make sure she was marginalized, and, eventually, pushed out of her job entirely.

Elections come and go. Presidents come and go. But the only way things will change is if people like Bob Rubin, Phil Gramm, Larry Summers and anyone in their remotest orbits are explicitly exiled from power for all the world to see. The troubles with the Obama Administration began from the moment they picked financial advisers prior to even taking office.javascript:void(0)

There is hope, though, in the likes of Darcy Burner and Elizabeth Warren. If the country can survive that long, 2016 and 2020 might be the time when the Larry Summerses of the world are finally given the boot they so richly deserve.

It will probably take a woman, and one not associated with the last 30 years of asset-based Bond-Lord-worshipping fiscal insanity.

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QOTD: Darcy Burner

by digby

Pulled from this morning’s Blue America chat.

Darcy Burner:

It’s obvious to pretty much anyone following politics that Congress is broken. And it’s also clear that we won’t be able to make real progress on fixing our economy, on educating our kids, on climate change, or on any of our other priorities unless we fix it.

There are parts of fixing Congress that are big and hard and will take a long time. For instance, we clearly need to reverse Citizens United – the entertainment value of the Republican Presdential primary notwithstanding – and it looks as though that will take a Constitutional amendment. We need to do it, but it’s hard and it will take a long time.
Some of what we need to do, however, is much easier and quicker. When Gingrich took control of the House in 1995, he made a bunch of rules changes designed to break the institution, and we’re reaping the effects of some of those today. Reversing them would take a simple majority vote in the House.

Let me give you an example. Why do lobbyists have so much influence? Lots of people give campaign contributions; what is it that lobbyists are doing differently? Right now, most of the policy work in Congress is done by staff whose average age is 26, and who are typically covering 4-6 major policy areas each. If they’re lucky, they might really understand one of those policy areas. So when a lobbyist walks in and says, “Ok, here’s what you need to know about this bill your boss has to vote on tomorrow, here’s how your boss should vote, and here are your talking points,” and that’s the only information they’re given, of course the lobbyist will usually succeed. It wasn’t always this way: there used to be internal think tanks in the House where members would pool their resources to hire deep experts in some topic area. There were, for example, experts on nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. So if a member of Congress wanted to know how big a threat Iran’s nuclear program is, or the impact of some piece of legislation with sanctions, there were deep experts they could consult who were part of their team. Gingrich banned shared funding of staff and canned those expert staffers in order to consolidate power, and as a consequence members have to rely on lobbyists, leadership, or outside organizations like the Heritage Foundation for the information they need. That’s totally fixable – and it could conceivably be fixed in the first week of a new Congress.

There are a whole set of changes – allow shared funding of expert staff, turn on track changes for legislation so we can see who changed what, stream online any committee hearing a lobbyist is allowed to attend – that would make Congress more transparent and accountable to the American people in meaningful ways, and which we can do quickly.

I’m running because we have to fix Congress – and I’m signing up to fix it.

You can help her do it, by donating a few buck to her campaign now so that she can prepare her ground game.

Donate to Darcy’s campaign, here.

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Let go

Via Brad Delong:

Fannie, Freddie and Chewbacca « Modeled Behavior: Center-left intellectuals in America apparently have a serious problem comprehending the concept of Bullshit. The entire econ world has borne witness to Paul Krugman tearing out his hair over Zombie Lies. Now, Mark Zandi devotes some several thousands words to overturning the nonsense notion that 70 year old US Government Sponsored Enterprises sparked a 21st century global boom in raw material and land prices during a time in which their influence on the international credit markets was approaching a multi-decade low. He writes

Getting history right for this dark economic period is critical if we are to design a better mortgage finance system for the future. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible for the debacle, then perhaps government’s role in a future mortgage finance system should be minimal. But if private lenders deserve most of the blame, the case grows for giving government an important role in backstopping and overseeing the system.

Mark, Mark. Clonazepam. It’s a beautiful thing. Let go. I am betting that maybe five people in the US actually believe Fannie and Freddie caused the housing bubble. Maybe half a dozen more are actively lying about it. The rest are just Bullshitting. That is, they don’t really care what the truth is one way or the other. This is just a way to gesture in the general direction of the federal government and say Urrhh!!!

Yep. Let go. You can talk facts until you are blue in the face. In the end it’s just “Gummint Urrhhhh!” (Plus ACORN)

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Foreclosure Investigation Update

by digby

Here are a couple of interesting videos with perspective on the latest forecolsure investigation. The first is Eric Schneiderman. The second is Matt Taibbi.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dday provides a thorough analysis of where we are at this moment.

Update: More from Taibbi here.

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Blue America welcomes the original Netroots candidate, Darcy Burner

by digby

Back in 2006, when Blue America was just a young PAC, one congressional candidate seemed to emerge from out of our own ranks, so conversant with the way the new technology had merged with progressive politics that she became the first real Netroots candidate. It was, of course, Darcy Burner of Washington state, a brilliant former Microsoft executive who famously declared that she knew she had to step into the arena when she realized that she needed to leave a better world for her young son.

We endorsed her enthusiastically in both of her heartbreakingly close losses in 2006 and 2008 and followed her subsequent work in Washington DC as Director of the Progressive Caucus Foundation with interest. While there, she learned the inside workings of the congress, built relationships and alliances with other progressives and deepened her policy knowledge to truly impressive levels. Yet through it all, Darcy has closely maintained her connections to the Netroots and commitment to the Progressive Movement we’ve been trying to build from the beginning. She was one of those rare people with the integrity and backbone to be in Washington DC without being of Washington DC.

But we couldn’t be more thrilled that she has now gone back home to the Pacific Northwest to give it another go and run for congress herself— and we are proud to endorse her for the congressional seat in the new WA-01 district.

We need people like Darcy in the congress more than ever because, as she says:

We can’t fix what’s broken with our country if we don’t fix Congress. Our Congress is full of crooks who trade on insider knowledge, of people who have sold their souls to the very people who have broken our country. Even the good ones, the members who want the right things, too often give up too easily on important fights, or can’t figure out how to fix the deep structural problems that undermine us.

We need people there who are tenacious and who won’t give up when things get hard.

Indeed we do. And Darcy is nothing if not tenacious.

It’s not going to be a cakewalk. She’s facing a primary with several dismal Dems, one of whom may very well get tacit backing from the Party. (Darcy wasn’t afraid to speak her mind when she was in Washington. They know she will not be compliant.) And once she gets through that gauntlet, she will be facing a probable GOP opponent who will be very well financed.(Aren’t they all?)

She’s got great name recognition, even though this is a new district, and is she very popular in the populated Democratic part of it. We understand that the progressives are rallying around her in the more Republican rural area. So she’s got an excellent chance.

But she’s going to need our help. Big business isn’t going to support a real progressive. Super-PAC gambling billionaires aren’t going to support a real progressive. The Party is terrified of Big Business and Super PAC billionaires so it isn’t going to support a real progressive. That’s going to be our job.

Please join us in the comments as we welcome Darcy back for her first chat of the election season. She’ll be taking questions for the next hour.

And please donate what you can to her campaign here. If you want to begin the real hard work of hope and change, this is the place to start.

Chaffetz Pwned

by digby

I’m no fan of Newt Gingrich, but I have to admit that this take down of the obnoxious, Utah Tea Partier, congressman Jason Chaffetz is enjoyable:

Chaffetz, a Mitt Romney supporter, has been turning up at Gingrich events during the past two days, though he denied in a brief interview with The Hill that he was doing so in order to goad the former Speaker. He said he was merely there to “offer some perspective.”

But Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond decided it was time to do some goading of his own, as he briefed reporters. Hammond first waved with faux-glee at the Utah congressman and invited him to join the briefing. When Chaffetz ignored him, the spokesman instead marched the press over to where Chaffetz was standing with fellow Romney supporter Bay Buchanan.
Hammond told Chaffetz that Sen. John McCain, a Romney supporter and former GOP nominee, has expressed distaste for the tactic of having campaign surrogates shadowing an opposing candidate’s events. Chaffetz replied, “I am just here attending.”

Hammond would not let the matter rest, though, teasing an increasingly uncomfortable Chaffetz that “I didn’t even have to pay at a fundraiser to see you — that’s exciting.”

Hammond continued for several minutes in a similar vein, asking Chaffetz with fake bonhomie, “Where are you going next? Do you want our schedule for tomorrow? Are you going to join our charter to Tampa?”

As the barrage continued, an exasperated Chaffetz asked Hammond, “Are you serious?”

I guess Chaffetz can dish it out but he can’t take it. Newtie and his boys were doing this stuff when young Jason was still drinking sweet liberty tea from his sippy cup. He’s got a long way to go before he can compete with that kind of nasty.

Rhetoric Matters

by David Atkins

Matt Taibbi on Countdown, discussing how President Obama’s embrace of populist rhetoric may already be impacting Wall Street:

There are many who have argued that the recent streak of anti-Wall Street rhetoric from national Democrats is just that: rhetoric. And that after the election, everything will go back to business as usual.

I’m not sure that’s the case. But even so, there’s a lot to be said for rhetoric alone. When leaders promote progressive ideas even with no intention of acting on them, that changes the national conversation. It affects behavior. And that in turn may force legislators’ hands even if they had no intention of acting in the first place.

Rhetoric matters.

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The Kitten Nazis