Month: November 2012

Profound silliness

by digby

Oh dear:

Co-Chair of Fix the Debt-Tennessee, Tim Pagliara, recently finished climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with his friend Gordan Inman.

Tim, the Founder of “Enact the Plan,” has been working with Fix the Debt for most of the year, building up a group of support in his state along with co-chair and former Tennessee Governor Winfield Dunn. Gordan, who joined him on the climb, also lives in Tennessee, and at 74 years old, wowed Tim with his ability to climb the mountain. “Guys half his age quit 5 hours into summit night!”

Climbing the 19,340-foot mountain took dedication and commitment, similar to how much dedication and commitment it will take to fix this country’s debt. It certainly won’t be easy. But it must be done, and as Americans, we’ll feel quite accomplished as a country if we get our country’s fiscal house in order.

Jesus, you can’t take it with you fellas. Be grateful you get to take expensive, exciting trips to foreign continents and don’t have to spent your later years cleaning toilets for food money —  like you want large portions of the Americans public to have to do. Relax.

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ICYMI: Psy and Hammer

by digby

I don’t know why, but this made me smile:

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Atwater in context: not really abstract at all

by digby

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.” — Lee Atwater

The same researcher who found the 47% video(James Carter IV) found the entire Lee Atwater interview from which that quote came. And Rick Perlstein gives the full historical context in this article in The Nation.

This is just so rich in so many ways:

In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”

It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn’t been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren’t quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).

He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he’d absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).

“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won’t have anything to do with it.

Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters…the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

As Perlstein concludes, seven years after he gave that quote Atwater went on to make Willie Horton the “running mate” of Michael Dukakis.

You can listen to the whole interview at The Nation.
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Gaza

by David Atkins

There has been some annoyance in some quarters at the lack of comprehensive coverage of the events in Gaza by the much of the most widely read parts of the progressive blogosphere. I agree that the coverage has been limited. But there are three good reasons for that:

1) Incoherent, hateful backlash. The fact is that it’s impossible to say anything substantive about the Israel-Palestine conflict without being called a hateful anti-Semite, or a hateful bloodthirsty imperialist. Most hilarious is the notion that silence on the issue is caused by defense of the Administration, as if most of the progressive blogosphere had been somehow aggressive against the Bush Administration for failure to be concerned about the Palestinian people. If one examines the archives, one will see that most of the big sites from Atrios to DailyKos to TPM to Hullabaloo and the rest have largely refrained from commenting too much on the issue for years, long before Obama took office. That’s in large part because nothing can be said about it without eliciting a horrifying deluge of asinine commentary that no other issue seems to generate. Especially for unpaid bloggers more concerned with climate change, the predations of the financial sector, the ongoing assault against the middle class and women’s rights, etc., it’s often not worth the headache of being called a vicious anti-semitic terrorist enabler and/or imperialist apartheid murderer–often for the exact same post.

2) There are no good guys here. Bibi Netanyahu is a horrible person, and Likud is filled with horrible people. They’re basically the Israeli version of Dick Cheney and John Bolton, but with a religious belief in their right to steal land that belongs to others.

Hamas, meanwhile, is a murderous organization of cutthroats who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and want to drive every Jew out of the land they believe their God owes them.

Israeli policy pretends to want to keep control of illegal settlements that continue to incur into Palestinian lands while secretly encouraging it. Whatever goes for Palestinian authority pretends to want peace and self-determination while doing next to nothing to prevent rockets from being fired at Israeli civilians. Hamas knows that there can be no peace without recognizing Israel’s fundamental right to exist, but they can’t even bring themselves to put those words down on a negotiating contract. Israel knows that there can be no pressure on Hamas to negotiate fairly as long as Palestine remains an Apartheid-style lockdown zone with continued encroachment from settlement.

So we get the usual cycle of violence with no end in sight.

3) There’s nothing we can do about it. It makes sense to blog about things that we can theoretically do something about. The Gaza situation is frankly hopeless at the moment. America is not going to abandon its commitment to protect the only functioning democracy in the region and the only dependable national refuge for the Jewish people. The American people can and should eschew support for Netanyahu and Likud, but it’s not as if relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu aren’t already frosty. Netanyahu quite obviously wanted Romney to win, and there can be little doubt that Obama would prefer to deal with someone from Labour/Kadima. Defunding Israel isn’t an option, particularly given the hostility of other Middle Eastern powers to Israel’s very existence.

So that leaves bloggers advocating for cooler heads and changes in leadership on both sides of a dispute over which American activists have very little control, and in which there are no clear-cut good guys. Syria is less complicated, frankly, with much greater suffering and bloodshed–and it’s not exactly been a huge topic of debate in the progressive blogosphere, either.

So don’t expect a lot of coverage of the issue. Most of us don’t want to take a lot of stupid abuse from nutty people for speaking powerlessly over an issue in which both sides deserve plenty of scorn.

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Epistemological relativism for dummies

by digby

Senate Science Committee member Marco Rubio said today, “I’m not a scientist, Jim, I’m just an old country GOP hack” and everyone’s all atwitter. (Actually, he said “I’m not a scientist, man” in answer to the question of the age of the planet.)

But we should be grateful that in keeping with the new kinder gentler Republican party that he didn’t say what he really thinks: teaching science in schools is akin to communist indoctrination. Via LGF:

Rubio said there also could be activity in the legislature by evolution proponents who wish to remove the theory compromise language. “I think there’s still going to be folks out there talking about this – on both sides. … I think this will be a battle that will go on for quite some time,” he said.

The “crux” of the disagreement, according Rubio, is “whether what a parent teaches their children at home should be mocked and derided and undone at the public school level. It goes to the fundamental core of who is ultimately, primarily responsible for the upbringing of children. Is it your public education system or is it your parents?”

Rubio added, “And for me, personally, I don’t want a school system that teaches kids that what they’re learning at home is wrong.”

Rubio, a Cuban-American, made a comparison to the strategy employed by the Communist Party in Cuba where schools encouraged children to turn in parents who criticized Fidel Castro.

“Of course, I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro,” he quickly added, while noting that undermining the family and the church were key means the Communist Party used to gain control in Cuba.

“In order to impose their totalitarian regime, they destroyed the family; they destroyed the faith links that existed in that society,” he said.

This is a very slick politician and I think he’s quite dangerous. That answer is the usual wingnut gibberish, but he is very good at dogwhistling to the rubes. He signals very clearly that he is on board with the whole idea that evolution should not be taught as … science.

This gets back to one of the most fascinating aspects of right wing ideology over the past couple of decades: their bizarroworld post-modernism. Recall this from Lynne Cheney’s jeremiad against “relativism” called Telling the Truth:

“In rejecting an independent reality, an externally verifiable truth, and even reason itself, he [Foucault] was rejecting the foundational principles of the West.”

There was a time when the right used to argue that there was such a thing as objective truth and it was the left who said it was arguable. But due to their need to accommodate the primitive superstitions and literal biblical interpretations of so many of their followers conservatives have become extreme epistomological relativists, unable to make a clear statement as to whether or not the sun came up this morning if it means that a fundamentalist somewhere might have a problem with it. Rubio proves it with his slippery endorsement of the idea that schools should teach that science is all a matter of opinion.

But one thing has remained of their arguments through every permutation: it’s always about phantom totalitarians infiltrating their families and businesses. I can only speculate about why that might be, but I lean toward this explanation from Corey Robin:

Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in both the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has been to cede the field of the public, if he must, but stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field.

I guess I just assumed that when Lynne Cheney was talking about the foundational principles of the West she was talking about the Golden Age of Greece and the Enlightenment. It turns out she was taking her inspiration from the Dark Ages.

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QOTD: Meghan McCain

by digby

“I hate — hate — Karl Rove”

So, Republicans, we lost again. I have voted three times in my life, and I have never voted for a winning candidate. I’m sick of this friction’ track record. Everyone knows I’m Republican; I worked very hard trying to get Mitt Romney elected, defending him on television hundreds and hundreds of times. And Republicans, we lost because we were talking about rape and abortion and we can’t get behind our gay friends getting married…I don’t want everyone to break out the ice cream and Nora Ephron movies, because in all failure, there is opportunity. I am many things, but I am no freakin’ pessimist. I think we have a chance to rebuild right now, and I think it can be awesome, and we have another four years. People just have to stop listening to frickin’ right-wing lunatics like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — ’cause see where it’s gotten us? I think losing — a lot. And losing early.

I frickin’ hate it when election nights are called early. I always think it’s gonna last all night and then it’s called at, like, 11.

I hate Karl Rove. I have hated Karl Rove before anybody else hated Karl Rove. I hated Karl Rove when I was, like, 14 years old. I hate — hate — Karl Rove. I think he’s an idiot, a pretentious blowhard, and I think he was ruined a lot of things for the Republican Party during the Bush administration. All these millionaires that keep giving him $400 million for him to not win one election — maybe it’s not working! Maybe it’s not working.

Give me five freakin’ dollars — I’ll tell you for free what we gotta do. You can’t keep going and trying to get white men, because they’re dying off; it’s not a demographic anymore. We need the single women. But you don’t care. Seriously, I hate Karl Rove. Karl Rove needs to go away and retire, and just crawl back to the hole he emerged from…Everybody hates Karl Rove; he’s like a Bond villain.

Via Adele Stan at Alternet who has compiled an impressive list of post-election rants from Republicans. McCain’s is actually one of the more astute.

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The other side of soul searching

by digby

It’s natural for the party that loses two presidential contests in a row to do a postmortem and try to figure out what it needs to change in order to compete in the future. We are seeing lots of that happening right now with the GOP, although I agree with Sahil Kapur here that there’s a lot more talk about “tone” than about policy. (Certainly, the self-righteous denunciations of Mitt Romney from the 2016 potential president club couldn’t be more disingenuous.)

But as much as that story is fascinating, Ed Kilgore pointed out that the Democrats are going to face their own internal battles:

But underneath all these indicators of unity and ideological coherence, and the defensive crouch in which all Democrats found themselves during and after the 2010 midterms, there are unmistakably intraparty tensions on a significant range of issues domestic and international. Many of them go back to the more visible fissures of the Clinton presidency. And several could very rapidly emerge quite soon, depending on how the administration and Democratic congressional leaders handle the negotiations with Republicans over tax and spending issues during and perhaps immediately after the current lame-duck session.

At a minimum, if Obama accepts as part of some “grand bargain” on fiscal issues actual benefit cuts in Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, and/or major structural changes in how these programs operate, there will be a backlash among Democrats in and out of Congress that could be significantly fiercer than the one favoring a “public option” which for a while threatened the enactment of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. And now that the threat of a Republican president has subsided, we can also expect to hear much more vocal Democratic objections to Obama’s foreign policy, particularly its continuation of the “war on terror” and its heavy use of drone strikes in the Greater Middle East. Long-simmering progressive resentment of Obama administration positions on civil liberties, and on its support for relatively high defense spending, will also re-emerge for the same reason.

I couldn’t agree more. These are the two big fault lines and they are very deep indeed. But Kilgore makes a very keen observation that’s sort of politically incorrect, but cannot be ignored: any Democratic leader who has a strong personal bond with minority voters is unlikely to be challenged. I don’t think this is a criticism of either the left or minority voters, but rather a simple observation of the dynamics of the center left coalition generally. (I actually think it’s less about minority voters than the left being so repulsed by right wing racism and misogyny that they simply can’t join the chorus of criticism out of solidarity on those points.)

And because of all that, this is worth noting:

It’s fascinating, therefore, to observe the possibility that Democrats could continue their intraparty detente by uniting around the 2016 candidacy of Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 candidacy aroused significant progressive opposition, much of it owing to misgivings about her husband (buried during his last two years in office as liberals rallied around his fight against impeachment). If HRC’s current numbers are any indication, she could all but rout the field should she make an early and decisive move towards a presidential candidacy. What’s less certain is what sort of ideological profile she might present, given her complex background and image.

I’m fairly sure that the same dynamic that protected President Obama from any serious challenge from the left would protect Clinton as well — the first woman president would suffer terribly at the hands of the right wing, and none more than her. Whether you think this is the correct way to look at politics is up to you, but it is a human affair, and people are going to identify with leaders on a very fundamental level. (The ideological fight is largely about that in any case.)

If a woman or minority are not front runners in the next contest, however, things could get scrambled in some different ways. Progressives will argue strenously for the party to move away from the mushy centrism of the Clinton/Obama era.

Kilgore issues a warning to the political establishment:

Those elements in the Democratic Party who applaud Obama as a “centrist reformer” who proved once and for all that the Clinton legacy provides the sole path to a Democratic Majority (arguing, quite naturally, that it’s no mistake the two men, plus fellow “centrist” Jimmy Carter, have been the only Democratic presidential winners since LBJ) will find their own presidential champions, and many long-submerged intraparty controversies may finally come back into full light.

It is, in fact, just a matter of time.

Indeed. Now, you can only imagine the reaction of the Villagers to any attempt to move the Democratic party to the left after having absorbed nearly a decade’s worth of GOP propaganda insisting that Barack Obama is to the left of Fidel Castro, so it won’t be an easy lift. And, as Kilgore points out, there is always going to be tension if people identify with the leadership (or the leadership is seen as being under siege because of that identification.) But I guarantee it will happen at some point. The country is ideologically polarized, but the only place that it is polarized between centrism and conservatism is in Washington. Many Democrats around the country have an agenda too and it’s … liberal, even if they don’t know it.

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Humans are weird

by digby

Good morning:

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California’s fracking battle: a problematic story of coalitional politics

by David Atkins

State Democratic Party executive board meetings are typically none-too-dramatic affairs in which sometimes contentious internal organizational business gets done that often has consequences for grassroots and progressive influence in the party structure, but has little impact at a policy level.

This weekend’s California Democratic Party executive board meeting in northern California was a somewhat different story. Activists within the party can push for resolutions on various issues. Resolutions are non-binding, but demonstrate the will of the Party’s hardest workers and core activists, sending a clear signal to legislators about the priorities of the people who worked hardest to put them in office. While they obviously don’t carry the force of law, they make a significant difference as political statements and are closely watched by legislators and activists alike, particularly when conducted within a political party as dominant as the Democratic Party is in the Golden State.

One of the resolutions that came before the Resolutions Committee this weekend was a moratorium on the horrible practice of fracking, which can lead to groundwater contamination, significant CO2 emissions leading to climate change, potential earthquakes, and a glut of natural gas on the market that drives down the cost, thereby rendering solar and wind energy non-competitive.

Unfortunately, the Trade Unions believe that a significant number of jobs depend on fracking. So they put a great deal of pressure on party leaders and the endorsement committee to create a “compromise” in which the moratorium language was stricken out, substituting a toothless review by an ineffectual state organization instead. Dailykos diarist, Grist writer, California Environmental Caucus Secretary (and fellow Ventura County Dem Executive Board Member!) RL Miller helped lead the fight against watering down the resolution. As she wrote today:

After all, the state Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Regulations – pronounced “Dogger” – literally doesn’t know how much fracking is going on in the state. Venoco is drooling over the billion dollar Monterey Shale, running under some of the most productive farmland in the world; grape growers, vintners, and strawberry farmers are less enthused. Whatever the merits of fracking up Pennsylvania and New York may be, it’s hard to see the upside of a water-intensive, earthquake-inducing process in a water-scarce, earthquake-prone state. And climate hawks are deeply concerned because we don’t know the quantity of natural gas methane leaks (natural gas is mostly methane, a potent greenhouse gas). Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is holding its first Monterey Shale lease auction December 12.

But the building trades are bothered by anything that may threaten jobs. So they’ve been calling everyone in the Democratic Party hierarchy demanding that the moratorium language be pulled. At a closed door session yesterday, a handful of people rewrote the resolution to call for DOGGR to regulate fracking equal to or better than federal regulations now, then – if DOGGR doesn’t so act – seek a moratorium on fracking no earlier than the end of 2013.

Or, as I put it, waiting for the insurance company’s arson investigator to write its report before considering whether to put out the fire.

I attended a DOGGR-and-pony-show hearing last May to ask that the state track methane emissions for climate purposes. I was ignored. By an interesting coincidence, every person who specified a desired regulation was asked to submit comments in writing, but every person who opposed fracking entirely was simply thanked with a pained smile and glazed eyes. I have no hope whatsoever that DOGGR regulations will be sufficient.

Keep in mind that it is not corporate corruption driving this problem. It’s something else entirely. It’s a problem of coalitional politics. Environmental activism is good. Labor activism is good. But sometimes they don’t see eye to eye.

In this case, what the labor activists fail to understand is that the “jobs” that fracking enables are worthless in the face of the cancer, disease and eventual community debilitation caused by the groundwater pollution; that the earthquakes fracking probably causes will cost more jobs than fracking enables; and that in the long term, the disaster of climate change caused by increased emissions could destroy not only a few jobs, but human civilization itself as we know it within less than a century.

But in this sort of dispute, only uncomfortable influence among those with the power to change minds inside the tent can make a difference. Nothing outside the tent matters much.

In this case, the objections of climate and environmental activists held little sway before the Resolutions Committee, which worked out the “compromise” in an attempt to placate both sides. The watered-down resolution then made it to the Executive Board floor for a vote on Sunday morning. With few voting members willing and able to object, I moved to send it back to the Resolutions Committee to be considered and brought to the full body of activists around the state at convention time. That motion was objected to by members of the endorsement committee, but it carried. The resolution will go back to the resolution committee, without the watered-down version carrying the weight of Executive Board approval.

Why do this? Because scuttling the entire resolution would have failed, and it would have pleased the anti-environmental side, anyway. The status quo is good for them. And because the full convention is much more filled with grassroots activists than the comparatively insider Executive Board (as one E-Board member argued in opposition to my motion, the smaller E-Board is “more adult”!), there will be more time to engage environmental activism on the issue and present it before a more diverse group of activists less worried about the coalitional political implications of doing the right thing for the planet and for Californians at large not directly employed in the natural gas industry.

And this is why it’s not enough to simply write on blogs and march in the streets. Not everything is about people power versus corporate power. Sometimes friends can disagree strongly, sometimes you have to have progressive voices able to play an insider’s game with enough credibility to effectuate changes within the tent.

That matters most when it comes to endorsing progressive candidates over conservadems. But it can also matter in issues that more directly and immediately affect policy as well.

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The Oracle speaks: Alan Greenspan talks utter nonsense

by digby

Alan Greenspan was at some Peterson Deficit Scold event and Ali Velshi caught up with the great man to ask him for his sage wisdom on the fiscal cliff:

VELSHI: Alan Greenspan had a front row seat to some of the biggest economic events of the last 25 years. When he was appointed chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, it was 1987. Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

Over 18 years Greenspan led the central bank of the world’s largest economy through good times and bad. Now six years after he’s left the job, his successor Ben Bernanke is warning of the danger of plunging over the fiscal cliff.

I’ve been warning you about the catastrophic effects that could have on America’s already fragile recovery. But some say that it’s fear mongering.

I spoke with Alan Greenspan who was in Washington at a Peterson Foundation event to discuss the fiscal cliff and I asked him point blank, do you believe the U.S. can go in a recession as a result of the fiscal cliff?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENSPAN: Most certainly. But remember, all the forecasts come off econometric models, which didn’t catch the 2008 crisis. And so you have to be very careful about using them to evaluate this type of problem.

VELSHI: The last time Washington faced the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts back in 2010, you said in interviews they should follow the law and let them expire for everyone. Now putting aside the other parts of the fiscal cliff, do you still feel that all Americans should see their income tax rates rise?

GREENSPAN: I say that this crisis is going to be extraordinarily difficult to resolve. In other words, the crisis I’m referring to is not the fiscal cliff crisis but the broad crisis with respect to debt. We have had an inexorable rise in the rate of spending on “so-called social benefits.” And as I mentioned before, this is both Republican and Democrat and neither one of them get a hold on this.

But what the data very clearly shows is that as social benefits rise, the savings, the domestic savings of the American economy declines. And that is basically the root source of funding for capital investment and capital investment is where productivity comes from and productivity is where economic growth comes from.

So unless and until we recognize that we got to slow the pace and in fact reduce the level of benefits to allow savings to come through, that will create the type of economic growth, which will enable us to fund these social benefits. We’re running into a stonewall here in which the more social benefits we have which we don’t contain, the lower the rate of savings, lower the rate of growth, and a lesser quantity of real resources to fund the benefits.

This is obviously an unsustainable situation. And the sooner we come to grips with it the better. And I raised the issue of allowing the Bush tax cuts to rescind on schedule was not that I want taxes to go up. I think it’s a terrible idea. Relative to what? I mean if we don’t close this deficit fairly quickly, we are in real trouble.

Remember, it’s always easier to cut taxes politically than it is to cut spending. So if you have to allow a significant rise in taxes to essentially cut a deal on a major benefit cut, that’s a good deal for me because it’s always easier in the future to cut — politically to cut taxes than it is to cut spending.

VELSHI: So let me ask you this. If we can get to that 3 percent growth to 4 percent and beyond, then you’ve got — you’re seeing it becomes a virtuous cycle. Can that happen? Is there — would the immediate spending cuts that we are looking at now help get us there?

GREENSPAN: Look, IMF studies show definitively that if you cut spending in a situation like this, it does lower the GDP but nowhere near the amount and increase in taxes lowers the rate of increase in GDP. So that I think if we have to have a moderate recession to solve this huge fiscal problem that’s if front of us, I think there is a very small price to pay. Because we’re not going to get out of this thing without paying it.

There is a presumption here that we have a whole schedule of economic policies, which can just basically solve the problems compared to a normal situation. It is not. This is an extraordinarily unprecedented situation and unless and until we reign in the spending growth, this economy can’t function.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VELSHI: The economy can’t function. So he’s saying a little recession is better than the idea of raising taxes on everyone. A fascinating conversation with the former Fed chairman.

What bullshit. I’m not sure what you have to do to lose credibility but obviously the crashing of the economy isn’t one of them. His self-serving “nobody could have seen it coming” historical inaccuracy aside, the circular logic is fairly amazing.

First, let’s take a look at the language Greenspan uses: “so-called social programs.” I’m not sure why he didn’t just refer to them as “gifts” but he might as well have done so. He’s a little bit less aggressive than he used to be when he openly called people parasites, but his disdain is still obvious.

But beyond that, what he’s saying is that the “so-called social programs” are draining the economy of the capital necessary for growth. That’s nonsense. There is a ton of capital out there that’s not being put to work because there’s no demand. Making old and sick people poorer is not going to help that. I find it fairly amazing that the oracle is being this dishonest in public, but there you have it.

But he was very honest about one thing — and it’s something I’ve been saying since the last debt negotiations:

[I]t’s always easier to cut taxes politically than it is to cut spending. So if you have to allow a significant rise in taxes to essentially cut a deal on a major benefit cut, that’s a good deal for me because it’s always easier in the future to cut — politically to cut taxes than it is to cut spending.

Yep. Uncle Alan is signaling openly for the Republicans to take yes for an answer. They will never have a better chance to have the Democrats help them achieve their most cherished goal: slashing the “so-called social programs.” They foolishly walked away before and now they are being given a second chance. All anyone wants in return is for “the rich to pay a little bit more” and as Uncle Alan wisely points out, cutting taxes is always popular. (Restoring loopholes is a breeze.)

As for the IMF study saying that cutting taxes is worse than cutting spending, I don’t understand the point. After all, this is the guy who just said we should raise taxes (temporarily) in order to get those “so-called social programs” slashed. Moreover, the reason some have interpreted the data to suggest that tax hikes bring worse results than spending cuts is because central banks are assumed to take a dim view of such “revenue” increases and adjust accordingly. (One can only wonder how much the looting, burning, protesting, suffering and lost output spending cuts will bring. That data tends not to come in right away, but it does come in.)

Regardless of where it comes from, austerity has made things substantially worse wherever they implemented it. The US managed to escape the worst of it (although not entirely because of the contraction in state spending and federal hiring) but only by a small margin. Our growth is anemic and unemployment is still at very painful levels. Even discussing further austerity now, particularly in light of the IMF and OECD reports, is simply political malpractice by both parties.

When you look at Greenspan’s contradictory, nearly nonsensical attempt to rationalize it you can see just what a pile of tripe it really is. To suggest that it’s a good idea to go back into recession in order to deal with our debt when the IMF study he cites for his own purposes clearly demonstrated that countries that did that increased their debt, makes it clear that there are other agendas at work.

Read the rest of the transcript with a variety of people from Bob Reich to Stephen Moore and you’ll find that we’ve gone all the way down the rabbit hole. This issue is no longer moored to reality.

They’ve gone nuts. Again. (We can’t let the smoking deficit come in the form of a magic mushroom …)

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