Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Krugman has a good column today about the unbelievably cheap money available to our government to use to invest in the future (win the future?) if we could just get these deficit fetishists to STFU:

…[I]nvestors are, in a sense, offering governments free money for the next 10 years; in fact, they’re willing to pay governments a modest fee for keeping their wealth safe.

Now, those with a vested interest in the fiscal crisis story have made various attempts to explain away the failure of that crisis to materialize. One favorite is the claim that the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low by buying government bonds. But that theory was put to the test last summer when the Fed temporarily suspended bond purchases. Many people — including Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco — predicted a rate spike. Nothing happened.

Oh, and pay no attention to the warnings that any day now we’ll turn into Greece, Greece I tell you. Countries like Greece, and for that matter Spain, are suffering from their ill-advised decision to give up their own currencies for the euro, which has left them vulnerable in a way that America just isn’t.

So what is going on? The main answer is that this is what happens when you have a “deleveraging shock,” in which everyone is trying to pay down debt at the same time. Household borrowing has plunged; businesses are sitting on cash because there’s no reason to expand capacity when the sales aren’t there; and the result is that investors are all dressed up with nowhere to go, or rather no place to put their money. So they’re buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt.

And governments should be granting their wish, not obsessing over short-term deficits.

Obligatory caveat: yes, we have a long-run budget problem, and we should be taking steps to address that problem, mainly by reining in health care costs. But it’s simply crazy to be laying off schoolteachers and canceling infrastructure projects at a time when investors are offering zero- or negative-interest financing.

You don’t even have to make a Keynesian argument about jobs to see that. All you have to do is note that when money is cheap, that’s a good time to invest. And both education and infrastructure are investments in America’s future; we’ll eventually pay a large and completely gratuitous price for the way they’re being savaged.

That said, you should be a Keynesian, too. The experience of the past few years — above all, the spectacular failure of austerity policies in Europe — has been a dramatic demonstration of Keynes’s basic point: slashing spending in a depressed economy depresses that economy further.

So it’s time to stop paying attention to the alleged wise men who hijacked our policy discussion and made the deficit the center of conversation. They’ve been wrong about everything — and these days even the financial markets are telling us that we should be focused on jobs and growth.

Unfortunately, all these alleged wise men are working overtime in Washington, behind the scenes, to persuade the US congress that they need to slash even more and lower tax rates — and our elite media seem to think they are the Sully Sullenbergers of the economy.

Meanwhile, if you were hoping for growth, keep hoping. Today’s GDP numbers reveal that we are as flat as a pancake:

IF RECENT data left any doubt, America’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) dispatched it this morning: the American economy slowed sharply in the second quarter, adding to the weakest recovery of the post-war period. The BEA’s advanced estimate of economic growth found that real GDP rose at just a 1.5% annual pace in the second three months of the year, down from 2.0% in the first quarter and a surprisingly strong fourth quarter performance of 4.1%—the fastest three-month spurt of the recovery. The advance estimate is subject to two revisions in coming months.

Growth slowed across most major categories. Personal consumption grew at a more laggardly pace in the second quarter relative to the first, net exports shifted back to a drag on the economy as import growth outpaced exports. And the government remained an economic albatross; the federal government has reduced its contribution to output for all of the past year, and state and local governments have been a drag for 11 consecutive quarters.

Andrew Sullivan surveyed the reporting and made special note of this one:

Josh Barro sees the report as a reason to vote for Romney:

President Obama doesn’t have a plan for economic growth other than fiscal stimulus, and he can’t get any more of that from Congress. The president won’t engage on monetary policy or housing policy, and he has turned up the volume on his hare-brained industrial policy ideas that would only make the economy worse. That’s why, despite all hismanifesthorribleness, I might still vote for Mitt Romney. Our best hope with Romney, even if it is a thin hope, is that he has a secret plan to fix the economy. It’s no secret that Obama doesn’t have one.

That has to be one of the dumbest paragraphs I’ve read this election season. The reason demand remains flat is pretty obvious: deleveraging from the amount of public and private sector debt accumulated before the recession and during it takes time. And trusting some bizarre “secret” plan to rescue the economy is just nuts. Romney’s official plan is to be even more draconian than David Cameron in Britain, where premature austerity has now led to a serious double-dip. The actual plan – because Romney is nothing if not a cynic – will likely be more Keynesian stimulus through Pentagon spending and a new war, alongside more debt-fueling tax cuts. In other words, in my view, Romney will be more deficit-friendly than Obama in the near-future, while blocking any Grand Bargain on future spending because of theological intransigence on tax cuts.

I agree with him that Barro’s logic is daft. Hoping for a “secret plan” is right up there with believing in Santa Claus, particularly since the Republicans have a very limited playbook. But I doubt seriously that Romney’s not going to come through with a draconian austerity plan. (After all, he and Cameron are already in a dick measuring contest over the Olympics. Is Mitt going to let that fop be more of a slash and burn conservative than him? I doubt it.)

But Sullivan might be right about the wars. They like to do that on a non-Keynesian basis, so I see no reason to think it’s part of his economic plan, however. (And God help me, let’s hope there’s no Grand Bargain either way.)

Krugman weighed in on the GDP numbers on his blog this morning:

Here’s a chart. It shows changes since the second quarter of 2009, which was both the bottom of the recession and the earliest point at which you can plausibly say that Obama had any influence on actual policy. I show nonresidential fixed investment — basically business investment — and government purchases of goods and services:

Business investment has actually gone up a lot; maybe you think it should have gone up even more, but it’s not the heart of the problem. On the other hand, we’ve had a lot of cutbacks in government — mainly at the state and local level, but federal aid could have avoided that.

This isn’t an act of God. There have been specific policies enacted at all levels of government that made it happen. And in a rational world they could be reversed. We don’t seem to be in a rational world, unfortunately.

Headline ‘o the day

by digby

Gosh I sure hope that George Stephanopoulos has her on again this Sunday for some more of that fantastic insight.

Heroes in their own minds

I’m afraid America is going to have to apologize for him.

by digby

Utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive:

Embarrassing beyond belief. During the Olympics no less.

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The right to bear (fire)arms

by David Atkins

The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

These few words have been parsed ad nauseam by both conservatives and liberals alike, with most progressives focusing on the words “well regulated Militia” and conservatives focusing on the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

What has not been sufficiently parsed is the word “Arms.” There has been much discussion, of course, of the dramatic difference between ballistics technology of the 18th century compared with today. But few have concentrated on the nature of the arms involved.

Keeping an armed citizen militia to preserve the security of a free State is a fairly antiquated concept. Doing so while maintaining the world’s most expensive standing army seems illogical. But even granting the questionable wisdom of such an approach in the 21st century, it would seem clear that the militia would be intent on guarding the “free State” against both foreign invasion and a tyrannical domestic government. The conservative movement tends to concentrate on the latter, though it’s fairly clear that the Founders were more concerned about the former.

But if an armed citizen militia is to protect against outside invasion or internal tyranny, it should theoretically be equipped to do so. Yet few conservatives or NRA members would argue that random civilians should be allowed to own anti-tank weaponry, anti-aircraft missiles or military-grade explosives, much less chemical weapons.

Simply put, traditional firearms are utterly helpless in the face of the might of modern state arms. Which means that either the 2nd Amendment is hopelessly outdated for the modern era, or we need to take the discussion of “Arms” out of the realm of firearms and into the realm of much more potent technology.

The NRA and its allies slide comfortably on occupying an untenable middle ground. In reality, it’s one or the other. The NRA should be encouraged to get off the fence and decide whether it truly wants to fulfill the purpose of the 2nd Amendment in the modern era, or whether it truly has much more disturbing ulterior motives related to urban cowboy and suburban castle dweller fantasies of murder without accountability.

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Fluids!

by digby

Via Greg Mitchell:

For Stanley Kubrick’s birthday: Yes, “Dr. Strangelove” helped changed my live as an early teen and remains my favorite film anyway. Here’s the long suppressed, rejected trailer for the film, downright hysterical.

It’s right up there for me too. Happy Birthday, Stanley.

We don’t do that here

by digby

I’m finding it a little bit hard to believe that this needs to be said, but apparently it does. This is from Adam Serwer at Mother Jones:

Blocking construction of Chick-fil-a restaurants over Cathy’s views is a violation of Cathy’s First Amendment rights. Boston and Chicago have no more right to stop construction of Chick-fil-As based on an executive’s anti-gay views than New York City would have had the right to block construction of an Islamic community center blocks away from Ground Zero. The government blocking a business from opening based on the owner’s political views is a clear threat to everyone’s freedom of speech—being unpopular doesn’t mean you don’t have rights. It’s only by protecting the rights of those whose views we find odious that we can hope to secure them for ourselves.

The man has a right to make odious, bigoted remarks without the government threatening his business. You don’t have to think too much about the implications of that for people who say … Rick Perry doesn’t agree with. Or Scott Walker.

Obviously, if private citizens would like to boycott Chick-fil-a over its owners beliefs, have at it. (I’ve been inclined to boycott it purely on the basis of its sub-literate brand name, but it’s up to you.)There’s nothing wrong with individuals exercising their right not to eat in a certain restaurant and asking other people to do the same. But the government refusing to allow the business to exist because of something the owner said? That’s not how we do things in America.

As Adam says later in the piece, they will have to adhere to all the discrimination laws which, in both states where this is a controversy, applies to LGBT citizens. And there’s no guarantee that people won’t protest outside the business and agitate against them. That’s all fair and constitutional. But if this fellow wants to open his business there and conduct himself within the laws of the state, the beliefs of the owner is none of the state’s business.

Liberals are at a big disadvantage right now because so many more rich people are conservatives (and bigots, apparently) and they are donating vast sums to elect more Republicans. It’s tempting to leverage whatever state power we have to fight it — and there may even be legitimate ways to do that. But that’s all the more reason to be vigilant about the Bill of Rights. It’s a bulwark against what could happen if they are successful.

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Battle of the millionaires

by David Atkins

One of the less watched stories of the Presidential election is noted foreign casino magnate/family values champion Sheldon Adelson’s attempt to pry away the Jewish vote. There are some doubts that it will work: American Jews aren’t really going to cozy up to a party of hate and intolerance because President Obama advocates a two-state solution and caution on Iran, and doesn’t get along with the far-right Netanyahu. After all, Israelis themselves aren’t terribly happy with Netanyahu right now.

Still, Greg Sargent reports that a group of Democratic-friendly millionaires is seeking to push back on Adelson’s well-funded blitz:

So how seriously are Dems taking the possibility that Obama could lose Jewish votes, now that billionaire Sheldon Adelson is planning a multi-million-dollar campaign to hammer Obama over Israel?

A group of wealthy and influential Democrats is quietly putting together their own effort to raise several million dollars to counter Adelson’s efforts in key swing states, by aggressively pushing back on criticism of Obama’s record on Israel and to remind Jewish voters that he agrees with them on domestic issues they care about, I’m told.

The effort — which involves Dems like Harvey Weinstein and Rahm Emanuel — is effectively an acknowledgment that Dems need to take the possibility of Jewish defections seriously, that Republicans have gotten an early start in their efforts to peel off swing state Jewish voters, and that small shifts could impact the outcome…

Many Dems believe the key to preventing Jewish defections is that Jews are not one-issue voters on Israel, and on domestic issues are much more in sync with Democrats. So the pushback will also emphasize choice, health care, education, social justice and marriage equality.

“These are the issues we’re taught as Jews to support,” Stanley says. “Tikkun Olam — to repair the world. That’s why Jews historically vote Democratic.”

That’s all well and good, of course. As long as our election laws are what they are, it’s important for those with wealth and morals to counter those who have an ample amount of the former and scant regard for the latter.

But over the long run, as long as millionaires completely control our elections the rest of us are going to be mere window shoppers in our putative democracy. Campaign finance reform, including revisiting the idea of corporate personhood and the constitutionality of money as speech, is going to be key to repairing our electoral world.

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How to save 250 million dollars per congressional district

by digby

Darcy Burner is one of the few candidates in this cycle talking constantly about the war in Afghanistan. She’s been holding town hall meetings all over the district with General Paul Eaton, offering a sophisticated and detailed plan to withdraw, explaining the stakes and the difficulties to her constituents. She’s very serious on these issues and anyone who has been to her presentations knows that she is highly informed about the issue. She says:

In 2003, when my son Henry was a few months old, my brother Jason marched into Iraq with the initial invading force. I realized that no set of choices I could make would give Henry the kind of life I wanted him to have if we didn’t change the direction of the country.

In 2007, I worked with retired Major General Paul Eaton to write A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq, which was endorsed by more than 60 candidates for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, including Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Congressman Jared Polis, and Senator Jeff Merkley.

In 2010, I worked as part of the Afghanistan Study Group on their report called A New Way Forward which laid out why and how the U.S. needs to end the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops and the $100 billion per year we are spending there home. That is $250 million per Congressional District per year!

People are voting in Washington right now and top-two primaries are hard to predict. She can reach 25,000 potential voters with this succinct, straightforward message and needs to raise some money to do it.

You can contribute to Darcy’s campaign here if you’d like to help.

I wish more candidates would make this part of their message. There’s a common sense aspect to it to which I think a lot of people can relate.

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He just seems foreign

by digby

Colbert:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

This has to be the loudest dogwhistle since Willie Horton. I can’t believe he’s getting away with it. Why not just call Obama un-American and get it over with?

And at some point, some conservatives in Hawaii are going to have to speak up about this bullshit:

Rush Limbaugh:

How many people come from a background like Obama’s? “Half say Obama has the background and set of values they identify with”? Yeah? Where’s the hardscrabble life? Where’s the growin’ up in the Midwest? Where’s the numerous jobs as a boy with the hardscrabble life the parents had? There’s no life story that Obama has that has much in common with anybody in this country. Obama had a communist, bigamist, absentee father from Kenya. How many people in America can lay claim to that?

He was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.

He never set foot on the US mainland until he was in college and went to Howard Johnson’s. He was a student of the radical left. His mentors were communists like Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky and Jeremiah Wright.

That’s just a lie. There’s a very famous vacation in 1971 when Obama was just 11, where he went to Disneyland and traveled all over the place on a Greyhound bus with his (very midwestern) grandmother. But so what if he hadn’t? Hawaii is a state of the union even if these throwbacks (I’m looking at you Cokie) insist that it isn’t really America.

But here’s where ole Rush gets tripped up:

Where’s the hardscrabble life? Where’s the growin’ up in the Midwest? Where’s the numerous jobs as a boy with the hardscrabble life the parents had? There’s no life story that Obama has that has much in common with anybody in this country.

Who’s the last president that describes? The one he hates more than any other president in the world: Bill Clinton. Of course, he was technically Southern, but Rush probably needs to be careful with that one. It sure doesn’t describe George W. Bush or his father. Or Mitt Romney. Or John McCain. It describes Ronald Reagan, but then he was born a hundred and one years ago when that “hardscrabble” story was a lot more common.

Go back through history and there are a whole bunch of presidents and presidential candidates who don’t fit that mold. But you know who does? Rush Limbaugh. Oh wait. No it doesn’t. He likes to think he’s a self-made job creator but he comes from a long line of lawyers, judges and politicians. Still, you have to give him credit. He became gazillionaire by being the most notorious demagogue of his generation. Nobody can say he isn’t an achiever.

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