Author's posts
Nov 16 2010
The Last Refuge of Failed Economic Empires and Banana Republics
Laura Flanders of GRITtv.org talks with economist & Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington Dean Baker about the Obama Administration deficit commission‘s recommendations for massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs, and with UK journalist Laurie Penny about the growing street protests in London last week. Flanders also talks here with Susan Leal, co-author of the new book Running Out of Water and about the corporate push to privatize water:
“It’s the wrong answer to not a problem,” says Dean Baker of the report out last week from the leaders of Obama’s deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The report, which recommends massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs, has been roundly criticized by progressives for its targeting, but Dean notes that the biggest problem with it is that without the health care crisis we still have, we wouldn’t have deficits in the first place.
He joins us via Skype from Washington, D.C. to talk about the commission, the latest action by the Fed, and what can really be done to balance the budget–and why we should be much more focused on creating jobs and really reforming health care than on slashing programs that benefit us all.
“It’s fair to smash up someone’s future but not to smash up someone’s lobby,” notes UK journalist Laurie Penny of the student protests in London last week, now being branded as “violent” and “out of control.” Aside from one person who dropped a fire extinguisher off a building, she points out, the protests were free of violence against people, and property damage needs to be put in the proper perspective.
Laurie joins us via Skype from London, where she attended the protests and covered them for The New Statesman, where she is a columnist, to provide some perspective on misunderstood events–and to fill us in on why they’re said to be only the beginning.
“We’re on a collision course with our finite supply of water,” says Susan Leal, co-author of the new book Running Out of Water. It’s not just that the supply is limited, she notes, it’s our growing population, increased personal use, and climate change that are all playing into what journalist Anna Lenzer calls “the coming shock.”
Susan and Anna join us in studio to discuss water: why we’re limited, why privatization and drinking bottled water isn’t the solution, and why the problem has a better chance of being solved when people work together rather than have decisions imposed by private corporations.
GRITtv.org – November 15, 2010
Dean Baker, Laurie Penny, and the Coming Water Crisis
Nov 16 2010
The US $200-Trillion Debt Which Cannot Be Named
Rather than try to do an exhaustive interpretation here, I’ll just lay it out for you and let you read it from the source. The Daily Bell bills itself as “A Daily Compendium of Free-Market Thinking“, and while what they write about in this article is true, you may find their interpretation and spin as leaning strongly towards the idea that socialism and social services are in some sense bad things, although they recognize that drastic cuts are a recipe for social instabilities, to put it mildly.
They also say on their Contact Us page: “We’d be delighted if you want to carry the Daily Bell on your site. All we ask is that you give us credit and include a link back to the original article or interview at the Daily Bell.”
Here from The Daily Bell, is The US $200-Trillion Debt Which Cannot Be Named
The scary real U.S. government debt … Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 percent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.” Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.” This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling. – Globe and Mail (Canada)
Dominant Social Theme: What? That can’t be. Let’s not talk about it.
Free-Market Analysis: These numbers cited by Laurence Kotlikoff have been all over the Internet for a while now but have not been much reported by the mainstream press. No surprise there, but we are a bit shocked that the Globe and Mail chose to pick them up. Was it a slow news day? The story itself has been around since August.
Because the Globe and Mail has covered it, so shall we. Here is our question: Given these numbers, how can banks and institutions purchase US fixed income securities, let alone the dollar? What sense does it make? These large institutions, with fiduciary responsibility, are basically buying a bankrupt product. And it is not just the US. The entire Western world (maybe with the exception of Germany) is pretty much either flat broke or worse than broke.
Nov 11 2010
It’s Enough To Make You Cry
WASHINGTON-According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth’s continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.
While several years have passed since global warming was considered the most pressing issue facing mankind, recent studies from the Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and basically any scientific report available on the issue confirmed that it is not only still happening, but might also be worth stopping.
“Global warming, if you remember correctly, was the single greatest problem of our lifetime back in 2007 and the early part of 2008,” CGD president Nancy Birdsall said. “But then the debates over Social Security reform and the World Trade Center mosque came up, and the government had to shift its focus away from the dramatic rise in sea levels, the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, and the imminent destruction of our entire planet.”
Nov 11 2010
Robert Scheer: Appetites for Wealth
Laura Flanders of GRITtv talks once again with Truthdig.com’s Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, author of “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street“, about Barack Obama’s economic policies and team, about the blackmailing of you and the country and the world by Wall Street, about the financial industry lately booking two thirds of all profits produced by all economic activity in the United States, and about the parasitical mindset that now passes for “success” among the ultra-wealthy and their political servants in a morally warped empire in decline…or in freefall?
“Wall Street was blackmailing us,” says Robert Scheer of the bank bailouts, “And we got nothing in return.” It’s not news to any viewers of GRITtv that Wall Street’s tentacles ran throughout our election, but now that the election is over, we turn again to the running of government. Scheer joined us in the studio recently to discuss his new book, The Great American Stickup, and we asked him to give us some thoughts for after the election as well. Most pressing of all, he asks if either bankers or politicians are capable of thinking in anyone’s long-term interests.
GRITtv.org – November 6th, 2010
Robert Scheer: Appetites for Wealth
Nov 08 2010
Why Don’t You Two Get A Room?
I’ve been watching these two flirting while pretending not to flirt since about 2002. The elephant would watch the donkey all the time, and the donkey would watch back, while they pretended to hate each others’ guts. The donkey would pretend not to give a shit — not speaking to him, not returning his calls, but the whole time she’d look for excuses to be around while the elephant was in the room. It got to be pretty annoying after a while — the donkey would be flirting her ass off, and the whole time saying it was nothing, just a little bipartisanship, all in a spirit of compromise.
It only got worse after 2004 — the donkey practically throwing herself at the elephant, while acting all coy, like she didn’t even care, the elephant behaving like a cold bastard toward her, while anybody with half a brain in their head knew he really wanted to fuck her brains out.
The goddamn’ donkey got even worse around 2008 or so — smarmy coy looks, suggestive touching, soppy goo-goo eyes, all the time insisting there was nothing to it. Finally, about the time of the health care vote, she was all but falling all over the elephant, and it became insufferable. It was all I could do to keep from yelling “for crissakes, why don’t you two just get a room, already?”
Hat tip to political cartoonist Mike Flugennock for posting this at Corrente as well as at his own site.
Nov 06 2010
Barack Obama Deserves A Fair Trial, as George W. Bush Publicly Confesses to War Crimes
No Appetite for Prosecution: In Memoir, Bush Admits He Authorized the Use of Torture, But No One Cares
by Andy Worthington
With just days to go before George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hits bookstores (on November 9), and with reports on the book’s contents doing the rounds after review copies were made available to the New York Times and Reuters, it will be interesting to see how many media outlets allow the former President the opportunity to try to salvage his reputation, how many are distracted by his spat with Kanye West or his claim that he thought about replacing Dick Cheney as Vice President in 2004, and how many decide that, on balance, it would be more honest to remind readers and viewers of the former President’s many crimes – including the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the authorization of the use of torture on “high-value detainees” seized in the “War on Terror.”
As I fall firmly into the latter camp, this article focuses on what little has so far emerged regarding the President’s views on Guantánamo, and, in particular, on his confession that he authorized the waterboarding of “high-value detainee” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which is rather more important than trading blows with a rapper about whether or not his response to the Katrina disaster was racist, as it is a crime under domestic and international law.
On Guantánamo
On Guantánamo, the only comments in the book that have so far emerged are insultingly flippant, which is disgraceful from the man who shredded the Geneva Conventions and authorized an unprecedented program of arbitrary detention, coercive interrogation and torture. In addition, Bush’s baleful legacy lives on in the cases of the 174 men still held, in the recent show trial of Omar Khadr, and in the complacency regarding the basis for detaining prisoners of the “War on Terror” – the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks – on which Barack Obama continues to rely, despite its formidable shortcomings.
[snip]
Nov 05 2010
Congressional Progressive Caucus Increases Plurality in Next Congress
As David Swanson noted on Wednesday:
You may have heard that our center-right nation got enthusiastic, formed a grassroots movement called a tea party, and overwhelmingly voted in a more rightwing party, sending hordes of nasty socialists packing as a result of their overly progressive performance, meaning gridlock between the righteous Congress and the infidel president for the next two years. There are some problems with this story, beginning with the fact that it’s completely false.
[snip]
As Karen Dolan blogged about immediately after Tuesday’s elections, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — over 80 members — lost only 3 seats. The Cut-Spending-Except-For-Killing Blue Dogs had 54 members and lost 26 of them, and those 26 were their true believers. Congress members, including one or two real progressives, didn’t lose by being progressive but by being Democrats. Alan Grayson was defeated by the largest investment of corporate money in any House race, but the obedient corporatist Democrat in the next district over lost too. And this was despite the Democratic Party funding and supporting the Blue Dogs, leaving the progressives to raise their own money.Tea Party candidates, in contrast to progressives, did not have a successful day on Tuesday. Their nominees’ craziness cost the Republican Party control of the Senate. Yet the whole corporate-funded smoke-and-mirrors “movement” of the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party as a whole to the right, in a way that no well-funded institution has pushed the Democrats to the left or even tried to. And this is the key lesson: pushing the Democrats to the left would save them from themselves.
On Thursday Amy Goodman at Democracy Now spoke with CPC Co-Chair Raul Grijalva about the CPC not only holding it’s own with a loss of only 4 seats in the mid terms, but coming out of the elections holding the relative largest plurality of all groups in Congress.
The Democrats lost the majority in the US House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but what is the makeup of the new Democratic House caucus? The conservative Blue Dogs lost half their members, while the Progressive Caucus remains near eighty. We speak to its co-chair, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who appears to have retained his seat in a close election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. Over the past year, Grijalva has received numerous threats, including having a suspicious package covered in swastikas sent to his office and having a bullet shot through his district office in Yuma, Arizona.
Democracy Now – November 04, 2010
about 10 minutes
..transcript follows..
Nov 04 2010
Austerity & The Coming Lost Decade
Rob Johnson is the Director of the Economic Policy Initiative at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and is a regular contributor to the Institute’s blog NewDeal2.0. He serves on the UN Commission of Experts on Finance and International Monetary Reform. Previously, Dr. Johnson was a Managing Director at Soros Fund Management where he managed a global currency, bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging markets. He was also a Managing Director at the Bankers Trust Company. Dr. Johnson has served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire and was Senior Economist of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici. Dr. Johnson was an Executive Producer of Taxi to the Dark Side, an Oscar Winning documentary produced and directed by Alex Gibney.
Here, Johnson talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the economic fallout from the past couple of years and the 2010 mid term elections, and concludes that…
…the baseline scenario now is one of prolonged stagnation, gridlock in the government, unless Obama essentially capitulates to the agenda of the right. But will we go into a deep downturn similar to 2007, ’08, early 2009? Not necessarily. We may just remain stagnant. Perhaps the best model is the so-called lost decade in Japan, where you have negligible growth, negligible inflation, or even modest deflation, and you just kind of bump along the bottom. The danger of that, as I alluded to previously, is the long-term, persistent unemployment allows the skills of many people in society to atrophy. And the United States, unlike Europe and Japan, does not have a strong safety net, so it probably foments more social unrest, kind of like what we saw in the formation of the protest movements and Tea Party as we approach this election.
Real News Network – November 04, 2010
Austerity Could Lead to Lost Decade
Rob Johnson: They could accelerate foreign policy conflict to direct attention outwards
..transcript follows..