Rent is Too Damn High Party (Update: Now With More Hasidim!)

Edit: fixed malformed link.

Now THIS is how you do "single-issue candidate". Jimmy McMillan of the "Rent is Too Damn High Party" absolutely stole the show at the New York State Gubernatorial debate last night.

Gawker called him "crazy"; HELL no, he isn't crazy. He's cogent, on-message, has a striking appearance that helps get him attention (which you need as an issue candidate) and the sort of emphatic, impassioned delivery that'd make a preacher cry.

I'm sure a ton of people would (will?) happily vote for him; Cuomo would be insane not to leverage this.

Edit: Ah, or perhaps Cuomo should leave well enough alone. McMillan is trending high right now, but already people are noticing that he found a target for his ire back in 2005. That would be, *ahem*, "the Jews". Utter ethical dubiousness aside, I don't think it's a terribly wise position for a gubernatorial candidate in New York, of all places.

It is a rather weird case. His specific complaint was, from what I can gather, that Hasidim (ultra-Orthodox) Jews living in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn were systematically refusing to rent to outsiders. Considering that's a common complaint about the so-called "black hats" in Israel, it's plausible that he might not understand the distinction. But, then again, he also blamed "the Jews" for the 2001 WTC attack. That is, uh, a wee bit less plausible.

On the other hand, he claims that he's renounced that stuff:

There have been comments that I have attempted to label me anti-semitic or anti-Jewish. This has been nothing more than "kill the messenger" and "character assignation" politics as usual which was spread by opponents that have nothing better to say. It may sound trite in this matter but even in this campaign I rely on Jewish close friends and advisors.

However, if I have ever made any biased remarks toward anyone or any group I heartfeltly apologize. Further, I apologize to the Jewish community for having to suffer the boorish bias of anyone. Even the reminder that there is still bias in America bias is painful; as a Black-American Man I empathize fully with the Jewish-American community.

Hey, they forgave Bob Byrd.

Wall Street's Pathologies

While I'm KrugPostin', here's a KrugLink to a piece in the NY Observer about, well, just what kind of asshats are working on Wall Street these days.

"The first thing that needs to happen, I think, is to get these people out of their homes," a man wearing a bespoke blue-striped shirt, a Hermés tie patterned with elephants and Ferragamo loafers said recently. "Correct! I'll explain," the veteran member of a bank restructuring and advisory team said.

Amid evidence of sham documents and widespread paperwork gaffes, if not systemic fraud that increasingly looks like it may be terrifically deep, Bank of America recently halted all foreclosure proceedings around the country. That followed similar announcements from the home-loan giants JPMorgan Chase and GMAC.

But Wall Street does not sympathize. "You had people putting zero down to get massive houses they couldn't afford to be in," he said Monday morning, "but now they want to stay. And the government wants to let them stay, because they're voters." A few hours later, the Goldman Sachs arm Litton Loan Servicing said it had suspended certain foreclosure proceedings, too. "Talk about a financial scandal," a Wall Street Journal editorial this weekend joked. "A consumer borrows money to buy a house, doesn't make the mortgage payments and then loses the house in foreclosure—only to learn that the wrong guy at the bank signed the foreclosure paperwork. Can you imagine?"

"The problem is they don't deserve to be in that place. They probably deserve to be there less than they used to," the source continued, referring to incomes lower now than they'd been when the loans were made in the first place. "You do need to foreclose, and you need to go back to people living in houses that are consistent with their income levels."

At this point, I'd like to remind readers that there are reports all over the place about people getting foreclosed upon that paid in full and paid in cash. Including in the Observer. Moving on...

In order to understand Wall Street's shrug during this foreclosure crisis, which as many as 40 attorneys general are expected to announce an investigation into this week, the key is to appreciate just how deeply connected the gesture is to Wall Street's view of who's to blame for the financial crisis.

The feeling, the idea at the bottom of all the others, is that even if Wall Street aggravated the crisis by bundling and betting on mortgage-backed securities that turned out not to live up to high ratings, it was not a matter of, as Citi chairman Richard D. Parsons told The Observer this summer, "bad people trying to do bad things." The loans wouldn't have been there in the first place if American home buyers, driven by what The Weekly Standard calls immediate gratification without personal responsibility, hadn't overstepped their bounds.

So when Ken Bentsen, the executive vice president for public policy and advocacy at Wall Street's largest trade group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, talks about this foreclosure fraud crisis, he points out that the homeowners arguing about administrative problems are the ones who've gotten themselves tied up in the foreclosure route in the first place, regrettably. "No one has raised the question that anyone who's going through this process shouldn't have been in the foreclosure process," said Mr. Bentsen, who, as a congressman from Texas, helped write the Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley acts.

"Look, I think it's just human nature. People want to have a bogeyman," Ralph Cioffi, the former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager, who was found not guilty of fraud, said in a recent Observer profile about anger at banks and bankers. "People don't want to take responsibility for their own actions."

Apparently not.

So, the Wall Street titans, having screwed up so badly that they needed to be rescued from their own financial crapulence by the American people, are right back to blaming absolutely everything on poor people. Let the borrowers suffer. I have a tee time to get to!

Never mind that the wealthy are more likely to play the "jingle-mail" card than the poor are. Never mind that the professionals involved all signed off on this nonsense. And never mind that everybody said that the crash couldn't happen, that home prices couldn't go down, and that anybody who said otherwise was a crank. And never mind that the institutions that these guys work for were more precariously leveraged than a thousand insolvent homeowners. No, it all comes back to the OTHER guy.

And why?

"Because people don't want to take responsibility for their own actions".

No, Government Hasn't Gone Up

Yeah, Krugman's been banging on this one for a while, but he linked to a great post by Menzie Chinn that shows the situation.

I've been lecturing on the government sector in my macro course. In updating my lecture notes, I plotted out some interesting graphs, which link up nicely with this previous post. The following four figures highlight: (1) normalized Federal outlays are not much higher than in 1986; (2) government consumption to GDP is back up to 1991 levels; (3) the cyclically adjusted budget deficit is only 2 ppts larger than that recorded in 1987; and (4) Federal consumption remains far below the previous peak in 2007.

One of the topics stressed in the textbook and lecture notes is the endogeneity of the budget balance, and especially the transfer and tax components. This leads to the first graph, of transfers normalized by nominal GDP, and transfers normalized by potential GDP...

...Notice that government transfers as a share of GDP looks particularly high because of the collapse of GDP in the Great Recession which started in 2007Q4. Normalizing by potential GDP highlights the fact that, while the ratio is the highest over the last forty three years, it is only slightly higher than that recorded in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan administration.

Normalizing government consumption and investment illustrates that overall spending by the government in purchases of goods and services is not particularly high. Even dividing by nominal GDP indicates that we are only (almost) back to the levels of 1990. Normalizing by potential GDP indicates that we are still only back to the levels of the early 1990's (this spending includes defense)...

...So, it is true that the Federal government's role in terms of spending and transfers has increased against the backdrop of a massive decline in output starting in 2008Q4 -- but some of the movements in various indicators are distorted by the large negative output gap that has opened up.

That latter bit is why I liked the post so much. Focusing on spending as a percentage of GDP is really prone to distortion. That measurement of spending as a percentage of potential GDP neatly removes that problem. It reinforces what I've known for a while: that you don't need to cut social spending. Just end the damned wars, end the Bush tax cuts, and end the recession. Do those things, and the budget falls neatly into place.

Obama Hit by Foreclosure Scammers?

Holy Hell. From ZeroHedge:

Just like we have been saying all along, this is so much bigger than  "affidavits."

Here is another piece of the puzzle, without bringing up the REMIC issues...

Now that YOU are effected personally in this, Mr. President, what are you going to do about it?

Let's get off the whole CNN Axelrod signals White House opposition to foreclosure moratorium BS...

"The Obama administration opposes a moratorium on home foreclosures, but wants problems involving improper paperwork resolved as quickly as possible, senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday."I'm not sure about a national moratorium,"

Like my dear friend at the Hamlet puts it

It’s not the foreclosure affidavits only. Hello? It’s the whole kit-n-caboodle. it’s the fabricated assignments of mortgage, fake allonges, robo-stamped endorsements in blank, and satisfactions of mortgage, ignoring SEC and IRS regulations, disregard for the steps required by the REMIC rules. It’s all the top national banks and their servicing arms. The whole of it is a sham. Don’t believe the propaganda that insists otherwise.

Got it?

Now for the fireworks...

I won't quote the whole thing, but the post (appears to be Michael Redman from 4closurefraud.com) gets into how it's quite likely that multiple people were posing as Marshe Craine, the same "vice-president" from Chase Manhattan, in the same sort of documents that Obama put up. "Marshe" had one signature in one form, and an entirely different signature in Obama's forms. And wasn't with Chase to begin with, but another (sketchier) outfit called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS.

Whoops.

Of course, the whole thing relies on photos that I haven't reproduced here, so you should check it out yourselves. And it's not exactly unlikely that this would happen, because it has apparently happened to half of the damned country!

But it does put things in perspective:

So you see, this whole Foreclosure-Gate crisis has nothing to do with the "deadbeat" borrowers, it never has.

It has to do with the complete lack of the respect of the law by the banking industry.

They got away with it up until now and are trying their damnedest to paper over their crimes.

It is time to say no more...

They tricked all of us, even you Mr. President, and completely disregarded the basic laws of this country to make a buck.

I have been beating this drum, along with a few others, for years now and it is time to come to an end.

Mr President, now that you have had the fraud perpetrated on you personally, what are you going to do about it?

The system is broken and the foreclosures need to be stopped NOW.

It is actually worse than you can imagine...

What's that old line? Look at any great fortune, and you'll find a great crime?

Well, we knew what the fortune was. And now we're discovering the crime.

Israel Requires Loyalty Oath to "Jewish, Democratic State"

The Israeli Cabinet has apparently approved a bill requiring non-Jewish immigrants to swear loyalty to the "Jewish, democratic state". Yep, Yisrael Beitenu managed to push it through. Not exactly going to endear them further in the Muslim world, especially when the initial effects involve, you guess it, West Bank Palestinians.

Were the bill to be passed by the Knesset, the people immediately affected would be Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who either want to marry a Palestinian-Israeli citizen or have already married and are waiting on their papers to be processed, she said.

Earlier, Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, told Al Jazeera that the bill was aimed at Palestinians - and not at Jewish newcomers to Israel since they already enter on Israel's Jewish Law of Return.

"Palestinians will have to say that this country is for Jews, and Palestinians are only guests. If you are saying you are democratic, you should treat citizens with equality," Tibi said.

He said that Israel was trying to impose this on the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a pre-condition for peace talks.

Direct peace talks between Israel and the PA, under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, are currently at an impasse due to Israel's refusal to extend the 10-month freeze.

Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is one of Netanyahu's principal demands in any eventual peace deal with the Palestinians...

...Palestinians have repeatedly rejected Netanyahu's condition as it would amount to an effective renunciation of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

"The new citizenship law will make it impossible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homeland," Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, said.

Theoretically, this doesn't change that much. Israel IS a Jewish Democratic state. What bothers me is that little comma there, since it implies that people have to swear to loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state in particular. Israeli Arabs are already feeling more than a little put-upon; this is only going to cement it.

And, as the AJ analyst said, this preempts one of the most important elements of any peace negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians: the question of Palestinian refugees. Requiring them to swear loyalty to the Jewish character of the state of Israel is not going to happen, not after they were pushed out in the first place. It's clearly a move to create "facts on the ground"; and the Palestinians are not going to look kindly on Israel pulling that tactic again.

Not that the negotiations are going anywhere. I'm not convinced that Netanyahu gives a damn about them in the first place. But if there's some future prime minister that is interested in peace and reconciliation, he or she is really going to have their hands tied.

Jailed Chinese Dissident Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Yep, you heard me right. Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned Chinese democratic activist, has just won the world's most prestigious award. Huffpo:

Imprisoned Chinese democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize – an award that drew furious condemnation from the authoritarian government and calls from world leaders including President Barack Obama for Liu's quick release.

Chinese state media blacked out the news and Chinese government censors blocked Nobel Prize reports, which highlighted Liu's calls for peaceful political change, from Internet websites. China declared the decision would harm its relations with Norway and promptly summoned Oslo's ambassador to Beijing to make a formal protest.

In Oslo, China's ambassador to Norway met with a state secretary at Norway's Foreign Ministry, ministry spokeswoman Ragnhild Imerslund said.

The Norwegian officials explained that the peace prize committee is independent of the government and that Norway wants to maintain good relations with China, Imerslund said.

This year's peace prize followed a long tradition of honoring dissidents around the world and was the first Nobel for China's dissident community since it resurfaced after the Communists launched economic but not political reforms three decades ago...

...The Nobel committee praised Liu's pacifist approach, ignoring threats by Chinese diplomats even before the announcement that such a decision would result in strained ties with Norway. Liu has been an ardent advocate of peaceful, gradual political change.

The Nobel committee cited Liu's participation in the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989 and the Charter 08 document he recently co-authored, which called for greater freedom in China and an end to the Communist Party's political dominance.

Obama said in a statement that Liu "has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs" and is "an eloquent and courageous spokesman for the advance of universal values through peaceful and nonviolent means."

"We call on the Chinese government to release Mr. Liu as soon as possible," Obama said.

No surprise that Obama said he should be released. They ARE Prizebuddies.

But this is a serious black eye for China. Just as they're starting to get a wee bit belligerent in the region, squabbling with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Island chain and with Vietnam over the Spratlys, here comes the Nobel Prize committee saying "hey, folks, remember how China is kind of an oppressive regime? You may have forgotten, but look at this guy! He's amazing, an utter pacifist, and they tossed him in a hole!"

It's going to embolden their external and internal critics, and it's going to be damned near impossible for their Great Firewall to block discussion of all this.

On the other hand, at least now the Chinese and the neo-conservatives have something they can finally commiserate about: how much they loathe the Peace Prize.

"Thin Strips of Objectivist Jerky"

John Scalzi absolutely knocks it out of the park on the whinging by the wealthy about their supposedly (read: not at all) high taxes. He notes that many don't even seem to understand how marginal taxation works, but then goes on to talk about another group...

There is another answer as well, which can be paired with the above or stand on its own, and it’s that there’s a certain sort of person who believes that all taxation (or all taxation outside of one or two very specific things of which they approve) is theft. Naturally that sort of person will fly to the defense of any who bleat about their taxes being too high, even if in point of fact, the wealthy in the US are currently being taxed at historically low rates (“but they’re still too high!”).

I really don’t know what you do about the “taxes are theft” crowd, except possibly enter a gambling pool regarding just how long after their no-tax utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the world that logically follows these people’s fondest desires. Sorry, guys. I know you all thought you were going to be one of those paying a nickel for your cigarettes in Galt Gulch. That’ll be a fine last thought for you as the starving remnants of the society of takers closes in with their flensing tools.

Sure, we've all heard it before. "If you want to live in Libertopia, move to Somalia" and suchlike. Damned if Scalzi doesn't make it vivid, though.

I don't want to live in libertopia—and rest assured, neither do you.

Taibbi on the Tea Party: "They're Full of S**t. All of Them."

Here, have a Taibbi:

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

This is just the beginning. There is LOTS more. But that's the crux of it. It's hard to make sense of the Tea Party because it doesn't make sense. It's not logical. It is, as Taibbi discovered, "deep down and psychological". It's a reaction to the subconscious knowledge that they're being exploited by someone, but they've been deceived as to who. They blame "radical leftists", and don't even consider that they might be being exploited by people who putatively share the same ideology they do. People who essentially bought and paid for their "grassroots movement", which is as neat a bit of AstroTurfing by the Koch Corporation (and other corps) as you could ask for.

So they're being used. They're being exploited. But it's hard to care when they're calling you a communist:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over — as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

"They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.

"Your race?" I ask.

"Probably," he says.

"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.

"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."

An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff.

Full of shit, narcissistic as hell, utterly delusional, probably racist (though they'd never admit it)...and if you disagree you're a commie bastard who hates America.

This is the group dominating American politics, folks. This is who Obama's going to be conceding things to next year, since conceding to wingnuts is all that he's turned out to be good at. This is the group that's going to be driving policy. People who think that white males are going to be executed by the Death Panels.

America in 2010: It's like something out of a bad SF novel.

The Blogger Editor is TERRIBLE Now

No, really, it is. I'm getting really, really tired of the insertion of random empty spaces before and after every quoted paragraph. Even if I edit this in HTML, they still creep in. The old editor didn't do this; I'm honestly wishing there was a way to go back to it.

I can see why so many people have left for WordPress or TypePad or the like.

Kocherlakota v. DeLong('s commentators)

Well, okay, not just DeLong. Also Atrios and, well, J. Bradford DeLong's commentator.

The president of the Minneapolis fed—you may remember him as the "interest rates cause inflation" guy—is now saying that the lack of employment demand is structural:

This estimate is based on a rather aggregative view of the labor market. It is important to dig deeper to get a better understanding of the problem, and there is a considerable amount of research under way exploring the quantitative importance of the various forms of mismatch. For example, the International Monetary Fund has recently released a special study based on a new state-by-state measure of the gap between demand and supply for workers with different levels of educational attainment. The study examines the impact of this variable and the foreclosure rate on state-level unemployment. It estimates that 1.5 percentage points of the national unemployment rate is due to these two sources and their interaction. Thus, according to this study, these two types of mismatch alone can account for a significant fraction of my estimate of 2.5 percentage points.

Good economic policy is about using the right tool for the problem at hand. The mismatch problems in the labor market do not strike me as readily amenable to the kinds of monetary policy tools currently available to the Fed.

A DeLong commentator named "Neal" provided the perfect response. What's the top four fields with job openings?

Top 50 job openings 2008-2018
1 Cashiers, except gaming
2 Retail salespersons
3 Waiters and waitresses
4 Customer service representatives

An "education gap"? For cashiers? Uh, no. Over-education, perhaps. Employers may be a bit unwilling to hire highly educated people for jobs that don't even require high school, since they'll (correctly) assume that they're gone the nanosecond they get a better opportunity. But Kocherlakota isn't saying that. He's saying that there are people who are under-qualified for the available positions, and that just ain't the case if you aren't talking about health care.  That's ludicrous.
Another brings up this salient point:

Mismatch is a cruel hoax. To quote Larry Summers before the bubble burst: "Nor can education be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month."

Education doesn't help if cost of living differences overwhelm it.

And then there's Robert Waldmann, who decries Kocherlakota's confusion about structural unemployment:

The quoted passage from MinnFed is nonsense, because it is based on double counting. MinnFed first claimed that structural unemployment caused 2.5% of the difference between current unemployment and normal unemployment. MinnFed gave no theory of normal unemployment (up there it is assumed to be exactly zero and subtracting 5 % from the data is normal practice).

Everyone who has ever addressed the question, identifies the natural rate of unemployment with structural unemployment, so the number to hit is 7.5% not 2.5%. Note the quote "It estimates that 1.5 percentage points of the national unemployment rate is due to these two sources and their interaction." that is "It estimates that 1.5 percentage points of the 9.6% is due to these two sources and their interaction." 1.5/9.6 1 so if you count something twice you overestimate.

DeLong makes it clear that he thinks the guy should be canned. He may be right. This bizarre comment and the interest rate thing just show that he's completely out of touch. If not completely out to lunch. Saying that there's a skill gap when it's Cashiers that people want is just ridiculous, and Waldmann has now called his basic economic acumen into question. I don't know what they're doing over at the Minneapolis Fed—wanking over DSGE models, I'm led to believe—but it clearly isn't anything useful.

Germany and the Eurozone

Good piece by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times (article's behind a paywall, but a google search for "Germans are wrong" and Martin's name might see you through) talking about Germany. They aren't too fond of the Euro right now, since they feel like it's forcing them to prop up their European counterparts.

Wolf said that Germany benefits from the Eurozone. It's got loads of captive markets who use the same currency as it does, for example, and it needs them since most of its exports head to European destinations. But take a look at this:

More important, imagine what would have happened, in the absence of the euro. The exchange rate of the D-Mark would have exploded upwards, as currency crises savaged the European economy, as happened in the 1990s. In peripheral Europe, currency depreciations would have been at least as big as, if not bigger than, sterling’s. The absence of such shocks has greatly enhanced the prospects for the German recovery. The creation of the eurozone was, for this reason alone, much more than a favour Germany did for its partners. It was also a big economic (not to mention political) gain for Germany. German industrialists are clear on this, as is the government.

Wolf said that some economists disagree, thinking that investment flowed out of Germany and into the European "periphery". Fine. But what's going on right now isn't a problem of investment, now, is it? The issue is lack of demand, and how much more depressed would the demand for German goods be if their currency was through the stratosphere? Sure, that very lack of demand would probably bring down the value of said currency, but compared to the other countries in Europe it would still be uncompetitive. People would be buying German bonds, but not German goods, and I doubt the average German would be too keen on that.

Meanwhile, everybody else in Europe would arguably be better off than Germany would. Yes, their currency would have depreciated, and their foreign debt loads been much more onerous. But because their currency would have depreciated, their goods would have been amazingly cheap, so much so that demand would have already picked up and stabilized things a bit. That's what floating currencies are FOR, and it's still amazing how many people tend to forget that. That sort of automatic stabilization is what the Euro countries gave up when they joined Germany in their little currency experiment. They counted on the Germans to understand that, and to put the interests of Europe over the interests of their own little corner of it.

Perhaps that was naive. Perhaps Wolf is right, and the Germans aren't as committed to Europe's future as previously thought. Perhaps the Euro is in serious trouble. But we shouldn't pretend that it's Germany that would benefit from its dissolution.

Blame the Progressives

Well, this was inevitable. As highlighted over on Kos by Joan McCarter, Time's Michael Scherer is pre-blaming the results of the 2010 election on progressives.

Yes, despite the fact that progressives were not listened to—when not openly mocked—and the fact that the White House basically bent over backwards to appease the Republicans, Scherer is blaming them.

even as Obama aides were aware of a growing disconnect, it didn't seem to worry their boss. Instead, the ambitious legislative goals usually trumped other priorities. Both in the original stimulus package and then in the health care and energy measures, the White House ceded most of its clout to the liberal lions who controlled the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. That maneuver helped assure passage of reforms, but it also confirmed some of the worst fears about how Washington works. "I'd rather be a one-term President and do big things than a two-term President and just do small things," he told his team after Republican Scott Brown was elected Senator in liberal Massachusetts and some in the Administration suggested pulling back on health reform.

Not that anybody couldn't have seen that happen. It's the village. They love punching hippies.

Here's Joan:

It's obviously not just the way the right wants to tell the story--it's how the Village wants to tell the story. The evil liberals got their way and forced Obama to overreach on all these policies--never mind that there is no public option, that the energy bill is a shell of what it should have been to either address energy independence or climate change, and the stimulus was about half a billion less than most liberal economists (and WH advisor Christina Romer) thought was necessary and less than what the more liberal House wanted.

One has the feeling that Michael Scherer wouldn't recognize a liberal lion if it bit him on the ass. Say what you will about the stimulus, health care reform, the as-of-yet unpassed energy reform bill, you can't say that they ended up looking like the proposals progressives put forward.

Scherer doesn't CARE if they're actually liberal lions or not. That's not the game. The game is to reinforce the prevailing narrative and, by doing so, cement your status as a "serious journalist". Fame (and well-advertised book releases) will follow.

No, if he cared, he would have had to have addressed progressives' sense of resignation and betrayal, and realized that "overreach" wouldn't properly explain that. He'd need to look to reasons why Obama disappointed everybody, which is quite a bit tricker than simply wanking on and on about those filthy hippies in the Democratic Senatorial caucus.

(The truly bizarre thing is that the guy acknowledged that the stimulus was too small on his blog. Yet not a word of this appeared in the piece.)

The real story here was, is, and will remain the fact that the Republicans understand just how well obstinacy works. That they can block whatever they please, and it's the Dems that will catch hell for it. That the media is lazy, and will listen to whoever has the loudest voice and repeats the most instead of doing actual reportage. And that the deep pockets of secretive ideological zealots can make all the difference.

But that won't make you friends in Washington. It's just the truth. And who gives a rat's ass about that?

Oil Well Explosion in Gulf of Mexico

You have GOT to be shitting me.

An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel says the blast was reported by a commercial helicopter company about 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats are en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.

ARE ANY OF THOSE DAMNED THINGS SAFE?

Wrong on the Bubble, Wrong on Stimulus

Oh, now this is beautiful. Simply beautiful. Economics of Contempt posted a list of all the prominent housing bubble deniers from around 2005 or so. An endless list of AEI and Cato and Wall Street Journal "limelights" all insisting that the economy is fine, that housing is fine, and that anybody who is complaining about it is just an idiot.

Nice, but that's not the fun part.

The fun part is when Krugman revealed that all of these guys are stimulus opponents too! In fact:

There turns out to be a quite strong correlation between denying the existence of a housing bubble a few years back — and jeering at those who said there was — and insisting, now, that fiscal stimulus doesn’t, can’t work.

The question is, why do such people command such attention? As I’ve pointed out before, the same people who denied the existence of a housing bubble also told investors that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring; in other words, anyone who believed these people in the past, and acted on that belief, has lost a lot of money.

It's the same sort of Very Serious Person that was wrong on Iraq, wrong on Afghanistan, and (going back farther) wrong on the Cold War and on Vietnam. It's hard to see what these guys are RIGHT about, actually; they're so reliably wrong that you could probably make a fortune betting against their predictions!

The problem...the significantly less funny part...is that by the time their allies in Congress are done, you're going to NEED a fortune. Because once they're done with Social Security and Medicare, it's the only way you'll spend your retirement doing anything but eating cat food and wondering whether that lump will go away on its own.

Chait's being a dolt

Sorry, but gotta call 'em as I see 'em, and how else to describe this?

Moreover, I happen to think that liberals should be open to Social Security cuts as part of a balanced package of deficit reduction.

WHY? Is this one of those "truth lies in the middle" things?
Social Security isn't the problem; the Bush tax cuts, the recession, and two expensive overseas wars  are the problem. He KNOWS this. He's seen more than enough liberals explain exactly why and how this is the case. But he's ignoring them and taking potshots at them (seriously, read the whole post) in order to prop up Republican shibboleths and relegate seniors to an all-Whiskas diet. 


If that ain't a dolt, what the hell is?

So Apparently Dems Are Worried That They'll Lose the House

More so than they were, that is.

Funny thing how focusing on the deficit and on "bipartisanship" didn't pay any dividends, huh? We now know for a fact that the stimulus wasn't big enough (though most of us knew beforehand). We also always knew that stimulating job growth at all costs was the #1 job of the Democratic Congress, and what they'd be ultimately judged on.

We also knew that the Republicans were going to do whatever they could to block that, because it'd pay off for them. Doesn't matter how crazy they are. It's the Dems that are under the gun, not the Reps, and no amount of impassioned reminders that the Republicans' terrible governance was responsible for this will help.

But the Dems have done practically nothing, thanks principally to the Senate "blue dogs" that they protect so jealously, and time is running out. A whole lot of 'em are probably going to lose their jobs thanks to all this.

Appropriate, that, considering how they haven't given a damn about anybody else's jobs. Except, maybe, bond traders.

Witness The Face of the Teabaggers

Red, bloated, racist as hell and screaming at black men:

My favorite bit is probably around 3:30, when somebody started yelling "Mohammed's a pig". Repeatedly.

Duverger's Law is Dead

Well, so much for the idea that two-party systems produce stable governments. Canada and the UK had already beaten it senseless, but Australia just fired a shotgun round in its temple.

(Or, as was so eloquently and clearly said by the Australian electorate, "mbgffhf and also gghg vvjjv jmmbmbmbff". Words to live by.)

In any case, a lot of this is because the Greens apparently had a breakthrough. So, hey, maybe Nader's old crew should step it up. Looks like America might have the only two-party system left.

Edit: Yes, yes, technically Duverger's is about straight-up FPTP systems, and Australia's lower house uses IRV. Even so. 

You Gotta Be Kidding Me

Hey, Barry? Got a tip for you.

If you take a stand on something, even something controversial, don't take it back a day later. The people who did support you will feel betrayed—for good reason!—while the people who were mad at you will stay mad at you. Everybody else will just think that you're spineless, which is the last thing a Dem needs. 

Bad policy I can understand, especially by now. Bad politics is just shameful. 

Gibbs Just Keeps Getting Better

Instead of backing off, like a sane man would do, Gibbs is doubling down on this "professional left" crap. Yet he's saying that "he fully expects liberals to vote".

Why, exactly? There's a big enthusiasm gap between liberals and conservatives, and it's only getting worse. Liberals aren't going to be cowed into either silence or support by the whole "vote for us or you'll get the Republicans" line, especially when the White House itself installed a center-right candidate in Arkansas that can't possibly win.

I honestly don't even understand the point of this. Attacking the left isn't going to shut them up. Hasn't before, won't now. It won't endear the government to the right, either; the right ain't gonna vote for you, no matter how many liberals you piss off. The press might say some nice things about you because of how much they despise your typical "DFH", but that fleeting support will be long-gone by the time the election rolls around. They'll be distracted by a new shiny, and the left will still be pissed.

What the hell happened to "no-drama Obama"?