Category: Uncategorized

Herman Cain is pro-choice

And thus endeth the Cain bubble:

His views on abortion, he said, should be seen this way: “I can have an issue on a opinion without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.”

This is not the kind of bright-line language that social conservatives who oppose abortion – and who have been trying to elevate it as an issue amid an economy-focused presidential cycle – general like to hear.

Cain was always an unlikely candidate – and a terrible one at this particular financial juncture – but there is no way he can hope to win the Republican nomination without the social conservatives who have up until now been all but wetting themselves over the chance to win a get-out-of-racism free card by supporting a real live black Republican who talks a conservative game.

I wonder if Cain feels the same way about rape and murder. Personally opposed, but not something that the government should be trying to tell people to do or not.

Wrong and wronger

Both the liberal orthodoxy, as represented by Paul Krugman, and the conservative orthodoxy still completely fail to understand the financial crisis. That is why they have not even begun to successfully address it:

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

O.K., I’m exaggerating a bit — but not much. Mr. Frank’s name did come up repeatedly as a villain in the crisis, and not just in the context of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which Republicans want to repeal. You have to marvel at his alleged influence given the fact that he’s a Democrat and the vast bulk of the bad loans now afflicting our economy were made while George W. Bush was president and Republicans controlled the House with an iron grip. But he’s their preferred villain all the same.

The demonization of Mr. Frank aside, it’s now obviously orthodoxy on the Republican side that government caused the whole problem. So what you need to know is that this orthodoxy has hardened even as the supposed evidence for government as a major villain in the crisis has been discredited. The fact is that government rules didn’t force banks to make bad loans, and that government-sponsored lenders, while they behaved badly in many ways, accounted for few of the truly high-risk loans that fueled the housing bubble.

First, Krugman is totally and completely wrong about “the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades”. The last I noticed, the US financial system was still a government-mandated monopoly in the grand tradition of the East India and Hudson Bay companies. To claim that a nation which requires the reporting of all cash transactions over a certain amount to the government and where even cutting hair requires special permits is a “free market” is totally absurd.

But one cannot reasonably claim that the government is the primary villain in the financial crisis either. The government did put pressure on the banks to make bad loans, but the fact is that although they are certainly a serious probem, it is not the problematic banks loans are actually the major problem. Consider the following facts. The two total amount of money presently loaned out by all the commercial banks in the USA is $6.8 trillion dollars, down from a peak of $7.3 trillion in 2008. The total amount of debt presently owed by the financial sector is $13.8 trillion, down from $17.1 trillion in 2008.

This is the Wall Street Casino to which I have referred. It is sometimes referred to as the “investment” side of banks, which is nothing more than them borrowing money and gambling it in the form of derivatives on the different currency and equity markets. This is no more productive or capitalist than Grandma’s bingo night or Uncle Joe’s day at the horse track, it is simply gambling on a larger scale.

So, it should be readily apparent that anyone who is still attempting to frame the problem in terms of bank loans and not bank debts simply does not even begin to comprehend either the nature or the scope of the crisis.

There are serious economic problems, to be sure, but the core of the financial crisis would be better described as Bingo Night Finance than Rabbit Hole Economics.

On the radio

I’m going to be on WNJC 1360 AM from 3:10-4:00 PM Eastern today, a Philadelphia radio station. The two hosts have visited the Occupy Wall Street protests and they have invited me on the show to discuss it with them. You can listen live if you happen to be interested.

Crazy and ignorant

Crazy Eyes Bachmann appears to be almost astonishingly ignorant when it comes to foreign policy:

6:38PM Bachmann: “Israel is our greatest ally.”

Whether or not you think Israel deserves our help — and I think it does — that’s just a silly statement. Israel has fought shoulder-to-shoulder with us… where?

Israel is not America’s greatest ally. In fact, Israel isn’t America’s ally at all. If Israel goes to war with Turkey, which actually is an American ally, America will be obligated by treaty to wage war against Israel.

Bachmann isn’t merely an also-ran, she’s a never-was and never-will. And with good cause. The amazing thing is that her supporters actually believe that Ron Paul is the one who is a foreign policy naif. And yes, Michele, Libya is in Africa… then again, she probably thinks Chad is the guy with a popped-collar upon whom she had a crush in college and the Toyota Wars had something to do with Japanese auto makers establishing factories in the American South.

Republicans: the debate summary

Stephen Green renders it unnecessary for anyone to actually watch the debate:

6:09PM From Twitter: Explain and Co-opt Occupy Wall Street.

6:10PM Cain: Get a job, you filthy hippies.

I paraphrase, but not by much.

6:11PM Paul: “Cain has blamed the victims.” And then something about the Federal Reseve and bubbles and SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK.

6:11PM There were wild cheers, a few, to the chicken part.

6:12PM Paul: “I work on the assumption” that government is bad at almost everything.

And now I relove him.

This is the difference between a man who understands the core principles involved and a man who has absolutely no idea why things are the way they presently are. According to the principles of the international free traders and the Wall Street supporters, the jobs those “filthy hippies” should be pursuing are now in Korea, India, and China. The problem is that there are no shortage of highly educated, less expensive Koreans, Indians, and Chinese available to work those jobs.

Many young Americans went into debt, and were heavily encouraged to go into debt, in order to obtain unnecessary degrees for nonexistent jobs. Given that I was one of the first media figures to publicly call into question the value of a college education while many readers on this very blog argued vociferously against the anti-college case I was presenting, it is astonishing that so many people suddenly want to blame the young college graduates for believing in the inflated value of a college education and doing exactly what they were expected and instructed to do.

About time

They should have done this after Week Three:

Christian Ponder is in and Donovan McNabb is out in Minnesota. Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier has chosen Ponder as the team’s starting quarterback, Jason La Canfora of NFL Network reports.

It may not be enough. It probably won’t be enough. But at least we’ll find out what we have in Ponder and McNabb certainly wasn’t working in even the modest capacity that everyone envisioned for him. Hand off and throw a few passes to convert the occasional third down was all that was expected, but he couldn’t even manage the latter half of the equation.

Karl Denninger bitchslaps a banker’s tool

First, Tom Blumer demonstrates that he is a) in entirely over his head, and b) has no freaking idea what has been taking place in the financial sector for the last 30 years.

Even when they sharply criticize yours truly, I have tried in recent years to avoid getting unduly exercised over individual posts at other sites. They have their views, I have mine. It’s a (mostly) free country (for now).

I must carve out an exception to that stance because the individual objecting to my most recent PJM column (“October 14, 2008: The Day the Economy as We Knew It Died”): a) has accused me of “bald lies” while failing to successfully identify one; b) did so without having the integrity or basic decency to name me; c) criticized a column which deliberately focused on a narrow two-week time frame as “a particularly odious and sickening piece of crap” without the faintest understanding of my full take on the government-led, bank-assisted, political corruption-driven financial crisis we face and the several decades of history which led to it (completely irrelevant to this column, which will exclusively address the absence of “utter falsehood”); and d) deliberately made it about more than my work by indicating that “these people (in context: ‘at Pajamas Media’) need to be exposed as the liars they are.”

Now, I don’t think Blumer is as much a liar as he is a complete moron who understands nothing about banking, the economy, or the power structure of the US political system. I suspect he genuinely believes that the former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson forced the banks to accept TARP and “basically put guns to their heads”.

What Blumer is either too ignorant or too stupid to realize is that Paulson IS A CARD-CARRYING GOLDMANITE who was in the Bush Administration to protect the interests of Wall Street. His putting a gun to the heads of the banks and “forcing” them to accept TARP was exactly like forcing Brer Rabbit to be thrown in the briar patch. Congratulations, Tommy Boy, you’re not actually a liar, you’re just a clueless moron who doesn’t allow his ignorance to inhibit his expression of an uninformed and incorrect opinion.

But Karl doesn’t need my help in pointing out the many deficiencies of Blumen’s case:

You’re entitled to your opinions, whatever they may be. You’re not entitled to invent facts, and placing words inside quotation marks that claim to make a point that you in fact interpreted might have occurred from other sources without identifying them as your own belief as opposed to someone else’s actual words you are quoting falls into that category.

As for your opinion that the banks were “taken over”, I disagree. I argue that the banks in fact looted the people with the full cooperation and complicity of the Treasury, and my interpretation is backed by the actual words of the bill that were passed and how it was used, buttressed by the fact that Kashkari testified over a year later under oath that prior to final passage of TARP Paulson had already decided to inject capital into the banks and did not inform Congress of this change in the essential intent of the bill on the floor at the time. (CSPAN should still have archives of that testimony if you’re interested in it.) It is further buttressed by your own claimed source.

I was attempting to engage in a debate on the substance of the matter, which is the root of your claim rather than the minutia: You stated that our economy in large part is not growing because our government has basically taken it over via authoritarian acts, implying that were those acts to be reversed we’d be ok (or at least “better off.”)

You’re wrong.

Blumen, like Pajamas Media, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News, is desperately attempting to cast Washington as the bad guy when it is the Washington-Wall Street axis of pure evil that is the problem, and it is Wall Street that is the senior partner.

Mailvox: general incoherence and the Tea Party

SS defends Wall Street and blames government:

Yes I agree with both have wrong opposing ideas but, the Tea Party really had a broad based beginning and the Occupy folks are the orchestrated result of Big Union and (y)our “friends” at the Globalist Communist Party that is stirring up strife worldwide to bring down Capitalism and the West.

You know that Wall Street needed bailed out because of political pressure on the banking system to make loans to low income people that had no chance of paying them back. The resulting trading in bundled toxic securities was just a way for Bankers to spread the risk with Our government winking at the practice.

The social architects are the problem not Wall Street. The spending spree of social engineering has brought us to ruin. The government has borrowed and printed money and pushed for more of it into the economy to hide the fact that we no longer manufacture anything, we have exported all the good paying jobs.

What we are left with is a hollow shell of a service economy that is propped up by government spending and borrowing from a country that has taken all the jobs. The Tea Party has it right… it is a over-reaching Federal Bureaucracy that needs to be reigned in to it’s Constitutional boundaries and not what the anarchists Occupiers wanting to punish the successful want us to believe.

The problem is “Big” Government and the social engineering globalists that run amuck in positions of power in media and political parties!…………..

Marty denies that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin:

Two sides of the same coin? Are you nuts? I have been reading you columns mostly with great frustrations for 10 years now but this one takes the cake. You have either stopped reading or stopped thinking one of the two. I know of no tea partier that is for the wars ALL 6 of them! I know they all support our troops and will not denigrate them in times of war. But they are just as anxious to be home as anyone. The WS protesters want full blown communism and the tea party seeks a very limited and constitutional form of government. Is that two sides of the same coin? How about the tea party seeks limited and more fair taxes on everyone and not the confiscation of wealth from the wealthy. Is that same coin? The tea party wants no form whatsoever of socialized medicine and privatization of Medicare and social security. Is that two sides of the same coin? That fact of the matter is you refuse to admit the libertarian party and their philosophy is simply nutty to put it mildly. Very little of your political philosophy on how government should run would work and most of the folks know it which is why we reject your nutty libertarian junk. You are deliberately running a disinformation campaign against the tea party by linking them with Washington republicans. I will grant you one thing, the republican party is a natural home for the Tea Party; there is however no friendship between the Washington Republican establishment and the tea party. Each wishes the other gone. You know this and yet you link them like a two headed beast. If you wrote an article and said the republican Washington establishment and the WS protesters were two sides of the same coin, I would have said you were correct. In fact all the things you ascribe to tea partiers can rightly be ascribed to moderate RINO’s in Washington. The tea party did not support the extra spending. Politics is a game of wills and the simple truth is there are some battles you are going to win and some you will lose. The question in the end is what has been achieved and if the tea party gains prominence the county will be much better off. Your stupid party can’t figure out whether drugs should be legal, what’s wrong with abortion, the correct role of government and on and on. The fact of the matter is libertarianism leads to anarchy. That’s is the other side of your coin!!

Meanwhile, David isn’t inclined to let the Tea Party off the hook:

And don’t forget the Tea Party probably passed the three new job killing Free Trade pacts, too. Nobody gives a damn about saving our Middle Class factory jobs.

I responded to Marty thusly: You’re factually wrong. Not all, but most of the Tea Party-endorsed Republicans voted for the $1.299 budget deficit as well as for raising the debt ceiling. It’s also telling that you don’t give OWS the same benefit of the detail that you give the Tea Party. Both activist groups are rather stupid and incoherent… and both activist groups are correct at the deepest level. This is natural, since both are popular movements, which generally are not known for their intellectual precision. And they are two sides of the same coin, as both groups have correctly identified one-half of the problem. Unfortunately, both groups are also inclined to defend the other half of the problem.

Which is why as long as you subscribe to the Tea Party Good, Occupy Wall Street Bad mentality, you will be serving the purposes of the Washington-Wall Street axis.

Marty responded as follows:

You’re correct to link Wall Street and Washington. You’re the first and only person I have seen make this connection. But you are completely incorrect about the Tea Party and its connection to Wall Street. The tea party is the production of moderate republicans voting for Wall Street bail-out. That and health care reform. The Tea party was 100% against the bailout hence its existence. We wanted the companies to go bankrupt. And you cannot even begin to say that McCain’s running back to Washington to vote for the bailout didn’t hurt him big time. We cannot stand the republicans running this country in to the ground via WS albeit at a slower rate than the democrats via wealth confiscation.

There were 100 new Republicans voted in to congress in 2009. 54 voted against the current budget. That’s the majority of tea party Republicans the way I see it. Had you made that point in your article, you would have severely weakened your argument to the reader. You said “most” making it sound like 60% or more when in fact it was in the 40’s percent. I admit I am not always right but on this you are trying to paint a picture out of what you wish was true but it’s not.

To which I responded: You’re not counting correctly. Not all of the new Republicans were Tea Party-endorsed and not all the incumbents were not Tea Party-endorsed. Again, you are factually incorrect.

Of course, even if only 40% of the Tea Party-endorsed Congressman had been successfully corrupted within 12 months of their election, it would suffice to prove that the Tea Party strategy will not succeed.

Another childhood legend demolished

To be fair, I was always extremely dubious about this one:

First published in 1973, “Sybil” remains in print after selling over 6 million copies in the U.S. alone. A work of high Midwestern gothic trash, “Sybil” might have been purpose-built to enthrall 14-year-old girls of morbid temperament (which is probably the majority of 14-year-old girls, come to think of it). I would not be surprised to learn that it is circulated as avidly on middle-school playgrounds today as it was in my own youth. My sisters, my friends and I all devoured it, discussing its heroine’s baroque sufferings in shocked whispers before promptly forgetting all about it until the TV movie starring Sally Field came along.

That should have been the end of “Sybil,” another flash-in-the-pan “true life” paperback shocker that people sorta believe but mostly not — rather like “The Amityville Horror.” Instead, the book, written by journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber, became the catalyst for a psychotherapeutic movement that ruined many lives, beginning with the woman whose story it claims to tell.

If I recall correctly, there was a whole Christian sub-genre constructed around the principle that multiple personalities were demonic. However, I didn’t buy into that either, mostly because I found it rather difficult to believe that demons could possibly be so mundane and uninteresting. To paraphrase the immortal words of Bob Newhart, I find it hard to believe that the Prince of Darkness has spent the last twenty years as a frumpy suburban housewife.

And no, I’m not calling your dog a liar!

America or North Mexico?

The Mexication of the American Southwest proceeds apace:

Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson.

If you don’t see any problem with this, imagine if the Texas students were forced to sing Deutschland Uber Alles and learn the Nazi salute as part of a German class assignment. Perhaps for an encore, they can learn the geography of Mexico and which cartels control which regions.