New series! We decided to launch a scripture feature with chapter and verse to salve the spirit in the face of current frights such as the financial crash, but after the crash we couldn’t afford a good bible; so we had to go to AbeBooks and buy an old shabby one filled with cliches, heresies, and colloquialisms.
This fatted caveat having been uttered, here are today’s inspirational passages on how to feel about the Wall Street collapse:
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“Overthrow the multiplication tables of the money-changers.”
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“It is harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the knee of an idol.”
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Buy 200 Matthew (Symbol XIX, chapter 11)
The Times is reporting that the FBI is struggling to find enough agents to investigate financial industry shenanigans leading up to the meltdown.
After 9/11 the Bureau shifted1,800 agents from anti-crime work to anti-terrorism (you know how crime always goes down when terrorism goes up), so now they would be short-handed even if the financial industry mess were not so large and so complex.
The Times says people inside and outside the Bureau “wonder where the agents will come from and whether they will be enough.”
Really. Wall Street and the mortgage banks are laying off tens of thousands of financial experts, and the FBI can’t imagine where to find any? These are people who know the workings of the financial system top to bottom and inside out.
They even know where the bodies are buried!
If the Bureau is investigating Lehman Brothers, why not have a couple of traders and bond underwriters from Lehman Brothers on the case?
In the crony-rich, ideologically driven, faith-based Bush bureaucracy, tapping a readily-available pool of unemployed masters of the universe simply makes too much sense to consider.
Of course the secrecy-loving Bush administration warlords have consistently refused to give the FBI the money to hire more agents anyway. That’s the thing about Bush bureaucrats. Wherever two or more of them are gathered in his name, there is “Duh!”
We would love to give proper attribution for this sneak preview of the Bush Library, but it arrived, like so many others circulating by e-mail, absent of any clue as to authorship. Our thanks to the unknown originator, and special thanks to Betty Layport Feher for the glorious idea we’ve rendered above — of housing the Bush Library in a FEMA trailer.
The Library will include:
The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
The Alberto Gonzales Room. Have you seen that? You can’t remember?
The Texas Air National Guard Room. Skip this one. No need to show up.
The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.
The National Debt Wing. Bigger than a WalMart, and it has no ceiling.
The ‘Tax Cut’ Room: admission restricted to the fabulously wealthy.
The ‘Economy Room.‘ You’ll find it in the toilet.
The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes a fifth.
The Dick Cheney Room, in an undisclosed location.
The Environmental Conservation Room. Still empty.
The Supreme Court Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.
The ‘Decider Room’ complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws.
The museum will be equiped with an electron microscope to help you locate the President’s accomplishments.
Step right up and get your tickets!!!
Back in 1990, the Federal Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it.
They failed, and it closed.
Today, the fate of the economy rests in the hands of the same pack of nitwits who couldn’t make money running a whorehouse and selling booze?
Financial chaos is upon us, and its perpetrators are busy concocting their alibis – what Stanford law professor Joseph Grundfest has called “crimes of upholstery.”
The big cover-up has already begun, as it always does when conservative free-market supply-siders cause yet another catastrophe and then find some dog-ate-my-homework excuse to blame it on the liberals.
Supply-side economics was founded by crackpots masquerading as economists – people like Arthur Laffer (of the “Laffer Curve”), Jude Waninski, and Robert Mundell and lately espoused by Larry Kudlow on CNBC (shame on them) and Dick (“Deficits don’t matter”) Cheney. It’s a laffer, all right. The theory claims that government can cut taxes while spending lavishly and come out ahead because the tax cuts stimulate economic activity and increase government revenues.
People like Cheney love supply-side economics because politicians love to have an excuse to cut taxes for their rich friends and pretend there are no consequences.
We who are now living through the consequences disagree.
Under Reagan, supply-side theories led to all-time record deficits and a soaring national debt. Revenues increased very little, and productivity barely budged. Then, after these deficits had been turned into a surplus under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and friends lapsed back into the deadly combination of runaway spending exacerbated by tax cuts for the rich.
What goes hand-in-hand with the supply-side doctrine are rigid beliefs in deregulation – to let the free market work its magic, as it is doing right now, to our sorrow and theirs. Under Bush, regulators who actually tried to regulate were fired. New laws and policies prevented regulation of Enron, subprime mortgages, high-risk hedge funds, derivatives, and the financial markets in general.
At the same time, ideologically loyal incompetents – including utterly unqualified amateurs who didn’t believe in regulation anyway – were appointed to key posts related not only to finance but also to science, healthcare, environment, disaster recovery, law enforcement, and education. Competent professionals backed by an ethical government could have prevented much of the horrendous damage wreaked over the past eight years.
Some of these effects will take years to become obvious. But in the financial arena, Armageddon is at hand.
So the free-market supply-siders are busy spinning and spreading their alibis.
You can find them in conservative columns, on Fox “News,” and on talk radio everywhere. The bigger the lie, the louder they talk.
Big Lie Alibi One: that Republicans tried to rein in the excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, but Barney Frank and Chris Dodd stopped them.
This was in 2003. The Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, so they could have passed any reasonable reform or regulation bill they wanted to concerning Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. But no, what they tried to do was create a new agency under the executive branch, removing Fannie and Freddy from congressional oversight (as they’ve tried to remove everything else) so they could do with it what they please. And what they please to do – with Fannie, Freddy, Social Security, Medicare, the works – is dismantle them. In the case of Fannie and Freddy, no doubt their functions would have been turned over to Citibank and suchlike, to let the mythical magic of the free market work its wonders. Free marketers don’t think government has any business encouraging affordable housing, especially not for minorities.
By similar reasoning, Reagan had tried with might and main to prevent the founding of Medicare. And Bush made a big push in 2005 to privatize Social Security, which would have funneled trillions of dollars of FICA deductions through the skimming operations of banks, brokerages, mutual funds, and insurance companies. Can you imagine what scenes would be unfolding now, had they succeeded – with every senior citizen in the country now seeing not only his savings but also his Social Security evaporating in the financial meltdown?
Big Lie Alibi Two: that the financial market meltdown was precipitated by liberals with the Community Reinvestment Act. The subtext is their claim that CRA forced banks into making risky loans to minorities.
The racism and the perverted dishonesty of this twisted tale, as a friend of mine once said, “buggers description.”
To begin with, the law was passed in 1977, one of a series of anti-discrimination acts passed with bipartisan support starting in 1968. If it really had caused a financial meltdown in 2008, it would have taken thirty or forty years to do so — and in the meantime there were three Republican presidents plus four Republican congresses who had every opportunity to modify it – and, in fact, did so under Bush Sr.
CRA prohibits FDIC-insured banks from red-lining entire communities – refusing to write any mortgages to anyone in the neighborhood — but it does not in any way require them to grant a mortgage to someone who is not credit worthy. The fact is, the record of repayments of CRA-compliant loans made to minorities is better than the repayment record of mortgages in general. Further, the percentages of risky subprime mortgages issued by FDIC-insured banks is far lower than that of their unregulated brethern in the non-bank lending and leveraging orgy under George Bush.
The whole alibi is a deliberate lie, from beginning to end.
It’s promulgated under the Rovian theory that you can get people to believe even the most outrageous falsehood, slander, or smear if you tell it often enough and loudly enough.
This time, it may not work. The average person cannot understand financial practices and legislation, but everyone in the country can now see what horrors unfold when the free-market anti-regulation supply-siders get control of all three branches of government and have it all their own way.
In a book last year called The Big Con, author Jonathan Chait recounted the hare-brained exploits of right-wing economics since the 1970s – dismal failures at every turn. He noted how each time their strategies exploded in their faces (and ours), they talked their way out of their guilt, blaming the liberals – and he couldn’t see what would prevent them from doing it again.
Now he can. In an article in The New Republic, Chait reports on how corporations and money managers are deserting the Republicans in disgust and demanding real regulation, environmental programs, and meaningful healthcare reform. In other words, doctrinaire conservatives are losing their core constituency.
Chait’s column was headlined, End of an Error. Let’s hope he’s right.
Posted over at TPM: An ode to Fox pundit (well, let’s say ‘pundit’, because ‘pinhead’ is so crass) Sean Hannity by Monty Python alum John Cleese:
Ode to Sean Hannity
by John Cleese
Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity
This week The Economist published results of its own poll among professional economists – 683 members of the National Bureau of Economic Research, of whom 142 responded. Results:
“The majority – at times by overwhelming margins – believe Mr. Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics, and will appoint better economic advisers.”
“…Mr. Obama scores better on nearly every issue: promoting fiscal discipline, energy policy, reducing the number of people without health insurance, controlling health-care costs, reforming financial regulation, and boosting long-run economic growth. Twice as many economists think Mr. McCain’s plan would be bad or very bad for long-run growth …”
As for George Bush, “The respondents give Mr. Bush a dismal average of 1.7 on our five-point scale for his economic management.”
An observation from Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money on CNBC, writing in New York Magazine (emphasis his):
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There is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further:
Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression…
Oh, and on investments? Cramer thinks the Dow could be at 8300 this time next year. In terms of investing between now and next fall, he says, “I’d buy the stocks of only companies you can’t not use — Kellog’s, General Mills, Kraft, P&G.”
In June, Nobelist Steven Weinberg, a special favorite of ours, gave the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard. A few excerpts follow. These don’t do justice to his main subject, which is a look ahead to the possibility of a post-religious society, but the full text is available in the September 25 New York Review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21800).
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So far in my life, in arguing for spending more money on scientific research and higher education, or against spending on ballistic missile defense or sending people to Mars, I think I have achieved a perfect record of never having changed anyone’s mind.
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Then there are the ordinary pleasures of life, which have been despised by religious zealots, from Christian anchorites in the Egyptian deserts to tday’s Taliban and Mahdi Army. ….. We who are not zealots can rejoice that when bread and wine are no longer sacraments, they will still be bread and wine.
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….. very great poetry can be written without religion. Shakespeare provides an example; none of his work seems to me to show the slightest hint of serious religious inspiration. Given Ariel and Prospero, we see that poets can do without angels and prophets.
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I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes.
