Krugman Writes About ALEC

NYTimes Columnist writes about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council:

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

Did you know that there are ALEC legislators here in Pennsylvania?

Depressing

Paul Krugman on the economy and the 'sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries.'

I Wonder What They're Talking About

Scaife's braintrust, I mean.

In one of today's editorials, they contrast the conviction of hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam (11 years, $64 million in fines) with "another class of cheats" namely:

We're speaking of economic cheats, those who think they can defy the fundamental rules of economics in pursuit of "social justice." Democrat members of Congress come to mind, specifically those whose legislation was directly responsible for sowing the seeds of The Great Recession.

Think of the bubble-creating/bubble-bursting federal mandates that forced lenders to flood the housing market with easy money for those who had quite little or actually no financial wherewithal.

The "Occupy Wall Street" types can blame "greedy bankers" for subprime mortgages all they want. But unless they recognize government's role in the mess -- and direct their protests accordingly -- their entreaties for an economic "re-set" will devolve into just more "progressive" chants for more free lunches.

Of course, they're talking about the immensely powerful Barney Frank (D-MA).

From Paul Krugman:

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.

And after admitting that that last sentence was a little bit of an exaggeration, Krugman goes on to say:

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.

Indeed Frank said as much while defending himself against Newt Gingrich, who wants to throw him in jail (see how this connects to the Trib's editorial?) for triggering the current bad economy. From Talkingpointsmemo:

Frank said Gingrich’s anger over his and Dodd’s role in the financial meltdown was absurd given that Republicans were in charge of the House and — excerpt for a brief period — Senate, from 1995 to 2007.He noted that he worked on reform legislation on mortgage in his first year as chair in 2007.

“It’s interesting, the charge is failure to stop Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay from deregulating,” he said. “This notion we caused the problem that started while they were in charge even by Gingrich’s standards is very odd.”

So most of the subprime loans were made when the GOP was in charge of the White House and the House of Representatives (and for most of that tine, the Senate) and yet, it's the "Democrat members of Congress" who are to blame and who should be feeling the wrath of the Occupy Wall Street folks.

This from the gang who still hasn't corrected itself for their $16 muffin mistake or the "Obama sought to apologize for Hiroshima but was turned down by Japan" mistake.

Yea, still waiting on those.

And This Is All I'll Say About That...

From Paul Krugman:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Hear, hear.

No comments on this one. I ain't in the mood.

UPDATE: Krugman has more:

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

The rest is worth the read.

President Obama, Moderate Conservative?

You guys know Ed, right?

He blogs over at Cognitive Dissonance and he's doing a stand up job every week (far more than I am at this point, by the way) at countering Jack Kelly's conservative drivel over at the P-G. If you're not reading his blog, you should. It's pretty darn good. The bastard.

Anyhoo, he sent me a link to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman linking to Regan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett who's asserting:

Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.

The rest of Bartlett's piece is evidence of Obama's non-Liberalness for example:

• His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
• He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
• He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
• He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
• And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

And so on. Not sure I buy the whole argument but perhaps my political paradigm requires some shifting. If anything this shows that we live in a political universe that's profoundly relativistic.

There's no absolute space, no absolute rest. Everything is moving relative to everything else and what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative" has to be viewed through the relative frame of reference of the person using each term.

Ruth Ann Dailey Spins - Badly

In an attempt to find some sort of right-left equivalence regarding the tone of our current political climate, the P-G's Ruth Ann Dailey proves, yet again, that while she certainly knows how to write, her ability see to the truth from the fog of her politics is always in question.

Her opening:

Given their scurrilous, insupportable yet sustained accusations against Sarah Palin, tea party activists and other non-Democrats after the Arizona mass shooting, it would seem that Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, Clarence Dupnik and other left-wingers have created a "climate of hate" and are thus responsible for Eric Fuller's violent threats and arrest on Saturday.

She then points out:

After all, within hours of the Jan. 8 shooting, Messrs. Krugman, Olbermann and Dupnik et al. had publicly pinned the mass murders on the right wing, the tea party and conservative media figures. And throughout the week, despite growing evidence to the contrary, these irresponsible provocateurs and their supporters refused to retract their slander.

So when Mr. Fuller, a member of their ideological throng, threatened one of those supposed culprits with death, it was cause and effect, right?

Let's take a look at what Krugman, Olbermann and Dupnik had to say. From Krugman's "Climate of Hate" column:

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

And then he illustrates something Dailey probably wants us to miss:

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

And then:

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

No equivalence. But perhaps that's part of Dailey's issue - that the left is hypocritically accusing the right of violent political rhetoric. And that's the root of the left's immorality here.

But then there's Olbermann's comment, where he ends the piece with this:

Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

Something Dailey left out.

To be true, Olbermann does point out some of the violence/threats of violence coming from the right. For example:

If Sharron Angle, who spoke of "Second Amendment solutions," does not repudiate that remark and urge her supporters to think anew of the terrible reality of what her words implied, she must be repudiated by her supporters in Nevada.

If the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party.

Or the Tigris and Euphrates of the Fox "News" political rhetoric:

If Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O'Reilly, who blithely repeated "Tiller the Killer" until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers, do not begin their next broadcasts with solemn apologies for ever turning to the death-fantasies and the dreams of bloodlust, for ever having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by their viewers, and by all politicians, and by sponsors, and by the networks that employ them.

As far as I know, none of those things have happened yet.

The violent rhetoric is there - by far more so on the right. This is the politics of "if ballots don't work, bullets will." And it's a tea party thing. Something else Dailey doesn't want you to think.

Anyway, the big point that she missed, is that Fuller (the nexus of this column) was only threatening violence. He didn't pick up a Glock with 30 bullets in it and spray a tea party crowd with death. It was a threat - a stupid threat, to be sure, but a serious threat nonetheless.

And he was arrested for it.

Will we see an arrest for the next tea partier that gushes on about the tree of liberty being sprinkled with the blood if tyrants?

What Krugman Said

Krugman is it completely right:

The roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

This promise of transcendence may have been good general election politics, although even that is questionable: people forget how close the presidential race was at the beginning of September 2008, how worried Democrats were until Sarah Palin and Lehman Brothers pushed them over the hump. But the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

Krugman posits that it's Obama's habit of "negotiating with himself" before negotiating with Congress that's the culprit.

Here's the thing: given the animosity the Right has for the president, given how their leaders have stated publicly that they want to shut down every administration proposal, how DO you negotiate with a party that wants to kill your agenda.

Let them kill half of it?

Krugman's right. Obama should fight, he should be fighting and he should have fought more.

Depressing

Paul Krugman calls it.

(Reminder: Soup line protest in Pittsburgh tomorrow.)
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Krugman

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

And by that he means the right side of the Senate.

One More Reason To Read Krugman

From today's NYTimes:

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

Me, too.

Krugman goes on to describe progressives' reaction and the nature of the "public option", how it's supposed to lower costs and how the "co-ops" are a sham.

But here's the important stuff:

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Win it back.

Morning Joe

There's been a curious practice among some members of the news media for some time. In order to look "fair" and "balanced" it seems that the general practice is to say "well, both sides are doing it" and let it go at that.

Case in point.

This morning just as I was waking up, I saw a few moments of Morning Joe. In their discussion of how both sides are politicizing the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, they equated this:


where at about 45 seconds in, Rush Limbaugh says:

Well who did he hate? He hated both Bushes. He hated neocons. He hated John McCain. He hated republicans - he hated jews, as well. He believed in an inside-job conspiracy theory of 9/11. This guy is a leftist, if anything. This guy's beliefs, this guy's hate stems from influence that you find on the left, not on the right.

With this from Paul Krugman:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Yea, those are the same. Exactly the same. Both sides are doing exactly the same thing.

And if you don't get the sarcasm, you're reading the wrong blog.

What Krugman Says

While the day's news will swirl around the murder in Wichita, there's something else in the Times that should not go unnoticed.

Nobel prize winner in economics (so he's presumably an expert in these matters) had this to say about the roots of our current economic crisis:

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Specifically, the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act signed into law by Reagan in 1982:

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

And finally:

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

Thus Spake Krugman.

Late Night Music Post: "Hey, Miss California"

From the singer/songwriter of Hey Paul Krugman comes Hey, Miss California:



(h/t to firedoglake/La Figa)
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Krugman on GOP Hypocrisy

Paul Krugman pointing out some Republican hypocrisy.

A short clip:


Wonderful.

From Talkingpointsmemo. Here's what Krugman said:

What's so wonderful is watching Republican congressmen saying, "But this will cost jobs!" The very same Republican congressmen who were denouncing the stimulus, saying government spending never creates jobs, but cutting defense spending costs jobs. It's wonderful.

And they follow up with:

What Krugman doesn't note (because the panel covered it earlier in the show) is that these Congressional Republicans are basing their argument on spending cuts that don't exist. Funny, that.

Funny guys, those Congressional Republicans.

Hey Paul Krugman

(h/t to AmericaBlog)
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Krugman, Today

Read it:

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

The rest is just as good.

Questions? Comments? Remarks? Drop me an e-mail.

Wise Words

Paul Krugman on the election:

Last night wasn’t just a victory for tolerance; it wasn’t just a mandate for progressive change; it was also, I hope, the end of the monster years.

What I mean by that is that for the past 14 years America’s political life has been largely dominated by, well, monsters. Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people.

And in our national discourse, we pretended that these monsters were reasonable, respectable people. To point out that the monsters were, in fact, monsters, was “shrill.”

Four years ago it seemed as if the monsters would dominate American politics for a long time to come. But for now, at least, they’ve been banished to the wilderness.

End of the monster years.

Gore Derangement Syndrome

We've seen it here in the comments but Paul Krugman has some thoughts on GDS:

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore's name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

But he gets to the heart of the matter here:

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved.

So Gore was right about the climate and Gore was right about Iraq. That's why the citizens of winguttia go berserk.