With Their Castration Of Summers, the 'Religious Left' Re-Emerge
Aaron Sorkin's HBO drama The Newsroom has often made sport of portraying the Republicans as almost monolithically fringe (lead character Will McAvoy is written as a nominal Republican in order to bash the Party at every turn), and utterly devoid of policy nuance. This is doubtless interesting to actual Republicans, or former Republicans (like this writer), who can't seem to agree on most anything.
In Sorkin's defense, he made very apparent strides in Season Two to balance the writing at least somewhat, and then if he's looking for a storyline for next season to balance the show even more, he need look no further than the Democratic Party's castration of Lawrence Summers. The takedown of Summers by Democratic senators including Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, and Elizabeth Warren plainly reveals that ‘mouthbreathing fringe' isn't just a GOP thing.
What ultimately sank the presumed Federal Reserve frontrunner was his role in pushing through repeal of Glass-Steagall while in the Clinton administration. To the left's growing fringe element, his role in the latter signaled too tight of a relationship with Wall Street, not to mention too much comfort with deregulation of a banking system the deregulation of which allegedly caused a financial crisis.
It all sounds good, but the deregulation narrative laid out above is about as credible as the belief on the right that low birthrates signal looming American decline thanks to unfunded liabilities and Muslim domination. Simply put, Glass-Steagall's repeal had nothing to do with the troubles that eventually felled U.S. banks.
Indeed, forgotten by the cave dwellers on the left is that it was housing loans, along with exposure to securitized housing loans that got the banks into trouble. The problem for a knuckle-dragging left so eager to demonize Summers is that what wrecked traditional banks was already legal before Glass-Steagall's repeal.
As for the bailouts of financial institutions that properly offended an always emotional left, utterly lost on a church eager to excommunicate anything having to do with finance is that the heavy regulation of banking is what made the bailouts inevitable. Whether it's Republicans or Democrats running the show in Washington, banks have long been protected through regulation (does anyone remember how Walmart tried to enter banking only to be blocked by regulators?) such that bailouts of that which Washington exerted a great deal of control over were baked in the cake long before 2008.
Unfortunate for a hard left that was totally snowed by the non-sequitur that was Gramm-Leach-Bliley, its unyielding faith in that which was false blinded it to the real reasons for it to oppose Summers' Federal Reserve nomination. Simply put, Summers is a vastly overrated economic theorist whose ideas are inimical to the very economic chances of the downtrodden whom the fringe at least outwardly claim to care for.
If the above is doubted, one need only read books like Confidence Men about the thinking that has informed President Obama's economic policies. To read Ron Suskind's account is to be made aware of a Lawrence Summers who was totally wedded to the very government ‘stimulus' spending that robbed Americans of an economic recovery. To conclude otherwise, as in to believe that governments effectively stimulate with the money of others, is for people like Summers to believe that John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Harry Reid are better allocators of capital than are Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, FedEx's Fred Smith, and Oracle's Larry Ellison.
If the above doesn't convince the left's super fundamentalist sects that we'd be much better off if limited capital remained in the private sector, they'll quickly be cured of their fealty to the oxymoron that is "government investment" if they visit Washington, D.C. to witness up close what the ‘stimulus' hath wrought. To be clear, D.C. is booming right now. Most Americans of varying ideological stripes understandably dislike it when kleptocrats pocket the aid we send them, and if so they'd be horrified were they to walk the streets of our nation's capital. Increasingly they're paved with proverbial gold as the political class gorges itself on Congress' nosebleed spending. Hunger Games, meet K Street.
And for those who can't afford to visit the epicenter of all that ‘stimulus' spending, they might go on Amazon to buy Marc Leibovich's This Town. Once they open it up they'll quickly see that federal ‘stimulus' is very much a local concept; one enriching Republicans and Democrats alike who've stayed in D.C. to obnoxiously take part in dollar gavage, taxpayer edition. Leibovich's book will force the most pious of the hard left to acknowledge the harsh reality that the kleptocrats in the world's most backward countries have nothing on the permanent class of Republican and Democrat moochers who do their feeding in plain sight, and at the expense of country class rubes foolish enough to actually work for a living.
As for the Federal Reserve's ‘Quantitative Easing' (QE) that has predictably captivated a political class that much earlier invented the ‘something for nothing' mindset which now permeates our central bank, Summers notably softened his already limp discomfort with QE in order to make himself more confirmable by the Senate. Ok, so a highly devout hard left that claims to love the impoverished didn't seem to care one bit that Summers supported a policy that runs so counter to the economic chances of the least fortunate. Figure QE has robbed those reliant on interest of interest income, not to mention that its devaluation of the dollar has harmed the savers with the most to lose. Sorry doctrinaire left, but only the rich can actively hedge their exposure to dollars being rapidly devalued by our central bankers.
To put it plainly, Summers didn't rate confirmation at the Fed simply because this politicized creature of Washington supports the very economic policies that have served as barriers to economic growth in modern times, particularly for those at the bottom of the economic rung. Yet the reliably righteous hard left based its geld of Summers on repeal of a law that had absolutely nothing to do with the financial crisis. Michele Bachmann right, meet the Elizabeth Warren left. See you both on Season 3 of The Newsroom?
