This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books). The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.
The die has been cast. Obama’s deal to raise the debt ceiling is a disaster in the making.
This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns.
The ten member committee’s three dissenters in Tuesday’s decision, all unelected Fed regional board presidents, are free-market ideologues who don’t believe the government has a role to play in reversing the nation’s economic disaster. One is a former Wall Street investment banker and vice chairman of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. The other two are University of Chicago school of economics disciples long committed to free-market purism and blind faith in the mathematical models that had much to do with radical deregulation and the subsequent collapse of the financial markets.
That view led Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, before he assumed his Fed position, to sign a petition that the libertarian Cato Institute placed in various newspapers opposing President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan.
The dissent of the three members is thought to have prevented the Fed from pursuing more vigorous action such as the anticipated “QE3” purchase of additional securities. As New York Times columnist Floyd Norris speculated, “perhaps the dissenters really want to essentially say something like ‘We’ve done all we can, and if the economy is still lousy, that is for someone else to deal with.’ ”
Meanwhile, Obama has been reduced to an impotent bystander promising vigorous budget cuts in response to Standard & Poor’s adverse credit rating. The president’s pathetic performance on Monday, as the market crashed, was the low point of his career. Nor did it help that the rush of investors to Treasury bonds validated his bold claim that the United States of America deserves a perfect credit rating. On that point he is right, but Obama’s failure to challenge the idiocy demanded by S&P, along with the Republicans—that government spending be dramatically cut in the face of an economic crisis—cast his remarks as terminally tepid.
How dare a credit rating agency that got it so wrong, and should itself be investigated for malfeasance in the creation of the banking meltdown, dictate public policy? For S&P to insist on massive government cuts that would only increase joblessness is like a burglar shifting blame for his crimes to the poor quality of locks.
This from a credit rating agency that, as NYT columnist Joe Nocera points out, “has consistently fallen short.” S&P judged Enron to be an exemplary company until shortly before the corporation imploded, and it gave its triple-A seal of approval to the toxic securitized mortgage debt that caused the great recession. There are serious problems with the US economy, but they are not the ones that Standard & Poor’s outlined when it sent the stock market into a tizzy.
We don’t need draconian cuts in government spending at a time when the economy remains mired in deep unemployment, when state and municipal governments are shedding jobs and when the housing market is on life support. And if some Amercians thought that we did and voted to put irresponsible Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, isn’t it the duty of the president and his fellow Democrats in control of the Senate to fight back? That’s called democracy, and we need more of it instead of the false unity for which Obama settled.
Sure, it would have been much better if a phony populist movement called the tea party had not been financed by fat cats out to preserve their unseemly tax breaks and thereby gained control of the House. That’s what undermined what S&P termed the “effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions [that] have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges…” But, as S&P acknowledged with its downgrade after the Congressional vote on the debt ceiling, the fact that the president caved was of no help.
The result is that Obama has agreed to effectively remove the elected federal government from the battle to restore economic health and instead left us to the tender mercies of the banker-dominated Federal Reserve, which, like the folks at S&P, condoned the reckless Wall Street policies that got us into this mess. At a time when we need a full-throated defense of the role of government in protecting the interests of a majority of Americans suddenly made deeply vulnerable by the chicanery of the financial oligarchy, we are denied even the logical clarity of a former community organizer who once promised hope.
Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
If you like this article, consider making a donation.
Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.
posted by: jedi_mindtrick at 08/10/2011 @ 1:05pm
Your infatuation with the ignorance of Chris Hedges speaks volumes about your own diminished mental capacity.
Hedges who annoints himself as an expert on Christianity and especially Christianity in America is so off in his conclusions and assumptions that he is beyond laughable.
That ANYONE takes his rantings seriously is also laughable.
Dylan Ratigan Launches the Counterattack on our Financial Elites
Without further ado"¦"¦take it away, Dylan:
http://tinyurl.com/3ln33vp
Video clip must be seen to be believed! Awesome has a brand new definition.
8-1-11, A "Deal" That Will Live in Infamy
[The latest debacle from Washington is an opening salvo in a war on the American people by an economic elite]
Let's cut to the quick readers, shan't we? Barack Obama is a rank, miserable, heartless, spineless failure. The astronomical distance between his brilliant presidential election campaign, pregnant with themes of hope and change, and the almost incomprehensible miasma of the present moment is something that can only be beheld with fury and rage. The sight, alone, of John Boehner smugly proclaiming that he got "98 percent" of what he wanted"”even as economic indicators plummet, and new jobs are nowhere to be seen--should be enough to sicken the most iron of constitutions.
In this summer of 2011, as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginnings of the American Civil War, a new kind of civil war is being waged on the collective mass of American citizenry by a hyper-wealthy fragment of a percentage that sits imperiously at the top of the American economic pyramid. That extreme tip of the pyramid might just as well be a space ship that has visited from another galaxy, and it deserves to be met with the same instinctive wrath that is de rigueur in alien invasion, summer blockbusters.
The moment we inhabit is every bit as perilous as any that we can dredge from recent human experience"”the aforementioned Civil War, or World War I, or World War II, to name a few. But what makes the current debacle so maddening is the brazen, self-inflictedness of it all. I mean, you can't make this stuff up, folks.
If this were Hitler's Germany, circa 1938"”as it obviously is NOT"”the most significant, demonstrated differences might be the lack of a lock-step state, exhibiting Jewish and political persecutions, as well as the absence of a rise in concentrated power, riding the crest of an emerging tide of economic might. Instead, our current elites are effectively riding an ephemeral tide of phony baloney electronic money shuffling schemes. Schemes that are unavoidably destined for certain, quantum implosion, perhaps creating the first known instance of a sort of black hole death of an entire, planetary society. Who knows?
In any case, a seismograph of recent human events including wars, and technological breakthroughs would read like the heart monitor of a terminally sick patient"”moments of regular activity interspersed with increasingly frequent intervals of violent oscillations. In the ultimate reckoning, who among us knows where this crazy, cockamamie thing is headed? But if there is even a single lesson to be gleaned from a continuous track record of violent bouts of societal fibrillation, it has to be that early intervention is critical.
Links worth a look...
Activism:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28690.htm
General interest:
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
http://tinyurl.com/43gk2ea
http://tinyurl.com/3f9wg73
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28693.htm
Choice clip from last link:
A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform....
Hedges cont.
There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated....
Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life.
Hedges cont.
Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life....
Societies have, throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed. Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.
End quote.
S&P overestimated the creditworthiness of Enron and similar companies. Does Mr Scheer imply that S&P is now overestimating the creditworthiness of the USA?
Watch Ratigan's rant. This is the only guy on MSNBC that gets it. I don't know why Emmelt hasn't fired him because Ratigan is not following the neolib party line & blaming the Tea Party or the Reps for everything (unlike the rest of the motly crew at MSNBC). Ratigan knows that the economic mess we are in is systemic not partisan.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/video-msnbc-dylan-ratigan-meltdown-over-meltdown-031046281.html
Read Full Article »