Republicans and Freedom to Hide Information

June 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

What is it with these Republicans?  The entire theory of free markets depends on ‘the market’ having access to information — prices, quality,  ability to extrapolate costs and prices based on knowledge of the health of the  farms, fields and factories. It absolutely requires freedom of information; with out it there are no markets, there are deals, fast deals, strokes of luck and blows of fortune.  Yet, with every breath they take, the Republicans try to bottle up, obscure, or completely hide the information that is needed.

The preceding article on GOP trying to strip full disclosure on political ads is one example among hundreds.

The full page ad on the back of the NY Times Sunday Book Review, for Edward Conrad’s new book, “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong,” is another, trifling but instructive, example.  Although the cover informs us he was a former managing director of Bain Capital, you’d hardly know from the blurbs in the ad that this isn’t at least an honest attempt at fresh analysis and explanation.

Not so.

It is a statement of faith, say the Nicene Creed, masquerading as a history and analysis of  competing views of a famous man.

In fact, the book is almost jaw-dropping in its exculpation of big capital for what has just befallen the United States, and the world, claiming that what is most needed is more of Bain Capital’s kind of buy-the-cow-to-suck-the-marrow agricultural wisdom.

If he is so proud of his brand of economics why doesn’t he insist his book be marketed as what it is, a claim that Bain-Romney capitalism benefits the most by benefiting the fewest with the most?  Why?  Because book sales would tank. Only the readers in the .1% would be interested.  By selling it as a new look at an old field, filled with surprising wisdom, and by getting blurbs from Freakonics’ Leavitt, the famed Nouriel Roubini and others of a not obviously partisan stamp a wider universe of eyes is beckoned to.

There is a lot available before you buy, revealing the true faith of Mr. Conrad, a faith like so many, that depends not at all on beliefs matching reality, so caveat emptor.

 

Adam Davidson in the NY Times did a good review of the Bain Beliefs, and actually talked to Roubini, whose blurb is meant to help Conrad’s sales.

At its core, Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same). Glenn Hubbard, a prominent economist and one of Romney’s chief economic advisers, takes his ideas seriously. “He doesn’t have the blinders of a model-based view of the world, which is an advantage and a disadvantage,” Hubbard told me. Others, like the progressive economist Dean Baker, were less kind. “I can’t say there was much I found compelling,” he told me. The celebrated New York University economist Nouriel Roubini went out of his way to say that he had “great intellectual respect for his sharp mind,” even if he didn’t agree on numerous points, especially the benefits of inequality.

Wonkette offers a more snarky take on Conrad’s blaming the plebes for chicken-shitting-out on an entirely correctable bank-run.

And Joseph Stiglitz actually takes on Conrad and his weird financial history.

Timothy Noah at TNR has a brief notice of the book, and in a link, debates Conrad (at 20:45)

Back to my lede… yes, Conrad is open about his faith.  What he hides is what is hidden from those not at the very core of his buy ‘em and rend ‘em and sell ‘em practice.

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That Bailout Money for Greece? Hah!

May 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Once again the adage is proven: when trouble is brewing, protect your own. In this case, bankers protecting bankers with the aid of the bankers’ closest allies – their governments….

Its membership in the euro currency union hanging in the balance, Greece continues to receive billions of euros in emergency assistance from a so-called troika of lenders overseeing its bailout.

But almost none of the money is going to the Greek government to pay for vital public services. Instead, it is flowing directly back into the troika’s pockets.

The European bailout of 130 billion euros ($163.4 billion) that was supposed to buy time for Greece is mainly servicing only the interest on the country’s debt — while the Greek economy continues to struggle.

… the money dispensed by the troika — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fundand the European Commission — comes from European taxpayers, many of whom are increasingly wary of the political disarray that has afflicted Athens and clouded the future of the euro zone.

As they pay themselves, though, the troika members are also withholding other funds intended to keep the Greek government in operation.

Alderman and Ewing in NY Times

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NJ’s Christie: If You Can’t Fix it, Yell About It

May 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman takes on Governor Chris Christie in a scathing column this morning:

Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond?

First, by attacking the messenger. According to Mr. Christie, Mr. Rosen — a veteran public servant whose office usually makes more accurate budget forecasts than the state’s governor — is “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.” Civility!

By the way, even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation, which S.& P. called “structurally unbalanced” because of the governor’s optimistic revenue assumptions.

New Jersey, then, is still in dire fiscal shape. So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.

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Fixing the US Economy: Replacing the Engines of Inequality

May 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From the leadership from the greatly weakened U.S. labor movement, the same that once led the country to economic strength and a strong middle class, comes its analysis of what ails the U.S. Economy.

The crash of 2008 and the Great Recession were inevitable consequences of three decades of economic policies designed by and for Wall Street and the wealthiest Americans. At the heart of the problem was the hollowing out of American manufacturing, the growing dysfunction of our financial sector and a rapid increase in economic inequality, all of which crippled the growth engine of the U.S. economy.

Starting in the 1980s, corporate America decided to boost profits by shipping U.S. jobs overseas. NAFTA and the admission of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) accelerated the drive to relocate production to “export platforms” in foreign countries that would ship goods back to the U.S. market. Corporations that sent jobs overseas became forceful proponents of a “strong” (overvalued) dollar, which enhanced the profitability of their overseas operations but at the same time made much of the U.S. manufacturing sector uncompetitive and led to perennial U.S. trade deficits.

Fixing What’s Wrong….

 

The Republican presidential candidates not only failed to learn anything from Wall Street’s mistakes, they now want to double down on more of the same. They propose to deregulate the financial sector yet again, pass more trade agreements that encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs, suppress wages by intensifying the assault on unions, prioritize inflation-fighting over full employment and perpetuate overvaluation of the dollar and the U.S. trade deficit. We already tried this approach, and it already failed spectacularly.

The Republican candidates pretend that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are the answer to wage stagnation and the economic crisis, but the Bush years taught us that these obscenely wasteful tax cuts only make the problem worse. They are the equivalent of eating our seed corn, because they starve the kind of public investment in education, infrastructure and innovation that is indispensable for long-term economic growth.

Steven Greenhouse of the NY Times comments

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How Does Inequality Happen?

May 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Nicholas Lemann in April 23, 2012 New Yorker reviews  6  books in an essay called “Evening the Odds: Is There a Politics of Inequality?”

  • The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It?   Timothy Noah
  • Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray
  • Power, Inc., David Rothkopf
  • Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt
  • Benjamin Friedman — in The National Interest, title not given
  • Dylan Ratigan — mention of his views
  • Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin
  • The Tea Party and the Making of American Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
  • Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the Republic, Jay Cost

Though he particularly recommends Cost’s book as “the biggest, meatiest available conservative take on American Politics,”   and a “full-bore, non-caricature critique of liberalism,” and does a skilful job of distilling the essence of the books, he doesn’t draw any conclusions of his own to answer the question, except to agree that inequality as it now stands is a problem, and “if you believe that government is the best instrument with which to address the problem it’s also a morally urgent one.”  I wish he’d been given, or taken, the space necessary to write the kind of long-form essay he is very capable of doing.

To me, personally, the Noah book looks the most interesting.  I am some way through “Ill Fares the Land,” and think Judt a thinker and a moral man of the first order.  As to a good critique of liberalism, I am all for that, but doubt I will dive into a “big, meaty” book right now.  Let me know if you find good notices, or critiques of any of these.

As Lehmann says, we have a  “morally urgent” problem on our hands — which may, if not dealt with adequately,  ratchet very fast — as Greece is showing us– into a political and even police/military problem.

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Western Economies Need Serious Reform: Turkey

May 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It is a wonderful turn of the tables when the lecturer becomes the lecturee — in this case the United States and well developed Europe, who for decades have been demonstrating the uses of carrots and sticks to make other countries model themselves  into smaller images of presumed success.  Something funny happened in 2008 when the paragons of well-being and economic scientism blew up, wounding the well-off and leaving a ringing in the ears all over the world.

Turkey now, has some words of wisdom for the old masters of the universe: mind your own business, and if you need an example, we’ll show you ours.


Growing like gangbusters, Turkey says Western economies need ‘serious reforms’

Deputy Turkish Prime Minister Ali Babacan, a former foreign minister and Turkey’s point-man for economic policy … speaking at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University …  said neither the US nor the eurozone countries have yet to deal with the underlying causes of the global economic slowdown: a weak financial sector, weak corporate balance sheets, risky public financial positions.

Babacan contrasted the Western economic turmoil, with Turkey’s booming economy which he said grew at 9.2 percent growth rate in 2010, and 8.5 percent in 2011.

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Greece: Anti-Austerity Anger

February 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From Link TV

 

Protests have erupted in the Greek capital with thousands of people joining strike action over the prospect of more budget cuts. Unions say the economy is being driven downwards by the government. Greece’s EU partners are also frustrated but they blame the government’s failure to implement reforms. Despite all night talks with the “troika” of lenders, the EU, IMF, and the ECB, Greece’s Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, said more time is needed to agree on the right package.

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