Fighting Back … Ballroom Days are Over

Posted: April 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Corporate Crime, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Economic Develpment, Economy, education | Tags: , , , | 31 Comments

May take a week, and it may take longer.
They got the guns, but we got the numbers.
Gonna win yeah, we’re taking over.
Come on!

Yeah!

Your ballroom days are over, baby.
Night is drawing near.
Shadows of the evening
Crawl across the years.

Jim Morrison, from “Five to One”

I’ve spent the last six months watching this country’s policy makers throw all common sense and empirical evidence on the US economy to the wind. My jaw just drops when I consider what the Republicans have proposed under the flag of austerity and how the Democrats entertain them.

BostonBoomer and I spend a lot of time on the phone with each other. We’ve been each other’s support system having much in common as older, divorced women gone back to school and social justice activists feeling exiled in some kind of shared virtual gulag. We remember the protests and actions that we took at a younger age to demonstrate against war and the treatment of minorities and women.  BB was active in antiwar protests.  I was an avid women’s rights activist in the 70s and 80s, having found out that just getting good grades and hard work weren’t going to be enough for me to break into white male dominated bastions.  It’s maddening when you think of all the time you spend on your education and doing the right thing and find out that what really gets you ahead is your ability to fit certain biological characteristics and social status.  All those things I tried to change back then are being undone.  All over the country, privileged, wealthy people and corporations are using political donations and power to seek advantage like never before.  This is not healthy for our country or our future.  We need to end their Ballroom Days.

It’s heartened both of us to see union workers in the US and many citizens in the MENA region stand up to authority and demand their right to participate in policy decisions that impact their lives. All over the world, the immense transfer of wealth and national assets to a small elite–the uberwealthy few representing mostly inheritance dynasties–has occurred with the help of political lap dogs seeking donations and parochial interests.  It seems we may have reached a tipping point.  Some yearning-to-be-free democracy contagion has created a new call for activism to protect the interests of the many against the pillaging of the few.  It’s brought people to the streets all over the world and created scapegoats for rapacious states.  From whistle blowing of war crimes by Bradley Manning to shouting for no more political or economic prisoners in Northern African nations, we see ordinary, educated, middle class people taking to the streets and shouting enough!  We’ve fed the cheats long enough!

It’s about time.

Allison Kilkenny at The Nation has a new article up called “The Resistance Has Begun” that lists recent political demonstrations and unrest.  Her article was inspired by a post by Chris Hedges–This is What Resistance Looks Like–on the increasing number of political protests occurring around the country.   Hedges writes on the importance of the protests.  Are we looking at renewed activism from the people who’ve been hurt by the power class-enabling policies of the last 30 years?

Chris Hedges has this to say.

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance.  This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

I’ve written recently about the Social Contract of 20th century America and how that contract has been broken by politicians seeking to empower the monopolies and oligopolies that fill their political accounts with booty.  Things have gotten so blatantly amoral that the very same folks that destroyed the Gulf ecosystem and took 11 lives and many livelihoods through careless management decisions rewarded themselves with bonuses and ‘best safety’ records with no concept that people might find that appalling. This was a repeat performance of the situation where executives of investment and commercial banks took huge bonuses right on the back of their bad management decisions that brought near US economic collapse and massive bail outs with federal funds. Also, BP is right back applying for drilling rights having really not made things right on either the human or the environment accounts for their last cost-cutting, profit gouging adventure in ignoring safety for the sake of quick profits.

When the social costs of doing business exceed the benefits of doing that business for every one but a few, the society needs to take a hard look at why it tolerates such behavior.  Forcing other people to bear the costs of your business or your consumption is wrong and that’s exactly what most business subsidies and lax regulations do.  When businesses can push their costs off on society or consumers of certain goods can push their costs off on society, that market becomes distorted and dysfunctional.   The market price does not reflect true costs. It will overproduce harmful goods and drain resources that would be better placed elsewhere.  The only way to push these costs back to the producers and consumers of  costly activities and end the dysfunction is through legal prosecution or tough regulation.   The idea that’s been propagated that regulation serves no purpose in a market system is part and parcel of the problem.

Opaque, vague markets do no one any good.  They serve as breeders of Ponzi schemes like that of Bernie Madoff. Markets that don’t force the true cost of doing business back on the producer are no good either.  They take precious scarce resources and allocate them to activities that are not worthwhile because prices and costs are understated.  There are mounds and mounds of microeconomic studies that show how insidious markets can be when they are distorted by things like information asymmetries or supply-enabling protection.  All of these activities set up winners and losers.  In most cases, ordinary people are  the losers.  It takes money and power to access the special treatment offered by politicians and their laws.  You only get those huge passes and benefits if your get to call yourself a corporation in this country.  You can collect a lot of money for being inefficient for some reason.  Businesses in this country are considered to be ‘individuals’ for freedom of speech issues but they go unprosecuted for murder every day.  Just talk to grieving families of those 11 workers who died on the Deep Water Horizon in the name of increased production and lower costs.  Only a sociopath could murder 11 people with safety shortcuts then provide incentives for good safety records to the instigators of the bad decisions.  The only offset that we have to the kind of power and access achieved by lobbyists and corporate interests is civil disobedience and protests.  Protest we must!

Kilkenny’s article lists a number of protests that are brewing around the country.  These include examples in New York State, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other average cities with average US citizens.  Is this a Middle Class Awakening going viral?  Here’s some more from Chris Hedges on how concentration of power and money in monopoly banks has warped our policy agendas and priorities. Our incomes from hard work are being skimmed by paper shuffling fees paid as bonuses to agents with no productive purpose but market distortion.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

There is nothing free market about government-installed and enabled monopolies.  We achieve nothing as a society by buying into the delusion that all government does is destroy the business environment when all evidence points to their enabling of the worst business practices.  There is nothing remotely efficient about markets that can use public resources on the cheap to underprice goods and services, hence making them more marketable than they should be.  There is no efficiency in letting producers of products and services pass the costs of their bad management decisions on to middle class and working people.  You cannot blame government workers for the current economic failings.  You can however, blame Bank of America, Republican Governors who hand out tax cuts indiscriminately, and federal subsidies of inefficient businesses. Huge corporations and rich people gobble up tons of public resources via subsidies, tax breaks, and use of infrastructure.  Many governors have literally given away their states treasury and resources courting businesses that cost them more than they bring to that state in jobs or revenues. The big lie is that corporations are overtaxed and receive no benefits from state, local or federal government.  We can’t afford to enable that big lie. We must protest it.

Ordinary Americans cannot band together to hire lobbyists to help repair our broken Social Contract.  The only thing we have are our feet, our voices, and our votes.  Paul Ryan’s budget Anthem is just the latest in a line of assaults on reason and common sense.  It is the very definition of pennywise and pound foolish and it’s insulting.  It hypes unnecessary tax cuts and increases in pentagon spending while removing funding for public health, public education, and public information programs. It continues the effort to redistribute the incomes and the resources of the country to the very few at the cost of the very many. The only way to stop this is to protest.  Protest frequently.  Protest openly.  Protest now.  Public Policy should not be based on badly written dystopian fiction novels.

It is not illegal immigrants that have broken the American Dream.  It’s not bands of stereotyped Muslim Bedouins hiding out in caves a world apart from Main Street that’s threatening the livelihoods of American workers. It’s not poor Cuba’s last vestiges of Marxism or crazy-like-a-fox Hugo Chavez. It’s time to stop falling for their straw men enemies. What has taken the American Dream away from so many is  the greed and power lust of a few people that have completely usurped the nation’s policy makers.  It’s time to remind them that they may have the guns, but we have the numbers.

Monday Reads

Posted: April 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Diplomacy Nightmares, Foreign Affairs, Hamas, Labor unions, Libya, MENA, Middle East, morning reads, Reproductive Rights, Syria, worker rights | Tags: , , , | 68 Comments

Good Morning!

This is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.  It happened on April 4, 1968.  Historian Robert Creamer remembers the day and its meaning in a post at HuffPo.  It’s the 43rd anniversary of the activist’s death.  He was in Memphis working for the rights of ordinary workers to organize and better their work terms and conditions.

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to support the strike of the city’s garbage collectors who were demanding the right of collective bargaining.

He was there because the right to sit across a table and negotiate wages and working conditions gave otherwise powerless workers, the right to have a say.

Then — as now — collective bargaining was, as the AFSCME banner said in the Wisconsin Capitol Rotunda, about freedom.

At Duke that spring we — and the non-academic employees of the university — took up the same cause. Collective bargaining was the only thing that could systematically, permanently change the relations of power and overcome years of exploitation.

Even in 1968, their $1.15 per hour was a pathetic salary — $2,392 a year. They were exploited every day. They needed a union.

Now, 43 years later, America is relearning the lessons of April, 1968:

  • How collective bargaining is an integral part of a truly democratic society.
  • How the labor movement is about a lot more than wages and working conditions — that it’s about respect and dignity and hope.
  • And finally, it is learning once again that you can’t have the rain without the thunder and lightning. Freedom is earned through struggle. And if you want to have a great life — a life that gives you a sense of fulfillment and meaning — it’s never too late to decide that you will dedicate yours to the struggle for social and economic justice.

The LA Times reports that over 700 Anti-union pieces of legislation have been introduced across the country as part of the Republican party’s war on working Americans.  Sounds like a conspiracy to me.

More than 700 bills have been introduced in virtually every state. Nearly half of the states are considering legislation to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Unions are girding for a fight.

Now that the governors of Ohio and Wisconsin have signed bills to limit public workers’ collective bargaining rights, their fellow Republicans in other states are expected to gain momentum in their efforts to take on unions.

Palm Beach, Florida judges have evidently had it with the sloppy recordkeeping practices of mortgage holders and servicers.  They’re starting to “routinely”  dismiss foreclosure cases.

Angry and exasperated by faulty foreclosure documents, judges throughout Florida are hitting back by increasingly dismissing cases and boldly accusing lawyers of “fraud upon the court.”

A Palm Beach Post review of cases in state and appellate courts found judges are routinely dismissing cases for questionable paperwork. Although in most cases the bank is allowed to refile the case with the appropriate documents, in a growing number of cases judges are awarding homeowners their homes free and clear after finding fraud upon the court.

Still, critics say judges are not doing enough.

“The judges are the gatekeepers to jurisprudence, to the Florida Constitution, to access to the courts and to due process,” said attorney Chip Parker, a Jacksonville foreclosure defense attorney who was recently investigated by the Florida Bar for his critical comments about so-called “rocket dockets” during an interview with CNN. “It’s discouraging when it appears as if there is an exception being made for foreclosure cases.”

Dictator Bashar al-Assad of Syria is undoubtedly one of the most oppressive leaders in the world. He has been a strong supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah.  AJ has an op-ed that talks about how deluded he’s become these days as his people have finally stood up to say enough!  It’s an interesting piece that talks about how just being against Israel does not translate into a blank check from your people or other leaders in the region.

The eruption of Arab revolutions has been a reaction to decades of repression and the skewed distribution of wealth; two problems that have plagued anti- and pro-Western Arab governments alike.

And Syria is one of the most repressive states in the region; hundreds, if not thousands, of people have disappeared into its infamous prisons. Some reappear after years, some after decades, many never resurface at all.

Syrians have not been the only victims. Other Arabs – Lebanese who were abducted during the decades of Syrian control over its neighbour, Jordanian members of the ruling Baath party who disagreed with its leadership and members of different Palestinian factions – have also been victimised.

Syrian critics of the regime are often arrested and charged – without due process – with serving external – often American and Israeli – agendas to undermine the country’s “steadfastness and confrontational policies”.

But these acts have never been adequately condemned by Arab political parties and civil society, which have supported Syria’s position on Israel while turning a blind eye to its repressive policies.

Thus while Syrian dissidents, including prominent nationalist and leftist intellectuals, are incarcerated in Syrian jails, other Arab activists and intellectuals have flocked to Damascus to praise its role in “defending Arab causes”.

This hypocrisy has reinforced the regime’s belief that it is immune from the criticisms directed at repressive pro-Western governments in the region.

As some one who studies the region–albeit mostly in economic and trade terms–I’ve found that each country has its unique set of problems and circumstances even though many of them seem to have similarities on the surface.  Syria’s been one of the worst of the worst destabilizers in the region. This is one regime that could be replaced by nearly any one and it would be an immediate improvement.

Former President Clinton is on record saying that the US government shouldn’t rule out arming Libyan Rebels.

But Clinton said he wouldn’t completely rule out the idea of supplying arms to Libya’s rebels.

“Let me just say this. I sure wouldn’t shut the door to it. I think … we may need to know a little more,” he said.

Clinton, husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stressed that he was speaking without “any official sanction” whatsoever.

“I’m just speaking from myself. But I certainly wouldn’t take that off the table, too,” he said.

For some reason, emissaries from Gadhafi are meeting Greek leaders to find a political solution to their civil war and to the UN resolution.  Maybe Gadhafi is looking for that special retirement place on a Greek Isle.

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s acting foreign minister met with Greece’s prime minister yesterday to seek a political solution to hostilities in the north African country, said Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas.

“It appears that the regime is also seeking a solution,” Droutsas said, referring to Qaddafi’s government, after Abdul Ati al-Obeidi met with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Droutsas said in a statement.

The talks followed “a series of contacts over recent days” involving Greek and Libyan officials, including the countries’ prime ministers, which led to al-Obeidi’s Athens trip, Droutsas said. Al-Obeidi also planned to visit Malta and Turkey, he said.

“It is necessary for there to be a serious attempt for peace, for stability in the region,” the Greek foreign minister said.

The Daily Mail reports that Moussa Koussa is getting asylum in the UK.  I’d say that’s a pretty interesting development considering his role in the Lockabie bombing.  I suppose there’s worse places to spend your retirement from “notorious henchmen”.

Libya’s feared ‘torturer-in-chief’ has been offered asylum in the UK in return for his help to topple Muammar Gaddafi and his hated regime.

The secret offer to Libya’s former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, was made while he was still in Tripoli and helped persuade him to seek sanctuary in Britain.

But any promise of special protection for one of Gaddafi’s most notorious henchmen has provoked anger from those who want Koussa, 62, put on trial for his alleged crimes.

MP Ben Wallace, parliamentary aide to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, said: ‘This man should not be granted asylum or any other special treatment; the only proper outcome is to bring him to justice.

‘Britain needs to make up its mind quickly. There will be no shortage of courts that will readily seek his extradition. The last thing the UK wants is for Koussa to languish, at taxpayers’ expense, in legal no-man’s-land.’

MI6 officers first made contact with Koussa, who has been linked with the Lockerbie bombing and the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London, in the first few days after the UN-sanctioned attacks on Gaddafi’s military machine on March 19.

A source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Central to the enticements was the prospect of living in safety in the UK under the protection of the asylum laws. Koussa’s greatest concern was what would happen to him once he left Gaddafi.

I’m going to end with something BB sent me last on what the radical right thinks of women.  You can see this onslaught of anti women laws ooze disrespect and the opinion that women aren’t fully competent adults who are capable of making good, moral decisions without some big daddy republican government telling them what to do.  Disgusting!  They want to turn BP loose on the Gulf of Mexico again, but women can’t even been trusted with their own bodies.

Women sure are impulsive, lying, vulnerable and childlike creatures, aren’t they? That’s the conclusion I’d draw, if my understanding of women were based solely on anti-abortion bills.

These bills are pending and passing at a disturbing pace in multiple states. They don’t just reflect the nation’s chronic and understandable ambivalence about abortion. They also paint a shockingly negative portrait of women.

Here are a few key messages gleaned from the latest bills and anti-abortion advocacy:

* Women are impulsive. Half of states now require women to undergo a waiting period before obtaining an abortion. Usually the waiting period is one day. South Dakota just passed a three-day waiting period, the longest in the nation. The implication is that, without a government-mandated waiting period, women would dash into abortion clinics without first weighing the gravity of their decision.

* Women are prone to lying. Last week, the Indiana House passed a measure that would forbid most abortions after 20 weeks. A version of it is expected to pass into law. Opponents tried to carve out an exception for victims of rape or incest, as well as for women whose lives are threatened by medical complications. However, the bill’s sponsor fended off the amendment by attacking it as a “giant loophole” that women would use to get abortions by pretending they were raped.

* Women need things explained to them. A bill recently passed by the Texas House would require doctors to describe the fetus in some detail to all abortion-seeking patients, including victims of rape and incest. The bill allows women to close their eyes and cover their ears. (It doesn’t specify whether women are permitted to say, “La-la-la, I can’t hear you.”)

Well, that’s about it from me.  I’m just waiting for the severe weather to fire up today and trying to heal.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

The Donald Segretti School of Young Republicans

Posted: March 24, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: collective bargaining, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , | 44 Comments

Donald Segretti, professional Republican CREEP circa 1970

One of the things that I’ve  noticed about Republican politics and politicians is that they really haven’t given up the Donald Segretti tactics of the Nixon Years.  If any thing, they’ve adopted a new version that combines the lunacy of JackAss and the immaturity of early Ashton Kutcher.  They film themselves committing cons and use the internet to spread sex, lies, and videotapes.  I’ve definitely seen and experienced the sadistic huckster aspect of the fetus fetishists. They’ll lie, stalk, steal, and shoot and harm people to further their crusades.  This isn’t opposition research.  This is opposition fictional narrative and dirty tricks for dirty Republicans. Anything justifies getting the agenda done.

Now, we have the latest graduate of the Donald Segretti School of Young Republican Morality.  Will this email help undo the right wing extremist reign of Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker?  One can only hope against hope that the governor responded as eagerly to this email as he did with the suggestions from the fake David Koch which included sending thugs into peaceful labor protests.  This is from Wisconsin Watch.

An Indiana deputy prosecutor and Republican activist resigned Thursday after the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism uncovered an email to Gov. Scott Walker in which he suggested a fake attack on the governor to discredit union protesters.

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions,” the email said.

Carlos Lam: Donald Segretti Wannabe

“Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”

At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it.

“He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.

He came into the office and gave his resignation verbally, Cooper told the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. The resignation was announced after the Center’s initial story was published.

James O'Keefe, professional Republican CREEP circa 2010

Lila Rose, Snookie of the Fetus Festishists, also professional Republican CREEP

We’ve seen a number of people like Carlos F. Lam who will pull any thing.   Jame’s O’Keefe is another one of the Segretti wannabes.  His antics down here in Louisiana in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office should’ve netted him serious jail time. He was just barely blocked from sexually harassing a CNN reporter. He managed to fatally damage ACORN and create a right wing angst storm on NPR. Then there is Lilla Rose. She’s obsessed with other women’s pregnancies and Planned Parenthood. These two pull outrageous, punk’d style pranks that provide heavily edited outrage content for right wing blogs and pundits.  They both are modern day flim flam floosies.  The latest evidence of the confidence game is O’Keefe’s fundraising efforts.

We get to now add a third name to the young Republicans gone wild. This crew is the equivalence of the Jersey Show cast. They are over-the-top crazies seeking the spotlight and money doing appalling things.  What I want to know aren’t they in jail for running confidence schemes?

Monday Reads

Posted: March 21, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: collective bargaining, Economy, Farming, financial institutions, Foreign Affairs, Global Financial Crisis, Gulf Oil Spill, Japan, Libya | Tags: , , , , , , | 57 Comments

Good Morning!

I’m finishing up a paper today that’s off to be published on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS). Don’t worry!  I won’t bore you with the details but it’s basically about locating speculation bubbles like the one that happened in real estate markets in the 2000s.  There were a lot of folks that made money off of that ride although most of us little guys lost a lot.  The reason I’m bringing it up is that my first read of the day is a Paul Krugman response to Allan Greenspan’s critique of Obama’s economic policy.  I just wanted to remind you of what a mess the first part of the century has been and that many of the pots and the kettles still appear to be confused about their true nature.  I mean, the entire mess has given me a great research agenda, but at what cost?

Greenspan’s tut tuts Obama’s ability to create economic chaos in the academic journal International Finance (pdf here). While most of us are still trying to figure out what went so horribly wrong, Greenspan is trying to pin the blame on the new guys. I’m going to quote his abstract because it’s just more of the same old same old  from one of the beasts that brought us to this mess and its worth the bask in the arrogance to just remember his access to power.  Greenspan says it’s too much government regulation and Obma activism that’s hampering the recovery and that he can prove it with bad, outdated statistical methods.  This comes from the man that gave Wall Street a lot of cheap money and no regulation so they could go hog wild.  The recovery may be tepid, the stock market may be recovering, but I’ll be damned if there’s any regulation left standing upon which he can float his argument. Oh, Krugman dismisses the methods by which Greenspan infers that it’s government activism and its inherent chaos that’s created a stale recovery.  To be honest, a first year doctoral student would use better methodology and know the literature better.  That really scares me, frankly. What did he do while at the Fed?  Reread The Fountainhead?

So, here’s the bubblemeister’s blowing you know what up you know where with techniques that wouldn’t get me published in a mimeographed neighborhood newsletter let alone International Finance. Why hasn’t this man retired to an island somewhere?

The US recovery from the 2008 financial and economic crisis has been disappointingly tepid. What is most notable in sifting through the variables that might conceivably account for the lacklustre rebound in
GDP growth and the persistence of high unemployment is the unusually low level of corporate illiquid long-term fixed asset investment. As a share of corporate liquid cash flow, it is at its lowest level since 1940.

This contrasts starkly with the robust recovery in the markets for liquid corporate securities. What, then, accounts for this exceptionally elevated level of illiquidity aversion? I break down the broad potential sources, and analyse them with standard regression techniques. I infer that a minimum of half and  possibly as much as three-fourths of the effect can be explained by the shock of vastly greater uncertainties embedded in the competitive, regulatory and financial  environments faced by businesses since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, deriving from the surge in government activism. This explanation is buttressed by comparison with similar conundrums experienced during the 1930s. I conclude that the current government activism is hampering what should be a broadbased robust economic recovery, driven in significant part by the positive wealth effect of a buoyant U.S. and global stock market.

So, here’s Paul Krugman with ‘Rantings of an Ex-Maestro’.

He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.

If he wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.

Brad Delong actually does some analysis over at his blog Grasping Reality.

I don’t see how this hangs together in any coherent fashion at all.

If businesses are unwilling to invest in illiquid capital out of the fear that government action will impair the value of their investments, businesses must also fear that government action will impair the value of their existing illiquid investments. What is the value of their existing illiquid investments? The value of their existing illiquid investments is nothing more than the stock market value of their companies–liquid stock market value is, in the last analysis, nothing more than the cash flows proceeding from the illiquid investments that companies have made that generate the profits.

A much better and more sensible explanation for the relatively high value that the stock market places on existing illiquid corporate assets and the relatively low value that companies place on illiquid investments to expand their fixed capital is precisely that capacity utilization is low–so why spend more money now building factories when doing so would be more expensive and only add to your idle capacity?

And, indeed, if you ask people running businesses what is their single most important problem, they say that it is not (as they sometimes say it is) taxes; they say that it is not (as they said it was at the start of 2000) the cost and quality of labor; it is not (as they said it was in 2004) the availability and cost of insurance; it is not (as they briefly said it was at the start of 1993) government requirements. What do they say their biggest problem is? Poor sales.

Yup, it’s pretty basic.  You gotta have customers and those customers gotta have jobs and decent paychecks.  That’s the problem right now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just In: Judge in Wisconsin blocks Walker’s Union Busting Bill

Posted: March 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: collective bargaining, Domestic Policy | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments

A Wisconsin Judge in Dane County has issued a restraining order to block enforcement of  the Republican effort to end the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public workers.   The judge has ruled that the way the law was pushed through possibly violated the state’s open meetings laws.  She has stopped the enactment of the law until she reviews the merits of the case in terms of the process that was used to pass it.

Judge Maryann Sumi issued the order to temporarily block the law as Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne had requested as part of his lawsuit.She said the order will stop publication until further order of the court. Sumi said that while the order blocks the law’s publication, she said she has no authority to prevent the Legislature from voting on the bill again.The state Department of Justice asked for a stay of the order, but the judge denied the request.The judge said she wasn’t weighing the merits of the law in issuing the order.”What I want to make clear is I make no judgments on merit of legislation,” she said.She said that instead, she was interpreting the state’s open meetings law.

This action prevents the state’s Secretary of State from recording the law.

Sumi’s order will prevent Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law until she can rule on the merits of the case. Dane County Ismael Ozanne is seeking to block the law because he says a legislative committee violated the state’s open meetings law.

Sumi said Ozanne was likely to succeed on the merits.

“It seems to me the public policy behind effective enforcement of the open meeting  law is so strong that it does outweigh the interest, at least at this time, which may exist in favor of sustaining the validity of the (law),” she said.

The judge’s finding – at least for now – is a setback to Republican Gov. Scott Walker and a victory for opponents, who have spent weeks in the Capitol to protest the bill.

Asst. Atty. Gen Steven Means, who was part of the state’s legal team, said after the ruling that “we disagree with it.”

“And the reason they have appellate courts is because circuit court judges make errors and they have in this case.”

Means said the state would “entertain an appeal.”

“If the Legislature decides to go back and re-act on these provisions, they have the right to do that. And we will see what happens,” he said.

Means said he had no idea what the Legislature might do.

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