Would a Progressive Kill for Profit?

In today's NYT, columnist Paul Krugman writes "Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You."

Krugman explores how Trump's de-regulation rampage is giving rise to threats that will accelerate premature deaths among Americans. It's a limited focus piece and I won't get into it.  However it did raise the question of whether many of our leaders have clean hands when it comes to policies that will spread death, misery and dislocation throughout the world.

In Canada, that's an accusation that can attach to most of our political caste of all persuasions. We're a growing petro-state at the very moment when the last thing the world needs is petro-states.

Many of us politically positioned to the left of the Conservative Party of Harper and Scheer fancy ourselves as "progressive." I've found that laurel used in the most vague and flimsy way. Those schooled in the progressive movement would not recognize much of their ideology in Canadian politics today. Perhaps we think of ourselves as progressive neoliberals, a true oxymoron.

Which invites the question, would a progressive kill for profit?

There are lots of ways to kill for profit. We used to be a major exporter of asbestos, continuing even as only the most unscrupulous governments would accept our lethal product. Harper had to be shamed into stopping the asbestos trade and he did not do that willingly.

Yet aren't we doing pretty much the same thing with our exports of thermal coal and bitumen, two huge sources of greenhouse gas emissions that, to put it bluntly, our planet and the species that inhabit it, can no longer bear?

It's not 1980 anymore. We're forty years past that. We know what we're doing. We know what it causes. We know what it portends for our young people and future generations.

For now the worst impacts, that will emerge with far more grotesque clarity during the coming decade, are mainly absorbed by the people of other, more equatorial countries. Little brown people from poor and vulnerable societies that cannot push back against us - for now. Eventually, perhaps sooner than we imagine, our young people and those that have followed them, will have to take their turn to endure what we are bequeathing them.

Tell me, what kind of progressive would knowingly do that? Please, explain to me what is the progressive justification for that? Perhaps it's just me. I never understood progressivism to be a death sentence for anyone. I'm not saying I can't be wrong but that's not my take on it. Is there a new, anthropogenic progressive ethic?

Enlighten me, if you can. But if you can't, please give up the whole conceit of being a progressive if you're going to support the very neoliberal petro-state of Canada and the leaders who drive it.

Progressivism in the early 21st century confronts a reality that didn't exist in the early 20th century. In the earlier days it was a weapon of reform and advancement. But there is much in it that can also serve as a weapon of conservation and protection in this far more dangerous time.

Krugman - Europe Also Won in Yesterday's Greek Bailout Referendum

From my years practicing insolvency law, I was left stunned at the illogic in the demands that the creditors sought to impose on Greece.  The approach made no sense.  They demanded Greece accept a debt load it could never hope to pay off. They essentially wanted the Greek government to mortgage the very future of Greek youth, even those yet unborn.

It doesn't make any difference whether it's an individual, a corporation or a country - when it falls insolvent the best deal for creditors is always a workable deal and that means debt forgiveness, taking a haircut.  If Joe owes you a million dollars but he can only repay it at a hundred dollars a month, you have no more hope of recouping your money than Joe has of paying it.  Sometimes there is no deal.  Companies go under, their assets sold for pennies on the dollar of value. Countries can go in all sorts of predictable and unpredictable ways.

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman writes that yesterday's No vote in Greece was a win not only for the Greek people but also for Europe itself.


...Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.

...In advance of the referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency.

...In the failed negotiations that led up to Sunday’s referendum, the central sticking point was Greece’s demand for permanent debt relief, to remove the cloud hanging over its economy. The troika — the institutions representing creditor interests — refused, even though we now know that one member of the troika, the International Monetary Fund, had concluded independently that Greece’s debt cannot be paid. But will they reconsider now that the attempt to drive the governing leftist coalition from office has failed?

...Unless Greece receives really major debt relief, and possibly even then, leaving the euro offers the only plausible escape route from its endless economic nightmare.

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over. If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

Krugman Gives TPP a Thumbs Down.

New York Times economist and Nobel laureate economist, Paul Krugman, tends to support free trade but even he wants the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, or TPP, dead and buried.

Krugman's big objection is that the deal allows corporations to monopolize intellectual property and will result in monopolized trade, not free trade.

Is this a good thing from a global point of view? Doubtful. The kind of property rights we’re talking about here can alternatively be described as legal monopolies. True, temporary monopolies are, in fact, how we reward new ideas; but arguing that we need even more monopolization is very dubious — and has nothing at all to do with classical arguments for free trade.
 
Now, the corporations benefiting from enhanced control over intellectual property would often be American. But this doesn’t mean that the T.P.P. is in our national interest. What’s good for Big Pharma is by no means always good for America.

The GOP War on Working Class America

Freshmen GOP - 2010

Paul Krugman recently questioned the sanity of Congressional Republicans who, he contends, have inflicted such a level of dysfunctionality on the federal government as to leave America ungovernable.

Robert Reich, however, seems method in the madness of the "Party of No."

The real answer, I think, is they and their patrons want unemployment to remain high and job-growth to sputter. Why? Three reasons:

First, high unemployment keeps wages down. Workers who are worried about losing their jobs settle for whatever they can get — which is why hourly earnings keep dropping. The median wage is now 4 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery. Low wages help boost corporate profits, thereby keeping the regressives’ corporate sponsors happy.

Second, high unemployment fuels the bull market on Wall Street. That’s because the Fed is committed to buying long-term bonds as long as unemployment remains high. This keeps bond yields low and pushes investors into equities — which helps boosts executive pay and Wall Street commissions, thereby keeping regressives’ financial sponsors happy.

Third, high unemployment keeps most Americans economically fearful and financially insecure. This sets them up to believe regressive lies — that their biggest worry should be that “big government” will tax away the little they have and give it to “undeserving” minorities; that they should support low taxes on corporations and wealthy “job creators;” and that new immigrants threaten their jobs. 

What Reich is claiming is that the House and Senate Republicans are waging a covert war on working class Americans, blue and white collar, - the masses - for the direct financial benefit of their richest of the rich patrons - the few.

Does Reich's take sound extreme to you?  Maybe you've got a better explanation for the insanity Krugman describes as a willful effort to render America ungovernable.

There's a coup underway in America, one that will oust democracy and install a fascist corporatism in its place.  Congressional Republicans are the spear carriers of the plotters and, so far at least, they appear to be winning.

For a deeper insight on the coup that has befallen America, read Paul Craig Roberts' "In the Grip of Tyranny."

Krugman - Sexism and the Federal Reserve

Misogyny in the U.S. goes straight to the top, even right into the Federal Reserve.

Paul Krugman shines a light on the sexist campaign going on to undermine the eminently qualified Janet Yellen's shot at taking over the Federal Reserve when Ben Bernanke steps down as chairman.

Last week, The New York Sun published an editorial attacking Ms. Yellen titled “The Female Dollar.” The editorial took it for granted that the Fed has been following disastrously inflationary monetary policies for years, even though actual inflation is at a 50-year low. And it warned that things would get even worse if the dollar were to become merely “gender-backed.” I am not making this up.

True, The Sun is a marginal publication, with strong gold-bug tendencies, and nobody would pay much attention if the rest of the right had ignored or distanced itself from that editorial. In fact, however, The Wall Street Journal immediately followed up with its own editorial along the same lines, in the course of which it approvingly quoted The Sun piece, female dollar and all. 

The other campaign against Ms. Yellen has been subtler, involving repeated suggestions — almost always off the record — that she lacks the “gravitas” to lead the Fed. What does that mean? Well, suppose we were talking about a man with Ms. Yellen’s credentials: distinguished academic work, leader of the Council of Economic Advisers, six years as president of the San Francisco Fed, a record of working effectively with colleagues at the Board of Governors. Would anyone suggest that a man with those credentials was somehow unqualified for office?

Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.

Is Krugman America's New Revere?

It was encouraging to read the top columnist at The New York Times sounding the alarm at the decline of democracy in America at the hands of the emerging oligarchy.  Paul Krugman is absolutely right.  Union busting in America isn't really an economic issue, it's political.  It's a vehicle for the transfer of political power from the middle class to America's emerging aristocracy.

America is a nation where the powerful have turned on their own people.  Income inequality has been their weapon of choice.  The gap between rich and poor has never been as wide and what lies between has turned stagnant.

A vibrant, robust middle class is the beating heart of any viable democracy.  It operates as a buffer against the excesses of the right and the left alike.   It is the progressive center.  The stronger it is, the broader it becomes.   It once spanned the gamut from unionized workers through white collar occupations and on into the professions.  It was the middle class that assured the prosperity of the middle class.  It was the middle class that served as the vehicle for social mobility.  It was the ladder that people could climb to better themselves, to lift themselves out of poverty, sometimes to even become wealthy.  It obviously had to be crushed.

And then came along the crushers, guys like Mulroney and Reagan, the architects of globalization and outsourcing.   They talked about freedom, the free movement of capital.  They lied.  Capital always moved freely.  The snake oil they were selling had very little to do with capital and almost everything to do with surrendering our markets to capital using cheap labour abroad.  It was about liberating their own from having to employ the same people they needed to buy their products.  You're not going to sell a hundred dollar pair of sneakers to a guy who makes two bucks a day and has five mouths to feed.   Globalization was always about surrendering sovereignty over our markets, the elixir that makes outsourcing so terribly rewarding - for the very few.

Outsourcing led to wage stagnation for America's working classes, blue and white collar.  Wages stagnated despite decades of steadily increasing productivity.  More women entered the work force just to keep the family afloat.  More parents took second jobs.   And, when that no longer kept them afloat in their middle class lifestyles they turned to debt.  A nation became insane enough to believe that their houses were bank machines.   The middle class was sinking without even realizing it.

So now they're turning on government unions.  I watched an interview with the governor of New Jersey who wanted to scrap the state employees' pension plan.  It was the usual, "we're broke and can't pay it" crap.  Later it came out that for something like eleven out of the previous thirteen years, the state had defaulted on its obligation to contribute to the employees' pension fund.   That was money the state owed these people.  They took that money and spent it on something else and then blamed the workers for their pension crisis.  Those awful pinkos and their "entitlements."

Chris Hedges has a new book out, "The Death of the Liberal Class," in which he argues that American liberalism has been dead for almost a century.  He maintains that while modern liberals talk a good game they always give in to right wing and corporate pressure.   Quite frankly that sounds like the recipe for what passes for liberalism in Canada, especially big "L" liberals, in the 21st century.  Faux liberalism today that nitpicks about day care and arts funding while ducking entirely the critical issues confronting our country is just what Hedges is talking about.  But I digress.

A further, chilling account of the transformation quietly underway in America is documented by Andrew Bacevich in his book, "The New American Militarism."
Bacevich is  no pinko.  He's a retired, career US Army officer turned professor.  He contends that the American republic cannot survive the new American militarism.  He chronicles the marriage of the US military with neo-conservative ideology, religious fundamentalism, and the military/industrial/corporate warfighting complex into an entity that now even challenges its civilian masters.  Bacevich laments the death of the "citizen soldier" and argues that the historic bond between the army and the civilian population has been broken.  Even more troubling, Bacevich explores how military force has come to displace diplomacy as the main instrument of American foreign policy.

What drives a country riddled with debt at national, state, municipal and individual levels to spend more on its military than every other nation combined?  What conceivable democratic purpose can that possibly serve?  Today's Republicans are demanding that Obama cut $60-billion from his government's budget.   They could get that by simply trimming a mere 8 per cent from the Pentagon's bloated budget.   This year the Pentagon is expecting just under $700-billion and that doesn't include the cost of the war in Afghanistan or military operations in Iraq.   It doesn't include the military aspects of Homeland Security nor does it include the cost of America's nuclear arsenal which is picked up by the Department of Energy.

When you put Krugman's warning atop the alarms already sounded by people like Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson and Howard Zinn it's pretty clear that its not just Arab countries that are overdue for a revolution.   Then again, as I've written so often before, we do appear to be entering the Century of Revolution.

Trouble Making Sense of Arizona Atrocity? Let Paul Krugman Put It in Perspective.

New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman has written what, to me at least, seems the most coherent explanation of the Arizona shootings and America's "Climate of Hate."   Here are the guts of it:

there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.


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.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

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.

Krugman Heralds the Arrival of the "Third Depression"

Steve Harper hosted the G8/G20 chinwag intent on pushing one policy - a pledge of halving member deficits by 2013. And he got his way.

However a real economist (Princeton professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman believes what we watched over the past three days was the launch of the "Third Depression."

"...As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

...We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

...Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.

But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

...It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

Krugman concludes with this scathing indictment of Harper's deficit slashing policy:

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again."

Who Do You Trust - Krugman or Harper?

Decisions, decisions. Which economist do you trust - Stephen Harper or Paul Krugman? Hint- you have to pick one because they have two completely irreconcilable takes on the global economic crisis.

Hmmm - let me see. Krugman is an economics professor at Princeton, a PhD and all that. He holds the Nobel Prize in economics. He warned all and anyone who would listen that the world was heading for a massive economic recession at least a couple of years in advance (see his book The Great Unravelling). He knew just why his country's economy would crater. And now he's warning anyone who'll listen that prematurely curbing stimulus spending will send the global economy spinning straight back into the toilet.

On the other hand... Steve Harper got a master's degree in economics from the University of Calgary. Steve went straight from that into becoming a political wonk - never worked a day in his life as an actual economist. It seems Steve didn't get a Nobel Prize or, for that matter, any other prize in economics. Once he got into power, Steve wasted no time beginning to implement the very economic madness Krugman was warning about at the time. Steve also wasted no time in defunding the national treasury. Steve didn't see the recession coming. He even said no one did (apparently Steve doesn't read the New York Times). Thanks only to his inability to dismember the fiscal prudence of his Liberal predecessors, Steve's government weathered the global meltdown relatively unscathed. And, unlike doctor Krugman, Steve is waving a ridiculously smug finger at G20 leaders to scrap stimulus spending and cut their deficits in half by 2013.

Krugman says don't cut now. Wait until your economies are recovered enough to bear the consequences of cuts. Steve says go ahead boys, start cutting and cut deep, just go for it.

Oh, I don't know. Which one do you think is right?

McQuaig Outs Harper - Fiscal Charlatan

In the industrialized world, Canada stands best positioned to weather out the looming recession. And, as Linda McQuaig recounts in today's Toronto Star, we can be thankful that Harper didn't have more time to undermine Canada's fiscal strength:

"Harper's resistance to European calls for tighter regulations is ironic, since he has the luxury of presiding over a country that's been spared the worst of the financial meltdown, largely because of the Canadian tradition of tighter domestic financial regulations.

This has allowed Harper to ride out the current financial storm politically unscathed, even gaining re-election in the middle of it.

In fact, although Harper's record on this has received little attention, his government had started to push Canada down the dangerous road toward looser financial regulation.

In its first budget in 2006, the Harper government changed the rules in ways that effectively opened up the Canadian mortgage market to U.S. insurers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty noted that these "new players" would bring "greater choice and innovation" to the Canadian mortgage market. Unfortunately, they did just that. They introduced risky products – like mortgages amortized over 40 years with little or no down-payments.

The new mortgages quickly caught on. With their lower monthly payments, they made houses seem more affordable. In reality, however, they dramatically increased the cost of a home, roughly tripling it.

As the implosion of the U.S. housing market provided a vivid example of the pitfalls of looser mortgage regulations, Flaherty finally intervened last summer, tightening CMHC's rules."

Harper, a supposed economist, didn't see this recession coming. He ought to have seen it. He could have consulted his fellow economist Paul Krugman or simply read Krugman's columns in the New York Times. But no, the Boy Genius, was too busy stuck in his rancid ideology to bother looking up and noticing the obvious. He was more concerned with defunding the federal government than bolstering its strength to withstand this recession.

No matter what some Liberals may say, we ought to be very grateful indeed for the guiding hand of Paul Martin in the post-Mulroney years. We'll be reaping the benefits of that guidance in the turbulent near future. And it's all no thanks to the stooge who's running the show at the moment.

Krugman Explains Meltdown - More Coming?

For years, the Right has treated Paul Krugman as though he was Satan's retarded child. What was his mortal sin? He outlined the inevitability of the very meltdown that's happening now. Ooopsie!

So here is the Princeton economist and New York Times' columnists insight into where this is heading:

"...banks are normally able to borrow from each other at rates just slightly above the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bills. But Thursday morning, the average interest rate on three-month interbank borrowing was 3.2 percent, while the interest rate on the corresponding Treasuries was 0.05 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

This flight to safety has cut off credit to many businesses, including major players in the financial industry — and that, in turn, is setting us up for more big failures and further panic. It’s also depressing business spending, a bad thing as signs gather that the economic slump is deepening.

And the Federal Reserve, which normally takes the lead in fighting recessions, can’t do much this time because the standard tools of monetary policy have lost their grip. Usually the Fed responds to economic weakness by buying up Treasury bills, in order to drive interest rates down. But the interest rate on Treasuries is already zero, for all practical purposes; what more can the Fed do?

Well, it can lend money to the private sector — and it’s been doing that on an awesome scale. But this lending hasn’t kept the situation from deteriorating.

...government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.

Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.

Thursday night Ben Bernanke and Mr. Paulson met with Congressional leaders to discuss a “comprehensive approach” to the problem.
We don’t know yet what that “comprehensive approach” will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system. It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control. And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed."

Now remember, it's the same clown car full of pols and regulators who allowed this to occur in the first place. And they're going to fix it? Remember back when we used to envy American taxpayers?

Hey, all you Right-Wingers out there. Remind us how great your free market economic theories are. I can't seem to remember how that goes.