The party line is that Ben Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as Fed chief is a shoe-in, although he might face an unseemly amount of roughing up, like having to step down briefly if the senators who plan to put a hold on his vote succeed in delaying it beyond the end of January. And then there is also that wee inconvenience that Congress has woken up to the fact that the electorate is seriously unhappy about bailouts without accountability and reform, and the Fed allowed the Treasury to circumvent normal budget approval processed (as Willem Buiter has put it, the Fed acted as a “quasi-fiscal agent” of the Treasury). So a little, perhaps a lot, of curtailment of the Fed’s expanded role is in the offing.
But the sands are shifting against Bernanke. A mere month ago, the idea that he would face a filibuster was inconceivable. Similarly, no one would have thought he would have 30% of the Senate Banking Committee vote against his confirmation.
But what is particularly telling is that sentiment is continuing to erode. From Politico:
Six Republicans and one Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee voted Thursday against Ben Bernanke’s nomination to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve — signaling to some Fed watchers that President Barack Obama’s pick could be in more trouble than previously thought.
“It’s not the foregone conclusion it was a couple of weeks ago,” said Brian Gardner, a bank analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
Two aspects of the two-hour debate that preceded the committee vote struck Gardner as worrisome for Bernanke: the unenthusiastic — even apologetic — tone from some of the senators who voted yes and a dispute over the Fed’s refusal to release documents about the bailout of insurance giant American International Group to senators on the committee.
Sens. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) and David Vitter (R-La.), in particular, complained about the Fed’s lack of transparency. In the case of AIG, some banking committee staffers were allowed access to documents, Bunning said, but individual senators and the public were not allowed to see the information because the Fed said it was “protected.”
That spat could have legs, Gardner said, and if it resonates with a public already fuming at the Fed, it could sway the votes of yes-leaning senators.
Intrade, however, continues to show the Bernanke contract being priced at near-certainty levels. But we must note that that contract is thinly traded, and as Barry Ritholtz has pointed out, prediction markets have not infrequently been spectacularly wrong.
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The party line is that Ben Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as Fed chief is a shoe-in, although he might face an unseemly amount of roughing up, like having to step down briefly if the senators who plan to put a hold on his vote succeed in delaying it beyond the end of January.
Well, judging by his performance on his single-payer amendment, it sounds like all you need to do to get Sanders to fold is tell him his antics are inconvenient to your vactaion schedule, and he’ll cave in.
I’d have played Chicken with that jerk Coburn as well. Ed Harrison has it right, but not broadly enough: EVERY DEM in Congress needs to start being an asshole to the disloyal opposition.
I’ve always enjoyed the irony that the party that professes abhorrence for collective action is better at collective action (and the inverse, which you noted above).
“Two aspects of the two-hour debate that preceded the committee vote struck Gardner as worrisome for Bernanke: the unenthusiastic — even apologetic — tone from some of the senators who voted yes and a dispute over the Fed’s refusal to release documents about the bailout of insurance giant American International Group to senators on the committee.”
It’s the clash of authoritarianism!
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/are_americans_a_broken_people_why_we%27ve_stopped_fighting_back_against_the_forces_of_oppression/?page=entire
In regards to the Alternet article, isn’t that the very reason why conservatives hate people like Martin Luther King and Marx so much? Are not their philosophies, after all, what gave oppressed peoples not only the intellectual framework to question their oppressors’ rationales, but also the hope necessary to rise up against those oppressors.
Conservatives embrace an assumedly “natural” distinction of rich and poor. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, embrace a notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions.
As Hannah Arendt observed in On Revolution:
Marx’s transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term ‘exploitation’, that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a ‘ruling class’ which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.
Likewise, MLK didn’t buy into the conservative conviction that blacks are created inferior by virtue of the color of their skin, making their inferior status “natural.”
As to engendering hope, MLK led people to believe that God is on the side of justice. The secular Marx, on the other hand, espoused an inexorable historical dialectic process that was equally as unstoppable as MLK’s divinity.
And both MLK as well as the followers of Marx argued that it was incumbent upon the oppressed, and not their oppressors, to bring about change.
For an excellent encapsulation of the socialist doctrine, there is probably no better place to look than chapters 28 and 29 of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle:
And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unabridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of the exploiters until they organized…
Personally, I believe it is nonsensical to argue that today’s American middle class is more beaten down and demoralized than blacks or Hispanics were during Jim Crow, or workers were during the days of Upton Sinclair.
What’s the reason you call people “whores”? Is that because you hate them?
Doug
Great stuff, DownSouth. Your historical depth is impressive, always with incisive pertinence to our present predicament—educational, provocative, and entertaining. Much appreciated.
Why continue with the charade by these Senators. Just confirm him and move on. There is no realistic alternative, if he’s not picked, Summers or Yellen would be up and they would not likely be much different. Can only imagine what diaper boy Vittier would suggest, maybe some DC madame.
It’s not about the person Bernanke versus Yellen or someone else, it’s about the conviction of the ruling financial classes that they own government and can determine its actions. Yellen would act differently if she had been nominated and confirmed directly instead of after Bernanke’s defeat.
Behind the curtain,
the wizard steals your future.
Chairman Bernanke.