Category Archives: Social policy

Jon Walker: Roosevelt Institute Abandons Traditional Liberal Health Care Policies For Pete Peterson

By Jon Walker, a senior policy analyst at Firedoglake. Cross posted from Firedoglake.

Worrying about long term deficits with official unemployment over 9 percent and treasury bonds rates at near-record lows is inherently an act of madness. It is the antithesis of both progressive policy and basic logic. Left to their own devices, liberals would relegate reducing the deficit to a very low priority in this economic climate. Of course when you’re a billionaire like Pete Peterson and you’re willing to spend millions promoting deficit hysteria, your can convince “liberals” to play into your deficit fetish at even the most illogical of times. Hence the Peter G. Peterson Foundations 2011 Fiscal Summit.

I’ve berated all the so called “progressive” groups that took part in the Peter G. Peterson Foundation 2011 Fiscal Summit for including health care reform in their deficit reduction proposals, yet totally abandoning the traditional progressive solution: a single payer health care system. If the United States simply adopted a system that was roughly as efficient as France, Finland, Norway, Australia, Denmark, England, or New Zealand, we wouldn’t have a deficit. Yet the clear and demostrable global precedent set by these nations somehow managed to escape inclusion by these leading liberal economic lights.

The Roosevelt Institute’s deficit plan, however, deserves special attention. Of the three plans, it is particularly bad on the issue of health care.

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Is Foreclosure Via Facebook Coming to the US?

I’m about to reveal that I am a hopeless Old Fart, but I don’t understand why anyone other that a public figure uses Facebook. It has been demonstrated that anything on Facebook can and probably will be used against you. If you have a dispute or someone took an obsessive romantic interest in them, it would normally take some doing (like hiring a private detective) to try to find dirt. By making what would have been private information pubic, Facebook greatly lowers the cost of people with bad intentions toward you making your life miserable.

One development overseas that may be coming to the US is using Facebook to send legal notices, such as foreclosure notices. As Bloomberg informs us (hat tip reader Buzz Potamkin), this practice has been accepted by courts in Australia, Canada, and the UK.

This article triggered my “planted story” detector, since the piece kept stressing how there were no privacy issues involved (well, that’s close to tautological given how Facebook works) and had virtually no negative views expressed about this practice being adopted in the US.

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On Fauxgressive Rationalizations of Selling Out to Powerful, Moneyed Backers

I’m surprised that my post, “Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name” has created a bit of a firestorm within what passes for the left wing political blogosphere. It has elicited responses from Andy Rich of the Roosevelt Institute, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal, as well as two groups only mentioned in passing in the piece, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

They all illustrate the famed Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” And so it is not surprising that all of them engaged in straw man attacks and failed to engage the simple point of the post: if you have a clear purpose and vision, you do not engage in activities that represent the polar opposite of what you stand for.

These “the lady doth protest too much” reactions reveal how naked careerism has eroded what little remains of the liberal cause in the US.

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Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name

Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts back in December. While it seems counter-intuitive that a left-leaning organization would support illiberal extensions of corporate power, in fact, that is the role of the DC pet liberal. This dynamic of rent-a-reputation is greased with corporate cash and/or political access. As the entitlement fight comes to a head, it’s worth looking under the hood of the DC think tank scene to see how the Obama administration and the GOP are working to lock down their cuts to social programs.

And so it is that the arch-enemy of Social Security, Pete Peterson, rented out the good name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the reputation of the Center for American Progress, and EPI. All three groups submitted budget proposals to close the deficit and had their teams share the stage with Republican con artist du jour Paul Ryan. The goal of Peterson’s conference was to legitimize the fiscal crisis narrative, and to make sure that “all sides” were represented.

Now this tidy fact is not obvious if you check the Peterson Foundation publicity for its “Fiscal Summit:”

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Michael Hudson: Replacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Soon after the Socialist Party won Greece’s national elections in autumn 2009, it became apparent that the government’s finances were in a shambles. In May 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took the lead in rounding up €120bn ($180 billion) from European governments to subsidize Greece’s unprogressive tax system that had led its government into debt – which Wall Street banks had helped conceal with Enron-style accounting.

The tax system operated as a siphon collecting revenue to pay the German and French banks that were buying government bonds (at rising interest risk premiums). The bankers are now moving to make this role formal, an official condition for rolling over Greek bonds as they come due, and extend maturities on the short-term financial string that Greece is now operating under. Existing bondholders are to reap a windfall if this plan succeeds. Moody’s lowered Greece’s credit rating to junk status on June 1 (to Caa1, down from B1, which was already pretty low), estimating a 50/50 likelihood of default. The downgrade serves to tighten the screws yet further on the Greek government. Regardless of what European officials do, Moody’s noted, “The increased likelihood that Greece’s supporters (the IMF, ECB and the EU Commission, together known as the “Troika”) will, at some point in the future, require the participation of private creditors in a debt restructuring as a precondition for funding support.”

The conditionality for the new “reformed” loan package is that Greece must initiate a class war by raising its taxes, lowering its social spending – and even private-sector pensions – and sell off public land, tourist sites, islands, ports, water and sewer facilities. This will raise the cost of living and doing business, eroding the nation’s already limited export competitiveness. The bankers sanctimoniously depict this as a “rescue” of Greek finances.

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10 Year Real Wage Gains Lower Than During Depression

The New York Times yesterday made the an observation that seems to be lost on Team Obama, that high unemployment levels and second Presidential terms do not go together. We’ve predicted that the Osama bin Laden bounce won’t last long. Bush I, after all, had 91% approval ratings right after the invasion of Iraq and he still lost the reelection thanks to the state of the economy.

Another factor weighing on the collective psyche, and thus voter attitudes, is the inability of most people to get ahead in real economic terms.

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Are Fissures in Europe Worse Than Media Reports Suggest?

Thanks to an alert NC reader, we featured in Links more than a month ago the fact that Denmark, contrary to the spirit of the Eurozone, was implementing border controls. Today, a hand-wringing comment by Peter Spiegel, the Financial Times’ bureau chief in Brussels, describes how sentiment against Eurozone integration has risen among the locals. The near-victory of the nationalist True Finns, regime change in Ireland and Portugal, and demonstrations in Spain, Greece, and Portugal suggest that the citizenry is increasingly unhappy. Spiegel describes the Netherlands as “the California of Europe” and describes in some detail how it opposed the recent €440 billion rescue fund, opposed recent efforts to ntegrate the western Balkans into the EU to i, and demanded reform of immigration policies.

Perhaps I am projecting US tendencies onto the EU, but I see the same signs of elite isolation ther as we have here (in the US, it’s a New York-Washington bubble that includes finance, government officials, and major media).

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How Durable is Trust in Public Institutions?

A well argued and documented post at VoxEU seems glaringly at odds with recent experience in the US. “How the long-gone Habsburg Empire is still visible in Eastern European bureaucracies today,” by Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann looks at the territories formerly occupied by the Habsburg Empire, which had a well run and fairly honest bureaucracy, particularly in contrast to the other major powers that were influential at various points in Eastern Europe (the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia). The authors identified five modern countries in which the Habsburgs had once occupied only a portion of their territory. They limited their analysis to populations living within 200 kilometers of the long-ago imperial border.

Their findings:

Our results suggest that the Habsburg Empire is indeed still visible in the cultural norms and interactions of humans with their state institutions today. Comparing individuals left and right of the long-gone Habsburg border, people living in locations that used to be territory of the Habsburg Empire have higher trust in courts and police. These trust differentials also transform into “real” differences in the extent to which bribes have to be paid for these local public services.

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Why Are Republicans So Keen to Persecute Elizabeth Warren?

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee session today with the Republican’s favorite punching bag, Elizabeth Warren, managed to notch abuse up to a level that is politely described as unseemly or more accurately called Republican Derangement Syndrome.

The fact that Republicans’ last effort to use screechy and mean against Warren failed to deter her has not led them to improve their game. Two months ago, a nasty two hour Congressional hearing with Warren was the culmination of weeks of right wing media attacks, with the Wall Street Journal leading the pack. We noted:

The last time I can recall the Journal becoming quite so unhinged about an individual was over Eliot Spitzer. And since Warren seems pretty unlikely to be found to have similar personal failings, the specter of the right throwing what look to be ineffective punches at her makes for a peculiar spectacle. What is the real aim behind this drama?

The reactions to Warren, both on the right and left, are becoming divorced from reality. She has assumed iconic status as a lone mediagenic figure in the officialdom who reliably speaks out for the average person, a Joan of Arc for the little guy. And she drives the right crazy because she is rock solid competent and plays their game better than they do. She sticks to simple, compelling soundbites and images without the benefit of Roger Ailes and Madison Avenue packaging, and she speaks to an even broader constituency, Americans done wrong by the banks, than they target. No wonder they want to burn her at the stake.

Today’s spectacle had the Republicans looking like idiots who resorted bullying when their initial salvos failed to hit their target.

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Mark Provost: Why the Rich Love Unemployment

By Mark Provost, a freelance writer from Manchester, New Hampshire. He can be reached at gregsplacenh -at- gmail.com. Cross posted from TruthOut.

Christina Romer, former member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, accuses the administration of “shamefully ignoring” the unemployed. Paul Krugman echoes her concerns, observing that Washington has lost interest in “the forgotten millions.” America’s unemployed have been ignored and forgotten, but they are far from superfluous. Over the last two years, out-of-work Americans have played a critical role in helping the richest one percent recover trillions in financial wealth.

Obama’s advisers often congratulate themselves for avoiding another Great Depression – an assertion not amenable to serious analysis or debate. A better way to evaluate their claims is to compare the US economy to other rich countries over the last few years.

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Philip Pilkington: Beyond growth – are we entering a new phase of economic maturity?

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and anti-economist writing from amidst the devastated ruins of Dublin, Ireland

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door – JK Galbraith

What’s the easiest way to embarrass an economist? Okay, that’s a bit of a trick question. After all, economics is a pretty embarrassing profession and there are a million questions you could put to an economist that would likely turn his or her cheeks red. You could, for example, approach your typical ‘academic of ill-repute’ and ask them if they saw the bursting of the US housing bubble coming or the unsustainable debt-overload that accompanied it – yep, that would probably do the trick.

One topic that does cause your average economist a lot of brain-bother, though, is the environment. After all, everyone and their cat cares about the environment these days, but such concern seems irreconcilable with the ‘infinite growth’ assumptions of most economists. It has long been pointed out by environmentalists, concerned citizens and the sane how, if we are to prevent global warming from melting the planet, we have to put some sort of a ceiling on economic growth and industrial development. This is a truly pressing concern – yet it appears that economists and policymakers simply cannot integrate it into their worldview.

But here’s an uplifting thought: what if History is doing our work for us? What if we are already entering a sort of ‘post-growth’ world?

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Guest Post: Self-limited international migration: Insights from the pre-1914 North Atlantic

By Drew Keeling, Department of History, University of Zurich. Cross posted from VoxEU

Mass international migration is inherently controversial. This column looks at how the US immigration policies before 1914 sought to manage mass migration across the North Atlantic. It suggests that, with migration today seemingly neither well-controlled nor well-managed, the managed laissez-faire approach of a century ago is regaining relevance.

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Jamie Dimon Says Banks Are Being Nice to You When They Take Your House

Jamie Dimon has finally managed the difficult feat of making Lloyd Blankfein look good.

When Blankfein said Goldman was “doing God’s work,” as offensive and laughable as that sounds, it’s an arguable position.

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