Author: rootless2

Previously published here.

I’m inclined to award this to Michael Tomasky for his “Fire Holder”  article in which he gives the following hilarious advice to President Obama:

And if Obama permits these things to linger, they’ll poison the situation on Capitol Hill, which hardly needs any more poisoning, and the substantive bills he wants to pass will be at risk because the GOP base will be that much more intolerant of any Republicans voting for anything Obama favors.

OH MY! Don’t “poison the situation” on Capital Hill or else the GOP will start filibustering everything in sight, run hundreds of phony investigations, try to repeal Obamacare nonstop, make strenuous efforts to sabotage the economy – by golly you might even get to a situation where a Republican Congressman yells out an insult during the State of the Union address, maybe “YOU LIE”.   For God’s sake, the GOP may become so angry and extreme it will steal elections or start wars for no reason. Please President Obama, preserve the present mood on the Hill so your “substantive bills” will be seriously considered by Boehner, Cantor, and Ryan, not to mention Steve King and Louis Gohmert. Michael Tomasky’s world – where Republicans are reasonable.

Nearly as good as this counterfactual flight of weepy fantasy is Tomasky’s reasoning for firing Holder

And so the subpoena—extremely far-reaching as these things go, and possibly sought in violation of the guidelines governing such action.

Oh my! A totally legal subpoena that was “extremely far reaching” (something Tomasky knows without actually knowing how far reaching it was) that was possibly in violation of guidelines! Guidelines, no less. That’s a stunning indictment isn’t it.  Well, the President better take Mr. Tomasky’s advice and dump Holder for this possible guideline violation before the GOP gets all pissy and starts blocking his nominations – because God knows we’d hate to go into the next election without a strong AG to defend the voting rights act. Oh, wait.

But then there’s Charles Pierce, hopping frantically from foot to foot as if he’s just finished drinking beer at his favorite bar through a Celtics loss  only to find out that  the men’s room key has been lost.

This isn’t hard. This is what made Egil (Bud) Krogh famous. This is what got people sent to jail in the mid-1970s. This is the Plumbers, all over again, except slightly more formal this time, and laundered, disgracefully, even more directly through the Department Of Justice

In 2013, year to date, Treasury has received additional income of $1.5 billion from the PPIFs. As a result, Treasury has now
fully recovered its original investment of $18.6 billion in the PPIP program – plus a positive return to date of $111 million.
Future debt, equity and interest payments will provide an additional positive return for taxpayers.
http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/reports/Documents/PPIP%20Report%20-20130130.
pdf

Here’s Black, and the “crap” he refers to is my comment here that his analysis didn’t make any sense.

The issue isn’t that they’re worthless, the issue is that they aren’t worth nearly as much as the financial institutions are pretending they’re worth. Sellers have a huge incentive to not sell at lower prices because lower prices will potentially reveal that they’re insolvent/essentially bankrupt. As for this comment (crap, heading into Someone On The Internet Is Wrong territory), the reason that the big players can make money while the gov’t loses money is because of the no recourse loans, and the asymmetric upside/downside of the Geithner plan. They’re buying shitpile mostly with gov’t loans, and if there’s money to be made they and the gov’t benefit. But if the asset is shit, they don’t have to pay back the loan, just hand over the asset. All this encourages institutions to overpay, so we get to pretend shitpile isn’t so shitty until the gov’t eats the losses. – See more at: http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2010/1/5/11916/80154#sthash.Ti5SFS20.dpuf

Thanks god that the progressive media is not made up, like the old media, of a bunch of touchy prima-donas who can never admit error.

Previously published at the People’s View.

Mike Konzcal’s contribution to the world of Obama condescension  appears (where else?) in The Nation and takes the standard form of a finger wagging lecture as if from an exasperated teaching assistant to a particularly dim undergraduate.
There’s an implicit presumption in these lectures that Barack Obama stumbled into the Presidency via some kind of affirmative action plan -oddly, exactly what the far right believes as well.  And
this offensive assumption is often accompanied by  a peculiarly limited understanding of economics and of the political process and some very slapdash, shoddy reporting. Here’s Konzcal:

In the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama stated that he
would freeze 2011 discretionary spending even though unemployment was
projected to be above 8 percent, 

The President put it a little differently:

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years.
[..]
Now, most of the cuts and savings I’ve proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12 percent of our budget.

How many of Konzcal’s readers know that the President proposed freezing 12% of the budget: not Medicare, not Medicaid, not health care reform, not Social Security, not Pell Grants, and certainly not spending on energy or education? “The President proposed freezing 12% of the budget” kind of lacks the impact of Konzcal’s formulation, but has the virtue of being accurate.

Near the beginning of the President’s speech we find:

Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

So the President proposed first a targeted stimulus and industrial policy and then a long term emphasis on balancing the budget. There are good economic and good  political reasons for the Presidents approach. The political value should be obvious:  the President has taken the budget balancing and “entitlements” story that the  GOP has successfully used to bludgeon the Democrats for decades and turned it into a debate on why the rich and wealthy corporations have been allowed escape paying their share.  The failure of the “left” to understand this not all that subtle strategy is not surprising considering their usual level of political acumen.

Here’s Konzcal:

[President Obama] said, if “we don’t take
meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets,
increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery,” which
“would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes.”
This conventional wisdom gave the Republicans the leverage they needed
to destroy any pro-active economic agenda.

If this means what it says then it’s a claim that if only the President had made a different speech the Republicans would not have had “the leverage they needed to destroy any pro-active economic agenda”.  To me, that seems the like the argument of a  “political rookie” -to borrow Spandan’s phrase –  an academic who does not have the faintest glimmer of understanding of how to persuade or how power works.  The Republicans were not going to be won over in any scenario – their agenda of obstruction is not a secret and their command of the media and corporate sponsorship gives them a strong platform. It’s possible that Konzcal has a case to make, but that would require polling data and political knowledge and a strong argument – no evidence of any of those can be found in his article. FDR found it impossible to implement a full Keynsian recovery until he had a world war to fight, but Konzcal, like practically every other center left economist thinks it would be simple for Obama if he just, you know, made a tough speech or maybe some recess appointments. That’s the first of three big opportunities the President, according to Graduate Assistant Konzcal has neglected to turn in – magicking away GOP leverage with the right speech!

Here’s Konzcal on the second error.

President Obama has shown less interest in monetary policy [than the Sainted FDR] , reappointing
 the moderate Republican Ben Bernanke to office and leaving seats open
for years.

The bolded phrase (my bolding) is about seats on the Federal Reserve Board.  How many readers of The Nation, reading Mr. Konzcal’s account would
know that the President has appointed 3 of the 5 members of the board,
plus Mr. Bernanke and that one of his nominees, the Nobel Prize winner
Peter Diamond withdrew from consideration after 14 months of GOP
filibuster? It’s apparently not possible that the President thinks it better strategy to try to place a few board members in long term positions instead of having a some ephemeral appointments-  his failure to follow Konzcal’s impatient demand for recess appointments indicates “less interest”. But what would those recess appointees have done if the President had turned in his homework on time and paid attention in class?

At the end of 2011, key liberals like Christina Romer and Paul Krugman
started talking about a new way of doing Federal Reserve policy based on
 “nominal GDP targeting,” which would allow for higher inflation in weak
 economic times. Meanwhile, Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles
Evans put out a plan to allow 3 percent inflation while unemployment is
above 7 percent. These are good ideas; the administration could put them
 into practice by filling vacancies with appointees who understand their
 value.

“Nominal GDP targeting” turns out to be this spectacular policy where the Federal Reserve bank buys more bonds on the open market (like it has been doing for 3 years) and also – buckle on your seatbelt – says it wants inflation at say 3%! There you go, the powerful, liberal/left economic policy we’ve been deprived of by the President’s poor behavior is the Federal Reserve bank doing more of what it has been doing and also saying something mild about inflation. That’s a policy, by the way, that the great Keynes himself said would never work. It’s intended to get financial institutions to stop investing in treasury bonds (because interest rates on them will drop as the FRB buys them) and be so flush with cash that they are forced to make productive investments. But we know that the problem is not a lack of cash: US companies are sitting on trillions. The problem is money managers do not want to invest in building factories or hiring workers when they can invest in speculation. We recently found out that the investment managers at supposedly cautious TIAA were so desperate for places to get returns on their cash that they bought bonds paying 6% interest from M.F. Global, a company leveraged 40/1 in a completely wild speculation on European debt – yet our liberal/left econo pundits have not been able to wrap their heads around it.

The third and final missed opportunity is to prosecute the banks for foreclosing because allowing more Americans to stay in homes that are financially underwater (with mortgages bigger than the market value of the home) is going to create more jobs in some unspecified way.

Konzcal concludes:

There are ways forward; it is just a question of whether the administration is prepared to take them.

But in reality, none of the proposals he advances has a chance of creating millions of jobs. None of them. The obvious way to improve the economy is to push the GOP out of the House and strengthen the Democrats in the Senate so that Conservadems cannot work with the GOP to sabotage Democratic policy initiatives. How the incessant and poorly thought out bitching about the President is going to get us there, however, is not something I can understand.

Cross posted at ThePeople’s View.

Forty years after the Powell memo outlined a plan for right wing power in America, the permanent Republican majority is in sight. The packed Supreme Court seems ready to invalidate the voting rights act to protect successful gerrymandering that has boosted the GOP to control of the House of Representatives.  Reagan and the two Bushes loaded the public with debt and damaged the functioning of government, perhaps permanently. The press is on board and works overtime to sell right wing ideology to a public that has seen its access to education systematically devastated. The reverses that saw first Nancy Pelosi take over the House of Representatives and then Barack Obama win an unlikely campaign for President are being addressed via Citizens united, voter suppression, and an intensified PR campaign. Fortunately for the side of justice and truth, the American Left is ready to ride into battle and – complain about the wording in President Obama’s speeches.

Like vigilant middle managers with not much to do or academics who find their pupils don’t really deserve them, left pundits eagerly turn on “track comments” and set to work on the poor effort submitted by the confused black guy, hired via affirmative action no doubt.

Today’s Exhibit A, sadly, is our president, who repeatedly calls for  “shared sacrifice” in resolving the economic crisis and the related  fiscal deficit. Though a call for shared sacrifice, in the hands of  idiot pollsters, tests well at the level of civic platitude, in these  economic times a Democrat should never simply call for shared sacrifice. – Bob Kuttner  

Tsk, Tsk. It’s so exasperating to try to tutor this guy. Mr. Kuttner tries to find reason to to hope: “On Friday, at Obama’s most recent press conference, I thought I detected a learning curve”,  and “if you are inclined to cut Obama a lot of slack, you might blame the  speechwriters and the likelihood that different handlers prepped him for  the Friday press conference“. But, really, one must have standards and Mr. Kuttner is forced to give the President a D-  and conclude he lacks an “inner compass”. By the way, this is how Franklin Roosevelt put it:

I know the American farmer, the American workman, and the American businessman. I know   that they will gladly embrace this economy and equality of sacrifice-satisfied that it is   necessary for the most vital and compelling motive in all their lives-winning through to   victory.

He didn’t know jack about communication either. And Paul Krugman spots the President using the household budget metaphor in the budget debate! In a note titled: “Barack Herbert Hoover Obama” he writes:

This is truly a tragedy: the great progressive hope (well, I did warn  people) is falling all over himself to endorse right-wing economic  fallacies.

My Goodness, Obama is using the wrong metaphor! Didn’t he read the style guide? It’s right there on page 43 – “don’t compare the government budget to a family budget”.

Because faced with a highly organized, highly ideological right wing that has been building organization and digging into power for 40 years, it’s imperative that people with no experience in elections or expertise in public marketing  go out and lecture the President on his wording in the most condescending and demeaning fashion possible.  John L. Lewis must be smiling in his grave at such tactical brilliance.

A friend sent an email with a number of the standard complaints liberals have about President Obama and, although I knew it wouldn’t work, I sent back some factual corrections. The response was “those sound like excuses”. Marketing works and the goal of of consumer marketing is to produce an emotional reaction that feels more authentic than boring facts.  Since Roger Aisles managed Nixon’s campaign, Republican marketing has zeroed in on associating Democrats with “weak”, “untrustworthy/unreliable”, and either “effeminate” or “bitchy” depending on the gender of the target. Republicans on the other hand are tough, strong, decisive, manly or desirable. In the last couple of years the Republicans have made use of blogs and social media as well as the “alternative media” to  pitch this story as “criticism from the left” or “principled opposition”. So in addition to Maureen Dowd  and Paul Krugman of the Times referring to the President as “Obambi” and “this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular”,  respectively, DailyKos writes  “President grovelling beaten lump Obama  still believes in unicorns“, and FireDogLake tells us about “further spineless capitulation”.  Once the brand is established, it is automatic and self-reinforcing and immune to “excuses”.

Although President Obama seems to have faced down and fended off a very aggressive Republican attack via the budget process, the impression of capitulation has been sold so well that many people will never have a clear idea of what happened. What most readers will remember is “completely caved” and not the grudging later admission “So given political realities, this deal is probably less bad than it  otherwise could have been, and at least in my view, it’s better than  shutting the government down.”   Of course the progressive blogs rarely even admit error.

Now that we have the details of last Friday’s budget compromise, and now that we know that President Obama clearly out-played the Republicans in every aspect, will the very serious media and the pants-pissing Professional Left apologize or walk-back their narrative of cave-in and capitulation?

I wouldn’t count on it, even though it’s painfully obvious that a narrative was chosen to run with before anyone actually knew what was included in the bill.

The narrative is chosen and the facts are not only ignored, but made irrelevant. The Nation magazine provided startlingly sharp example of how this works in an article in which President Obama and his main legislative aide were repeatedly castigated for supposedly dishonest, weak, cowardly backing away from the promise to push Congress to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. What is so impressive about this account is that it was written after the President delivered on the promise.
Ari Berman who wrote The Nation piece and some of his sources feel betrayed by what they perceive as a weak and dishonest Administration and the fact that the Administration delivered what it promised is irrelevant. And then the Nation article becomes a source itself as Joan Walsh in Salon cites it as evidence. Anyone who reads Ms. Walsh’s story without starting out deeply skeptical of Ms. Walsh, will find more reason to believe what “everyone says”. Once your branding campaign is folklore, you win.

The influence of this “criticism from the left” is magnified because it perfectly complements the campaign the Republicans carry out in the mainstream media and on Fox, but it spreads virally via influenced media figures, social media, and person to person. When the RNC  writes

<center>In His Speech Tomorrow, Obama Will Avoid The Details Just Like He Has Avoided Leading On Fiscal Reform </center&gt

OBAMA’S SPEECH WILL BE SHORT ON SPECIFICS, AS USUAL
http://www.gop.com/index.php/news/comments/just_another_vague_speech#ixzz1JLbG62v9

and the Washington Post writes

Obama Has Been “Mostly AWOL” On The “Big Ideological Budget Discussions.” “They’re also talking about the big, ideological budget discussions that must occur in the future. `There are going to be I think very sharply contrasting visions in terms of where we should move the country,’ Obama said. `That’s a legitimate debate to have.’ Really? So where has the president been in that debate? Mostly AWOL, so far as I can tell.”

Read more: http://www.gop.com/index.php/news/comments/just_another_vague_speech#ixzz1JLdT4Pbg

(note the source)
And then “progressive” blogger Digby responds to the WAPO story with

So this is it:

Obama turns to his bipartisan deficit commission’s blueprint for reducing debt

Keep in mind that there was no deficit commission report. They couldn’t reach the required consensus. I’m guessing Obama figures he can get this one through the way Clinton got NAFTA. I guess we’ll see.

and here’s a sample of what Digby’s always furious commentators come up with

Actually, Obama doesn’t so much engage in kabuki as he engages in one coy striptease after another.  Keep ’em confused, bamboozled, and guessing seems to be his motto.
…
The reason you can’t say where he stands and what he thinks is because Obama has no core principles.  I know it’s hard to believe, in this day and age, but unfortunately it’s true.  The only thing he believes in is himself.
….
Voila! The Dem/GOP collusion with the financiers pulling the strings gets what it wants. Mission accomplished! And Obama’s meta-kabuki–of feigning to oppose the kabuki of politics while in fact doing just that–is just the ticket for the low information voters (“independents”).

So the conveyor belt carries the narrative from the RNC to the media to the blogs and to the commentators who retell the story all over the net and to anyone else they know.  The details are different: the RNC is unhappy that Obama is imposing socialist taxes and the “progressives” hate that he’s giving up all taxes to allow the rich to keep every penny, but the underlying theme of the unreliable, weak, dishonest Democratic President is the same. And it’s been the same since WWII hero George McGovern was made to look like a coward compared to Dick Nixon and Jimmy Carter was mocked for his sweaters and that killer rabbit. What’s changed is that the Republicans now also use all the tools of the net and modern undercover marketing. But here we are. Barack Obama who gave up an opportunity for a quiet life of wealth (like several of his Harvard Law classmates who have become absurdly wealthy) in order to take a job where millions of unhinged armed psychos dream of shooting him, is lambasted as a coward by people who never face a bigger danger than carpal tunnel syndrome. And Barack Obama who managed to get elected President against all odds is presented as naive and politically ignorant.

Generally, inconvenient facts that might cause the illusion to flicker are suppressed. For example:

• Both Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders sided with the Republicans to forbid the Administration from closing Guantanamo.
• The much criticized health care reform bill was hailed by Oakland Congresswoman Barbara Lee as being an accomplishment as significant as the passage of the Civil Rights acts. Barbara Lee, who was the only member of Congress brave enough to vote against authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan was a widely cited authority in progressive media until President Obama was inaugurated.
• Progressive Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown joined Republican efforts to make the budget bill a hostage for choking the EPA – as a favor for Southern Ohio’s miners and power plants

In fact, as WSY commentator Aleth noted, the critique is very light on specifics. Consider Krugman’s complaint about the budget deal: not only didn’t he know what was in the deal, but he never bothered to compare year to year Federal budgets to each other to see that even the cuts he imagined were taking place were minor. He certainly didn’t appear to know what the coal state Democrats were up to. But he did confidently explain that the President was a weak negotiator who lacks leadership.

There was a rare failure of the system last week on MSNBC when Ed Schultz (Republican until 2000, he says) was (unbelievably) hosting a panel on the status of black America. We got to see Republican PR hack Robert Traynham express his deep and sorrowful concern so many people think the President is failing to lead, Ed agreed, Cornell West chimed in to retransmit that concern as a left-wing rant against “plutocrats”, and then a woman whose only claim to fame is that she said on TV that she was tired of defending the President agreed. The perfection of the conveyor belt: Republican hack, prompted by media guy, to left-wing diatribe, to concerned citizen was interrupted briefly by Al Sharpton who had the bad manners to bring some real into this nonsense.

Rev. Sharpton just asked Professor West why well known academics were not then stepping up to this leadership void themselves. The question  punctures the whole balloon of “progressive” anger that is used to disguise the conveyor belt. Because even if all the complaints of the progressive critics were true, their response is a giveaway. If the President is too weak to make the case, what is attacking the President supposed to accomplish. Can one imagine MLK saying that because President Kennedy was too weak and evasive to support the civil rights movement that the civil rights movement should just spend the next 2 years attacking Kennedy? Union leaders were often critical of President Roosevelt (not that you would know it from the fake history progressives seem to prefer), but they went out and organized and led strikes. Republican marketing is that the Democrats are too weak to get anything done and that Republicans are the strong. What possible advantage can sincere progressives gain from agreeing with that?

We might have a real chance to reach voters who are freaked out by what  Walker, Kasich, and Snyder are doing.  If they click over to the blogs  that are “progressive/liberal/whatever” blogs and see these people  calling Obama weak, irrelevant, a sellout, blah blah blah, why the hell  would they want to join our side?  Our side is a fucking mess.  I don’t  even want to be on our side sometimes.
(blogger ABL )

Previously posted here.

Crossposted People’s View.

Glen Hurowitz is providing a great example of how the “professional left” works hard to support Republicans like Joe Barton. Mr. Hurowitz who is a “senior fellow” at the Center for International Policy wrote to me on Twitter:

Dems can’t win if nobody trusts them to stand up for clean air and water, jobs, values they ran on

and the body of his work is a shabby and dishonest effort to paint Democrats in general and President Obama in particular as untrustworthy on exactly those issues. Here’s Hurowitz in Grist magazine:

Indeed, as recently as Wednesday, the Associated Press had reported that Obama was insisting that congressional Democrats swallow rollbacks to EPA’s authority to crack down on climate emissions, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and Chesapeake Bay pollution as the price for passing a budget deal

What Hurrowitz neglects to mention is that the White House denied that report, that the report was written by an AP writer who Media Matters notes has produced dubious pro-Republican reporting in the past and that Grist itself had retracted the story the day before (see this for more). Hurowitz also neglected to explain that the EPA was facing attack from people like  Sherrod Brown as well as from Republicans – his story was that Obama was forcing a reluctant Congress to cave in to Republican demands and no inconvenient data needed to be provided to readers.

Meanwhile the Environmental Defense Fund asks people to  call Congress

Take Action: Support Tough New Mercury and Air Toxics Standards

If you live anywhere in the United States, chances are, you are being exposed to highly toxic mercury, acid gases, and heavy metals spewed from America’s coal-fired power plants every year.

These life-threatening emissions have NEVER been limited by the EPA… UNTIL NOW.

So Obama’s EPA under Lisa Jackson, a black woman who seems to be invisible to a certain group of white male “environmentalists” for some reason, takes aggressive action to protect the environment and Mr. Hurowitz asks for a primary challenger:

I wish Ed Markey would challenge Obama in the primaries. Passionate, courageous, and green – everything Obama isn’t. (Hurowitz on Twitter today)

When the Administration proposes strong environmental regulations and Congress tries to override, you’d expect environmentalists to attack Congress and defend the Administration just as the EDF is doing and you’d expect polluters to attack the Administration and try to obscure the role of Congress to give allies some cover. Hmmm.
But this oddly reversed approach is not new for Hurowitz.
Here’s Hurowitz in Grist the week before with an equally bogus argument

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday an enormous expansion in coal mining that threatens to increase U.S. climate pollution by an amount equivalent to more than half of what the United States currently emits in a year
[…]
In other words, despite his administration’s rhetorical embrace of clean energy, Obama is effectively using modest wind and solar investments as cover for a broader embrace of dirty fuels. It’s the same strategy BP, Chevron, and other major polluters use: tout modest environmental investments in multi-million dollar PR campaigns, while putting the real money into fossil fuel development.

In 2005 the United States mined 1.1 billion short tons of coal – about a billion tons a year.

The four leases, next to existing strip mines in the Powder River Basin, total 758 million tons and will take between 10 and 20 years to mine.

So, over 15 years this “enormous expansion” will amount to under 5% of annual production (Powder River coal is low sulfer so using it to replace Appalachian mountain removed coal reduces acid rain). Meanwhile the “modest wind and solar” investments have produced 15GW of new wind production already and record growth of solar power and the incentives to burn coal for electricity are being reduced by such things as the EPA regulations mentioned above and restrictions on mountaintop removal that the Administration has also embraced despite opposition from key Senate allies. Undoubtedly Hurowitz will be there in 2012 to tut-tut about the lack of enthusiasm for Democrats from environmentalists and young people as if his fingerprints were not all over the marketing campaign to win Joe Barton a friend in the White House by selling the Administration as the moral equivalent of BP.

It should be obvious, but just in case, one can easily oppose the expansion of coal mining in the Powder River basin without engaging in the kind of character assassination that we see above.  We are not forced to choose between supporting coal mining and spewing toxic propaganda. Here’s Hurowitz last year

I confess that when I initially heard of it, I thought Bill McKibben’s drive to return solar panels to the White House was essentially a waste of time: of all the things to ask the president, it seemed like the smallest, most insignificant, and easiest. It certainly wouldn’t solve the climate crisis. And it would allow President Obama to cloak himself in a symbolic green action that let him cover a rapidly worsening environmental record.

I realize now that the very simplicity of the request made the solar panels project a masterstroke that clearly exposed, more than any big policy ask ever would, President Obama’s unwillingness or inability to confront our great planetary crisis. Because even in this smallest of disappointments, Obama responded in a way that was a caricature of his failure-by-committee administration: sending mid-level officials to tell the greatest American environmental activist of our time that the president was rejecting their request out of hand in favor of a continued “deliberative process.”

Note this is not a critique of policy, it’s an attack on character that fits in beautifully with such other environmentalist critiques like

In 2012, Remember That The Campaigner-In-Chief Has A Pattern Of Being Loose With Words And Short On Results

Oh wait, that’s not from environmentalists, it’s from the Republican National Committee. Excuse me but sometimes it’s a little hard to keep track. Because failing to install 30 year old obsolete solar panels on the WH roof is, of course, illustrative of something important- except when it’s not as in this news that Mr. Hurowitz did not find worthy of comment.

President Barack Obama will have solar panels put back on the roof of the White House to demonstrate that renewable-energy technology is practical for U.S. homeowners, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

“The White House will lead by example,” Chu said today at a conference in Washington. A solar-water heater will be installed in addition to photovoltaic panels to generate electricity, which will be in place by the end of June, he said. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had them up there.”
[…]
Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, a free-market analysis group in Washington, said the rooftop panels will underscore hostility by Obama toward fossil fuels such as coal.

Oh well, can’t make everybody happy.

The strange material advertised as economic “criticism from the left” since the start of 2009  has damaged public perception of the Obama administration and the Democratic party in a way that favors Republicans and has also displaced actual liberal  economic proposals from public debate. The obvious example is the fate of the TARP funds which were originally a revolving fund that the Bush administration planned to distribute to Wall Street cronies. Under Obama and Geithner, TARP became a great success story of how  Democratic administration deftly stopped a panic, made Wall Street pay, and performed emergency life-saving on the industrial economy. And TARP should have provided the Obama administration with funds to continue to invest in industrial development projects, environmental remediation, renewable energy plant construction and so on. But instead of pushing a competent centrist government to be more active in freeing the economy from the grip of finance and petro oligarchs, the “progressives”, even those who were loudly decrying the inadequate funding for stimulus assisted the Republicans in shutting down TARP in a wave of faux-populism supposedly directed against banks.

Of the $245billion TARP gave to banks, Treasury has recovered about $244billion. Treasury is selling the $140 billion in “toxic assets” it acquired during the financial crisis and expecting a $10billion to $15billion profit. AIG has offered to buy back Maiden Lane II assets AIG transferred to the Fed during the crisis for a $1.5billion profit to the government. Other parties want to bid more. The Federal Reserve reports $80billion profit in investments ranging from the other assets the NYFed took over as Bear Stearns and AIG collapsed to the agency mortgage backed bonds purchased for quantitative easing. GM continues to reopen closed factories. Compared the the Reagan era Resolution Trust Find, TARP is stunning success for the public. We should have been advocating for TARP to be used as a revolving development bank, but instead we got stuff like this:

“Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary’s fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he’s a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day.

The things to notice about this passage is that it is entirely without any liberal economic content and is fully compatible with core Republican messaging.
Let’s dig up the points Taibbi is making:

1. “mop-headed weenie ” – Democrats are effeminate and weak. Classic!
2. ” gross giveaways in the new reform legislation” – reform is a fraud, how’s that hopey changey thing working out for you.
3. “living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration” – Bill Clinton is responsible for the economic collapse. Also note that, for example, Geithner presided over the auto rescue where the largest unionized industry was saved and bondholders were forced to take a back seat to union health/pension benefits. Hardly Rubinite, so ignored.
4. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being” – violent and literally dehumanizing rhetoric.
5. “replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank”Geithner actually has never worked for a “Wall Street megabank”, he’s a  career civil servant, but that’s the least of it.
6. ” would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day.” – out of touch Democrats don’t listen to the public

Right out of the Frank Luntz playbook – and Republican marketing has been so pervasive that Taibbi didn’t even need to be aware of what he was doing. Just add out of control rhetoric to anger, mix in indifference to facts, and the Republican narrative takes control. Also as noted above, there is no progressive economics at all in this passage: it’s barely a step up from  “New York Jew bankers!”. A realistic appraisal of Geithner’s policies combined with some liberal economics would have been more compatible with a paragraph extolling the auto rescue and demanding that TARP funds be made available as funding for mass transport projects, school buildings, housing, green energy, or environmental remediation. Maybe  a call for union management of GM would have been appropriate or a pitch for investing in the United Steel Workers/Mondragon experiment or in employee owned firms.  But you won’t find economics as far out of the right wing mainstream as even J K Galbraith in “progressive criticism from the left”. What you’ll find is reheated Republican propaganda, fragments of Chicago School economics tossed in randomly with demands that somebody be punished plus sloppy accounts of finance.
And here’s Taibbi again, from a diary on DKOS:

The losses from the Fed’s purchase of distressed/crap Bear Stearns assets (Maiden Lane I) and AIG assets (MaidenLanes II and III) alone were as recently as late July calculated in the $8.6 billion range, and even that number is very conservative. Then there’s the trillion or so dollars that the Fed used on buying up mortgage-backed securities and Treasuries; we don’t know what their market value is now. And there are untold trillions more the …

All of that was crap but shows the technique: a false claim that the Democratic administration has screwed up which can then be used to show that the explanations offered by the Democratic administration must be lies. The same technique can also see in the following snippet of wisdom from Duncan Black (Atrios).  Here’s a typical sample of his inspirational and suave approach:

Ponies In The Shitpile
Aside from setting up an overly complicated plan to try to disguise what they’re really doing, the utility of the Geithner plan rests (or pretends to rest, not sure) on one fundamental premise: that Big Shitpile is greatly undervalued by “the market” and that these mortgage securities really have expected revenues which justify higher prices. One could have reasonably believed this months ago, I have no idea why anyone would believe this now. The housing bubble burst, and now recession is here. There’s a lot of shit to be eaten, the question is who will eat it? Timmeh wants to make sure it’s not the banksters.

Points:

1. “Aside from setting up an overly complicated plan to try to disguise what they’re really doing” – the Democratic Administration is lying (note the absence of factual material introduced to support this claim)
2. “Geithner plan rests (or pretends to rest, not sure)” – Obama’s administration is dishonest  
3. “one fundamental premise: that Big Shitpile is greatly undervalued by “the market” ” – The premise of this criticism is that in the middle of a panic “market value” means something about “actual value”. Not only have events shown Geithner’s analysis to be correct, but this theory would have made J K Galbraith and Keynes laugh hysterically. While followers of the “efficient market hypothesis” have insisted that financial markets have Godlike powers, the liberal idea has always been that financial markets are made up of people who are often motivated by errors, delusions, ideology, confusion, and bad data. Especially in the middle of a bubble or a panic, pricing has no relationship to any rational “value”. In a panic, the irrational fears of investors are amplified as falling values for assets trigger demands of creditors for cash which must be met by selling assets which puts even more pressure on the market. Here we see an idea of the far right being used to belittle the programs of an essentially Keynsian centrist.
4. “here’s a lot of shit to be eaten, the question is who will eat it? Timmeh wants to make sure it’s not the banksters.” – another plug for the the banker conspiracy theory so fundamental to right wing populism plus that demeaning approach so characteristic of right wing PR.

Clearly, events have shown that the “shitpile” actually contained a lot of valuable assets that generate a lot of revenue. The “mop headed weenie” turns out to have been a highly competent and clear thinking public servant and the “progressive” critics were confused hysterics. The critics have fallen back on an argument that prices for this stuff have only gone up because the government has flooded the economy with cheap money and there is a desperate search for anything that can produce higher returns. This reflects two errors: the first is a profound failure to understand why these particular types of assets are so sought after in the first place, and the second more fundamental error is to believe that financial markets are ever independent of government action.

The reason CDOs were so popular is that they attach a reasonably high interest rate to a pool of assets that spread risk and that generate income. “The market” stupidly believed that the pools eliminated all risk and that was wrong, but a little arithmetic shows why these things are great investments even during a recession. Suppose we purchase $100 of pooled mortgage bonds at “face value” and the pool is a set of mortgages that pay 5% year and, for simplicity, pay off principle at the end of 10 years. In theory at the end of ten years we will have received $150 – $50 of interest and $100 of our principal. Even if 20% of the mortgagees default, we still make money. Suppose they default on day 1, leaving $80 in the pool. 10x $4 = $40 of interest plus the $80 of principal and we still made $20. So if you bought it for $100 that you had borrowed from someone, then a market panic is trouble – the market price for your asset might collapse entirely and your lender wants more collateral, oops. But the Fed and Treasury were not in that position. And that’s why AIG wants this stuff back now- because it cannot find similarly profitable assets on the market.

Liberal economists recognize that money is a social construct – a person on a desert island will find that gold, diamonds, credit cards, and so on cannot purchase anything. Capital is a social construct and a functioning government can make it either cheap or expensive. Our government has made money cheap in order to stop the panic and reverse the recession just as Abraham Lincoln’s government printed “greenbacks” to pay Union armies instead of asking for loans.  When the government prints money, it reduces the ability of investors/banks/etc to demand a high price for loans or investments. Amazingly, some of our “progressives” have joined with the Ron Paulists and goldbug nutbars to attack the Treasury and Federal Reserve bank for making money cheaper. Cheap money is the traditional demand of liberals. Cheap labor and expensive money is what the right wants. So, of course prices for high interest rate mortgage bonds have gone up when other sources of income from money have become scarcer – why is that bad?

Since Mop Headed Weenie wasn’t as stupid as Cool Matt or Cool Duncan, he didn’t lose his head and panic too. And that helped us avoid a complete economic collapse. What it didn’t do was create a significant initiative to build a fairer and more environmentally sustainable economy. For that you need popular pressure for reform. A popular campaign demanding for example that the public owned AIG offer low cost health insurance might get somewhere. A campaign for an end to the oil depletion allowance and tax credits for companies that move jobs abroad accompanied by demands for making capital available to manufacturers who pay decent wages has some chance of producing good results. On the other hand, a campaign demanding that “Banksters” go to jail and that the Democratic administration fire competent employees based on fake scandals and Republican themes has a good chance of producing good results for the far right.  And that’s what we got.

Crossposted http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/03/criticism-from-left-or-republican-spin.html

The political role of netroots is first to enforce MSM domination of news and second to spike political activism. An accelerating right wing attack on Elizabeth Warren and financial regulation and the manipulated hysteria over TSA security measures provide a wonderful illustration of how this works. First, netroots enthusiastically poutrage about TSA searches – in a nation where stop-and-frisk of minority residents, not to mention Jack Bauer’s torture of swarthy suspects is routinely celebrated on television every night. Efforts to point out the role of the far right in pushing this fake outrage are met with hysterical attacks -notably by Libertarian Political Correctness Commissar Glenn Greenwald.  But the concurrent Republican attack on financial regulation is met with passivity and indifference modulated by a masochistic anticipation of a defeat – which will provide occasion to express disappointment at the weakness of the Obama administration. For both of these, the fundamental hapless consumer outlook championed by netroots is presented as the only morally acceptable view and curiosity about the actual workings of power is condemned. The right wing blogs are full of triumphant howling about the TSA director, who is regarded as a traitor for preventing the FBI from participating in Bush’s torture state – and it’s deeply revealing that this fact is entirely absent from netroots discussion.
Consider this coverage of financial reform at poutrage central DailyKos – a site that recently drove off the one remaining generally positive prominent defender of President Obama.

Let’s also pay close attention to the Obama Administration. Is Obama going to go to bat for Elizabeth Warren and use the power of the office of the president to defend her from these jackals, or is he going to leave her out there on her own.

This is squarely opposed to any idea that what “progressives” do might influence outcomes. The idea that publicizing the Republican service to Wall Street might win people over to oppose the rule of financial capital is totally foreign to this viewpoint. The organizing effort of 30s radicals or civil rights activists is anathema to netroots. Reading down the comment threads on that post is to fall into depression: the Eeyore radicalism of the netroots blossoms into a garden of misinformation, sullen despair, confused gibes, and the ever present disappointment at the quality of political product available in the mall.
 Here’s David Dayen explaining that wall-to-wall netroots dismalism doesn’t really do anything

And so we come to believe that a blog post criticizing the President will do as much harm to progressive politics as a 9.5 percent unemployment rate; that catastrophic climate change is as consequential as a comment thread about Rahm Emanuel; and that a guy with a sign at an anti-war rally is as worthy of attention as the health-care crisis.

You see, it’s not our fault – we can advocate despair 24/7 and fill the internet with counter-factual arguments in favor of passive disappointment but every defeat remains the responsibility of the Obama administration. And every demurral from that attitude is mindless loyalism:

Some progressives, appalled by internecine warfare, believe that for the left to succeed, its members must band together and support the current Democratic President and Democratic Congress through all their compromises and concessions

Or as Greenwald put it on twitter

if you say mean things about the Leader, you help the GOP win

The Nation dared to note the influence of the Koch machine in the TSA outrage-fest and predictably would-be libertarian commissar Glenn Greenwald pitched a fit. Because as Tom Pynchon observed, if they get to determine what questions can be asked, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

1. Wal-mart needs a bank. They have wanted one for years, it would kill the payday loan business and seriously eat into business for the big banks – helping turn banking into a low cost commodity market. And it would reward them for supporting health care reform.
2. The AFL-CIO/SEIU/UAW need banks. They can invest in things like wind power plants that are profitable at a modest safe rate.

3)We need an infrastructure bank. It can be privately chartered by e.g. unions and so on and can then finance state and local infrastructure projects using the margin that the banks take for fronting bond sales. It could sell bonds to the Federal reserve – giving the government a way of investing in infrastructure by going around congress. The process of floating muni-bonds is way too expensive and is a pointless bank monopoly.

This is from the twitter feed of Peter Daou, Democrat, today.
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Well, at least the Elizabeth Warren nomination has been handled decisively
7 minutes ago via web

Geithner has met more often with Goldman CEO than Congressional leaders, including Pelosi and Reid http://huff.to/bhoZG9
about 1 hour ago via web

Newt knows what BP knows what Beck knows what Rush knows what Coulter knew when she abused 9/11 widows: Dems are inept at harnessing outrage
about 2 hours ago via web

I called the “Boehner Strategy” desperate http://bit.ly/cALubv Here’s @EzraKlein: “Dems turn to meaningless word games” http://bit.ly/buUHDZ
about 3 hours ago via web

Wonder how long we’ll keep getting dueling stories about Obama’s vaunted online army to the rescue vs his online army fading to a non-factor
about 5 hours ago via web

[Re: Boehner] @Misha44_ Such flailing to suddenly try to create a bogeyman out of someone known mainly for his tan http://bit.ly/cALubv
about 6 hours ago via web

 SamSeder I,for one, am glad we didn’t waste time “looking back” on Bush crimes- that would have spelled electoral disaster for Dems!
about 7 hours ago via web
Retweeted by peterdaou and 25 others

I just posted: Democrats hit rock bottom with desperate “Boehner Strategy” http://bit.ly/cALubv #boehner #p2 #tcot #obama
about 7 hours ago via we