Here’s what usually happens:
Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or-here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique-the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk-at least until the riots grow too large.
The Tea Party Movement has it upon a grain a truth here and it is this:
[E]lite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
And piggybacking on bobswern’s Daily Kos diary:
- We are not going to get a Consumer Finance Protection Agency. (Source)
- A weak attempt at re-instituting some of the New Deal banking regulations, not going to happen.
The interlocking nature of Godman Sachs and our government has already been alarming for a year.
It’s no wonder we have a Tea Party Movement. Will progressives be able to mount a strong enough campaign to wrest our government from the oligarchs?
Goldman Board Rejects Shareholder Demands on Pay
<
p>Incredibly, Goldman Sachs (continuing to be out-of-touch with reality) thinks that reducing compensation from 20 billion to 16.2 is going to alleviate public ire.
<
p>It’s comforting to know that shareholders are stepping up to the plate to speak out for the American economy, but it’s frightening to know that corporations no longer feel compelled to account to those shareholders.
<
p>I think it would be amazing for progressive to stand up to corporate America. They would be applauded by the entire middle/working class – tea party or not. Strong regulations and increased taxes on the corporate personhood would be a great start. I don’t have much confidence they are going to do it.
It’s going to be an ugly November.
But the distinction in my mind on economic matters it that while Democrats to passive in stopping bad things from happening to working Americans, they are not willing to actively cause bad things to happen in serving other interests (such as upper-middle class Americans).
The Democrats’ other interests are myriad, are you kidding? The NIH budget has never been higher than it is now (I am assuming, based on things I’ve heard Obama promise about not cutting it during the election (“I’ll use a scalpel, not a hatchet”), and then increasing it significantly this year. And pushing for universal health care with full coverage for trans surgery and fertility services and giving $410M (an increase of $45 million) for a federal “Safe Schools” program, and then there’s the old arts funding argument, and general priority for academia and technology… There are TONS of places where the Democrats could visibly take the lead by shedding their special interests and showing that serving working Americans is their priority.
The interests you list appear to be public (safe kids, arts, health research, education) rather than special (enhancing the bank accounts of private for-profit entities). Nice try, but all interests are NOT created equal!
They’re still a huge part of the budget, and they’re still passing on the costs of those things to working Americans, and they’re still for special interest groups that demand those things and which most working Americans don’t want, and especially don’t want to pay for. Nice spin on those programs but people aren’t fooled by it, and giving up some if not all of those demands is certainly called for.
<
p>I’m not defending enhancing the bank accounts of private bankers and lawyers and the rest of the wealthy, but note that they too frame their bailouts as being in the best interest of the public, and their industry as being some sacred right that would be un-American to not support in times of crisis or whatever.
$410M is “a huge part of the budget”?
<
p>We’re still talking about the Federal budget, right?
The “M” stands for Million, and the 410 represents the number of Millions. Each Million can pay for twenty $50,000 jobs. That’s 8200 teachers eliminated, in order to fund this unnecessary program which is not at all popular: opposition to these sorts of programs was a huge part of the reason Prop 8 was successful in California. It’s a perfect example of an elite making ever larger gambles, and Sab said the Democrats didn’t have any.
<
p>And I wasn’t only talking about that relatively small program when I said “huge” anyhow, I was talking about the huge NIH budget. From Genomeweb.com:
The total discretionary portion of the 2009 budget is $437B, so NIH gets almost a tenth of it, which if you ask me, is a huge portion of it. And let’s not forget that medicare and medicaid, and the Defense budget too, wind up funding medical research and drug research, since often 90% of the cost of a prescription is pure profit and goes straight into funding research too. NIH grants are only one source of research funding.
you have failed to make the case that $410M (or even $437B!) is “a huge part of the budget,” when the budget in question was $3.5 trillion in FY09. If you care about the size of the budget, let me know when you’re ready to talk cuts in defense spending.
Let’s cut all the technology research. No more programs to build an invisibility suit, or Universal Soldiers, or EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicles. OK, save the EM-50, that one’s cool. But what portion of the defense budget is genetic and bio warfare research? I bet a good bit of it, let’s cut it.
<
p>And the $437B is the “discretionary spending” portion that I assume the NIH is part of. The concept is that the other portions are mandatory and can’t be cut (though I’ve shown how to cut the Defense and Medicare budgets by slashing stealth research funding), so $437B is the total budget as far as any discussion of how to spend tax dollars goes.
Cut the F-22 program. Why we need a 22nd century jet fighter to beat out the hand-cranked Chinese or Iranian Air Force is beyond me.
CNN report from last Summer
I think you’ve got the military budget cuts exactly backwards. Let’s not cut DARPA and other military research agencies — the good folks who brought us GPS, the Internet, handheld speech translators, and gallium arsenide amongst others. Three of those innovations (GPS, Internet, GaAs) are already widespread in commercial use and have had a substantial impact on non-military life. Handheld speech translators are being used in Iraq, but are too new for us to know if they’ll have non-military commercial success.
<
p>Instead, let’s reduce the number of worldwide bases, barracks, installations, and deployments we have, and/or the size of them. Let’s reduce our nuclear arsenal. Let’s reduce our conventional weapons arsenal. Let’s reduce the number of tanks, planes, and other heavy gear we build every year. Let’s let the military pay for their own environmental cleanup, instead of agencies like the EPA.
We should also cut those things, and the F22, of course. My point though is that we shouldn’t feel obliged to keep funding the research programs just because they gave us GPS and other stuff, or just because it’s research. You guys have a complete inability to cut research, even when it is part of the military budget. Nostalgia? Is it self-interest of the academic community? Did everyone’s dad work at AF-CRL or Raytheon or something? Are you sure there’s no way we can cut that budget too?
Military pay, so we recruit and retain a professional force. Let’s improve the quality of life for military families by providing adequate housing and community support programs.
<
p>Let’s put some money into those of us that choose to serve.
DARPA has accomplished some things, but the name money probably could have been much better spent.
The government is far more able to fund basic research than private industry. The VC community is particularly ill-suited for such tasks. The entire point of basic research is that nobody knows what to do with it. That’s what the “basic” part of “basic research” is.
<
p>I’m really not trying be snarky here — the three examples that stomv cited (GPS, the internet, and GaA) are each precisely the kind of “deals” that VCs throw immediately into the rubbish.
<
p>Consider Internet history. The theoretical backbone of the modern internet was laid by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT, in 1962. It would be fifteen years (of significant government funding of basic research in networking) before the very first generation of personal computers was announced (“Apple II”, “TRS-80”, and “Commodore Pet”). The “internet” didn’t become a commercially-viable entity until the mid-nineties, more than thirty years after Kleinrock’s research opened the door to reveal what might be possible.
<
p>The internet is a sterling example of successful government investment in basic research. One of the most immediate, and most devastating, impacts of the breakup of Bell and the deregulation of the telephone industry was the demise of Bell Labs, one of the few (and leading) privately-funded research organizations in the nation. So much for the benefits to the research community of “privatization”. There is little or no basic research being done in private industry today — it isn’t profitable in timeframes demanded by shareholders.
<
p>The investment in basic research by the US Government between WWII and the Reagan era is one of very best examples of the successful use of public funds there is. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that investment epitomizes how government can “improve the business climate”.
<
p>Are you sure you really know very much about what DARPA did?
The “stimulus package” wasn’t so much designed for stimulus as it was to throw some money at pet issues. Union opposition to the “Caddilac tax” (and arguably pro-choicers rising to the Stupak bait) played a big role in the failure of the health reform effort.
<
p>Political parties are creatures of the special interests, and the special interests don’t have the commonweal as a priority.
A “special interest” seeks only to benefit a limited number of stakeholders in a very direct way, while a public interest can argue that everyone will benefit if they get their way. For example, I consider NRA and the Brady Campaign both public interests even though I strongly side with the latter myself. Likewise, the pro-choice and pro-life lobbies are both public interest in my book even though I side with the former. I think you’ll need to back up your comment about the stimulus. Arguing whether something is district-specific “pork” is a little different from arguing whether a group is a “special interest”.
The point–the only point– of the stimulus was to get “shovel-ready” projects working as rapidly as possible.
<
p>Then, the point wasn’t about creating instant jobs, but about supporting “green initiatives.” Because these green initiatves are new, they don’t have prevailing wage data. Because the Democrats were unwilling to waive regulatory red tape such as Davis-Bacon, the last year has been spent “implementing regulations” and not putting the ready shovel into the ground.
<
p>From this I conclude that the immediate creation of jobs, though highly touted, was a secondary goal. The primary goal was to throw sops to various Democratic pet issues.
<
p>I still think it was a good idea, as I support the funding of such initiatives. But, calling it “economic stimulus” was (though a great use of “framing”) something of an untruth.
Rather than taking the types of initiatives that money was spent on as evidence that those initiatives were actually the primary purpose, I take it that in delivering the primary purpose of stimulus required some decisions to be made about the ways in which that stimulus would be funneled. Predictably, those decisions were made with other factors and secondary goals in mind. This is as it should be if you think about it. First there is a decision to inject money into the economy because that is a goal in and of itself for stimulus. Then there is the obvious question of where to inject that money. Some of those latter decisions might require such things as fast-tracking, waivers, or variances, but that seems to me to be expected for an initiative to get money into the economy quickly.
<
p>I’m not saying the situation isn’t tempting for those that want to abuse it, but I wouldn’t take that people gave their special areas a boost as evidence that that was the point. When it was advertised that stimulus was the objective I don’t really see anything to indicate that it wasn’t.
And I don’t disagree necessarily with the underlying “secondary” spending decision. But I also think that the “secondary” goal completely undermines the first, which is the thing upon which the spending was sold in the first place.
The buzz at the time was “ASAP, shovel ready.”
<
p>There is therefore a certain sense of bait-and-switch, which in my mind, goes a long way to explain the present occupant of Henry Cabot Lodge’s seat, and related political weather.
…but in general I’m not in favor of waiving rules that are in place to protect such things as labor and the environment. It’s too easy and tempting to exploit a bad situation, be it a recession or a natural disaster like Katrina. There are very good reasons for these to be in place (probably even more so in these situations) and I object to them being described as special interests.
is absolutely infuriating. I can’t believe our government is turning a blind eye to this activity, and actually supplying the funds to support it, while letting the middle class continue to struggle and fall.
<
p>Our newly elected Democratic President and congressional majority can take a flying leap during the next election and head back to the streets of America.
or increase profits is not by investing in and growing the economy, but instead by downsizing and further straining our economy.
<
p>
<
p>Same as it ever was: What Digby Said.
Feel so helpless and confused about all the financial and regulatory stuff, tho I get the big picture–we’re being screwed and Dems aren’t stopping it.
<
p>What can we do? Seriously, what’s the game plan here to make a change???
who kill responsible legislation with dithering and thin excuses.
<
p>Get involved at the local level to put responsible progressives on the school boards, board of selectman, and the state house. Some of these people may eventually run for Congress.
<
p>Use electronic media (this forum, Facebook, etc) to counter the misleading corporate-sponsored ads and statements.
<
p>The following video gives an overview of the process: http://therealnews.com/t2/inde…
<
p>I would like to see a progressive primary challenger to Obama in 2012. He is a big part of our economic problems. The following video documents Obama’s association with The Hamilton Project, a Wall Street-sponsored group. Obama’s statement at 8:55 in the following video is a smoking gun that tells whose side he is on.
<
p>
<
p>Link: http://therealnews.com/t2/inde…
<
p>I would also say to ask candidates to be as specific as possible during the campaigns and to hold them accountable once they take office. This can work positively as well as negatively. “She said she would do xxxx, and did.”
We don’t want to go Republican so it has to be done at the primary level, just as MizJones states. You have to get involve in local politics, the Dem committees. Some candidates are only put on the ballot with enough support at the MA convention. It’s not easy, but if your Dem committee is as good as mine is, they will help you along and encourage your involvement. When people ridicule you or try to get you to shut up, just take on the chin and keep going. Don’t ever give up.
<
p>Realize when candidates are speaking, they may not be telling the whole story. The spin you hear in the news is often not accurate or is only half the story. Do your own research. Talk, talk, talk. To your neighbors, family, and friends. You’d be amazed at how sharing the truth of a situation to just a few people can have a much greater impact than you would ever imagine.
in propping up these oligarchs around the world in the interest of free-market economics is well-documented in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine. In case after case, the approach has been to deregulate financial systems, cut jobs, and privatize government services. The rich have gotten richer, and the middle class has endured the hardships.
<
p>The subprime mortgage scandal and subsequent bank bailouts shows how this same approach has been used in this country. That’s one reason we shouldn’t read Scott Brown’s election as a big boost for Republicans. It was frustration with the incumbent party. In the end, people realize there are more similarities than differnces between the two parties.