Quote of the day
11.8.2012 1 Comment
President Barack Obama and OMB director Peter Orszag.
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism wrote this one:
The Obama victory was less than 24 hours old when the Rubinite faction of the Democratic party was out full bore selling “reforming” Social Security as the adult solution to the coming budget impasse, giving it higher priority than any other measure on the table while simultaneously admitting that this is not even a pressing (let alone real) problem.
And the worse is that this snakeoil salesmanship, which comes from former OMB director, now Citigrgoup vice chairman of corporate and investment banking Peter Orszag, is almost certainly an Obama trial balloon. It’s no secret that Obama has long viewed cutting, whoops, “reforming” Social Security and Medicare, as one of his fondest goals. He made that clear shortly before he was inaugurated, in a dinner with conservatives hosted by George Will. He even volunteered in the debates that he and Romney were on the same page as far as these programs were concerned. So it’s reasonable to view Orszag as fronting for the Administration.
Orszag’s Bloomberg piece is simply putrid. It starts out praising Obama for discipline during his campaign and insisting he need to show discipline on the budget front. But this is already a rhetorical bait and switch.
The first mention of discipline referred to the President’s team choosing to put in long hours to meet their objectives. By contrast, the discipline Orszag wants to see happen on the budget front is sort you inflict on children, animals, and submissives in S&M (actually worse than that, since submissives at least get off on being hurt). But Obama is into that: “I want fiscal restraint and order.”
Now it’s outside the scope of this article to address long form, but we will stop to remind readers that the budget hysteria is completely, utterly misguided. The last thing this economy needs is austerity.
James Galbraith characterized this kind of political work as economic predation. And it is just that. Fractions of big capital seek to capture sitting governments in order to use the power of the federal state to extract rents from the people as a whole. This rent-seeking politics long ago generated a complex system that persists — that retains a distinctive identity — through time. Sheldon Wolin identified this political system as an inverted totalitarianism, a democracy without citizens, a political system that serves the general and specific ends of the profit taking corporation.
Barack Obama is an agent of this system. Some of his supporters might be shocked to learn that he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, that he will not seek peace or implement a peacetime army, that he will cut deals with the Republicans that harms the interests of the majority of Americans. This is what lesser evil voting in America brings into being — evil.
Related articles
- White House Should Be Ready for a Debt-Limit Deal – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
- Economic Growth First Then Austerity, Orszag Says: Tom Keene – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
- The Diamond-Orszag Plan Changes the Structure of Social Security (my.firedoglake.com)
- Obama Campaign “Clarifies” Approach on Social Security (news.firedoglake.com)
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go 
Ahhhhh, Andrew Ross Sorkin
10.4.2011 1 Comment
I found it noteworthy that Mr. Sorkin, currently a New York Times financial ‘journalist,’ quickly responded to a lament made by a member of his key audience (h/t to Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism):
“I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail.”
That is what Andrew Cole, an unemployed 24-year-old graduate of Bucknell University, told me Monday morning in Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Mr. Cole, an articulate young man dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and with a blue wool beanie on his head, had just arrived by bus from Madison, Wis., where he recently lost his job.
There was nothing particularly menacing or dangerous about Mr. Cole. He said he had come to participate in Occupy Wall Street because he believed in its “anticapitalist” message. “I see Wall Street as responsible for the mess we’re in.”
I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.
Well, I do wish the protest will not turn into a personal safety problem for this Bankster or for any other Bankster. After all, illegal killing is wrong when a mob commits the act or when a President authorizes the act.
That said, my strongest wish has the #OccupyWallStreet protest creating the conditions under which the Banksters will eventually confront a serious legal-political problem, one specific to their situation. This problem would include prison-time for those Banksters found guilty of crimes by legally rational courts. Although it should not need to be said but I shall say it anyway that wanting jail time for those Banksters guilty of crimes is a much different wish than wanting them guillotined or sent to reeducation camps, as suggested by Roseanne Barr, a celebrity given to hyperbole whom Sorkin quoted in order to focus attention on and thus to enhance the physically menacing features present in any protest movement seeking justice for institutional crimes. Thus does a ‘responsible journalist’ (“lapdog to bankers,” Yves Smith) recklessly impute criminal motives and a capacity for violence to a protest action that has been peaceful till now and remains committed to seeing justice done. Sorkin furtively sought to achieve this transformation by a sleight-of-hand trick: It’s the uppity unemployed, not the Banksters, who are dangerous. Well…. No!
“Lapdog to bankers” — it’s good work if you can get it.
Cross posted to Fire Dog Lake
Filed under Commentary Tagged with Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bankster, Financial Crisis, New York Times, Occupy Wall Street, Political Crisis, Popular Contention, Propaganda, Protest, Wall Street, Yves Smith