Author's posts

Sep 20 2013

What We Really Should be Yellin About When it Comes to Who Runs the Fed

Effective regulation, and on that note, it is a positive thing that the Summers of our discontent can finally be laid to rest. After all the damage Larry Summers has caused in being one of the architects of this crisis, from boxing in Brooksley Born and ignoring her warnings with regard to derivatives which brought down Long Term Capital Management during the Clinton administration, to his sexism among everything else. He has now thankfully taken himself out consideration for the job.

It’s a good thing he did. Rather than fighting for something or someone that helps people suffering from this economic crisis, President Obama strongly recommended and fought for Larry Summers to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a guy who lost a billion dollars as President of Harvard betting on interest rates. Yeah, let that sink in for awhile.

It’s really not OK. This is why making excuses for everything the President does, as too many Democrats do without thinking of the damage, is dangerous, immoral, and unprincipled. Now it looks like the front runner to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve is going to be Vice Chairwoman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and once President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Janet Yellin. Unlike Larry Summers, she at least saw the crisis coming as early as 2005.

Jun 20 2013

Historian Rick Perlstein Uses the Nation to Whine About My Tweet

I have to admit, I was surprised to be notified that Historian Rick Perlstein of Nixonland fame, devoted an entire column in the Nation to two tweets replying to him; one from myself and one from another commentator on twitter. It’s also surprising, because I have been a fan of some of what Perlstein has written in the past, and I have cited him before. However, after this, I and certainly a lot of other people surprised at this lack of professionalism from an established writer, won’t do it again.

After all, one doesn’t normally read columns by established historians devoting entire pieces to complaints about tweets they received or people on twitter. Especially, one tweet that was merely a question about a widely cited article at CNET. I certainly don’t know why Rick Perlstein was so offended by that to devote an entire piece in the Nation to mine and one other tweet he received. I have to wonder if he realizes how unprofessional he looks by doing so. The excellent responses to Perlstein’s shoddy piece in the comments section certainly speak to that.

On Glenn Greenwald and His Fans

Read another tweet:

“NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants cnet.co/1agOFCy via @CNET What say you, @RickPerlstein ?”

I think we can detect here an accusatory tone, especially given the way the tweeter, “therealpriceman,” fawns over Glenn Greenwald generally. (Though you can never be sure on the Internet, and besides, why do people pursue political arguments on Twitter anyway? I’ll never understand how, for instance, “When u talk gun violence lk in mirror PA here we cling to guns-apologz to PRES O”-another tweet directed my way, apparently somehow meant to respond to this-could possibly contribute anything useful to our common political life.) I detect in this message: even the NSA says you’re wrong about Glenn Greenwald, so when are you going to apologize? And if I’m reading right, that’s some really smelly stupidity. Because the whole point of my original post was that there was plenty Greenwald had “nailed dead to rights” in his reporting. What I had in mind when I wrote that (I should have specified this, I think) was the stuff on Verizon turning over metadata to the NSA. And yet what therealpriceman links to is an article suggesting something that Greenwald has not (yet?) claimed, and which still remains controversial and undetermined: that the NSA has acknowledged that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a claim sourced to Representative Jerrold Nadler, which Nadler based on a classified briefing he and other Congressmen received, but which it has since been established Nadler probably just misunderstood.

{…..}

And given that perspective, I would love to know why Glenn Greenwald thinks the establishment cannot do to him, a relative flyspeck in the grand scheme of things, what they did to Dan Rather, a towering giant of Washington reporting going back to Watergate. Which is: consign him to the outer darkness, where the only people who care about what he has to say are the likes of my good friends @therealpriceman and @runtodaylight.

He starts out by assuring the audience that he has thick skin, but then goes on to prove just how thin it really is.  By whining for 13 paragraphs or so about criticism, criticism from a couple of tweets he received days ago, it really doesn’t show the maturity he was initially hoping to espouse. So since I apparently hurt his fee fees so bad, in 140 characters or less, I’ll go ahead and put his suppositions to the test.

Jun 17 2013

Sunday June 16, 2013: FINAL Up With Steve Kornacki Tweets

This is the final #Uppers. It's just not worth my time and Lord knows I tried. They had Rick Perlstein on and didn't go into what I prepared for, via his BS attacks and misrepresentations of Glenn Greenwald's articles on PRISM. It was immigration reform, gun control, and more election demographic crap. It's not policy.

It's all inside Congress baseball and isn't that cool? No it's not. Elections without serious reforms to the process, million dollar campaigns and primaries, reform of all our government on all levels from the filibuster to the SCOTUS. It's just not worth staying up. Steve Kornacki doesn't get it.

I may try to tweet All IN a few nights and post that, but I have had enough. I am not alone either, if you check the feed. I have tired to make it interesting, but I can't do it anymore. I need to go to bed earlier. Enjoy the final #Uppers.

Thank you for everyone who read this series. I wish Chris Hayes was still doing it. Maybe part of me is getting tired of politics and cable news, anyway.

Jun 12 2013

When You Support George W. Bush’s Policies, like Obama, I Get to Call You a Republican

Worse than a Republican; I get to call you a fawning sellout with even less principles than the Republican security soccer moms of 2004 that we all remember before. They really believed back then, and still do, that giving up their rights was worth a sense of (fake) security. And you know what? They were more principled than anyone who writes diaries excusing neoconservative policies from the Obama administration that were unacceptable to them when they came from the George W. Bush administration.

Period. End of story. Why? The RW soccer moms didn’t pretend to be outraged about this stuff during the Bush years. They have consistently supported it. So since that is an undeniable fact, I have to ask some of you how it feels to have even less principles than Republican voters who excused and supported some of the worst war crimes in history? How does it feel to enable a Justice Department that has now de facto codified some of the worst war crimes and financial crimes in history? How does it feel now that it is now exposed that, like Republican voters, you need a BS war on terror to feel safe?

How does it feel to repeat the same BS that cretins from the right did in the 2004 election to support their chosen leader? You know that fear mongering bit about “having nothing to hide so then having nothing to worry about?” That came from the RNC, and now that garbage is being recycled by people “who consider themselves Democrats or progressives based mostly on their feelings and nothing more. This similar zeitgeist all started during the run up to the Iraq war after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was passed when almost no one read the Bill in Congress.

Unlike apparently many people who didn’t really mean it, I was actually horrified by what went on during those years, and yet those same policies continue under President Obama. I’m also horrified that some of the same people who call themselves Democrats are not horrified anymore.

Jun 09 2013

Sunday June 9, 2013: Up with Steve Kornacki Tweets

Hello. A programming note: Today was a decent show, but sadly, Saturday’s shows are kind of a waste of time for me since there is meaningless Congressional baseball talk(without the same caliber talk of reforming it or killing the filibuster) and hour long discussions about New jersey politics and Chris Christie I think are unwarranted. So therefore, I am going to be doing strictly a Sunday series on this now. That is when we talk about real shit like warrantless phone-tracking, warrantless surveillance, and the NSA as we did today.

It’s sadly not just me. In fairness, what I am interested in and what Steve is interested in are two different things. Chris Hayes shares my same interests and Steve does not. I like discussions about policy, and I’m just not getting enough of that. Besides, Sunday is enough to not abandon the #Uppers people who do appreciate what I tweet. I may or may not tweet on Saturday, but the tweets won’t be collected. So here we are on #Uppers.

Thank you for reading.

Jun 02 2013

Sunday June 2, 2013: Up with Steve Kornacki Tweets

Today was about vacancies in the DC circuit  courts being blocked in the Senate, the filibuster for once, Harry Reid, and the Justice Department obtained access to the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen accused him of being a likely criminal “co-conspirator” in the leak of sensitive material regarding North Korea, and violating the federal Espionage Act. All this now on #Uppers.

Thank you for reading.

May 26 2013

Sunday May 26, 2013: Up with Steve Kornacki Tweets

Today’s show was about immigration reform, Oklahoma disaster relief, Apple tax shelters, Apple, Congress, tax law, and corporate taxes. #Uppers is now.

Thank you for reading.

May 25 2013

Saturday May 25, 2013: Up with Steve Kornacki Tweets

Man, I was pissed off this morning. more about that meaningless BS speech from the President that was just bluster because the word is getting out about the forced feedings in Gitmo. This speech seems to give all MSNBC hosts orgasms as if it's the DNC in 2008 again. It was a rather sickening display all week, until today. Michael Hastings called out everyone's BS and showed how like Bush/Cheney this speech was even with some of the more loftier meaningless rhetoric which will have 0 action. There was also a lot of fear mongering about how we need drones or we're all going to die. That made #Uppers better.

Thank you for reading.

May 22 2013

John T. Harvey: Austerity Leads To… Austerity!

In the real world and the reality based community, there is talk about austerity from people who understand the nuances of it and macroeconomic accounting identities. They point out the undeniable fact that there is austerity in the UK, the Eurozone, and yes, the United States. This interactive chart will show this, though I can’t embed it here. So instead, I will add a small snapshot of some of the data.

Net spending in the United States has steadily declined since it rose from 2008 to 2009 when the inadequate stimulus(only $500 billion of direct spending at about 1.5 percent of GDP) was passed. Stimulus packages don’t exist in a vacuum, and you have to count all government spending, which basically shows how exactly the numbers, including the stimulus as this does, didn’t close the output gap. And since the numbers didn’t, that is actually austerity. After all, spending went up in the UK and Eurozone from 2008 to 2009 as well, and since then, their spending has declined. Even though it is on a higher level, it is being cut at an even more alarming rate with its fate set to go below our miserable level by 2017.

I have pointed this out before. Sometimes I get frustrated, and point this out harshly, because some pride themselves on denying this established data to support whatever a politician in their party says or does. I don’t know why. Denying reality is not going to give resources to people who need them. There is a reason my last diary has been cited by the reality based Post Keynesian MMT community, in which I am truly grateful for and humbled by; it is the truth.

The real economy of jobs and wages continues to go nowhere thanks to the lack of deficit spending and an illogical debate in DC about how much austerity we need to appease the invisible bond vigilantes and confidence fairies. It is neoliberal deficit terrorist economic insanity based on lies. And on that note, it is my pleasure to republish a piece by someone in the reality based economic community whom I can now proudly say is a friend of mine, Post Keynesian MMT economist John T. Harvey. He, once again, brings clarity to these matters in a way that only he can.  

May 18 2013

Saturday May 18, 2013: Up with Steve Kornacki Tweets

Today’s #Uppers was on the 3 scandals that the Obama administration is dealing with right now via the IRS, Benghazi, and the one that matters, the AP scandal where the DOJ ignored post Watergate regulations in seizing their phone records because of a leak they knew was going to be released. This problem with overzealousness over leaks from this administration has implications for everyone given what has happened to Bradley Manning and more whistle blowers than any other administration, especially one claiming to be the most transparent ever. The horrendous problem of rape in the military was also covered.

Now on #Uppers

Thank you for reading.

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