Somehow we've got to change the idea that in economic issues the so-called "serious" people can be trusted

"The old Soviet Union had two newspapers, Pravda and Izvestia -- Truth and Light -- and the saying in Moscow was, 'Where there is Truth, there's no Light. And where there is Light, there's no Truth.' It's clear now that the Soviet Union didn't really end.

"The walls came down, and we became them."

-- economist James K. Galbraith, in a blogpost
tearing the Catfish Commission report to shreds

by Ken

As Howie and I, along with scads of other commentators on the Left, have been pointing out repeatedly, under cover of the economic meltdown they themselves did so much to cause, and from which they have managed to get the government to largely extricate their personal interests, the American megacorporate oligarchy has been stealthily advancing a political agenda that even those greedy sons of bitches probably never dreamed they could get away with. I suppose you have to admire the sheer gall.

The fights over the and the Catfood Commission's secretly crafted deficit-reduction proposals and the issue of the expiring Bush tax cuts tend to merge in our minds because they really are part of the same agenda. The same agglomeration of writers has been pointing out since the spawning of the Catfood Commission that it was always devised, not to solve real economic issues -- of which I believe there actually are genuinely critical ones -- but to complete the restructuring of the American economy begun in the Reagan administration, and since then only marginally slowed down, and in many ways actually advanced, by the theoretically ideologically contrary Clinton administration, which in fact shared many of the same assumptions about whose interests should be paramount in the restructured economy.

"Deficit hawks" is the shorthand description for the ideologues of corporate governance who see the deficit as their opening for establishing once and for all who's in charge. And the makeup of the Catfood Commission left no possible doubt that it was commissioned to produce a report that would be a deficit hawk's wet dream. There are pandering pols who profess to be impressed by the commission's "bipartisan" 11-7 vote affirming for the report. Since the ground rules of the commission called for a minimum of 14 "yes" votes, and Bowles and Simpson were unable to drum up more than 11, despite what I assume must have been a fairly intense campaign of "persuasion," suggests how one-sided their document is.

What most disconcerts me about the developing debate about what to do about the deficit is the seemingly universally accepted determination made by our Village political-and-media nexus and for a couple of decades now applied to pretty much any issue that arises, as to who qualifies as a "serious" participant in the discussion. If you swear an oath to Village Principles and Assumptions, you're serious; otherwise you don't even exist. You're consigned to history's future "who could have foreseen?" invisibles. Think of the political and economic catastrophe of the Iraq war and the economic catastrophe of the housing bubble. Plenty of people foresaw both, but even after they were proved right, they not only weren't rewarded, they weren't listened to any more than they had been. Instead generous rewards were given, and the cleanup was entrusted to, the very people who got us into those messes.

The "serious" people.

On the specific issue of the Catfood Commission, economist James K. Galbraith is developing into a "go to" voice of sanity. In a New Deal 2.0 post yesterday, more widely circulated on AlterNet as "Moment of Lies: Galbraith Attacks Lack of Evidence for Frantic Deficit Fear Mongering" (with the subhead "The sky is falling, but not enough to tax the rich apparently"), he began:

The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled “The Moment of Truth.” The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph of the preamble:

“Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows that we face a moment of truth once again.”

These sentences set the tone. The first is a bald-faced lie, as a Westerner like Senator Simpson knows perfectly well. To the contrary, we have often fallen under the sway of robber barons, water barons, oil barons, bison-killers, clear-cutters and strip-miners, hell-bent on maximum pillage in the shortest time. Only occasionally have a few heroes like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and Harold Ickes Sr. emerged to battle for the most precious physical elements of our heritage — and then only with limited success.

In the next paragraph, the Commission states the threat:

“Our challenge is clear and inescapable. America cannot be great if we go broke.”

Exactly what it might mean for America to “go broke” is not explained. Nor is it anywhere in the report. . . .

By all means check out Galbraith's post for the specifics of the bogosity of the commission report. My immediate point is the contrast between the "serious" people whom Village pundits are now crediting with being "realistic" about the deficit, as against an economist as respected as Galbraith, who has nevertheless been relegated to the Party of the Invisible. Remember, he was asked for input by the commission, which he provided in the form of a scathing report, which was strenuously ignored. Some of the hardest work the commissioners seems to have performed was ignoring all realities that don't accord with their designated agenda.

And I'm afraid, once again, that anyone looking to the president as a "centrist" compromiser, someone we might hope will stand up at least in part for Americans who aren't tied to the corporate oligarchy, is living in a dream world. Our friend Ian Welsh made this point once again in a blogpost yesterday:

Obama isn’t about compromise

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly.

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through.

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?)

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody.

For the record, let me say that I am prepared to believe we indeed have, not so much a "deficit" problem as a "borrowing" problem -- namely that Americans have been encouraged to take on so much debt that our economy, which now produces hardly anything with which we might be able to pay off what we owe, is in for a mighty fall. We have our own economists screaming about it hear Europeans screaming about.

You know, people like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and Brad DeLong, people who not only could but did foresee the housing bubble, but whom the Chicago nitwits, not to mention the coalition of megacorporate media and political whores, continue to pretend never existed. We hear it more and more from Europeans -- that is, those of us who occasionally hear Europeans, whom the Right has worked so hard to reduce to bogeypersons to be reviled, presumably for this very purpose. A coming cataclysm in the American economy surely has to be on the minds of the Chinese who own so much of our increasingly dubious paper.

So yes, I am prepared to believe there's a potentially devastating reckoning up ahead. Unfortunately, the people who have been anointed, or have anointed themselves, as "serious" are the last people we should want presiding over it -- or anywhere near it.

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