We’re a nation of morans led by sociopaths.
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by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You
We’re a nation of morans led by sociopaths.
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Corner Stone
We are all Jane Hamsher now.
lacp
Hope everybody’s ready for the second dip of the recession. Better fasten your seat belts.
Judas Escargot
If only we had stuff that needed doing.
This would be a great time to borrow money and get that done, before rates go up.
Corner Stone
Like Mr. Frank (Cornell U Economist) said on TRMS last night. We can fix a 10 mile stretch of highway now for $6M or we can wait 2 years and pay $30M.
The highway isn’t going away.
First time I had seen that gentleman but he made sense. Thanks to TRMS for putting him on.
SiubhanDuinne
Here. This should cheer everybody up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWCZVggQAs
Corner Stone
The absolute best time in the last 30 years for our nation to borrow money for infrastructure. Especially since we have a $2.5T infrastructure deficit.
It is beyond unconscionable to be talking about reducing government spending at this point. It’s beyond stupid and beyond disingenuous.
Trollenschlongen
Well…since Obama is leading the charge to REDUCE THE DEFICIT! SLASH SPENDING! TIGHTEN OUR BELTS! an honest blogger might author a post contending that the president himself is a moran AND a sociopath.
Bruce S
It’s almost beyond comprehension that a Tea Partyized GOP is, literally, driving the economic debate in an atmosphere where all of the evidence is against them. Unfortunately, it’s easy to see that unemployment has persisted, while nearly everything else that one needs to know to understand the nature of the deep slump we’re in and why “tax cuts and spending cuts” is an insane answer seems obscure to most people. I don’t think the country is all morons, nor are all of our leaders sociopaths – hardly – but we need a level of leadership that, despite some occasional good efforts on the part of Dems and the White House, hasn’t been at all consistent. Obama in particular seems adept at giving mixed signals. I don’t have a clue what impact it would have, but I think that more high-profile clarification of a “best case” agenda early on was in order. Maybe the campaign mode is an opportunity to regain at least a bit of the ground lost to the Tea Party’s ravings. But just doing the same thing seems like the definition of insanity. It ain’t working (and I don’t mean that modest stimulus.) The messaging and politics suck, along with people’s sense of what this “team” is really about. Seems like it’s mostly been Rubin Redux on the economic front, without Clinton’s good luck or even a fraction of the GOP that’s willing to deal – just the Dem elite’s corporatist centrism.)
Corner Stone
Do people like highways? I don’t know, maybe.
Has anyone asked them?
srv
I like that comment there – The Third Rail isn’t Social Security, it’s Taxing the Wealthy.
burnspbesq
@Trollenschlongen:
Right. It’s all Obama’s fault. Boehner, McConnell, the Tea Party, Norquist, all utterly irrelevant.
I have heads of lettuce in my refrigerator that are smarter than you.
lacp
In a country where people see an image of the crucifixion on a telephone pole covered with kudzu, the idea that massive unemployment is best solved by the government shrinking spending is actually quite reasonable.
(My favorite quote of the last couple weeks: “You can’t spray Jesus with Roundup!”)
burnspbesq
@Bruce S:
Why is “elections have consequences” beyond comprehension?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The New York Times, or the Onion? You just can’t fucking tell anymore.
I heard a repeat of the Stephanie Miller show in my car this morning (still have a button set to the old Air America channel. It’s the car radio equivalent of hoarding, I guess) and somebody said the under 30 vote was 11% in the past mid-term. First time I’d heard that stat, which was worse than I thought it would be.
lacp
Jim, Foolish Literalist
We report, you decide.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/article_4e60de3e-1a53-556d-a0de-b6d5d71ed454.html
Bruce S
burnspbesq – the lesson isn’t that elections have consequences (which is too easy and obvioius) so much as that passion, political engagement, activism and insistence appear to have consequences. We won when we gave a shit. We lost when we let the other side define the debate and lots of folks just didn’t show up.
El Cid
It’s odd how sometimes the political system gets caught up in stuff that everyone talks about as being so stupid. It’s the merest coincidence that the stupid policies and arguments advocated strongly benefit a number of parties, including those who hate social welfare / insurance programs anyway.
What a bizarre thing, that people would do what they want to do for the people they want to do it for, when of course we know it’s just ignorance and herd mentality making them do it.
It must be. Everything always has to be unintended consequences, or explained by stupidity and not malice, and so forth.
jl
If you are a wealthy member of the rentier class, and have to roll over huge amounts of debt in order to maintain claims on lots of bad paper assets you hope to cash in on some day. the blue line needs to be kept real low.
So, it is in the self interest of large financial corporations who have exposure to bad mortgage debt, most of which was not fixed by TARPS and HAMPS and VAMPS and whatever.
Corner Stone
@El Cid: Don’t your posts exhaust you?
brendancalling
so does this mean no more “chill the fuck out I got this” posts?
because that would be a real shame.
jl
The issue of loss of asset value is something that has been vaguely rumbling around in the back of my mind, but for some reason I have forgotten to mention.
A rise in interest rates on new bonds will reduce the value of outstanding bonds and other assets with fixed interest rates. To the extent that large financial corporations have asset portfolios dominated by securities with fixed interest rates, a rise in interest rates, even one that is insignificant for the real macro economy, will produce a loss in value of these assets.
The U.S. (and I think Europe) has pursued an ‘extend and pretend’ policy: extend the official life of bad assets so they can be kept on the books, and pretend that the banks and related financial firms holding bad mortgages and related securities are solvent.
If financial corporations are depending on assets with pretend artificially high valuations to maintain the appearance of solvency, then they desperately want to avoid a rise in interest rates.
In aggregate, the value of outstanding mortgages is far higher than the current market value of US housing stock, so probably, a lot of corporations are desperate to keep the value of these mortgage assets as high as possible. Rises in the interest rates would be an immediate across the board (in terms of both individual banks asset portfolios, and across corporations) blow to their valuation.
So, that is another reason for the obsession with not only low, but a preference for falling real interest rates. For, falling real interest rates would increase the value of securities with fixed yields.
I don’t know the details enough to know how important this issue is, but it must be an issue with the financial corps.
El Cid
__
Better to spend some time cursing the darkness rather than trying to convince yourself there’s a lot of light around.
ZigoMandelbaum
morans?
Triassic Sands
ZigoMandelbaum
Look up “moran” in the Urban Dictionary or another similar source. The Urban Dictionary will also provide the all-important photograph. Now, it is just another standard Internet tradition.
Triassic Sands
burnspbesq
For years, Republicans have been spewing nonsense about how the federal government is just like the average family — when things get rough economically, they say, both have to tighten their belts and cut back.
And for decades, Democrats have countered this utter nonsense by pointing out all the ways that the federal government is nothing like the average family, and cutting back when things are rough economically is among the absolute worst things that the federal government can do.
So, imagine my surprise when I heard James Fallows today, on NPR, express his own surprise that President Obama had, in what is a first for any Democrat the sane side of Ben Nelson, declare that the federal government is like…blah, blah, blah.
Not possible, I thought. I hadn’t heard him say it and I hadn’t heard anyone else report that he had said it. Now, I wouldn’t expect to see it on BJ, but I checked back several days through BJ front page posts and didn’t see anything, but no surprise there since, for the most part, the front pagers try to portray Obama in the best light possible, and quoting him saying garbage like that isn’t exactly the best possible light. I mean, that is straight out of the heart of the Modern Republican Party’s Bible.
Then, I found the actual quote:
Grover Norquist? Orrin Hatch? Eric Cantor? John Boehner?
No, no, no, no, and no.
Ben Nelson? No, again.
Barack Obama. WTF?
So, in what may be a historic and tragic first, a Democratic president has publicly embraced one of the Right’s most pernicious lies. A lie that decades of history have shown to be false.
Apparently, burnspbesq, you have a refrigerator full of heads of lettuce that may or may not be smarter than Trollenschlongen, but they certainly are smarter than this president.
On the other hand, this may not be an intelligence problem, because Obama does seem generally smarter than the average bear; but if not stupidity, then what?
I think someone should check the White House water supply — they might find that the president has been drinking Repubican Kool-aid for some time now. Has he been kidnapped and hypotized?
As hard as I try, I can’t find a benign reason for the president to embrace such idiotic right-wing nonsense.
The choices all seem bad —
Stupidity?
Dishonesty?
Gullibility?
Temporary insanity?
He really believes it?
Is it just that he’s got some genuine winger blood running through his veins? I’m at a complete loss to explain it. As questionable as some of Obama’s choices have seemed to me, I never expected to hear that kind of lunacy coming out of his mouth.
So, whatever the explanation, I’d love for you to confer with your resident lettuce scholars and offer an explanation for Obama’s inexplicably cozying up to what has here-to-fore been pure Winger bullshit. Dangerous, untrue, bullshit. The first rung on every right-wing ladder leading to gutting the social safety net and royally screwing the poor and elderly.
And you can skip the adolescent personal insult. This isn’t about me or how much I love Jane Hamsher (not at all) or how I think Obama is worse than Bush (ridiculous — Bush IS the worst president ever). Rather, this is about the tremendous damage that Obama can do to long-standing core Democratic values.
Triassic Sands
Astonishing!
David Stockman (Reagan’s head of OMB) appears on the radio calling for taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. He sounds like a socialist explaining his reasoning. He also calls for letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire. Why does David Stockman sound like he’s more liberal (and smarter) than most Democrats?
He’s making it awfully easy to claim that modern Democrats are far to the right of 70s and 80s Republicans — and not just Republicans, but conservative Republicans.
Steeplejack
@ZigoMandelbaum, @Triassic Sands:
Hell, it’s right here in the Balloon Juice Lexicon.
Triassic Sands
But I would have to have looked in the Balloon Juice Lexicon to know that it’s in the Balloon Juice Lexicon. And it’s usage is so much wider than just here at BJ. The “moran” in that initial photograph truly immortalized himself by misspelling the word “moron” on a sign that tries to condemn others for being stupid.
Irony died right then and there.
I just looked at it in the BJ Lexicon and was very pleased to see the photo is included — in this case one picture is worth a vigintillion words and a definition without the photo would be hopelessly incomplete. Fortunately, when he put the Lexicon together, JC understood that.
I’ve always wondered if the Prime Moran ever realized what he’d done. It would be a shame if he went to his grave without knowing how justly famous and revered he is by the Left.
Suffern ACE
Because David Stockman isn’t running for office or looking for a job in government!
Steeplejack
@Triassic Sands:
The Lexicon is a font of knowledge that should be studied daily by all true believers.
Actually, I was just giving you and what’s-his-name a quick reference that tied it all up–picture and explanation.
But the Lexicon is truly a font of knowledge that should be studied daily by all true believers.