If the Republicans win the House in November, which now seems likely, word is out they mean to attack the President by subpoenaing documents related to his administration’s actions and policies since coming into office. The aim here is two-fold: embarrass and weaken the president in preparation for his 2012 reelection bid; and distract the public from a deep recession for which the Republicans have no real cures. This is dirty politics, of course. But so what. As Harry Truman trenchantly noted:...

Austerity has taken hold in much of Europe. In some countries, like Greece and France, it has begun generating a great deal of social unrest. In Britain, a drastic austerity program that has just been announced will reduce the benefits of millions and lead to reducing the size of government by almost 500,000. Austerity is much on view in this country as well, but so far only at the state government level where budgets have to be balanced. At the federal level, huge borrowing has put off the austerity...

Around the country, candidates with few if any qualifications for high public office other than a willingness to ‘self-fund’ their own campaigns seem on the verge of winning a fair number of elections — a process that moves us yet another step toward… A Monarchy Of Money In days of yore the rich would seek a needy candidate, And legally (though quietly) his campaign chest inflate. Both giver and receiver liked the tradeoff here just fine, One got himself...

Peter Orvetti wrote a post about why older folks don’t really deserve a boost in their Social Security benefits. This was well grounded in economist thinking. Which, of course, is why, in my opinion, it is so far removed from reality. His point was that since official inflation was very modest this past fiscal year (1.1 percent), and official inflation was actually down last year, and official inflation was up so much the year before that, older Americans are really ahead of the game financially...

It now appears certain that Republicans will gain control over at least one house of congress and maybe both. What can we expect from them in this new political environment, and how might their behavior differ from the behavior of Democrats after the 2008 elections? 1. Whatever their margin of victory, Republicans will proclaim they have a mandate for great change and act accordingly. They won’t compromise. They won’t desperately seek bi-partisanship. They will say that voters put them...

One is six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. Millions are lined up at food pantries, and food stamps are at record levels. Foreclosures may have been suspended for many at present because of screw ups in bank paperwork but that does nothing to solve the housing crisis — indeed, from a certain prospective, it just makes things much worse. Voters are angry as hell at both self-absorbed parties playing I-want-the-power games in the Beltway, and will likely take it out on the party...

To the guy running for the senate against Russ Feingold in Wisconsin: Why do you think your experience as a plastics manufacturer qualifies you for a senate seat? Does Feingold’s experience in politics qualify him to run a plastics company? To Christine O’Donnell in Delaware: Please take the catch line “I’m you” out of your commercials. Every time it appears it reminds me of the first “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movie, and I visualize a new me taking...

I had a strange dream the other night. I dreamed that I was an archeologist and came upon a three thousand year old tomb in Egypt. In the two rooms of this tomb were stacks of assets. One stack consisted of bricks bearing hieroglyphics that stated, when translated, that the bearer was entitled to a 4 percent annual interest rate backed by the Bank of Necropolis and the full faith and credit of the government of Pharaoh Rames II. The other stack was gold bars. The brick bonds had great historical...

A headline in today’s New York Times read: “Cheap debt for corporations fails to spur the economy.” A line in this story goes on to explain: “The situation underscores the limits of Washington policy makers’ power to stimulate the economy.” Not true. What is underscored here is these policy makers’ endless and mindless commitment to trickle down economics. Cheap debt based on record low Fed-generated rates is only accessible to large corporations. Not to...

Both the United States and Western Europe have entered a period of austerity that looks to be quite protracted. The two economic powers are approaching this reality in very different ways, however. One of the most obvious differences involves language. Official pronouncements and media in Europe are full of comments about “austerity budgets” and “austerity angst.” In this country we seem to be in verbal denial when it comes to austerity, focusing instead on that strange economist...

I don’t think people who oppose higher taxes are crazy. What I find crazy is that their opposition is directed at the wrong taxes and the wrong taxers. Forget the formal definition of “tax.” What a tax really is in the real world as applied to real people is any money the government scoops out of the pockets of its citizens and businesses. Fees for all kinds of government services, for example, are going up these days, many of them steeply. You want to drive, get married, prove...

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about a declaration by the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) that the recession ended in June 2009. The point of that post was that it was silly and indeed cruel for a few academic economists to broadcast their technical definition of recession at a time when so many Americans are suffering in what for them is a very real on-going and in many ways deepening recession. Insensitive timing by a few academic economists in an obscure professional...

Police arrest you. Beat you to a pulp in the station house. Then let you go when they find you’re innocent of any crimes. Do you feel good about the incident because you’ve been exonerated? You have a stroke. It leaves you paralyzed and unable to speak. But the doctors assure you that you’re lucky because the stroke didn’t actually kill you. Do you feel healthy now? You’re left impoverished by a SLAPs suit that had no basis but was used by a large corporation to punish...

Republican Party candidates for major offices come in three basic varieties these days — right, far right, and out-of-sight right. What I find especially interesting about this mix is how nicely campaign financial arrangements of these three reflect these ideologies. Right republicans, for example, are generally party regulars with pro-business, pro-Wall Street, pro-social conservative views. Their primary objective is to keep a job in Washington or win one by saying nasty things about Democrats...

Darn. The primaries are over. And just when I finally figured out how to get myself elected to congress or maybe become a governor. Silly me. I let a few things hold me back from making the run. Minor things that are no longer relevant. No, I don’t have experience or real qualifications for the job. So what. I don’t have specific policies or programs in mind to make things better either. What’s the problem? I have feelings. Strong feelings that things aren’t going well. And...

I don’t agree with the Republicans in Congress who want to extend tax breaks for the richest two percent of Americans as well as the other 98 percent. But let’s be honest here. The reasons these worthies give to support their point of view are sometimes entertaining. Indeed, on occasion, they’re a real hoot. Take the Republican congressman from Georgia interviewed on Public Radio this past weekend. To justify extending tax breaks for the top two percent of American earners, he said...

Democratic campaign strategists are desperately trying to come up with a unified theme they can use to salvage their majority in Congress this November. That would be a nice thing to have, of course. But there’s a better way to reduce the expected electoral damage: Learn the lesson of the 2004 presidential election. In that campaign Democrats made a disastrous mistake by overlooking an obvious opportunity. They focused on the failures of George W. Bush. And while these failures, both in the...

Headlines in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and various financial websites this past Friday proclaimed the happy tidings. They read: “Better-than-expected jobs data boasts markets,” and “Recession Concerns Ease on August Jobs Data.” and “Fed May Face Less Pressure to Add Stimulus After Jobs Report,” and the rather more informative headline, “Growth in Jobs Beats Estimates, Easing Concern.” The jobs report this past Friday was actually terrible....

It’s small potatoes by American financial rip-off standards. But the run now going on at the Kabul Bank in Afghanistan might soon lead to yet another U.S. government bailout, a new bit of fiscal idiocy to add to our country’s other manic policies in the nasty pissant backwater in which we are currently drowning. The facts here are simple enough. As part of our policy-makers’ ongoing exercise in nation building, we decided to remake the Afghan financial/banking system in our own...

Was it just a coincidence? A case of life imitating art? A very subtle attempt at self-parody? Or did that Tea Party gathering on the Washington Mall this past weekend bear an eerie resemblance to the tea party in Alice In Wonderland? The March Hare in Carroll’s book, who presided over a tea party on the other side of the looking glass, was of course quite mad. Glenn Beck, who presided over doings in Washington, is mad as well — though not in the same sense as the March Hare. Beck is mad...

‘Money talks and nobody walks’ is an observation that applies to a great many situations. But it doesn’t quite catch the reality of the Wall Street, Washington Beltway relationship. Here, it’s not a matter of talking and walking. It’s more a case of bawling and crawling. For most of the last century the Republican Party was the universally recognized political mouthpiece of Wall Street. And for the half century between the coming of the New Deal and the 1980s, the Democratic...

Woe is me. What have I become? How did this come to pass? What bizarre, terrifying confluence of circumstances have led me to actually agree with House Republican leader John Boehner? The other day Representative Boehner said that President Obama should immediately get rid of his top two economic policy advisors, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. And instead of hissing at the image of Boehner on my TV as is my usual response to his pronouncements, I found myself standing up and cheering. “Yes,”...

The next big legislative soap opera in this country will involve expiring tax cuts. A few long-time fiscal sinners seeking to do a hair shirt number (think Alan Greenspan here) have been saying all these tax cuts, instituted in 2001 with George W. Bush in office, should be allowed to expire because otherwise the national debt will grow still more disastrously in coming years. But congress wasn’t elected to do the unpopular — to do things like letting tax reductions expire. Congress, after...

Yesterday the founder of the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was charged by Swedish authorities with rape. It made front page news in this country because WikiLeaks has made public documents that suggest the American military, intelligence community, and key members of two administrations have been consistently misrepresenting their horrendously bungled Afghanistan adventure. Today, according to news reports, Julian Assange is no longer suspected of rape in Sweden, and no longer...

One of the most glorious things I witnessed in my lifetime was the way working class consciousness largely evaporated in this country after World War II. A Beatles song neatly summed up the reason: “A working class hero is no way to be.” Indeed, it had only seemed a good way to be in years when people in this very large and diverse group of Americans didn’t have a clear shot at joining the better heeled middle class. When that chance came along, “Don’t call me working...