Simon Johnson -- shown above, looking a bit like Bob Newhart -- has had his manic anti-Laputa moments lately. But it seems, come the ultimo pinch -- once a guy's spent some quality time trawling the watery byways of the planet for the IMF in full B and D mode... well, you know... ya just can't take the bonecrusher out of 'em.

Here's Simon pressing our brave little grasshoppering Hellenes to morph into fiscal anorexia mode and deal with their "sovereign debt bubble" by... paying it off!

"By the end of 2011 Greece’s debt will reach around 150% of GDP... About 80 percent of this debt is foreign owned, and a large part of this is thought held by residents of France and Germany."

" Every 1 percentage point rise in interest rates means Greece needs to send an additional 1.2 percent of GDP abroad to those bondholders."

"What if Greek interest rates rise to, say, 10% – a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world, which continues (under the so-called “austerity” program) to refinance even the interest on that debt without actually paying a centime out of its own pocket, and which is struggling to establish any sustained backing from the rest of Europe?"

"..Greece would need to send a total of 12% of GDP abroad per year, once they rollover the existing stock of debt to these new rates (nearly half of Greek debt will roll over within 3 years).

This is simply impossible and unheard of for any long period of history. German reparation payments were 2.4 percent of GNP during 1925-32, and in the years immediately after 1982, the net transfer of resources from Latin America was 3.5 percent of GDP (a fifth of its export earnings). Neither of these were good experiences."

"On top of all this Greece’s debt, even under the IMF’s mild assumptions, is on a non-convergent path even with the perceived “austerity” measures."

These "numbers" can get a signifigantly opposite play. Enter St Paul of Nassau: "In the past, some countries have managed levels of debt that high or higher, without default...So how is that possible?

Suppose that Greece had as much credibility as Germany, and could borrow at a real interest rate of 2 percent. Then stabilizing the real value of its debt, even with a debt ratio of 150 percent, would require a primary surplus of only 3 percent of GDP. That’s certainly possible for some countries, although maybe not for Greece... this suggests that optimism or pessimism about future default can, to at least some degree, be a self-fulfilling prophecy." As if to scotch Johnson's own bitter prophecy, the Euro barons are making nice about Athens -- err, not Byronic nice; more like "them's pets of the realm" nice.

In any case these numbers are far from horrorific in absolute terms. Imagine, say, South Carolina in fiscal trouble. Could the rest of the states bail her out through the grand offices of Uncle Sap?

"Soitenly!" as "Curly" Krugman pointed out some time ago: "Overall, the group of stressed economies account for about 20 percent of the eurozone’s GDP", Krug observes -- less of a hard slog than, say, if Uncle were to bail out Dixie (though we have to put Spain aside as TBTF).

Hell, it gets to be a damn fine boat ride. If the Euro central bank can borrow at sub German rates, then...

But alas, mates, a greater fraud is in progress here, perpetrated upon a lesser fraud, and in the end 'twill all prove just another silk-hat squeeze play, a starve-the-little-critters gambit, a nifty iron-law flimflam, a way to crumple the welfare state just a tad more, foul its safety nets and crimp its feckless hu-cap squanderings. "They're in a pickle, boys, so let's squelch 'em and squelch 'em gooood!..."

To paraphrase Andy Mellon: "Starve starve starve! Starve Greece! Starve Portugal! Starve Latvia and Estonia too, and oh yes, of course, begorrah, starve that dirty little figment on the Emerald Isle."

-------------------

(*) List available upon request. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/hellene_and_mean.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/hellene_and_mean.html The Immiserators Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:21:13 -0500

My man Alex Cockburn was in fine form the other day, a propos the Oscar for Hurt Locker:

The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, said at the end of her acceptance speech, “I'd like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world and may they come home safe.”

...I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker and don’t plan to.... “We had these Blackwater guys that were working with us in the Middle East and they taught us like tactical maneuvers and stuff – how to just basically position yourself and move with a gun,” Hurt Locker actor Anthony Mackie told the New York Times’ Melena Ryzik. “We were shooting in Palestinian refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn't like we were without enemies. There were people there looking at us, 'cuz we were three guys in American military suits runnin' around with guns. It was nothing easy about it. It was always a compromising situation.”

I love Alex for breezily dismissing a movie he hasn't seen. You can tell a book by its cover, I've always said, and all you really need to know about a movie is how people respond to it. I am not being ironical here. Reception is not just the main thing, it's the only thing.

I personally made this discovery years ago, in connection with the movie The Deer Hunter, which I still haven't seen. I found that all I had to do was get people to tell me what they liked about the movie, and I had plenty of grist for my mill. Sentimentality is chief lady-in-waiting to militarism -- sloppily weeping and waving her sodden handkerchief as Moloch marches off to the fields of slaughter.

Sentimentality also gets to have it both ways. IMDB has an unsourced quote supposedly from director Kathryn Bigelow:

I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. [Movies are] a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war [i.e. Afghanistan] that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

There is something all too twisted in me. Take my new heartthrob, the rather aquiline Catherine Rampell. I find her as entrancing as a glass case full of birthday cakes, and she works for Father Smiff's NYT, no less -- in fact, she edits their online econ-con efforts, and writes stuff too, like this, f'rinstance:

"Rather than obsessing over Washington’s rubbery backbones, perhaps we should find ways to align the interests of the country with those of the politicians who are guiding it. Put another way, how can we get politicians elected on a short-term basis to think about the long-term good of the country?...

Historically, fiscal crises have followed financial crises [yup, like the one we just had], so now is probably the time to start planning.... It has been difficult to spook Americans too much because it has been so blissfully long since we had a budget crisis; the last time the government technically defaulted on its debt was during the Great Depression.

Alas, we don’t have a color-coded alert system to warn us about our fiscal condition.

We do, however, have credit rating agencies. Moody’s recently warned that it might downgrade America’s top-notch sovereign credit rating, which could alarm the markets and eventually make it harder for the government to borrow. Once upon a time it seemed we needed the government to save the financial markets; perhaps now it is the financial markets that will keep the government in line."

Now here's one for my darker side:

"The question of why so many Jews have been so good at making money is a touchy one...From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud...

Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.)...

The exorbitant interest rates they charged — sometimes as high as 60 percent — only fed the fury. But considering the economic climate, such rates probably made good business sense: capital was scarce, and lenders frequently risked having their debtors’ obligations canceled or their own assets arbitrarily seized by the crown...

This early, semi-exclusive exposure to finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking, trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism, unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty particularly ennobling...

For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew — one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice, [inspiring] resentment among history’s economic also-rans."

I may die with her image swimming past my unshut eyes. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/paine_in_love.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/paine_in_love.html Whale watch Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:42:56 -0500

Welcome the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

The advisory board is worth a look: what a criminal-looking bunch, every man jack of 'em wearing an expression that's either brittlely brazen or shifty-eyed and hang-dog. These are the motley Merlins that George Attaturk Soros has assembled to redesign the global economic system; and here is a quote from his highness, lord Soros, that serves as well as any might to seed the ground with dragon's teeth:

"The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm to rebuild from the ground up."

]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/paradigm_a_dozen.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/paradigm_a_dozen.html The dismal non-science Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:50:34 -0500

March is Independent Fed month!

This month back in '51, the blatantly bright-eyed anal-looking briefcase thief pictured above freed our Fed from the Truman treasury department, after 9 harrowing years of institutional captivity, just as many of our brave boys in Korea were entering Chicom captivity.

Clio takes with one hand as she gives with the other, no?

At any rate, brainwashing seems to work in both directions. Here's one way -- the classical way, the Red Menace way. Before washing:

After washing:

And here's another way -- the Fed's freedom-to-turkeyrope way. Before washing:

After washing:

To read about this glorious silk-hat liberation struggle, maybe start here. In brief: the Fed had its policy rate ceilinged, for nearly a decade, at a level often well below inflation. The clamp was placed originally in 42-43 just as Uncle, resorting to extraordinary measures, exploded his deficits to win the war.

The same clamp -- prolonged by diabolical Treasury forces -- helped win the postwar peace too, as the economy barreled ahead in unprecedentedly broad and bottom-elevating strike-infested fashion.

With help like this pinned rate, obviously the size of our war-induced federal paper debt mountain shrank nicely, as the postwar years of stiff -- in part, wage-driven -- price level updrafts roared away.

March, '51 -- like mighty badger Milhous closing the gold window in August '71

-- one of the really big invisible ink landmarks in the great American class struggle. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/thermidor_en_ventose.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/thermidor_en_ventose.html The Immiserators Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:09:21 -0500

Congressman Eric Massa is not going quietly, is he? He's been a favorite here since my visit to the Daily Kos convention back in '06.

His supposed "inappropriate" behavior -- don't you hate that term? -- doesn't seem to have amounted to much, unless there's juicier stuff to come. But all right-minded people are agreed that it's a lunatic "conspiracy theory" -- don't you hate that term? -- to imagine that the Dems might have greased the skids for him.]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/we_knew_him_when.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/we_knew_him_when.html Varia Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:34:18 -0500

Comments were again inexplicably disabled on Owen's Trumka post. Fixed now.

]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/gremlin_strikes_again.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/gremlin_strikes_again.html Meta Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:15:20 -0500

Behold the agony of Blanche Lincoln:

"Caught in a surge of antigovernment sentiment, [Arkansas senator] Lincoln has been blasted by conservatives for allowing health care legislation to proceed, and has already attracted a slate of potential Republican challengers. At the same time, in a state with a more centrist tradition than most others in the South, she has become a target of the left for opposing a government-run public health care option, easier organizing rules for unions and regulation to fight global warming.

Not only do polls show her behind several of the Republicans, she now also faces a challenger in the May 18 Democratic primary, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter... The Sierra Club is running radio advertisements against Mrs. Lincoln and even Emily’s List, which raises money for the election of Democratic women who support abortion rights, joined the pile-on last week, reminding followers that it stopped supporting Mrs. Lincoln, who is generally a supporter of abortion rights, after she voted to ban a form of late-term abortion in 1999."

"Mrs. Lincoln retains the support of... former President Bill Clinton and Wesley K. Clark, the retired Army general."

His endorsers:

"Calling Mr. Halter “a true progressive,” MoveOn.org and other liberal groups quickly raised $1.1 million for him... four unions pledged to spend $1 million each to help him win.The Sierra Club is running radio advertisements against Mrs. Lincoln and even Emily’s List, which raises money for the election of Democratic women who support abortion rights, joined the pile-on."

Can we at least hope the seat goes red-meat Republican come fall? Not that that would be any improvement; but it would provide a salutary blend of justice and entertainment, something we don't see much of any more, now that public hangings have fallen into disfavor. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/lames_to_the_slaughter.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/lames_to_the_slaughter.html '94 all over again? Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:41:25 -0500

And no, I don't mean the football team:

Icelanders reject full repayment to British, Dutch caught in bank collapse

LONDON -- Icelanders this weekend resoundingly rejected a plan to reimburse overseas depositors after the failure of an online Icelandic bank, a rare public referendum on the repayment of a foreign liability that could fuel further concerns over debt problems in Europe.

A whopping 93 percent of Icelanders rebuffed a government push to reimburse Britain and the Netherlands $5.3 billion....

Voters reveled in a carnival atmosphere following the vote, shooting fireworks into the air and raising placards saying "Sorry Darling, No Deal" -- a reference to Britain's Alistair Darling, the finance minister....

Darling conceded on Sunday that it could now take "many, many years" before London would see any reimbursement. But he also seemed to strike a conciliatory note, saying both Britain and the Netherlands are willing to be flexible.

It's always been head-for-the-hills time in northwest Europe when the Vikings find themselves seized by a "carnival atmosphere".

I happened to be living in Ireland during one of the intermittent "cod wars" between the Icelanders and the Brits. It would have done your heart good to hear the Irish cheering on the Icelanders -- all those unfortunate misunderstandings with Thorgest et al. quite forgotten.

According to a story I heard several times there -- though I've never been able to confirm it -- there was at least one occasion when an Icelandic gunboat loaded up its guns with potatoes and broadsided an English vessel. Talk about bangers and mash! The characteristic Irish narrative genius brought vividly to the mind's eye an image of the Brit warship and its spiffy officers slathered inches-thick with potato puree, flavored with a soupcon of cordite.

]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/lets_hear_it_for_the_vikings.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/lets_hear_it_for_the_vikings.html The Immiserators Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:05:44 -0500

Okay, it's time I put together a links page on this site. I'm soliciting nominations. Leave suggestions in a comment or send email -- stopmebeforeivoteagain {at} yahoo.com. I'd be especially interested in hearing about sites that link to us. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/links_wanted.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/links_wanted.html Meta Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:43:48 -0500

The executive council of the AFL-CIA, backing its charging fearless leader Ferdinand Trumka, has issued a 5-point jobs plan -- and as far as Knothole Paine here is concerned, at least one of the points sucks hot rivets.

Here's all 5. Can you pick out the banjo? Hint: it's not even number 5:

1. Extending current federal supplemental unemployment benefits programs to prevent a downward spiral as families fall into bankruptcy and lose their health care and their homes to foreclosure.
2. Investing the money to meet the $2.2 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs, while including prevailing wage protections and strong Buy America provisions.
3. Helping state and local governments meet pressing needs to overcome an estimated $180 billion shortfall in the fiscal year 2011 and $588 billion over the next four years.
4. Putting people back to work doing work that needs to be done by preserving good public jobs that provide vital services and capacity for building strong communities. In addition, expansion of vital services in targeted areas can reduce unemployment and provide infrastructure for economic growth.
5. Easing the credit crunch for small-and medium-sized businesses by establishing a fund to lend TARP money to small-and medium-sized businesses at commercial rates, managed by the community banks left out of the Wall Street bailout, with the banks taking first-dollar risk

For that matter, point 3 looks like special consideration horseshit, too. God, I hate public-sector unions as currently constituted, almost as much as the construction trades crowd, the perennial establishment butt boys of the "movement".

Ahh, but I say too much, don't I. Where's my party muzzle when I need it? Oh yeah, we're in 'post-party' times here in America, and how awful that is, especially for big-mouth egg drops like me, here at the SMBIVA bugle.

Father Smiff allows too wide a range of flourishes to this reckless irresolute copperhead.

------------------

(*) I never shall forget the indulgence with which [Johnson] treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature....

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. 'Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.' And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.'

-- Boswell]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/hodge_shall_not_be_shot.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/hodge_shall_not_be_shot.html Toil and trouble Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:27:51 -0500

“It’s the Americans,” said Gen. Mohamed Gelle Kahiye, the new chief of Somalia’s military, who said he recently shared plans about coming military operations with American advisers. “They’re helping us.” That American assistance could be crucial to the effort by Somalia’s government to finally reassert its control over the capital and bring a semblance of order to a country that has been steeped in anarchy for two decades. For the Americans, it is part of a counterterrorism strategy to deny a haven to Al Qaeda, which has found sanctuary for years in Somalia’s chaos and has helped turn this country into a magnet for jihadists from around the world.

Just like old times. The highly touted return of the rule of law must yield to exigent circumstances. Or maybe not. But it's still the Republicans' fault if and when the tortured terror suspects may or may not have to be tried in military kangaroo courts. The Democrats' neurotic mockery of proceduralism is the dry, sadistic, technocratic version of the Republicans' sweaty, sadistic, technocratic mockery of proceduralism. Neither of them can produce anything remotely plausible as justice. Order is out of reach for them both, because they have no idea what it is. So... Why not simply murder them? Cut through the dithering! Murder is sufficiently spiteful, and surely there's room in the president's "Just War" theory for a murder or four. He could authorize a predator drone if that would sit better with the focus groups. ]]> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/incontinent_spiteful_dithering.html http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/03/incontinent_spiteful_dithering.html Hope springs eternal Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:17:22 -0500

Nobody's in favor of book-burning or anything, but there are words and phrases which, when you encounter them, tell you, or should tell you, "Read no further -- this is twaddle."

Among these expressions are "extremist", "progressive," and "spiritual."

"Progressive" is a word used by liberals who don't want to admit they're liberals, and "spiritual" is a word used by religious people who don't want to admit they're religious. ("Spiritual progressive" is therefore of course a quadrate term in pusillanimous euphemism.)

But of the three, "extremist" is perhaps the deadest giveaway. It's never used approvingly; and as criticism, what exactly does it mean, except that anything that's any distance from the dead center is ipso-facto bad?

These reflections were suggested by an item in Alternet, from the deeply concerned pen of one Mark Potok:

Right-Wing Rage: Hate Groups, Vigilantes and Conspiracists on the Verge of Violence
The radical right has caught fire, as broad-based anger over the past year has ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels -- almost 1,000 -- despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80 percent, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups -- militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans -- came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

The anger seething across the American political landscape -- over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" -- goes beyond the radical right.

It's always been my view that actual violence is more of a problem than potential violence. Thus the daily actual violence at home and abroad practiced by the "relatively liberal" Obama administration agitates me a good deal more than the potential violence of some Teabagger crackpot. But then, I'm an extremist.

I've always found Rabbi Michael Lerner faintly sick-making -- there's something goo-eyed and clammy-palmed, something damp-browed and flabby-mouthed, something stands-too-close and breathes-in-your-face about his authorial persona. I can't explain it, his stuff just makes my skin crawl.

A couple of days ago he put a link on his blog at Tikkun magazine -- and by the way, I know what the word means, but using it to name anything shows a remarkably bad ear -- to a rather fun piece by Chris Hedges. Hedges wrote:

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.

... The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats.

My recommending the article is not meant to be an endorsement of Chris’s position any more than our circulation of other articles is meant as an endorsement of them. (Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives are nonprofits that are legally bound to refrain from endorsing political candidates or political parties, though we can certainly engage in discussions about them.) ...

On the other hand, in the case of Chris Hedges, he says so much that is true and insightful that we don’t want to distance ourselves too far from his courageous stands,

Apparently he misjudged his distance. One imagines a deluge of rancorous phone calls from apoplectic yentas of both sexes -- canceled subscriptions -- vivid Yiddish maledictions turning the air blue. The next day's dawn saw Lerner backing water so fast his oars were just an indistinct blur, like a hummingbird's wings:

Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I sent out yesterday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama Administration are legitimate points. But the way Hedges's positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view.There was too much anger in his statement overshadowing our spiritual progressive commitment to compassion and a spirit of generosity toward others with whose politics we disagree. And not enough sympathy for the problems anyone would face trying to get elected as President and to repair the damage of the past 30 years....

Hedges' analysis and particularly the harsh way he expresses it leads to despair and to the "blame game" that has little usefulness in politics. Our difference here is partly the difference between two styles of prophetic leadership: one that rails against injustice, the other that moves beyond the legitimate outrage and seeks to find a way to change the reality.