(Posting was a real chore this week, as I was afraid it would be; I'll try to be a bit more timely with this stuff next week.)It wouldn’t be possible for me to even begin to summarize what Krugman discusses or do it justice; he discusses the difference between “saltwater” economists, who more or less theorized along the lines of John Maynard Keynes (who favored the “stimulus,” for example) and “freshwater” economists who “start from the premise that people are rational and markets work” according to Krugman.
However, I believe Krugman does a good job of explaining why Keynesian economic theory, derided by the “freshwater” people, was and remains now the most logical approach for understanding (and solving) the mess we currently face.
And I thought this excerpt was particularly instructive…
…it wasn’t just Keynes whose ideas seemed to have been forgotten. As Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out in his laments about the Chicago school’s “intellectual collapse,” the school’s current stance amounts to a wholesale rejection of Milton Friedman’s ideas, as well. Friedman believed that Fed policy rather than changes in government spending should be used to stabilize the economy, but he never asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment. In fact, rereading Friedman’s 1970 summary of his ideas, “A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis,” what’s striking is how Keynesian it seems.Yeah, well, I think that tells you all you need to know about “freshwater” economists (let’s see a few of them try to pay bills and support families while looking for work, especially now).
And Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments. Thus Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: “Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work . . . decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).” Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”
Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.
In late June of this year, the small Central American nation of Honduras faced a constitutional crisis. The president at the time, Manual Zelaya, was scheming, Hugo Chavez style, to remain in office beyond the single four-year term the constitution grants presidents.As you can read, Rohrabacher (and Repugs generally without exception as nearly as I can tell) believe that the removal of Zelaya from power was lawful, an opinion with which I categorically disagree (Zelaya wasn’t very smart to oppose his country’s Supreme Court, but as far as I’m concerned, his ouster was still an illegal act).
The Honduran Attorney General found Zelaya’s actions and intentions were a violation of law and thus charged him accordingly. The nation’s Supreme Court in conjunction with the Congress and military ordered his detention. Zelaya was taken into custody and sent into exile. Perhaps prison would have been a more fitting location for his current residence.
Of course the Repugs would be pleased with this, though, if for no other reason than the fact that, as noted here…
General Romeo Vazquez, who led (the coup), is an alumnus of the United States School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation). The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups.Looks like past is prologue for the Repugs here, people (and believe it or not, Lanny Davis has wormed his way into all this; as Mark Weisbrot tells us, “(Davis) has been hired by a coalition of business interests to represent the dictatorship”…and to learn more about the School of the Americas, click here).
The coup government has shot and killed peaceful demonstrators, closed TV and radio stations, and arrested journalists. Two political activists have been murdered.
During the 1980s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency trained a military death squad -- the infamous battalion 316 -- that tortured and murdered hundreds of Honduran political activists. The U.S. embassy looked the other way, and the State Department doctored its annual human rights reports to omit these crimes.
Of course, these antics are part and parcel for Rohrabacher, who called President Obama a “cream puff” here (and let’s not forget that Rohrabacher supported the Afghan groups who eventually became the Taliban and forces loyal to bin Laden, as noted here). However, Rohrabacher wisely told Dubya to “stay home” from their party’s ’08 convention last year (here).
Besides, given our blood-stained history of Central American involvement, a person with a conscience would realize that we would do better to stay out and let the Hondurans sort this out for themselves (dangerous to assume that any Repug, especially Rohrabacher, possesses a conscience, I realize).
Update 11/18/09: Um...apparently our pal Dana was chummier with OBL than I first thought (here - and Grover Norquist too?? h/t Atrios).
Yes, you read that right; Froma Harrop made what I thought were good points about that here...
Start with Canada to see how this works. Canadians have universal coverage, a big immigration program and almost no undocumented workers. These things are not unrelated. Government-guaranteed medical care is a big reason why Canada doesn't tolerate illegal immigration. No country can long afford a large subclass of poor workers that pays little in taxes and collects full benefits.Wow, that teabaggin’ fool Phil Gingrey actually “finds the nut.” Color me impressed!
To quote conservative economist Milton Friedman, "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."
…
As a practical matter, undocumented workers shy away from government programs that could expose their illegal status. A law passed in 2005 requires applicants to Medicaid, which insures poor people, to prove their citizenship. Two years later, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform studied Medicaid enrollments in six states (Kansas, Colorado, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin). It found only eight illegal immigrants on the rolls.
But, says Georgia Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey, "a lot of their kids are in the school system." That's true. The schools don't check for immigration status. Medicaid does. And so would the health-care system now envisioned by Congress.
And by the way, good on Obama for this…
It's worth noting that President Obama's is the first administration to seriously crack down on illegal immigration in decades. Under its orders, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has stepped up audits of companies suspected of using illegal labor. Hundreds of offenders have been slapped with stiff fines and warnings to mend their ways.What I’m trying to communicate here is the fact that we need to start finding a way to determine exactly who is here legally and who isn’t (aside from some actual enforcement, which, thankfully, is a lesson well learned by the Obama Administration). And while the debate about national ID cards is playing itself out and legislation works its way through Congress, we could look at this also as well as providing temporary driver’s licenses for these individuals (which would also serve the purpose of obtaining a record for them). And yes, I know that these are “hot button” issues, particularly the driver’s license thing, but as I’ve said before, I’ll change my opinion on this when someone can make a good argument that illegal immigrants are worse drivers than legal ones.
And as always, the fact that we have to scramble for “back door” solutions in the matter of handling illegal immigration is a testimony to the failure of the Repug congress (and president) in addressing this issue because of the umbrage generated in response by the right-wing media echo chamber.
We Americans like to think of ourselves as iconoclasts, proud of our pioneer heritage and the way we flipped the historical finger at our colonial oppressors. We talk about, and believe in, liberty and justice and are usually able to balance those competing interests when necessary.As usual, Flowers is wrong.
Until Sept. 11, 2001.
That's when the flames and fury split the population in two along an invisible fault line - those who saw the world as it is and fought to meet the challenge in whatever way they thought necessary, and those who saw the world as they wanted it to be, and refused to violate their own concept of honor.
…
On 9/11, the terrorists did a lot more than bring down the Twin Towers. What died in the smoke and melting metal, along with our precious countrymen, was a big piece our shared identity as a people able to compromise.
The partisanship she so bemoans now that her preferred party is out of power (and if she’s a “Democrat,” then I’m a Chinese aviator) has been a long time in the making, and 9/11 had nothing to do with it.
Start with The Sainted Ronnie R’s presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near where the slain bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Michael Schwerner were found (here). Then follow it up with heaping rhetoric about “welfare queens” and other "values voter" nonsense (welfare in particular, "reformed" under Clinton, not Reagan) as well as the introduction of supply-side economics, tax cuts for the rich, and war on the environment. And after that, add the Michael Dukakis-Willie Horton smear to the toxic mix (and by the way, the early parole program that allowed Horton to go free was instituted by a Republican gubernatorial predecessor of Dukakis), along with a certain Poppy Bush wrapping himself in the flag and pontificating about school choice and “Read My Lips: No New Taxes” (in addition to working the Republican base into a lather, all of this had the thoroughly anticipated side effect of polarizing voters who traditionally identified themselves with either major party). And if I were to try and catalogue once more all of the ways that Number 43 did this, easily surpassing both his own biological father and his ideological one, I wouldn’t finish this post until sometime tomorrow.
But for yours truly, the partisanship “point of no return” is described here, as follows…
…nobody who was paying attention in 1998 can plausibly claim that the media give Democrats a pass. The feeding frenzy set off by the Lewinsky story that January is simply unmatched in history. It was the dominant topic in newspapers, on evening news broadcasts, and on cable news every day for a year. Nothing has come close to the sustained level of wall-to-wall media coverage the Lewinsky story was given. Not the three presidential elections that have happened since, not the war in Iraq -- nothing. Media coverage of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2000 recount arguably came close to that of Lewinsky in terms of intensity, but for a much shorter period of time.Christine Flowers has made a living fanning the flames of partisanship in her Friday diatribes which, in their infinite stupidity, Philadelphia Newspapers has allowed to see the light of day both print and online.
On Day 2 of the Lewinsky story, The Washington Post and The New York Times combined to run 19 articles (five on their front pages) about the affair. The articles totaled more than 20,000 words and involved the work of 28 reporters who were given bylines or named as contributors. A month later, the papers combined for 12 articles, columns, and editorials, involving 17 reporters and columnists, as well as both editorial boards. At one point in 1998, Brent Bozell of the right-wing Media Research Center whined that the media had "stopped" covering the story. At the time, there were 500 news reports a day about the Lewinsky matter. Five hundred stories a day -- on a typical day -- and conservatives were complaining about a decrease in coverage.
Again: You obviously can't directly compare coverage of a president's affair with coverage of a senator's. I offer an illustration of the extent of media coverage of the Lewinsky affair not to compare it to coverage of, say, David Vitter, but simply because I can only assume that anyone who thinks the media take it easy on Democrats who have affairs must not have been paying attention in 1998.
But it isn't the relentless media coverage of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in 1998 that most convincingly debunks Brzezinski's claims of a pro-Democrat double standard. It is what has happened since.
Years after the events of 1998, the media have continued to obsess over Bill Clinton's affair. Take Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, during which she was subjected to The New York Times (figuratively) peering in her bedroom windows as the media attempted to tally the number of nights the Clintons spend together per month. When Clinton aides and supporters appeared on MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews grilled them about whether Bill Clinton would "behave" and whether he would be a "good boy" and warned that "he better watch it." Bill Clinton's affair -- which happened a decade earlier -- was treated by the media as a significant part of the campaign.
And Bill Clinton wasn't even running!
And I don’t know if trying to avoid her share of blame by invoking 9/11 is perhaps her lowest moment yet, but at this time, I can think of none lower.
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