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Romney's desperation is clear by his abandonment of Etch-a-Sketching toward the right-center, in favor of:
- a full-blown, racist-right move to his low-information base
- incoherent attacks on Obama's foreign policy, in the face of murderous violence
- moving forward with long-term GOP project of phasing out Social Security and Medicare
- and his bizarre embrace of Ron Paul and the John Birch Society's scorn of the Federal Reserve System
Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, announced a change in his institution’s recession-fighting strategies. In so doing he seemed to be responding to the arguments of critics who have said the Fed can and should be doing more. And Republicans went wild. ...Ed Kilgore terms Romney's serpentine "econo-manic campaign" (nearly identical to the campaigns of W. Bush, McCain and the other great deregulaters) as demonstrating a movement "so locked down on tactical day-to-day maneuvering that it’s lost sight of any coherent strategy or rationale-for-candidacy."
So last week we learned that Ben Bernanke is willing to listen to sensible critics and change course. But we also learned that on economic policy, as on foreign policy, Mitt Romney has abandoned any pose of moderation and taken up residence in the right’s intellectual fever swamps.
So now, Romney wants (and openly advocates) the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 declared as creating a mere inflation-fighting tool, no matter the legislative and administrative history of the law and the function of the Federal Reserve System.
Honest money
Who needs monetary policy? We need "honest money," as Paul Ryan phrases it, whatever that would be in GOP land.
As Brad DeLong puts it in his Paul Ryan calls for fewer jobs and higher unemployment in America: "'Honest money' is a Ron Paul dog whistle: the good productive workers, the bad exploitative usurers, the necessity of a hard-money depression to cleanse the monetary colon--you know the drill."
Continues Kilgore: "Long-time if somewhat muted (at least outside the Ron Paul campaign) Republican muttering about stimulative monetary policies broke out into the open in the Romney campaign’s reaction to the Fed’s QE3 announcement [last week]."
This is the same Fed that saved the country in the great crash of 1987 when we "'came within an hour' of the disintegration of the stock market," as noted by Felix Rohatyn, a partner of Lazard Freres and Company. (Johnson. Sleepwalking Through History, America in the Reagan Years; W.W. Norton Company, 1991. p. 381) [A reviewer of Haynes Johnson's book writes, "A readable critique of the fatuous illusions foisted on a willing society by American leadership in the 1980s." (Hyland. Foreign Affairs; Summer 1991)
Fatuous illusions indeed.
Haynes Johnson also notes, "In that moment of maximum peril (in 1987) the Federal Reserve Board in Washington stepped in forcefully and dramatically, [announcing its 'readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.'"]
Damn stimulative forces! I say, let 'em crash.
Not the first time the Fed has saved the system, though 2008 has evidently fallen into the black hole where facts and history no longer exist.
And 1929? Pay no nevermind.
Those 18th, 19th and 20th century recessions. God and the Magical Market made sure nothing bad happened to good, Christian Americans; though 1987 was a bit scary—Satan, no doubt.
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman; they're just part of those liberal elitists calling for our country not to commit economic suicide: Trying to control our lives, just like them liberals!
Probably went to college too. (See Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The New York Review of Books)
What a couple of snobs, Rick Santorum might say.
Political journalists seriously ought to ask of Romney: Are you totally deranged?
To which Romney might reply, 'Look, I need my base, folks. It's my only shot at this thing.'
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