Fascism Today

Hundreds marched for peace and children in Madison,
Wisconsin on August 26 2017. Marchers led by youth
questioned the necessity of police and criminals
shooting them, saying, "I want to live."
Photo by Paul McMahon, (Heartland Images)

Madison, Wisconsin — At some future point in American intellectual life, racism will be recognized as a deranged condition, indexed in psychopathology and the political annals of lunacy.

Putting aside the inherent problems in the psychiatric field working by metaphor and abstraction, a belief in race is delusional and is a dangerous pathology.

The abiding belief in race and the anti-human behavior this delusion causes is not dysfunctional in American society.

The resurgence of American racism led by Donald Trump today builds upon the ideological ground on which America was founded: Genocide, social dominance, enslavement and terror. Trump is in a sense the logical inheritor of American racism.

It behooves the reader to consider the foundational aspects of deadly and torturous racism when one reads the daily ravings emitted from the White House, because oppression and control of ethnic minorities is as American as the military-industrial state.

On the up side, Paul Krugman has his swing back for some time now.

His piece in today's New York Times is a joy:

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a 'concentration camp,' where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was 'convicted for doing his job,' pardoned him.

By the way, about 'doing his job,' it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

Fascism has been here for some time.

Trump just targeted elite sectors of American society positioned and inclined to fight back.

Republicans Call for Failure

"[Y]ou might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency ... to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form," writes Paul Krugman this morning, (New York Times).

Republicans are a wrecking ball, self-consciously, and the small swath of Americans voting in Republican primaries and caucuses love it, thirty-five days out from the Iowa caucuses.

Paul Ryan wants his dream shot at dismantling Medicare and Social Security, and any candidate running for the Democratic Party nomination should commit to protecting and expanding these programs from Republican destruction.

The next U.S.-led global economic crisis that will occur, should Republicans enact their radical economic and social policies, shows a Party resembling a nihilistic cult more than anything else.

Walker, Ryan, Johnson and GOP Hold Americans in Scorn

The racist John Birch Society's neofascist idealizations appeared near-extinguished with the death of Joe McCarthy, the rise of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson consensus on social insurance and public investments in infrastructure, jobs and public education, amid the victories of the American Civil Rights Movement for jobs and justice.

Like Lazarus, fascism is back, brought to life by five Republicans on the US Supreme Court, and the realization among a handful of rightwing political strategists that Americans remain sufficiently disengaged and despondent about their ability to secure the blessings of liberty for their families (United States Constitution) that rightist Republicans can create legal, non-biological entities and endow them with rights and power exceeding the American people with a 50/50 shot of people not knowing what happened.

In a typically insightful column this week, Nobel-Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, notes other derangements of the GOP-Koch mob in Congress and the GOP presidential clown car: A clueless and out-of-touch attitude that translates neatly into policy, (supplied by the corporate-funded, rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)). (Center for Media and Democracy)

Krugman, commenting on the Federal Reserve's new study of the financial well-being of American households, (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 27, 2015 Press Release and Study), writes, "I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. ... But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation."

The Koch brothers-Ayn Rand strain of modern-day Birchism that Krugman references as tolerated and abetted in Washington is embodied in Wisconsin by Republicans led by Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson.

Scott Walker is defined more completely by his malice, as his sociopathic contempt masks a ignorance combined with corruption, and an anti-intellectual bent that makes for a dangerous public officeholder who never faces presidential-level turnouts at the ballot box.

Though Krugman does not mention Wisconsin's trio of modern-day John Birchers in his latest column this weekend, Krugman has eviscerated Paul Ryan numerous times and repeated what is obvious: Ryan is a liar, and the GOP effort to attack Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is cowardly and dishonestly presented.

What the Fed study makes clear is that about one half of American families are living on the edge.

This is obvious to most Americans, remote to centrist conventional wisdom in D.C. , and a good thing to Scott Walker and Koch brothers holding malice the likes of which Wisconsin has never seen, or even contemplated.

Krugman Prevails Again over Austerity

Thomas Herndon devastates
GOP fantasy economics

Updated - 'The really guilty parties here are all the people who seized on a disputed research result, knowing nothing about the research'

"(L)ast week, a startling discovery (by Thomas Herndon, a Ph.D student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst) obliterated one of the key premises upon which the whole austerity movement was based. ... The discovery of (a) simple math error eliminated one of the key 'facts' upon which the austerity movement was based," notes Henry Blodget.

Economists, notably Paul Krugman, have been tearing out their hair for years trying to reason with Republicans and too many Democratic policymakers.

But facts, like evidence, logic, science and other liberal constructions mean nothing to many Republican policy makers, aka the austerians, no matter how badly Americans families suffer.

Don't look for this new development to change policy radically and immediately; Repubs such as Paul Ryan and company are not easily swayed.

Here's Krugman on the austerity agenda:

You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.

And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?

I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.

As John Nichols notes: "Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman suggests that an essential underpinning of the 'the intellectual edifice of austerity economics' has been called into question. But, adds Krugman, 'the really guilty parties here are all the people who seized on a disputed research result, knowing nothing about the research, because it said what they wanted to hear.'"

See also UMass Econ in the News.

Krugman on the GOP and Intellectual Degradation

After reading Paul Krugman's column this morning, it's unclear whether Krugman believes the GOP propaganda mill, such as the Heritage Foundation, is composed of people who are lying or delusional.

What is clear is Krugman's utter disgust with the GOP commissars who would happily throw the world into a depression out of lust for the visceral satisfaction sustained by the resulting gutting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Krugman on Paul Ryan: Con Goes On

Paul Krugman this morning:

I wondered recently whether Paul Ryan, who is a con man pure and simple, would be able to step right back into his role as Washington’s favorite Honest, Serious Conservative.

Well, Alec MacGillis appears to have the answer: Foreign Policy Magazine has named Ryan one of its top 10 global thinkers.

And people wonder why I’m so caustic about the Very Serious People.

GOP Blocks Econ Policies, Then Asserts Policies Have Failed

Paul Krugman: "[The American Jobs Act] bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.

Paul Ryan's Insider Trader Scandal May Blow Back onto Romney

Paul Ryan cashes in for $1,000s

This story is not just about Paul Ryan, Washington creature and pampered scion, caught downing two $350 bottles of wine with a hedge fund manager at a D.C restaurant.

This is a venal insider trading story that has the legs and potential to dominate the all-important news cycle for weeks moving past Labor Day.

"Over the weekend, the Richmonder blog broke what looked like a whopper of a story: that Republican vice-presidential hopeful Paul Ryan had lined his pockets from information he had obtained from a now-legendary meeting that took place on September 18, 2008," writes Lynn Parramore.

Parramore notes media avoidance of Ryan's many political problems thus far, as Paul Krugman notes this morning, likely won't persist.

Certainly this insider trading story is moving forward, no matter that some are buying the Romney campaign's knock down that Ryan's trades "were part of a Russell 1000 index fund that automatically traded stocks as part of a pre-set formula," as Benjy Sarlin asserts.

Brad DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, scoffs at Sarlin's explanation.

Writes DeLong:

There is no way in hell--if you are rebalancing to try to track the Russell 1000 index--you make only 58 trades in a year, that you make 27 of those 58 in large money-center banks, and that 10 of those trades involve shifting your money from Citi to Goldman and back five times.

No way in hell.

I don't know what was going on. But it appears that Ryan's flacks are--for some reason--simply making s@#& up.

Romney and Ryan lying? No.
---
By Lynn Parramore

On [September 18, 2008], Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson broke the news to congressional leaders that they would have to approve a bailout to avert a complete meltdown of the financial system.

America was lurching toward catastrophe. But some folks were apparently thinking about their stock portfolios. Checking through Ryan’s financial disclosure reports, the Richmonder discovered that Ryan had sold the stocks of several major banks that day, while purchasing – surprise! – stock in Paulson’s old firm Goldman.

Check out the rest of Parramore's piece, because no way this story gets buried.

How to End This Depression

End this Depression NOW!

It's obvious who Paul Krugman is talking about when he notes the "depression we’re in is essentially gratuitous."

Gratuitous as in the Republicans' pushing the world into a pit and self-consciously stopping the people and communities from clawing their way out, as the GOP hauls in $millions in campaign contributions, while laughing at the 99 percent.

Writes Krugman:

The depression we’re in is essentially gratuitous: we don’t need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives. We could end it both more easily and more quickly than anyone imagines—anyone, that is, except those who have actually studied the economics of depressed economies and the historical evidence on how policies work in such economies.

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

"If you want to ask 'what is the structural problem with the U.S. economy?' I say it's not a structural problem with the economy, it's a structural problem with our politics; in particular the fact that we have one party that has gone completely off the deep end, and is not interested at all in helping to run this country unless they get to run it all." (Economic Policy Institute, May 2, 2012. Video below)

Paul Krugman Is Tired of Trying to Reason with You People

Read Paul Krugman for a dose of sanity during a crazy period of American history.

Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist, is the author of The Return of Depression Economics (W.W. Norton and Company; 2000) and a large body of work that is most frequently ignored by President Obama's economic team.

From Krugman on Plutocrats and Occupy Wall Street:

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

The Pathology of George Will

George Will continues his descent into paranoia as his excursions from reality become more frequent.

It did not take long to brand as Soviet-minded 'collectivists' the vast majority of Americans who want reform and an accounting of the Wall Street gang—a small number of people who brought us the global economic crisis and then were bailed out with $700 Billion in tax dollars.

By Paul Krugman

George Will believes that Elizabeth Warren wants to turn him into a collectivist slave.

Bwahahahaha. First, however, we will turn him into a mindless automaton by forcing him to ride high-speed trains.

George Will's job as Wall Street apologist and defamer of the American people is never done. But does he really believe slavery is coming?

Krugman Hits Centrist Drivel

"Some of us have long complained about the cult of 'balance,' the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.' But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

"The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism."
- Paul Krugman, NYT

Krugman Eviscerates Kill-Medicare Pols, Ryan and Lieberman

So desperate are Republicans to kill Medicare, they have threatened to crash the economy if Obama doesn't let them gut the popular program.

Now Joe Lieberman has chimed in.

Paul Krugman shines some needed light on the kill-Medicare debate.

Below is an excerpt with a link to the Medicare discussion at The Democratic Strategist.

Writes Krugman:

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

... Medicare actually saves money -- a lot of money -- compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn't Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it's true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we'll be forcing them to get private insurance -- if they can -- that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

Stiglitz, Johnson, Krugman Sound Alarm

Three economists who during the Bush-Cheney years became political-economic pundits of sorts are sounding the macro-economic alarm.

As President Obama turns the political focus onto “jobs, jobs, jobs,” Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson and Paul Krugman warn of a "enormous catastrophe" (Johnson), and real-economy circumstances about which economists are "almost universally pessimistic (Nobel Laureate Stiglitz)."

One understands the political imperative of not placing all bets [political-economic initiatives] on a single swing when mainstream Republicans will happily court more catastrophe if they can garner a political advantage out of the rubble, but Obama needs to swing for the fences and follow the advice of another economist, Nobel Laureate Krugman, who warns that "2010 [may] be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief."

Krugman: Kill the Filibuster

Putting aside the notion now pushed by Republicans that policy such as health care reform [vis a vis say war] must have overwhelming, super-majority support before it can legitimately be passed into law and sustained as public policy, the Republicans and tacitly most Democrats support anti-democratic, dangerous legislative procedures choking off the will of the American people.

The most pernicious is the U.S. Senate filibuster, and its abolition is a reform needed, as Paul Krugman writes, "unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike."

Will Senate majority leader Harry Reid listen to these concerns? Does Harry Reid think?

Krugman: Don't Kill It

Update: NYT: "David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, began the day by calling in to MSNBC to urge the party to hold together, warning of a 'tragic outcome' if Democrats failed to pass a bill that the White House says would expand health coverage while reining in costs." Why if so much is at stake do the Senate Dems not ditch the filibuster?

Kill the filibuster. Blast the President. But pass health care, says Paul Krugman.

Congress better fix the fracking thing, or Sen. Jim Demint's (R-SC) words on health care [Obama's "Waterlooo"] will be proven prophetic. And Demint is a bigoted, religious whackjob.

Does Harry Reid think that the political message that America cannot abide obstruction and business as usual at this time of crisis won't play well, so he just has to keep the filibuster?

Obama and Progressives

President Obama was elected as an agent of change with the energetic support of the peace-and-justice, civil-liberties-loving, Constitution-following, reality-based community.

So it comes as a disappointment to see Obama bow to those who are opposed to change and hostile to civil liberties.

What's going on?

Mike Madden in Salon says, "Obama's just not that into you," asking if progressives and the president are really meant for each other.

Paul Krugman says, "So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. ... So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back."

Obama needs to make a decision: Cater to Sarah Palin and her off-the-wall, white GOP or make good on the shiny, progressive promises of the last campaign that saw Americans break all manner of new ground in their thirst for real change.

Low Wages Are No Good

You offshore American jobs and people lose their jobs.

No good, not for Americans and not for the economy.

Krugman offer some advice against falling wages; might seem obvious but Republicans love the idea of falling wages.

Concern about falling wages isn’t just theory. Japan — where private-sector wages fell an average of more than 1 percent a year from 1997 to 2003 — is an object lesson in how wage deflation can contribute to economic stagnation.

So what should we conclude from the growing evidence of sagging wages in America? Mainly that stabilizing the economy isn’t enough: we need a real recovery.

There has been a lot of talk lately about green shoots and all that, and there are indeed indications that the economic plunge that began last fall may be leveling off. The National Bureau of Economic Research might even declare the recession over later this year.

But the unemployment rate is almost certainly still rising. And all signs point to a terrible job market for many months if not years to come — which is a recipe for continuing wage cuts, which will in turn keep the economy weak.

To break that vicious circle, we basically need more: more stimulus, more decisive action on the banks, more job creation.

Credit where credit is due: President Obama and his economic advisers seem to have steered the economy away from the abyss. But the risk that America will turn into Japan — that we’ll face years of deflation and stagnation — seems, if anything, to be rising.

Krugman Blasts Bank Execs

I wish the Obama administration would ask for Krugman's resignation at the Times, and put this guy in charge of the economic recovery.

From Krugman:

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline 'The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.' The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society. ...

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels. Why is this disturbing? Let me count the ways.

It's D-Day, Shiller, Roubini, Stiglitz, Kuttner and Krugman Sound Alarm

Just saying.

- Roubini's Pissed-Off and Stiglitz Goes Ballistic

- Robert Shiller: Depression Lurks Unless There’s More Stimulus

- Krugman: Green Shoots and Glimmers

- Kuttner: Will Obama's Economic Team Lead Him Off a Cliff?

Politically, it's time for a for-us or against-us ultimatum to the GOP while people still recognize that Bush and his GOP brought us to this mess. The TEA Party was a joke, for now.

But the idea that we have to try the recovery program now and then try something else, more comprehensive, in the Fall ain't going to work while the economy continues its slide and the GOP continues trring to appropriate unfocused frustration and aggression.

Be bold and great forces of the American people will come to your aid. "Choo-choos," as some the Tea Set derogated the labor-intensive high-speed rail project should be just the beginning of a massive public works program. [I know we have some begun now.]

And everyone knows that the fare of Robert Gibbs' “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests” didn't play and appears emblematic of opacity.

This recovery needs to be framed as Obama against Newt, Rush, Sarah Palin and the GOP.

Spook them [the GOP] , scare them [the public], shake the markets.

I know this more confrontational political strategy is being considered; well now it's D-Day, and Gen. Patton-Obama ought to lead the landing this time and all operations thereafter.

A Vision for High Speed Rail