Time to Evict Congress

Again the blame for a lack of legislation on the stimulus goes to the U.S. Senate and that dipshit Mitch McConnell.  Even if there is a deal reached on the stimulus bill today or the next few days, some 20 to 30 GOP assholes supposedly will not back it no matter what.  They don't give a shit at all about people.

Meanwhile, millions and millions of people are not just facing financial ruin, they are facing homelessness.  Members of Congress, however, have more pressing concerns like making sure their vacation plans can be fulfilled on time.  Total idiots.

Up to 40 million Americans could be evicted by the end of this year, according to a new report published Friday by the Aspen Institute.

The report warns that the United States may be facing the most severe housing crisis in history if conditions do not change, with up to 43% of renter households facing eviction this year.

"As the data demonstrates, the gravity of this situation cannot be overstressed," said Emily Benfer, law professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and a co-author of the report. "Unless the federal government invests in eviction prevention, we are not only risking widespread eviction and homelessness, we are guaranteeing negative health outcomes, greater unemployment, educational decline, and long-term harm for renters, property owners and communities."

Congress doesn't care, though. They don't even care enough to put through the aspects of the stimulus bill they agree on as stand-alone legislation. No, they have to fuck it up every single time.

Now they might shock me and actually come to an agreement today, but I am not holding my breath.

Update:  Negotiations have come completely apart.

How the "Science" of Economics Turned into a Form of the Occult

or simply a cult without the "oc" is evident from this "no shit" piece from Paul Krugman.

I don't know why it took people so stinking long to see the obvious. I saw this decades ago and warned people about it the minute policymakers were following the crackpot Chicago School economic theories.

Of course I am not Ivy League-educated, so what did I know other than I was right?

All anybody had to do was ask why all of these regulations were put in. It wasn't to stifle capitalism but to save it, for crying out loud, thanks to what happened during the Great Depression. You can't have unrestrained greed--people get hurt and societies can't be sustained by a handful of parasites at the top and everybody else poor. Revolution necessarily results from it.

It's like we have to revisit this crap a couple of times a century when younger generations come along and don't have any firsthand knowledge or secondhand knowledge (through parents who lived through hard times) of how bad it was, and thank God for the regulations and people like FDR.

The biggest problem we have now, as thirty years ago, is with the elected officials, especially those in D.C., who are completely bought and paid for by the elites who like the current disaster just fine because they have profited from it. They have NO intention of giving up "their" wealth, the wealth they stole from the rest of us by gaming the tax laws and getting their puppets to pass more favorable legislation.

Krugman:

But policy makers and politicians have ignored both the textbooks and the lessons of history. And the result has been a vast economic and human catastrophe, with trillions of dollars of productive potential squandered and millions of families placed in dire straits for no good reason.

They have no intention of changing course, either.

We. are. fucked.

You Don't Have to Write 700 Pages to State the Obvious,

but it helps. Neoliberal economics has been debunked and discredited again and again, but since our politicians are owned wholesale by the filthy rich, it's going to be extremely difficult to root out.

Unregulated capitalism will lead to revolution, and the rich won't win that no matter how much. There's simply too many peons out there for them to succeed. The key, though, is to avoid such a dire outcome.

In the U.S., destroying the middle class and safety net has been deliberate policy in order for the rich to have everything. It is a sick mentality, but many people swallowed it whole.

Now they are coming after the public sector and pensions. Then it will be the merely rich who will be cannibalized, then the richer, and then there will be only a handful of families--no sovereign countries--who will own everything. That is, if things aren't reversed.

I don't know if I will get the Piketty book or not.

Paul Krugman writes a review of it here including a few shortcomings of the book.

FUBAR Economics

If it weren't for the fact "austerity" policies have created so much human misery, the Reinhart-Rogoff scandal would be hilarious.

Unfortunately, it isn't.

Paul Krugman has been rubbing this in for the past few days.

In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

They fucked up. They could have published their findings in the National Enquirer, but even that publication would want something to back it up.

This is just a minor blip, however; it won't matter when there are ideologues who insist on screwing over everybody to enrich the few.

The Story of Economic/Political Evil

I am glad somebody took the time to look at the origins of "neoliberal" economics because I sure as hell don't have the time or the inclination to do the legwork necessary.

It's a multi-part series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Speaking of neolib economics, their obsession with austerity is why the economy can not get back on trackk:

When Moyers asked what the Treasury should do to help the economy, he said, “Campaign against this austerity obsession. We’re not going to get a big new stimulus package, much as I would like to see it. No, we’re not going to get it this year, anyway. But I’d like to see him saying when somebody says, ‘Well, we need to slash here, we need to slash there.’ And he would say ‘Why would we want to be doing that now? That’s actually going to hurt the economy.’”


“This is the same kind of animal that we confronted in the ’30s. This is depression economics. And the nature of the solution is not really very different now from what it was then,” he said later.

“Depression economics is when the normal things you do to boost the economy, have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates a little bit, are no longer available or effective. It’s a situation where the normal rules of what you– of economic policy, have to be put on hold, and you really need to do extraordinary stuff,” he explained.

Does Obama really believe this? I doubt it; he, too, likes austerity policies.

Milton Friedman: The Untold Story

Too bad Uncle Miltie didn't wind up as just another nobody; his crackpot economic ideas have destroyed entire countries and plague this country to the present day. No matter they have been discredited and debunked, our politicians in both political parties subscribe to this nutballery.

It appears he was peddling bullshit as early as right after the second world war:

The purpose of the FEE — and libertarianism, as it was originally created — was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.

False, whitewashed history is as much a part of the Milton Friedman mythology as it is the libertarian movement’s own airbrushed history about its origins; the 1950 Buchanan Committee hearings expose both as creations of big business lobby groups whose purpose is to deceive and defraud the public and legislators in order to advance the cause of corporate America.

To think this crackpot was EVER given any kind of forum, let alone won the Nobel Prize in 1976, which is mentioned near the end of this column, just boggles the mind.

Friedman was an evil, evil man.

Update February 2014: Sorry about leaving the link out. Corrected it.

An Evil, Evil Man

No, Milton Friedman didn't kill anybody that I am aware of, didn't order the murder of millions of people like Hitler or Stalin, but he destroyed many, many lives and many countries with his crackpot economic theories.

Although he died a few years ago, his evil beliefs still resonate with politicians and powerbrokers despite those theories having been completely debunked and discredited.

Beginning sometime around 1970 the U.S. and most of the ‘free world’ have diverged from traditional “free market capitalism” to something different. Today the U.S. and much of the world’s economies are operating under what I call Monetary Fascism: a system where financial interests control the State for the advancement of the financial class. This is markedly different from traditional Fascism: a system where State and industry work together for the advancement of the State.

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

The foundation of Friedman’s corrupting principle is that the investor (money to be more precise) has no duty, obligation or covenant to anyone or anything. Friedman’s ‘Market’ is not subject to ‘any’ human standard of morality, political limitations or national interests. Money is free to act without bounds or conventions. Nothing is prohibited as long as the market can provide a “clearing price”.

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

Friedman was an evil son of a bitch and not very bright besides, but look at his handiwork. Hell, you have "Democrats" like Obama who subscribe to that crap.

He wasn't an Adam Smith; he was basically an Ayn Rand type who created a nutso economic theory which became policy in many countries to justify the greed of the elites.