All Life Is Problem Solving

The best short characterization of the current banking/foreclosure mess that now threatens us with another episode of “shock doctrine” capitalism is Randy Wray’s. Here it is: We have long known that lender fraud was rampant during the real estate boom. The FBI began warning of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud as early as 2004. We […]

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Mike Konczal is writing a terrific series on the foreclosure crisis. The other day I read Parts 1-3 of it at New Deal 2.0. I recommend it as providing a very clear explanation with some diagrams about what’s behind the crisis, and a discussion of some possible ways in which could represent big trouble for […]

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Last Sunday, my son asked me what I thought about the WaPo article “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP.” Here’s my reply. There’s a lot of truth to the specifics, but his overall evaluation is way off because he looks at it by cherry-picking specific points, and also restricting his evaluation to […]

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I urge all Real Democrats to declare war on the Democratic Party and this Administration by — refusing all appeals for financial contributions to Democratic candidates, — refusing to do any work at all for the Party, — refusing to go to Party functions, — going to meetings held by Congresspersons and Senators and — […]

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These last couple of days, I happened to see a couple of pieces by Robert Borosage. The first of these called “Kick the Old and Disabled to Show We’re Serious About Deficits,” is about organizing and fighting back against the deficit terrorist movement to cut Social Security, and reported that Borosage’s organization, the Campaign for […]

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After going to one of the AmericaSpeaks community conversations yesterday, I’m even more confident that the deficit crisis being promoted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, AmericaSpeaks, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and the Obama Administration, as well of much the world’s global elite is a fantasy. There is no truth to […]

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In my last post I introduced Warren Mosler’s notion of “deadly innocent frauds,” (difs) and discussed the idea of fiat monetary systems and its implications for the first dif: “in order to spend money, the Government must first raise it through taxation, or borrow it.” In fiat monetary systems, that idea is false, which is […]

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Deficit Hawkism is the ideology that prioritizes bringing tax revenues and Government expenditures into balance ahead of other far more essential national needs and priorities. This “old time religion” used to be the exclusive province of Republicans, and was particularly important in hindering America’s recovery from the great depression of the 1930s and particularly for […]

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I think “groupthink” is a general pattern in this Administration. Not the simple groupthink that considers only one alternative and never discusses anything else, but a more complex sort of groupthink about frames. Obama looks at alternatives in deciding on policy, alright. And he appears to be rational in his consideration of them. So far, […]

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He’ll deserve the credit, he’ll deserve the blame, and Harry Mason Reid, not Nikolai Ivanovitch Lubachevski, is his name. And don’t let him try to tell you any differently, because it’s just not so. Here’s the way things can play out now. Harry Reid, under cover of merging the Senate HELP and Finance Committee bills, […]

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