Posts Tagged ‘Federal Reserve’
Progressives Need to Politicize Money
From a series of legal codes favoring creditors, a two-tier justice system that ignore abuses in foreclosures and property law, a system of surveillance dedicated to maximum observation on spending, behavior and ultimate collection of those with debt and beyond, there’s been a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense. Control over money itself is the last component of oligarchical income defense, and it needs to be as contested as much as we contest all the other mechanisms.
Read Rortybomb. Via Krugman, who notes “the upshot is terrible: more and more, this really does look like the Lesser Depression, a prolonged era of disastrous economic performance. And it’s entirely gratuitous.”
Monday Night
* A key feature of capitalism in America is the complete insulation of elites from the violence the system inflicts against the poor. This is illustrated well in today’s health care debate; the actual human suffering and death caused by our broken health care system is invisible to people like Joe Lieberman, who is therefore free to consider health care reform as a purely abstract game centered around revenge against his enemies. To bring up the fact that people are actually dying over this is considered unspeakably rude—a total breach of decorum. Frank Rich and BAGnotes make the same point today about the invisibility of suffering in the economic crisis as a whole.
* In any event, Lieberman won (with an apparent assist from Rahm): the Medicare buy-in is officially dead.
* Ezra Klein explains why everyone is so terrified of reconciliation.
* Grist says the big story out of Copenhagen’s first week is the emergence of tensions between richer and poorer developing nations.
The one significant new feature of this treaty round is the emergence of a distinct voice for small island nations and the poorest states—the folks for whom climate change is an existential, not just economic, problem. Inside the talks, this manifested in the tiny island state of Tuvalu’s call for a new, post-Kyoto treaty that would require mandatory reductions not only from rich countries but from the biggest and fastest-growing developing nations, including China and India. It would also set 1.5 degrees C as the target for limiting the rise in global temperature, rather than the 2 C agreed upon in previous talks (and still maintained by big emitters). This amounts to the first big public eruption of the simmering tensions between major developing countries and their smaller/poorer brethren. Whereas China and India want to shelter their economic development above all else, Tuvalu, well, might go under water soon.
* The ultimate Disney/Marvel mashup.
* Millions of “lost” Bush administration emails discovered by computer technicians. MetaFilter has your schadenfreude.
* Could Bernanke really withdraw his nomination for chairman of the Federal Reserve?
* And I wanted to post this a few days ago, but seem to have forgotten: the situation with Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is rapidly growing completely insane.
King Ben
That Republicans and Democrats always agree about who should chair the Federal Reserve tells you a lot about the way politics actually works in America. The most important issues are the ones that have been put beyond all possible dispute, on which all reasonable people can only agree.
Market Apocalypse
Via Matt Yglesias and everywhere else, this is why I’m glad I have no money:
It’s just been announced that JP Morgan will buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, implying a value of about $250 million. Given that the company headquarters is said to be worth about $1.2 billion, that gives the BS banking business a value of negative $1 billion. And that’s only after the Fed agreed to take on $30 billion worth of toxic waste from the BS portfolio, politely described as “less-liquid assets.”
Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth-biggest investment bank, had opened at $60 a share on Thursday.
There’s much more at Huffington Post, MetaFilter, and elsewhere, including Alan Greenspan’s claim that this is the worst financial crisis since World War II. And he should know, he helped cause it.