Bernanke Almost There…
According to CNBC:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke won a key procedural vote in the Senate, clearing the way for his confirmation for a second term running the world’s most powerful central bank.
The Senate is now moving to final confirming vote.
Bernanke was expected to win the Senate’s backing despite the stiffest opposition to any nominee for Fed chairman in the nearly 32 years the Senate has voted on the position.
So it’s not quite official yet, but it looks like it will go through. They needed 60 votes to end debate (or whatever) and now they just need 51 to confirm him.
I think some senators are voting to end debate but then will vote against confirmation, so they can say, “I voted against Bernanke!” in the fall.
As Robert Wenzel points out, the Senate’s vote occurs after the markets closed, perhaps to avoid embarrassing the Printer in Chief.
Potpourri
* Josiah Neeley sends this article on “6 Enlightened Ideas Brought to You By Evil Empires.” The premise is that yeah these regimes were mass murderers and ate their own children and such, but gosh they were kinda progressive in a modern way too. Rather than concluding that things like mandatory schooling or bans on smoking are suspect, of course the writer concludes that maybe these regimes weren’t unadulterated evil after all. (Note that I am not saying I have a problem with women being allowed to own property, which is one of the examples.) Note that there are some naughty words in the article.
* I haven’t done any research to confirm or deny, but David R. Henderson had an interesting blog post arguing that Republicans purposely allowed ObamaCare to advance in December, so they’d have a great thing to run against in November. (This was before the Scott Brown election.)
* Here’s a weird thing: A guy got charged with DUI when his car wouldn’t even start.
* Richard Ebeling saw that I survived, and so he too faced Wendell Jones and Godfrey Eneas on Platform TV in the Bahamas.
* RatherBFlying sends me this rather ominous RAND report, “Does the United States Need a New Police Force for Stability Operations?” Here’s the conclusion from their summary:
Weighing all considerations, the researchers concluded that the best option would be a 6,000-person hybrid force headquartered in the U.S. Marshals Service. The personnel in reserve status could be employed in state and local police forces so they would be able to exercise police functions in a civilian population daily and could be called up as needed. The Marshals Service was deemed to have many of the requisite skills. However, its training and management capabilities would need to be expanded to take on this large mission, and it would have to recruit additional personnel as well. The annual cost, $637 million, is reasonable given the capability it buys. The cost savings in relieving military forces of these duties could be greater than required to create the SPF [Stability Police Force].
The Military Police option was attractive for a number of reasons, especially its capacity, training, and logistical capabilities, but its inability to engage in policing activities when not deployed was a major stumbling block. The Posse Comitatus Act precludes military personnel from exercising police functions in a civilian setting, and legislative relief might be difficult to get. Even if such relief were forthcoming, it is unclear where and how routine police skills might be honed.
Creation of a civilian SPF would not affect the roles that other elements of the U.S. government would play. Rather, it would complement other agencies such as the departments of Defense and State. But the SPF would provide a necessary capability, and the U.S. Army should support its creation.
Note that the report, as written, seems to be exclusively focused on deploying the new SPF to foreign theaters; I skimmed it and didn’t see any mention of US operations. However, as I put in bold above, the SPF would obviously be trained on US soil. If you don’t see the potential trouble, please watch Star Wars Episode III.
What Would It Take For Americans to Realize They Are Not Free?
I was having lunch with someone today (name being withheld in case he doesn’t want this broadcast) and we were musing over the contradiction in the average American’s mind. On the one hand, if you asked Americans to rate professions in terms of their morality or decency, politicians would come in at or near dead last, and if they beat out lawyers, that wouldn’t be much help–most politicians are lawyers.
But at the same time, when it comes to the life-and-death decisions that U.S. politicians make, most Americans give them the benefit of the doubt–often ridiculously so. Sure, they might have made a mistake in, say, invading Iraq, but it really was always about protecting Americans and freeing Iraqis from a brutal thug. The CIA guys just goofed, that’s all.
So anyway, my buddy asked something like, “At what point are Americans going to wake up and realize they can’t trust their government?”
My answer, “When it’s too late for them to do anything about it.”
Note that I wasn’t just trying to say something dramatic, at which point the snare drums kick in and lightning cracks in the background. I meant it quite seriously: The people in charge have to keep up appearances so long as it’s necessary for the overwhelming majority to actually trust that the system basically works. In contrast, in more totalitarian regimes, the average person a large portion of the population knows full well that the rulers are evil, and they are kept in place by fear and helplessness. (They also might think there are no better alternatives.)
So with that in mind, let’s quote from today’s post by Glenn Greenwald. We have already learned that Americans won’t revolt–heck, won’t even vote against an incumbent–just because of worldwide CIA secret prisons and systematic torture of POWs. OK fine. What about this?
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.”…
But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed…
Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?
Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That’s just the essence of war….But combat is not what we’re talking about here. The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.
Sure, if you want to argue that we’re not there yet–after all, people would flip out if they learned that the CIA was killing people in their beds in Hackensack–go right ahead and make that point. But we’re sure a lot closer now, than any of us would have guessed 10 years ago, wouldn’t you say? Could you possibly have imagined 10 years ago, that in a decade it would be common knowledge that the US tortured its prisoners, and that the president drew up lists of American citizens to be killed without any kind of process or review? Oh and that after he made up his list of who’s naughty and dead, that the president would then review the balance sheet of the two Detroit car companies that he owned?
Potpourri
* Stimulus Tracker: CNNMoney clocks it at $4.7 trillion in total stimulus so far. It’s a neat little graphic breaking it all down. (Hint: Most of it is via the Fed.)
* What really made me skeptical about the White House’s “support” for Bernanke and Geithner, was this anonymous email that uses the word “honestly” twice. Sort of like when Obama says, “Let me be clear,” which I am pretty sure means, “The following is false…”
* Jeff Kvistad sends this WSJ op ed that epitomizes our Keynesian, inflationist age. Note the part at the end where now “central bank independence” means “willingness to print money like crazy.” (Recall that it used to mean the opposite.)
* Rich Wilcke sends along this very entertaining journal article [.pdf] on Ag Econ (really!).
"End the Fed" Rap Video
I must be out of touch. For the last 6 months I have been working on a remake of The Hollies’ “Pay You Back With Interest” thinking it would be a fantastic and cutting edge critique of Paulson and Geithner. The video was going to feature girls with dresses showing their ankles, people driving around without seatbelts, and even a guy smoking a cigarette in a restaurant. I thought it would be seriously hardcore. But apparently rap is where it’s at. (HT2EPJ)
Progressives Starting to Realize That George Carlin Was Right…
…the game is rigged, you don’t have a choice. Hmm, McCain or Obama? One would ramp up military adventures in the Middle East while pledging fiscal responsibility while actually running unprecedented deficits, whereas the other candidate would…oh shoot.
What’s interesting is not so much Paul Krugman’s discussion of Obama and Hoover (and his failure to mention that Hoover disowned Mellon’s reported remarks about liquidation), but rather the disillusioned Obama voters in the comments.
I’m not gloating, I’m glad they are wisening up. Now what happens? Are they going to vote for Obama again to keep out President Palin (or Brown)? Or will they go anarcho-communist?
Or will they find Free Advice in time?
Bernanke Will Be Distracted at the FOMC Meeting
Yikes, Senator Jim Bunning let out a bombshell today (HT2LRC):
A Republican senator said Tuesday that documents showing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernake covered up the fact that his staff recommended he not bailout AIG are being kept from the public. And a House Republican charged that a whistleblower had alerted Congress to specific documents provide “troubling details” of Bernanke’s role in the AIG bailout.
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), a Bernanke critic, said on CNBC that he has seen documents showing that Bernanke overruled such a recommendation. If that’s the case, it raises questions about whether bailing out AIG was actually necessary, and what Bernanke’s motives were.
A letter Bunning sent Monday to Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) also refers to an “[e]mail exchange regarding restructuring of assistance to AIG, initiated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner” in March 2009.
Senators will be voting on Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term in the coming days. But only senators on the Banking Committee have had access to documents that illuminate just what decisions he made and how he made them. And that access only came after Bunning publicly complained that Dodd and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) were the only members of the committee could see them.
Hmm. I think to understand this properly, we’d need to be like federal investigators and put up pictures of Bernanke, Geithner, et al. on a big board and just research everyone full time. By the end we’d look like Glenn Beck.
I earlier offered my theory that this was all staged, that the important people knew all along that Bernanke wouldn’t be reconfirmed. However, it’s hard for me to reconcile that theory with the White House’s apparently obvious attempts to round up support for Bernanke.
Let me simply say this: The mere fact that Rahm Emanuel and others are “reportedly” twisting arms behind the scenes, doesn’t prove that Obama really wants Berananke confirmed. I mean come on, these guys are professional liars. Their entire careers have been based on telling the public one thing, then doing the exact opposite.
I admit that there are always power struggles going on, that not everyone in DC has the same objective, and that Occam’s Razor suggests that we take the events at face value, rather than assuming everyone is putting on a show. Yet all conspiracy doubters must admit at least this: The reasons the various senators give for their intended votes, are bogus. We all know full well that Bernanke’s not making the rounds tomorrow assuring senators he will follow the Taylor Rule, or will implement a 2.7% NGDP growth target based on his careful study of Scott Sumner’s work.
Art Laffer Publicly Says Bernanke Should Go
C’mon now, in contrast to some of the other big gun economists, Laffer isn’t afraid to state the obvious. I think some of you should cut him slack for the Schiff stuff now. From a letter to the editor in the WSJ (HT2 Peter Klein):
Ben Bernanke is a good person, a fine academic and a well-respected professor. But those traits have no bearing on whether he should be reconfirmed as Federal Reserve chairman (“The Bernanke Nomination,” Review & Outlook, Jan. 25).
It’s normal practice in business, professional football and politics that the leaders of a losing organization also lose their jobs, even when fault is nigh on impossible to prove. The Obama administration has obsessed on accountability, whether it’s TARP recipients paying bonuses, or the firing of GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner. It wants businesses and banks to be held accountable.
Applying accountability principles, there’s no way Chairman Bernanke should be reconfirmed by the Senate, let alone reappointed by the Obama administration. Over the past six years, during the U.S. economy’s biggest train wreck since the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke has been involved in policy at the highest levels. He was a member of the Federal Reserve Board and Alan Greenspan’s right-hand person from 2002 to June 2005. He then became chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors from June 2005 to January 2006, and finally Federal Reserve chairman from February 2006 to the present. He’s been at the helm from the very beginning of this Great Recession. That alone warrants a “no” vote on reconfirmation.
In addition, the Fed’s behavior over the past 15 months has put America on a very dangerous path. The Fed has increased the monetary base (high-powered or wholesale money) by the largest amount ever, from colonial times to the present, times 10. Without an exit strategy, inflation is a virtual certainty over the coming decade, while an effective exit strategy virtually assures a further weakening of the U.S. economy. Chairman Bernanke has put the U.S. economy in a lose/lose situation. So on substantive grounds he also should not be reconfirmed.
And lastly, on a more personal note, he doesn’t have the gravitas of a Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan or William McChesney Martin. In this day and age of crisis management, gravitas is essential. Almost anyone would be better than Mr. Bernanke.
Arthur B. Laffer
Nashville, Tenn.
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