Glenn Greenwald Nails Chuck Schumer
I have often thought that Chuck Schumer was the worst that we could get in terms of a politician. He was one of the biggest defenders of the government’s actions at Waco, he was a big supporter of the assault weapons ban, and yet he grins while firing this nice piece of hardware. I think I also have been aware of Schumer because he was “my representative” for my formative years, growing up in New York State.
In this context I loved Glenn Greenwald’s recent description:
…I’ve come to see the Democratic Party (and its apologists and loyalists in the pundit class) much differently now that it’s in power rather than out of it. Just look at Schumer himself. He isn’t some obscure Democratic official; he’s one of its leading figures. He’s not one of those dreaded Blue Dogs or “conservative” Democrats which Party pundit-apparatchiks and reverent Obama loyalists love to exploit to excuse the Party’s flaws (don’t blame the weak and helpless Obama; he is a prisoner to those bad, powerful conservative Democrats); rather, Schumer is considered progressive, or at least mainstream, within the Party, representing one of its largest and bluest states. If anyone is the face of the mainstream Democratic Party, it’s Chuck Schumer. That’s why he’s clearly the most likely replacement for Harry Reid to become Senate Majority Leader if Reid loses in November.
But look at what Schumer represents, who he is. Schumer championed countless, radical Bush appointees (including John Bolton, Michael Mukasey and Michael Hayden), but then sabatoged Obama’s appointment of Chas Freeman due to insufficient devotion to Israel. As The New York Times documented, he has long served as one of Wall Street’s most loyal and devoted servants, reaping huge benefits for himself and his Party. As the financial reform package gets negotiated and watered down, Schumer leads the way in doing Wall Street’s bidding. After spending years sucking up union money, he just congratulated Blanche Lincoln for fighting unions (and, showing how cynical he is, also congratulated her for fighting Wall Street even as business interests almost single-handedly funded her campaign and as he himself continues to serve as the most devoted property of bankers). So that’s Chuck Schumer: suffocate Gazans; champion Bush national security appointees; punish those with insufficient devotion to Israel; serve Wall Street. And that, by definition, is the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
Aptly Named Insana Disses Ron Paul
Bob Wenzel has a good response to CNBC commentator Ron Insana’s putdown of Ron Paul’s economic views.
As many of you know, I am often a self-hating Austro-libertarian, and I bend over backwards to understand what motivates those who disagree with me. So on this issue of Ron Paul’s “scandalous” investments in gold-mining stocks, I tried to turn the tables to understand how someone like Paul Krugman would react to the news.
I think I’ve got it: Al Gore. I suspect many readers of this blog are skeptical of the global warming hysteria, and so when you heard that Al Gore stood to profit quite handsomely if governments around the world investing in “green” sectors, I bet that just fueled your cynicism. I mean, surely Al Gore didn’t really believe all the nonsense about climate tipping points, etc. So now his behavior makes perfect sense–he’s just trying to get more power for the government, and increase his personal fortune!
Don’t misunderstand, I still think Ron Paul’s views are correct, and I don’t see anything wrong with him investing his personal wealth in a smart way. I’m just saying that if you are someone who thinks any honest observer can see that the gold standard caused the Great Depression–why even right-winger David Frum knows that!–then seeing all the GoldLine commercials etc. on conservative blogs would confirm your views that these goldbugs are a bunch of frauds.
To repeat once more: My purpose in these types of observations is to defuse the anger and bitterness amongst those who think like me. The difference between you and “those insane liberals / statists” etc. is not as huge as it first appears. With just a few tweaks of their value scales and intellectual beliefs about how the world works, it’s perfectly understandable why they have the heroes they do, and how they can demonize our heroes.
BP Spills Coffee
A former student, Heidi Lange, sent me this. Like a good Onion article, they fill it with good elaborations on the initial (funny) premise. Be careful though, there is one naughty word near the end.
Bob Wenzel Sounds the Alarm
When you have a little kid you get to watch a bunch of Disney movies that would otherwise classify you as a sissy. (This includes the Little Mermaid, which is a really great movie–I mean, I forced myself to watch it for the little kid.)
Anyway, I forget the name of it, but when my son was really sick a few years ago we watched a movie with a young Asian woman who ends up being a great samurai warrior or something like that. In the beginning of the movie, the sentries need to warn the people that invaders are coming, and so they have a string of warning fires that they light. In other words, the guy on the outer perimeter spots danger and lights his fire, then the next guy in sees it and lights his fire, etc.
I am merely doing my duty now in the blogosphere. For all I know Bob Wenzel has been spooked by his own shadow, but when he sounds the alarm I have to relay the message:
The continuing mystifying decline in T-Bill rates continues.
The yield on the one-month T-bill is now at 0.005 %. This is a drop of -0.014 or -36.842%, from Friday. Less than a month ago, on May 20, the one month was at a 52 week high, yielding 0.165%.
The decline in rates means, somewhere, somehow, very serious money wants to be in a totally risk free, virtually no yield position. Yet there does not seem to currently be the panic anywhere in the world that would justify this flight into T-bills.
This kind of activity doesn’t happen without something breaking in the markets somewhere big time, very soon.
I don’t have any special insight into what the chink in Geithner’s armor is, but this whole “recovery” is held up by bubble gum and Bernanke’s charm, as I’ve written elsewhere. I have been expecting another collapse in the stock market. Let me put it this way: After the bubble popped, stock and other prices began falling down toward reality in late 2008. Then the Fed and the Treasury did what they could to reinflate the bubble. So I fully expect it to deflate once again.
(Note that I am talking about asset prices here, not the prices of consumer goods. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to wriggle out of my CPI-inflation call. I think stock prices are going to tumble in the near- to medium-term, and that consumer prices are going to skyrocket.)
Parody Idea
As I clicked on his blog today–my favorite thing to do with my morning cup of tea–I started humming, “Kru-u-u-gman” to the tune of The Buckinghams’ song, “Susan.” So of course I pulled up the song to see it’s parody potential.
It was better than I hoped. Just listen to the first 30 seconds to see how perfect it would be.
Naturally we’ll have to come up with something to substitute in for “love you,” (“loathe you?”), but you must agree the framework is already in place.
I Join the Fractional Reserve Banking Wars
In today’s article at Mises.org I walk through a simple example to show exactly how bankers benefit from fractional reserve banking. Whether you love or hate FRB, I think you should check out the article because I take the analysis one step deeper than I’ve seen it anywhere else.
Specifically, I show exactly how the bankers gain shareholder equity from earning interest on “money created out of thin air,” and I also show why the standard textbooks assume each bank in the process only makes loans equal to the excess reserves generated in that round. For example, in a standard econ textbook, if someone deposits $1,000 in a bank, then bank then loans out $900. But as I show in this article, the bank has the legal ability (vis-a-vis reserve requirements) to actually loan out $9,000; it is simple prudence that limits it to issuing $900 in new credit/money.
Analysis of the Lord’s Prayer, Part II
A few weeks ago I began analyzing the Lord’s prayer. Today I continue:
“Your kingdom come,
Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.”
Here is what I take away from this part, at least lately: There is a definite sense in which the things that happen on earth are not in accordance with God’s will. (We run into apparent paradox here, because there is also a sense in which everything that happens is because God willed it–He is sovereign over everything, not just heaven.) This accords with our intuition, because surely there must be a sense in which God doesn’t want people to murder each other, etc.
In heaven, on the other hand, God’s will is perfectly obeyed and fulfilled. This is why heaven is itself perfect. By extension, if everyone on earth did exactly what God commanded, then earth too would be heavenly. And in fact it was, in the Garden of Eden–until people disobeyed God and thus introduced imperfection into His creation.
But although these weighty matters of heaven, earth, free will, and God’s omnipotence may draw our attention, let’s not skip over the fact that Jesus refers to heaven as a kingdom. I think this partly explains why people are so annoyingly eager to anoint other humans as their political masters. They recognize their frailty and need for a King, and just pick a really awful substitute for the real deal.
(It’s true, if you are a libertarian atheist you can say, “Forget that, I’m my own man and follow no one.” I can’t prove you wrong, I just think you are misdiagnosing the human condition. At the very least, Bob Dylan agrees with me, and he presumably carries more weight with you than C.S. Lewis.)
And here we butt up against another paradox in Christianity: Jesus is our King, and yet the ruler of this world is a prince named Satan. Again, I understand how a skeptic would laugh at all these paradoxes floating around–“save yourself the mental gymnastics and stick to reason!”–but surely we all know that there are mighty forces of good and evil battling in this world. Even if you don’t subscribe to Christianity, surely you can recognize that. In which case, the Christian explanation has the ring of truth to it, though it is still admittedly mysterious.
Culture Shock: Colm Wilkinson in Les Mis
I was forever spoiled when my mom took me to Les Miserables as a young lad. Years later, when I was in grad school at NYU, I saw Les Mis on Broadway, but whatever punk they had playing Valjean was nothing. I wanted to yell out, “Hey man, do you even care that you’re facing this moral dilemma? You’re throwing your life away man, show some emotion!!”
Anyway this is my favorite part of the play. Valjean has escaped from prison–where he was Prisoner #24601–and has assumed a new identity. He has done well for himself, becoming a successful businessman (employing many people) and even the mayor.
The indefatigable Javert has been tracking him, however. Yet some other guy, who happens to look like Valjean, is being tried for Valjean’s crimes. Now comes the moment of truth:
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