A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

As I mentioned, I've been taking my time with Part III of Adventures In Flatland. But I have completed the first section of that essay. It wasn't easy to write because of the subject matter. I was trying to explain the Flatland perspective on bullshit. How do we define bullshit? What motivates it? And so on.

Anyway, that was the easy part. The hard part was taking humans seriously. Consider Paul Krugman's recent Rolling Stone article In Defense of Obama. By the way, Krugman does not appear in Part III.

I said to myself, "Why are you writing this? Virtually nobody reads your shit anyway. Why don't you just publish the picture and caption below and be done with it?"

"Politics Makes You Stupid"


Source

Is there anything I could say that isn't right there in that picture? And the best part is that the picture is fake! Salon photoshopped it, but it's so true to life...

Anyway, here is a sample of what The Conscience of a Liberal said.

... But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history...

FINANCIAL REFORM

Let's be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn't.

No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.

It's easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd-Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn't. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there's a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.

Dodd-Frank is a complicated piece of legislation, but let me single out three really important sections.

First, the law gives a special council the ability to designate ''systemically important financial institutions'' (SIFIs) – that is, institutions that could create a crisis if they were to fail – and place such institutions under extra scrutiny and regulation of things like the amount of capital they are required to maintain to cover possible losses.

This provision has been derided as ineffectual or worse – during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney claimed that by announcing that some firms were SIFIs, the government was effectively guaranteeing that they would be bailed out, which he called ''the biggest kiss that's been given to New York banks I've ever seen.''

But it's easy to prove that this is nonsense: Just look at how institutions behave when they're designated as SIFIs. Are they pleased, because they're now guaranteed? Not a chance. Instead, they're furious over the extra regulation, and in some cases fight bitterly to avoid being placed on the list. Right now, for example, MetLife is making an all-out effort to be kept off the SIFI list; this effort demonstrates that we're talking about real regulation here, and that financial interests don't like it.

Another key provision in Dodd-Frank is ''orderly liquidation authority,'' which gives the government the legal right to seize complex financial institutions in a crisis. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We have a well-established procedure for seizing ordinary banks that get in trouble and putting them into receivership; in fact, it happens all the time.

But what do you do when something like Citigroup is on the edge, and its failure might have devastating consequences? Back in 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and yours truly, among others, wanted to temporarily nationalize one or two major financial players, for the same reasons the FDIC takes over failing banks, to keep the institutions running but avoid bailing out stockholders and management.

We got a chance to make that case directly to the president. But we lost the argument, and one key reason was Treasury's claim that it lacked the necessary legal authority. I still think it could have found a way, but in any case that won't be an issue next time.

Whatever you say about Krugman, one thing remains clear: this man's crap is some of the finest the world has ever seen — Grade-A, 100% Certified, No-Fucking-Around, Impurity-Free, Top-Notch Bullshit.

To do a good job, it would take me days to fully deconstruct the passage I quoted above, text which flowed effortlessly and automatically from the "reasoning" part of Krugman's brain to the keyboard, text which probably took Paul all of 20 minutes to write. And the man is tireless. In the time I might use to deconstruct only one example of Krugman's extraordinarily fine bullshit, he will have written 15 new ones!

That doesn't seem fair somehow

In any case, there is also my lost youth. Jack Bruce died the other day. I was 15 years old when I first heard these tunes. That's him playing some righteous bass in 2005. RIP, Jack.

 

 

Comments

[Germ]

Just keep writing Dave.
Krugman's a kunt - it needs to be said, and it needs to be repeated!