Feb 2011
Lakoff on What Conservatives Really Want
Feb 20, 2011 19:49 Filed in: Politics
George Lakoff, Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, lays it down in words I have been trying to say recently. He explains how conservatives lie about what they believe and about their intentions, because they know that the vast majority of Americans want no part of the world they are working to create.
The Democrats can’t seem to get it through their head exactly what they are up against. They should read this. Thanks to Truthout for carrying Dr. Lakoff’s column.
What Conservatives Really Want
The Democrats can’t seem to get it through their head exactly what they are up against. They should read this. Thanks to Truthout for carrying Dr. Lakoff’s column.
What Conservatives Really Want
Comments
Austerity in a Nutshell
Feb 14, 2011 19:44 Filed in: Economics
From Truthout, a short video by Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He has a PhD in Economics from Yale University as well as degrees from Harvard University (history BA) and Stanford University (economics MA).
"Austerity" Comes to America
I’ve been asking myself the following question over and over for the past year and have received no satisfying answer: How can one of the brightest and seemingly most progressive presidents in the past 50 years manage to do so little for the working people of this nation? How did he attach himself to an unwinnable war in an area known to historians as the “graveyard of empires”? Was he so naive as to think that bailing out megabanks would make them behave or assure their political loyalty? Doesn’t he have the slightest idea of how the national debt works and how it affects the economy?
In the midst of record unemployment he should have never have allowed the idea of an austerity program into his brain, or any economist or politician advocating austerity into his office. Deficits are normal and predictable in times of recession. Tax collections go down and public relief goes up, or at least it should go up. In boom times, the government should run a surplus and reduce the national debt, a process that tends to dampen the irrational exuberance that characterizes those periods. In short, fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. This is Econ 101, not nuclear physics.
Yet Obama appears to have bought into the delusional realm of neoclassical economics, a bogus collection of teachings whose sole object is to justify the aggrandizement of wealth to the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Its most prominent huckster was Milton Friedman, but his disciples seem to have the ear of the media to the exclusion of all but a few reasonable voices, like Paul Krugman.
An alternative explanation for Obama’s lean to Republican-lite is that the president has very little power and must do the bidding of the power elite, irrespective of his own inclinations.
Either explanation causes a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hope there’s a better, more benign, explanation.
"Austerity" Comes to America
I’ve been asking myself the following question over and over for the past year and have received no satisfying answer: How can one of the brightest and seemingly most progressive presidents in the past 50 years manage to do so little for the working people of this nation? How did he attach himself to an unwinnable war in an area known to historians as the “graveyard of empires”? Was he so naive as to think that bailing out megabanks would make them behave or assure their political loyalty? Doesn’t he have the slightest idea of how the national debt works and how it affects the economy?
In the midst of record unemployment he should have never have allowed the idea of an austerity program into his brain, or any economist or politician advocating austerity into his office. Deficits are normal and predictable in times of recession. Tax collections go down and public relief goes up, or at least it should go up. In boom times, the government should run a surplus and reduce the national debt, a process that tends to dampen the irrational exuberance that characterizes those periods. In short, fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. This is Econ 101, not nuclear physics.
Yet Obama appears to have bought into the delusional realm of neoclassical economics, a bogus collection of teachings whose sole object is to justify the aggrandizement of wealth to the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Its most prominent huckster was Milton Friedman, but his disciples seem to have the ear of the media to the exclusion of all but a few reasonable voices, like Paul Krugman.
An alternative explanation for Obama’s lean to Republican-lite is that the president has very little power and must do the bidding of the power elite, irrespective of his own inclinations.
Either explanation causes a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hope there’s a better, more benign, explanation.