Daily Archives: December 27, 2012

Obama’s OMB Channels its Inner Tea Party

By William K. Black

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is every administration’s heavy artillery on budget issues.  OMB’s staff is dominated by neo-liberal micro-economists under every administration, so it is institutionally conservative.  OMB personnel obtain promotions by killing programs, cutting spending, and either blocking the adoption of regulations or weakening the regulations.  OMB is institutionally predisposed to embrace austerity.  OMB is also expected to be a zealous advocate for the President. Continue reading

Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940

By Mark Nelson

We capitalists have got to decide how much we are going to pay for capitalism.[1]

Marriner S. Eccles: New York Times, May 1935

This is the crowd that wants power rather than recovery- the crowd that for 12 years was in power, that tried the very policies which ended in the greatest smash in our economic history; the crowd that willed this administration a debt of 20 billions and a demoralized, prostrate country; yet they have the sublime audacity to propose that we go back to the very policies which wrecked the country. They have been proved false profits on their own record.[2]

Marriner S. Eccles: memo to FDR, December 1935

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