Daily Archives: January 7, 2013

Wake Up Progressives: The Bad Guys Are Trying To Steal the Trillion Dollar Coin to Save the Financial Status Quo!

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | 29 comments

By Joe Firestone

Among the many posts on the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) and Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) we’re seeing this week, is a category of posts favoring using PCS in a limited way to avoid the debt ceiling crisis, rather than using it in a much more robust way, that would change the procedures underlying Federal spending, so that fiscal policies advocating austerity no longer have a political foundation in a visible and rising national debt that austerity advocates can constantly talk about fixing through “shared sacrifice.” Continue reading →

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Obama and McConnell are Playing the Country – and Mainstream Liberals are the Instrument of Choice

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | 25 comments

By Dan Kervick

Brad DeLong worries that President Obama does not have a strategy to persuade Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to back down from their “crazy” threat on the debt ceiling and force them to accept a “real deal”:

I don’t see a strategy from Obama to convince Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the other debt-ceiling hostage-takers that Obama has a path for what happens after the debt ceiling is breached that he prefers to a real defusing deal.

DeLong’s description here is slightly confusing, because the debt ceiling has already been breached.  It was breached six days ago, and Treasury Secretary Geithner has already informed Congress that the US Treasury is now taking a series of extraordinary accounting measures to continue making all of the government’s payments without increasing the nation’s total debt obligation.  The estimate is that we have a couple of months before the government runs out of the kinds of accounting tricks that will enable the country to avoid defaulting on some its payment obligations without issuing debt above the current statutory limit.   So I assume DeLong just misspoke here, and by “breaching the debt ceiling” he actually means “defaulting on payment obligations”.

Continue reading →

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News Conference for a Paradigm Shift

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | 12 comments

By J. D. Alt

*A work of fiction

The President appeared surprisingly upbeat and confident: He grasped the sides of the lectern—not as he often had in the recent past, as if to support and steady himself in moments of national turmoil—but rather as if he were about to lift it up and toss it aside. Adjusting his papers, he quickly made eye-contact with each reporter in the front rows, usually with a quick nod of greeting, but sometimes with a stern hesitation. Continue reading →

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Neo-Liberals’ Dismissal of Latin Americans as “Idiots”

Posted on January 7, 2013 by | 11 comments

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

Alvaro Vargas Llosa (AVL) co-authored the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot with two other journalists.  He revisited the subject with an article in 2007 entitled “The Return of the Idiot.”

“The ‘Idiot’ species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs — revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law — derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct.” Continue reading →

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