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What Obama Wants - Krugman

Now, this might just be theater: Mr. Obama may be pulling an anti-Corleone, making Republicans an offer they can’t accept. The reports say that the Obama plan also involves significant new revenues, a notion that remains anathema to the Republican base. So the goal may be to paint the G.O.P. into a corner, making Republicans look like intransigent extremists — which they are.

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth. 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Lost Authority, Lost Order

From the rubble and fear of World War II, the West built a collective fantasy. We would be safe. This time, we would no longer need to rely on the kindness of princes or generals. Institutions would do their work instead. Organization Men could protect our economies, maintain a new currency, and keep the peace.

If true, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s actions in a $3,000 Manhattan hotel suite are despicable and tragic. More lurid details will tumble out soon enough. It will be a fitting moment for our times: The IMF on TMZ.

Robert Reich: The Battle for the Soul of the GOP

robertreich:

The Tea Partiers don’t care about the debt ceiling. To them, it’s a giant bargaining chit to shrink government. Nor do they worry about credit markets. If the full faith and credit of the U.S. government is no longer honored, so much the better.

You see, Tea Partiers hate government more than they hate the national debt. They refuse to reduce that debt with tax increases, even with tax increases on the wealthy, because a tax increase doesn’t reduce the size of government. The Tea Partiers’ real aim is to shrink the government.

But the Street and big business dislike the national debt more than they dislike government. And they wouldn’t even mind a small tax increase on wealthy people like themselves in order to cinch a deal on raising the national debt. They have so much money they’d scarcely notice. 

Harper majoritaire : les milieux financiers jubilent

Les conservateurs majoritaires au Canada, c’est du bonbon pour les milieux financiers, les analystes et opérateurs de marché, pour tous ceux qui veulent « moins d’État et plus de marché ». Vu de Bay Street, de Wall Street, de la City de Londres, vu de partout où la langue maternelle, c’est l’argent, le Canada entre dans une nouvelle ère, celle des impôts bas, de la réduction des dépenses, de l’ouverture des marchés, de la déréglementation et de quantité de mesures jugées favorables aux affaires. 

Ireland: Preservation of self is true measure of elite's genius

But Nyberg does inadvertently reveal the ultimate genius of the elite – its ability to turn its own incompetence to its advantage. Thus, for example, the directors of the banks showed gross negligence in not bothering to document or record their discussions. This manifests the attitudes that made their supposed stewardship so disastrous. But it also protects them from subsequent scrutiny.

The same goes for government. The supreme idiocy of the decision in September 2008 to underwrite all the liabilities of all the banks is obvious from the lack of documentation of the most important economic decision in the history of the State. (“Proper information”, as Nyberg points out, “is a precondition for any crisis management based on reality”.) But the very fact that the decision was made on the bureaucratic equivalent of the back of an envelope means that the Nyberg report simply has nothing to say about it.

You have to be in awe of a ruling class that can use its incompetence to escape the consequence of its incompetence.

Washington on the Rocks

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.

Anti-Bailout Party Gains in Finland

Finnish voters dealt a blow Sunday to Europe’s plans to rescue Portugal and other debt-ridden economies, ousting the pro-bailout government and giving a major boost to a euroskeptic nationalist party.

With all ballots counted, the biggest vote-winner was the conservative National Coalition Party, part of the outgoing center-right government and a strong advocate for European integration.

But its main ally, the Center Party led by Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi, said it would drop out of the government after falling behind two opposition parties that have challenged eurozone bailouts.

The anti-immigration and staunchly euroskeptic True Finns don’t see why Finland should rescue Europe’s “squanderers,” while the Social Democrats have called for changes to how they are funded.

John Stuart Mill fustigerait la «nouvelle» droite québécoise

Déjà en 1848, John Stuart Mill, dans Principles of Political Economy, était engagé dans une argumentation contre l’incohérence d’une droite qui utilisait la même base rhétorique qu’aujourd’hui (c’est-à-dire le «trop d’État»). Mill, pourtant reconnu par plusieurs — dont le néoclassique Frederick Von Hayek — comme étant le plus grand philosophe du libéralisme politique, demandait à cette droite «pourquoi les gens devraient être protégés par leur gouvernement, c’est-à-dire leur propre force collective, contre la violence et la fraude, et non pas contre les autres malédictions de la vie». 

Il s’agissait et il s’agit toujours d’une question normative fondamentale et «personne, même les plus fanatiques à l’égard de l’interférence étatique, ne s’est jamais opposé contre l’utilisation des pouvoirs étatiques pour la protection de la propriété et de la richesse». 

Mill était inspiré par Adam Smith qui affirma, dans son oeuvre classique de 1776, que ce n’est que sous «l’abri» de l’État que les riches «peuvent dormir chaque nuit». En effet, sans les mécanismes étatiques de protection de la propriété privée que le gouvernement peut créer, modifier et éliminer, les accumulations (parfois ostentatoires) de ceux qui décrient l’intervention gouvernementale seraient impossibles.

Stephen Harper fournit 4 milliards aux Newfies

C’est un véritable affront qu’a fait, hier, le chef conservateur Stephen Harper au gouvernement du Québec en promettant de garantir un prêt de 4,2 milliards pour la construction du projet hydroélectrique du Bas-Churchill, au Labrador, évalué à 6,2 milliards.

Stephen Harper a fait cette annonce à St. John’s lors d’une assemblée de partisans en présence de la première ministre Kathy Dunderdale.

Pour Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, il s’agit d’un avantage financier majeur puisque cette garantie de prêt permettra à la province d’emprunter au même taux que celui du gouvernement canadien. À l’heure actuelle, il existe un écart de 0,725 % entre une obligation à long terme de Terre-Neuve et le même titre émis par le Canada, mais l’émission d’obligations d’une valeur de 4,2 milliards par Terre-Neuve pourrait commander un écart supérieur, a indiqué au Devoir une source du marché obligataire. Sur une période de 30 ans, cet avantage financier pourrait atteindre 1milliard de dollars.

Bradley Manning, Barack Obama and the National Surveillance State

In 2006, Sandy Levinson and I predicted that the next president, whether Democratic or Republican, would ratify and continue many of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism policies. The reason, we explained, had less to do with the specific events of September 11th, and more to do with the fact that the United States was in the process of expanding the National Security State created after World War II into something we called the National Surveillance State, featuring huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure. These end runs included public private cooperation in surveillance and exchange of information, expansion of the state secrets doctrine, expansion of administrative warrants and national security letters, a system of preventive detention, expanded use of military prisons, extraordinary rendition to other countries, and aggressive interrogation techniques outside of those countenanced by the traditional laws of war.

The reasons for the creation of the national surveillance state were multiple; they concerned the rise of digital networks, changes in the technology of warfare, and the concomitant rise of networks of non-state actors as serious threats to national security. These problems would present themselves to any President, whether liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

(Source : rortybomb.wordpress.com)

New Republic Editorial on Cutting the Deficit in a Weak Recovery, 1938 Edition.

There’s a game of chicken going on with the budget and whether or not the government will shut down. I think everyone has written a lot about the need to expand the short-term deficit in terms of government spending and tax cuts, not contract the government through painful cuts that will cost GDP and risk the recovery.

So instead, I’m going to enlist the liberals of the 1930s; maybe this cool retro liberal style will give the Democrats some spine. I’ve blogged this before, but it’s one of my favorites so it gets reblogged. It’s also fun to see how similar the arguments are then and now – Brad Delong digs up a 1932 letter from Hayek that is identical (and even clearer) form of the pain caucus. Not much changes in these debates, sadly.

This is the New Republic in 1938 going “I told you so about balancing the budget too early FDR.” Listen up, because this is what the liberal econoblogosphere is going to sound like next year if the Democrats cave and try to turn it around later.

The biggest lie in British politics

Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.

Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land. As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. Or is it George Osborne’s economics that are bust?

A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some Harvard Boys

It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations.  Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change.  Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

He had become adviser to Moammar Khadafy’s Libya.

Comment Québec a PAYÉ 10 millions en redevances aux minières

C’est difficile à croire, mais c’est vrai.  Même si les minières ont extrait pour une valeur de 6 milliards en minerais du sous-sol québécois en 2009, le  ministère des Ressources naturelles n’a reçu aucune redevance, en fait il a dû verser 10,3 millions $ aux minières. (…)

Bon, en clair, les minières ont versé trop d’argent en 2008 (43 millions $ en droits miniers) et elles ont procédé à de l’exploration intensive.  Et en 2010, les minières ont versé près de 100 millions $.

Alors résumons:

Droits miniers: 2008: 43 millions,  2009: -10 millions,  2010: 100 millions  (chiffres arrondis).   Total: 133 millions en trois ans (cela exclut les droits sur les «claims», environ 10 millions par année).

Pendant ces trois années, les minières ont puisé pour environ 19 milliards de minerais du sous-sol québécois.