The warning that matches the headline of the story Soros Warns U.S. Could Be On Verge Of Dictatorial Democracy is pretty dire.

I found the following paragraph at the end of the article to be a nice complement to my previous post, True Motive For Tax Cuts.

In the U.S. Soros said that QE2 has created “bad side effects ” by pushing up the price of assets.

Industry won’t invest in new jobs, plant, and equipment because there is plenty of idle labor, plant, and equipment that could be pressed into service if there were sufficient demand.  So where is all this extra liquidity going to go if not to new jobs, plant, and equipment?  Where it always goes when there is too much liquidity, asset bubbles.

This is further proof, if we needed any, that monetary stimulus is no substitute for fiscal stimulus.  Fiscal stimulus needs to be in the form of government spending on the $2 trillion of infrastructure repair that is needed within the next 5 years to prevent the country from falling further behind in required maintenance.

The way Mitch McConnell sees it, apparently, is that the country’s infrastructure should just be allowed to fall into disrepair so that the government won’t be spending so much money.  I guess highways, railroads, airports, navigable rivers, and other infrastructure are not really needed if all you want to do is ship money around electronically.  Even then, good broadband service might be needed.

Encouraging financial industry instead of manufacturing industry is exactly how we got into the current predicament.  Maybe this is the old “Hair of the dog” remedy.  If a little wacky financial mania has caused a hangover, the solution must be another dose of wacky financial mania.

The Republicans don’t even wait to gloat.

In the story Tax deal passes Senate test vote, the Boston Globe reports:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a speech yesterday that the tax compromise was an essential first step toward addressing the nation’s deficit, by “cutting off the spigot” of tax income to the federal government to force Congress to make spending cuts.

I suppose the Republicans will next want to whiten the snow falling in DC by painting it black.

Does Obama seriously think that in a Congress dominated by a minority of Republicans that the tax cuts will expire in 2012?  This is the last chance for the Democrats to stop the attack on the nation by the Republicans that want to live in a country where the government is too weak to control the excesses of the ultra-wealthy.

The Koch brothers might be surprised one day by what the Tea Party actually does when the Tea Partiers finally realize they have been had.

The article Groundhog Day: Judith Miller-Style casts serious doubts on the integrity of The New York Times for its shoddy reporting of the unsubstantiated claims that:

“Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year.”

The New York Times refused to let its readers know that the report was unsubstantiated or give the item the context .by which the readers could form their own opinion.

The article that casts the aspersion is on The Huffington Post which is not necessarily any safer to read than The New York Times.

Be that as it may, I want to record the links to this article for when hawkish The New York Times continues to beat the drums for war with Iran.  Maybe someone will remember the lies that led up to their call and just tell them to pipe down.

Richard Kirsch wrote the article, What Obama Can Learn From Reagan. The subtitle is “He must show real leadership on his core values, not weakness and waffling.”

What the president fails to comprehend is that his style of public vacillation and preemptive compromise is much more to blame for the disillusionment that so many Democrats share than the substance of what he gave up, whether it be on health care or taxes.

Kirsch goes on to show how different was the fight on Health Care from the tax cut capitulation, and yet how Obama’s style detracted even from that “win”.

The fact that so many people draw the line at the tax capitulation isn’t so much its absolute magnitude.  It is the cumulative effect of all his compromises.  In essence this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

An article Who Really Got What in the Tax Deal? by Mike Konczal is posted on the New Deal 2.0 web site.

There is no continuation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Fund  (TANF EF) from the stimulus bill in the tax cut compromise. Regular TANF was created as part of the Clinton-era welfare reform to get people off assistance by getting them back to work. This approach becomes problematic when unemployment is high due to faults in monetary and fiscal policy, not because people choose not to work. In a Great Recession, TANF runs out of both money and conceptual scope very quickly. So this Emergency Fund, at the low cost of five billion dollars distributed to states, allowed locals on the ground to expand and continue TANF to meet the needs of fighting poverty and putting people to work.

The White House claims that “We got $238 billion and the Republicans got $114 billion out of the tax cut capitulation.”

Mike Konczal shows that the White House got $106 billion out of the deal and the Republicans got $246 billion.

Not bad negotiating for a party that has minorities in one branch of the government and nothing in a second branch of the government.  Maybe we need to stop President Obama from negotiating with himself before he negotiates with the opposition.  By the time he is finished negotiating with himself, the opposition has already got more than they had hoped for.

Whose Side is the White House On? is the headline give to this talk by James K. Galbraith to the Americans For Democratic Action on November 20, 2010.  This was before we  knew about the Obama tax capitulation.

Recovery begins with realism and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It’s beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective. Four and again two years ago, the people demanded change. As a candidate, the President promised change. In foreign policy and the core economic policies, he delivered continuity instead. That was true on Afghanistan and it was and is true in economic policy, especially in respect to the banks. What we got was George W. Bush’s policies without Bush’s toughness, without his in-your-face refusal to compromise prematurely. Without what he himself calls his understanding that you do not negotiate with yourself.

It’s a measure of where we are, I think, that at a meeting of Americans for Democratic Action, you find me comparing President Obama unfavorably to President George W. Bush.

He goes on to fault the set of advisers and administrators that Obama chose for his administration.

The president deprived himself of any chance to develop a narrative from the beginning by surrounding himself with holdover appointments from the Bush and even the Clinton administrations: Secretary Geithner, Chairman Bernanke, and, since we’re here at Harvard, I’ll call him by his highest title, President Summers. These men have no commitment to the base, no commitment to the Democratic Party as a whole, no particular commitment to Barack Obama, and none to the broad objective of national economic recovery that can be detected from their actions.

I think back to the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  In Hillary we would have had the tough fighter, but one who did not really understand what she was fighting for.  In Barack Obama we seemed to have a person who really knew what we were fighting for, but he turns out to be one who doesn’t have much fight.

I wonder if some of the international policy decisions come from Hillary Clinton’s toughness in fighting for the wrong policies that contradict what Obama ran on.

I frequently remind myself that I think I may have myself financially protected enough that perhaps I won’t suffer too much if the country collapses while I am still around.  There is not much I can do after that.  A stiff deflation might actually help me with my zero long term debt policy.

For those that did not catch parts of Senator Bernie Sanders’ long speech, both Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann show snippets.

Below are links to the three segments of the entire 8 ½ hour speech.

Sanders Filibuster: Part 1

Sanders Filibuster: Part 2

Sanders Filibuster: Part 3

Here is something to shake us up.

Reconsidering Japan and Reconsidering Paul Krugman appears on the Truthout web site.

In the midst of the Great Recession, the United States is suffering through nearly 10 percent unemployment and 50 million people without health insurance. A new report has found over 14 percent of Americans living below the poverty line, including 20 percent of children and 23 percent of seniors, the highest numbers since President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. That’s in addition to declining prospects for the middle class and a general increase in economic insecurity.

How, then, should we regard a country that has 5 percent unemployment, health care for all of its people, the lowest income inequality and is one of the world’s leading exporters? This country also scores high on life expectancy, low on infant mortality, at the top in literacy, and low on crime, incarceration, homicides, mental illness and drug abuse. It also has a low rate of carbon emissions and is doing its part to reduce global warming. In all of these categories, this particular country beats both the US and China by a country mile.

The second paragraph describes Japan according to this article.  The article decries articles in the mainstream press and all the US pundits that declare Japan as having a lost economic decade.  They take Paul Krugman and The New Yotk Times to task.

The Truthout article links to a series in The New York Times that starts with the article Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened.  The article of course discusses the well known problems in Japan since its great economic bubble burst.  Toward the end of The New York Times article there is a slight concession:

Yukari Higaki, 24, said the only economic conditions she had ever known were ones in which prices and salaries seemed to be in permanent decline. She saves as much money as she can by buying her clothes at discount stores, making her own lunches and forgoing travel abroad. She said that while her generation still lived comfortably, she and her peers were always in a defensive crouch, ready for the worst.

Not having any direct experience of Japan myself, it is hard to judge and balance these opposing points of view.  Do any of my faithful readers have any insights to share?