Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. He writes:
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is sponsoring a "fiscal summit" on April 28 to reinforce what has become the standard narrative about the perils of the deficit and the debt. In this storyline, the most dire peril facing the economy is the increasing public debt. Of course, the more immediate problem is the high unemployment rate, the risk of a largely jobless recovery, and a lost generation of prosperity.
We finally blasted our way out of the Great Depression by using the monumental deficit spending of World War II to put Americans back to work and recapitalize US industry. We did not use budget austerity to produce the wartime and postwar boom - quite the opposite. Then when prosperity returned, high growth made it easy to return to fiscal balance and pay down the war debt. ...
[N]ote the prominent role of Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan [at the summit]. If any two Americans are responsible for the economic, financial and fiscal mess we're in, they are Rubin and Greenspan. Much of the rising deficit, after all, is the result of the financial collapse. The main reason for the big deficits is that tax revenues are down in a severe recession. The financial collapse also required the government to step in with increased public spending.
If the orgy of financial deregulation that led to the crash had two prime sponsors, the Democratic one was Rubin and the Republican one was Greenspan. Inviting these characters to a fiscal summit to devise a way out of the crisis is like inviting arsonists to design a seminar on fire prevention.
We're more than three years into the economic crisis that these two men - and like-minded fellows such as Larry Summers - gave the intellectual and political imprimatur to. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million Americans are out-of-work or only able to find part-time jobs. The credit pinch is not over. Massive foreclosure numbers are still with us. Wage stagnation continues to bash families. And only a handful of analysts suggest that economic growth is going to be anything but tepid for at least the rest of 2010, and probably well beyond. These guys haven't conceded their prescription had anything to do with this disaster. But, as Kuttner laments, they get to tell us that deficit spending is our big problem?
Where is Joe Stiglitz on that list of Peterson summiteers? Or L. Randall Wray? Or Nomi Prins? Or Brigitte Bechtold? Or Lawrence Mischel? Or Teresa Ghilarducci? If we're going to have a summit dialog, let's have a real one instead of this sad-sack echo chamber populated by the guys who did so much to get us into this mess.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
Bill O'Reilly's "interviews" follow a simple pattern: invite a guest on, introduce them, and then spend the next five minutes cutting them off and challenging their love of country. As we know, O'Reilly never debates the person he has on the show, never engages their points or responds directly to their arguments. No, O'Reilly doesn't do that type of debate because he simply can't win that type of debate. Rather, O'Reilly's m.o. is to debate a false caricature of the opposition. He pummels his guests with non sequiturs, shoving absurd statement after absurd statement down their throats until...well, until he decides to cut off their mike ...
But what happens when the guest refuses to take it? What happens when the guest refuses to shut up and thows his insanity back at him?
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Update [2010-4-6 3:7:42 by Meteor Blades]: The worst was expected. Latest reports say 25 dead, four still unaccounted for at Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County, W. Va. Here are links to stories byThe New York Times and the Charleston Gazette.
Mr. Rick has a diary here.