Where's Volker

This article in yesterday's NYT chronicled the infighting among Obama's economic advisers, but it didn't mention Paul Volker. I find that disturbing, because Volker is the only one who has really gotten the US out of an economic mess. Greenspan looked like he did, but it turned out that he was only postponing trouble and making it worse. Larry Summers was Bob Rubin's deputy, when they looked great, but not it turns out that they led the changes that got us into this economic mess. We don't really know about Geithner, but suspicions are that at the New York Fed, he was in bed with the Wall Street wizards who got us into this mess. Bernanke gets points for taking unorthodox steps at the Fed that may have prevented the financial system from imploding, but he did it by making money easier and basically making everybody happier. I'd feel better if he had made somebody hurt. I'd prefer that the bankers hurt, but if it had to be the general population, so be it. Bernanke has done smart things, but he has not done difficult things. When you mess up by overcharging on your credit cards or by making a bad investment, it's unusual to have someone give you a billion or a trillion dollars to make it alright. Usually you have to cut back in some way. But that's because you can print money like Bernanke does. It's unlikely that zero interest rates are the answer to every problem.

So far, for the last several decades, nobody in government has inflicted pain on the US economy. Private citizens, of course, the leaders of our banking and investment establishment, have produced the savings and loan debacle, the tech stock bubble, the housing bubble, and then the financial system meltdown.

Volker actually got us out of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan stagflation quagmire by prescribing tough medicine for the US economy. Nobody else has had the foresight or the guts to do the same thing in response to our more recent problems.

Granted Volker is in his 80's, but these young whipper-snappers ought to be seeking out his advise and listening to it. The NYT article intimates that Summers doesn't have a very high opinion of anybody else's opinions. I hope Obama listens to Volker more and Summers less.

NYT Op-Eds

It may happen frequently or infrequently, but it looks like all the authors of op-eds in today's New York Times are Jewish. Actually, I'm not sure about the guy who did the cartoons of an old graduating class, but his name sounds Jewish -- for sure Krugman, Brooks, and Livni are. In theory there's nothing wrong with this, but I worry that it gives the reader a slanted perspective. The Times is owned by Jews; so, maybe it's on purpose, but the news usually seems pretty balanced, although there are probably lots of Jewish writers in the newsroom as well.

I am hoping that reading the Financial Times op-eds will give me some balance, although who knows, they may be Jewish, too. Certainly one of the most celebrated Financial Times columnists until he left to join the Obama administration was Larry Summers, who is Jewish. In addition, a lot of the bad business practices that led to the current financial debacle were carried out by Anglos, both in New York and London, (probably not WASPs, since the P for Protestant seems to be a dying breed).

I am somewhat heartened that Niall Ferguson, who I think is Scottish, has taken on Paul Krugman, at least on the issue of inflation, in the Financial Times. I think Jon Meachum, who may be Episcopalian, is also a fresh voice on these issues.

Meanwhile, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is in the news all the time because of his role in examining Sotomayor for the Surpreme Court. He comes from my background: Alabama, U of A Law School (about the same time I graduated there, although I don't remember him), now lives in Mobile, and presumably Protestant. But I don't agree with him on much of anything. I agree with Brooks and Krugman much more often, not to mention Tom Friedman, with whom I agree most of the time.

Selig Harrison Wise on North Korea

Selig Harrison was correct to point out on Fareed Zakaria's CNN GPS show that the US and its Japanese and South Korean allies were the first to fail to honor the agreement with North Korea.  The right-wing North Korea haters may be right that North Korea would not have lived up its agreement with the US, but we'll never know, because the US abrogated the agreement first by failing to provide North Korea with the heavy fuel oil that we promised.  

After we reneged on the agreement, North Korea restarted its nuclear reactor and produced the plutonium for several more atomic bombs.  But apparently the Rush Limbaugh crowd got some kind of satisfaction from revitalizing the North Korean nuclear weapons program.  

Republican Hypocrisy on CIA

The intelligence failures to predict North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's missile test are indictments of the current CIA. Newt Gingrich has been deriding Nance Pelosi for criticizing the CIA; however, the Republicans under Bush/Cheney leadership tried to destroy the CIA. They gutted the career CIA leadership, and they imposed additional layers of intelligence bureaucratic leadership over the CIA. Until Bush, the head of the CIA was the head of the intelligence community. Now the CIA has been reduced to just one of many intelligence agencies, and a separate intelligence chief has been created to oversee the whole community, including the CIA.

Why? Because the CIA wouldn't parrot the line that Cheney and company wanted them to, saying that Iraq was an immediate danger to the US. When the CIA wouldn't provide what it believed to be lies, Cheney and Bush destroyed it. Newt Gingrich and most talking head commentators on TV have conveniently forgotten this. The intelligence failures on Iran and North Korea demonstrate that the US is clearly not safer than it was before Bush and Cheney undermined our security by destroying our most important intelligence agency.