Writes Kevin Drum in Mother Jones (citing the same Thomas Frank article we were talking about here yesterday).
"Pitchforks" refers to Obama's claim to be "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And "you" was investment bankers. Drum is saying the financial collapse was the opportunity for left-wingers to turn the American people into a pitchfork-waving mob, but they let that serious crisis go to waste (as they say).
Why a pitchfork? In pop culture, it's "standard equipment for any angry mob on a Witch Hunt."
The mob may be going after a witch, an evil wizard, a vampire, a Mad Scientist, a "perverted" person, or any other unpopular local figure. If the mob is after the villain, he most probably ends up being shamed by the mob. f they're coming after the good guys for one reason or another (like if our heroes are hiding a Reluctant Monster), their best defense is Shaming the Mob or an obstacle that will force them to go one by one, raising the question of Who Will Bell the Cat?But Drum is pro-mob. He wants out-and-proud pitchforkery.
I'll take the cotton candy. And I won't let the opportunity of this post go to waste. This is my time to say that when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I was not hoping for the United States to lurch way left. I was hoping for the very moderation that irks guys like Frank and Drum. Frank-n-Drum. Frankendrum!
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I do have to appreciate Drum's honesty. (I don't appreciate much else about him.)
"Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction and that didn't happen."
So we brought in a new public.
The United States has been, historically, a center right country.
That we'll stay that way in the future is anyone's guess --- the attractions of social democracy run deep in many parts of the population. But, historical tides change slowly, and both Frank & Drum know that. That they thought that the 2008 financial crisis & the election of Obama was a harbinger of a change in the electorate towards social democracy was amazingly naive.
Too many American intellectuals read too much into presidential elections. For much of the electorate that hasn't made up its mind from day one, the choice at the ballot box becomes "Okay, which of these two assholes is the least awful?". Don't misread that ballot box choice as being an "electoral mandate".
What does a "lefty paradise" look like, one wonders? Is it Chicago? If not, why not? Liberals and progressives completely dominate Chicago. Why don't lefties concentrate their efforts on turning Chicago into a lefty paradise and, if it works and we like the results, we can then think about extending their wonderful model to other areas.
Althouse said ...
"This is my time to say that when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I was not hoping for the United States to lurch way left."
Obama wrote ...
"I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them."
It is sad that people like you didn't actually pay attention to what he wrote, said, or did.
He was an academic lecturer with no leadership skills, no ability in science or logic, and a producer of no academic work of merit. He was a senator of no merit who voted 'present'. In other words, he was, and is, a university groupie who could play the game well enough to be a lecturer with no real responsibilities.
And a lecturer shows up to class. Talks. And is finished. That is all he has done for 6 years. Talk and believe that is all he was supposed to do.
Just like when he was in class and was upset when a student didn't get their homework done. He talked didn't he?! He presented the information and they were supposed to write the paper! Stupid student.
Except now we are the "stupid americans" to him. He told us what was what didn't he?! Why can't we just do what we were told to do?! Stupid Americans!
It's a classic marketing problem.
When the dogs don't like the dog food, they won't eat it.
And then clowns like Frank and Drum say "ungrateful whelps!"
And Ms. Althouse's comment about what she meant by her Obama vote in 2008 is simply proof that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
What haven't libruls failed at,in the last five years, besides getting Obama re-elected?
So, Professor Althouse, you voted for Obama in 2008 for moderated and incremental moves toward liberalism?
And all you got was a lousy t-shirt and the federal takeover of one-sixth of the economy. On a pure party line vote. The biggest, most partisan federal initiative in a lifetime.
Screw the pitchforks and torches. Get the giant set of scales and a duck. Much more orderly, tidy, and straightforward (either you weigh more than a duck or you don't; if you don't, you get necklaced).
Given that most of the problems are caused by the government, it seems funny.
Note: Bush PUNISHED Enron executives. Obama protected Wall St.
As will Clinton. As will Warren.
"Drum is saying the financial collapse was the opportunity for left-wingers to turn the American people into a pitchfork-waving mob, ..."
But the left, in the guise of "mortgages for everyone!", was the cause of the collapse. Maybe the American people are smarter than left-wingers assume.
The biggest disappointment I have with the American people, particularly the middle class, was how after 2008 we agreed to support things like TARP and bank bailouts with the expectation that even thought we may not like it, it would keep the economy from collapsing. There was a reasonable expectation that in exchange for bailing them out, corporate America wouldn't be such dicks when it came to hiring and paying their employees once the economy got better. Lesson learned. Next time, I'm with the pitchfork people.
Corporate America couldn't have planned it better, get bailed out shed payroll, and once things get better enjoy all time high stock prices and profits.
Barney Frank says Hillary Clinton is left of Obama.
So anti far left lurchers will end up voting for Rand Paul this time.
Part of the "blame"--for not moving the country to the Left, which would have been a bad thing in my mind if for no other reason than the fact that our society's political centrism is a plus--is at the feet of Obama. His incompetence and "lead from behind" style has caused every major liberal priority to become a disaster--a stimulus that wasted nearly a trillion dollars, a cap and trade law that died even in a Democratic-dominated Congress, and an ACA that is demonstrating to most moderates that this government shouldn't be trying to run any more big things than it is doing already. The public hasn't swung to the right, but they're rejecting any hard left movement as well.
But the rest of the "blame" is really owed to the weakness of the Left's big arguments themselves. Complaining about "inequality" and demanding more free stuff--whether health related subsidies, loan forgiveness, minimum wage increases or other mass distributions--will not move the masses when you can't make the case for why this is fair or beneficial. The Left simply assumed everyone would agree with this, and while some of these things on the individual level (such as minimum wage) are popular, the moderates are simply not ready for a far-left lurch. It would take a much more desperate and suffering population to accept socialism, and fortunately we haven't suffered enough to get there.
If the Left wants to convince more people of its arguments, it'll have to make those arguments better. Shrill articles and drum circles aren't going to do it.
Kevin is a typical white prosperous well educated leftist but he is honest, in contrast to many of his companions. Back in 2004 he investigated the rumor about Bush and the TANG and concluded there was no real story there. That was well before CBS did its face plant. I used to read and comment on his blog but the lefty moderators then began to delete all comments that disagreed with the approved policies.
Ah, the Upton Sinclair effect. The Jungle was supposed to cause the American people to rise up and found that socialist paradise that's always just around the corner. Instead they created the Food and Drug Administration.
nice pun. I like puns
Detroit is probably a better model of where the left is going. You have to include the racial element because that is so important to them. Chicago may well go the same way depending on who the next mayor is.
I'm reading "Destructive Generation" and it is very interesting. The Weather Underground leadership (Ayres and Dohrn) was repudiated after the townhouse explosion and the group went harder left with the black radicals. They were the only "authentic" group to the communists that took over.
Chicago and Detroit. Liberals models of progressive paradise.
The rest of us, who were unable to take advantage of an epic financial collapse to get the public firmly in favor of pitchforks and universal health care, deserve most of it.
I would've been on board with the pitchforks, Kev, but you lost me with "universal healthcare". We need to have a little chat about pitchforkin' targets and priorities here.
crimso: Screw the pitchforks and torches. Get the giant set of scales and a duck.
And the hard rain and the cleansing fire. Wait, wait, that won't work...first the cleansing fire, then the hard rain.
The left hate profits. The want everything taxed - especially profits, (the profits they hate!) so that all of their utopian non-profit dreams are free.
Unaware that the golden egg laying goose is dead - they scratch their collective heads and wonder why the gravy train is frozen. Must be those horrible bankers!
And Ms. Althouse's comment about what she meant by her Obama vote in 2008 is simply proof that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I think you mean ignorant, emotional intentions left over from hippie-dreamy days.
Drum must admire tea partiers then. They are the closest thing to villagers with pitchforks. They've cleaned out some of the dreck in the Republican Party like Cantor and Lugar and have no love for Big Business. That the don't love Big Government is unforgivable to Drum.
But the left, in the guise of "mortgages for everyone!", was the cause of the collapse.
Nope nope nope. Not even honest conservative economists, such as they exist, are still pushing this horseshit.
"All the peasants are coming with pitchforks. We're going to take this over the top." Pat Buchanan, candidate for President, 1996.
The bureaucratic/academic/thinktank elite will always be the ruling group. Reagan couldn't change that; Obama couldn't.
It's very hard to ignore the evidence that the financial crisis wasn't a Cloward-Piven planned event. The Democrats did everything within their power to sabotage the banking system starting with Jimma's Community Reinvestment Act, BillyBoy's insertion of teeth into that Act and Barney Frank's relentless defense of Fanny and Freddie.
They got the calamity they wanted and now they are moaning piteously because there were only a half dozen of pitchfork events?
If anyone doubts that this was planned, read this from the NY TRAITOR
''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market."...In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
and this from the LA TIMES
All of this suggests that Clinton's efforts to increase minority access to loans and capital also have spurred this decade's gains. Under Clinton, bank regulators have breathed the first real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a 20-year-old statute meant to combat "redlining" by requiring banks to serve their low-income communities. The administration also has sent a clear message by stiffening enforcement of the fair housing and fair lending laws. The bottom line: Between 1993 and 1997, home loans grew by 72% to blacks and by 45% to Latinos, far faster than the total growth rate.
Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more.
both published in 1999. It was inevitable....and it was planned. That's just what lefties do.
-Krumhorn
garage mahal said...
But the left, in the guise of "mortgages for everyone!", was the cause of the collapse.
Nope nope nope. Not even honest conservative economists, such as they exist, are still pushing this horseshit.
Then please enlighten us.
Pitchforks AND torches! (Part of one of my early lines in a training class I do annually.)
Mah pore heart jest buhleeeeeds fer pore old Tommy and pore old Kevin.
I agree 110% with Virgil Hilts. Why aren't the big cities the liberal/progressive paradises that they promise us?
And didn't some Goldman Sachs people work for Barry?
Damisec said:
"Given that most of the problems are caused by the government, it seems funny."
What a true statement! Consider the essential goals of the average person: Buying a home, the cost of college, saving for retirement, buying health insurance...the feds have their big, grimy, scuzzy paws dug deep into each of these areas and each one has been f-ed as a result.
"Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction and that didn't happen."
Oh but it did, Kevin. The public has moved in a liberal direction in spades. (That's a card, not a race, reference, Crack)
Your problem is that you use the wrong definition of the word "liberal". Those of us who use it in its classical sense, roughly synonymous with libertarian, are tickled pink at the liberal direction we are moving in.
Public with pitchforks? Didn't Glenn Beck, when still on Fox, used to have pitchforks on the set?
Ron Paul ran a credible, albeit losing, campaign for Prez as a liberal/libertarian. Gary Johnson ran as a liberal both in Repo primaries and in the November general. Rick Perry shows some liberal traits.
Ron Paul's son Rand is widely talked of as a presidential candidate and his politics are liberal.
Ted Cruz is another liberal who has, in just a couple of years, risen to national prominence acting as a liberal.
Sarah Palin, another liberal, is still very much in the limelight. Not something you can say about very many failed VP candidates. Or successful ones either, for that matter.
Eric Cantor was just trounced by an unknown liberal who spent about 5% of what Cantor did campaigning.
There are others as well.
The Tea Party movement is all about liberalism.
Obama and his team are as I have been saying since 2007 a liberal manufacturing machine. Or, as this article by Roger Simon says A libertarian manufacturing machine
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/11/18/barack-obama-libertarian-manufacturing-machine/
You and your ilk, from Obama on down have been tremendously successful at fomenting a liberal revolution. Keep it up, please!
I don't even mind if you don't know what the word liberal means (Latin for a "free man"). I do and am happy to see it finally coming to the fore.
Roll on liberalism!
John "liberal not conservative" Henry
"I agree 110% with Virgil Hilts. Why aren't the big cities the liberal/progressive paradises that they promise us?"
As long as there is one rethuglican in political office, the lefties can't deliver paradise. You have to give them all the power.
Once the mob gets enflamed, it can be difficult to control. That kind of hatred can easily start consuming itself, as in France's Reign of Terror.
American examples of mobs in action include lynch mobs and the KKK.
garage mahal said...
But the left, in the guise of "mortgages for everyone!", was the cause of the collapse.
Nope nope nope. Not even honest conservative economists, such as they exist, are still pushing this horseshit.
7/22/14, 12:57 PM
Sorry you are the one pushing the horseshit. Try again...
Clinton, however, sowed the seeds of the Great Recession by helping to inflate the housing bubble, a key part of the financial debacle of 2007.
Then why is Clinton culpable? Because his secretary of housing and urban development, Andrew Cuomo, current governor of New York and a likely 2016 presidential aspirant, accelerated easy-housing policies and inflated the housing bubble, setting the stage for its collapse.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/14/clintons-legacy-the-financial-and-housin
"Washington failed to rein in" the two government-sponsored entities, the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"), both of which ran into trouble by underwriting too many risky home mortgages to buyers who have been unable to repay them.
It’s true that key Democrats opposed the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, which would have established a single, independent regulatory body with jurisdiction over Fannie and Freddie – a move that the Government Accountability Office had recommended in a 2004 report. Current House Banking Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank opposed legislation to reorganize oversight in 2000 (when Clinton was still president), 2003 and 2004, saying of the 2000 legislation that concern about Fannie and Freddie was "overblown." Just last summer, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd called a Bush proposal for an independent agency to regulate the two entities "ill-advised."
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/who-caused-the-economic-crisis/
Effective in January 1993, the 1992 housing bill required Fannie and Freddie to make 30% of their mortgage purchases affordable-housing loans. The quota was raised to 40% in 1996, 42% in 1997, and in 2000 the Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the quota raised to 50%. The Bush administration continued to raise the affordable-housing goals. Freddie and Fannie dutifully met those goals each and every year until the subprime crisis erupted. By 2008, when both government-sponsored enterprises collapsed, the quota had reached 56%. An internal Fannie document made public after the financial crisis ("HUD Housing Goals," March 2003) clearly shows that by 2002 Fannie officials knew perfectly well that these quotas were promoting irresponsible policy: "The challenge freaked out the business side of the house [Fannie] . . . the tenseness around meeting the goals meant that we . . . did deals at risks and prices we would not have otherwise done."
The American Enterprise Institute found that in 1990 80% of the residential mortgage loans acquired by Fannie and Freddie were solid prime loans with healthy down payments. By 1999 only 45% of their acquisitions met this standard. That number fell to 15% by 2007. By 2008, roughly half of all outstanding mortgages in America were high-risk loans.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323477604579000571334113350
You can lay this at the feet of Dems. Clinton, Dodd, and Frank own the biggest share of this but Dems across the board played a part. Community activists (like the big O, Jessie and others) pushed from the streets and the politicians pushed from the gov to get banks to "lighten up" and make more loans. Were some in the financial market greedy? Sure but the government dragged the house to the river and then later squawked when the horse drank.
To stand there and say this was not the fault of the dems is to ignore the facts. Bush pushed (not hard enough) for more oversight and Dodd and other dems fought it because it would have shut off their money.
It had been some time since I thought about Cloward-Piven but John and Adam were just discussing it the other day. And now Krumhorn brings it up here.
John and Adam were discussing the traditional C-P model but then my fevered mind got to work on it.
I have been saying for 6-7 years now that Obama et al are bring about a liberal revolution. I have generally assumed that they are doing it out of incompetence but have always admitted the possibility that it could be some sort of stealth plan to do so on purpose.
If they are, it is almost exactly Cloward-Piven in methods, if not in goals. Obie, as a community organizer is certainly familiar with C-P. He is said (with no evidence) to be genius level smart. Is it possible he is a closet liberal using C-P to achieve liberal rather than socialist ends?
In the end, it is the result rather than his motives that matter. Whether he is doing it on purpose or by accident hardly matters. He is "gittin' her done" and I am very happy with that.
I wish it were a bit less painful but it took us 80 years to get here, you can't turn this ship on a dime.
Crank it on up, Obie. Don't stop at 11. Let's go to 12 or even 13.
John Henry
"Not even honest conservative economists, such as they exist, are still pushing this horseshit."
I don't know what you're talking about, garage.
Ah, the bankers. But which ones? The ones who loaned the money to the women who bought the houses they could not afford? The ones who sold the crappy paper to the greedy bankers who bought the crappy paper? The greedy bankers who bought the crappy paper made possible by the women who bought the houses they could not possibly afford? The greedy bankers who chopped up the crappy loans into tranches of crappy attractive yields? The greedy bankers who created synthetic markets of crappy paper to mirror the actual crappy paper based on loans to nice people who could not possibly repay their loans, much less make the monthly payments?
Suffice it to say that had the nice woman paid the debt she agreed to pay the world would not have gone into the financial ditch it went into. Axiomatic actually.
Send in the pitchforks!! Because Goldman Sachs. Because AIG. Because greed. Borrowers, builders, lenders, bankers, and a government machine still very much in the business of buying, stimulating the creation, of crappy paper.
The United States has been, historically, a center right country.
I actually have to dispute this. The issue is not the US is center-right. It is that the US and European political spectra are incommensurable. The US right is completely unlike the European right, and the US popular left (as opposed to the transnational university-educated froth) is completely unlike the European left.
Which is why Marxism, even in the attenuated Labour/social democratic forms, never got any serious ground in the US, whether at the height of the Populist-Progressive alliance or in the early part of the FDR administration. Marxism claimed to be universal truth (and thus Stalin denounced "American exceptionalism" as the heresy it was), but it was a European weed sdependent on European soil.
Drum misanalyzes the failure of the American left here as a failure of the vanguard of the proletariat to properly propagandize the revolution. But the truth is, the failure is that he and members of his froth are alienated from the American masses entirely, living in a Europeanized intellectual bubble. They can propagandize all they want; the Tea Party, which has all the pitchforks, is never going to buy what they're selling.
Reading Kevin Drum's old blog, and the comment threads, was the proximate cause of my leaving the Democratic Party. These days my rule of thumb is that voting for a Democrat is never the right thing to do. Kevin did not write in vain, he did some good.
Huh. So, as a means of persuasion, "STFU you racist, heartless troglodytes" apparently didn't work.
@Steven,
Drum misanalyzes the failure of the American left here as a failure of the vanguard of the proletariat to properly propagandize the revolution.
My comment about the US being center right applies to the right/left spectrum as it applies in the US, not as it is applied in Europe.
Other than that, I pretty much agree with your analysis, especially since you choose to apply it to Drum & most especially, Frank, who are in many ways classic European Social Democrat Marxists. Anyone, like Frank, who writes a whole book on the problem of false-consciousness among the American electorate is Marxist of some stripe.
"Barney Frank says Hillary Clinton is left of Obama."
Shit, Richard Nixon is left of Obama.
CStanley: "Huh. So, as a means of persuasion, "STFU you racist, heartless troglodytes" apparently didn't work."
Crack hardest hit.
I don't read Kevin Drum, and apparently for good reason: he seems like an idiot. Who expects to turn Americans left? Why even assume that's necessary?
Rather, one would hope that Americans of any political stripe would be outraged at news of the crimes of those highly placed in government and big business, crimes that aggrandize their wealth and power at the great expense of the wealth, health, safety, education, job opportunities and quality of life for all of us. One would hope that, whether right or left or in-between, we all wish to see criminals in the public and private spheres pay for their crimes and expect those representing us in government work to improve conditions of life available to us.
Not convinced Mr. Drum understands Angry Village Mobs
In the end, we didn't persuade much of anyone.
It wasn't so much the Kevin Drums failed to persuade as it was that their Grand Project was such a Towering Clusterf*ck of Failure.
That's what we elect presidents for: to take the blame.
Actually, we elect Presidents to show up for work, not to make burger runs while Russian Proxies blow airliners out of the sky or jet to Jay-Z fundraisers while New Al Quaeda murders our diplomatic personnel.
What does a "lefty paradise" look like, one wonders?
The free healthcare and high literacy come with a Police State and long lines for toilet paper and rice.
The ones who loaned the money to the women who bought the houses they could not afford? The ones who sold the crappy paper to the greedy bankers who bought the crappy paper? The greedy ...
The financial regulators who promulgated and enforced the Community Re-investment Act, which required the greedy bankers to loan to the women who bought the houses that they couldn't afford?
Send in the pitchforks!! Because Goldman Sachs. Because AIG. Because greed. Borrowers, builders, lenders, bankers, and a government machine still very much in the business of buying, stimulating the creation, of crappy paper.
The greedy bankers behaved rationally and stupidly. That's exactly what one would expect when you flood the markets with moral hazard...which is precisely what happened when Fannie and Freddie were obliged (regulated) to buy up all that mortgage paper with the implicit guarantee of the taxpayers. Of course, not all collateralized debt was Fannie and Freddie, but once that train started to move, everyone piled on.
- Krumhorn
It is useless to point out to the lefties that the big bad bankers' bad bundled bonds wouldn't have gone bad if the underlying instruments had not gone bad. The mortgages were crap. That was the issue. The big banks didn't, for the most part, write the bad mortgages.
Brando back @ 12:16 nailed it.
First and foremost, you've got to have a good story to tell (sell). Lecturing, hectoring, and pointing out others' supposed moral shortcomings is not the way to win converts.
For example, if you actually cared about influencing Kansans beyond your desire to demonstrate your own superiority and show off for your friends, perhaps you don't title your book "What's the matter with Kansas?"
"There was a reasonable expectation that in exchange for bailing them out, corporate America wouldn't be such dicks when it came to hiring and paying their employees once the economy got better. Lesson learned. Next time, I'm with the pitchfork people."
Surely you jest. As long as they keep shoveling contributions into Democrat coffers, you will not be allowed to even hold a pithcfork.
"All of us who do what Thomas Frank does — what I do — have failed. Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction..."
Thomas Frank essentially said that anyone of the working or middle classes who disagrees with him must have "false consciousness" (aka, is misinformed or delusional).
Why is anyone surprised when this argument fails to persuade?
"I'm right and you're a deluded fool; now don't you agree with me?" Yes, Frank, that sure is a convincing argument.
The problem for Drum and Frank is that we've had a chance to see the results of liberal policies in action, we've had an opportunity to contemplate the additional policies they want to put in place. And we want none of it.
"A riot iss an ugly thing und I think it is chust about time that WIR HAD ONE!"
@YoungHegelian
Whereas I would define the US's balance-point as being the center of the US political spectrum by axiomatic self-definition.
Robert Cook,
Shit, Richard Nixon is left of Obama.
You might actually have a point there; so much was f'ed up in the mid-70s that telling left from right, up from down, forwards from bassackwards is impossible. Still, I find it difficult to imagine a Nixon who had just "evolved" to accept gay marriage. (And don't forget Hillary! She "evolved" at almost exactly the same moment, really she did!)
I'll blend Frank's critique with Drum's:
Obama had a window of opportunity, but he squandered it. Instead of responding to the crisis in a coherent, sensible way, he took every point of conflict between conservatives and liberals and tried to dial it three clicks to the left.
In what way was Obamacare a response to an economic crisis? It wasn't. It was a leftover goal that had been rotting at the back of the Democratic refrigerator for years. Obama took it out and put it on the table, and the results were about what you'd expect.
Instead of responding to the crisis in a coherent, sensible way, he took every point of conflict between conservatives and liberals and tried to dial it three clicks to the left.
That is what the Left does. They don't solve the problems at hand, they use them to gain power. Promises of land reform, peasant self governance, etc., all go by the board. The big picture is that somehow, once the Left gains power, all problems will be solved. It's an article of faith. And it naturally appeals to those of no practical competence beyond, on occasion, rabble rousing, plotting, dissimulation, and insurrection. It was so in the 60's, where I saw folks organize marches where infrastructure was damaged to no end. Someone has to fix the lights and windows in order to maintain civilization, but the organizers had more important things to do.
"The financial regulators who promulgated and enforced the Community Re-investment Act, which required the greedy bankers to loan to the women who bought the houses that they couldn't afford?"
It actually wasn't the regulators who created the mess. It was ACORN and the left who don't give a shit about credit and work and responsibility.
ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and "direct action" that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn't get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we're in.
We know where the blood and feathers lead:
ACORN proudly touted "affirmative action" lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an "advisor" to banks seeking regulatory approval. "Thus we have J.P. Morgan & Co., the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN." Is this a great country or what? As conservative community activist Robert Woodson put it, "The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."
ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days.
It's not a mystery. It's just surrounded by a wall of lies.
How anyone could vote for a flaming Leftist while hoping for moderation is beyond me.
Obama voted for the bank bailouts. So did all the Democratic leadership, the Republican leadership, and most of the Democrats. The only people who even tried to fight back were Republicans in the House of Representatives -- the precursors to the Tea Party.
Drum voted for a guy who voted for bank bailouts and received most of Wall Street's campaign dollars, and he's surprised the outcome wasn't anti-Wall-Street? So much for the theory that lefties are high-information voters.
Drum is saying the financial collapse was the opportunity for left-wingers to turn the American people into a pitchfork-waving mob, ...
But the excesses of the government did turn Americans into a pitchfork waving mob. And the government went after them with various agencies in an attempt to shut them down because they didn't want to go left.
The biggest disappointment I have with the American people, particularly the middle class, was how after 2008 we agreed to support things like TARP and bank bailouts with the expectation that even thought we may not like it, it would keep the economy from collapsing.
The middle class did no such thing. Most of the middle class were screaming 'NO' and were ignored. If GM ran their company into the ground, that should have been solely on them. Restructure or go under - on their own.
Same with banks.
"Drum voted for a guy who voted for bank bailouts and received most of Wall Street's campaign dollars, and he's surprised the outcome wasn't anti-Wall-Street? So much for the theory that lefties are high-information voters."
Heh.
Original Mike: "I don't know what you're talking about, garage"
Neither does he.
What Drum doesn't get is that a good many of us would have been wielding those pitchforks against the government, not the investment bankers.
Althouse said ...when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I was not hoping for the United States to lurch way left. I was hoping for ... moderation...
From a small-time community organizer who was weaned on resentment and coughed up by the Chicago Machine? Not likely.
"Moderation" may not be you were truly looking for. "Toleration" perhaps.
That is not what either Democrats or Republicans are about these days. Both favor big government. Neither is fond of Liberty and tolerance.
YOU were kidding yourself in the extreme.
They (as in the progressive left in power) did not let the financial crisis go to waste. Have you read dodd-frank and the regs for the new CFPB?
It's a rent-seekers wet dream for the financial industry.
McCullough wrote:
They've cleaned out some of the dreck in the Republican Party like Cantor and Lugar and have no love for Big Business. That the don't love Big Government is unforgivable to Drum.
not all big business is bad. The right is against corporatism, but are the tea party really against big business too? that sounds like the other side of the same socialistic blade.
Two things, Ann:
1) Yet, this is what you got, and
2) These are the people and the base who will pick the next Democrat candidate(s), so don't forget to vote D again, and don't forget to be surprised when the same thing happens.
Ann, I don't think your or Drum's mini-mea-culpae are working when your commentariat starts emulating Ace of Spades "let it burn" crowd...
Ahh, yes. Academia vs reality. Ann, I hope this has been a learning experience for you. Never NEVER vote for a Democrat again.
The ultimate in Liberal White Guilt - "it can't be Obama's fault, so it must be mine" - Keven Drum
What a racist.
You bought the Hope N Change™ line in 2008? O my. I told my wife the first time I heard Obummer speak that he was either Socialist or Fascist. I've now concluded he is an inept Fascist.
Young Frankenstein:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazOmi4yIbU
The only rational response to any comment by Garbage Mahal is "You keep using [those] word[s]. I do no think [they] mean what you think [they] mean."
That last photo looks like white America's ancestor's, looking to string up the night's entertainment, which would be who?
The Crack Emcee.
Yeah, that's it - they said he did something with a white girl.
That's what they all say,..
"I was hoping for the very moderation that irks guys like Frank and Drum."
And there was almost zero reason for you to think this was a realistic hope. Nothing in Obama's past had suggested it to be so.
"When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008..."
Rings kinda hollow now, doesn't it? In the end--as anyone with a moral fiber in their body knows--what you hope for in someone else matters virtually not at all. It is what THAT PERSON is likely to do that matters.
More Schadenfreude...yay!
So is it me or is Drum tacitly admitting that he knew that Obama was farther left than he campaigned? That he would govern more to the left than he campaigned?
The problem, as I see it, is that Obama from day one has governed differently than he campaigned. If he'd been the same President as he was candidate, the country would be better off and so would his job approval.
Then again, Drum thought Bill Burkett was a reasonable man as he pursued his personal vendetta against now-President George W. Bush by fabricating fake-but-true administrative memos.
For that reason and ever since, I've had to take anything that Drum says with a planet-size grain of salt...
I used to be Drum's neighbor. While it isn't a megarich neighborhood, nor is it the slums.
Drum lives in a very nice development in one of the safest cities in America. He's incredibly insulated from the effects of liberal policy.
Garage - You probably don't read the economic literature so you may not really understand what happened in 2007-08. Actually two distinct things happened.
First, there was a bubble and crash in the real estate market and the related securities markets. This bubble was caused (not necessarily in this order) by (a) easy money from the Fed and (b) governmental encouragement to lenders to loan money to subprime borrowers in order to promote " affordable housing." This encouragement took many forms, which you can read about in Gretchen Morgenson's book, Reckless Endangerment. If regulators had prohibited low- and no-money-down mortgages (which they had the power to do under the safety and soundness standard) there would have been no bubble and no crash. The crash happened because such asset bubbles always pop sooner or later.
Second, the collapse of the real estate market and mortgage-backed securities market led to a financial panic which in turn resulted in the Great Recession. Now not every asset bubble collapse leads to a financial panic and recession. The collapse of the internet bubble in 2000 did not. The difference is that the internet stock bubble was all equity and no debt, and the real estate and real estate-backed securities bubble was very highly leveraged. So you could draw some good conclusions there about leverage and why financial institutions ought to be required to have a lot more equity capital than they did then or do now.
I hope this explanation clarifies things for you.
So he is complaining that he and his buddies didn't murder enough people to make theft commonly acceptable?
Really? That is his complaint? Does he plan to murder more next time?
In the end, we didn't persuade much of anyone.
You never had a chance, Kevin.
Because you were always far too entrenched in the Progressive cocoon to comprehend how non-fellow-travelers felt about much of anything.
You did a fine job of firing up the base and preaching to that choir, though!
"What Drum doesn't get is that a good many of us would have been wielding those pitchforks against the government, not the investment bankers."
Although they both deserve to be pursuded with pitchforks, by going after only the government and not the investment bankers, you would have been pursuing the minions and not the masters.
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