It's one thing that Herman Cain turned around in less than 24 hours and went from condemning Rick Perry's hunting ground being named "Ni**erhead" to essentially blaming the media for pursuing the story.
It's another thing for him to act is if he is some kind of business titan when he was a principal party to an Enron-like speculation which wiped out the investments of his Aquila energy corporation's employees.
And, we've all grown accustomed to his referring to himself incessantly in the third person, in spite of that being a fairly obvious sign of a serious narcissistic disorder.
But now, there is this... Appearing on the WSJ's The Big Interview, Cain was lobbed a softball about the Occupy Movement. Not content to merely dismiss it, not satisfied with making conspiratorial accusations about it, he went further. During the worst economic crisis to face the world in four generations, he said"if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself."
Many people find Nouriel Roubini's work dry and dispassionate. You generally don't see him on television. After all, his style is more academic than political. He is certainly no hyper-partisan of the Krugman or Stiglitz mode. All that said, Roubini got a lot more attention last week than usual. In an interview with the WSJ's Simon Constable, he told it like it is in the same measured tones that have made him a less than household name.
You don't cut taxes when you go to war. The stimulus was too small. The deficit is "Bush's fault." You don't "front load" austerity in a crisis. Rather, you apply that pressure when an exit from recession is secure. Rising income inequality naturally leads to civil unrest.
However, this observation at the 5min 10sec mark sent out a shock wave:
"Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process."
God help us. He is usually right. No one more accurately predicted the collapse of 2008.
The fact that we now have an ascendant movement in American politics which greets proven centralized monetary policy with charges of "Communism" only makes the disaster more likely.
It's all common sense... unless you are a devoted Fox viewer.
That the Wall Street Journal has for years been just to the right of any other "respectable" newspaper in America has long been known. There has never been a Cato or Heritage pronouncement, no matter how absurd or ultimately proved wrong by the uncooperative nature of reality, which was not at first promoted in their editorial pages as very nearly the latest burning bush. As we head toward what looks like the GOP sabotage of America's good credit, former WSJ writer and recovering radical David Frum noted that they published an all time whopper yesterday.
"The strict demands of the paper’s ideology do not always lie smoothly over the rocky outcroppings of reality. It can take considerable skill to match the two together.
If you were to write a story about government debt, you’d probably be inclined to write about the two sets of government decisions that produce deficits or surpluses: decisions about expenditure and decisions about revenue. You’d want to do that not only as a matter of fairness, but also as a matter of math.
And that’s why, my friend, you would wash out as a WSJ editorialist. They wrote this editorial without any reference to revenues whatsoever. Boom! Gone! Don’t deny reality. Defy reality."
Click HERE to read further as Frum lays out the shockingly dishonest steps the WSJ employed to lay blame for the debt where it doesn't belong.
There is increasingly bad news on the horizon regarding the United States' AAA financial rating. Any number of factors are included in yesterday evening's WSJ piece on the chances that S&P and Moody's may be forced to lower that rating.
This would be, to put it delicately, a disaster of epic proportions. The problem with the piece is that it doesn't actually provide much context for the primary reason both institutions brought this up last year. It also relegates the most important factor to the 16th paragraph.
"...measures of the U.S. debt burden include federal debt to revenue, estimated to average 397% of gross domestic product until 2020. The ratio of interest to revenue, meanwhile, is expected to rise to 17.6% by 2020, nearly double last year's level. These are "quite high for an Aaa-rated country," Moody's said in its report."
REVENUE. Say it with me. "Revenue." Got it? What's glaringly missing here is the fact that Moody's and S&P affirmed in December that the rating might have to lowered due to extension of the "W Tax Cuts."
