"David Brooks Reveals He Literally Worships Money" (Jonathan Schwarz of "A Tiny Revolution")

STOP THE PRESSES: 9th Circuit panel lifts injunction that permitted DoD to continue enforcing DADT (see below)

Our Davy Brooks: Does the fact that he has a career prove that there truly aren't any disadvantages to being a functional moron?

I know I sometimes try to argue that, contrary to what you might think from observing who gets respect in our society, there actually are disadvantages to being a functional moron. That, however, would still leave the career of Our Davy Brooks -- and I mean the fact that he has a career -- unexplained. Beyond that, I don't think anything more needs to be said about this post from Jonathan Schwarz on his blog "A Tiny Revolution." -- Ken

July 06, 2011

David Brooks Reveals He Literally Worships Money

David Brooks just acknowledged that the Republican party is insane, which has caused great excitement among liberals. But no one seems to have noticed the most important thing Brooks said, which is that he actually worships money:

The members of this [GOP] movement [to default on the national debt] have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money.

Obviously there's no religious or moral tradition which considers repaying loans to be "sacred." It's almost 180 degrees the opposite: the Old Testament, New Testament and Qur'an all condemn charging interest on loans. And of course the Bible requires Jubilee years in which all debts are completely canceled.

That doesn't mean that defaulting on the U.S. national debt would be a great idea. It just means that Brooks is, ethically-speaking, a gigantic pervert.

On the other hand, it turns out there's a particular kind of U.S. debt that David Brooks feels is completely unsacred:

BROOKS: There is no Social Security trust fund there.

And:

BROOKS: We all bow down and worship at the beast of this fiction called the Social Security trust fund...

And:

BROOKS: ... the trust fund is an accounting fiction.

What's the difference between these two kinds of debt? Well, David Brooks himself undoubtably owns a lot of standard government bonds. Paying him back is sacred. But the Social Security debt is mostly owed to peons. So paying them back is profane.

-- Jonathan Schwarz

POSTSCRIPT: DOES OUR DAVY HAVE A POINT?

An exceptionally erudite colleague points out that "many religious traditions do, in fact, involve themselves with borrowing and lending, dating back as far as written records," which he says often actually document temple loans in barley and silver, with gods listed as creditors and wars fought over collection of such debts. Even my learned colleague acknowledges, though, though, that officially at least this is not the case in the monotheistic religions, possibly in response to the abuses noted in such cultures as the Sumerian. (And I'm guessing that when Our Davy invokes the "sacred," he has a pretty limited version of same in mind.)

He suggests that, while "maybe Brooks is right," the point to stress is that "the US is not a theocracy, legally at any rate." He points out too that it's worth stressing who it is threatening to not live up to U.S. debt obligations: the Republicans.


STOP THE PRESSES: IN THE WAKE OF FRIDAY'S DOJ FILING,
9TH CIRCUIT PANEL RESTORES BAN ON DADT ENFORCEMENT

This statement comes from Jon W. Davidson, legal director of Lambda Legal in Los Angeles:

The injunction issued by the district court in the Log Cabin Republicans' challenge to Don't Ask, Don't Tell is back in effect. The government is enjoined from enforcing DADT anywhere in the world -- that means, not only no more discharges, but also no more processing for discharge of those who might violate DADT.

This, of course, was the situation that existed for 8 days, before a different set of Ninth Circuit judges issued the stay of the injunction in the Log Cabin Republicans case. Nonetheless, this is a quite stunning development. It shows just how important it is that the Department of Justice now recognizes that sexual orientation discrimination should be presumed to be unconstitutional and that courts should examine such discrimination carefully, as the Department of Justice forcefully argued in its brief filed last Friday in our Golinski case, which today's Ninth Circuit order expressly referenced.

But, how safe it is to come out depends on what happens next. The government could ask the Ninth Circuit judges who just lifted the stay to reimpose it while they ask a larger group of Ninth Circuit judges to again issue a stay or while they ask the Supreme Court to reimpose the stay. Even if the 3 Ninth Circuit judges who just lifted the stay refuse to do that, the government could ask the larger group of Ninth Circuit judges or the Supreme Court to reimpose the stay.

Jon W. Davidson
Legal Director
Lambda Legal

For more information on today's DADT development, check out Chris Geidner's Metro Weekly blogpost, "Ninth Circuit Halts DADT Enforcement, Pentagon 'Taking Immediate Steps' To Comply."

#

You can't have a bitchin' "austerity" movement without an International Conspiracy of Dunces -- meet Our Davy Brooks

Once upon a time, Doonesbury's Roland Hedley went spelunking in Reagan's brain. Would anyone have the courage to attempt the same quest in Our Davy Brooks's brain?

by Ken

I expect many of you have already seen this, but I don't think you'll mind looking at it again. (Sorry I can't provide a link. Somehow as of this writing it still doesn't seem to have been added to the Borowitz Report website. Well, there's a link!)

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 17, 2011

Greece Offers to Repay Loans with Giant Horse
Steed Wheeled Into Brussels at Night

BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report) – In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of the EU’s bailout.

But German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said she “welcomed the beautiful wooden horse,” adding, “What harm could it possibly do?”

I've intentionally led off with a light moment because, as promised, we're about to descend into the murky, incomprehensible depths of DavyBrooksWorld.

Just this morning on the radio I heard some pompous economic semiliterate, commenting on the Greek crisis, saying that we know how to deal with their debt problem but now we just lack the political will to do so. Of course what he means is that we know the forced-austerity technique, which transforms the ill-gotten gains of the financial players who've made out like bandits in the runup into a price to be paid by people who've gotten no benefit from it.

The "serious" people who tut-tut about the Social Security "crisis" tut-tut in exactly the same way. We know what has to be done; we just lack the political gumption to do it. Or the state budget crises raised to toxic proportion by the economic meltdown: Hoodlums like the new governors of Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio know how to deal with it -- and they've got the political gumption to do what has to be done: "solve" the problems on the backs of people who didn't cause them, thereby protecting the movers and shakers who did, and in many cases got rich, or I should say richer, doing it.

I suppose if you just wanted to pick on Our Davy Brooks, you could equally well deconstruct every pile of manure Our Davy shovels onto the NYT op-ed page. The levels of stupidity and dishonesty are really that predictable.

I can think of several reasons why I've glommed onto the column he wrote last week, hailing an astonishing discovery, the most important discovery since the discovery of sunshine: that the economic meltdown was caused by . . . Freddie Mac! (Or maybe Fannie Mae, I forget which.)

First, I had a moment of instant revulsion when I noticed the blurb for that column (for which, on principle, I'm not going to provide a link; that seems to me just encouraging him) on the day's NYT e-newsletter. It didn't take a particularly keen olfactory detector to smell a turd. It looked to be, only three years late, yet another assault on the best scapegoat the Far Right has come up with to deflect blame from the class of movers and shakers whose private parts they live to lick.

Maybe too I was primed because I once made the mistake of allowing a wingnut commenter to drag me into his inexhaustibly "sourced" conviction that the true cause of the economic meltdown was the Community Reinvestment Act of 2008, by which the government held guns to the head of scrupulously honest bankers and forced them to lend money to vile scum of the criminally poor class (not very hidden subtext: overwhelmingly people of inappropriate skin pigment) for the purpose of sinking the economy. Of course those inexhaustible citations, if you look at them, turn out to be either just plain bogus or twisted-beyond-recognition distortions, all to buttress the ideological delusions they've made up in their head, all of which are totally impervious to facts, which the Far Right has come to consider its deadliest enemy.

Now my point here, and the reason I bring it up, is that this is exactly the way Our Davy Brooks works. His trick -- and I'm not equipped to say whether it's a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck -- is to wrap his ideological rigidities in a veneer of "centrism." But he practices "journalism" the way David Brock -- as he reported in Bllinded by the Right -- discovered was the standard practice of the Far Right pseudo-journalists he'd attached himself to, among whom he had made himself the shiningest star. It occurred to him rather belatedly that where actual journalists set out to find out what the story is, his people started out with the story fully written in their heads and then went out in search of anything they could find, or more likely twist, to seem to support it.

THE POINT IS NOT THAT FANNIE
AND FREDDIE ARE BLAMELESS

To start with, it appears that that book Our Davy read, well, he doesn't seem to have actually read it, just glommed onto the part that fits his ideological fixation. I'm told by people I trust a lot more than Our Davy that he ignored substantial parts of the book that dealt with the Fed, Wall Street, and nonbank financial parties.

More to the point, though, he's just got the Fannie-Freddie story wrong. Which is not to say that Fannie and Freddie don't deserve brickbats. Here's economist Dean Baker's take:

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

Just to be clear, Fannie and Freddie were serious bad actors. They are both huge companies that do nothing else but deal with housing. It is incredible that they did not recognize the housing bubble and take steps to try to deflate it, and protect themselves, before it grew to such dangerous levels.

Suppose that Fannie and Freddie started demanding appraisals of rental values and refused to buy any mortgage where the ratio of sale price to annual rent was higher than 20. This action by itself likely would have shaken some sense into the housing market. I said this back in 2002, when I first warned of the housing bubble and predicted the collapse of Fannie and Freddie. I also frequently criticized Fannie and Freddie in public forums, including debates with their chief economists. Unlike Brooks, I wasn't worried about non-issues as economic disaster loomed on the horizon.

However:

As much as Fannie and Freddie deserve blame for incompetence and corruption, no serious person can make them the main culprits in this story. The Wall Street crew made hundreds of billions on pushing fraudulent mortgages. Furthermore, if we had competent economists running the Fed, they would have been shooting at the housing bubble as early as 2002 also. This does not mean raising interest rates in an economy that was struggling to recover from the collapse of the stock bubble. (I'll say that again, since people have a hard time understanding "do not raise interest rates." The Fed should not have raised interest rates.)

If Greenspan had paid attention to the economy he would have had the Fed's staff devoted full-time to document the evidence for the housing bubble and he would have used every public appearance (e.g. congressional testimonies, public speeches, international forums) to warn of the risks posed by the housing bubble. He also would have used the Fed's full regulatory authority to police the mortgage issuing practices of the banks under its supervision. He also would have prodded other regulators to use increased scrutiny for the institutions under their control. (Greenspan was never shy about making suggestions to others.)

My guess is that these actions would have by themselves crashed the bubble and done so long before it grew to such dangerous levels. They would be essentially costless, so it is difficult to see why a vigilant Fed chair would not have followed this route.

It is difficult to believe that these actions would not have been sufficient to deflate the bubble. After all, the David Brooks of the world can ignore Dean Baker warning of the housing bubble, they cannot ignore the Fed chair issuing such warnings, backed up by endless Fed papers documenting the case.

But Our Davy has found his narrative, and restored the earth to its rightful axis. And people continue publishing and reading his gibberish.

#

If Greece Sells Mykonos Or Lesbos and Austria Sells A Couple Of Alps, How Soon Before We Sell Off The Rest Of Yosemite?

Yesterday Ken did two posts about the "austerity" movement, by which the very rich hope to even further entrench and enhance their positions in society-- "Austerity": the price we've gotta pay to keep the World's Greediest rollin' in dough and then one poking around one of the loudest public voices of the movement, David Brooks, the NY Times columnist paid to be a mouthpiece for that class which bought the entire "free" press, vowing to never allow themselves to be victimized and held up for public opprobrium by muckrakers again.

How could he have possibly missed this story about how Austria had decided to start selling off its Alps so that the rich could get even richer.

Austria has postponed the sale of two Alpine peaks after a public outcry that underscored the lofty challenges faced by cash-strapped governments that attempt to sell treasured national assets to raise funds.

The Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft, or BIG, Austria’s federal real estate company, proposed divesting two peaks in eastern Tyrol for a minimum of €121,000, but public opprobrium put a brake on the sale.

The agency received an avalanche of calls from irate Austrians, while a series of political figures spoke out against the privatisation of the pair of craggy peaks.

The sale process was temporarily suspended on Tuesday pending further evaluation, with a future sale now likely to be restricted to “Austrian institutions."

“Tyrol is not Greece,” a satisfied Günther Platter, governor of Tyrol, told an Austrian newspaper, adding that the proposed sale had been a “Schnapsidee”, or “crackpot idea."

The comparison stems from a headline last year in Bild, the German paper, urging Greece to sell off some of its most treasured tourist attractions instead of relying on a European Union bail-out.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks! And sell the Acropolis too!” the paper proclaimed. George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, has insisted the country will not sell these assets as it pushes ahead with a €50bn privatisation programme.

The Austrian affair echoes a similar climbdown by the British government, which in February was forced to abandon a sale of state-owned forests.

In Spain, plans to privatise the popular state lottery as part of a planned multibillion-euro sale of public assets have so far raised few objections.

Like most EU countries, Austria is running a budget deficit, but its debt is rated triple A-- the highest level-- by the credit agencies and the country has no trouble financing itself in the markets.

Laugh, but in our country, where conservatives always opposed the whole concept of publicly owned parks and fought the establishment of the national park system, the masters of the universe now feel the time is right to sell them off or, as David Brooks will one day soon urge, privatize them. And they have just the politicians in their pockets to do it for them, shills to great wealth like John Kasich in Ohio, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Rick Scott in Florida and, more tragically, even financially hard-pressed "progressives" in progressive states who have been taking the likes of David Brooks seriously. Yesterday, in a plea for donations, Truthout e-mailed subscribers an ominous missive:

A growing number of politicians are doing their best to take the "public" out of everything in American life, including libraries, schools, government workers, environmental protection-- even parks and parking meters.

And the movement is fast succeeding at creating an environment where only privileged students have access to higher education, by cutting subsidies to state and community colleges to such an extent that tuition is no longer affordable for many young Americans and their families.

When fewer and fewer of America's young people can afford to attend public college, we know that the US is headed toward a third-rate future.

Who should we listen to, Marcy Kaptur or Our Davy Brooks? (Yes, but who'll GET listened to?)

Notice how grudgingly Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) is given the floor. Can't you just feel the rage, even the hatred, of Republicans forced to put up with the ravings of the crazywoman from Ohio? Fortunately, from their perspective, they know that no one's going to pay a damned bit of attention.

by Ken

Howie passed this video along from Nepal. (Our information "back channels" at DWT are way back.) He asked, "Does this appeal to you?" And by the time I got this far into Marcy's speech, I wrote back, "Not only does it appeal to me, it's perfect for the post I'm pulling together for 6pm dumping on David Brooks as part of the 'them' conspiracy. Here's somebody who ISN'T."

Now we even have a bill that's going to take food away from about 350,000 women and children. Now whose fault is that?

Here's a little note from somebody in my district. [Reads from a paper plate.] She says -- [waving paper plate] she signed up this plate at the food bank, the local food bank -- she says: "Without help from the food bank, I would be on the street. I struggle every day to make ends meet, so my kids have a place to lay their heads at night. I have a job, but with two kids it's still very hard. I have a lot of trouble paying rent, and bills. I just wish there were more help for parents like myself.

That's from the rural part of my district. From the urban part of my district [holding up another paper plate] and plate is signed at the food bank: "My income is spent on bills which leave very little money for me to purchase food for myself and my two daughters."

You know, the majority of people in this house are Christians, and I'm not pushing that, though I am one of them, but the First Beatitude says, "Feed the hungry." It doesn't say, "Rugged individualism." I'm as individualistic as anybody else in this chamber, but I'll tell you what, there's a heartlessness that goes with people who take everything for themselves and turn their back on the rest of the American people. So when Big Oil makes record profits and pays no taxes, there's something really wrong.

There's something really wrong with the country, and the American people know it. They didn't clean house here last November because they thought you were better. They just wanted a change. And they'll vote for it again if their lives don't get better, and their lives won't get better unless we fix what Alan Greenspan and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and the whole rest of those buzzards up there did to this country.

And they're taking bonuses! In fact, they're making so much money, they take members of Congress out. You know the average amount of the meal? $193. $193 a plate. These folks [holding up the paper plates], a couple of bucks in a day they spend on food.

So I stand with the American people, not those wealthy interests who took the nation to the cleaners. . . .

Speaking of "who took the nation to the cleaners," you'll be thrilled to know that no less intrepid a detective than Our Davy Brooks has figured it out. And you know who it was? Freddie Mac!

As I suggested earlier, media dunce-whores like Our Davy are crucial to the corporatist juggernaut now running roughshod over non-plutocratic America.

And how does Our Davy know this? He read a book. Well, apparently he read part of a book -- the part that said what his dunce-whore ears wanted to hear. See, Our Davy "thought" (using the term in the very broadest possible sense), it wasn't the fault of the Godlike Rich People who make it possible for me to enjoy my scrumptious standard of living as their dunce-whore bitch!

But of course, as always, he's wrong. And it apparently doesn't bother the people at the NYT who have his checks cut that he's always wrong. People like Our Davy and the Rose Douchebag given them "balance" -- balancing their roster of moderates with right-wing dunce-whores gussied up to look like people with working brains.

We'll go more into the specifics of how Our Davy f**ked up this particular scoop tomorrow.

#