Tuesday night, I thought I’d attend The National Journal’s Debate on “Our Fiscal Future” between John Podesta and Douglas Holtz-Eakin with Jim Tankersley moderating at The George Washington University’s Marvin Center. I was interested because Podesta is often thought to be on the left-wing of “mainstream” opinion, and also it is said that he is one of the leading possibilities to succeed Rahm Emanuel as the President’s Chief of Staff. So, I wanted to see if I could find some glimmer of novelty in the point of view he expressed; some indication that he might bring some new thinking into The White House beyond what Obama has been hearing from say, Austan Goolsbee.

Unfortunately, the event filled up too fast and I wasn’t able to go, so I tuned into the live video stream, which is now available at the Center for American Progress web site. By the end of the debate I was very glad I didn’t go. First, because I got to “cover” the debate in my living room, and Second, because I didn’t appear to lose anything in translation, especially since the promised Q & A period was limited to answers to one question, and contained nothing that could possibly embarrass any of “the notables” or make them think twice about what they were saying.

In my previous three posts analyzing the June 26th AmericaSpeaks Community Conversation event I attended in Falls Church, VA, I presented the steps in the decision process used for the event, and discussed the pre-conference phase and the first four steps. These reflect a strong and consistent bias toward socializing participants into the idea that there is a deficit problem and that it has to be treated by cutting expenditures and/or raising taxes. The bias was reflected in many little ways in the materials used for the meetings and in the way the first four steps were carried out. The framing of exercises in the decision process continually restricted choices to ones that bring participants back to the supposed problem of a deficit and debt crisis. The web-streamed talks about national conference proceedings and orientations, and the brief constricted discussions of major values issues all worked to fit participants’ thinking to the ideas and frames presented in worksheets and the Federal Budget 101 presentations. Lines of discussion that would have led outside of the intended framing were politely aborted by the facilitators, pleading limited time, and the need to get through the agenda, and give everyone a chance to speak, so that any person developing counter-themes to the major narrative did not have a chance to develop these counter-themes and counter-narratives in the context of the supposedly unbiased process. In this post I’ll continue with my examination of step five of this process.

In early December, I asked whether President Obama would choose to be more like Hoover, or more like FDR. Well, I guess it’s definitely Hoover.

James K. Galbraith’s short piece in The Washington Post Outlook section proposed that we ought to toss the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). I couldn’t agree more. This post is a commentary intended to amplify the argument.

Jamie begins with:

”The forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office are holy writ in Washington, and they fuel scary headlines about an impending federal debt disaster. This is a shame, because the CBO’s projections are indefensible, internally inconsistent and economically impossible.”

A little more than a week ago, I proposed a Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In and Counter-Conference to be held in Washington, DC as a response to the First Meeting of the Administration’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, sardonically called by some the “steal our retirements commission,” on April 27th. The Counter-conference would also be a response to the Conference scheduled by The Peter G, Peterson Foundation’s (PGPF’s) “fiscal summit” on April 28th. This conference will be full of notables but won’t include even a single economist who doesn’t share the neo-liberal view of fiscal sustainability, centered around budget deficits, the national debt, and the debt held by the public to GDP ratio. The PGPF Conference, some powerful Senators and the President’s commission are spearheading a very broad-ranging campaign to persuade the American people that austerity is necessary for ordinary Americans (as if we haven’t had enough of that since the crash of 2008), including cutbacks on entitlements while, at the same time, the same people do all they can to preserve one of the periodic “great barbeques” in American history where well-off people accumulate immense wealth by looting the few resources owned by working people. It’s the purpose of the teach-in Counter-conference to oppose this deficit hawkism point of view with a alternate new economic paradigm offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that offers opportunity, balanced growth, and public purpose, in place of austerity, private irresponsibility, and hopeless Hooverism.

In my last post I discussed the Washington Post’s Hooverite anti-deficit campaign and Fred Hiatt’s recent piece in the deficit hysteria genre. Now, let’s look at the latest effort of Robert Samuelson, a well-known WaPo columnist to frighten us some more.

Like Fred Hiatt, Samuelson wants President Obama to pivot from health care reform and do something serious about “deficit control,” regardless of whether this will hurt economic recovery and leave us with high unemployment rates for a long time.

Last weekend that so-called epitome of liberal media bias called The Washington Post continued its on-going war on economic recovery and the American people with two salvos on the “crisis” in Government finances created by our “unsustainable” deficits, written by Fred Hiatt and Robert Samuelson. Hiatt and Samuelson are not the only deficit warriors in the WP army. Others of note include David Broder, Dana Milbank, Steven Pearlstein, and Lori Montgomery. Together, and along with the absence of any writers who write about deficits from a positive point of view, the WaPo reflects a determined Hooverite position on deficits, advocating that the Administration now “pivot” toward deficit reduction, even though their writing recognizes that such a pivot can only come at the cost of a delayed or a denied economic recovery, and even at the cost of a renewed plunge into deeper recession or even depression.

This position is not liberal or “progressive.” Some may call it neo-liberal. I’d prefer to call it Hooverite, because it is a renewed application of the economic philosophy of Herbert Hoover to the 21st century American economy. But, in any case, whatever the label used to characterize it, any Newspaper or other publication taking such a position cannot be characterized as liberal, or progressive, or “left.” But in our modern context must, be seen as “right,” corporatist, “neo-liberal” and globalist, because it demonstrates that it cares nothing for working people and their well-being, but only cares about defending the interests of the already well-off, the financial institutions, and the predatory economic globalists. Let’s take a look at the latest efforts of Hiatt and Samuelson to frighten us over the deficit, beginning with Hiatt’s in this blog post, and then following with Samuelson in my next one.

It looks like we’re approaching an inflection point of great danger in working through problems in creating Economic Recovery. The inflection point is coming because there has been little economic recovery both internationally and domestically, with some nations continuing to run large deficits, and a growing chorus from many, calling for austerity and Governmental budget balancing even though it’s well known that the consequences of these policies will be economic contraction and further hardship for all of us but the rich. The big question is: which way will nations that have debts held in their own sovereign currency like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia go? Will they listen to the domestic and international deficit hawks (e.g. the ratings agencies, the IMF, the European Commission (EC), and various currency traders and hedge fund managers) and cause further contraction and hardship for their citizens, or will they tell the deficit hawks to “take a hike,” create demand from the public sector, where private sector demand is falling short, full employment, and healthy economies?

I can’t answer this question, but what they ought to do is stated quite clearly in a recent blog post by L. Randall Wray and Yeva Nersisyan. Here’s an extensive sampling of their views along with some comments.

The corporatist-centrist politicians, such as Judd Gregg, Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, no longer afraid of a total collapse of the world economy, are using deadly innocent frauds, scare, myths, and lies about the deficit and the national debt to undermine the possibilities of progressive change in the United States. It seems, also, that they’re now being led by President Obama, who has emerged as a full-throated champion of deficit hawkism, while pretending to be concerned about the well-being of the Middle Class, during his first State of the Union speech, where the President treated us to the following statements, about the debt, and the deficit, among others.

When contemplating American politics today, it’s hard not to think of Yeats’s line from the Second Coming:

”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the health care reform legislative process, the progressives held true to the slogan that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they forgot the maxim that “if you stand for nothing, you’ll end up with nothing.” So, here we are with worse than nothing, with two immoral bills, that do more harm than good, and with every prospect that an equally bad compromise between them will be presented to both Houses for final ratification.

That immoral compromise needs to be defeated. Health Care Reform must be sent back to the Leadership for further work. If Congress is not immediately ready for true health care reform ending the fatalities, bankruptcies and foreclosures within a years’ implementation time, then, at least, a bill must be passed that ends rescissions, denials of coverage or price discrimination based on preconditions, and that limits insurance premium increases to the annual rate of inflation, effective immediately.