Hold Fast

Mike Konczal week at Hold Fast continues… We have a genuine, full-blown demand crisis on our hands. But our neoliberal policy advisors are looking to provide confidence to the bond market and are telling the unemployed to start taking night classes to get us out of this mess. Economic policy has conceptually been surrendered to the right, [...]

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Mike Allen reports on a meeting pulled together by Home Depot CEO Ken Langone and 50 Wall Street and hedge fund millionaires and billionaires with union-busting reactionary Chris Christie in which they encouraged Christie to run for President. Several of them said: I’m Republican but I voted for President Obama, because I couldn’t live with [...]

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Katie Porter at Credit Slips has a good post debunking the spin from banks and many conservatives that if banks don’t continue to aggressively pursue foreclosure, regardless of their actual legal standing to do so, then a lot of undeserving people will get free houses. While Porter notes that this really isn’t happening that often [...]

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Matt Stoller has a piece that’s really worth reading up at Naked Capitalism. In it he looks at the comparative leadership styles of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama. What’s particular important in this piece is the elevation of Warren as an individual who not only has strong beliefs, but believes her ideas are worth fighting [...]

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Mike Konczal looks at why the GOP will try to block Richard Cordray as the new director of the CFPB. He notes that one of the main GOP goals for changing the CFPB is to “Replace the single Director with a board to oversee the Bureau. This would prevent a single person from dominating the [...]

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Krugman responds to Mike Konczal: Mike Konczal ratchets up my rentier argument, arguing that what we’re seeing is a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense. That has to be right. It doesn’t necessarily take the form of pure cynicism; it’s more a matter [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field. In today’s New York Times, reporter Trip Gabriel goes after the heart of Tim Pawlenty’s argument for why he should be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, namely his sound record of fiscal accomplishments during his two terms as Governor of Minnesota. As the Gabriel piece shows, though, [...]

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I think it’s worth talking more about what a counter-offer to McConnell would look like. The biggest flaw with McConnell is that it would mean Obama would be required to put up $2.5 trillion spending cuts, with no offsetting revenue increases. This gives the GOP what they wanted: deficit reduction entirely through spending cuts and [...]

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Matt Taibbi: The blindness of the DLC-era “Third Way” Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your [...]

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At New Deal 2.0, James Galbraith has a really comprehensive look at the absurdity of the debt ceiling talks and the truly insane deficit negotiations. There’s a lot of really good stuff in it and it’s hard to pick just one passage that’s worth elevating…so I won’t. Just go read the whole thing.

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