A passionless presidential race

Robert Reich:

Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.

President Obama will be supported by progressives and the Democratic base, but without enthusiasm. His notorious caves to Republicans and Wall Street — failing to put conditions on the Street’s bailout (such as demanding the Street help stranded home owners), or to resurrect Glass-Steagall, or include a public option in health care, or assert his constitutional responsibility to raise the debt limit, or protect Medicare and Social Security, or push for cap-and-trade, or close Guantanamo, or, in general, confront the regressive Republican nay-sayers and do-nothings with toughness rather than begin negotiations by giving them much of what they want — are not the stuff that stirs a passionate following.

Mitt Romney will surely be the Republican presidential candidate — and Romney inspires as little enthusiasm among Republicans as Obama does among Democrats. The GOP will support Romney because, frankly, he’s the only major Republican primary candidate who does not appear to the broader public to be nuts.

But Republicans don’t like Romney. His glib, self-serving, say-whatever-it-takes-to-win-the primaries approach strikes almost everyone as contrived and cynical. Moreover, Romney is the establishment personified — a pump-and-dump takeover financier, for crying out loud — at the very time the GOP (and much of the rest of the country) are becoming more anti-establishment by the day.

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Elegy to Berlusconi

David Dayen at FDL:

Parliament under his rule served mainly to extricate him from any of a number of extra-curricular legal problems, when it wasn’t designing policies almost entirely for the benefit of his businesses. Anyone who thinks that Berlusconi will spend a minute in jail hasn’t been paying attention to how he has run the political sphere for the past two decades, quietly reducing his own exposure to prosecution.

The Prime Minister ran the country into the ground, and even under the circumstances, his exit is welcome news. Berlusconi’s unflagging optimism actually bordered on dementia: his response to the current bond crisis, initially, was that the restaurants were full, so the economy must be doing fine. The country is a mismanaged wreck, where powerful monopolies hold the vast majority of wealth, poverty rises, and protection rackets are the norm. It can be said that, at least when the entire government was under the sway of the mafia, the trains ran on time. This Berlusconi/Mafia hybrid – his ties are well-documented – was just inefficient. Growth over the past 15 years has averaged a paltry 0.75% (of course, this doesn’t take into account a very large black market economy).

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Bill O'Reilly's book on Lincoln won't be sold at Ford's Theater—too many factual errors

In two separate posts at Salon, Justin Elliot reports on the fate of Bill O'Reilly's bestselling book, Killing Lincoln, which was being considered for sale at Ford's Theater, the site of Lincoln's assassination. The site is run by the National Park Service and contains a bookstore at which Lincoln–related material is available for purchase.

In the first post, "Ford's Theater flunks O'Reilly's Lincoln book", Elliot reports on the recommendation of the book reviewer assigned by the NPS:

A reviewer for the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre has recommended that Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling new book about the Lincoln assassination not be sold at the historic site “because of the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.”

Rae Emerson, deputy superintendent at Ford’s Theatre, which is a national historic site under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, has penned a scathing appraisal of O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever.” In Emerson’s official review, which I’ve pasted below, she spends four pages correcting passages from O’Reilly’s book before recommending that it not be offered for sale at Ford’s Theatre because it is not up to quality standards.

Read the rest of the post to see Emerson's full review. Some of the items she found are less "off" than others, but all are factual errors, and there's quite a list.

In his second post, "Second expert trashes O'Reilly's Lincoln book", Elliot implies that the NPS has taken the reviewer's recommendation and declined to offer the book (my emphasis):

On Friday I wrote about the decision of Ford’s Theatre not to offer Bill O’Reilly’s bestsetlling [sic] new book on the Lincoln assassination at its bookstore because an expert National Park Service reviewer found the work to be riddled with factual errors.

The first article doesn't say whether the bookstore had made a decision, but based on the above, it certainly looks like the No is official.

That second post goes on to detail further factual problems, as noted in a book review from the November issue of North & South, "the official magazine of the Civil War Society". That review is not online, but there's a good write-up of it in Elliot's Salon post.

Each is an interesting read, short and to the point.

This kind of performance doesn't surprise me from O'Reilly, whose mouth makes factual errors all the time. I'm more concerned that the publisher, Henry Holt, allowed them to remain in the final version. Elliot says he's contacted the publisher, but hasn't heard back.

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Dear God, there’s ANOTHER GOP debate tonight

Now, granted, the GOP debate actually served a purpose.  Rick Perry lost his mind, Herman Cain made a sexist joke, and Newt Gingrich proved once again that he doesn't have the temperament to be president.  So it's hard to say there are too many debates when the last debate actually was actually quite useful.

So, if you're insane and decide to stay home on a Saturday night to watch the GOP debate (I'm grabbing dinner with my friend Joe), here's a good piece from Peter Hamby at CNN on what to look out for.

For the rest of us, here's an adorable kitten that really likes raising its paws. Read the rest of this post...

James Galbraith on Europe: The baton is passing "to the hand of resistance"

As many have been saying for a while now, the coming collapse in Europe (whatever shape it takes) is not a debt crisis per se, but a banking crisis.

Only corrupt Greece got itself in debt trouble before 2008; the rest just experienced banker-financed economic bubbles. Now that the bubbles have burst, Europeans have to decide what to do with the banks. (You know where this is headed, don't you.)

Here's economist James K. Galbraith, writing in Salon (my emphasis):

Like our own, the European banking crisis is the product of over-lending to weak borrowers, including for housing in Spain, commercial real estate in Ireland and the public sector (partly for infrastructure) in Greece. The European banks leveraged up to buy toxic American mortgages and when those collapsed they started dumping their weak sovereign bonds to buy strong ones, driving up yields and eventually forcing the whole European periphery into crisis. Greece was merely the first domino in the line.

In all such crises the banks’ first defense is to plead surprise – “no one could have known!” – and to blame their clients for recklessness and cheating. This is true but it obscures the fact that the bankers pushed the loans very hard while the fees were fat.

Quelle surprise as they say in, well, Europe. The Northern Europeans — Germany, France, et al — were the beneficiaries during the boom, and are determined not to let those advantages end:

[T]he Germans reap the rents and lecture their newly indebted customers to cut wages, sell off assets, and give up their pensions, schools, universities, healthcare – much of which were second-rate to begin with. Recently the lectures have become orders, delivered by the IMF and ECB, demonstrating to Europe’s new debt peons that they no longer live in democratic states.

Europe refuses to do the one thing that would end the crisis in a day (the ECB buying or at least guaranteeing the debt of troubled nations). This leaves them with (a) a rolling unsolved escalating continent-wide problem, and (b) a truly toxic solution. Read the following carefully:

[T]he ECB refuses to solve the crisis at a stroke, which it could do by buying up the weak countries’ bonds and refinancing them. ... So instead the zone has gone about creating a gigantic toxic CDO [collateralized debt obligation] called the European Financial Stability Fund, which may shortly be turned into an even more gigantic toxic CDS [credit default swap] (like AIG, they will call it “insurance”). This may defer panic at most for a little while.

CDOs are the bundles of mortgage contracts that were "tranched" (sliced) on Wall Street and sold as investments. We know what happened there; most went bad and turned into junk.

CDSs are side bets between assorted investment bank and hedge fund gamblers (called "counterparties") on whether specific investments will fail or not. AIG took the "won't fail" side of the bet in most cases, collected monthly fees for providing "insurance" — then couldn't begin to pay off on that "insurance" when the CDOs it was guaranteeing collapsed in a heap, more or less all at once.

What Galbraith is saying is that the ECB is creating a situation in Europe where the underlying "bet" is the ability of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal (et al) to pay their debts. You can invest in the "rescue" fund, and you can place side bets for or against it. All because the ECB doesn't want to guarantee the underlying debt to begin with.

So watch that fund; it's the key to European hopes, and will be their downfall.

Someone mentioned (I think it was Matt Taibbi) that for a whole lot less than the banker bailout cost, the U.S. could have guaranteed or bought out every shaky mortgage in the country and the crisis would have been over.

Europe is facing the same choice, and has the same determination not to take it.

Galbraith's bottom line: Europe is "at the point where political structures offer no hope, and the baton stands to pass, quite soon, to the hand of resistance."

When resistance is your solution, you've got trouble. Tick, tick, tick.

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