StephenKMackSD's Blog

According to a report posted at Politico by Ben Smith January 21, 2011, Michele Bachmann will deliver a  rebuttal to the State of the Union Address on Tuesday January 24,2011. The Republican Leadership has made their choice of Paul Ryan, to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama's speech. Is the Republican phalanx, elected in November and just seated, already fissuring before our eyes? Bachmann's reply will be streamed on www.TeaPartyExpress.org. The American Political Melodrama can only be deepened and enriched by the assertion of the Tea Party Jacobin's power of dissent, of the sowing of the seeds of an exploitable political nihilism. The coming conflicts over a whole range of issues will be highlighted by a conflict between a Republican Establishment and its Jacobins and The New Democrats presently governing. What ever happened to the Republican's Eleventh Commandment of nearly a generation ago? Where is the GOP that once carefully controlled its every step of a continuing campaign, with an unbeatable public relations machine? Nothing was left to chance or the inevitable but disastrous improvisation.        

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/19/AR2011011905000.html

The Great Will (TGW) entitles his column of January 20, 2011 ‘Hubris heading for a fall’. His first line is from the Folk standard ‘Worried Man Blues’.  Is his essay just a highly garnished political tantrum, by a leading apologist for an utterly failed ‘Free Market Capitalism’, inaugurated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and ignominiously ending in the financial crash of 2008? His column quotes one of the leading proponents of that ‘financial reform’ Larry Summers. TGW’s favorite hobbyhorse of the inherent evil of ‘government’ is here taken for an extended canter. The ‘political class’ is ,of course, a stand-in for New Deal Liberalism and its epigones, even its New Democratic Charlatans and Pretenders.  The beast must be starved, even in the face of the demonstrable irresponsibility, even criminality, of American Capital. TGW has a penchant for such metaphors as the aforementioned ‘political class’, adding ‘government squandering’, ‘reckless expansions’ for good measure. Quoting such conservative intellectual and political luminaries as James Q. Wilson, America’s preeminent social scientist, William J. Baumol, Princeton economic professor emeritus and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator; he demonstrates the bankruptcy of the idea that government can provide any real answers: to the present economic problems that beset our nation, yet never seeing or admitting that the “Free Market Ideology’, that he venerates as singular answer, has proven unworthy of his continually professed faith.

Here is an extended quote from Wikipedia entry on the career of Mr. Summers:

‘Summers hailed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted more than six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services (by repealing key provisions in the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act): "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers said.^[18] "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy."^[18] Many critics, including President Barack Obama, have suggested the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis was caused by the partial repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act.^[19] Indeed, as a member of President Clinton's Working Group on Financial Markets, Summers, along with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt, Fed Chairman Greenspan, and Secretary Rubin, torpedoed an effort to regulate the derivatives that many blame for bringing the financial market down in Fall 2008.’

This information could render any comment that Mr. Summers might make about the economy in a dubious light, as a beginning or even an ending point, to any discussion about our presently wretched economic condition.