Yearly Archives: 2013

Obama’s Prefabricated Henhouse: Notes on The 2013 Inaugural Address, Part I

Lambert Strether blogs at Corrente.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. … As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.

Obama’s second inaugural address (January 21, 2013) was so shoddy and forgettable -– everyone did, in fact, forget it, and promptly, too, despite contemporaneous hagiography – and yet so unpleasant to read, as hack jobs are to all but hacks, that I couldn’t bring myself to finish this piece on it in a timely fashion. However, the advent of the SOTU – John Favreau’s last White House deliverable before he leaves for Hollywood – has concentrated my mind. Now, there’s very little here for the student of rhetoric to emulate; but I hope that by throwing many of the “phrases tacked together” into buckets or categories, I can at least persuade the reader to listen to the SOTU with a well-attuned but skeptical ear. And if the categories are justly chosen, maybe I can use them for the SOTU as well.

So, I’m going to color code the speech as follows:

Koch Brothers Driving Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to Cut Out Venezuelan Oil

Paul Jay of the Real News Network interviews Greg Palast, a BBC investigative reporter and author of Vultures’ Picnic.

Links 2/9/13

Is the Euro Crisis Over?

By Robert Guttmann, Professor of Economics at Hofstra University and a visiting Professor at University of Paris, Nord. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

A strange calm has settled over Europe. Following Mr. Draghi’s July 2012 promise “to do whatever it takes” to save the euro, which the head of the European Central Bank followed shortly thereafter with a new program of potentially unlimited bond buying known as “outright monetary transactions,” the market panic evaporated. This calming of once-panicky debt markets has led to optimistic assessments that the worst of the crisis has passed. All this begs the obvious question whether this major shift in mood is justified and as such durable or just a temporary break before the next storm.

Neil Barofsky Tells Jon Stewart How the Ego and Narcissism of Washington Preserve a Broken Status Quo

Hope you enjoy this chat. I did, despite its predictably depressing conclusion. Stewart and Barofsky do a good job of conveying how DC works and why that guaranteed “a thoroughly broken financial system” would stay intact.

Blizzard Reader Bleg

FYI, bleg = blog beg, I assume.

Links 2/8/13

The Island Dispute Between China and Japan: The Other Side of the Story

By Robert H. Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

The current dispute between China and Japan over a few barren islands inhabited by goats – called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese – looks at first sight to be a mere territorial spat. But it has escalated to a very dangerous level in recent months — first words, then actions of police forces, now actions of air forces, and, behind all these, both sides have mobilised all their military, political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural energies to engage in the dispute. It is more fundamental than normal territorial disputes, because the very identities of the two countries are at stake.

Credit Ratings Agencies Are Pimps of Wall Street – It’s Time to Ban Them!

By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Cross posted from Alternet.

Is Eric Holder’s “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” Department of Justice finally getting serious about investigating fraud on Wall Street?

Neil Barofsky: Geithner Doctrine Lives on in Libor Scandal

By Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector-general of the troubled asset relief programme and is currently a senior fellow at NYU School of Law. He is the author of ‘Bailout’. Cross posted from the Financial Times with permission

Now that Tim Geithner has resigned as US Treasury secretary, it is time to survey the damage wrought from four years of his approach to the financial crisis.

Links 2/7/13

Bank of America Foreclosure Reviews: How the Cover-Up Happened (Part IVB)

This post continues our discussion of how Bank of America and its consultant, Promontory Financial Group, made concerted efforts to ignore and suppress evidence of harm to borrowers who asked for what was supposed to be an independent review of their foreclosure.

Europe’s Imbalances Widen

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

While the latest European PMI is showing some improvement it has become apparent that imbalances are growing ever-greater in the zone.

Philip Pilkington: The Fear Industry – Austrian School Propaganda and the Gold Market

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

When you survey the websites and the pundits of Austrian economics on the internet you tend to get a niggling feeling that they’re trying to sell you something.