Austan Goolsbee, his economics guru, came into the news recently for the role he played in the Canada/NAFTA flap. As you will recall, Goolsbee privately assured the Canadian consulate that Barack Obama's denunciation of NAFTA was nothing more than an exercise in election-year theatricals. When caught, he deceptively denied being on Team Obama -- even though he is and has been for years. He didn't mind being called Obama's "chief economics adviser" in this interview.
Goolsbee is an economist with the University of Chicago, home of Friedmanism. He has joined both Skull and Bones and the DLC. Those resume items don't bother me much, but I am surprised that they have not set off the usual paranoia alarms throughout blogland.
So why aren't the so-called "progressives" screaming about this guy? (By the way: I'm perfectly aware that he also offered informal advice to Kerry and Bill Clinton.)
Goolsbee denounced Michael Moore for advocating "socialized medicine". He's the sort of economist who earns high praise from George Will. And sure enough, he's a staunch defender of free trade:
"Globalization" means free trade and various deregulations that supposedly put downward pressure on American wages because of imports from low-wage countries. Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says that "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition."As Goolsbee puts it in this interview:
"I'm a University of Chicago economist and no one is ever going to be more in favor of open markets and free trade than an economist..."By the way, Hillary Clinton did not and never has supported NAFTA. She disagreed with her husband on the issue as far back as 1992.
Goolsbee's all-purpose solution for our economic woes is simplistic: Higher education for everyone.
Inane.
The problem with this country is that we don't make anything anymore. Our economic strength is a mass hallucination. To an increasing degree, we bounce from bubble to bubble -- and bubbles always pop, as did the tech and housing bubbles. Eventually, we will be left with all pop and no bubble. What's the use of putting an even higher percentage of our population through college if graduates will enter an economy destined for ragnarok? Which is worse -- a schlub with no job, or a schlub with no job and a student loan debt of $90,000?
The hard fact is that most people simply are not bright enough for college. Sorry to sound snobbish, but we must be realistic. We already have too many mediocre minds attending institutions of higher learning; we cannot further lower academic standards. Persons of average IQ (90-100) have no business entering a university for any purpose beyond an after-hours dog walk. We cannot improve the lives of such people by demanding that they learn German or master trig. Nevertheless, the economy must accommodate such people, must give them prosperity -- and that's just what FDR managed to accomplish, in the days before "the Chicago boys" ruined the world.
Obama's other big economics mentor is Jeffrey Liebman, who has earned the praise of the Libertarian Cato Institute for his advocacy of Social Security privatization. When Bush tried to scare the public with talk of Social Security's imminent collapse, he used fake numbers provided by Cato. (Al Franken discusses this episode at length in The Truth (With Jokes).) Alone among Democrats, Obama accepts that same Cato-ized argument.
On the positive side, Goolsbee advocates repealing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. That stance, in and of itself, provides one excellent reason why liberals should do everything they can to insure that Obama defeats McCain.
But the more I learn about Team Obama, the more I wish that I had supported Hillary Clinton.
12 comments:
I would expect that a similar investigation of Clinton's economic advisers would yield similar disappointing results.
At this juncture, we must either have the audacity to hope that Obama will, once having achieved the White House, revert to the progressive positions that characterized his early races for the Illinois State Senate, or resign ourselves to the despair of having another triangulating, corporate-pleasing, social program destroying Democrat-in-name-only in the White House.
The only sure rallying point is that no matter what happens, we do not want to end up with a psychopathic right-wing neo-fascist with his arthritic fingers on the nukleahr button.
I guess Hillary saying that NAFTA was good for NY and America isn't support.
Uh huh.
Didn't read the piece to which I linked, didja?
Didn't think so.
I think Goolsbee's "higher education for everyone" was hyperbole. Basically he said the more skills you learn, the more money you can earn, and therefore you can spend more money. The so-called standards for college-level proficiency were lowered in the 1960s, but that was a good thing. In the 1950s universities put their energies into their graduate schools. College had become an elongation of high-school time. Ten or 12 years (high school) became compulsory (it used to be that 8th grade was sufficient) because the 'economy' couldn't absorb its bubbling populace. Schools became waiting pens. Ask any high-school student. BTW, JFK's IQ was under 120. Two-year degrees in the health field and in security (for 90-100 IQ types) are the facts of life and have been for 30 years already.
The thing about Obama (and one reason I support him) is that he is one of a very rare breed of politician that does not surround him with yes men. Another of his strong academic advisors is an economics professor at Harvard that one of my good friends works with, and is quite progressive.
Obama is an unabashed academic, which is why he has so much support from the highly educated. He actually cares about multiple points of view... he himself may be a very strong progressive (just look at his background in community organizing), but unlike the Bush administration, he actually listens to other points of view, and builds consensus.
A personal example: I am a pretty strong liberal, but the only newspaper I read is the Wall Street Journal. I understand the liberal perspective on most things intrinsically, but reading a conflicting view allows me to understand the other side and make more educated decisions. This seems to be similar to what drives Barack Obama.
Quite a few people will be having buyer's remorse if Obama becomes the Democrat's nominee. Why? Because they fell for the sermonizing of Obama's "words". Yep, words that were not his own but had been formualated into a winning strategy. Its not just the media thats been blindly following Obama. The "progressive netroots" have become drunk with their power to persuade over the internets, while denying facts. Luckily, we have the Superdelegates who may be able to save the election by making the right decision when its time. So, the superdelegate plan is the firewall that may prevent a huge mistake from happening when the media begins to do its job.
The answer is HRC didn't want the Administration to move forward with NAFTA, but not because she was opposed to NAFTA as a policy. She opposed NAFTA because of its timing. She wanted her health-care plan to be voted on first. She feared that the fight over NAFTA would use up so much of the White House's political capital that there wouldn't be enough left when it came to pushing for health care. In retrospect, she was probably right.
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/
I blow hot and cold on Obama myself. My best hope for him is that he will turn out to be on the model of Franklin Roosevelt -- who was elected in 1932 with extremely conventional economic policies, didn't have much to offer the nation to start with except encouraging rhetoric, but after trying the conventional thing all through 1933 and having it not work was able to switch sharply to the left in 1934 and do things differently.
Many of his most bitter enemies on the right in later years were people who had supported him at the start and felt betrayed by that leftward move -- and were appalled by the fascist tint they saw in things like the NRA. (No, not that NRA. The other one.)
I also recall vaguely having read that Roosevelt loved to keep around a string of advisers with wildly varying positions and then set them fighting like cats and dogs for his own enlightenment.
Our current situation, as I see it, is one in which *none* of the existing solutions is going to work. If we're going to get out of the several different kinds of hole we're in, we're going to have to improvise wildly and creatively and do things that have never been done before. I think that Obama could be that sort of improviser, while I'm quite sure that Clinton could not.
I also expect that no matter what happens, the netroots and the young people who have been energized by Obama's campaign are going to be the most powerful force pushing for meaningful change. If Obama is elected, he will know very clearly he owes it to those people and will hopefully be responsive to them -- but Hillary has already shown by her top-down campaign and mommy-knows-best advertising that she has little interest even in the opinions of her own supporters.
If Obama does show signs of becoming the prisoner of his centrist tendencies and/or an obstructionist GOP minority in Congress, there will be a powerful wind behind him, pushing him to correct course. There's no such wind for Clinton -- her collection of traditional Democratic interest groups is the furthest thing imaginable from a political movement -- and thus no such corrective.
More than that -- there's a powerful accumulation of raw political energy among Obama's supporters. Under a President Obama, that energy could be channeled productively. But under a President Clinton, I can only see it being ignored and resisted, turning alienated and radicalized, and ending in 60's-style bitterness and violence. That's a scenario I very much want to avoid.
A fair amount of a campaign's 'advisors' are put there for campaign reasons, to make a point to prospective donors that the candidate is adequately mainstreamed and isn't a radical who will disrupt things.
And the president as decider could take the same set of advisers and make whatever policy he or she wanted. Consider that the Reagan administration had more Trilateral Commission members in it than did the Carter administration. Was the Reagan administration simply a follow-on to the foreign policy of Carter, or was it quite different?
It isn't the advisors, it's the president and what he does with the advice.
Same DOD and Pentagon advisors for JFK as for LBJ, but the difference in the presidents found only 18 dead Americans there as of Nov. 23, '63.
...sofla
yea! Sofia for that remarkable stat on the 18 dead before that Democrat (secretly clinging to the Military/Pentagon/CIA/ "secret govrnment" agenda to get US into that God forsaken war reversed JFK's policy decisions and pushed us into war.
Party affiliations are almost irrelevent when its time to initaite those "profiter's paradise" quasi wars..our little 1984 wars against make believe enemies..like today's war, blaming 911 on the Islamic looking people when the secret government at least 'facilitated" the event..if not orchestrated it entirely.
we do not want to end up with a psychopathic right-wing neo-fascist with his arthritic fingers on the nukleahr button
A hearty "Fuck you" to Democracy Lover from those of us who happen to have arthritic fingers.
Most of you have probably read the news reports that an "Obama campaign advisor" met with the Canadian consulate and told them that Obama's campaign talk against NAFTA was mostly just talk and it would not result in any big changes.
So who leaked the story? What motive would the Canadians have to leak this? Could Goolsbee have leaked it? Well, who is Goolsbee?
A Yale grad and member - like Bush I and II - of Skull & Bones. S & B has a long history of CIA ties. Goolsbee is a total WTO/NAFTA supporter. His research papers are on how corporate taxes and taxes on the rich DON'T WORK. Since Goolsbee doesn't advocate cutting government programs - gotta retain state power and keep up the pretense of being more liberal than the Republicans - that means more taxes for working class and middle class people.
And how did Goolsbee get started in the power elite in DC - he got a job with Senator David Boren, a fellow Yale grad and Skull & Bones member. Boren is famous for disgraceful chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Comm and his "rigorous" investigations into Iran-Contra, the October Surprise and other intel crimes - "Nope, nothing wrong here. Move on. CIA blameless, Bush blameless." More on Goolsbee mentor, Mr. Boren, from wiki:
"He is regarded as a mentor to former CIA Director George Tenet from his days as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee."
Obama had the appearance of change and being honest compared to Clinton. And Obama had clean hands when he said he wanted serious changes to NAFTA, unlike Clinton. But this story makes Obama out to be as dirty and pro-NAFTA as Clinton. But the Obama camp says that Goolsbee is not a major advisor and that nobody from the campaign instructed him to meet the Canadians or say those things. So did Goolsbee just spike the Obama campaign? If he gets a job with Clinton or McCain...Anyway, I am sure Mr. Ghouls Be will get a standing ovation at the next Skulls & Bones reunion meeting.
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