Meltdown 101: Liberal Perspectives

Here’s a couple of excerpts from a community forum held last month in NYC by The Nation magazine to discuss what drove the US economy off a cliff and what steps need to be taken to rectify the situation. The first features a vintage liberal, director of economic policy research at The New School, frequent contributor to the New York Times, and author of the book The Case for Big Government, talking about some of the fundamental causes of the recession and grading the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis thusfar.

The second is Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, an outspoken critic of “free market fundamentalists” and professor at Columbia University, attempting to explain the reason behind the Federal Reserve’s “loose monetary policies” of the past. According to Siglitz, the underlying problem stemmed from “an insufficiency of global aggregate demand” caused by a paradoxical disconnect between GDP growth and real wealth, the inverse redistribution of money, encouragement of unsustainable debt financing to compensate for the shortfall in real income, cost of the war in Iraq that contributed to rising oil prices that would have otherwise resulted in an economic downturn had not the Fed maintained artificially low interest rates, but that backfired through facilitation of an unsustainable housing bubble and consumption boom.

The other reason for the problem Stiglitz maintains can be indirectly traced back to the manner in which the IMF mismanaged the global economic crisis of 1997-98 in ways that robbed countries of their economic sovereignty and pushed them into destructive, pro-cyclical policies that made things go from bad to worse. Consequent to this, many countries decided to protect themselves from being dictated to by the IMF in future by accumulating massive reserves, thereby effectively taking their national income out of play. This hoarding Stiglitz argues was a contributory factor accounting for his so-called insufficiency of global aggregate demand.

Real Time: New Rules

“Liberals must launch our plan for socialist domination immediately. Listen closely comrades. I’ve received word from General Soros and our partners in the U.N., ‘Operation Streisand’ is a go. Markos Moulitsas, you and your DailyKos controlled army of gay Mexican day-laborers will join forces with Michael Moore’s Prius tank division north of Branson, where you will seize the guns of everyone who doesn’t blame America first, forcing them into the FEMA concentration camps; that’s where ACORN and I will re-educate them as atheists and declare victory in the War on Christmas!”

Aside from that, the theme of this week’s rant was mankind’s boundless ability to foul our own nest, examples being the orbiting space debris now threatening to destroy our satellites and that island of non-biodegradable waste floating in the Pacific Ocean that’s estimated to be larger than the state of Texas.

The Uncivil War

Sandy Crux is woman on a mission: to defeat the militant tide of incivility threatening to destroy our democracy. “Can we not have respectable differences of opinions without that kind of name calling?” Mrs. Crux plaintively asks, recalling her glory days back in the Niagara constituency office more than a decade ago. Then, as a plucky volunteer fighting on the front lines of the “Common Sense Revolution,” Crux was responsible for pulling incoming hate mail from the fax machine (a type of office equipment that supplanted the even more antiquated Telex machine and was widely used at the time for transmitting paper documents before the invention of e-mail). According to Mrs. Crux, many of the irate missives from Ontario voters received by the office were actually addressed to “Adolf Harris.”

Those traumatic fax-handling memories of the past were cruelly brought back to life for Mrs. Crux, a retired teacher and now President of the Stephen Harper Glee Club, when she was recently “catching up on the blogs and the news” and disturbingly “came across several people referring to Prime Minister Stephen Harper as Adolf Harper.”

Driven by her harrowing flashbacks of the Harris years and sensing an emerging threat to the integrity of Canadian political discourse arising from an imagined smear against the Dear Leader’s esteemed reputation circulating on the nefarious Internets, the erstwhile educator immediately swung into action and forcefully repudiated the maliciously demonic statements made by “several people” whose identities remain unknown.

Following up on her plea to have “respectful differences of opinions” without name calling, Mrs. Crux expressed hopes that the “pathologically negative” media will expose Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff as an “emporer [sic] with no clothes” and anxiously looks forward to the day when future Google searches of the expression “Adolph Harper” might reveal more than Mrs. Crux complaining about use of the expression “Adolph Harper” alleged to have been made by “several people” in addition to a handful of stale videos from last year based on the movie Hitler: The Last Ten Days — an amusing gimmick that many people of all political stripes have comically exploited for one reason or another.

Dooche Alert: It seems Mrs. Crux has removed the post in question, as she’s frequently prone to do whenever heat in the kitchen becomes intolerable. More specifically in this case, because “the usual suspects have used the very article where I wanted to improve the level of discussion to write about me in a derogatory and sarcastic tone,” she says. Crux has now “put that post on private so that it is no longer accessible to such ridicule.” People not dumb as a sack of rocks however, can still read the cached version of the article here. Taking down her own blog post “only proves my point” said Crux, “that the demonizing is NOT coming primarily from conservatives.”

Here in this little corner of the blogscape we thought the “point” of Mrs. Crux’s original post was to “improve the level of discussion” rather than, as more evidently has been shown, to conclusively demonstrate the vast moral superiority of conservatives when compared to “demonizing” liberals. Unfortunately, the “pathologically negative” media could not be contacted for comment.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Crux has “been advised to expect some server interruptions today.” Readers in need of her relentless fluffing and sycophantic tripe shouldn’t be too concerned, however. “Hopefully, they won’t be for long,” she said, quite ungrammatically, with chipper optimism.