Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week, but first, today's Crowson:
Paul Krugman: What the Malaysians Know: Quotes several cases where right-wingers, including the Heritage Foundation, have switched tunes and started praising Malaysia -- after money changed hands:
It seems that some years ago Malaysia's ruling party took a good look at leading pundits and policy intellectuals in the conservative movement, reached a judgment about their personal and intellectual integrity or lack thereof, and acted in accordance with that judgment.
Funny how Malaysia gets who these people are and what motivates them -- while our own press corps doesn't.
Matthew Yglesias: Ben Bernanke Has a Terrible Record on Inflation:
Testifying before Congress recently, Ben Bernanke bragged, "my inflation record is the best of any Federal Reserve chairman in the postwar period, or at least one of the best, about 2 percent average inflation."
Catherine Rampell's numbers show that Bernanke has, in fact, delivered the lowest inflation of any postwar Fed chair, coming in at an average of 2 percent. On the other hand, Floyd Norris notes that unemployment under Bernanke has been second-highest of any postwar Federal Reserve chairman. Now if you ignore the "postwar" qualifier, the picture looks different. Several Depression-era Fed chairs had less inflation and more unemployment than Bernanke. And putting those Depression-era bankers into the mix serves to highlight how absurd Bernanke's bust is. No sensible person would look at America's economic performance in the 1929-1933 period and say "man, they did a great job of fighting inflation."
I've often remarked on how dumb I thought it was for Obama to nominate Bernanke for a second term as Fed Chairman: if he's going to be blamed for a depressed economy, and he was, Obama should at least insist on putting his own man in charge of the one government job that has the most day-to-day impact on the economy, but he succumbed to a wave of hype and renominated Bush's man, and got Bush's economy in the bargain. Seems unlikely that Bernanke will get a third term, not so much because Obama's finally decided to appoint people who will help but because the Republicans have developed a huge grudge against Bernanke for trying to do anything at all to expand the economy. Bottom line, though, is that he didn't try much, it didn't work very well, and he has yet to show any visible displeasure with the results.
Also take a gander atBusinessweek Warns That Minorities May Be Buying Houses Again. Isn't the real story here in the fine print: "Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?" That says much more about the failure of Dodd-Frank to end the practices that caused the housing bubble and recession in the first place.
Also, a few links for further study:
Steven Brill: Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us: Extensive reporting on how hospitals, doctors, etc., rack up charges to individuals far in excess of what they charge insurance companies and Medicare; e.g.:
Dozens of midpriced items were embedded with similarly aggressive markups, like $283.00 for a "CHEST, PA AND LAT 71020." That's a simple chest X-ray, for which MD Anderson is routinely paid $20.44 when it treats a patient on Medicare, the government health care program for the elderly.
Also see Paul Krugman here and here for a sanity check on the conclusions. From the latter:
So why does Obamacare run through the private sector? Raw political necessity: this was the only way that it could get past the insurance industry's power. OK, that was how it had to be.
But you should really be outraged at the efforts of some states to ensure that the Medicaid expansion is done not via direct government insurance but run through the insurance industry. What you need to understand is that this is a double giveaway, both to the insurers and to the health care industry, because private insurers don't have the government's bargaining power. It is, bluntly, purely a matter of corporate welfare for the medical-industrial complex.
Tim Dickinson: The Gun Industry's Deadly Addiction: Hook the kids, seduce the ladies, turn shooting ranges into live-action video games, prep the preppers, supply cartels and criminals.
Henry Farrell: Slaves of Defunct Economists: Review of Mark Blyth:Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013, Oxford University Press). Normally we like to believe that growth is good for all, even if its promotion is lavished on business (the job creators get profits, the jobs trickle down). In other words, the growth paradigm is to suck profits up the class scale. What austerity does is push losses down, making sure they are suffered as much or more by the masses as by the rich. Sharing the misery seems to comfort the rich, probably because it isn't shared equally.
John Quiggin: Open Thread on Hugo Chavez: The comments here are often as good or better than the pieces. PlutoniumKun seems to have a good start:
The problem with Chavez is that it was so hard to see past his charisma and ego. His anti-Americanism was justified in many ways, but the manner in which this extended to supporting the likes of Ahmadinejad and Assad was less endearing, although I suppose its no worse than considering the house of al Saud to be a friend. He was good at the broad brush, but it seems that he wasn't particularly good at building up the internal structures which Venezuela so badly needed to ensure his reforms had long term benefits. I fear that he has not left a lasting legacy of deep structural reform in governance in Venezuela, something which it desperately needs. Although arguably the problems are so deep rooted that they are unfixable. But it is absolutely unquestionable for anyone who has looked at the recent history of Venezuela that his policies greatly benefited the poor and dispossessed and that he gave great pride to many South Americans.
Amir-Hussein Firouz Radjy: A Forgotten Anniversary: Iran's First Revolution and Constitution: December 1906, when the Qajar monarchy gave way to a first effort at democracy in Iran.
Dennis B Ross: To Achieve Mideast Peace, Suspend Disbelief: Proposes 14 steps, evenly divided as if the obstacles to peace are evenly distributed. For the Palestinians, these tasks reduce to wait patiently and pretend this is working. For Israel, he wants to step down from further settlement expansion -- a non-starter with the current government not that he says so nor suggests any remedy to -- and tread a bit lighter. The silliest proposal is to"commit to an exchange of classrooms or regular youth exchanges starting as early as third grade" to mitigate against "children on each side are being . . . being socialized to demonize and dehumanize the other." This is typical Ross: a nice liberal idea that will take forever and accomplish nothing. He forgets that the main attraction of the "two state" plan is that it doesn't require either side to like or even forgive the other, and that it's tolerable now only because the separation it assumes has been accomplished, for the most part long ago. Otherwise, if Israelis accepted Palestinians they could implement a "one state" equal-rights solution on their own, immediately. That they don't -- that they won't even consider the possibility -- shows that they won't: that they are too wrapped up in their insistence on ethnic rule and the violent suppression of others to conceive of living in an equitable society.