This is my second appearance on the Tim Caffrey Show. There is some talk of doing a third episode. Look for it after the election.
Tyler Cowen, who is an Economics Professor at George Mason University, posted an interesting and important thought piece in his blog today regarding the pernicious influence Wall Street has on Washington. In his informal review of Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s new book, 13 Bankers, Cowen poses this question: Do big banks control our government?
According to Cowen, Johnson and Kwak say ‘yes.’ “Johnson and Kwak make a major step forward in describing our recent financial crisis as a fundamental problem in political economy,” Cowen writes, “namely by pointing their fingers at an unholy alliance between banks and the U.S. government.” But, while Cowen applauds their analysis, he ultimately sees the problem differently.
“Whereas they see banks as the puppet master and our government as the fool, I wonder whether it is not more accurate to think of the government as running the show,” Cowen muses.
Matt Plavnick at the Colorado Progressive shrewdly discusses No Child Left Behind and the degree to which it is universally maligned now by both major parties in Washington and in school districts across the country. In particular, he chastises Republican strategist, Patrick Ruffini, for arguing that the Bush administration effectively solved education at the national level with NCLB. Plavnick writes:
The notion that there’s a perception, even a political perception, that education has been "solved" in this country, let alone by NCLB, leaves me completely bejabbered. Ruffini invokes education as the model from which Republicans might have mapped a plan to reach a more politically desirable set of circumstances surrounding health care while Bush was in office. That’s all fine and good, and perhaps Ruffini is on to something in his observation that good-faith Republican policy efforts peel away planks from the Democratic political platform. But invoking NCLB? Seriously?
When I was in college, my political science advisor, who was a specialist in American Security Policy, often argued that J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists at the Manhattan Project should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His reasoning was that nuclear deterrence—that is, the threat of mutually assured destruction—forced otherwise irrational international actors to act rationally.
I always found his reasoning compelling, and the historical record since World War II seemed to comport with my advisor’s contention: The existence of nuclear Weapons put an end to large scale conflict.
The peculiar rise of the tea party movement and its intense distrust of America's major political and economic institutions have gotten a great deal of ink in the nation's leading newspapers and magazines. Recently, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote a column where he observed that progressives have a hard time understanding the ferocity for which the tea party movement has come to oppose President Obama, especially considering the fact that Obama's governance hasn't been particularly liberal. He certainly isn't the radical socialist tea partiers seem to assume as almost an article of faith.
In response, talk radio's Mike Rosen wrote a surprisingly vitriolic column in the Denver Post attacking Dionne for being afflicted with "Tea Party Derangement Syndrome." According to Rosen, Dionne belongs to the ‘delusional left' and accuses him of reducing the rise of the tea parties to inveterate "racism and anti-statism." He contends that Dionne assigns "seditious and mean-spirited" motives to tea partiers rather than believing they may actually be motivated by principle. Rosen then argues that Dionne dismisses anti-statism by "narrowly associating it to the anti-federalists who opposed the Constitution."
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