Belling the Catastrophe

While insistently working at making that Liberal label into something scary the conservative mantle over the right wing has been evolving as its tactics worked. The campaign just past has proved what we on the left have seen happening, the public no longer believes right wing lies. They have been costly to the whole country, and at least as costly to those of the right who were thinking they were making a career for themselves.

Watching the recount in Minnesota come ever closer to proving that despite skulduggery of the usual sort, Franken, that Liberal, won, is highly entertaining. It is also very educational. The majority of citizens in this country got over the scare tactics. The majority have suffered from it, like burning themselves on the stove, and have recovered from those monster-in-the-closet warnings.

Listening to a presentation by White House press secretaries yesterday afternoon, Dana Perino noted that "I see you" about people in the audience shaking their heads as she denied that the president had condoned torture. The line that it isn't torture because WH lawyers redefined torture, the line that our media accepted as if it had been true, is no longer given any credence.

One of the instruments of change has been the peeling back of the fiscal conservative pretense, as the domination of wingers unleashed their predatory nature. Our country's economy has taken more blows than it can handle, and the country is in financial collapse. There's an object lesson we on the left fought against, and our loss is no one's gain.

This morning the Dallas Morning News has a fascinating editorial canning one of its former darlings, Phil Gramm.

•In 1999, Mr. Gramm co-authored the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of Depression-era legislation building a firewall between financial institutions. The new model, in the words of two critical libertarian economists, "allowed banks of all types to engage in increasingly risky transactions and to greatly expand the leverage of their balance sheets." The law also diluted federal oversight capacity of the giant new entities.

•As Congress rushed toward its Christmas recess in 2000, Mr. Gramm slipped into an omnibus budget bill an amendment that prevented federal regulators from monitoring trade in complex new financial instruments called derivatives. These markets were less than $1 billion at the time; when the 2008 crash came, these reckless credit markets involved a staggering $62 billion. Experts today, including Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, blame the derivatives trade for much of the current crisis.

•He fought against congressional attempts to rein in subprime mortgage lending, which was making Wall Street a mint. In a 2001 Senate debate, Mr. Gramm said: "Some people look at subprime lending and see evil. I look at subprime lending, and I see the American dream in action."

In 2008, the American dream became an economic nightmare. Implausibly, Mr. Gramm has denied any responsibility for the disaster upon us. It's painful to recall the words of a triumphant Mr. Gramm upon passage of one key deregulation bill: "We have learned that government is not the answer."

Now, with Washington having committed up to $7 trillion (so far) to cover the catastrophic losses resulting partly from the policies cowboy capitalist Phil Gramm zealously pursued, we are learning otherwise. (Emphasis added.)

They lie. They lie about lying. We lose. Lesson learned. And then there's this one: we told you so.

I notice that Eschaton had that same thought about the war this morning; They lied. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Then they lied about lying.

Can we get that blazoned over the financial and other news from now on? It would make things easier on us all. Think of the disasters we could avoid.

As Eugene Robinson told us this morning:

Despite the popular belief, lemmings don't really hurl themselves off cliffs to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate...

They lie. They lie about lying. We lose.

If they wore bells so you could know they were coming, that would save a lot of jobs and incomes, wouldn't it?

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Update: '.....according to a running tally on the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Web site.
(snip)
Late Friday morning, the newspaper's tally put Franken ahead by 102 votes.'