Centrists

[phantom power]

I guess the implication is that in the "stupid or lying" spectrum, "they're lying." And their motivation for lying is basically Straussian -- "we can't handle the truth"

The stupid/evil/12 dimensional chess/we're TRYING thing has bothered me for a long time. The Dem elected officials are clearly not stupid. They're not "caving" or negotiating badly. If dumb fucks with a blogger account can see that things aren't working out well for their putative constituency, they get that too.

There has to be an underlying organizing principle for why they would bail out banksters, and fuck over homeowners, why they would subsidize big Pharma at the expense of their base voters. And I think I've finally gotten some of what's going on.

The president, and the Democrat's Senate leadership, reject movement liberalism. The ideology they follow is grounded in the impact of globalization on world capital and labor markets. They believe the US has to reduce labor costs to be competitive as capital flows freely around an interconnected world—that it is unrealistic, “neo-populist” to think the middle class can be preserved. But they also recognize that the middle class is not gonna be happy with these necessary, painful policies:

...

Note that a central theme here is that it is above partisanship—that the experts, left alone, will best do their work. When you use that frame, then the health care negotiation makes sense. These negotiations took place not with politicians, but with the large service providers, because those stakeholders are the real experts and will keep us out of distracting, distorting partisanship. It makes sense that we turn to the money center banks as the mechanism for minimizing the contraction—they’re the pros who have risen, through merit and diligence, to their positions.

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2011/10/centrists.html

[valerief]

1. Yep. Only the rich and poor. And never the twain shall meet. nt

[Vincardog]

2. Any 'Democrat' that believes the BS is nothing but a Cool aid drinker and does not deserve a

"Leadership" role.

[markpkessinger]

3. Unfortunately, there seem to be an awful lot of them out there n/t

[Vincardog]

4. When I say I am not ever voting for a republican they are who I am talking about

[JoePhilly]

5. Can you provide a quote from the President that backs up the claim made in BOLD?

If Obama BELIEVES that .... as the statement indicates ... surely there is a quote in which he says it. Right?

Or ... is the author making an attribution of what THEY believe. If so, the author should say THAT ... the should say MY OPINION, is that Obama BELIEVES .... ".

btw ... the bank bailout start before Obama became President, not after, and yet this author attempts to suggest other.

I BELIEVE that the author has an agenda, and being truthful, isn't part of it.

[banned from Kos]

6. You're right. TARP did enormous psychological damage to this country.

Never mind that it helped avert a meltdown.

But TARP set the stage for the Tea Party. The right hated it. The left hated the "bailout the banks" aspect of it and rightly so. We all live with it today.

And Bush slipped out in the cover of night once again leaving his baggage with the new president.

[girl gone mad]

7. Economist Michael Hudson has written and spoken extensively about..

Obama's neoliberal agenda to gut the American middle class by dramatically reducing wages to labor.

http://real-economics.blogspot.com/2011/07/this-may-be-very-long-but-it-is-one-of.html