Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute and former BOE policy wonk, doesn't understand BOE sets rates

First of all we know about Pete Peterson and his self-serving and subversive mission to end Social Security.

He's been known to hire lackey's who are nothing more than relentless, high paid human propaganda machines for his sick mission. Guys like David Walker, that lying SOB who I got to admit that Social Security checks would never bounce and there was no issue with insolvency.

Now here's Adam Posen. He's the head of the Peterson Institute a deep pocketed think tank that works to spread the lies and support the liars who would make Peterson's dream of ending Social Security come true.

Posen was on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, yet here's what he said back in February with respect to the possibility of Brexit.

"Very high interest rates."

So there you have again, another example of a guy in a high policy post who doesn't have a fucking clue that it is the Bank of England--the very fucking institution this guy works for--that sets interest rates.

Let's hope the other morons over at the BOE don't think this way, too. I won't be holding my breath.

Bill Black — Blocking a bad idea that enriches the rich: Peterson, Austerity, and the Washington Consensus

Yep, it's them again — or still. The demand for "austerity" goes back to 1989 with the "Washington Consensus."

New Economic Perspectives
Blocking a bad idea that enriches the rich: Peterson, Austerity, and the Washington Consensus
William K. Black | Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Matt Yglesias — Pete Peterson's 1993 Forecast of Japanese Domination

Wrong then. Wrong now. Wrong for America.

Slate
Pete Peterson's 1993 Forecast of Japanese Domination
Matthew Yglesias

Peterson Institute Economists Like the Platinum Coin Idea?

commentary by Roger Erickson

Could the ‘platinum coin option’ solve the U.S. debt crisis?

What we really need are anthropologists to solve our fiscal problems.  Read on, to grasp why.

This murky story starts with a seemingly isolated, and arcane question. Does the Pete Peterson Institute like the platinum-coin option for real, or do they just see it as a way to reduce future public spending, and hoard more of the existing currency supply among the plutocrats? Answering that arcane question, however, requires assessing the context - involving class & clan competition, and competing social paradigms held by the feuding sub-groups competing to shape group policy.  Hint: you can't coordinate without communicating.

[And wow. Some of the other factions  REALLY don't understand fiat currency!]

Initially, I can't tell if Pete Peterson is evil, or just ignorant about dynamic operations. Any evidence to tilt one way or the other?

Turns out Pete's had multiple interviews on Charlie Rose, so I'm going through them, to see if it helps shed some light on this baffling situation. It's revealing, from the start.

Jump to the 6 min mark here, to see Pete's views on the American dream.

Ok, Pete Peterson is a typical child of immigrants, like so many of us. Unlike others, however, he took a narrow path and became an absolute acolyte of Milton Friedman, working out of the Death Star (U-Chicago Economics Dept). Pete now clearly believes that in order to attain liquidity, "money" has to be saved up - even by the issuer of fiat liquidity notation!

I'd love to ask him how we "save" inter-personal credit, optimism and goodwill - aka, social credits; aka, social liquidity. Just to see how he answers.

[How do other social species maintain liquidity? Do ants hoard pheromones?]

Pete either didn't notice, or never accepted, that we left the gold std in 1933?

It's a tragically ironic twist that a man who "cares so deeply" about loss of the American Dream, is absolutely the major peril to that dream ... and simply doesn't realize it. He wants to save the American Dream, by starving it of liquidity? It's confusing. Doesn't that imply that he wants us all to have one, and only one, fixed dream - nevermore to diversify and evolve? Note to Pete: there is no evolution without liquidity - only austerity, and death.

There may be a deep-seated social reality here. Innovative people want liquidity so they can rapidly explore all options. Conservative people want to avoid risks, and hoard existing assets. They both extrapolate their fears of one another to extremes.

To be fair, conservatives hyper-extrapolate their fear that freely exploring emerging options will "naturally" lead to hyperinflation and collapse. They're patient, organized control freaks, and hibernators. They panic at the thought of depleting hoarded static-assets.

To be fair, innovators hyper-extrapolate their fear that any constraint whatsoever to exploring emerging options will stifle all exploration, and "naturally" lead to debt-deflation and collapse. They're impatient, disorganized risk takers, and rebels. They're enraged by the thought of running up dynamic-asset Output Gaps.

In reality, conservatives don't want to enslave and kill everyone, they just want them to suffer, a little bit - so everyone stays properly "motivated"? That's controlling.

In reality, innovators don't want to risk everyone's lives, they just want them to maintain enough daredevil practice to avoid comatose hibernation - so everyone stays adequately alert and gets enough practice, whether they want to or not? That's pushy.

Surival tracks the messy back and forth of staying between those two tolerance limits? Can't the two camps get together and focus on smoother navigation, rather than wasteful oscillations? Isn't that failure to maintain prior levels of coordination the factor that is really killing the American Dream?

We can do this. Can anyone schedule a small, private meeting with Pete Peterson?

New Right strategy – Take power by controlling the narrative

The only political party linked to organized ‘voter fraud’ in 2012 was the one loudly denouncing it....

As [Richard] Viguerie has explained, over the decades, and as part of its long term strategy to take power, the New Right has built a net- work of alternative media outlets, think tanks, political operatives and elected officials, the likes of which progressives cannot begin to match. And it’s why they control the national conversation.

In These Times
The New Right’s Rabid Watchdog
Joel Bleifuss | former director of the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the editor & publisher of In These Times

These are also some of the neoliberal forces aligned against increasing policy space and therefore MMT. And they control the narrative at present. It's not all on the right either. Pete Peterson is a New Democrat, and he has been just as active for decades, too. Now it is paying off.

Meanwhile, the left is asleep at the switch as the New Deal crumbles under the assault, lead especially by the assault on organized labor. The economic dynamic is between ownership, with management the minions of ownership, and labor. Distribution of productivity gains over the past several decades reveals graphically who is winning. This chart illustrating the productivity-compensation gap says it all.

Paul Krugman doubles down on the MMT POV on deficits

This is the NYT op-ed page, not his blog. The big time. And he calls out Pete Peterson by name. The fight is on.

The New York Times
Fighting Fiscal Phantoms
Paul Krugman | Professor of Economics, Princeton University

Christina Wilkie and Ryan Grim — CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly

The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.

The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills.

The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.

During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council -- most visibly, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd ["Doing God's Work"] Blankfein and Honeywell's David Cote -- have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.

As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" -- money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.

Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting "entitlement" programs, as well as what they call "low-priority spending."

This is what they mean by "expanding the tax base." Just say no, and tell your senators and the presidente to just say no, too.

The Huffington Post
CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks
Christina Wilkie and Ryan Grim

Stephanie Kelton — Pete Peterson Has Won

As Stephanie intimates, this is the politics of fear, pure and simple. It's the same hyper-emotional politics that is depriving Americans of their constitutional liberties in the name of fighting drugs, and terror, and undermining their future in the name of preventing US bankruptcy.

It's carefully crafted, well-financed, and ruthless. And Stephanie is right, they are winning, with leaders of both parties in the tank and the leadership of the left clueless and resistant to learning there might be a better way. Lookin' bad not only on the economic front but also on the social and political front as well. This is not going to end well for America.

New Economic Perspectives
Pete Peterson Has Won
Stephanie Kelton | Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Director of Graduate Student Research at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability

Peterson Institute Trying to Co-opt Financial Reform?

commentary by Roger Erickson

This could be right out of Ed Bernays' playbook. Agree with some attempts to fight myths, then divert & pervert them ... in this case to Peterson's fixation on balanced budgets. I smell an obsessive-compulsive-disorder mania. OCDM. Do they have a missile with that warhead?

Big Banks Fall Back On Three Myths - By Simon Johnson

Johnson admits that the banking lobby uses 3 myths in their propaganda.

Myth 1: that all opponents are misguided "populists,"

Myth 2: that every “cost-benefit analysis” would show that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not worth pursuing

Myth 3: that every form of financial reform will hurt our growth prospects

All true, but that's just the set up.  Then Mr. Johnson's essay makes an unpredictable U-turn, and heads directly south.  (Do they use Bernays propaganda books in undergrad economics courses?)

"Fortunately, Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues at Better Markets are fighting hard against this myth. In a report released this week, Kelleher, Stephen Hall, and Katelynn Bradley point out that the industry never wants to take into account the real costs of the crisis – millions of jobs lost, growth derailed, lives disrupted, and massive damage to our public finances.
We had a frank discussion of this report at the Peterson Institute ... "

I'll bet they did! And that a little light went off in their one track minds, and they sensed an opportunity.

Talk about perverting & propagandizing the work of Dennis Kelleher and the Better Markets Foundation! Yet few will notice.  We need a warning bot to instantly call policy BS wherever it appears.

"Danger, Will Rogers!  Danger, Will Rogers!"

"Distributed breakdown in logic has allowed unstable forms of DeficitTerrorism to loiter too close to irrational ideology, thereby forming a critical mass of ignorance & stupidity & fraud that is STILL - despite all efforts of the 99% - generating a cascading chain reaction of suicidal mistakes within our very Congress."

Have you ever tried something as simple as trying to play a game of chess with criminally insane, sociopathic, hopelessly ideological Control Frauds? The Control Frauds will amaze you with their ability to cheat - and can arrange to win against even against an entire group of chess grandmasters! 

No matter how superior the group skills, every one of the grandmaster moves will make the fatal mistake of constraining itself to brilliantly extending an existing, logical framework. In response to every single one of these adaptive moves, however, the Control Frauds will simply attempt to derail reality by declaring the equivalent of "my chess pig can fly" while attempting to ignore any and all interdependencies not guaranteeing their local, tactical success. Then they declare - again - that they're winning, of course ... and that you're a populist, that their cost-benefit analysis shows they're right, and that it would be too expensive to deal with reality. It's hauntingly familiar, and strangely addictive, since familiar bits of logic are randomly strewn about with just enough frequency to have a powerful effect on the weak minded.

And we've let these people within 10 miles of policy?  Their outlook requires no allegiance or reference to scalable reality whatsoever.  Hence, they will always win .... if you let them.   They don't even require any coherent strategy, policy or goal since long term planning has no relevance to them. Their entire thought process displays the range of a gold spoon, which they want permanently in their own tea cup.

It's as though the Peterson Institute is operating from a rambling manifesto written in jail by Irwin Schiff, renamed "Mein Brain Krampf."

"The only person sure of himself is the man who wishes to leave things as they are, and he dreams of an impossibility." - George M. Wrong

Would it be wrong to permanently embed someone like George in the Peterson Institute?  Can someone tell them that there's no sane point in arbitrarily balancing a fiat budget, and that there hasn't been since 1933?  The Peterson Institute is worse than impossible, they actually want to go back in time.

I suspect it's hopeless.  One logical approach would be to politely ignore them, and take on the expense of warning all students not to talk to the sick men and their addictive rhetoric.  On the other hand, it might be cheaper to actually build a string of asylums to house them all, complete with personal gold spoons.  We could slip it in as a tenure program in a new, better purposed Ivy League Economics system of really high education, where they could smoke their stuff to their heart's content.