54 Comments

• 1. David  |  January 6th, 2011 at 10:09 am

  Necktie? Ames?!

• 2. Derp  |  January 6th, 2011 at 10:11 am

  Derp derp derp! We need austerity cause we gotta spook Commie in the white house! Get us the god-like Bush or Reagan back and we can spend again and it’ll be okay!

  Also, figures you’d appear on a Commie show instead of a real American show like Hannity or O’Reilly, derp derp derp!

• 3. shakeymcheadshake@stopthatshit.org  |  January 6th, 2011 at 10:12 am

  ames, you make great points and you look like the shit on tv. i spent the whole time watching you bouncing my ass around, and i envy the woman who is fucking that tongue of yours and licks your lips. or you can go back to the old, more comfortable, “no tie, unbuttoned shirt” ames ratigan first showed us.

• 4. Lavrentij "Anarchy99" Lemko  |  January 6th, 2011 at 10:25 am

  Don’t assail John Q. Galt III with your filthy accusations of welfare queenage and your reductio ad Nazi-um!

  This commenter at Newsweek.com put it best why those demagogues Glenn Q. Beck and Sarah Q. Palin are so popular among us ordinary folks:

  ‘Do you know why I believe many MSM and Internet citizen journalists take pot shots at Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. In 1974, I was a sales merchandiser in New York for the leading costume jewelry manufacturer in the nation and a division of General Mills.Part of my employment agreement was to attend Dale Carnegie training. As far as I am concerned, when I graduated that course my life had changed in a sense that I became a highly successful individual by virtue of my relationship to the Dale Carnegie Institute. Not too many people ever heard of this motivating and miraculous man, he died in 1955 and besides the kids adhere to a new motivator who has a bestseller about computers and power point presentations.Dale Carnegie wrote one of the biggest selling books in history a long time ago, “How To Win Friends and Influence People”. So here’s what I learned from that course which exactly explains the venom projected at these two game changing leaders. “Nobody kicks a dead dog”. I better explain. If you saw a dead dog lying by the side of the road, what would you do? Exactly, nothing, just walk on by. You see it is because we only disparage and insult live wires and beautiful people with big intellects and never say anything to the beggar in the subway is why Beck and Palin get it. It is part jealousy and partly because of how successful and influential they are. Remember what Dale Carnegie said, the rest of which became my mission in life, “Nobody kicks a dead dog”.’

• 5. Mish  |  January 6th, 2011 at 11:00 am

  Noticeably stressed (guess Ames is sober in this one) but still great to hear Mark rant – I’m replaying the Kudlow schpeel now.

• 6. Yousif  |  January 6th, 2011 at 11:35 am

  lookin good stud

• 7. Fissile  |  January 6th, 2011 at 11:46 am

  I agree with the message. Besides that, all I can say is that there are dumbfuck nobodies out there who are probably dying to give you tips on how to present yourself on TV–don’t listen to them, especially if they’re as fucking retarded as I am.

• 8. Sergo Ordzhonikidze  |  January 6th, 2011 at 12:20 pm

  @ Lavrentij “Anarchy99” Lemko were you taking a piss with that quote?? Because I have no fucking idea what your talking about.

• 9. Zirb  |  January 6th, 2011 at 12:40 pm

  According to the totally insane crypto-Confederate nutball magazine The Freeman, austerity worked in the 1920-1921 depression in the U.S. Then again, Glenn Beck is the modern heir to The Freeman right-wing libertard thinking, so ignore me, I’m a fucking retard.

• 10. sam  |  January 6th, 2011 at 1:18 pm

  Not sure what Lemko is huffing, but I’m sure that there are street kids in Russia who’d love a whiff.

• 11. Victorvalley Villain  |  January 6th, 2011 at 3:18 pm

  Is this shit going to be a daily rant, or did I hear something wrong? I hope we are going to get a lot more of this.

• 12. Lavrentij "Anarchy99" Lemko  |  January 6th, 2011 at 4:18 pm

  What I say is that the rhetorical entity they call “American people” stupid fucks.

  Amerikantsy can be lead to believe anything. If their Koch-funded FreedomWorks outsider/insider “leaders” (Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, etc.) say that the sky is orange, they will believe that the sky is orange (or that the media is “liberal” … or that vaguely creepy George Soros is the puppeteer behind Obama administration’s “socialism”, etc.).

  Investor class say: ‎”By stuffing our prison system with more inmates, we will grow economy, keep those who have been left behind in the global economy satisfied with a career in the corrections professions and thereby kick the can of inevitable social unrest further down road. In meantime, I can score up the points with social conservatives by appearing to be hard on crime and take golf junket to St. Andrews courtesy of Big PHARMA.”

  Amerikantsy say:

  ‎”We, the children, the unwashed masses, must defer to their intellectual superiority and wisdom. It would be foolish to think otherwise. Let them do their jobs, let us workers and day laborers sweep the streets.”

  Last US President who gave damn Lyndon “Johnson” LOL. He was fighter who won what he fought for: BOTH guns and butter. But he died a loser, losing both. But we are stuck living with consequences.

• 13. I1  |  January 6th, 2011 at 6:34 pm

  Sure. They’re gonna cut Medicare and whack Social Security. Then, it’s on to the bloated Department of Defense. Please. Does anyone with a mind buy into this dog and pony show psy-op? Like there’s a hope in hell we’ll ever get out of debt. Two choices: default or hyperinflation. I’m banking on the latter.

• 14. yhyhyhyh  |  January 6th, 2011 at 7:26 pm

  You might be surprised at what Hayek actually advocated–because it’s a thousand times more insane, such as his work for Pinochet and for the South African apartheid regime. This ditty from Friedrich Hayek’s Wikipedia page, which has been tightly controlled by PR trolls and libertards:

  Hayek even going so far as to say that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism”

  Whooooaah. Does that blow your mind or what dude? He actually, actually said that. And I read into every little thing Hayek says like it’s gospel. You may be excused for confusing Hayek with Ludwig Von Mises or Murray Rothbard–they all shill the same pro-oligarchy libertarian horse shit.

• 15. Patrick  |  January 6th, 2011 at 9:52 pm

  THE TV CAMERA LOVES YOU, FACE IT!
  GEE, IS IT KINDA WEIRD THAT I’M WRITING THIS COMMENT?

• 16. Max  |  January 6th, 2011 at 9:54 pm

  Mark, I think you are being a little too fair to the Austrian school (Hayek & co.). Are you sure they have an elementary grasp of reality? If you want to see how totally fucking corrupt these fools are and have a good laugh at a it all, why don’t you arrange to have a long talk with one of the econ profs who work for (or are at least affilated with) the billionaire kleptocrats who pay them through some rank front group called ” Mises Institute” at mises.org?

  These people are corrupt blusterers, as inoffensive as dung beetles, easy to deal with so long as you pay them; they will bore you to death or they will do your bidding through a laughable retarded front ideology called ” Austrian school” whatever the fuck that means.

  I’ve been told that if I tried to reason with you like I’m a nice guy and we’re all reasonable people, that this will somehow soften you and make you think we’re humans, when in fact we are fungus inhabiting human forms.

  Well, I’m going to go back to masturbating in my parents’ garage now.

  Best wishes,
  Max

• 17. Rubbadubba  |  January 6th, 2011 at 11:02 pm

  Ames,give us more TV snapper. Every Russian girl is, by law, named Olga. Give the masses Olga snappers.

• 18. Ash  |  January 6th, 2011 at 11:20 pm

  The ‘Austrian school’ is the most laughable of the laughable.
  I mean there are terrible, terrible problems with mainstream economics yes – but the Austrian school goes a step further: they actually reject the scientific method as a methodology. I am not making this up, the entirely reject formulating theory and comparing it to reality to verify it as a matter of doctrine.

  The whole problem with economics is the obsession with pretty theories at the expense of reality, with ‘micro foundations’ in macroeconomics for instance and with badly defined notions of efficiency – what needs to happen is the development of macro models based solely on the real world and looking at where theories (including heterodox areas like Post-Keynesianism) actually do explain the behavior of the RL economy.

  The ‘Austrians’ utterly reject that approach or anything like it because essentially, math is too hard for them and they’d rather ponder and preach unfalsifiable garbage derived through crack methodology like ‘Praxeology’.

• 19. Jon  |  January 7th, 2011 at 1:45 am

  Every time I see Mark Ames on TV, I am stunned, simply because I cannot believe that someone who tells the truth–and who, for that matter, is genuinely free from the usual careerist constraints that stifle any hope of honest discussion in the mainstream media–seemingly without regard (or he is simply very good at suppressing the feeling) for the incredibly inflammatory nature of his content. To paraphrase John Dolan, Americans are allergic to truth, and they are doubly allergic (i.e., murderously inclined) toward people who tell them the truth in such a casual and debonair manner–as if to say, “you know I’m right, but you will still persist in your obstinacy, and I will revel in your Kierkegaardian despair that is unaware of being despair; good riddance, morons.” Pardon the discursiveness, but, damn, Ames’ performance here has me grinning from ear to ear. Existence may be brutal and mad and meaningless, but fuck me if it can’t be terrifically entertaining sometimes too.

• 20. John Drinkwater  |  January 7th, 2011 at 10:39 am

  Austerity. I welcome the rise of another Hitler because it will lead to a revolution and the destruction of our bogus two-party system. As Tom Jefferson believed, the Constitution should be re-written every 20 years anyway.

• 21. Sycophant  |  January 7th, 2011 at 12:02 pm

  Good and informative. I kind of wish you’d raise the entertainment level with some Glen-Beck style props — puppets on strings, wacky sound effects, marching band music, that sort of thing.

• 22. Skeeve  |  January 7th, 2011 at 7:56 pm

  So, dude, what’s the plan? Personally, I’d love to see the defense budget cut by 80% (so we’re only spending twice as much as Russia and China combined), but I don’t pretend we can do that without causing severe short-term pain somewhere in society. You can’t cut *anything* without causing knock-on effects in the rest of the economy.

  (Or do we just keep spending and selling Treasury debt until the whole shithouse collapses?)

  I don’t hold a brief for Republicans and Libertards and their fuck-the-poor agenda. But saying “don’t accept austerity” is about as vague as the GOPs promise to “cut spending.” It’s easy to place yourself in opposition to something, but it would nice to have some kind of viable alternative going forward.

  So, Ames, do you have a plan? Like, with numbers and stuff? Details about whose ox gets gored, that kind of thing?

  Because I can’t deal with any criticism of something insane unless there’s a plan in that criticism. Otherwise, I’m the type of retard who simply falls back on “the plan” at hand. Which makes perfect sense–if you’re a dumbshit.

• 23. Jyp  |  January 7th, 2011 at 8:27 pm

  “18.Ash” fyucking nails it. Mises rejects empiricism. The economy, he says, is “too complicated” for the empirical method. So he gots to use “reason”. Ha ha! He makes it up in his head. Wonderful. They, the tards, then have the incredible gall (Galt?) to claim their nutsy method is “scientific”. Ha ha ha! Shit. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Would you go to, say, a doctor who said “The human body is too complicated for empirical methods” so he gonna make it all up in his head. Using “reason”. Like Euclid. Ha. “Idealism” is a fyucking curse.

• 24. Lavrentij "Anarchy99" Lemko  |  January 8th, 2011 at 4:25 am

  @Jyp: you’re right. There is a great chapter in Yves Smith’s Econned that sums up precisely your point.

• 25. Sprout Penn  |  January 8th, 2011 at 6:50 am

  (The following comment was intended for the austerity thread, not the dead celebrity thread. Sorry.)

  Let’s try to put this austerity lie into perspective: think about it this way: when the large banks speculated and lost every penny, all of sudden politicians were able to find unlimited billions (and by now trillions) of taxpayer money in order to bail them out. Yet no bankster was prosecuted or even fired and they got to keep all those billions for themselves and their cronies, i.e., the politicians who are bought and paid for by the banksters.

  That the banks paid back the Bailout money is just another one of the vicious lies propagated by the pro-bankster, corporate media.

  So. When the banksters and their bought-off politicians saw how easy it was to pull off the Bailout swindle: when they saw that the American people were not revolting and many of them were so stupid they actually believed the politician and bankster lies that the Bailout money was paid back, at this point they figured they might as well go one step further and steal everything the American people have. Why not, because the dumbed down majority would either accept it or be too stupid and ignorant to revolt.

  And so that brings us to “austerity”, which you will notice means austerity for everyone, that is, everyone except the elites (the banksters, the bought-off politicicans who work for them, and the pro-bankster shills in the corporate media). Because austerity will not apply to these criminals, it will mean even more money for them.

  Austerity is nothing other than theft from the people so the banksters can further enrich themselves by gutting what is left of FDR’s New Deal state, including social security, and medicare.

  Think of it this way: social security is an account payable by the US government. It can only be insolvent if the US government itself is insolvent and defaults on its Treasury bonds. If this was a large bank that had speculated and lost $5 trillion, the US government would find the money to bail them out within 24 hours. They’re cutting social security because they know can get away with it, and they know they can get the ignorant public to accept it.

  In the end this will lead to two classes of people in America: a billionaire class who will become even richer through austerity measures, and a peasant class (the target of austerity), consisting of everyone else.

  In other words what the USA will become is financial oligarchy, also known as a kleptocracy or a banana republic. It’s almost there and austerity will complete the process, unless people finally wise up and revolt.

• 26. Max  |  January 8th, 2011 at 7:19 am

  Ho ho very funny Mark. Look at this guy’s stuff:

  http://michael-hudson.com/

  He’s much more your ideological cup of tea. But you and Hudson, unlike anon commenter trolls like myself, come across as an adult with genuine education; when you talk about economic issues, you make me sound like a first-year college student who’s excitedly talking about the new neo-classical ideas I’ve just been fed by my corrupt econ teacher. I should stick to stuff I really know about, which pretty much amounts to trolling–oh yes, I’m an excellent troller, most of us libertards are. You on the other hand have incredible fucking range not available to libertards: you’re a first-rate war correspondent for example, and your writings about encounters with Russian (and other) prostitutes have to be some kind of modern classics, and it goes without saying that your takedowns of these Austrian idiots is right up there.

  Austrian economics? Hearing you expose the truth about them is embarassing to libertarian saps like myself. I pretend that I listen to Hudson for a seriously angry, EXPERT, exposition of what you’re trying to say, but honestly, it hurts to listen to either of you. On the other hand don’t listen to whatever it is I’m trying to write here, because my own experience of listening to myself brings shame to my parents, who still to this day sit alone in total silence.

  Max

  PS: I know how to get you next time, Ames. I’ll pretend that you know nothing and call you a not-expert–I betcha that’d really hurt! Coming from a troll, it’d seriously hurt! Ooch!

• 27. mydick  |  January 8th, 2011 at 8:56 am

  “Daily Rant”?

  You know what really grinds my gears….

• 28. Sean Strange  |  January 8th, 2011 at 11:57 am

  As a nihilist, I love the Exiled and Mark Ames and am pleased to see his rather cadaverous face on my TV screen. Ames is living proof that the truth is toxic; he is like a character out of an H. P. Lovecraft story, always on the verge of losing his sanity, a man who has gazed into the abyss too long to remain publicly respectable. I would like to see Mark do something really spectacular as a fitting climax to his life’s work, some Scanners-style head explosion or Omen III shotgun suicide on live TV. Think seriously about it Ames; this MSNBC gig could be your route to dark sainthood and immortality.

• 29. CensusLouie  |  January 8th, 2011 at 12:51 pm

  Breaking news: the tea party nutjobs have finally declared open war. Democratic Congresswoman just gunned down at rally by Travis Bickle wannabe tea bagger wacko.

  Guys, we don’t want to pass gun control as part of some U.N. shadow government plot, but because of shit like THIS.

• 30. Lavrentij "Anarchy99" Lemko  |  January 8th, 2011 at 2:04 pm

  Yeah, who needs representative gummint anyways? They were all on the take anyhoo.

• 31. Skeeve  |  January 8th, 2011 at 11:01 pm

  And now the betting pools start on whether the guy was a Hannity/Beck/Limbaugh/Coulter fan. My money is on Michael Savage, naturally.

  Or maybe he was just lovesick for Sarah Palin and thought this would get her attention.

• 32. adssa  |  January 9th, 2011 at 12:43 am

  yeah, so im a behavioral (scientific) economist by profession, and saying that the austrian school “reject(s) the scientific method” just evinces misunderstanding of economics; over-reliance on empiricism in the social sciences leads you nowhere (its called “scientism”). look at linguistics. bf skinner’s linguistics was based on strict empiricism, but since observable inputs and outputs aren’t the only relevant data in discovering the “language program” that runs in our heads, it was rejected in favor of chomskyan linguistics, which has more robust theories; that is, they make more accurate predictions and better fit the observed data, but they are based not just on observable phenomena, but also on assumptions about how minds work that could never be “proven”. economics is similar in that most of it is not predictive, or even meant to be, and very little of it is descriptive (and these are some of the bare minimum necessary conditions for scientific propositions). econ is not a science, so criticizing ppl for rejecting a scientific approach is nonsense. this is why issues in econ are never “settled”; in physics, einstein’s papers on relativity were published, and some issues in physics were settled. they threw out the old paradigm. in econ, this doesn’t happen because a lot of it (at least in micro) is more akin to philosophy (“reasoning from first principles”), and the goal is internal consistency first, and if youre lucky, external validity (but this never happens). but lets be honest; ive never read “road to serfdom”. have you, commenters? has ames? i doubt it (this isnt to say that i advocate austrian theories… and ames didnt make any of these “science” claims in his speech either)

• 33. boson  |  January 9th, 2011 at 5:28 am

  yeah, economics is NOT a science, but austrians and neoclassicals pretend that it is, and justify their murderous policy prescriptions with claims about the scientific status of their analyses…it’s all a smoke-screen to hide their class war from the top agenda…

• 34. Ash  |  January 9th, 2011 at 5:58 am

  oh for fucks sake
  I can’t be fucked going through your bullshit line by line, just to point out a little:
  “it was rejected in favor of chomskyan linguistics, which has more robust theories; that is, they make more accurate predictions and better fit the observed data”
  You fucking twit- you mean one theory was rejected in favor of a theory which better fit the data? Holy shit! sounds like the scientific method don’t you think?

  Austrians utterly reject this – it’s not just that they don’t rely on empiricism for the formulation of theory, it’s that they reject comparison to reality as a method of validating any theory because supposedly the economy is just too complex a system for real world data to mean anything.

  I would agree that the present paradigm in economics has massive problems and does favor internal consistency than anything else, but “Austrian economics” is sheer ideology and is even worse because it explicitly rejects fitting theory to observable reality, not merely favors internal consistency over uncooperative observations.

  Secondly I severely doubt you’re any sort of economist because literally no one outside of the batshit insane fringe has any time for Austrian garbage for the same very reasons that they’re never published in mainstream journals. – if you utterly reject mathematics, utterly reject statistics, utterly reject actually you know… trying to use observable reality to prove something, and throw tantrums when people won’t let you re-define dictionary-defined words like ‘inflation’ you’ll be treated like the idiot you are.

  I’m calling libertard troll, you’re pulling the “this isn’t actually what I believe -BUT” shit.

  Every time one of these crackpot ideologues stands up and starts preaching, this needs to be shoved in their face – it’s an utter farce that they’re actually presented as ‘experts’ on occasion, they’re on a par with holocaust deniers, free-energy-machine-inventors and anti-vaccination loons in terms of credibility.

• 35. FOARP  |  January 9th, 2011 at 1:44 pm

  Surprised not to see a “Going Postal” – type angle on the shootings in Arizona.

• 36. DarthFurious  |  January 9th, 2011 at 7:43 pm

  @Ash:

  Here fucking here.

• 37. Armen  |  January 9th, 2011 at 8:56 pm

  To adssa, the “behavioral (scientific) economist by profession”…

  Yeah, whatever, dude.

  Riccardo told the truth about Capitalism, and the truth he told was that workers get paid less than what their work is worth, owners get paid way more than what their work is worth, and the whole system is totally unethical.

  Once the truth was told, the purpose for the field of economics became muddying up these clearly reasoned conclusions so that those in power could stay in power and those without power could be made to believe that that was just natural.

  There’s nothing mysterious about economics. It’s made complicated so that horse-shit can be passed for truth. And Behold the prodigious amounts of horse-shit required to make austerity measures sound “reasonable.”

  A good austerity measure for you would be stopping dropping (all the wrong) names and shutting your libertard mouth the fuck up. How about that, asshole?

• 38. proletariat  |  January 9th, 2011 at 11:53 pm

  So, Mr. Ames, I’ve written some articles about the situation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is about 500 times worse than what is about to happen to white america.

  What do I need to do to get these published?

  EDITORIAL BOARD REPLY: You need to send us money, drugs, and a jpeg of Pocahontas’ snapper. Otherwise, send us a goddamn email about your article and we’ll take it from there. Remember: “the worse, the better” as the feller said.

• 39. adssa  |  January 10th, 2011 at 7:21 am

  youre right, i dont publish in “mainstream journals”. if u had any idea what behavioral economics is, u would realize that by definition that means i couldnt be an austrian school adherent in practice. but im sure u read a book once, so arrogance is the right approach here. first, the anecdote about linguistics is just to illustrate that science can proceed without “falsifiability”, which is the main critique against austrians (one which u, knowingly or not, made yourself). i dont know what specifically confused u on that. “austrians…reject comparison to reality as a method of validating theory”. why would “comparison to reality” be better? because falsifiability, the “goodness of fit” of past observed data to the theory, and the accuracy of the predictions made by the theory (empiricism: how well theory conforms to the real world) are prereqs for science. if u think empiricism is the only source of truth, thats a different argument. if these are ur “necessary conditions” for a valid economic paradigm, u can eliminate every single paradigm because they all fail at least on predictability, if not all counts. so this critique isn’t specific to austrian school n if u dont understand that, read a lil more wikipedia. and ur right, im more of a psych researcher than an economist, and i do more statistics in a week than youve done in your life. but some schools make u read at least a few articles by austrians, especially for classes about monetary policy and the business cycle, so as i admitted, ive never read hayek (n neither have u) but i have read a few austrian articles (which is prob more than the wikipedia page u read), and books which reference austrians. if u have such great faith in stats to tell u scientific truths, u should read a book that any decent 200-level college stat class requires called “how to lie with statistics”. or just look up frank luntz. and the 2nd guy, i dont even know what to say; if ur reading ricardo, i wouldnt go around telling too many ppl about that if u wanna be taken seriously. my claims: 1. criticizing austrians as unscientific is meaningless because u have to ask “compared to what other econ. paradigm?” and whether u realize it or not, no school of thought meets the necessary conditions to be scientific. you could argue that other positions are better, but u didnt do that, u just attacked austrian school for flaws that all the paradigms have. remember: if ur claiming that empiricism is the only source of scientific truth, thats a different argument. 2. neither i, nor u, nor ames have read the book(s) he’s criticizing. this is like criticizing a movie u haven’t seen. n im still not saying i consider myself austrian, i just think its dishonest to criticize a book u havent read, n what i did read from them, i liked (but ive read way more non-austrian).

• 40. Jeff  |  January 10th, 2011 at 9:39 am

  IMO Definitely one of your best. Of course I disagree with you, which is why I’m trying to troll here for a way to hit at you–like pretend that I’m normally with you on these things but this time bla bla bla–anyway, you let that hate flow naturally, while I continue sucking up to the assholes of this world. That’s just what I do. Sue me.

• 41. atlas_lied  |  January 10th, 2011 at 6:07 pm

  @adssa, You just don’t get it do you? The Austrian school is only taken seriously by self-serving, vested interests and the gullible fools who are unaware of being fleeced. I’m guessing you belong to the latter. Academia and any sane person with any semblance of knowledge rightly dismisses it as BS. Like other crackpot schemes, the Austrian school diregards empirical data. Thus it’s a joke and about as relevant as the perpetual motion machine and the flat earth society. End of story. No more idiot half-baked comparisons to anything else. But you’ll continue to argue, and maybe you can dismiss cogent arguments just like your favored Austrian economists/snake oil salesmen dismiss reality.

• 42. Max  |  January 11th, 2011 at 3:24 am

  I wish you would consider my retarded comments in your god-like mind, Mark. (It would surprise me, frankly.)

  In your next appearance or article about economic and financial issues, why don’t you make a recommendation or two for a SPECIFIC course of action? Because I’m too much of a dumbfuck to deal with criticism unless an entirely new workable system is immediately posited in its place.

• 43. Skeeve  |  January 11th, 2011 at 4:46 am

  Yes, I am a dumb shit, I freely admit it. A better, less confrontational way of asking the same question might be: how do we avoid austerity? I read a lot of financial porn, and between the predictions of debt default, hyperinflation, and dollar collapse, it’s hard to see how there’s a happy ending to all this, even if you did manage to put all the people in jail that belong there.

  My own view is that Obama should have set aside some of that bailout money (what, 21 trillion so far?) to feed, clothe, and house the 50 million destitute Americans that will be an immediate consequence of the current crisis (a number that is only going to grow as things get worse). He didn’t, and with the current deficit being largely financed by Benny and The Inkjets, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to ease the pain.

• 44. Reality  |  January 11th, 2011 at 2:45 pm

  Basically, what “austerity” means is that all you stupid fucks who swallowed what passes for “economics” from either your unionized goon daddies or your banker daddies (so hard to tell them apart anymore) will actually have to go out and do productive work for a living instead of sitting around in your parents’ basements getting on the internet spouting shit off like you know what you’re talking about.

  Thank you, have a nice day, and kiss my ass.

• 45. liberals  |  January 11th, 2011 at 5:31 pm

  Fortunately, it’s possible to spend more money than you make forever.

• 46. Suzanne  |  January 12th, 2011 at 4:48 am

  To illustrate the absurdity of any politician calling for austerity measures, and to show how they are lying:

  Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England has compared the banking industry to the auto industry, in that they both produced pollutants: for cars, exhaust fumes; for bank, systemic risk.

  He estimates the real cost of banks to society (unemployment, reduced government services at the state and local level and business failures) as lying anywhere between one and five times annual GDP. Put in money terms, that is an output loss equivalent to between $60 trillion and $200 trillion for the world economy.

  It is clear that banks themselves cannot pay this much, and so assuming a banking crisis every 20 years or so, would mean a $1.5 trillion a year cost to taxpayers to sustain the banks. (thanks to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

  And as Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism puts it: “The reality is that banks can no longer meaningfully be called private enterprises, yet no one in the media will challenge this fiction. And pointing out in a more direct manner that banks should not be considered capitalist ventures would also penetrate the dubious defenses of their need for lavish pay. Why should government-backed businesses run hedge funds or engage in high risk trading, or for that matter, be permitted to offer lucrative products that are valuable because they allow customers to engage in questionable activities, like regulatory arbitrage or tax evasion?”

  So basically it comes down to the banks versus the human race, with governments and the media on the side of the banks. Eliminate the Too Big Too Fail banks, which are nothing parasites on society, save at least $1.5 trillion a year for the people instead, and there would be no need for any kind of austerity measures.

  The need for austerity is nothing more than a lie being promoted by the banksters themselves and their paid shills in the media.

• 47. Reality  |  January 12th, 2011 at 7:54 am

  Fuck me, cutting back government spending would help the big banks??? Wow, that would be a really great theory if it weren’t so glaringly self-contradicting! Keep up the good work, Suzanne! Copying and pasting from other websites without verifying what they’re claiming is a pretty tough fucking job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Your parents must be very proud.

  BTW, I just want to apologize right now if I’ve offended anyone. It’s just that I want to get out all my hate speech now before the Demmycrats make it illegal.

  Thank you very, very much, everybody! Now go fuck yourselves.

• 48. Suzanne  |  January 12th, 2011 at 4:33 pm

  Hi Reality,

  If you’re so determined to defend the banksters while they loot the country, then why not simply donate your organs to Goldman Sachs, then kill yourself so they can sell your body parts on the black market.

  And before offing yourself for GS, don’t forget to suck Lloyd Blankfein’s cock you retarded piece of bankster loving shit.

• 49. Friend of Reality  |  January 12th, 2011 at 5:41 pm

  Hi,

  I’m a friend of Reality and resent the implication that he is a bankster shill and a piece of human trash. Goldman Sachs itself has publicly stated that austerity and budget cutting are necessary to the economy and they would never lie as they have the best interests of the American people at heart, therefore Reality has to be telling the truth when he says that the American people must accept austerity.

  And no, Reality is not being paid by me or any other bankster to come out here and defend austerity. Nor is anyone he works for requiring him to go down on them or take it in the ass.

  He sincerely believes that the $14 trillion (and counting) bank bailout was necessary and that austerity for the people is also necessary, he’s just being honest and he is a straight shooter. Yeah, he may be a little retarded, just a mite simple, but the last time I checked there was no law against that.

• 50. Jason Velveeta  |  January 12th, 2011 at 6:25 pm

  Reality is probably another one of those paid shills for the Pete Peterson Foundation, as they seem to be all over the place these days, spewing out their vile austerity message 24/7 on the mainstream media. Pete Peterson, of course, being the billionaire private equity investor, and former commerce secretary for Nixon, who wants to make drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, as a first step towards eliminating them altogether, though of course the lying bastard doesn’t tell you that. Peterson himself doesn’t need Social Security, as he arrogantly reminds everyone, in addition to being a billionaire, he was also allowed to make use of something called the fund manager tax subsidy, a provision of the tax code that allows the richest Americans to pay lower taxes than blue collar workers.

  And so, since this billionaire scum doesn’t need Social Security, no one should need it, including McDonald’s minimum-wage laborers or janitors or plumbers. They should either have been born rich or learned to become billionaires like this asshole.

  And so, to get the austerity message out, Peterson hires scumbags like Reality, and thousands of others, to spread the lie that the American people must accept endless bailouts for the banksters, but austerity measures for themselves. What a load of horseshit.

  Go fuck yourself, Reality, you Pete Peterson bankster shilling piece of trash! Fuck off and die!

• 51. Fritz Drybeam  |  January 12th, 2011 at 7:38 pm

  Reality, you lying piece of shit, first
  let’s eliminate all the Bank Bailouts (up to $14 trillion and counting, if you include all the foreign banks we’ve bailed out), then eliminate the $3 trillion for two endless Imperial wars, the billions in subsidies to Big Agriculture, as well as all other forms of corporate welfare, and so on.

  And once all that is done, then get back to us, and maybe we can have a discussion about austerity for the people. Because until you eliminate the above waste, you cannot pretend our political leaders are really concerned about “fiscal conservatism”. It’s a total lie. If they were, they would first cut out everything that’s listed above.

  You’re either a bankster shill or a Pete Peterson shill or else a truly ignorant moron, (that is, if you’re not a shill and actually believe what you’re saying), but whichever it is, just for defending the billionaire banksters while arguing to cut out poor people’s Social Security, this alone would be enough to make you an abhorrent piece of shit.

• 52. atlas_lied  |  January 12th, 2011 at 10:25 pm

  I wonder if Reality realizes how stupid he sounds? Austerity means hurting the vast masses of society for the sins of the few on top, all while the corrupt FIRE sector mavens continue to reap profits AND socialize their losses?

• 53. Rudy Blatnoyd  |  January 13th, 2011 at 5:30 am

  Reality, I agree that you are either a shill for the Pete Peterson Foundation and/or the banksters, or you’re one of the dumbest hicks on the planet. Not sure which, but there’s no third option here.

  The American people are willing to make sacrifices as part of a shared effort, but they are not willing to make *all* the sacrifices while the Wall Street Banker Pigs gorge on trillions in stealth bailouts. Because don’t kid yourself, the bank bailouts are continuing, they’re just hiding it from the public now, by using the FED and FDIC to continue the bailouts, as well as zero interest rate giveaways, that help banksters but punish elderly retirees. And as their way of thanking the American taxpayer for all this help: the criminal bastards paid themselves a record $144 billion in bonuses, money which came right out of the pocket of the American taxpayer. And nothing of societal value has been created by them in return. Nothing. They are parasites.

  In this environment, trying to sell austerity “cuts to social security” is not going to work, and fuck you, Reality, for even bringing it up, you dumb ass motherfucker, or bankster shill, (substitute whichever term applies in your pathetic case).

• 54. Jack Boot  |  January 14th, 2011 at 10:10 am

  Mr. Ames is quite correct: In a major downturn, Hoover/Brunner-style austerity only worsens matters – rather like 19th Century doctors wrapping feverish patients in thick blankets (“I don’t care how hot you are! Leave ’em on, and we’ll just sweat that fever out of you!”)

  As Keynes noted, when money & jobs are in short supply, the government must inject both into the economy. After Hoover & Brunner had mired their respective countries up to their axles, they were replaced by FDR & Adolf, both of whom did just that. Of course, one did so via the WPA & suchlike; and t’other via the Wehrmacht..

  Why not create a new WPA? (We already have a Wehrmacht) God knows the US infrastructure could do with a thorough overhaul.

  Don’t see it happening, though…

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