The Next Step for Krugman

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In Krugman’s latest, he gives us another version of the common burning building metaphor to characterize Mitch McConnell’s crooked position on finance reform.

 

On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, called for the abolition of municipal fire departments.

Firefighters, he declared, “won’t solve the problems that led to recent fires. They will make them worse.” The existence of fire departments, he went on, “not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of burning buildings; it institutionalizes them.” He concluded, “The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes that lead to fires pay for them. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest buildings are allowed to burn.”
O.K., I fibbed a bit. Mr. McConnell said almost everything I attributed to him, but he was talking about financial reform, not fire reform.

 

He’s right about McConnell, of course, but Krugman’s scam is to pretend that he wants something different.

 

Let me try the burning building:

 

You have a building which will frequently catch on fire spontaneously, which often sets itself on fire. This fire then spreads to other buildings. Krugman and McConnell are both lying when they pretend to care about these other buildings, and when they claim they have the solution which will prevent further fires.

 

McConnell says “let it burn”. Let’s just vow, No More Bailouts. As Krugman rightly says, that’s obviously a lie. We know damn well the next time the fire starts, it will be fought. There will be another bailout.

 

But Krugman himself offers nothing but a more refined version of the same lie. He has now come out for the “resolution authority” scam. This is of course just the same no-more-bailouts lie, but with an extra layer of lie.

 

Just as we know a “no more bailouts” pledge will be broken when the next crisis hits, so we know any paper “resolution authority” will also be disregarded. The result will be the same – bail them out.

 

We don’t need to speculate on this since we already have resolution authority – the PCA law. This not only allowed but required the “resolution” of the insolvent banks in 2008. But we know what happened to this resolution authority – the same thing which will happen to the next version of resolution authority.

 

(With his silence on this point Krugman pretends this authority doesn’t already exist. He pretends his scam “reform” solution hasn’t already been proven to be a lie. For Krugman, Bill Black is an unperson.)

 

This is what disaster capitalism does. With every new piece Thugman reveals himself more and more its lackey.

 

The real solution for the burning building is in fact to let it burn. Better yet, demolish it. Set up a firebreak to defend the homes and other buildings which need to be defended (BTW, there are far fewer of these than the neoliberal corporatist Krugman and other globalization and financialization cadres think).

 

Let it burn down to the ashes. Once and for all. Then we’d be free of it forever.

 

That’s what reform has to mean – the will to freedom.

 

By definition, any prescription of a corporatist like Thugman, anything which leaves us still under the thumb of gangster rackets, any “order” of things where rackets still exist at all, cannot be reform.