Another said: "Omigod. Larry Summers [the discredited conservative Democratic economist] looks good [by comparison to the President he advised]."
The only economists who still thought that high unemployment was the result of increased economic productivity were Republicans like Glenn Hubbard, who had headed George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors. One of Harvard's prominent champions of aristocracy, the Republican Niall Ferguson, also publicly defended this view on 2 November 2011, when Yahoo News headlined an interview with him, "Poor Public School Education Not Wall St. to Blame For American Inequality." In other words: (democratic) government was to blame; what's needed was more private schools, fewer public schools; kleptocratic aristocrats who financed political commercials (and financed scholars like Glenn Hubbard's and Niall Ferguson's careers) were not to blame for the bad national economy (even though they'd walked off with the winnings from the taxpayer-funded bailouts).
From this point forward, the only people who supported Barack Obama were the uninformed and outright suckers -- besides any conservative insiders who were in on this con-game. Suskind's title "Confidence Men" referred to an overwhelmingly dishonest group of conservative Democratic insiders (Geithner, Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, among others) who surrounded and advised this President. But could anyone have suspected that Obama himself was actually far more conservative than any of them, and was the worst of all of those "Confidence Men"?
When Geithner resigned in early 2013, Liaquat Ahmed at a blog of The New Republic, headlined on 24 January 2013, "Timothy Geithner on Populism, Paul Ryan, and His Legacy." In this lengthy "exit interview," Geithner described himself as a courageous person who overcame the urge to "go populist" (shades there of Obama's having told the Wall Street elite "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks"), and who instead rejected "the understandable need people had for justice." To Obama and company, any "justice" against the elite was merely "pitchforks." Geithner implicitly said there that anyone who wanted any of the banksters to be prosecuted was an ignoramus who was endangering the USA by pushing for such "populism." He praised Obama and other "political leaders who are willing to take the brutal political cost of doing what's necessary," and he contrasted him with political leaders who "let the populist fires burn, or decided they were going to try to teach people a lesson." To Geithner, prosecuting banksters would be mere revenge-seeking. He proudly proclaimed himself as one who "pushed earliest for a pivot [away from unemployment] to a focus on the debt situation." He was proud of his anti-Keynesian stance. He even expressed agreement with Republican House Budget Committee Chairman, and ex-Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan, rejecting "growth-killing revenue increases" (rejecting increased taxation upon the rich that would fund additional short-term stimulus-spending to restore a growth-economy so as to long-term pay down the debt from this long-term growth in people's incomes), and when asked "If you said that to Paul Ryan, would he agree with you?" Geithner answered: "I think he would. We've had the chance to talk about this in public and in private. I think what he would say is that you also have to worry about the 50-year problem, not just the 10-year problem ... because of the demographics of the nation," with more people living longer. He wanted to target Social Security and Medicare for cuts and so redirected the interview to those as "the 50-year problem." In other words, he was advising: Take the losses -- from the Wall Street bailout, and from the economic collapse that had produced it -- out of the hides of future recipients of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, not out of the hides of the banksters who had made billions from those frauds. This was the most extensive statement expressing the real Obama that had ever been published, and it came in the "exit interview" of Obama's mouthpiece and top policy-maker: Timothy Geithner. (Obama himself is too slick ever to speak the way that Geithner did there.)
Obama and his minions believe strongly that holding the top-level gangsters to account must be prohibited at all costs, and that all of the losses from their frauds must instead be absorbed by the masses. There is an ideology behind this, and it is profoundly conservative, which means it embodies the conviction that all praise goes upward, and all blame goes downward. (Worship of the very personification of power, "The Almighty" -- not of the "All-truthful," but instead explicitly of The All-Powerful" -- feeds fully into that sentiment, of course. Religion has thus, for thousands of years, been the handmaiden of the aristocracy.)
The actual political agenda that drives this passion to slash government spending at precisely the time when the masses of people are economically hurting has been well expressed by a string of leading Republican thinkers since Milton Friedman first hinted at it in 1978. Here, we will now describe the origin of the Republican drive to slash "entitlements": Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid:
Friedman, in a 15 January 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed "What Every American Wants," gave his first clear expression of it: "I never met a tax cut I didn't like.... The reason ... [is] the effect of tax cuts on government spending.... How can we ever cut government down to size? I believe there is one and only one way: ... cutting taxes. Resulting deficits will be an effective -- I would go so far as to say, the only effective -- restraint on the spending.... The public reaction will make that restraint effective." First, the debt soars, then the government shrinks (by slashing Democratic-initiated programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). That's the strategy. Friedman first introduced it in 1978; candidate Ronald Reagan then adopted and defended it in 1980.
Here's how Reagan put it, in a Presidential debate, on 21 September 1980: "John tells us that, first, we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker." They're still trying, even after having already exploded the federal debt fifteen-fold since then.
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