Clinton Loyalist Authoritarianism: Brad DeLong Threatens a Journalist and Economists. Who is Next?

[GRhodes]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/clinton-loyalist-autclinton-loyalist-authoritarianism-brad-delong-threatens.html

Clinton loyalists are now showing their true colors. And they are not pretty. Initially, it seemed better to leave Brad DeLong alone when he made a drive-by misfire at my Politico article on why many Sanders voters will never vote for Clinton. It’s a badge of honor of sorts when a Clinton hack, um, tribalist, gets so upset about a pro-Sanders story that he rushes in on the offensive.

However, DeLong’s piece was sorely deficient in intellectual integrity. He make it obvious he had not read the story by misattributing a reader comment to me and then compounding the error by riffing on the reader remark (Politico even provided the link so its audience could see the quote in context). What is telling is that diatribes against Sanders supporters are increasingly of the “shoot the messenger” or “shoot the voter” variety, as the case may be. The Clinton camp is responding with ever-escalating levels of abuse to evidence that Sanders supporters have serious, reasoned objections to the Clintons’ track record, Obama’s policies, which Hillary Clinton embraces, and her neoliberal economic stance. If you want to confirm the view of the Sanders bloc, that the Democratic party is not interested in their issues, this is precisely the way to do it.

But the Clinton loyalists are stooping even lower and are purging dissenters on the left. Mind you, this isn’t a new practice. As Jane Hamsher pointed out in 2009, the Obama Administration successfully most put left-leaning groups in a “veal pen,” by attacking individuals and organizations that stepped out of line by doing things like criticizing Blue Dog (pro-corporate, pro-bank) Democrats, or criticizing the payment of bonuses to AIG staffers. Those organizations that didn’t fall in lime and had institutional funding (most) would be disciplined by calls to important backers pressing them to end their financial support.

...And now, in a sort of piling on, Brad DeLong threatens Zach Carter, a Huffington Post journalist who has done some fine work in the financial services beat. This is the headline and first sentence of his post (emphasis original): The Huffington Post Has a Serious, Serious Quality Control Problem with Seth Abramson…Live from the Huffington Post’s self-made Gehenna of Lies: It has a serious quality control problem with Zach Carter too. But the time to talk about that won’t come until November…So we have a former Clinton Administration official calling a journalist a liar (with no supporting evidence) and threatening him with unnamed consequences in November. That is presumably on the assumption that Clinton wins, which is not at all a given. So what can we expect will happen then? That the transition team will issue a hit list of disfavored journalists and Carter is sure to be on it? That seems to be the drift of DeLong’s thuggish promise.

[Demsrule86]

1. Naked Capitalism

is a rightwing site that wants to lower wages for workers...I long for June 16th when this sort of garbage won't be posted .

[GRhodes]

2. Can you define right wing?

What drivel. They've posted left wing, heterodox economists, MMT economists for years now (Michael Hudson, Bill Black, Steve Keen, Stephanie Kelton, etc.), strongly critiqued the banks and their massive crime spree too. You know, the interests paying Clinton to put more policies in place that benefit them?

Please, explain how the site is right wing, after you define right wing. Then, stop evading and answer to the substance of the post. After June 16th, is it 100% stick your head in the sand time here? No more having to answer to factual critiques and questions you don't want to discuss? Is this where we should go to get Brock's annoying and reality-less daily talking points? Yes, yes, and yes.

[Demsrule86]

6. They want to turn American workers into bowl of rice workers

suppress wages is their game...doesn't get more right wing than that.

"Naked Capitalism is an American financial news and analysis blog that claims to "chronicle the large scale, concerted campaign to reduce the bargaining power and pay of ordinary workers relative to investors and elite technocrats."

[GRhodes]

9. Explain what the hell you are talking about

then provide citations. I could claim Hillary Clinton is an invisible vampire, but I might need to first explain what I mean, then give some evidence to back the claim up. Yes? So, feel free crazy person.

[tblue37]

10. To "chronicle" something means to tell about it, to report on it, to provide evidence that it is

happening.

They are against the reduction of workers' bargaining power and are attempting to "chronicle" (i.e., show, tell, report) how it is happening and what its effects are.

ON EDIT: This is an excerpt from the "About" page of naked capitalism:

SNIP

The meltdown also showed the high cost of the economic restructuring that began in the 1970s and accelerated in the Reagan/Thatcher era. Most people in advanced economies do not realize that we are in the midst of a finance-led counter-revolution. In parallel to the enclosure movement of the early capitalist era, which turned formerly self-supporting peasants into wage slaves, we are now in the midst of a large scale, concerted campaign to reduce the bargaining power and pay of ordinary workers relative to investors and elite technocrats. We believe this effort is not only detrimental to most citizens, but is ultimately destructive to the capitalists classes, since highly unequal societies produce worse outcomes on virtually all broad measures, such as crime rates, longevity, and educational attainment. Indeed, inequality exacts a cost in terms of the health of even the top cohort. But this cohort seems to define its self-interest in narrow economic terms.

With the help of a growing group of dedicated and skilled writers, we are chronicling this transition and doing what we can, in our small way, to fight it. That often takes the form of parsing propaganda, decomposing complex financial structures and legal agreements, and following the money to inform and educate readers about what is going on beneath the surface of major news stories. We regularly criticize government officials and their amplifiers in academia and the media, particularly those who promote policies that favor entrenched interests and the wealthy while pretending they are good or necessary for ordinary people <emphasis added>.

[GRhodes]

13. The above poster said nakedcapitalism is "right wing"

How exactly does his or your quotation back that up? I also know what the word chronicle means. What I would like is a definition of right wing. I really am interested now what the poster, or you, think is right wing.

[tblue37]

15. HE said it is right wing. I am saying it is PRO-LABOR, ANTI-Oligarchy,

NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT right wing. Therefore, [font size="+1"]I [/font]DO NOT THINK IT IS A RIGHT WING SITE.

The quote the poster provided was his attempt to "prove" it is a right wing site. [font size="+1"]I [/font] was explaining to him that the quote he provided is evidence that naked capitalism is the opposite of a right wing site.

Apparently he believes to "chronicle" something means to support it, when in fact it means to tell or report about it.

My post was intended to explain to him that he had totally misunderstood what the passage he quoted actually means.

[Demsrule86]

14. It is on the website

They are in favor of lower pay and less power in the workplace for ordinary people. I don't know why anyone would even go to this site much less post from it...not progressive.

[tblue37]

16. They support the opposite of what you say they support. nt

[YouDig]

3. Only in Bernieland is criticizing an article considered a "threat".

DeLong is right, HuffPo's standards became embarrassingly low with Seth Abramson and HA Goodman.

[GRhodes]

4. Is it too much to ask

for you head in the sand types to actually read the articles you post about?

[YouDig]

5. I read it, there wasn't any "threat". There was well-deserved criticism of some idiots

writing truly dumb pro-Bernie articles on HuffPo. Also DeLong said it might be a good idea to lay off the criticism until after the election in order to placate Berners.

Whoever wrote this article is a moron if they think that DeLong is planning some kind of revenge against Seth Abramson, other than writing about how much of an idiot he is.

[GRhodes]

7. LOL!

DeLong mistook a reader's comment for Smith's, and riffed on that. Did you miss that? It's clear what he was doing when he referenced November.

DeLong, however, did say this about Hillary Clinton in 2003:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

[YouDig]

8. You forgot to point to the "threat". Can you at least spell out your conspiracy theory for us?

[GRhodes]

11. As I said above, is it too much for the head in the sand crowd

to read the f*cking articles they are commenting on.

A comment from the well connected DeLong, from the article I cited, says:

Mind you: The day will come when it will be time to gleefully and comprehensively trash people to be named later for Guevarista fantasies about what their policies are likely to do. The day will come when it will be time to gleefully and comprehensively trash people to be named later for advocating Comintern-scale lying to voters about what our policies are like to do. And it will be important to do so then--because overpromising leads to bad policy decisions, and overpromising is bad long-run politics as well.

At his site, he includes this comment after the paragraph above.

But that day is not now. That day will be mid-November.

How is it not obvious to you what he is saying?

[YouDig]

12. So your conspiracy theory is so dumb you refuse to even try to explain it. That says something.

[BootinUp]

17. I just looked at the various links and I don't know what the hell

Yves Smith is talking about. She did indeed write an article called:

Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary

So Brad Delong and Scott Lemieux figured it was fair game for criticism. Who can blame them?

[Doctor_J]

18. Hillary is so much like Nixon that it's scary

Enemies lists, galloping paranoia, covering up crimes. I never thought the democrats would devolve to nominating someone like this.

[reddread]

20. Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate. Contras, stolen elections, superpredators and welfare queens, IWR

?ve=1&tl=1

[sufrommich]

19. Where is the threat? nt