IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

[Master Shake]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

The neverending onslaught of mindless partisan drivel is drowning any thoughtful discussions and rendering this site all-but-worthless. A far cry from the forum it was in 2007 when I joined.

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Hard drives destroyed:

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/0...ls-108044.html

How convenient.

What about other agencies, Senators and the White House? Did they receive emails from Ms. Lerner? If so they may have been retained. But the chance we will ever know in likely nil.

[touhy]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

The mainstream media is very silent about this story. I was about 8 years old during the missing Nixon 18 minutes of tape, but media excitement over that was so intense it broke through to an 8 year old's consciousness. The new's professionals are not covering themselves in glory with their bold partisanship.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/06...royed-irs.html

[Thailandnotes]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Particularly important is the growing discontent of economics students with the university curriculum. Undergraduates’ discontent matters, because economics has long been the West’s political lodestar.
This discontent was born in the “post-autistic economics movement,” which started in Paris in 2000, and spread to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Its adherents’ main complaint was that the mainstream economics taught to students had become a branch of mathematics, disconnected from reality.
The revolt made little progress in the years of the “Great Moderation” of the 2000s, but was revived following the 2008 crisis. Two important links with the earlier network are US economist James Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, and British economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of the best-selling 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism.
In a manifesto published in April, economics students at the University of Manchester advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it,” rather than with mathematical models based on unreal assumptions. Significantly, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, wrote the introduction.
The Manchester students argue that “the mainstream within the discipline (neoclassical theory) has excluded all dissenting opinion, and the crisis is arguably the ultimate price of this exclusion. Alternative approaches such as Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and Austrian economics (as well as many others) have been marginalized. The same can be said of the history of the discipline.” As a result, students have little awareness of neoclassical theory’s limits, much less alternatives to it.
The aim, according to the students, should be to “bridge disciplines within and outside of economics.” Economics should not be divorced from psychology, politics, history, philosophy, and so on. Students are especially keen to study issues like inequality, the role of ethics and fairness in economics (as opposed to the prevailing focus on profit maximization), and the economic consequences of climate change.
The idea is that such intellectual cross-fertilization would help students understand recent economic phenomena better and improve economic theory. From this point of view, everyone stands to benefit from curriculum reform.
The deeper message is that mainstream economics is in fact an ideology – the ideology of the free market. Its tools and assumptions define its topics. If we assume perfect rationality and complete markets, we are debarred from exploring the causes of large-scale economic failures. Unfortunately, such assumptions have a profound influence on policy.
The efficient-market hypothesis – the belief that financial markets price risks correctly on average – provided the intellectual argument for extensive deregulation of banking in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly, the austerity policies that Europe used to fight the recession from 2010 on were based on the belief that there was no recession to fight.
These ideas were tailored to the views of the financial oligarchy. But the tools of economics, as currently taught, provide little scope for investigating the links between economists’ ideas and the structures of power.
Today’s “post-crash” students are right. So what is keeping the mainstream’s intellectual apparatus going?
For starters, economics teaching and research is deeply embedded in an institutional structure that, as with any ideological movement, rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy. The great classics of economics, from Smith to Ricardo to Veblen, go untaught. Research funding is allocated on the basis of publication in academic journals that espouse the neoclassical perspective. Publication in such journals is also the basis of promotion.
Moreover, it has become an article of faith that any move toward a more open or “pluralist” approach to economics portends regression to “pre-scientific” modes of thought, just as the results of the European Parliament election threaten to revive a more primitive mode of politics.
Yet institutions and ideologies cannot survive by mere incantation or reminders of past horrors. They have to address and account for the contemporary world of lived experience.
For now, the best that curriculum reform can do is to remind students that economics is not a science like physics, and that it has a much richer history than is to be found in the standard textbooks. In his book Economics of Good and Evil, the Czech economist Tomáš Sedláček shows that what we call “economics” is only a formalized fragment of a much wider range of thinking about economic life, stretching from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh to the meta-mathematics of today.
Indeed, mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses. It should be applied to whatever practical problems it can solve; but its tools and assumptions should always be in creative tension with other beliefs concerning human wellbeing and flourishing. What students are taught today certainly does not deserve its imperial status in social thought.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/com...OjbxXITMTqe.99

[Thailandnotes]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Particularly important is the growing discontent of economics students with the university curriculum. Undergraduates’ discontent matters, because economics has long been the West’s political lodestar.

This discontent was born in the “post-autistic economics movement,” which started in Paris in 2000, and spread to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Its adherents’ main complaint was that the mainstream economics taught to students had become a branch of mathematics, disconnected from reality.

The revolt made little progress in the years of the “Great Moderation” of the 2000s, but was revived following the 2008 crisis. Two important links with the earlier network are US economist James Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, and British economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of the best-selling 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism.

In a manifesto published in April, economics students at the University of Manchester advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it,” rather than with mathematical models based on unreal assumptions. Significantly, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, wrote the introduction.

The Manchester students argue that “the mainstream within the discipline (neoclassical theory) has excluded all dissenting opinion, and the crisis is arguably the ultimate price of this exclusion. Alternative approaches such as Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and Austrian economics (as well as many others) have been marginalized. The same can be said of the history of the discipline.” As a result, students have little awareness of neoclassical theory’s limits, much less alternatives to it.

The aim, according to the students, should be to “bridge disciplines within and outside of economics.” Economics should not be divorced from psychology, politics, history, philosophy, and so on. Students are especially keen to study issues like inequality, the role of ethics and fairness in economics (as opposed to the prevailing focus on profit maximization), and the economic consequences of climate change.

The idea is that such intellectual cross-fertilization would help students understand recent economic phenomena better and improve economic theory. From this point of view, everyone stands to benefit from curriculum reform.
The deeper message is that mainstream economics is in fact an ideology – the ideology of the free market. Its tools and assumptions define its topics. If we assume perfect rationality and complete markets, we are debarred from exploring the causes of large-scale economic failures. Unfortunately, such assumptions have a profound influence on policy.

The efficient-market hypothesis – the belief that financial markets price risks correctly on average – provided the intellectual argument for extensive deregulation of banking in the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly, the austerity policies that Europe used to fight the recession from 2010 on were based on the belief that there was no recession to fight.
These ideas were tailored to the views of the financial oligarchy. But the tools of economics, as currently taught, provide little scope for investigating the links between economists’ ideas and the structures of power.

Today’s “post-crash” students are right. So what is keeping the mainstream’s intellectual apparatus going?
For starters, economics teaching and research is deeply embedded in an institutional structure that, as with any ideological movement, rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy. The great classics of economics, from Smith to Ricardo to Veblen, go untaught. Research funding is allocated on the basis of publication in academic journals that espouse the neoclassical perspective. Publication in such journals is also the basis of promotion.

Moreover, it has become an article of faith that any move toward a more open or “pluralist” approach to economics portends regression to “pre-scientific” modes of thought, just as the results of the European Parliament election threaten to revive a more primitive mode of politics.

Yet institutions and ideologies cannot survive by mere incantation or reminders of past horrors. They have to address and account for the contemporary world of lived experience.

For now, the best that curriculum reform can do is to remind students that economics is not a science like physics, and that it has a much richer history than is to be found in the standard textbooks. In his book Economics of Good and Evil, the Czech economist Tomáš Sedláček shows that what we call “economics” is only a formalized fragment of a much wider range of thinking about economic life, stretching from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh to the meta-mathematics of today.

Indeed, mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses. It should be applied to whatever practical problems it can solve; but its tools and assumptions should always be in creative tension with other beliefs concerning human wellbeing and flourishing. What students are taught today certainly does not deserve its imperial status in social thought.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/com...OjbxXITMTqe.99

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

When the public loses faith in their leaders during an economic slowdown, it serves to make the situation worse and could contribute to a recession.
It is not partisan drivel when the most powerful agency over citizen's financial lives acts in a highly partisan matter. When MSNBC
joins the coverage, you know this is not partisan.

I clearly remember Watergate, and openly was critical of Nixon and his henchmen well before the final proof. I fear this is the same.

Wall Street Journal: IRS scandal 'worse than Watergate'

BY PAUL BEDARD | JUNE 19, 2014 | 10:14 AM

'Morning Joe' Panel Relentlessly Rips On IRS Over 'Recycled' Lerner...

'Morning Joe' Panel Relentlessly Rips On IRS Over 'Recycled' Lerner Computers

TOPICS: CONGRESS WASHINGTON SECRETS JUDICIAL WATCH HERITAGE FOUNDATION BILL CLINTON IRS WALL STREET JOURNAL WATERGATE LOIS LERNER NRA

http://content.washingtonexaminer.bi...t_fade_top.png) 100% 0% repeat-x, url(http://content.washingtonexaminer.bi...ade_bottom.png) 100% 100% repeat-x, url(http://content.washingtonexaminer.bi...t_fade_mid.png) 100% 0% repeat-y;">

AP Photo

The revelation that the computers of Internal Revenue Service workers, including Tea Party prober Lois Lerner, were erased of critical emails sought by lawmakers has elevated the affair to -- and maybe beyond -- an old familiar presidential scandal, Watergate.
“The IRS tea-party audit story isn't Watergate; it's worse than Watergate,” according to deputy Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Daniel Henninger.
“The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable,” he added.

Sign Up for the Paul Bedard newsletter!

Some argue that it is certainly worse than when former President Bill Clinton was accused of using the IRS to punish huge conservative groups including the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation and Judicial Watch.
The reason: Obama’s IRS went after the grassroots. Henninger suggested the order to do so came in Obama’s code language. “Mr. Obama himself in a March 2010 radio address spoke of ‘shadowy groups with harmless sounding names’ that threaten ‘our democracy,’ ” he wrote.
And like Richard Nixon, he added, Obama didn’t have to hound the Tea Party and conservative groups because he was in a good position to get reelected, especially with the GOP so divided.
“They didn't need to do this,” concluded Henninger. “The Obama campaign machine was a wonder, perfecting the uses of social media in 2008 and 2012. But the Democrats were so crazed in 2010 by Citizens United, so convinced that anyone's new political money might bust their hold on power, that they sicced the most feared agency in government on people who disagreed with them.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted atpbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

No one believes political leaders of either party or the media.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/171710/pu...toric-low.aspx

http://www.nationaljournal.com/the-c...phies-20140618

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/mich...s-all-time-low

[vinoveri]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

No one believes political leaders of either party or the media.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/171710/pu...toric-low.aspx

http://www.nationaljournal.com/the-c...phies-20140618

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/mich...s-all-time-low

But they sure keep voting for them and still keep listening to them now don't they?

[lektrode]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

But they sure keep voting for them and still keep listening to them now don't they?

methinks george carlin had some of the best insight on this topic:

"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."

"In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem."

"Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out."

"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."

"The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post 'Thou shalt not steal,' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' and 'Thou shalt not lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians.
It creates a hostile work environment."

"Deep Throat: Think about it. There is actually a semi-important figure in American history who is named for a blow-job movie. How do school teachers handle this?"

"These days many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people."

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

MSNBC doesn't views this as "mindless political drivel"

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/morn...tory-every-day

[lektrode]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

MSNBC doesn't views this as "mindless political drivel"

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/morn...tory-every-day

Morning Joe: If a GOP Prez Lost IRS Emails, It Would Be NYT Lead Story Every Day

"I think with a different administration, one that was a Republican administration, this story would be a national obsession..."

never mind if it was them big bad oil types in texas that had krashed the economy not once, BUT TWICE IN 10 YEARS

(instead of lower manhattans 'finest demo/limo-libs')

the NYT, et al
HEADLINES WOULD BE 6" TALL EVERY DAY SINCE 2009

and not just during the runup to the elections in 2008...

[flintlock]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

No kidding! Its only mindless partisan drivel because its a Democrat administration. Anyone trying to defend the IRS being used in this manner doesn't have a leg to stand on. Republicans have done bad stuff on other occasions but this scandal takes the cake for its blatant disregard for the law. If this goes unpunished then nothing short of a Coup d'etat would surprise me. Congress is becoming impotent and the parallels with ancient Rome becoming more apparent. This may one day be seen as the beginning of the end for American Democracy. Yet many are not the least concerned as long as they are getting what they need. Amazing. In the 1930s many Germans also went along because they couldn't see the harm. Problem is, when a leader can simply disregard the law, you may one day find yourself in need of it and nobody will care.

[don]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

We sat, we listened, and we could not quite believe our ears...

[Mn_Mark]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Congress is becoming impotent and the parallels with ancient Rome becoming more apparent. This may one day be seen as the beginning of the end for American Democracy. Yet many are not the least concerned as long as they are getting what they need. Amazing. In the 1930s many Germans also went along because they couldn't see the harm. Problem is, when a leader can simply disregard the law, you may one day find yourself in need of it and nobody will care.

I think that a useful way of understanding what's happening is that we're becoming just another crooked, dysfunctional Latin American country.

Concepts like the importance of maintaining respect for the law just don't apply when your plan is to dismantle a nation.

[flintlock]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

I think that a useful way of understanding what's happening is that we're becoming just another crooked, dysfunctional Latin American country.

Concepts like the importance of maintaining respect for the law just don't apply when your plan is to dismantle a nation.

I agree and have said as much to my friends and family. Respect for law and order is what used to set more successful nations apart. Just wait, things are only beginning to unravel.