CHARLIE ROSE SHOW COMMENT
ON BERNARD SCHWARTZ INTERVIEW
Comments as of Morning August 7 2010

1. JohnGelles  08/07/2010 8:12 AM

   Discussion on the CR Show of SLOW GROWTH in new jobs at the moment, between Alan Greenspan and Bernard Schwartz, might NOT yield a promising agenda for use by congress, the executive branch, or the voting public.

   Why? Not because the suggested participants will not agree or know less than, say, Kenneth Arrow or Paul Krugman, but because the RATE OF NEW JOB GROWTH is the product of so many variables that more than disagreement between people with valuable models of reality in their heads is called for. After all we want a useful product from idealized discussions.

   We would need a staff of diagram artists, logistical scientists, practical bankers, Keynesian scholars, anti-Keynesian scholars, playwrights like David Mamet, and experts in labor economics and political action, at least.

   Nothing less could capture a useful set of optional agendas for democracies on earth, in competition with each other, and with Mother Nature, to consider for adoption.

   Any ordinary discussion will leave us where we are -- on opposite sides of the argument over deficits.

   Bernard Schwartz and I see the "deficit in demand" as paramount. Alan Greenspan may see the soon to experienced "very large federal debt" as of equal importance.

   What the PBS Newshour showed last night were Americans looking for work in need of real relief payments to stay off the street and out of a padded cell. Opposing such payments were people who claimed the lazy disease would eat up the American people -- if victims were really cared for by voters afraid to disobey the Golden Rule.

   The CR Show is a business. The business of America is business. Schwartz and I see business as obedient to the Golden Rule in the best of circumstances. Kenneth Galbraith always said we are all victims of the tyranny of circumstance. He was right.

   The discussion I would like to see would be between Barack Obama, both Presidents George Bush, William Clinton, and the people looking for work we saw last night on PBS.

   Each president in this discussion would have a direct secret wire to Ben Bernanke. If they buzzed the wire, Bernanke would have to send the people looking for work an unlimited credit card to tide them over until they had a good American job or were dead.

   No one would ever know the signals Bernanke received. No one but you and I watching the show. And we would have to keep it secret -- or else.

    

2. doodah  08/07/2010 7:01 AM

   I would like see to this gentleman (Bernard Schwartz) and Allen Greenspan on an hour long program together. .. would be very educational for me. ... would be wise to absorb as much knowledge from them while they're still around. ... can't call on Milton Freedman anymore.

    

3. doodah  08/07/2010 06:53 AM

   "Jobs are the last thing to bounce back coming out of a recession." .. "And construction jobs are the last of all jobs to come back". - That's how it's always been, in the past. Is that how it will continue to be? .. This recession is different than the ones before. .The stench of 'moral hazard' lingers.. in the back of everybodies minds

   I made that comment on the other interview, but I see it's more appropriate here.

   I'm still not opposed to abolishing the Federal Reserve. To create a more real and fair currency.

    

4. JohnGelles  08/07/2010 04:56 AM

   Assume the worst:

   a. Avowed conservatives take back both houses of congress.

   b. Two years of getting even and doing nothing.

   c. Victory in 2012 by Gingrich or another of similar mind.

   d. China and America face off for a trade and cold war.

   e. China wins. America becomes a poorer wage-slave society.

   f. China and India become the Russia and America in a replay of 50 years of failure to resolve the root causes of poverty, pollution, corruption and armed conflict.

   How might something better have been achieved? Who's to blame for counterproductive complexity, deeply embedded corruption, profound ignorance in office, and all the opportunities missed? Why did we never pass the Second Bill of Rights?

   Why did we never kill:

   ..... a. Debt-- with debt-free money?

   ..... b. Climate change-- with risk avoiding investment:

   ..... ..... (1) in hydrogen to replace carbon for fuel?

   ..... ..... (2) in modesty to replace maniacal greed?

   ..... c. War-- with preventive war against absolute evil?

   ..... d. Negative outcomes-- with positive effort?

   ..... e. Morbid inequality-- with altruism?

    

5. JohnGelles  08/07/2010 12:05 AM

   Dear Mr. MacCallister and/or Mac Callister,

   From your keyboard to God's to-do list:

   ..... a. Neighborhood Health Clinics

   ..... b. More public parks with rewarding activities

   My list consists of

   ..... a. the tax rebates in my previous posts: they grant cash payment relief checks to businesses and individuals -- which are intended to create both jobs and self-employment income (based on capital enough to be in business).

   ..... b. loans to big business to harness wind; solar; ocean temperature difference, tide and wave potential energy; and other green highly safe independent sources of energy -- aimed at a hydrogen economy, wherein the ocean gives us hydrogen and oxygen to store, and fuel cells give us pure power without carbon or something worse.

   ..... c. private and public magnet schools serving parents of children from the earliest practical age until an age suitable to the rational desires of students. Some schools would be mainstreamed -- some would cater to similarly special needs. Parents and professional practicing coach-teachers would be trusted to manage schools without remote political bosses. Prevention of waste, fraud and abuse would be what was possible. We would err on the side of local control --

   ..... but professional independent audit and inspection, and a free press (that may have to be subsidized -- if dependency on commercial advertising would be worse), will be charged to minimize fraud and crime in these activities.

   ..... d. direct per capita payment to states (and agreed to lower political units) of very large sums of money to minimize their tax collections and maximize their potential excellence in solving problems closer at hand than to a national capital.

   ..... e. create and finance a government reform university in, say 8 geographical regions, six in CONUS, one each in Alaska and Hawaii. Charge these new institutions to study and present reform idea and agendas as needed, and on regular basis as well, to prepare America to remain an example to all the world of majority rule and minority rights -- including a universal individual right to life, liberty, earn a living, education, training, and support (where family and friends are not there for a person in need.)

   ..... f. a non-commercial internet and television service, without call to ask for contributions, answerable solely to the head of state, which may be replaced wholesale by an incoming head, or left in place as the head may desire.

   ..... g. study for subsequent constitutional amendment creation of a supreme court of equity with power to decide all issues of fairness, contradicting the Supreme Court when necessary, where simple justice requires decision based on facts without reference to law.

   The court would consist of all living ex-presidents under 70 years of age at time decisions of rendered.

   It could hear and decide any case in no more than 60 days. It could be convened only by the sitting president. Its jurisdiction would end 61 days after convening. Its decisions would apply to the specific injustice it was convened to address and none in dispute thereafter.

   The supreme court of equity would be at the apex of the judicial system and not a fourth branch of government. All its decisions would require a two thirds majority of its seated members. Any ex-president could decline to sit. If the seated members were less than 3, the sitting president would be eligible for self-appointment.

    

6. NeilMacCallister  08/06/2010 10:30 PM

   Dear Mr. Gelles,

   I believe everyone agrees with you that America needs more jobs, ..and with Mr. Schwartz' encouragement of us spending "stimulus" money to build the structures that our federal government has left sitting on its waiting-to-build list.

   A job is a better expenditure than an unemployment or welfare check. As Elaine Chao has said, "The best assistance to an unemployed worker is a real job."

   The hard part is moving from "A good idea", to "Let's get started!"

   What would you build?

   ***

   My projects would be:

   Complete the wall from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. Put doors in it, so we could have a controlled flow in and out.

   Build a neighborhood health clinic in every town in America. We should have as many low-cost health service-stations as we do 7-11 stores and Quickie-Marts.

   Build a gym in every town with obese and unemployed people, and stock that gym with exercise-bicycles with mounted electric generators tied into the local electric-power grid.

   Pay the peddlers 10-cents a watt-hr, and they will make at least minimum wage, reduce their obesity and heart-risk, and also learn the cost of leaving a lightbulb on at home.

    

7. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 10:29 PM

   The PBS Newshour, tonight, as CR's rival in delivering thought provoking TV to a large literate audience, focused on jobs and unemployment -- including the tragic experiences formerly employed persons must survive -- all because we, as a nation, are habituated to a savage reaction to the pain of other people.

   Sartre said HELL is other people. He would have added, if alive at the moment, WE are HELL on earth, where others are hurt and we escape their fate.

   The TEA party is all about emotion. There mouthpiece on the PBS show was worried about government spending. He was obviously not a victim of recent financial misadventures.

   Of course, he is not alone. Effectively, the whole world is of his same mind: spend less, talk more, eat dirt.

   Schwartz and I have the same education and same experience of war and depression. We see a straight path from enlightened business to successful government to economic green growth and a positive outlook on life.

   We also see the absence of clear thought and persuasion that fiat money and its final empowerment by Richard Nixon, when he closed the gold window to foreign central banks, as one great fly in he oatmeal -- one great error in the literature of banking and production that defies all logic and political acumen. How can a bunch of Chicago pols be so ignorant -- except that they caught the "flu" at the University of Chicago.

   You know the meaning of FUBAR. FLU has similar meaning with LU standing for lousy university -- following "ing".

   I have been accused of hating China which is not true. I hate no one in particular and all our dead brain cells standing n the way of progress.

   YES WE CAN walk and chew gum at the same time -- fast track windmills and tax moratoriums simultaneously. Cut enough taxes and red tape, spread loans to small business on an immense scale, extend actual RELIEF refunds of prior decades' income and payroll taxes to firms and individuals alike, until the jobless scene cries uncle.

   We never hesitated to hit enemies with shock and awe. Well the jobless scene is our enemy. Let's deal it a knockout blow!

    

8. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 08:10 PM

   Please forgive me for a typo or two. CR Show ought to borrow Amazon forum style that allows post-send edit forever.

   In connection with minimizing taxes, we should not that luxury sales and profits can do the same as taxes do in fact.

   In fact taxes do not pay the bills for government. Cash money pays the bills. Taxes are paid to keep lawful money from demanding more than a nations economy can supply -- at an affordable price. Abba Lerner's Functional Finance explains all this.

   So, by happy logic, an open free competitive economy can raise the MINIMUM standard of living to an envied level (by nations with less understanding). The fiat money to pay for high supply and high demand, that support such MSL, can be protected from inflation by great wealth, honestly earned,

   which sells luxuries -- even in competition with governments who may want to sell alcohol or other special products. When such wealth also supports education, peace, progress and health, etc., it does double duty as part of the American dream -- everyone a winner, reaching higher one generation after another.

    

9. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 07:34 PM

   Yes, a business man like Bernard Schwartz, with understanding of working people, ought to be heard by any president who wants to leave his nation better than when he was elected.

   However, we must be accurate and honest when we ask the voters to listen to our advice.

   Bernard Schwartz wants heavy federal investment for infrastructure promised when we all campaigned for "YES WE CAN."

   I want that too. But are we willing to pay for it by finessing tax and deficit issues with QUANTITATIVE EASING (QE)-- that is, by central bank direct funding of a US treasury need for cash money?

   Ben Bernanke is doing this now. Mariner Eccles did it when our lives hung in the balance in WW II.

   Many scholars recommend it. Many will not touch it.

   Bernard Schwartz is famous for his faith in the English language -- when spoken like a human being (avoiding jargon and outright lies). He has endowed his faith with wealth. We would all be wise to do the same.

   Now is the time for the president to speak frankly of taxes, productivity and QUANTITATIVE EASING. Taxes should be avoided whenever possible. They invite misery -- much like traffic tickets.

   Taxes are easily avoided to the degree that direct cash money creation, unalloyed with matching debt, is matched by creation of sufficient quantities of goods and services to keep supply, demand and price working in favor of the affordability of a decent middle class standard.

   Savings can also hold demand down to desired level. For this reason, cash savings should be protected from inflation by indexed balances the same as certain bonds.

   At the present moment, Bernanke who really knows the score, and the rest of the global economic authorities, are all afraid to plan outright for wartime spending to prevent depressions and wars. They are even more afraid to do this just to save some ordinary people from suicide and despair.

   I am mad as hell at this. What about you?

   Do you not think that Schwartz's ideas on plain speech and infrastructure development makes more sense than any other? He would add some QE for some other priorities. Energy independence comes to mind. Protection of our fifty states from insolvency and/or degradation of law and other necessities also comes to mind.

   Nobody said "YES WE CAN" was easy. That is why we elected the president of the law review who also knew the needs of ordinary people that were not being fairly served.

   If QE will demand data gathering and predictions of a more accurate nature than the current IRS (which we ought to close -- the code it tries to enforce is unreadable by every lawmaker who votes for it,) then we should create and pay for an economic security agency with no criminal code but with credibility that it can prevent our abusing QE as others have in the past who brought on hyperinflation.

    

10. brianbook  08/06/2010 05:37 PM

    Our president should fire Larry Summers & hire Schwartz,Krugman & Shiller to put people back to work. These programs can be paid from a "reorganization" tax on Wall Street institutions & reductions in our military budget, since the Cold War is over & Bush's war allegedly made us all safer.

     

11. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 09:50 AM

    Dear REMant ~

    Thank you for the history of the bank holiday and your general ideas on inflation. The history tells us details we never knew from the press as they happened.

    You remarked in connection with Schwartz' call for a trillion dollar federal investment (which I and others estimate is too low, 3 to 5 trillion are needed):

    "Obviously the standard of living of the lower and middle classes have declined along with our infrastructure, but the reason for this has to be laid at the door of inflationary policies such as he [Bernard Schwartz] advocates. And it has been going on a lot longer than just the past decade. More like the past half-century. However, there is no multiplier effect unless it is thru an increase in productivity, otherwise it just trickles down until it evaporates, as Hume saw in he 18th c when he looked at Spain. I am not sure that Keynes ever thought it would do anything else. His interest was in employing ppl in whatever way possible,..."

    You are wise to offer the truth that success after any "new money" capital investment requires higher productivity to overcome the inflationary effect of adding Spanish stolen gold to the system of production in the 16th and 17th centuries.

    In today's industrial development curve, most see exponential growth in productivity. Visit the Singularity University website for a feel of where we will be as old and new money are invested in our current monetary system of production.

    With such growth in productivity -- undisputed by those who know the most -- do you still have qualms about the Schwartz plan?

    My guess is that you won't. But I would like to hear it from you.

    John

     

12. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 05:30 AM

    Dear Neil,

    Please excuse my typo in first line "and" should read "on" Bernard Schwartz plan.

    Please excuse my apparent "hate". I like Sarah and Niall, and our Chinese allies whom I met in 1946 when I was in the Navy removing Japanese from their land.

    Please excuse my confusion over how many of us support the Schwartz plan for jobs and American leadership. Maybe it's three -- all but comment 1 on the bank holiday I so well remember.

    The bottom line is that an Infrastructure Investment Plan is urgently needed and we must all support it. Especially Charlie Rose--we must support the 19 million people out of work with one (actually far more than one) trillion dollars of federal investment ASAP. What stands in the way? Deficit hawk false, unnecessary and hurtful choices in the matter-- especially on the part of the President's team. I have listened to the Rose-Schwartz interview many times as I write these words. It gets better each time. "I am petitioning the President to invest. Will it happen? I hope so." "The economy by itself will not grow fast enough without leadership. We must use plain English to reach the people. We must have a job for you and I, the President, am responsible to see it happen. Yes I am. Yes we can"

     

13. NeilMacCallister  08/06/2010 04:57 AM

    .."military Keynesianism", John? ..are you sure???

    (P.s., J.M.Keynes' entire family lived off of public monies, ..don't you think that might have been an important restriction in his outlook on life???)

    ***

    "Yes we can!"

    (..I feel your heat!)

    but, ..Yes we can WHAT, John?

    ..Yes we can what?

    ***

    I'm sorry that you hate the Chinese, Niall Ferguson, and Sarah Palin, ..but maybe those people have shown us some things from which we might learn.

    Let's keep our minds and our options open, okay?

     

14. JohnGelles  08/06/2010 04:09 AM

    Four comments, including my first one, and Bernard Schwartz' plan for government investment in new jobs to build and renew urgently required infrastructure with similar courage (relative to deficits, debt and inflation,) as that with which we faced the threat to the banking structure, has support from half of us.

    The plan deserves more than that. The plan is to reach the American voters and get them behind a plan for success. The plan must rescue 20 million Americans from the middle class the way the Bush-Obama stimulus has rescued Wall Street from the kind of window-jumping-out that the Great Depression set off before FDR took the helm.

    Charlie Rose has provided his significant audience with opinions in support of bold government investments in line with a Schwartz' plan, and NOT in support of it -- for fear of an un-repayable future national debt.

    What if Charlie Rose were as enthusiastic for current investment of borrowed and newly-created monies, to accomplish Schwartz' goals for our planet's future as he would be for a museum of architectural history or a plan to replicate Duke University several times over as Rose University with gargantuan contributions from the Rose audience of responsible serious people?

    Well my words sound un-serious. And that is the way too many of us are treating the jobs problem at hand -- and its potential to derail YES WE CAN and install NO WE CAN'T.

    Charlie Rose is in the middle. Two comments on this show seem to me to be on his right. Two others, including my own, are on the left. The net looks to me like a disaster. Who's to blame? The Obama whose face is on the plate I have over my fireplace. I swore when I bought it, I bust it into pieces, if the new President was too timid to prove WE CAN. If the deficit blues were to defeat the American people whom Lincoln, Grant and Sherman saved from ignominious defeat. The times,of course, are different. But the issues are much the same.

    Are we to leave it to the Chinese Communist Party and Red Army to show the world how to nation-build? Is government of, by and for the people now redefined by our allies from WW II as they have evolved through cultural revolution and military Marxism instead of military Keynesianism?

    Strange if that is true. It seemed at one time that the American dream knew the power of Benjamin Franklin's attachment to science and commerce in fair proportion. It seemed that we built a middle class to last -- when maybe we hadn't. Really Charlie, why do I watch you every night if Niall Ferguson can turn you away from Franklin and Lincoln right into the path of the oncoming bullet trains -- racing out of Asia to put us all in our place -- as a bunch of grubby liars with the brain of Sarah Palin.

     

15. NeilMacCallister  08/06/2010 01:14 AM

    Thank you, Mr. Schwartz, for putting your voice behind the prioritization of jobs and an educated workforce over the focus on bank bailouts, heathcare restructurings, and the new financial rules and penalties with which we have been so occupied.

    However, ..did anyone hear you?

    Today, Larry Kudlow televised a "rumor" he had heard: That "in two weeks" President Obama is set to roll out a large sum of money to repair homeowners who now owe more money on their homes than those homes are worth on the market.

    Let's not argue over whether or not that was originally implied from the TARP spending of public funds, ..or whether that relief should have come before any of the banks' relief.

    ..or whether such a move would be an ethical political game-strategy just before an election.

    But, will "salvaging" a surely select group of photo-op mortgage-debtors somehow help our economy as a whole?

    Will it provide any jobs? ..or produce any "education" for anyone?

     

16. charlizecourriers  08/05/2010 05:48 PM

    Who's on first, What's on second, and I don't know is in the Whitehouse. As Bernie said, They didn't even know.... Of course they didn't-politicians don't know because that is the safest place to be. Obama is just the same as his predecessors. Pass the bills, but don't come up with the (dollar) bills to pay them. This is true of the so called Health Care Bill. It isn't really paid for. None of the Obama Bills are. Especially the Wars.

    And now the argument is that it's too late to pay, i.e., new taxes.

    I think it's too late for Obama. He didn't expect a vortex when he started to campaign. And being a poorly educated lawyer, he is unprepared (has the smarts but lacks the imagination) for what is coming. As Bernie suggests, he ain't no Roosevelt, either. As to Mr. Schwartz's plan, recreating that world by spending a trillion deficit dollars is a nonstarter: that world is gone, gone, gone.

    America has been sold down the river by cheap politicians and businessmen who created an economy based on yellow slave labor (China) and brown slave labor (Mexico). How ironic that we have a President whose primary voting bloc sees itself as the heirs of the black slave laborers. And he isn't even black. So it goes!

     

17. JohnGelles  08/05/2010 03:04 PM

    Bernard Schwartz was a breath of fresh air. He did not give a prepared lesson at Harvard Business School on creating jobs with money from quantitative easing by the central bank or from selling bonds to money owners which add to the national debt.

    Instead he stayed on message that America "must" create jobs "now" or risk economic defeat by China and/or suicidal self-destruction by deficit hawks hoping the "economy" will "find the money" without government strategic leadership and a degree of "intervention".

    Bernard Schwartz spoke as a Democrat and businessman. He made sense if you were on his wavelength. If not, you echoed in your own mind the anti-Krugman school that is killing this great nation.

    Stories of the New Deal that was saved by WW II from passing on to us -- a nation flat broke in a world gone completely mad -- are misused by too many on the right.

    We received the Arsenal of Democracy and knowledge of the critical necessity for a Second Bill of [economic] Rights -- from FDR and people like Henry Kaiser and minds like Bernard Schwartz's.

    With that strength we later removed communist tyranny from the world's great game.

    Now we are engaged in competition to lead to cooperation between five great contenders, USA, EU, Russia, China, India -- with nary a Hitler or a Stalin anywhere in sight.

    We have to defeat Islamic terrorism for our own sake and that of the people who worship Allah.

    We have to employ every American and every person, from both the aforesaid super-nations and all the other nations, who wants the dignity of work and the money to pay his bills.

    That money must be managed more by brains like that of Bernard Schwartz than that of bankers like Timothy Geithner.

    Charlie Rose has at least given us these choices: he appears to favor the deficit-cautious over the spending-bold.

    That is too bad. That is where th President is. That is where the G20 is. But that is a losing hand.

    The winner will spend enough to stay on top of politics and the future of industrial might.

    We have the lead at the moment. If we lose it to Asia we may more resemble a has-been than the example Abraham Lincoln made possible.

    Lincoln saved the continent and freed the slaves -- partly with greenbacks. Greenbacks are needed now to save his legacy, free us from wage slavery (where it may exist ?) and create that government of, by and for the people, that Bernard Schwartz speaks for -- and well, if not like a trained professor of economic history.

     

18. REMant  08/05/2010 12:38 PM

    He is a traditional Keynesian, and I might say a New Dealer of the type that evolved in the late 30's when it was revealed that it did not matter how much money is spent, because it is all "money we owe ourselves."

    (As John Flynn in "The Roosevelt Myth" notes the first New Deal was the fiscally conservative platform FDR ran on, which saw only lip service; the second New Deal was embodied in the agencies struck down by the Supreme Ct; while the spending phase beginning in 1938 was the third.)

    Obviously the standard of living of the lower and middle classes have declined along with our infrastructure, but the reason for this has to be laid at the door of inflationary policies such as he advocates. And it has been going on a lot longer than just the past decade. More like the past half-century.

    However, there is no multiplier effect unless it is thru an increase in productivity, otherwise it just trickles down until it evaporates, as Hume saw in he 18th c when he looked at Spain.

    I am not sure that Keynes ever thought it would do anything else. His interest was in employing ppl in whatever way possible, and this notion of one of his students provided him with the argument that a given amount of govt money would go further than just its immediate recipients.

    I don't know when the idea began ssociating it with pump-priming, which has a different ancestry, one connected specifically with inflation. In 2008 I argued for the kind of long-term investment found in the TARP. For all its faults, that is not one of them. But I also argued for a balanced budget.

    I'll agree that deregulation was bad, and the financial rescue misguided, but these are not arguments for govt spending, only against monetarism.

    The question is what will make the private sector invest, and. it should be obvious, when it appears the country can return at least the investment, which it will not if 14-15% of the working population is on relief. This is what we tell everyone else.

    Wall St found inflation fine when it allowed equity and commodity prices to rise; now that it interferes with making a return it is anathema, and another reason to invest overseas. I'll agree, too, that the president has not been esp voluble on this question.