... does that prove that economics is not a science?Or on the other hand when they disagree on politics does it prove that political science is not a science?
Who knows.
But it does expand the saying "politics makes strange bedfellows" further and even into the saying "economics makes strange bedfellows".
This morning flagrant conservative Joe Scarborough of the MSNBC program "Morning Joe" was on the pessimistic side or the realist side ... depending on one's point of view.
Joe repeated some dire predictions he had made in 2004 about the Bush II administration's economic policies, which proved to be accurate.
He repeated that the Obama administration is no more exempt from the penalties of promiscuous economic policy than was the Bush II regime.
His basic argument is that a poison is not an antidote for a poisoned economy.
Wonder of wonders, Rolling Stone Magazine has an article that is in agreement with Morning Joe of all people:
It's over — we're officially, royally f**ked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire ...(Rolling Stone, emphasis added). Something is clearly not science, not accurate, and not even sane.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
We worship the fear god when we intrude by searching even into the crotches of Americans trying to catch their flight.
We worship the market god when we don't even consider looking into the darkness of the unAmerican AIG.
When we do both at the same time we worship the god of folly.
Reversing the roles of those gods, President Obama in his recent California town hall meeting, likened those who "qualified" for bailouts to terrorists with explosives strapped around them with their finger on the detonator button.
It is a crisis and we are hostage to them was his message.
In the final analysis, could this fit into the Pogo folder? We lost some "war on terrorism" because we did not know that we have found the enemy and it is us? Have we found that the warsters and banksters of the Bush II administration end up being our enemies? With friends like them who needs enemies?
If so, then the theme song for the Bush II regime must become I Fought The Law And The Law Won.
Send in someone who really knows how to deal with those who have the finger on the detonator.
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