July 2010 Archives

Dear America,

The Republicans in congress started the Obama years with six rounds in their political revolver, and they have fired all six at their collective foot already, though we won't know if they hit the mark until November. The first was their criticism of the bank bailout, in which they conveniently omitted the fact that the banks could put us into the conundrum that required the TARP only because of twenty years or more of Republican winnowing away of regulatory control of our financial system. The Second was their objection to the financial recovery legislation that pumped billions of dollars into the economy, reversing the pattern of job loss and now actually creating a flow in the right direction for the first time since the autumn before George Bush left office. The third was their opposition to the health care reform effort, which started out as the intention to create a "single payer system" like that in effect in the majority of the industrialized nations in western Europe and most of the rest of the world. They succeeded in killing it and forcing the Democrats and the Obama administration to settle for health insurance reform, which the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) then managed to mischaracterize to the extent that it is regarded in much of the nation as federal intrusiveness. But ultimately it will be seen as the ability to access healthcare for more than thirty million of our friends, relatives and neighbors who had to do without until now, necessitated by the Republicans decision to allow medical costs to go uncontrolled by refusing to allow universal health care. Fourth was their successful effort to impede progress in the areas of energy and environmental legislation. Frankly though, the profile of that effort never reached the level that the public noticed it, and until the smog is so thick that you can eat it and gasoline costs ten dollars a gallon, the public will ignore the issues anyway. Fifth was financial reform, which the Republicans managed to water down in significant ways that will become clearer as campaigning begins, specifically with regard to the Republicans' resistance to assessing the banks themselves to fund what was to be essentially an escrow account from which the government could take money to pay for liquidation of troubled banks, thus obviating future tax payer funded efforts. And sixth was campaign finance reform that would limit corporate electoral influence, which the Republicans in the Senate just recently filibustered to death. But that issue will be on the docket over and over again from now until November, so the Republicans will continually have to defend their allegiance to corporate America in order to gain the favor of popular America, no small feat I would venture.

That should have been the self-destructive end of it, but fortunately for the Democrats, the Republicans have now reloaded and they are about to fire round number seven. They did the Democrats the favor of protesting like stuck pigs about everything suggested by the liberal Democratic establishment on the issue of immigration reform; no matter what shape immigration reform legislation takes, there will be something in it for everyone to hate-- it was a no win issue for the Democrats anyway. So the fact that no bill ever reached the floor to get the attention of the electorate takes it off the slate of issues that will decide our next congress's character, and both the Republicans and the Democrats will be hurt by the failure to pass a law, each in a different constituency: its a wash. But the Bush tax cuts will expire on January 1, 2011, and the issue of extending them is about to hit the news. The tax cut package included not just a three or four percent reduction in the taxes of the richest five percent of Americans, it also included measures that reduced the taxes of those whose incomes were below $250,000-- the "middle class" that President Obama said would not experience tax increases under his administration. So, if the Bush tax cuts expire, while taxes on the rich will increase, so will taxes on the middle class, and that is shot number seven, which will be heard around the nation. I'm betting that the Republicans in congress, in particular in the Senate where they can stop legislation even though they are in the minority, think that they can extort extension of the tax cuts for the rich by preventing legislation to extend the middle class cuts unless the rich are included. But just between you and me, America, that dog won't hunt in the immortal words of our last Democratic president. He said those words to the Rcc and Newt Gingrich when they used the same tactic in attempting to extort approval of a draconian budget out of Mr. Clinton by refusing to fund continuing government operations until he signed the budget. The government shut down for a day or two and the public was outraged. Gingrich conceded the fight. That's going to look familiar in short order.

The Republicans in the Senate will no doubt claim that the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in both houses are responsible for impending tax hikes on the middle class because they did not negotiate and pass some form of extension of the Bush cuts. They are assuming that the public will not separate their tax cuts from those of the rich when they consider the issue. Put another way, the Republicans think that if they say that the choice was the Democrats' and that the Democrats decided not to extend the middle class cuts, the public will accept that claim at face value. But they are overreaching on two counts. First, the Democrats are not going to sit silent while they do so. It will be pointed out to the American people in every news cycle that the Democrats tried to pass a bill extending only the middle class tax cuts, but the Senate Republicans prevented it because the bill didn't include tax cuts for the rich-- a double whammy: a Republican finger in the eye of the middle class with a pat on the back for the rich. Second, even if the Democrats never say a word, the American people are not stupid. Between Republicans' support for campaign financing by corporations and their attempts to lower taxes for their CEO's, the Republicans will have a lot of explaining to do. It should be a good show. So break a leg, you Republicans. Break a leg.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Yesterday, the Republican minority in the U.S. Senate asserted its control over the legislative process one more time by preventing the Senate Campaign Finance Committee from reporting out for debate on the floor of the Senate a bill intended to mitigate the pro-plutocracy effects of the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case. The case was a successful constitutional challenge to the set of laws that regulated corporate political campaign contributions and corporate participation in federal election campaigns. The conservative decision in the case favored allowing corporate participation beyond what the law permited, and it is the very decision that President Obama criticized, much to the overt displeasure of Justice Alito, at the State of the Union Address.

During the Supreme Court argument presented by the next Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, the Chief Justice asserted that the law was paternalistic-- that the public was being presumed to be incapable of controlling corporate campaign activities without government intervention. He argued that shareholders could vote against such campaigning by selling their stock, or by implication, casting their votes at annual meetings. Kagan's response was that many people were like her in that they own mutual funds, and they don't necessarily know what is in them, rather than confronting him with the fact that his argument was a red herring. The Chief Justice's questions were just as inept, and frankly irrelevant, as Kagan's answers because the question of constitutionality does not turn on whether people are capable of doing without the law in question. The question is whether The Constitution proscribes the law, but that is all moot now. The old campaign finance law is stricken from the books, but what are we going to do from this point forward. The Republicans say nothing, and though in the minority, that is what they have accomplished thus far-- they have ensured that the Senate can do nothing.

But a new law is necessary because corporations obscure their identities behind subordinate corporate entities and euphemistically named political action committees.  And the power of corporate wealth in campaigning gets used before shareholders, who actually own that wealth, can find out about it, unless of course they work in the corporate board room or in its executive offices. So the real owners of the power wielded by corporations, the shareholders, are never consulted about how the power of their wealth is being used, and they can address the political choices of the management in that regard only after their campaign decision has had its undesired effects, all as a consequence of expenditure of money from the corporate fisc on something outside of the corporation's business.

Campaigning by corporations is controlled only by corporate bylaws, which in reality the shareholders cannot change if executives don't want them changed because in the cases of most public corporations, the bulk of shares are controlled by powerful individuals who control corporate management to the exclusion of the average small share holder, even though the majority of shares may be owned by such small share holders. Share holder meetings are not accessible to the majority of small share holders, so without the protection of some kind of law, the individual has essentially no power to control corporate political activities in real time, and thus corporations, in reality the surrogates of a stratum of the American polity motivated by avarice and empowered by their wealth, arrogate the power of millions of people's money and use it for their own personal, political, and indirectly, financial gain.

Though corporations are not people, and so should have no right of free speech, they are people under the law, allowing the Supreme Court to "guaranty" their free speech rights in election campaigning under the Citizens United holding. It is accepted legal doctrine that corporations are persons under the law, but that is nothing but a convenient legal fiction, and it should be limited when it comes to fundamental rights like free speech; after all, who ever spoke to a corporation, and for that matter, who ever put one in jail for corrupt practices or violating campaign finance laws. But because of Chief Justice Roberts and the conservative wing of The Court, no such limitation is going to happen. The fact that corporations can therefore act with impunity, shielding the individuals who wield their power from the consequences of its misuse, did not save the law. So now, the rights of corporations are not the same as the rights of individual people even though unlike people, corporations are inanimate and immune to the consequences that we people must bear. In fact, corporate rights are greater because the political weight of corporations has been multiplied by their impunity.

That is why the congress is trying to promulgate a new law that will at least make candidates acknowledge what corporate entities contributed to pay for a given ad. And that is what the Republicans are against, crowing at the Democrats all the while, "Who's your daddy," as if they just won the big game. In November, it will be up to you to answer that question. Who's your daddy, America? Who's your daddy?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Tim Geithner made the Sunday morning television rounds this week, and he addressed the persistent questions in the usual way...for the most part. But buried within his litany, which we have heard over and over again, was an interesting paradox. Geithner was asked two related questions about job growth. First he was asked about the prospect of a double dip recession along with the pessimism of the American people on the subject of the economy, that is, the fear of a second round of negative growth and job loss. His response was that businesses now have money to spend, which is a positive sign, but that they are still wary of investing it in their businesses out of uncertainty-- they would rather give overtime to their existing employees than hire new ones for fear that if the recession rears its ugly head again, those new employees will have to be laid off. But later in his interview with David Gregory of "Meet the Press," and only moments later, he was asked for his opinion on the effect of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and about loosening credit for small business. And while he supported letting the tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% of Americans lapse, he felt that credit for small businesses had to be stimulated so as to precipitate job growth. That is the persistent internal contradiction in the supply side mentality of economic thinkers today: we have to lend money to business so that they can spend it in order to create demand. In other words, businesses that are running profitably have to be given the opportunity to borrow money: they don't want to spend their money for fear of having to retrench later, so we should loosen credit to give them access to someone else's money to spend. To Mr. Geithner and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc), which uses that equation as a mantra, I say this. The problem with our economy is not that business doesn't have enough money; it is that business doesn't have enough customers who have money.

I made reference in a recent letter to you, America, to an article by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in The Nation. Reich made the overall point that the rich in this country are rich to a record degree, and that the problem with our economy is that they have all the money and that there is not enough left for the people who might actually spend it. He used as fodder for his argument the similarity of the proportion of the nation's income taken by the richest Americans now and that taken by them just before The Depression. That is half the answer to the question of how we get out of this recession, and it is still a recession whether the Gross Domestic Product is growing or not if you don't have a job. If our economy depends on investment by the rich, we don't need to give them more income by reducing their taxes. We need them to spend their money-- and not by buying stocks in the stock market; with the exception of initial public offerings, all that does is move money from one pocket to another, but it creates nothing. We need them to buy commercial bonds from businesses that are seeking to expand physical plant. We need them to put their money in local banks so that those institutions can lend money for mortgages and new cars, even if the interest rate is low. We need them to fund innovative, but risky, ventures and to lend money to entrepreneurs with ideas that may be successful, but then again may not be. We need them to take risks that will actually stimulate job growth so that those with less, including the taxpayers, don't have to take those risks. But they won't do that, so government has to. Thus, contrary to the Rcc philosophy, the rich do not have paternalistic feelings toward the rest of us. They will not use their money to help us out of the hole they dug for us. So giving them more by reducing their taxes will not make our lives better; it will only make the rich richer-- it will swell their bank accounts, not ours, which brings me to the second half of the solution.

Recently released government statistics show that we are liquidating our debt at a record pace. The amount of debt retained by the American people as a whole is going down dramatically, and that is because we have all finally learned the truth about ourselves. If there was anything good about this deep recession it was that it was like a mirror held up to our collective face. And what it revealed was an average American less like Dorian Gray than like his picture. The recession was created by the ugly side of us: excessive consumption, greed, short sightedness, envy and financial narcissism. We learned, as we should have. But the cure for our moral decay is long term, and it will be painful. Geithner made reference to pent up demand when he discussed the future of our economy, but what he was referring to in reality was the level of gluttony that characterized our spending as individuals prior to this recession. We have all learned a lesson that will last for decades: eventually the bill comes due. There is no pent up demand in the wake of our economic collapse. There is only a hard learned lesson. We cannot save ourselves, and for that matter our children and grandchildren who will have to repay our debt, by going back to the excesses of the past, but demand must come from somewhere before private enterprise will create new jobs, the liquid that will prime our economic pump. So we must find a source of demand other than insane self-indulgence. That is where government spending comes in.

There is a sense in which government spending is an addiction as dangerous as the personal spending that in reality was at the core of our collapse. But it is like a tonic in the appropriate doses. To the extent that government spending constitutes wages in the pockets of workers who will spend it every week, it is salubrious for our economy, even though we will have to pay it back eventually. By priming the economic pump in this way, we create more money with which to fill the bucket later. Simple as that metaphor is, it is apt. When the Republicans in the Senate insist that extended unemployment benefits be paid for, they ignore the fact that the extension is only to further prime a pump that is not yet producing. And it may not be the last of the priming necessary. If we do not prime the pump sufficiently, all that we have poured down its throat will be wasted and lost. The time for prudence in spending was during the years when they controlled spending. Now, their claims that we should reduce public spending are hypocritical parsimony that will result in failure, not the virtue of fiscal responsibility that they claim for themselves. Let us hope, America, that the Obama administration and our Democratic congress see that, because if we tighten the federal government's belt now, the Rcc prediction that we will drown in debt will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The November election is important, but we have to keep our eyes on the bucket when we cast our votes.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As we approach the November elections, we are understandably inundated with positions taken by politicians seeking either elevation to office or retention of it. That is the nature of politics, and until an alternative is invented, it is the best way for us to choose who shall best govern us. But the frustration indigenous to the process-- the persistence of insincerity and self-serving rhetoric in politics-- makes me despair each time we go through a crucial election like the midterm election coming up this year. There is much more at stake than usual in the midterm: the economy continues to advance with no better than faltering steps, we are engaged in two wars, neither of which has much of a prospect of advancing the causes of world peace and human freedom, our ethos is under siege from those who would characterize as patriotic what in other times would be seen as crass and selfish, the moralistic right is attacking those different from them and is trying to prevent them from enjoying basic human needs like the commitment of marriage, monogamy, mutual responsibility and loving companionship, oil contaminates not just our waters, but the very cultures of some of our people, avarice rules on Wall Street, and the list goes on and on.

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana gets on television puling about the moratorium on deepwater drilling, drilling such as what has just devastated Louisiana's coastline, after puling in the past about the role that the federal government played in allowing the devastation caused by deepwater drilling without a good contingency plan that such as would envision the unforeseeable accident that has already occurred-- never once mentioning that our scientists still don't know how to cope with such a disaster. Yet, no one throws a shoe at him the way an Iraqi journalist did at George Bush when he boasted about the success of the American effort in that country. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner spout vague platitudes about the free market and big government in their protests of a financial reform plan that probably does too little rather than too much to reign in corporate greed and speculation in our financial markets, which together have created a sinister plutocracy motivated only by increasing wealth far beyond what anyone could possibly use. The talking heads on television promote themselves in the name of informing us, and they do more to promote their own political goals than they do to help us to choose our own. There is even opposition to a proposal by Congressman John Larson of Connecticut that all campaigning be done with federal financing only, thus curtailing the impact of obscene wealth on our government institutions. It is all beyond cynicism. It is dastardly.

There are certain things that we can demand of our congressmen that might make a difference, but we would have to be the loudest voices in politics to accomplish them. First, we could demand the elimination in the U.S. Senate of the sixty vote filibuster cloture rule. If a filibuster could be terminated by a simple majority, it would be effectively eliminated as would be the very anti-democratic ability of forty one Republican senators, or Democratic senators for that matter, to prevent the representatives of the majority of the people of this country from doing America's business. That probably comes before any other reform in its significance for change. The fact that we as a nation permit a minority to effectively control government is incomprehensible, and it is at the heart of our problems. I assume that filibuster democracy is not what we are trying to bring to Iraq and Afghanistan. But we also must do something about the role of money in politics. Campaign reform is the key on that issue, and it may be that Congressman Larson's bill is the right solution, but whether it is or not, something must be done or we risk the rise of the modern equivalent of feudalism in which those with wealth rule over the rest of us as though we were serfs, only using financial power in place of cross bows and maces. As to the rights of all regardless of sexual preference, gender or history, if we do not all stand our ground, the next frontier may be sex outside marriage, or worse yet, sex for any purpose other than procreation, the risk there being that to which people are exposed in countries like Iran: stoning-- as primitive a punishment as fits the primitive intent to control the private conduct of others that has nothing to do with one's own life and wellbeing. There is the need for financial reform, equalization of opportunity across race and gender, tolerance of diversity, even on moral issues, and as many other issues as there are Americans, I would guess. But we must start somewhere, and I hope that we start now. If we all let our representatives know how we feel about the most important of these issues-- in my opinion, the filibuster rule that is the enabler of the tyranny we are threatened by with regard to all the others-- we may get some surprising results.

Elimination of the sixty vote cloture in favor of fifty votes will revitalize the election process and reinvigorate popular enthusiasm for truly democratic government. It will re-empower the majority and prevent the kind of didactic de facto control of our politics that the Republican minority has exerted for the past two years as they propose nothing while criticizing and thwarting every effort. They are thus never wrong because they never make anything happen, while the opposition is doomed to fail in consequence of their obstruction, which has the unfortunate consequence of misery, inertia and frustration for all of us. And it is all because as a minority, they can bring the majority to its knees. Think about it, America, and write to your congressmen when you do. It's time to end the Un-Democracy.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I was flipping through the channels on television on Monday evening when I happened upon Democratic Senator Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, addressing the Senate on CSPAN. Of course, he wasn't really addressing the Senators, just their empty seats, but that is often the way it works-- being in congress is all about making a record, you know. Reid was talking about the Republicans and the fact that they had three times prevented the passage of an extension of unemployment benefits for people who had been out of work for more than a year. The cost of the extension was $36 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to a budget deficit for the year well in excess of $1 trillion, but the Republicans refused to pass it unless it was "paid for," whatever that means. They were not proposing to cut any particular programs to do so, mind you-- they weren't suggesting bringing any troops home early or increasing taxes on any hedge fund executives-- but they wanted the program paid for before they would support it. Reid pointed out that the economy grows by $2 for every $1 of unemployment benefits paid, which makes sense though I don't know that it is true, and he recounted the tale of one of his constituents who had looked for work not just in Nevada, but in neighboring states as well for two years without success. He also reported the comments of two Republicans, one of whom said that the extended benefits would just be used to buy drugs, and the other of whom said that the unemployed were lazy and just didn't want to work. I flipped on.

Then, I came across Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader of the Senate, being interviewed on the subject on CNN. He essentially refused to answer the questions put to him and opted instead to answer the questions he wanted to be asked, so his responses were the same old basic talking points-- in other words, evasions. But he made the legitimate point that we are spending money as a nation that posterity will have to pay back, albeit avoiding the fact that he was in the Senate spending most of that money when his party was in the majority. He continued on with the old criticisms of the Obama strategy for getting us out of our economic hole, implicitly asserting that a year and a half was enough time to fill the hole that had been dug over the past twenty years, and that the way out of this mess was to extend the tax cuts for the rich that he and President George Bush had arranged for them, and to find a way to lend more money to businesses. I have questions to ask about those propositions, and I expect to write to you soon about them, but for the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that those are valid points. In fact, McConnell said that these were the issues that would decide the election in November: do we want to keep adding to the national debt and expanding the role of government or do we want to pay down the debt and show some restraint on spending government money to subsidize our economic recovery, which McConnell says is not working. It's a false choice mind you, but everyone seems to believe that votes will be cast on that basis. But that isn't the choice at all.

The way I see it, we are in the process of deciding what kind of a country we are going to be for the next century or so. We are deciding who we are as a nation, as a people, as human beings. Nearly ten percent of us don't have jobs. That means that ten percent of our children will go to bed with less to eat than they would like. Ten percent of them will have to worry about where they will be living in six months, and whether their parents will be able to afford them. And ten percent of the parents in the country will have to contemplate the fact that their children are worrying about such things instead of studying or playing as children should do. They will worry about their homes and whether they can stay in them, and about how they will put the next meal on the table while the Republicans argue that they are getting fat and lazy on three hundred bucks a week. Those are the important facts along with this one.

Though this is metaphorical, I think it is accurate. As a nation, we are like a person walking down the street thinking about our future: about our job and paying off our mortgage and putting aside enough money to retire and insure our health and our family's security-- all legitimate concerns. And we come across a family looking for change on the sidewalk. The parents look up at us and ask us if we can spare some change so that they and the children can take the bus to the grocery store and get enough food to bring home and feed themselves for a few more days. We reach into our pocket and find some loose change, not folding money, just loose change. Do we give it to them or not. We do have all those big money concerns, and they are legitimate, but the question for the moment is, do we give our loose change to people who need it just to survive. What do you think, America?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It always concerns me when I hear people with a public forum say things that are superficially persuasive, but foolish at their cores. An example is the constant harping of the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) on the size of the major legislative packages that are coming out of congress lately. Both the health insurance bill and now the financial reform bill were approximately 2,300 pages long, and most "omnibus" bills, that is groups of individual legislative elements packaged together to create a larger, overall purpose, are of substantial size, whether passed by Republican or Democratic congresses. But the parallel notion that the length of such bills makes them so ponderous as to make comprehending them impossible is just absurd, as is the notion that a bill should be shorter because shortness is some kind of virtue.

The fact is that legislation as a process is very complex, and I don't mean just that it requires so much compromise and negotiation. There are the details that have to be included. So, for example, when a bill creates a commission to oversee a process, much of the bill's printed volume must be devoted not just to the powers of the commission, but to how the commissioners will be appointed, how they will be convened, how much they will be paid, where they may come from and what their backgrounds must be, or more likely, not be. However, the very essence of the bill, that is the powers of the commission and the duties as well, are often laid out in a small percentage of the pages of the bill. And as to the burden of reading those pages, they are not like the pages of a good book, which may comprise 300-500 words of text. Often the pages of a bill are in outline form, and they may have as few as 100 words on them, perhaps even less.

Anyone who wants to find grounds to criticize recent legislation will be un-dissuaded by these observations, and may even be tempted to trivialize them, but my purpose in making them is as it has often been in other contexts: each of us as a member of the electorate of a free and democratic nation must begin to think with his or her own heads, not someone else's. With the internet available to the vast majority of Americans, there is no excuse for people failing to read perhaps as few as fifty pages, as little as a few thousand words, in order to discover the truth for themselves when it comes to criticism of the course our government is taking, and more importantly, deciding how to vote. When the administrative details and the overviews are set aside, the meaning of virtually any bill is accessible to anyone who really wants to understand it, and we must begin wanting to understand those meanings for ourselves or we risk succumbing to the manipulation and deceit of political forces often directed by those with ulterior motives contrary to our needs. We must begin answering our questions for ourselves rather than trusting those with political ambitions to explain everything to us.

I wrote to you some weeks ago about the financial reform bill, some time about when it came out of Senator Dodd's banking committee, and I then said the same thing. I thought then that there were provisions in the bill that were too weak, but that it was certainly an advance over the state of affairs before the bill was fashioned, and if nothing else, a good start. It appeared at that time that the bill faced minor revisions, but that it would be submitted to the Senate more or less as it was, but that appears not to be the case. For one thing, the provision of a several billion dollar fund comprising money assessed against the banks to be used to obviate the expenditure of public money when financial institutions became "to big to fail," in other words, the creation of an escrow account from bank money so as to make taxpayer money unnecessary when steps had to be taken...that provision is gone now in favor of a provision that makes it necessary to fund any bank dissolution with creditor and shareholders' money. But what if those funds are not enough? What if, as was the case with the last bank bailout, something must be done to make whole other institutions to keep them from failing? The people to whom those questions should be asked are the Republicans in the Senate who insisted on the change, and they should be asked whenever McBoehnell or some other congressional leader spouts his obstructionistic objections to the bill by saying that it now represents a guaranty that there will be future bank bailouts. Though they may be right, it is only because they engineered the excision from the bill of the provision that would have prevented them.

What I am saying is not that you should take my word for how the bill works. You should read the essential fifty pages of the bill and then begin asking questions-- not my questions but yours. And when you have done so, decide how you are going to vote in November and make someone-- anyone who will listen-- how you are going to vote and why. Our country needs to be saved right now, and we have to do it, America. No one else will.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

By a vote of sixty to thirty nine, the Senate has now passed what can only be described as the Democratic financial reform bill with one Democrat voting against because he felt the bill too limited, and three Republicans defecting from the Republican party phalanx, one of them being the temporary Massachusetts senator, Down Town Scotty Brown. Brown was a shooting point guard when he played basketball in college-- I say "shooting point guard" because he loved to be the center of attention and thus shot the ball whenever he got the chance-- but I guess he learned enough before he graduated to figure out when he was being set up for a fall rather than a shot. Apparently he figured out that his fifteen minutes of fame for his vocal opposition to the bill was also his political obituary, written and published by his friends in the Republican Party, who by the way remained opportunistically and pusillanimously silent while Scotty played the point. But the effort to scuttle the bill, a half hearted one at that, failed and Brown is largely to blame, or given credit if you happen to have a sane opinion about the banks and Wall Street. I thought he would come to his senses for the health insurance reform bill, but better late than never. Only time will tell whether he has redeemed himself in the eyes of Massachusetts voters, but the Republicans are not likely thank him any time soon.

The Republicans in both houses are already loading their pistols and taking aim at their feet over this bill, and while John Boehner of The House is shouldering his manly responsibility and walking out in front of his troops with his six shooter aimed squarely at his big toe, Mitch McConnell isn't saying much. He is deferring to Senator Shelby of Alabama, who ironically appeared with Senator Dodd, the prime mover of the bill, on one of the Sunday political talk shows a couple of months ago to appear conciliatory and amenable to compromise over what he conceded on that occasion were resolvable differences. Apparently his attitude has changed, and now he is opining that government regulation is not preferable to financial industry rapacity such as caused the economic debacle that we are all now forced to endure. According to Shelby, the bill is a "2,300 page legislative monster" that he claims "does little to make our system safer." Note that he is not recommending any alternative. Of course Mitch McConnell, when he said what little he has said, claimed that the bill, which gives the government the ability to identify banks getting so large or acting so irresponsibly as to represent a threat to our financial system and then to dismantle them at shareholder and creditor expense, effectively guarantees the very thing that the law is going to prevent: future bailouts of banks. Unfortunately, their "up is down" strategy seems to be working in some quarters, but our president is committed to wrangling his party into fulfilling his progressive campaign promises regardless of the electoral consequences-- principle over self-interest: who ever heard of such a thing in Washington. The question is, will the American body politic come to realize that the thing for which he takes the greatest criticism, the continuing dearth of jobs, first was not a phenomenon of his creation, and second, cannot be addressed in eighteen months, or perhaps even in four years. Will America realize that the Republican solution, always tax cuts for the rich and lending more money to those who spent their own money unwisely or at least to no avail, is the same stuff of which our current nightmare is made.

It still shocks me, especially after the past two years of hearing them make non-credible representations about the way things are and should be, that the Republicans and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) have not been pilloried on a mass scale for what they have done. First, they (albeit with some Democratic weak mindedness at their backs) presided over a continual three decades long winnowing away of the constraints that held business in check-- usury laws, restraints on banking practices such as the Glass Steagall Act, tax reform that put more money in the pockets of those who already had too much. But then, even in the face of the consequences of their support and implementation of greed as a credo, they cleave to their "principles" and openly demand more of the same with the same justification as they used all those years ago when the erosion of our nation's financial ethic began: what is good for business is good for us all. That is demonstrably incorrect, or should I say that it has been demonstrated to be incorrect...painfully. Yet many people continue to buy it, even in the face of the evidence to the contrary that is all around them. And now, they vote almost as a unanimous bloc to prevent efforts to change the self-destructive course that our nation has been allowed to take for the past thirty or thirty five years in the area of macro-finance. When will we hold them to account, America? When will someone draw back the curtain?

The Laissez-Faire policies promoted by the Rcc have failed. The "free market" that they tout as the solution to all economic problems has been accomplishing nothing less than the creation of more of them, and massive ones at that. The amassing of obscene amounts of wealth at the top of our economic ladder has concentrated power in perhaps one percent of the American population creating in our society a plutocracy that has managed to co-opt our democracy with the insertion of Republican politicians into our democratic institutions, and a large segment of the American electorate applauds as they take a bow. You may remember Robert Reich, the diminutive, bearded economist/sage who served President Clinton as his Secretary of Labor and has also advised President Obama. In an article he wrote for the July 7, 2010 edition of The Nation, an admittedly liberal news journal, he said as much, and he added these statistics as support for the contention. In 1928, the year before what is largely accepted as the beginning of the Great Depression, 1% of the population of this country owned 23.9% of the nation's wealth. Gradually, after the regulation of our financial institutions that followed upon the crash of our economy in the early thirties, that distribution of wealth returned to a more reasonable level in the seventies when that same 1% held less than nine percent of the wealth. But thirty five years later in 2007, the year before our most recent economic calamity, the richest 1% once again owned nearly twenty four percent of the wealth again. The point of citing those statistics is not to inspire envy; it is much more practical than that.

Reich's point, and one that I have been trying to make for years as well, is that with so much of the wealth created by working people being siphoned off for the enrichment of the plutocrat class, there is not enough to fund the consumption from which all that wealth was generated. To put it in an idiom that even they can understand, the rich keep killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. So apparently, America, it falls to us to save the rich from themselves, because it seems that the Republicans never read that fairy tale. All they see is a good meal. If for not other reason than an instinct for self-preservation, vote, America, and do it wisely. Because if we allow the rich and the Rcc to govern, they're not just going to eat their lunch, they're going to eat ours too.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I continue to be bemused by the inclinations of the American body politic, as do most people who regard themselves as liberals. What seem to us to be obvious, even immutable truths appear to be questions in the minds of the majority of those who plan to vote in November. The Democratic congress and the Obama administration have been deemed to be failures by most potential voters if the polls are to be simplisticly interpreted as they reflect disapproval of both by voters, but the nature of their failure eludes me. Is it the lack of progress toward the implementation of the Democratic Party's platform or is it the platform itself, despite the fact that the same majority voted for it a mere two years ago. Is it the inability of the Obama administration to undo what existed when it came into existence, or is it the course taken by The Administration in its attempt to do so. And the polls do not contradict each other numerically, though the questions they ask and the exact issues they address vary, a fact that the pontificators of both political poles never acknowledge-- those from the Republican conservative complex regard the polls as harbingers of impending doom for the Democratic congressional majorities while the same data say to us progressives that you, America, are just disenchanted with Washington, and that could just mean that both parties have a lot of explaining to do. What I don't understand is why these very polls on which everyone is doting can't do a better job of identifying the cause of the dismay of the electorate. After all of the money spent by the polling organizations, some of which are decidedly non-partisan, and given all of the times that people have been called on the phone to be asked what they think, why do we still not know what they think, much less why. I suspect that the dissatisfaction is a function of the same thing as is the failure of the polls to detail it accurately: both the pollsters and the politicians continue to ask the wrong questions. Let me be specific.

The new financial regulation package contains a provision based on what is called the Volcker Rule. I say "based on" because the Volcker Rule itself is much sterner stuff than the provision in the financial reform bill. The rule propounded by Volcker, himself a former fed chairman, was that bankers could not make proprietary trades in securities if they are selling securities to their customers, which was part of the substantive effect of the Glass-Steagall Act repealed by the second to last Republican congress, albeit with the signature of then President Bill Clinton, obviously a Democrat. In other words, the banks could not make money off of an inherent conflict of interest by acting as both investors and investment counselors. While Volcker has leaned that way since he resigned from his position in the fed decades ago, the rule itself was dubbed the Volcker Rule after Volcker brought it up again in his capacity as advisor to President Obama. The Volcker Rule aims to prevent exactly the conduct for which Goldman Sachs is being not just sued, but prosecuted, yet it has been diluted largely because Republicans in the Senate were not willing to vote for the bill unless the dilution occurred. In my mind, that begs the question of whether the people of this country, not just those on Wall Street, want companies like Goldman Sachs to continue to have the right to do what they did, and if not, how do they feel about people who work to protect that right, but pollsters don't ask that question-- for that matter, the Democrats don't ask it either, at least not so that anyone actually hears them. And then there's the BP oil spill.

Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, has made a public spectacle of himself over the past three months bellowing like a wounded animal about the spill and the federal response. And now, he is not only complaining about the federal response, he is objecting to the attempts by The President to halt further risky activities like those that led to the BP spill, that is deep water drilling for oil, until the world can have an assurance not that such a thing won't happen again, but just that the company that causes such a spill will know what to do about it and be able to do it. Jindal, who advocated deep water drilling as a key principle of his political philosophy, has not only refused to rethink his position, he has gone further out in that direction. Even though he now knows that deep water drilling with nothing but our current technology to protect us causes disasters, that we are as a species out on a flying trapeze without a net, he insists that we continue to drill in deep water with abandon, which begs this question: how do you feel about the BP oil spill, and how do you feel about people who want to continue to take the risk that another will occur. But again, the pollsters don't ask that question, and also again, the Democrats don't seem to be asking either, or at least no publicly, and certainly no loudly. We see Jindal crying his crocodile tears on the evening news, but no one says, "Hey look. Jindal is crying crocodile tears."

I don't like to think in these terms, but I am starting to feel that the Democrats will deserve being cast out if that happens, not because they do not merit our trust, but because they are letting all of this happen without doing anything about it. Maybe the Republicans are just a superior fighting force to the Democrats not because they are smarter, but just because they have the will that the Democrats lack. Maybe what this country needs is a party with a strong will rather than a party with a strong moral sense. Nah. But that's what's coming unless the right people pull their heads out of the dark place that they seem to be in. I mean us, America. It's now or never. Now or never.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As we approach the November elections, the state of the economy becomes ever more momentous, and ever more debatable. There is no doubt that the position of McBoehnell (McConnell and Boehner) and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc) will be as it has been-- that this is the Democrats' recession now, and that President Obama's leadership has not brought us out of the economic doldrums that have plagued us for nearly two years. But that position is much like most of the other condemnatory arguments made by the Rcc, and by McBoehnell as the Republican leadership in congress in particular, in that it states the obvious truth as a premise for the wrong conclusion. The conclusion they urge in this case is that The President's stimulus plan has failed, and that the Democrats do not have the right answers to the questions that our prosperous future depends upon. But that is a palpable oversimplification that, if persuasive to enough majorities in enough elections in the fall, will lead us back from what progress we have made to a dismal economic fate that will this time threaten to become the new state of American affairs, and two articles in the Friday New York Times support that notion.

The first is an opinion piece written by Paul Krugman in which he notes that job creation has been disappointing of late, though first quarter corporate profits were up 44% over a year ago. He also points out that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up to about ten thousand from eight thousand a year or two ago, though it has fallen significantly recently, which suggests that business has done pretty well under the President's and the Democrats' chosen course; usually, the Rcc loves such a result, though they will do anything to avoid attributing it to the opposition's policies, but this time it is not enough for them. They must rather seize on other statistics, such as the fact that business spending on new physical plant and equipment is down to the lowest share of gross domestic product in forty years and that business use of manufacturing capacity is up over the past year but far below its previous highs, as fodder for the Rcc argument that the stimulus hasn't produced jobs. It is a desperate resort necessitated by the fact that average Americans continue to be unemployed in vast numbers, and they cast the votes, not corporations. But the argument is logically false in that these are all expected metrics in a time of economic recession. They are symptoms of our economic crisis, and they would be present no matter what we did, and for as long as the recession went on, even well into the recovery. They were not caused by what we have done to address them, but rather are reflections of the depth of the crisis that the Obama administration and the Democrats in congress inherited from their respective predecessors-- to reference The President's analogy, the ones who drove the car into the ditch. They are a function of supply side economics and the notion that if you promote business, everyone profits, and a continuation of that policy is what the Republicans propose to give us to get us out of the crisis that that very policy created. That is why President Obama doesn't want to give them back the keys. Not only is the car still in the ditch, but they want to drive the car further into it.

Krugman's point is that business will not invest in physical plant and equipment when the plant and equipment they already have are not being fully utilized. In other words, lending them money and reducing their taxes will not yield new jobs, and the reason is the subject of the second article, which is on the front page of the business section and is entitled "June Sales were Tepid at Low End and High." Retail sales in June were disappointing, though they were up somewhat in May, and they were disappointing in both high end and low end retail commerce, but in the economy retailers, the big box stores, in particular-- where the unemployed shop. At the same time, the conclusion reached by the government was that consumers were holding back on spending. They note that outstanding consumer credit in May declined for the fourth consecutive month, falling by $9.1 billion-- 4.5% of outstanding debt. People are paying off the ocean of debt they accrued during the boom period that the Rcc effectively promised would continue forever if we just let them reduce taxes on the rich and lend money to anyone who wants it so that they can spend more than they have in the name of supporting American business. What they promised was substantive wealth, but what we got was an illusion of wealth: the proverbial bubble full of nothing but the fiction that everyone can be rich. And coping with the disastrous impact of that fiction is why pumping money into the economy by increasing the national debt has not yet yielded the desired result. The problem is not deficit spending and the huge debt, it is that we need to continue to spend, even if it does increase the debt. The debt can wait, and it will wait even longer if we do not further stimulate the economy now. Consumption is what will stimulate the economy, not increased supply that no one can afford. The Republican obsession with debt reduction is the simple answer that Mark Twain said existed for almost any problem: obvious, simple, and also wrong.

So, America, when you go to the polls in November, be careful what you wish for. If you heed the Rcc's siren call, you may well stop the growth of our national debt, but you may also stop our movement in the right direction in its tracks. Consider this: jobs may not be plentiful, but new ones are being created every month while they were being lost in the hundreds of thousands every month before the federal recovery act was passed, and that is what the Republicans want to take us back to. So look at the signs and be careful of what you hear. The Rcc wants you to believe that they are crying out for sanity, but in reality, they are just howling at the moon.

Your friend,

Mike