The People vs The Establishment
For me the most distressing aspect of American politics over the last 30 years is the realization that the Washington Establishment really does rule the country no matter which party holds the White House or Congressional majorities. Progressives suffered through 12 years of Republican presidents after Reagan’s election only to realize that the election of Bill Clinton changed nothing. The military budget didn’t shrink, deregulation of business oversight continued apace, alternative energy strategies sat on the shelf. Now we have to suffer through watching Larry Summers and Tim Geithner lead Obama down the primrose path to disaster while the financial elites take home record bonuses.
As some of our correspondents have suggested, the split we may be seeing is not between liberals and conservatives, but between insiders and outsiders–the Establishment vs the People.
So yesterday the outsiders won an important, but little noticed victory (it did not even deserve a headline on the NYTimes.com politics page). Representatives Ron Paul and Allan Grayson managed to pass out of the House Financial Services Committee a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, despite the strenuous objections of Barney Frank, Ben Bernanke, Mel Watt (Bank of America’s congressman) and the Washington Establishment. As the Huff Post’s Ryan Grim reports, it was all classic establishment playbook, but Grayson managed to rally the rebellious Dems behind Paul.
The playbook in Washington often goes like this: When a measure that threatens the establishment builds enough momentum that it must be dealt with, it is labeled as “unserious.” The Washington Post editorial board, true to the script, called Paul’s measure “an unserious answer to a serious question.”
And it particularly rankles the center that a pair of “wingnuts” are behind a successful effort to challenge the prevailing order.
Step Two is for a “serious” compromise to be offered. In this case, it was Watt’s amendment. But by the time the vote was called Thursday afternoon, committee members had seen through his measure, recognizing that it was not a compromise effort to bring real transparency to the Fed but an attempt to further shut the the doors.
“The Watt amendment will fully obliterate everything 1207″ — Paul’s measure — “is intended to do,” said Paul during Thursday’s debate.
For anyone remaining confused, the debate was further clarified by the central bank itself: Federal Reserve Vice Chair Don Cohn and General Counsel Scott Alvarez spent much of the day calling committee members, urging them to oppose the Paul-Grayson amendment in favor of Watt’s, a member of Congress who asked for confidentiality told HuffPost.
Paul’s opponents also placed a letter from former Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker on the seats of every committee member. Such a move is in violation of House rules and Grayson was able to have the letters removed.
We have to realize there is still a long way before this becomes law. The Senate is the heart of Establishment power. But still, we someday may look back at this day as a day when something slightly unusual happened that began the populist uprising against The Establishment.
The next front in this new coalition against the Insiders is to take on the establishment consensus about Afghanistan as expressed by the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl.
On Afghanistan, in contrast, there is unanimity in the Pentagon and considerable agreement in Congress and among the NATO allies…Almost everyone agrees that accomplishing all those aims will require at least some additional American and NATO troops.
Who appointed bonehead’s like Diehl to speak for “almost everyone”? The Wash Po editorial page, which has been remarkably wrong on every foreign policy question in the last 10 years, is just one more Establishment mouthpiece. If more voices on the right like George Will and the Cato Institute start raising their voice against our military adventurism we might actually be able to dig this country out of the massive hole it is in. If you don’t believe the world economy is still in a hole Look at The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks world wide bulk dry cargo (Coal, Wheat, Autos, Steel, etc)
All it takes to understand this is to attend a couple of cocktail parties with mid-level Washington bureaucrats and listen to the “Inside the Beltway vs. Hoi Polloi” chatter. They are all knowing. We exist to pay them…
All it takes to understand this is to attend a couple of cocktail parties with mid-level Washington bureaucrats and listen to the “Inside the Beltway vs. Hoi Polloi” chatter. They are all knowing. We exist to pay them…
Wallets clamped shut. Heads on pikes.
Wallets clamped shut. Heads on pikes.
I’ve been feeling this in my bones since Clinton came in. Red or Blue is just an illusionary cape to keep the bull distracted until the kill.
The Establishment used to use poor white vs poor black as the capes. Now it’s radical right vs lying liberals.
This Paul-Grayson bill could form a bridge between those of us separated by media loud mouths. We have a lot more in common about how we feel about Establishment politics.
It’s time to stop putting the blame on left or right and start putting it on the oligarchy that runs this country with their red and blue sock puppets.
If we can get past the forces – mostly media – that keep us separated I think there’s a good possibility for a government of the people instead of one for Wall St.
Geithner and Summers must go. Audit the Fed. There’s two good first steps.
I’ve been feeling this in my bones since Clinton came in. Red or Blue is just an illusionary cape to keep the bull distracted until the kill.
The Establishment used to use poor white vs poor black as the capes. Now it’s radical right vs lying liberals.
This Paul-Grayson bill could form a bridge between those of us separated by media loud mouths. We have a lot more in common about how we feel about Establishment politics.
It’s time to stop putting the blame on left or right and start putting it on the oligarchy that runs this country with their red and blue sock puppets.
If we can get past the forces – mostly media – that keep us separated I think there’s a good possibility for a government of the people instead of one for Wall St.
Geithner and Summers must go. Audit the Fed. There’s two good first steps.
Audit the Fed.
The shit going on there is criminal. For those who wish to keep an eye on the shenanigans, I recommend: http://www.zerohedge.com/
Just right now there, you’ll find a tremendous idea – tax derivatives.
There are about $1.4 quadrillion of them. So why not tax them? As Tim Geithner says “That’s not something we are prepared to support.” Some are curious, who is this editorial “we” in this case.
Audit the Fed.
The shit going on there is criminal. For those who wish to keep an eye on the shenanigans, I recommend: http://www.zerohedge.com/
Just right now there, you’ll find a tremendous idea – tax derivatives.
There are about $1.4 quadrillion of them. So why not tax them? As Tim Geithner says “That’s not something we are prepared to support.” Some are curious, who is this editorial “we” in this case.
Jon. seiously, Progressives? Progressiing toward what, and in the name of which collective? I suspect that that moniker stands for nothing other than progressing spending, to the tune of a 32% increase in the cost of an education at the once proud University of California. If the “”Progessives” of California stand for anything more than progressive spending, I’ll eat my shoe.
Jon. seiously, Progressives? Progressiing toward what, and in the name of which collective? I suspect that that moniker stands for nothing other than progressing spending, to the tune of a 32% increase in the cost of an education at the once proud University of California. If the “”Progessives” of California stand for anything more than progressive spending, I’ll eat my shoe.
I should think that this student-fee development, especially in combination with recent, provisional, confiscatory tax policies, would awaken even a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California.
They fucked up, Jon, for years. They were warned by the best not to do so, but that’s what they did do. You know as well as I do that those spendthrifts are precursorrs of the Washington pols who will ruin us.
I should think that this student-fee development, especially in combination with recent, provisional, confiscatory tax policies, would awaken even a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California.
They fucked up, Jon, for years. They were warned by the best not to do so, but that’s what they did do. You know as well as I do that those spendthrifts are precursorrs of the Washington pols who will ruin us.
Audit the Fed.
…just wanted to echo that.
Audit the Fed.
…just wanted to echo that.
Where I come from the “Establishment” has ruled the roost for the past 300 years. We have the illusion of democracy but the reality is that a group of individuals organically manage the way the country feels. The USA has a way to go yet before the Establishment can claim it can control the national psyche – but it will get there. The reason why is stability. Without the ability to manage a nation through deception, you create the possibility of unmanaged change which is not ideal. Relax and accept the need for a strong educated Establishment, that is bigger than governments that come and go. It will happen – the secret is to know how to become part of it!
Where I come from the “Establishment” has ruled the roost for the past 300 years. We have the illusion of democracy but the reality is that a group of individuals organically manage the way the country feels. The USA has a way to go yet before the Establishment can claim it can control the national psyche – but it will get there. The reason why is stability. Without the ability to manage a nation through deception, you create the possibility of unmanaged change which is not ideal. Relax and accept the need for a strong educated Establishment, that is bigger than governments that come and go. It will happen – the secret is to know how to become part of it!
Where I come from the “Establishment” has ruled the roost for the past 300 years. We have the illusion of democracy but the reality is that a group of individuals organically manage the way the country feels. The USA has a way to go yet before the Establishment can claim it can control the national psyche – but it will get there. The reason why is stability. Without the ability to manage a nation through deception, you create the possibility of unmanaged change which is not ideal. Relax and accept the need for a strong educated Establishment, that is bigger than governments that come and go. It will happen – the secret is to know how to become part of it!
Both parties suck and try to fund whatever will keep them in power through donations. Government, as currently operated, is a giant ponzi scheme that can’t be sustained.
Both parties suck and try to fund whatever will keep them in power through donations. Government, as currently operated, is a giant ponzi scheme that can’t be sustained.
Both parties suck and try to fund whatever will keep them in power through donations. Government, as currently operated, is a giant ponzi scheme that can’t be sustained.
Yes, indeed. The walls are coming down about us and this is one of those times when the mute speak.
Yes, indeed. The walls are coming down about us and this is one of those times when the mute speak.
Yes, indeed. The walls are coming down about us and this is one of those times when the mute speak.
307 million Nacerimans, now there’s a collective for you. Already fucked, because they are busily pursuing their own self-interest in the Cave, unaware of the real world that projects those shadows they react to, feed off of, and think they find meaning in.
There are so many examples of selfishness and stupidity and seeing-opportunities-and-takin’-emism — why poke at student fees? Half the national disposable income goes to war toys and intentionally creating more strands of chaos in the rest of the world to keep the apparent need of a huge Elephant of Homeland Security in peanuts and in the forefront of the shadows, the bullshit about how “we have to protect our way of life at any cost,” where the cynical few reap not only this year’s harvest of Real Wealth but the un-discounted value of harvests of ages to come. Now there’s a “futures contract” for you.
All you one-note libertarians: Say you get your audit of the Fed — is that the key log in the logjam that will turn loose the cleansing wall of water that washes away all the badness downstream, maybe the same way rainfall flowing over the farmland “washes away” the topsoil and the pesticides and fertilizers, except that when we live on a sphere of finite dimensions and finite capacity to absorb “environmental insults,” at some point there is no more “away” to throw or wash things to?
Ok, all you really smart economists of whatever school of cold fish you swim with: Let’s assume you get your “audit” of the Fed. With any luck, at least the broad-brush image of how the vast majority of us have been “had” by the “haves.” Something will break in the wall of silence that the motherfuckers (including in the sense of fucking their Mother Earth) have raised so successfully. Hayek says, “Mr. Bernanke, tear down that wall,” and people with sledge hammers and wedges and shaped charge explosives go to work on it. What do your vaunted fucking theories say about what happens next? You think there’s a group of people sharing a set of ideas and values and meanings that’s just waiting in the wings to pick up the reins and grab the levers of power and “make it all better”? You wise people can’t even agree amongst yourselves about what constitutes the core tenet of your economic faith.
I at least, and I admit both deep skepticism and studied avoidance of what seems to me to be nothing but mental pollution and self-delusion inherent in any of the “schools of economic thought” or particularly fundamental religious phony-piety, don’t see that “economists” or “political scientists” or “political manipulators” have a clue about how to keep the merry-go-round spinning. I at least do not hear or see anyone offering any set of mental and emotional and spiritual tools that will allow even just the populace of this “nation,” now riven into ever more particularized sects with only one common skill, hatred of “the other,” one common stupidity, “follow the loudest-mouthed, most outre talking head,” and one common set of tools, where you even have acolytes who have pledged their sacred faith to one caliber or another and one gun maker’s line or particular product or another, so they can’t even standardize on the “best weapon.’ I at least don’t see anyone with even a 1 ½ volt flashlight that’s interested in helping to point the rest of us to a way to come out of the Cave, either by the main entrance or even some hidden back door, without a major die-off of the people who live underground and grow and make the stuff that the heedless and mindless, from Beck to Paris Hilton, just know is their due, their “drought de seigneur,” their “divine right.”
So how’s about taking on a little task: You folks who are monetarists, and you knowers of the ineluctable truth Constitutionalruleoflaw, and all you other schools of great political and economic and spiritual thought, what’s the path out of here? Or did you all leave your flashlights at home too, and maybe are hoping that you will be able to find your way into one of the walled enclaves “secured” by killing everyone else that doesn’t submit to your values and your rule in your immediate area?
Or is my unschooled guess, based on my little pea-brain’s facility at spotting and collecting and remembering and integrating all the Bad Things that are going on that I know about (and I gotta say, if I wander the echo chambers of the sectal web, I ain’t exactly alone in that part at least), that the species has shot its last wad, closer to where we are? In the days of yore, the phrase was “The devil to pay, and no pitch hot,” which maybe doesn’t mean what you might think.
I wish and hope and pray that my grandkids have a chance at a Better Life, and I don’t mean just that chance to get an MBA and join the grunting few at that deep trough the rest of us busily fill while cussing and shoving each other to be first in line with OUR bucket of nutritious slop, stolen from the mouths of average others, for the few to pleasure themselves?
“Dahling, pass the curried peacock’s eyes, won’t you be a dear? And have a nugget of this Pate’d Heart of Peasant Girl – a little plain, but the seasonings and capers makes it just so piquant…”
Let’s Ragnarok-’n-Roll!
307 million Nacerimans, now there’s a collective for you. Already fucked, because they are busily pursuing their own self-interest in the Cave, unaware of the real world that projects those shadows they react to, feed off of, and think they find meaning in.
There are so many examples of selfishness and stupidity and seeing-opportunities-and-takin’-emism — why poke at student fees? Half the national disposable income goes to war toys and intentionally creating more strands of chaos in the rest of the world to keep the apparent need of a huge Elephant of Homeland Security in peanuts and in the forefront of the shadows, the bullshit about how “we have to protect our way of life at any cost,” where the cynical few reap not only this year’s harvest of Real Wealth but the un-discounted value of harvests of ages to come. Now there’s a “futures contract” for you.
All you one-note libertarians: Say you get your audit of the Fed — is that the key log in the logjam that will turn loose the cleansing wall of water that washes away all the badness downstream, maybe the same way rainfall flowing over the farmland “washes away” the topsoil and the pesticides and fertilizers, except that when we live on a sphere of finite dimensions and finite capacity to absorb “environmental insults,” at some point there is no more “away” to throw or wash things to?
Ok, all you really smart economists of whatever school of cold fish you swim with: Let’s assume you get your “audit” of the Fed. With any luck, at least the broad-brush image of how the vast majority of us have been “had” by the “haves.” Something will break in the wall of silence that the motherfuckers (including in the sense of fucking their Mother Earth) have raised so successfully. Hayek says, “Mr. Bernanke, tear down that wall,” and people with sledge hammers and wedges and shaped charge explosives go to work on it. What do your vaunted fucking theories say about what happens next? You think there’s a group of people sharing a set of ideas and values and meanings that’s just waiting in the wings to pick up the reins and grab the levers of power and “make it all better”? You wise people can’t even agree amongst yourselves about what constitutes the core tenet of your economic faith.
I at least, and I admit both deep skepticism and studied avoidance of what seems to me to be nothing but mental pollution and self-delusion inherent in any of the “schools of economic thought” or particularly fundamental religious phony-piety, don’t see that “economists” or “political scientists” or “political manipulators” have a clue about how to keep the merry-go-round spinning. I at least do not hear or see anyone offering any set of mental and emotional and spiritual tools that will allow even just the populace of this “nation,” now riven into ever more particularized sects with only one common skill, hatred of “the other,” one common stupidity, “follow the loudest-mouthed, most outre talking head,” and one common set of tools, where you even have acolytes who have pledged their sacred faith to one caliber or another and one gun maker’s line or particular product or another, so they can’t even standardize on the “best weapon.’ I at least don’t see anyone with even a 1 ½ volt flashlight that’s interested in helping to point the rest of us to a way to come out of the Cave, either by the main entrance or even some hidden back door, without a major die-off of the people who live underground and grow and make the stuff that the heedless and mindless, from Beck to Paris Hilton, just know is their due, their “drought de seigneur,” their “divine right.”
So how’s about taking on a little task: You folks who are monetarists, and you knowers of the ineluctable truth Constitutionalruleoflaw, and all you other schools of great political and economic and spiritual thought, what’s the path out of here? Or did you all leave your flashlights at home too, and maybe are hoping that you will be able to find your way into one of the walled enclaves “secured” by killing everyone else that doesn’t submit to your values and your rule in your immediate area?
Or is my unschooled guess, based on my little pea-brain’s facility at spotting and collecting and remembering and integrating all the Bad Things that are going on that I know about (and I gotta say, if I wander the echo chambers of the sectal web, I ain’t exactly alone in that part at least), that the species has shot its last wad, closer to where we are? In the days of yore, the phrase was “The devil to pay, and no pitch hot,” which maybe doesn’t mean what you might think.
I wish and hope and pray that my grandkids have a chance at a Better Life, and I don’t mean just that chance to get an MBA and join the grunting few at that deep trough the rest of us busily fill while cussing and shoving each other to be first in line with OUR bucket of nutritious slop, stolen from the mouths of average others, for the few to pleasure themselves?
“Dahling, pass the curried peacock’s eyes, won’t you be a dear? And have a nugget of this Pate’d Heart of Peasant Girl – a little plain, but the seasonings and capers makes it just so piquant…”
Let’s Ragnarok-’n-Roll!
307 million Nacerimans, now there’s a collective for you. Already fucked, because they are busily pursuing their own self-interest in the Cave, unaware of the real world that projects those shadows they react to, feed off of, and think they find meaning in.
There are so many examples of selfishness and stupidity and seeing-opportunities-and-takin’-emism — why poke at student fees? Half the national disposable income goes to war toys and intentionally creating more strands of chaos in the rest of the world to keep the apparent need of a huge Elephant of Homeland Security in peanuts and in the forefront of the shadows, the bullshit about how “we have to protect our way of life at any cost,” where the cynical few reap not only this year’s harvest of Real Wealth but the un-discounted value of harvests of ages to come. Now there’s a “futures contract” for you.
All you one-note libertarians: Say you get your audit of the Fed — is that the key log in the logjam that will turn loose the cleansing wall of water that washes away all the badness downstream, maybe the same way rainfall flowing over the farmland “washes away” the topsoil and the pesticides and fertilizers, except that when we live on a sphere of finite dimensions and finite capacity to absorb “environmental insults,” at some point there is no more “away” to throw or wash things to?
Ok, all you really smart economists of whatever school of cold fish you swim with: Let’s assume you get your “audit” of the Fed. With any luck, at least the broad-brush image of how the vast majority of us have been “had” by the “haves.” Something will break in the wall of silence that the motherfuckers (including in the sense of fucking their Mother Earth) have raised so successfully. Hayek says, “Mr. Bernanke, tear down that wall,” and people with sledge hammers and wedges and shaped charge explosives go to work on it. What do your vaunted fucking theories say about what happens next? You think there’s a group of people sharing a set of ideas and values and meanings that’s just waiting in the wings to pick up the reins and grab the levers of power and “make it all better”? You wise people can’t even agree amongst yourselves about what constitutes the core tenet of your economic faith.
I at least, and I admit both deep skepticism and studied avoidance of what seems to me to be nothing but mental pollution and self-delusion inherent in any of the “schools of economic thought” or particularly fundamental religious phony-piety, don’t see that “economists” or “political scientists” or “political manipulators” have a clue about how to keep the merry-go-round spinning. I at least do not hear or see anyone offering any set of mental and emotional and spiritual tools that will allow even just the populace of this “nation,” now riven into ever more particularized sects with only one common skill, hatred of “the other,” one common stupidity, “follow the loudest-mouthed, most outre talking head,” and one common set of tools, where you even have acolytes who have pledged their sacred faith to one caliber or another and one gun maker’s line or particular product or another, so they can’t even standardize on the “best weapon.’ I at least don’t see anyone with even a 1 ½ volt flashlight that’s interested in helping to point the rest of us to a way to come out of the Cave, either by the main entrance or even some hidden back door, without a major die-off of the people who live underground and grow and make the stuff that the heedless and mindless, from Beck to Paris Hilton, just know is their due, their “drought de seigneur,” their “divine right.”
So how’s about taking on a little task: You folks who are monetarists, and you knowers of the ineluctable truth Constitutionalruleoflaw, and all you other schools of great political and economic and spiritual thought, what’s the path out of here? Or did you all leave your flashlights at home too, and maybe are hoping that you will be able to find your way into one of the walled enclaves “secured” by killing everyone else that doesn’t submit to your values and your rule in your immediate area?
Or is my unschooled guess, based on my little pea-brain’s facility at spotting and collecting and remembering and integrating all the Bad Things that are going on that I know about (and I gotta say, if I wander the echo chambers of the sectal web, I ain’t exactly alone in that part at least), that the species has shot its last wad, closer to where we are? In the days of yore, the phrase was “The devil to pay, and no pitch hot,” which maybe doesn’t mean what you might think.
I wish and hope and pray that my grandkids have a chance at a Better Life, and I don’t mean just that chance to get an MBA and join the grunting few at that deep trough the rest of us busily fill while cussing and shoving each other to be first in line with OUR bucket of nutritious slop, stolen from the mouths of average others, for the few to pleasure themselves?
“Dahling, pass the curried peacock’s eyes, won’t you be a dear? And have a nugget of this Pate’d Heart of Peasant Girl – a little plain, but the seasonings and capers makes it just so piquant…”
Let’s Ragnarok-’n-Roll!
It’s quite beautifully said, JTM, and I agree with your every word. Would you consider the blasphemous possibilility that this country has elelected the Ultimate Pipsqeuak? The Amateur President?
It’s quite beautifully said, JTM, and I agree with your every word. Would you consider the blasphemous possibilility that this country has elelected the Ultimate Pipsqeuak? The Amateur President?
It’s quite beautifully said, JTM, and I agree with your every word. Would you consider the blasphemous possibilility that this country has elelected the Ultimate Pipsqeuak? The Amateur President?
I would.
I would.
But he was a community organizer and constitutional law professor! And he got elected to state and national office! What exactly had he acomplished? Er, never-mind.
But he was a community organizer and constitutional law professor! And he got elected to state and national office! What exactly had he acomplished? Er, never-mind.
But he was a community organizer and constitutional law professor! And he got elected to state and national office! What exactly had he acomplished? Er, never-mind.
Back on the student “reaction” (or lack thereof) to Afpaghanistaq, I’d highly recommend Bill Moyers superb program on LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam.
This conversation with McGeorge Bundy in May of ’64 is especially striking as an anticipation of our position today. At 1:30, LBJ begins his “it’s just the biggest damn mess” soliloquy. Very familiar. But at 5:30, McGeorge Bundy brings up a pet idea of his: what if we made this an “all volunteer” thing? And he offers this slogan: “America Against Terror”. Ouch! Would we have gotten out of Vietnam by today if Bundy’s suggestion had been adopted?
Here’s an attempt to include the audio segment link in a friendly graphical format (wish me luck with wordpress):
President Johnson speaks with McGeorge Bundy
AudioPlayer.embed(“audioplayer_3″,
{soundFile: “http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/mp3/bundy_052764.mp3″});
Back on the student “reaction” (or lack thereof) to Afpaghanistaq, I’d highly recommend Bill Moyers superb program on LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam.
This conversation with McGeorge Bundy in May of ’64 is especially striking as an anticipation of our position today. At 1:30, LBJ begins his “it’s just the biggest damn mess” soliloquy. Very familiar. But at 5:30, McGeorge Bundy brings up a pet idea of his: what if we made this an “all volunteer” thing? And he offers this slogan: “America Against Terror”. Ouch! Would we have gotten out of Vietnam by today if Bundy’s suggestion had been adopted?
Here’s an attempt to include the audio segment link in a friendly graphical format (wish me luck with wordpress):
President Johnson speaks with McGeorge Bundy
AudioPlayer.embed(“audioplayer_3″,
{soundFile: “http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/mp3/bundy_052764.mp3″});
Back on the student “reaction” (or lack thereof) to Afpaghanistaq, I’d highly recommend Bill Moyers superb program on LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam.
This conversation with McGeorge Bundy in May of ’64 is especially striking as an anticipation of our position today. At 1:30, LBJ begins his “it’s just the biggest damn mess” soliloquy. Very familiar. But at 5:30, McGeorge Bundy brings up a pet idea of his: what if we made this an “all volunteer” thing? And he offers this slogan: “America Against Terror”. Ouch! Would we have gotten out of Vietnam by today if Bundy’s suggestion had been adopted?
Here’s an attempt to include the audio segment link in a friendly graphical format (wish me luck with wordpress):
President Johnson speaks with McGeorge Bundy
AudioPlayer.embed(“audioplayer_3″,
{soundFile: “http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/mp3/bundy_052764.mp3″});
No luck. The conversation link above works, but lacks the handy clock that allows you to find specific points in the conversation. If you go to the PBS site, you can listen to this conversation and use the nice widget I was trying to include.
No luck. The conversation link above works, but lacks the handy clock that allows you to find specific points in the conversation. If you go to the PBS site, you can listen to this conversation and use the nice widget I was trying to include.
Of course, consider the alternatives. On the one hand, we had Hillary “Sniper Survivor” Clinton. On the other we had the Rogue Team of Mavericks.
Obama had the advantage of not having completely discredited himself on the campaign trail.
Of course, consider the alternatives. On the one hand, we had Hillary “Sniper Survivor” Clinton. On the other we had the Rogue Team of Mavericks.
Obama had the advantage of not having completely discredited himself on the campaign trail.
I mezn feckinin progressive wots that suppoosed to mean, the opposite of regressive? Is it just political lipstic, ,rouge on the face of the undead Harry Reid, or lipstick on the gash of Nancy Pelpssi’s remaining skull?
Don’t lecture me about the corruption of politics whilst meanwhile running interference for these beasts.
I mezn feckinin progressive wots that suppoosed to mean, the opposite of regressive? Is it just political lipstic, ,rouge on the face of the undead Harry Reid, or lipstick on the gash of Nancy Pelpssi’s remaining skull?
Don’t lecture me about the corruption of politics whilst meanwhile running interference for these beasts.
I mezn feckinin progressive wots that suppoosed to mean, the opposite of regressive? Is it just political lipstic, ,rouge on the face of the undead Harry Reid, or lipstick on the gash of Nancy Pelpssi’s remaining skull?
Don’t lecture me about the corruption of politics whilst meanwhile running interference for these beasts.
Sometimes you have to look past the statements and theatre, examine the real record and understand what the combination of the Beltway existence, the media manipulation and having a real private life does to the perception. Obama had the advantages of mondo money, no record anyone could lock on to, and a generation that had dedicated itself to not being racist and proving it.
And therefore got what it deserved and asked for. When you win you gotta ask yourself what that is about instead of tossing the prize in the trash.
Notice things may not be going fast in a direction hoped for but other than the momentum of the wobbling economy and figuring out how to dig out the messes we all helped make… it’s not that bad.
Sometimes you have to look past the statements and theatre, examine the real record and understand what the combination of the Beltway existence, the media manipulation and having a real private life does to the perception. Obama had the advantages of mondo money, no record anyone could lock on to, and a generation that had dedicated itself to not being racist and proving it.
And therefore got what it deserved and asked for. When you win you gotta ask yourself what that is about instead of tossing the prize in the trash.
Notice things may not be going fast in a direction hoped for but other than the momentum of the wobbling economy and figuring out how to dig out the messes we all helped make… it’s not that bad.
Sometimes you have to look past the statements and theatre, examine the real record and understand what the combination of the Beltway existence, the media manipulation and having a real private life does to the perception. Obama had the advantages of mondo money, no record anyone could lock on to, and a generation that had dedicated itself to not being racist and proving it.
And therefore got what it deserved and asked for. When you win you gotta ask yourself what that is about instead of tossing the prize in the trash.
Notice things may not be going fast in a direction hoped for but other than the momentum of the wobbling economy and figuring out how to dig out the messes we all helped make… it’s not that bad.
Since I am an amateur but long-standing curmudgeon and avid cavil-ator, maybe I could ask YOU where, on the Pipsqueak Scale of 1 to 44, you would put the Current Occupant.
Bearing in mind that yes, he is The One, having gained that role that in our Imperial system so many have worked so hard, in their own self-interest, to create over all these decades surrounding 1984.
But now, just short of a year into the kind of task that Hercules was faced with in dealing with the Augean Stables and that famous Knot, Let us remember that he and the people who came along with him into the High Seats of Power meet with a bunch of rent-seeking, self-serving, incumbent motherfuckers in both the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch, along with all the “legacy” motherfuckers that, following the several game plans from outfits with the national interest so closely at heart as the Heritage Foundation and the Committee on the Present Danger, were installed during the reign of the Teflon Ron and the Anschluss of the Bush League in all the various nodes of warpable law-giving and law-elucidating and law-regulatory-capturing and law-enforcing.
Maybe you would like a Chancellor to come along, riding a white horse, with blasphemy of another sort on his forehead and the kind of Will that it takes to turn a Nation into a quickly-burnt-out Roman Candle? In with a whimper, out with a BANG-ZOOM? How does one person or a small group manage a soft landing and a rosy future for a place that is as totally FUBAR as the US of A in the Year of Our Lord 2009? All the individuals with power and all the small groups are groping the cheerleaders, grabbing everything in the vaults and waving red capes to keep the bull on high heat.
In your cogitations on this, should you accept this assignment, please note (and I am hardly the first to so observe) that Our Worst Presidents List has a very large population of individuals whose last names begin with “H.” Would it put Barack Hussein Obama in the middle ranks, since that’s where the “H” is in his name? That wold line him up with Wm. Howard Taft, who at least was distinguished as the fattest president. And on the “H” bomb, as it were, note that if in the first letter of the president’s name, you have people like Harry S. Truman. and if you squint, Dwight David Eisenhower.
You know there literally is a horde of our fellow Americans that is sharpening pitchforks, practicing hard with those .50-cal rifles, and egging each other on to commit another act of regicide. The Secret Service has almost more than it can handle, to the point that those guys aren’t watching one of those other state-terrorism threats, the integrity of our paper currency, any more. (Little inside joke, there.) That’s where our comity and community have gotten to.
There’s blasphemy a-plenty filling the airwaves and billboards and this medium we are playing with, depending on your particular set of spiritual certainties to find the particular stuff you consider blasphemous. I think that if there were a consumer protection statute that covered fraud in the inducement by political candidates and had criminal sanctions attached, a whole lot of people (assuming they didn’t already own all the enforcement tools and staff) would be looking down the barrel of an indictment. Not a conviction, necessarily. None of the folks we are covering here have any convictions of the one sort, and are unlikely in the extreme to suffer a conviction for anything, since they get to say not only what the law is, to write the fucking law and the implementing regulations and guidance and policies and interpretive memoranda and control the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and hold the club of exile to Omaha over the heads of any government gumshoes that dare to file an enforcement report spotlighting nefarianism in high office. “What I (or we) did is Not Illegal, and since we just re-wrote the words on the wall of the Animal Farm barn yet again, it’s not even unethical or improper. So there, you fucking plebians and serfs.”
Obama seems to me to be both exactly what some of us Nacerimas want him to be, and exactly not what some of us want him to be. He is a wonderful effigy for the Epsilon-minuses, up from the basement, blinking at the beautiful sunshine the Alpha-plus-plus-pluses live in up on the roof. He is a total disappointment to some who still are fooled and tooled by that “alabaster city’ bullshit. As usual, the world works on a curve and I would if I were grading it put him somewhere in the middle of that curve, and send home a note with his parents saying that he tries too hard, takes on too much, and needs to work on his balance. And to encourage them to get him to stop hanging around with those little bastards who control the gates and doorways and steal the little kids’ lunch money and shoes and anything else their covetous little fancies take to.
What we do not have is a sort of simple values statement that people, all of us, can sign on to — not the fucking loyalty oaths of the earlier days of the forever war, but something along the lines of that silly old wimpy-loser’s-thinking Golden Rule. Now there would be something to work toward. But hey, them that has will NEVER YIELD a SQUINCH while there is breath in their security staffs’ bodies.
This system will self-destruct in
Since I am an amateur but long-standing curmudgeon and avid cavil-ator, maybe I could ask YOU where, on the Pipsqueak Scale of 1 to 44, you would put the Current Occupant.
Bearing in mind that yes, he is The One, having gained that role that in our Imperial system so many have worked so hard, in their own self-interest, to create over all these decades surrounding 1984.
But now, just short of a year into the kind of task that Hercules was faced with in dealing with the Augean Stables and that famous Knot, Let us remember that he and the people who came along with him into the High Seats of Power meet with a bunch of rent-seeking, self-serving, incumbent motherfuckers in both the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch, along with all the “legacy” motherfuckers that, following the several game plans from outfits with the national interest so closely at heart as the Heritage Foundation and the Committee on the Present Danger, were installed during the reign of the Teflon Ron and the Anschluss of the Bush League in all the various nodes of warpable law-giving and law-elucidating and law-regulatory-capturing and law-enforcing.
Maybe you would like a Chancellor to come along, riding a white horse, with blasphemy of another sort on his forehead and the kind of Will that it takes to turn a Nation into a quickly-burnt-out Roman Candle? In with a whimper, out with a BANG-ZOOM? How does one person or a small group manage a soft landing and a rosy future for a place that is as totally FUBAR as the US of A in the Year of Our Lord 2009? All the individuals with power and all the small groups are groping the cheerleaders, grabbing everything in the vaults and waving red capes to keep the bull on high heat.
In your cogitations on this, should you accept this assignment, please note (and I am hardly the first to so observe) that Our Worst Presidents List has a very large population of individuals whose last names begin with “H.” Would it put Barack Hussein Obama in the middle ranks, since that’s where the “H” is in his name? That wold line him up with Wm. Howard Taft, who at least was distinguished as the fattest president. And on the “H” bomb, as it were, note that if in the first letter of the president’s name, you have people like Harry S. Truman. and if you squint, Dwight David Eisenhower.
You know there literally is a horde of our fellow Americans that is sharpening pitchforks, practicing hard with those .50-cal rifles, and egging each other on to commit another act of regicide. The Secret Service has almost more than it can handle, to the point that those guys aren’t watching one of those other state-terrorism threats, the integrity of our paper currency, any more. (Little inside joke, there.) That’s where our comity and community have gotten to.
There’s blasphemy a-plenty filling the airwaves and billboards and this medium we are playing with, depending on your particular set of spiritual certainties to find the particular stuff you consider blasphemous. I think that if there were a consumer protection statute that covered fraud in the inducement by political candidates and had criminal sanctions attached, a whole lot of people (assuming they didn’t already own all the enforcement tools and staff) would be looking down the barrel of an indictment. Not a conviction, necessarily. None of the folks we are covering here have any convictions of the one sort, and are unlikely in the extreme to suffer a conviction for anything, since they get to say not only what the law is, to write the fucking law and the implementing regulations and guidance and policies and interpretive memoranda and control the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and hold the club of exile to Omaha over the heads of any government gumshoes that dare to file an enforcement report spotlighting nefarianism in high office. “What I (or we) did is Not Illegal, and since we just re-wrote the words on the wall of the Animal Farm barn yet again, it’s not even unethical or improper. So there, you fucking plebians and serfs.”
Obama seems to me to be both exactly what some of us Nacerimas want him to be, and exactly not what some of us want him to be. He is a wonderful effigy for the Epsilon-minuses, up from the basement, blinking at the beautiful sunshine the Alpha-plus-plus-pluses live in up on the roof. He is a total disappointment to some who still are fooled and tooled by that “alabaster city’ bullshit. As usual, the world works on a curve and I would if I were grading it put him somewhere in the middle of that curve, and send home a note with his parents saying that he tries too hard, takes on too much, and needs to work on his balance. And to encourage them to get him to stop hanging around with those little bastards who control the gates and doorways and steal the little kids’ lunch money and shoes and anything else their covetous little fancies take to.
What we do not have is a sort of simple values statement that people, all of us, can sign on to — not the fucking loyalty oaths of the earlier days of the forever war, but something along the lines of that silly old wimpy-loser’s-thinking Golden Rule. Now there would be something to work toward. But hey, them that has will NEVER YIELD a SQUINCH while there is breath in their security staffs’ bodies.
This system will self-destruct in
Since I am an amateur but long-standing curmudgeon and avid cavil-ator, maybe I could ask YOU where, on the Pipsqueak Scale of 1 to 44, you would put the Current Occupant.
Bearing in mind that yes, he is The One, having gained that role that in our Imperial system so many have worked so hard, in their own self-interest, to create over all these decades surrounding 1984.
But now, just short of a year into the kind of task that Hercules was faced with in dealing with the Augean Stables and that famous Knot, Let us remember that he and the people who came along with him into the High Seats of Power meet with a bunch of rent-seeking, self-serving, incumbent motherfuckers in both the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch, along with all the “legacy” motherfuckers that, following the several game plans from outfits with the national interest so closely at heart as the Heritage Foundation and the Committee on the Present Danger, were installed during the reign of the Teflon Ron and the Anschluss of the Bush League in all the various nodes of warpable law-giving and law-elucidating and law-regulatory-capturing and law-enforcing.
Maybe you would like a Chancellor to come along, riding a white horse, with blasphemy of another sort on his forehead and the kind of Will that it takes to turn a Nation into a quickly-burnt-out Roman Candle? In with a whimper, out with a BANG-ZOOM? How does one person or a small group manage a soft landing and a rosy future for a place that is as totally FUBAR as the US of A in the Year of Our Lord 2009? All the individuals with power and all the small groups are groping the cheerleaders, grabbing everything in the vaults and waving red capes to keep the bull on high heat.
In your cogitations on this, should you accept this assignment, please note (and I am hardly the first to so observe) that Our Worst Presidents List has a very large population of individuals whose last names begin with “H.” Would it put Barack Hussein Obama in the middle ranks, since that’s where the “H” is in his name? That wold line him up with Wm. Howard Taft, who at least was distinguished as the fattest president. And on the “H” bomb, as it were, note that if in the first letter of the president’s name, you have people like Harry S. Truman. and if you squint, Dwight David Eisenhower.
You know there literally is a horde of our fellow Americans that is sharpening pitchforks, practicing hard with those .50-cal rifles, and egging each other on to commit another act of regicide. The Secret Service has almost more than it can handle, to the point that those guys aren’t watching one of those other state-terrorism threats, the integrity of our paper currency, any more. (Little inside joke, there.) That’s where our comity and community have gotten to.
There’s blasphemy a-plenty filling the airwaves and billboards and this medium we are playing with, depending on your particular set of spiritual certainties to find the particular stuff you consider blasphemous. I think that if there were a consumer protection statute that covered fraud in the inducement by political candidates and had criminal sanctions attached, a whole lot of people (assuming they didn’t already own all the enforcement tools and staff) would be looking down the barrel of an indictment. Not a conviction, necessarily. None of the folks we are covering here have any convictions of the one sort, and are unlikely in the extreme to suffer a conviction for anything, since they get to say not only what the law is, to write the fucking law and the implementing regulations and guidance and policies and interpretive memoranda and control the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and hold the club of exile to Omaha over the heads of any government gumshoes that dare to file an enforcement report spotlighting nefarianism in high office. “What I (or we) did is Not Illegal, and since we just re-wrote the words on the wall of the Animal Farm barn yet again, it’s not even unethical or improper. So there, you fucking plebians and serfs.”
Obama seems to me to be both exactly what some of us Nacerimas want him to be, and exactly not what some of us want him to be. He is a wonderful effigy for the Epsilon-minuses, up from the basement, blinking at the beautiful sunshine the Alpha-plus-plus-pluses live in up on the roof. He is a total disappointment to some who still are fooled and tooled by that “alabaster city’ bullshit. As usual, the world works on a curve and I would if I were grading it put him somewhere in the middle of that curve, and send home a note with his parents saying that he tries too hard, takes on too much, and needs to work on his balance. And to encourage them to get him to stop hanging around with those little bastards who control the gates and doorways and steal the little kids’ lunch money and shoes and anything else their covetous little fancies take to.
What we do not have is a sort of simple values statement that people, all of us, can sign on to — not the fucking loyalty oaths of the earlier days of the forever war, but something along the lines of that silly old wimpy-loser’s-thinking Golden Rule. Now there would be something to work toward. But hey, them that has will NEVER YIELD a SQUINCH while there is breath in their security staffs’ bodies.
This system will self-destruct in
Cato’s voice has been raised for a long time. They opposed both Iraq wars, if I recall.
Cato’s voice has been raised for a long time. They opposed both Iraq wars, if I recall.
Cato’s voice has been raised for a long time. They opposed both Iraq wars, if I recall.
Auditing the Fed may be a good thing. I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is, like JTM, I don’t know what it ultimately will mean. So what?, a voter may ask.
I do know that Rep. Paul is against the Fed…and wants it eliminated as well as a return to the gold standard. That’s his goal in pushing for this audit. Is that a good thing, given the interwoven nature of world economics? I don’t know that either.
Right now, I’m listening to Bloomberg’s “Covering the Crisis.” While most of the show features business reporters and Prof. Niall Fergeson, the final comment – most important and telling comment – was from the CEO of Morgan Stanley. He said, “We have regulators crawling all over our firm now. We’ve never had that before. If you ask me, do I like it? I love it. It forces us to manage risk.”
So, okay, you audit the Fed and you find they’ve guaranteed loans and payments amounting to trillions. Then what? We all know the Fed failed in their fiduciary responsibility. And probably will again. People run these organizations. And as long as fallible human beings are in charge, mistakes will be made. Dumping the baby with the bath water is no cure. So, what is the cure?
Because of the populace revolt and anger, Congress is willing to make a “nod” to the voters in the hope of keeping their seats. But as the reporters said today on Bloomberg, they are surprised that thus far Congress has failed to call anyone from AIG FP or the other financial institutions to testify. No one in Congress, from either party, has been willing to dig into what happened or why it happened or to ask the actual “workers” what was going on in these companies.
Ferguson said a week or so ago that Congress is as corrupt now as it was back in the “Golden Age.” I believe that’s true. There’s too much “free” money flowing into Congress from too many special interests. Being a member of Congress has become a good way to become a multi-millionaire…and too many appear to be in it for the cash. Just look at the Sunrise Foundation’s long list of ethical violators.
But even changing “campaign funding” may well become even more of a problem. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a case that may well overthrow McCain-Feingold, thereby stating that any company, or person, may give as much money as they wish to any campaign as a matter of free speech. The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently affirmed the ruling that campaign donations equals free speech in a State case. If the Supreme Court agrees, well, you can imagine how little opposition voices will be heard over the din of well financed – bought – campaigns.
The only real hope for “real” citizens is a question raised by the newly appointed justice: Is a corporate entity legally entitled to the status and privileges of a living, voting person when it comes to free speech?
Right now, we exit in a conundrum of the far right and far left dominating the conversation on every issue, while the mainstream populace (middle of the road voters) don’t who to believe…and more and more come to believe that no one is honest or to be trusted. That politics and policy have become nothing more than a giant shell game…and that the voting public will always be the loser.
So, here’s my take on whole situation. Until the American public comes out in force, stating that
*we will no longer support interminable wars or our country being the world’s police force;
*we will no longer support candidates who accept corporate or special interest donation;
*Congressional members will no longer be reelected based on how much “bacon” they bring home but on how well they vote in the national interests of average citizens;
* Congressional members seriously look at ways to reduce the deficit and unemployment…the rebuilding of American industry…through thoughtful and logical tax policies, rather than through the lens of populace anger or monied special interests, we will not vote for them.
The entire Congressional an bureaucratic regime in “the Beltway” has been fueled by money and voter ignorance with quick fixes around the edges but none of the systemic changes that need to occur to level the regulatory and tax policy playing fields for businesses and individuals. I could go ad infinitem over tax regulations that favor the rich but do nothing to help small businesses or sole proprietors. And I’d be willing to bet that each and every one of those tax laws was bought by someone with a vested interest. For example, I remember a few years ago while preparing my tax return I saw a tax deduction for anyone who bought a (gas-guzzling) SUV. There are tax deductions for anyone investing in or producing corn-based alternative fuels. Additionally, tax deductions for foreign investments. And on and on and on. That’s just the tip of the tax deductions iceberg.
It’s not a matter of “heads on pikes”. It’s a matter of changing society: changing our value system to reward people with ethical and moral values that reflect those stated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Teaching political theory and business with an ethical slant, and, most of all, teaching Constitutional history.
Frankly, I’m really sick and tired of the “me first and to hell with everyone else” mentality that has become so predominant in our society. Essentially, that is what brought down Rome, and every other great society.
If this country does not change its behavior and attitudes and demand real reform at every level, the yuan, within a few short decades, will become the universal currency…and the US will be bankrupt. Minus, of course, the few gold diggers who made out like the bandits they were.
Auditing the Fed may be a good thing. I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is, like JTM, I don’t know what it ultimately will mean. So what?, a voter may ask.
I do know that Rep. Paul is against the Fed…and wants it eliminated as well as a return to the gold standard. That’s his goal in pushing for this audit. Is that a good thing, given the interwoven nature of world economics? I don’t know that either.
Right now, I’m listening to Bloomberg’s “Covering the Crisis.” While most of the show features business reporters and Prof. Niall Fergeson, the final comment – most important and telling comment – was from the CEO of Morgan Stanley. He said, “We have regulators crawling all over our firm now. We’ve never had that before. If you ask me, do I like it? I love it. It forces us to manage risk.”
So, okay, you audit the Fed and you find they’ve guaranteed loans and payments amounting to trillions. Then what? We all know the Fed failed in their fiduciary responsibility. And probably will again. People run these organizations. And as long as fallible human beings are in charge, mistakes will be made. Dumping the baby with the bath water is no cure. So, what is the cure?
Because of the populace revolt and anger, Congress is willing to make a “nod” to the voters in the hope of keeping their seats. But as the reporters said today on Bloomberg, they are surprised that thus far Congress has failed to call anyone from AIG FP or the other financial institutions to testify. No one in Congress, from either party, has been willing to dig into what happened or why it happened or to ask the actual “workers” what was going on in these companies.
Ferguson said a week or so ago that Congress is as corrupt now as it was back in the “Golden Age.” I believe that’s true. There’s too much “free” money flowing into Congress from too many special interests. Being a member of Congress has become a good way to become a multi-millionaire…and too many appear to be in it for the cash. Just look at the Sunrise Foundation’s long list of ethical violators.
But even changing “campaign funding” may well become even more of a problem. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a case that may well overthrow McCain-Feingold, thereby stating that any company, or person, may give as much money as they wish to any campaign as a matter of free speech. The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently affirmed the ruling that campaign donations equals free speech in a State case. If the Supreme Court agrees, well, you can imagine how little opposition voices will be heard over the din of well financed – bought – campaigns.
The only real hope for “real” citizens is a question raised by the newly appointed justice: Is a corporate entity legally entitled to the status and privileges of a living, voting person when it comes to free speech?
Right now, we exit in a conundrum of the far right and far left dominating the conversation on every issue, while the mainstream populace (middle of the road voters) don’t who to believe…and more and more come to believe that no one is honest or to be trusted. That politics and policy have become nothing more than a giant shell game…and that the voting public will always be the loser.
So, here’s my take on whole situation. Until the American public comes out in force, stating that
*we will no longer support interminable wars or our country being the world’s police force;
*we will no longer support candidates who accept corporate or special interest donation;
*Congressional members will no longer be reelected based on how much “bacon” they bring home but on how well they vote in the national interests of average citizens;
* Congressional members seriously look at ways to reduce the deficit and unemployment…the rebuilding of American industry…through thoughtful and logical tax policies, rather than through the lens of populace anger or monied special interests, we will not vote for them.
The entire Congressional an bureaucratic regime in “the Beltway” has been fueled by money and voter ignorance with quick fixes around the edges but none of the systemic changes that need to occur to level the regulatory and tax policy playing fields for businesses and individuals. I could go ad infinitem over tax regulations that favor the rich but do nothing to help small businesses or sole proprietors. And I’d be willing to bet that each and every one of those tax laws was bought by someone with a vested interest. For example, I remember a few years ago while preparing my tax return I saw a tax deduction for anyone who bought a (gas-guzzling) SUV. There are tax deductions for anyone investing in or producing corn-based alternative fuels. Additionally, tax deductions for foreign investments. And on and on and on. That’s just the tip of the tax deductions iceberg.
It’s not a matter of “heads on pikes”. It’s a matter of changing society: changing our value system to reward people with ethical and moral values that reflect those stated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Teaching political theory and business with an ethical slant, and, most of all, teaching Constitutional history.
Frankly, I’m really sick and tired of the “me first and to hell with everyone else” mentality that has become so predominant in our society. Essentially, that is what brought down Rome, and every other great society.
If this country does not change its behavior and attitudes and demand real reform at every level, the yuan, within a few short decades, will become the universal currency…and the US will be bankrupt. Minus, of course, the few gold diggers who made out like the bandits they were.
Auditing the Fed may be a good thing. I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is, like JTM, I don’t know what it ultimately will mean. So what?, a voter may ask.
I do know that Rep. Paul is against the Fed…and wants it eliminated as well as a return to the gold standard. That’s his goal in pushing for this audit. Is that a good thing, given the interwoven nature of world economics? I don’t know that either.
Right now, I’m listening to Bloomberg’s “Covering the Crisis.” While most of the show features business reporters and Prof. Niall Fergeson, the final comment – most important and telling comment – was from the CEO of Morgan Stanley. He said, “We have regulators crawling all over our firm now. We’ve never had that before. If you ask me, do I like it? I love it. It forces us to manage risk.”
So, okay, you audit the Fed and you find they’ve guaranteed loans and payments amounting to trillions. Then what? We all know the Fed failed in their fiduciary responsibility. And probably will again. People run these organizations. And as long as fallible human beings are in charge, mistakes will be made. Dumping the baby with the bath water is no cure. So, what is the cure?
Because of the populace revolt and anger, Congress is willing to make a “nod” to the voters in the hope of keeping their seats. But as the reporters said today on Bloomberg, they are surprised that thus far Congress has failed to call anyone from AIG FP or the other financial institutions to testify. No one in Congress, from either party, has been willing to dig into what happened or why it happened or to ask the actual “workers” what was going on in these companies.
Ferguson said a week or so ago that Congress is as corrupt now as it was back in the “Golden Age.” I believe that’s true. There’s too much “free” money flowing into Congress from too many special interests. Being a member of Congress has become a good way to become a multi-millionaire…and too many appear to be in it for the cash. Just look at the Sunrise Foundation’s long list of ethical violators.
But even changing “campaign funding” may well become even more of a problem. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a case that may well overthrow McCain-Feingold, thereby stating that any company, or person, may give as much money as they wish to any campaign as a matter of free speech. The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently affirmed the ruling that campaign donations equals free speech in a State case. If the Supreme Court agrees, well, you can imagine how little opposition voices will be heard over the din of well financed – bought – campaigns.
The only real hope for “real” citizens is a question raised by the newly appointed justice: Is a corporate entity legally entitled to the status and privileges of a living, voting person when it comes to free speech?
Right now, we exit in a conundrum of the far right and far left dominating the conversation on every issue, while the mainstream populace (middle of the road voters) don’t who to believe…and more and more come to believe that no one is honest or to be trusted. That politics and policy have become nothing more than a giant shell game…and that the voting public will always be the loser.
So, here’s my take on whole situation. Until the American public comes out in force, stating that
*we will no longer support interminable wars or our country being the world’s police force;
*we will no longer support candidates who accept corporate or special interest donation;
*Congressional members will no longer be reelected based on how much “bacon” they bring home but on how well they vote in the national interests of average citizens;
* Congressional members seriously look at ways to reduce the deficit and unemployment…the rebuilding of American industry…through thoughtful and logical tax policies, rather than through the lens of populace anger or monied special interests, we will not vote for them.
The entire Congressional an bureaucratic regime in “the Beltway” has been fueled by money and voter ignorance with quick fixes around the edges but none of the systemic changes that need to occur to level the regulatory and tax policy playing fields for businesses and individuals. I could go ad infinitem over tax regulations that favor the rich but do nothing to help small businesses or sole proprietors. And I’d be willing to bet that each and every one of those tax laws was bought by someone with a vested interest. For example, I remember a few years ago while preparing my tax return I saw a tax deduction for anyone who bought a (gas-guzzling) SUV. There are tax deductions for anyone investing in or producing corn-based alternative fuels. Additionally, tax deductions for foreign investments. And on and on and on. That’s just the tip of the tax deductions iceberg.
It’s not a matter of “heads on pikes”. It’s a matter of changing society: changing our value system to reward people with ethical and moral values that reflect those stated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Teaching political theory and business with an ethical slant, and, most of all, teaching Constitutional history.
Frankly, I’m really sick and tired of the “me first and to hell with everyone else” mentality that has become so predominant in our society. Essentially, that is what brought down Rome, and every other great society.
If this country does not change its behavior and attitudes and demand real reform at every level, the yuan, within a few short decades, will become the universal currency…and the US will be bankrupt. Minus, of course, the few gold diggers who made out like the bandits they were.
Today at Union Square Park in NYC I happened upon a demonstration against the Fed. The interesting thing about it was that the participants seemed be from right and left. People from GOP suburbs, right wingers, younger anarcho types,older hippy politicos, and others. They handed out literature and had their schtick down pat.
Today at Union Square Park in NYC I happened upon a demonstration against the Fed. The interesting thing about it was that the participants seemed be from right and left. People from GOP suburbs, right wingers, younger anarcho types,older hippy politicos, and others. They handed out literature and had their schtick down pat.
Forgive my grammatical errors. My enthusiasm got the better of me.
Forgive my grammatical errors. My enthusiasm got the better of me.
Forgive my grammatical errors. My enthusiasm got the better of me.
I’m chomping at the bit to hop into this conversation. Sadly, I’ve got work to do this evening.
But one thing I will say is that we are absolutely at a turning point where the traditional “left” and “right” will once again likely evolve and morph.
I think Jon is correct in his setup. On one side, you have the establishment, of which Obama and his ilk are every bit as entrenched as Bush and his. These are the corporatists, the incrementalists, the schemers and the compromisers. They are relatively free of principles or understanding, except for a rather mushy ideological bias.
I personally see a great deal of the educated, non-partisan lot from the principled left and right converging around a classical liberal coalition. This is the anti-Fed, anti-corporate, anti-bailout, pro-freedom lot. The “left” will remain leery of the profit motive and less concerned about property and contract rights (sometimes too little), while the “right” will consider profit a vital part of incentives and entrepreneurial calculation and hold property rights and contract in more absolute term (sometimes too much).
But both sides will agree that central planners and power brokers are the enemy of autonomy and rights, be them negative liberties or positive ones. Both sides will be pro small government and pro local government in the face of our current single party of keynesian corporatists.
On the economic front, this new coalition of less mathematical, more skeptical theorists will emerge. Humility will be the order of the day, for a time. The Austrian theory of money and credit is on the rise. Crude keynesianism is too, for now, though it’s ineffectiveness will make it short lived. The minsky notion of bubbles will likely remain in play.
Recall, that there was a time when the Democrats were the war party, the Republicans were the protectionists, and the progressives spanned both parties. Change is in the air.
I’m chomping at the bit to hop into this conversation. Sadly, I’ve got work to do this evening.
But one thing I will say is that we are absolutely at a turning point where the traditional “left” and “right” will once again likely evolve and morph.
I think Jon is correct in his setup. On one side, you have the establishment, of which Obama and his ilk are every bit as entrenched as Bush and his. These are the corporatists, the incrementalists, the schemers and the compromisers. They are relatively free of principles or understanding, except for a rather mushy ideological bias.
I personally see a great deal of the educated, non-partisan lot from the principled left and right converging around a classical liberal coalition. This is the anti-Fed, anti-corporate, anti-bailout, pro-freedom lot. The “left” will remain leery of the profit motive and less concerned about property and contract rights (sometimes too little), while the “right” will consider profit a vital part of incentives and entrepreneurial calculation and hold property rights and contract in more absolute term (sometimes too much).
But both sides will agree that central planners and power brokers are the enemy of autonomy and rights, be them negative liberties or positive ones. Both sides will be pro small government and pro local government in the face of our current single party of keynesian corporatists.
On the economic front, this new coalition of less mathematical, more skeptical theorists will emerge. Humility will be the order of the day, for a time. The Austrian theory of money and credit is on the rise. Crude keynesianism is too, for now, though it’s ineffectiveness will make it short lived. The minsky notion of bubbles will likely remain in play.
Recall, that there was a time when the Democrats were the war party, the Republicans were the protectionists, and the progressives spanned both parties. Change is in the air.
I’m chomping at the bit to hop into this conversation. Sadly, I’ve got work to do this evening.
But one thing I will say is that we are absolutely at a turning point where the traditional “left” and “right” will once again likely evolve and morph.
I think Jon is correct in his setup. On one side, you have the establishment, of which Obama and his ilk are every bit as entrenched as Bush and his. These are the corporatists, the incrementalists, the schemers and the compromisers. They are relatively free of principles or understanding, except for a rather mushy ideological bias.
I personally see a great deal of the educated, non-partisan lot from the principled left and right converging around a classical liberal coalition. This is the anti-Fed, anti-corporate, anti-bailout, pro-freedom lot. The “left” will remain leery of the profit motive and less concerned about property and contract rights (sometimes too little), while the “right” will consider profit a vital part of incentives and entrepreneurial calculation and hold property rights and contract in more absolute term (sometimes too much).
But both sides will agree that central planners and power brokers are the enemy of autonomy and rights, be them negative liberties or positive ones. Both sides will be pro small government and pro local government in the face of our current single party of keynesian corporatists.
On the economic front, this new coalition of less mathematical, more skeptical theorists will emerge. Humility will be the order of the day, for a time. The Austrian theory of money and credit is on the rise. Crude keynesianism is too, for now, though it’s ineffectiveness will make it short lived. The minsky notion of bubbles will likely remain in play.
Recall, that there was a time when the Democrats were the war party, the Republicans were the protectionists, and the progressives spanned both parties. Change is in the air.
okay… maybe that was more than one thing.
okay… maybe that was more than one thing.
okay… maybe that was more than one thing.
How’s this for a platform to end political discretion and the corruption it inherently invites:
#1. Liquidate the accounting industry with a Flat tax across the board on private income, corporate income and capital gains (say 15%). No deductions (including employer health insurance). No more lies about “trust funds” that don’t exist (I’m looking at you, Social Security). Historically, tax revenues have only ever been around 18% of GDP no matter what the marginal rates were and lower rates have resulted in a higher percentage of the contribution coming from the top earners.
#2. End all foreign aid and bring ALL of the troops home.
#3. liquidate all the bailouts, and end all corporate subsidies.
#4. Constitutional amendment for permanent, unilateral free trade with all nations. That means no more “free trade agreements” that are anything but. That means bye bye to sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, etc. Americans have right to buy goods from any human on earth and they have the unrestricted access to sell us their stuff.
#5. Re-constitute the Fed with a mandate to target 3% nominal GDP growth per year. No more dual mandate that targets consumer inflation and full employment, since that’s a clear failure.
#6. Repeal the 17th amendment as a further check on Congress.
#7. Pass an amendment that re-establishes the limits on the executive branch definitively, liquidating most of these ridiculous agencies like Departments of Energy and Education.
#8. Pass an amendment that reinforces, once more, the mandate for an explicit declaration of war by the US congress before such military adventures can be undertaken.
#9. Eliminate public employee unions (or better yet, all special union privileges).
#10. Prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes.
That’s all for now.
How’s this for a platform to end political discretion and the corruption it inherently invites:
#1. Liquidate the accounting industry with a Flat tax across the board on private income, corporate income and capital gains (say 15%). No deductions (including employer health insurance). No more lies about “trust funds” that don’t exist (I’m looking at you, Social Security). Historically, tax revenues have only ever been around 18% of GDP no matter what the marginal rates were and lower rates have resulted in a higher percentage of the contribution coming from the top earners.
#2. End all foreign aid and bring ALL of the troops home.
#3. liquidate all the bailouts, and end all corporate subsidies.
#4. Constitutional amendment for permanent, unilateral free trade with all nations. That means no more “free trade agreements” that are anything but. That means bye bye to sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, etc. Americans have right to buy goods from any human on earth and they have the unrestricted access to sell us their stuff.
#5. Re-constitute the Fed with a mandate to target 3% nominal GDP growth per year. No more dual mandate that targets consumer inflation and full employment, since that’s a clear failure.
#6. Repeal the 17th amendment as a further check on Congress.
#7. Pass an amendment that re-establishes the limits on the executive branch definitively, liquidating most of these ridiculous agencies like Departments of Energy and Education.
#8. Pass an amendment that reinforces, once more, the mandate for an explicit declaration of war by the US congress before such military adventures can be undertaken.
#9. Eliminate public employee unions (or better yet, all special union privileges).
#10. Prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes.
That’s all for now.
How’s this for a platform to end political discretion and the corruption it inherently invites:
#1. Liquidate the accounting industry with a Flat tax across the board on private income, corporate income and capital gains (say 15%). No deductions (including employer health insurance). No more lies about “trust funds” that don’t exist (I’m looking at you, Social Security). Historically, tax revenues have only ever been around 18% of GDP no matter what the marginal rates were and lower rates have resulted in a higher percentage of the contribution coming from the top earners.
#2. End all foreign aid and bring ALL of the troops home.
#3. liquidate all the bailouts, and end all corporate subsidies.
#4. Constitutional amendment for permanent, unilateral free trade with all nations. That means no more “free trade agreements” that are anything but. That means bye bye to sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, etc. Americans have right to buy goods from any human on earth and they have the unrestricted access to sell us their stuff.
#5. Re-constitute the Fed with a mandate to target 3% nominal GDP growth per year. No more dual mandate that targets consumer inflation and full employment, since that’s a clear failure.
#6. Repeal the 17th amendment as a further check on Congress.
#7. Pass an amendment that re-establishes the limits on the executive branch definitively, liquidating most of these ridiculous agencies like Departments of Energy and Education.
#8. Pass an amendment that reinforces, once more, the mandate for an explicit declaration of war by the US congress before such military adventures can be undertaken.
#9. Eliminate public employee unions (or better yet, all special union privileges).
#10. Prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes.
That’s all for now.
Changes should have been in the air the moment that Obama took office, the momentum was there to be taken. The world was ready to dance but somehow it became a coitus interruptus of some kind. Frustrating when one see things and cannot believe that the course of events continue towards the opposite direction. It’s so obvious why can they see it ! Lies have a short life and simulation is a sin.The goods news are that a crisis of this proportion will gives way to to the birth of of a new conscience. Hey, as long we are alive we can do something, contribute somehow, without arrogance and an open heart.
Changes should have been in the air the moment that Obama took office, the momentum was there to be taken. The world was ready to dance but somehow it became a coitus interruptus of some kind. Frustrating when one see things and cannot believe that the course of events continue towards the opposite direction. It’s so obvious why can they see it ! Lies have a short life and simulation is a sin.The goods news are that a crisis of this proportion will gives way to to the birth of of a new conscience. Hey, as long we are alive we can do something, contribute somehow, without arrogance and an open heart.
Changes should have been in the air the moment that Obama took office, the momentum was there to be taken. The world was ready to dance but somehow it became a coitus interruptus of some kind. Frustrating when one see things and cannot believe that the course of events continue towards the opposite direction. It’s so obvious why can they see it ! Lies have a short life and simulation is a sin.The goods news are that a crisis of this proportion will gives way to to the birth of of a new conscience. Hey, as long we are alive we can do something, contribute somehow, without arrogance and an open heart.
John- I think we can find some common ground.
John- I think we can find some common ground.
John- I think we can find some common ground.
Got duopoly?
Yah, look for common ground, but in dealing with True Believers, watch out for the guys in the cassocks pushing platforms outfitted with stakes and faggots (the old-fashioned definition, folks) and racks and thumbscrews to address any deviation from the orthodoxy they preach, at least in this particular diocese. The preaching is about “small,” but the flavor of the whole is as centralized as you can get. Go look at the way that Ms. Rand worked over any of her acolytes who strayed a femtometer from the rectilineal groove of her Given Truths. And taste the flavor of the “platform” prescriptions offered here.
There’s an ordinary-person paradigm, with a reasonable range of variation, and looking over what the libertarians have to say, it doesn’t appear to me that what they preach and are organizing to try to force on everyone falls within that range.
Times of Change are when organized extremists have the best chance of shoving their particular notions of The Truth down everyone else’s throats. In all transactions, always be careful to Count Your Change.
There are more kinds of transactions in city and town, old Hayek, than are dreamed of in your whateveryoucallitatthemoment…
“try to force on everyone”
You clearly have no idea what libertarians are about, JTM. Zero. Fiscal conservatism married social liberalism is hardly a radical doctrine. Small coercive government is not radical either. Anarchism is radical, but it is the minority.
Rand is not the same thing. Her tone, her strident adherence to “reason” above all, among many things are out of step with what I and most of my classical liberal friends are about.
We’re about non-violence. We’re not about trying to “force” you or anyone else to do anything. Quite the opposite.
Personally, I find the Bush/Obama warfare machine to far more frightening and radical in its murder of innocent people than anything I’ve ever read in libertarian philosophy. Feeling justified in drone-bombing women and children in the name of a “war on terror” is radical. Opposing taxation is downright mild mannered in comparison.
> Liquidate the accounting industry with a Flat tax
> across the board on private income, corporate
> income and capital gains
This is possible with private income, but not corporate or capital gains – what is identifed as corporate or capital gain is a matter of accounitng.
You can simplify tax laws a lot, but you’ll never completely kill the accounting beast.
> End all foreign aid and bring ALL of the troops home.
These are incompatible – the U.S has interests abroard that it will find reason to either buy or fight for. When China buys votes in the U.N from aide to Pacific nations the U.S will find itself on the wrong end of international treaties it won’t agree with – that it will undoubtably consider invalid but will need a military to ignore.
But foreign aid is cheap. You can lose a lot of the military and still buy a lot of influence for a lot less money.
> liquidate all the bailouts, and end all corporate subsidies.
The place to begin is to legislate to make it crystal clear that corporations aren’t citizens and do not enjoy a citizens protections.
>Constitutional amendment for permanent,
> unilateral free trade with all nations.
>That means no more “free trade agreements”
> that are anything but.
Please do this before my government negotiates one.
NZ pretty much did this – but then recanted at the end of the 1990′s when the complete destruction of our (small but internally very significant) manufacturing industry was almost complete – there was no other option for workers as their jobs were replaced by cheap imports and wealthy investments flew into financial investments rather than productive industry.
> Re-constitute the Fed with a mandate to target
> 3% nominal GDP growth per year
NZ’s Reserve bank had a %1 to 2% target for a decade that was upped to %3. Just this week our Laboour party – who instituted the original plan – has announced policy to repudiate it on the grounds it restricts growth, though I think they’re just looking for something to differentiate themselves from other parties again.
> Pass an amendment that re-establishes the
> limits on the executive branch
And wait until you see how creative courts get in ignoring it.
> Pass an amendment that reinforces, once
> more, the mandate for an explicit declaration
> of war by the US
Or the NRA could live up to it’s rhetoric and execute every congress critter that (treasonously) voted to hand that authority to the President. That’d learn ‘em real quick.
Wouldn’t you just love to be a Supreme Justice for a day? One would get RSI from all the arrest warrants one would sign.
> Eliminate public employee unions (or better
> yet, all special union privileges).
Outlawing freedom of association and, oddly for such an avowed Libertarian, outlawing freedom to decide how to negotiate and trade for ones labour?
Then the NRA would have to execute you.
> Prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes.
Hear, hear.
Fentex,
You’re right that government Foreign Aid is used to gain influence with other governments (and not to help the people). That’s the problem. It props up failed regimes. Who cares if it’s relatively small? It’s still wrong. Replacing aid with trade is the better answer.
FREE TRADE:
As for needing protectionism to support local manufacturing… that tells you about the competitiveness of your local manufacturing. Make no mistake, though. The people subsidizing those special merchant/producers are the local Kiwis who get unjustly taxed when buying foreign goods. Free trade isn’t easy on everyone. I won’t claim that it is. But it’s the right thing and does deliver the broadest good to the most people.
MONETARY POLICY:
I’m sorry to hear that your pols are trying to push through an inflationist agenda that will only lead to larger booms and busts. NZ lead the way on restrained monetary policy. But I’m talking about nominal spending targeting, not inflation targeting. I think inflation targeting has failed to account for productivity-based deflation and lead to overly easy money even with low consumer inflation.
LABOR UNIONS:
I don’t have any problem with the freedom to associate. I have a problem with special legal rights that enable groups to invade property, threaten other people and maintain a monopoly. Public employees should be banned from unionizing as a counterbalance to the fact that their incomes are taken forcibly from taxpayers. Call it a libertarian compromise. Taxpayer-funded income = no unionization.
As it stands now, the public unions are full blown parasites that:
A. Threaten the public:
http://tinyurl.com/yhf8ycm
B. Make more than the rest of us with our money:
http://tinyurl.com/m497zn
“Obama seems to be…if I were grading it”…”
That, buddy, is one helluva metaphor. You are right on the money (pun intended).
Maybe what I meant to say was “jobs on pikes”…I’m not voting for any incumbents. In my opinion ‘experienced’ has become synonymous with ‘corrupt’. They’re all going to get ‘bought’ in the end and I don’t think the rubes will do any more damage than the current batch of warmongering insiders. One-term limits for legislators. Two-terms for the executive. Tenure for the justices. Try that.
Oh…and no ‘job swapping’ (rep for senator) without a mandatory ‘cool down’ period.
The Establishment may not be as unified as all that. Some are smart enough to recognize that the rest are being idiots, and that historic parallels, when found, tend to lie in places like Czarist Russia, and 18th Century France.
In the link above, William Gross observes that it’s still icebergs straight ahead for those dealing with US Finance (and, for that matter, everyone else in the same ship of state).
At one point, the Times reporter notes in breathless tones that $80 billion is “about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.”
Yes, and it’s also equal to about 11% of the DoD’s annual budget.
It’s about time the Republican’s who go on ad nauseam about “fiscal responsibility” take real ownership of an institution that’s doing more to bankrupt this nation that all others combined.
On a lighter note, none of these “massive” financial problems are nearly so daunting if we add up the true cost of rampant paranoia, and remove that expense from our national budget.
Because honestly, what’s the point of worrying about a non-existent threat of foreign invasion when you house has already been foreclosed on, your medication cut off, and your (now grown) kids alienated by the struggle the face in covering the costs of your care and that of their children while struggling to preserve enough wealth to avoid becoming destitute in their own old age – coming, as it will, with absolutely no support from a “safety net” that will – at that stage – be ancient history.
JP, there has to be some kind of engine to drive the revolution you are pushing. 7 billion people are not suddenly going to stop doing what they already do and start waving your Little Red Book, without some kind of central authority doing, compelling and enforcing all the things you say are “a good start.” Nor even 307 million.
You have this magical-thinking notion, in my mind, that somehow a “neutral government power” of just exactly the right size that is never going to get any bigger or abuse any of the concentration of force and power that is inherent in the Beast is going to spring into existence, full blown like Athena from the Brow of Zeus, and modulate all those “transactions” and to “sue the hell out of” anyone who “commits fraud,” (a legal concept that partakes of statute and decisional law “written” by judges who are variously appointed and elected, and that has strict but floating definition in a common-law legal system which is what you seem to postulate.) Who picks the judges? Who writes the statutes and regulations defining “fraud” and “coercion?” Or are we to take the blandishments of the Cato Institute and Ron Paul and your Hayek as the Tablets From The Mountain? Who collects the money to hire people, whatever you want to call them, investigators, ombudspeople, cops, prosecutors, to make sure that there is none of your only apparent sins, “coercion” and “fraud,” in all those transactions? “Free trade” doesn’t exist without some kind of international system and structure, involving a shitload of lawyers to create the documents that somehow will make it absolutely clear in every possible detail to be sure there’s no unfair advantage taken or coercion applied by any party to the deal.
Your system prays, I guess, that some Deus Ex Machina will keep the planet alive by extirpating externalities, or maybe there’s just a hint of the Real Malthus, not your demonized term, in what you believe — you trust ‘natural correctives’ from aggregate behaviors of all those contracting parties pursuing their self-interest that I guess eventually will flow from the minute aggregations of all the effects of all those uncoerced transactions, to keep us from foundering in our own shit, breathing fouled air and trying to drink toilet water, and I don’t mean ‘eau de toilette.’ Like every other Utopian set of notions, I think yours is short on an accounting for human nature and history. But that’s just me, of course.
So you go on opposing taxation. If I remember right, your Cato people have some pretty selective ideas and ideals — they don’t hew to your asseembled notions of how it could all be beautiful, and have various views on taxes and money generally and the role of government and some pretty interesting history when it comes to foreign wars and rabid capitalism.
Disavow Rand — on personality grounds, at least. Believe that there will be or is another guru who can determine less abrasively what is in or out of doctrine and dogma and what changes have to happen to achieve that state of graceful contracting you think humans are capable of (with some quantum of ‘government enforcement’ of uncoerced and fraud-free contracting. Say again and again, until you believe it, that you are not about “forcing” anyone to do anything. But tell me how your “live-and-let-libertarian” notions are going to overcome the practices and culture and wants of 300 million people, the po’ folk who are supposed to sacrifice their job opportunities and unionizing potential and existing if declining “national economy” in order to achieve some kind of New World Net Efficiency Over Some Inestimable Period Of Time, as the mechanisms you truly believe in sort out, magically in my estimation, the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.
And why spend your engrams on notions like diddling with “Constitutional Amendments” as a way to “fix” and “clarify” and “emphasize” those bits of the founding notions that you think need some change? You really think that unless there’s more of an executive coup than already exists so that the words on the wall of the Animal Farm Barn can be re-written with impunity, the process for amending a document (or un-amending it, you don’t like the 17th amendment) that was deliberately made very onerous will produce even one of your prescribed nostrums?
There are things going on here at home and in the wider world that are anathema to almost all of us except the ones who are legally for the most part (gvien how “the law” is made) stealing everything that’s not nailed down and liening or foreclosing on the rest. If suddenly “we” storm the Bastille, take the Palais, behead the King and all those Bernankes and Geithners and Lays and deLays and such, how long is it gonna be before the new Committee of Public Safety is raised up, and people start losing their heads over claims of anti-Libertarian activities? And Richelieu is always waiting in the wings…
We have some common enemies at present, but my betting is that even if we the people pull off some radical change, with all the horror and costs that will necessarily go along with, if you and I survive that, we would be on opposite sides of the next schism.
But it’s fun to go back and forth, you with your position that I fail to address your specific points, and me saying that they do not compute, and you accusing me of “broad strokes” and me saying you are working in a haze of “broad smokes” where you only see what’s up close and personal to the vision you have worked out.
But keep talking and writing and thinking — and remember that Frank Sinatra ditty:
“Once there was a silly old Ram,
Though he’d bust a hole in a dam.
Everyone knows a ram can’t
Bust a hole in a dam.
But he had high hopes,
He had high-igh-igh hope,
He had high apple-pie-in-the-sky-a-y-y hopes:
So any time you’re feelin’ low
‘Stead of bein’ low,
Just remember that Ram!
Oops, there goes a billion kilowatt dam,
(There goes a billion kilowatt dam!)”
Gee, is there anything wrong with that picture?
It was an illusion, Bernard, like a small child on a tricycle peddling furiously toward a mountain peak. From the perspective of the child, there is momentum. From the perspective of one looking at them relative to the mountain, there is little chance of more than exhaustion. The child learns a lesson. The observer has a lesson reaffirmed.
As noted last year during the election, the Beltway and world politics in general are illusory. The operational power rests with civil servants who can easily outlast any administration in democratic or republican (as in governance types, not parties) governments. Trying to make fast progress is like running through mud in unlaced boots. All you get is muddy wet socks.
Real heads on pikes would at least demonstrate the seriousness of this but Obama’s handlers had no intentions of doing that. They are of the same class and convictions as those who’s heads would be mounted.
Culturally the issue is very deep and pervasive. We live in a society where hierarchy and pecking order and their approval as absolute prerequisites for social advancement by individuals ensure that few can or will band together to change the order of things. Regardless of what we claim are the purposes of our institutions they are the vehicles individuals use to advance themselves.
Sucking is the first order of business where egos are the customers and self-gratification is the product. That is why the Mandelas of the world are few but the only kind of leader capable of taking a one part of society from slavery and impoverishment toward equality of the classes, and even then, progress is slow and only goes so far. Someone has to change the order of those lined up to kiss the teats.
Oh, and on that note, here’s a bit of absolutely perfect hit surfaced by the LA Times.
Apparently, the Pentagon has internal numbers for the costs of the Afghan buildup that are (a) double what their public numbers state and (b) in line with what the Obama administration expected, but (apparently) wasn’t getting.
Add this to the recent insubordination from McChrystal and Petraeus, and the picture gets less pretty by the day.
I had some hopes for President Obama. They weren’t particularly high, since the way he ran his campaign convinced me that at heart he is a conservative man, cautious and respectful, and such a man rarely sees outside the box far enough when times are dangerous and a new path is needed to be blazed. Then his approach to the wars and empire and the military, state secrets, and his continuation of so much of what was terribly wrong in his predecessor’s administration, made me wonder whether in today’s Washington the President is able to take us in new directions. Perhaps he is confined by this Insider Establishment, and all that he can do is push back a little here, or encourage it a little there.
Now I believe that we should all wash our hands of the federal government. Even state governments seem beyond the power of any real change. Instead we should all localize. Move and change things in your ward, your town, your neighborhood, your family. It’s this smallest of arenas where we all have the most power to change and improve; it’s there that the exercise of our voice will give us the most personal satisfaction.
Love your neighbor and work with him to make your street, block, and town a better place. Render unto the Caesar of Washington only that which he requires; in the meantime remake your town, ally with other towns, send better representatives to your state house, and work on change from the bottom up.
This is, after all, the truly American way, the way of the pioneers, the frontiersmen, the original immigrants and colonists. It also is the way of much of the native Americans before our European ancestors arrived on these shores.
Alex,
Bill Gross, aka “The Bond King”, is working the refs on the terms of the eventual debt settlement. Pity the poor bondholders, who might see some inflation someday! That’s only partly facetious, of course: the bondholders include all future Social Security recipients.
Anxiety over The Big Debt is reasonable, but it’s worth bearing in mind that deficits are the symptom rather than the cause of our troubles. It’s the fever not the infectious agent.
The cause is diagnosed pretty well by Mancur Olson in his ambitiously titled “The Rise and Decline of Nations” In a nutshell, our interest groups are logjammed in a way that many other nations have avoided because either:
a) recent revolutions or military defeats swept away obsolete groups in favor of better adapted ones (eg Germany, Japan)
b) their interest groups operate at a national scale which allows them to be less parochial (eg unions in scandinavia)
Our history is actually remarkably free of domestic revolutions (the Civil War being older and more distant than any European country’s institutional memories of war) and our interest groups developed in a very lopsided, regional institutional patchwork.
Today, our MIC is out for itself, our insurance lobby is out for itself, the banking industry is out for itself, our public sector unions are out for themselves, etc. etc. and none of them is broadly representative enough to become sensitive to larger issues. So the mortgage bankers are distinct from the Wall Street i-bank lobby. They toss their garbage over the walls at each other, so to speak.
It’s a big picture idea which resonates with me in part because of Jared Diamond’s urgent warning (11:30-13:30 especially): elites who can insulate themselves from long-term consequences lead their societies into disaster. Sound familiar?
Don’t forget the drug cartels (international and coast to coast) and the big pharmas. It isn’t that there is one set of bad guys. There are several, they are well-organized and they all use Wall Street to launder their money.
At least the MIC employs domestically.
I was at a university concert Saturday night that was packed onstage and off. The nice lady next to me remarked how wonderful it was that there are so many students in wind ensemble. I told her it is typical for a smallish town with a large well-off middle class but that we are in an economic bubble, aka, a war economy town. She thought about that and said, “We are lucky to live here.” as the choral director came on stage to tell the Music 100 students to leave and give up their seats to the uni President and Provost who have arrived late but just in time for the speech saying we need a much bigger auditorium.
And that’s the problem in situ.
I think the Establishment v. People formulation is helpful when considering the dynamic between those who fund campaigns via K St., and the public good to which these interests are so often opposed.
But I think it also needs serious moderation, least it become too unfocused, and capable of more harm than good.
Putting aside (for a moment) the corruption of process surrounding health care, and looking at the deeper dismay and anger providing the backdrop to this
fiascodebate, there’s another formulation that should remain top-of-mind: Creators v. Speculators.Whatever arguments that speculators could have made to defend themselves (typically, their ability to ‘facilitate’ trade by safely and efficiently redistributing risk) have become demonstrably worthless now that their actual risk-concentrating and amplifying tendencies are painfully clear.
I think Jon is right when observing how damaging it is for the Obama administration to carry on ignoring the financial, moral, practical, and cultural consequences of treating innovation in speculation as though it were even remotely commensurate with innovation in (or even the simple production of) goods and services with actual value, exchanged for prices set in free markets backed by strong regulation to ensure their openness and transparency.
In many ways, this distinction between clearly real and deceptively artificial cuts to the heart of the health care mess. Yes, access in America is conspicuously limited and expensive, but that’s not a function of health care itself. Rather, it’s a function of accepting an entirely inappropriate over-reach by the insurance industry – one that’s transformed the routine mechanisms of payment and billing into a system-wide flash-point threatening to undermine not just the enterprise itself, but the broader measure of trust on which it depends.
As (many) others have noted, there’s no fundamental economic need for this. Even the political demands are dubious, and effective only because of there near-total lack of coherence, reason, honesty, and leadership coming from partisans on both sides of the aisle.
To wit, the Swiss have a private but non-profit insurance-based scheme (as opposed to government backed payments) that produces enviable results in terms of cost and care alike.
More importantly, the profits generated by our version of this system are paltry, at best. Even investors aren’t terribly reliant on this sector.
In fact, the only people who are enjoying major returns are the senior managers who have the ability to set outrageous compensation deals in exchange for minor manipulations in share prices, and – to a lesser extent – certain hospitals that have focused on gaming the system to maximum effect.
Also benefiting are those politicians who’ve managed to shroud this atrocious arrangement in terms that, though misleading in the extreme, are guaranteed to inspire loyalty and fury among the increasingly mindless groups known as primary voters.
So here, as with finance, we see massive social damage done by people creating the illusion of value to cover their unwarranted appropriation of real value. And we see their defense coming from people presenting equally cynical versions of the truth in order to prop up their own positions.
Meanwhile, those struggling to produce tangible value for themselves and others are left to manage the havoc caused by the monsters and the parasites, while infrastructure and social contracts crumble around them.
And all this continues unabated – even in the wake of the biggest implosion any of us have ever seen – in large part because we lack a government willing to clearly distinguish between production and theft.
I find it hard to view Obama as a man of intelligence and integrity when he’s so quick to ignore or dismiss its absence in others. And while I don’t believe he can address these broader challenges on his own, I also doubt that anyone can deal with them sensibly while there’s such a devastating void at the top.
The fact that none of his competitors were up to the job doesn’t excuse him from failing to do it as well.
Captain Negative flies in again: How familiar are you with the way local governments have learned to operate, after a century of development of what we have now? Ask Chicagoans or D.C. residents or even the 900,000 people down here in Pinellas County and St. Pete, where the serial incarnations of Daley-class mayors and ward-heeler council members and “staff” that’s either grossly inept or in on the gig are the rulers and the rule. Even though real unemployment is 22% and foreclosures are climbing and realtors are lying in their teeth about “surges” in home sales and the shoe labeled “commercial real estate liabilities” is still in the hands of the Gods, our local gov’t is still trying to steal a billion to give to some of the Bear Stearns guys who got out at the peak and bought the local MLB franchise and are using every trick in the book to get their free fucking stadium and a huge free boost in their net worths. The corruption is top to bottom, and all work from the same paradigm.
And don’t aptheosize the “pioneers” and “frontiersmen:” most of them were looking to slash and burn in their own interest, and seeking the land beyond the boundaries of law to get away with it.
But yeah, we have to muck out the stables before there’s a fit place for an honest plowhorse to stand.
On a semi-related note: For any of you that respect Paul Krugman as a social “scientist”, I suggest you read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html
then, read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/opinion/11KRUG.html
Not science or honesty. Just team sports nonsense.
Curses, Foiled Again!
We used to grow cotton
Now we grow guns
Curses, foiled again!
Our means of destruction
Are measured in tons
Curses, foiled again!
Our dear leaders tell us
It’s all for the good
To sacrifice comfort
You know we all should
While they live in mansions
And we’re chopping wood!
Curses, foiled again!
Our sons and our daughters
Are marched off to war
And no one will tell us
Just what the hell for
The knave’s in the kitchen
The wolf’s at the door
Curses, foiled again!
The parties predict
That they’ll overturn sin
Curses, foiled again
The ill wind of money
Blows out and blows in
Curses foiled, again!
Their plans are all hogwash
Their ads sell us pain
We try to forget them
But they’re back and then
We vote for the winner
But we just can’t win
Curses foiled again.
If I had the power
To summon down fire
I’d burn their big houses
And smoke their desire
I’d layoff our bosses
And quickly retire
Curses foiled again.
len bullard – nov 23 2009
> The people subsidizing those special
> merchant/producers are the local(s)
Yes, import duties and other market protections subsidise businesses by creating added expenses for (and often taxation of) domestic populations.
Communities don’t always object to helping their neighbours and often find it comforting that all must share a little equally.
If you grant that a society as a whole prefers some inefficiency to buy stability (the less employment the more individuals have to worry about) then you have to consider how the inefficiency is spread.
If you rely on individuals choosing to contribute then some will avoid the community service, some will game the system to their own advantage.
And if we pay attention to peoples motivations we notice, as a rule, we hate cheaters a great deal more than authority.
Societies prefer to organise to share responsibility. When the means of doing so is captured by those with a will to power who pervert the mechanisims to avoid sharing responsbility you get a totalitarianism mess.
Libertarians argue to avoid that by avoiding constructing the mechanism in the first place.
But people resist that idea because they feel it throws out the social cooperation as well.
> I have a problem with special legal rights
> that enable groups to invade property,
> threaten other people and maintain a
> monopoly.
Perhaps I don’t understand unions in the U.S. (I repeat a phrase an acquaintance in Germany used in conversation with others recently about unions in the U.S) and don’t understand U.S labour laws.
As I understand it you object to laws priviledging unions on the same principles I assume you object to laws priviledging corporations.
I suspect declaring that as (paraphrasing you in the manner I expect people to read ) `wishing to outlaw unions’ is a folly that will only antagonise people, as the desire to outlaw unions is all they’ll remember – which is blatantly anti-libertarian and therefore suggestive of hypocrisy.
Which can only serve to re-inforce impressions that Libertarians are simply selfish. I suggest you find another way to put your point.
> Taxpayer-funded income = no unionization.
I’ve often thought a solution to some of the U.S problems with money corrupting politics would be to have a rule: if you’re elected to office you must have no other income but your public salary, and for x-years after your service ends.
Where x is a period that increases the higher the office. Possibly the rest of your life once you get to Senate and Presidential levels.
Then you up the pay somewhat of most public offices. Accept that it will cost millions in the hope that it will save billions.
Eh, it probably wouldn’t work, People have plenty of family they can be bribed to advance.
Whatever notion prevails, The US is the mother of invention, thats a fact, go to the patent office and find out who, where and how much was invented this year. Some of it are the worst inventions, some of it are the best but still they are inventions that have rocked the world in the past and will in the future with the help of an organized society. Money don’t mean shit.We are better then that. Reality is catching up. Corporation don’t invent. Inventors do.
So the moral of this is we better be creative about this and forget about dogmas and adapt with intelligence to the new challenges. The climate will force us to have a planertary point of view where nationalism is a slow cliche. Left right center whatever as long as it WORKS.
Patent offices are more places to find examples of suppression of innovation than the occurence of invention.
Although they are a wonderful example of the ongoing inventiveness of corporate protection.
“all must share a little equally”
Tariffs are the MOST regressive form of such redistributive “sharing”.
I grant very little of “a society as a whole” preferring anything because “society” is a construct and has no preferences that are distinct from the individual preferences held by the individuals within it. But you recognize this from the get go, which is cool. Voting is, in fact, a pretty ineffective way of aggregating and ranking preference.
See Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility theorem.
Society is a construct. It is, at best, an emergent, extended order. It’s pretty much a strawman used for whatever scheme some Community, on the other hand, is real. Community is a local order and, as Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated, community can overcome even the problems in “the commons”.
I am not personally selfish, nor are most of the libertarians I know, not that this matters. The ideas that someone is “selfish” because they don’t believe in using force against others to take their stuff is pretty ridiculous. It’s not charitable to play robin hood. It’s just theft. One book, “Who Gives” actually demonstrates that political liberals tend to give less to charity than conservatives, even when the liberal is rich and the conservative is poor.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682730&page=1
This book may be partisan hackery, but the incentives make sense. If you believe in the coercive government version of “charity”, than you see your taxation as your “giving”. It’s not, of course. It’s mostly stealing. But if you see the government as largely wasteful (it is) and believe in private, voluntary action, you give more to charity.
Union thuggery is what I’m against. I have no problem with association or even strikes. I have a problem in intimidation. I have a problem with unions using fear tactics and threats. I have a problem with non-union workers being violently threatened if they come in to take the jobs of people asking above-market wages. That is the lingua franca of big labor and it speaks to the underlying problems inherent in their approach.
The best thing for workers “rights” is maximizing the number of opportunities through competition and low barriers to entry. That means breaking down the very regulatory barriers that so many so-called labor advocate have erected. Start with getting rid of the minimum wage.
Now, I don’t believe in “the market” per se. I believe in peace and voluntary action. I operate on the idea that, if people are wicked, than their government agents will be the most wicked of all, due to the nature of the political process. But if people are generally good, than they have no need for coercive “sharing”.
Thanks for the clarification. It does seem that the the collection of special interests that have ended up in the DC log jam really do represent the new parochialism.
And that’s another strike against privately funded elections. What you end up with is a situation where ‘your’ Senator (i.e. the one who bends the most rules in favor of your employer) isn’t even from your state. At the same time, your state ‘rep’ feels so insulated (either by virtue of gerrymandering in the House, or, in the case of Bacchus, by not having to go to the polls until 2014) that they have no compunction about selling their constituents short.
Not being a direct conduit into the law books is good when your constituents are crazy, and need moderation, or when they’re demanding something unconstitutional, and need guidance. The ugly starts when a third party starts telling that Senator they’ll give him the money he needs to keep his job (and the phenomenal set of perks that come with it) if he’ll just be so kind as to screw people who don’t matter anyway (even if they are, technically, his neighbors).
Lessig, whose take on all this has evolved very nicely, is no longer bothering to address all those defensive remarks from Congressmen about there being zero connection between the votes they deliver on the floor, and contributions from the lobbyists who pay their bills (and who go on to write many of them too).
Instead, Lessig is saying that the simple act of making this defense is damning in itself, as it’s prima face evidence of a decline in trust. The fact that it gets made so often (like, daily) only speaks to how corrosive the behavior has become. Also, having to repeat the same defense over and over is a clear sign that nobody is buying it.
Not when defensiveness of any kind means you still favor the status quo in general, even if there’s no quid pro quo from you as a legislator.
And why is this? Is it because you’re thinking about what comes next? Who do you look to for employment once your public ‘duty’ ends? Are people paying now to become your clients later?
So even if you remain “unpersuaded” by every lobbyist who’d pay well to have you vote against your conscience, your silent support of the Big Revolving Door means you’re tacitly approving the mechanism by which the less scrupulous trash the common good both during their terms, and after (Exhibit A: Tom Daschle).
This isn’t a problem centered in the Oval Office. So I wonder how long it will be until folks realize that any Presidential Candidate promising to “change the tone in Washington” is either being cynical or naive?
Sadly, not nearly enough people recognize that the rules of this particular game are not the President’s to change. This isn’t a task we can delegate to him. Instead, we need a broad pan-partisan consensus that support for private election funding is indistinguishable from support for corruption.
The only role a President can play comes from loudly declaring “there’s not much I can do to change this directly. But I’ll spotlight the mechanics of the problem in a way that nobody else can, and leave it to you – the voters – to insist on reps who will advance a pro-legislative independence agenda.”
This starts by insisting that throwing the bums out isn’t good enough if voters don’t follow through by extracting promises from their replacements to push – first and foremost – for public election financing – paid for at the State level to encourage a diversity of approaches, that accommodate regional differences where they matter, and to cultivate national bast-practices when they don’t.
Once a district has found a rep who will work towards this, then he must commit to giving up his ability to gerrymander districts as evidence of being selfless enough to representative one.
And of course, the President can offer a carrot as well, by drawing a clearly defined golden circle of access for clean legislators. Extending the effect of this with visits to the districts that elect them becomes part of the package (even if – or especially when – they elect clean Republicans).
And the President can salvage his own battered agenda by saying “Look, this is a Democracy. I’m not a Dictator and I’m not a King. I have to work through Congress. And that’s not going to happen if Congress doesn’t have the trust of the people it represents. And because I’m the President, I can’t just sit here, explaining and complaining – I actually have to do something to fix this. This means my job is to fix their approval rating – and to keep it fixed” (insert soaring rhetoric about checks and balances / the wisdom of the Founding Fathers / the self-correcting capacity of a divided government / some ‘hey, this is America and we’re all in this together sentiment / etc.)
The second-rate way of doing this would be to wait until his second term. The first rate way would be starting tomorrow, making the first test the 2010 midterms, and focusing on his 2012 campaign as the point where he’ll have enough people on-board to pass the measure.
Obviously, aspiring reps trying to dislodge incumbents on a “ditch K. St.” platform are going to have a hard time raising money from, well, K. St. And that’s where Obama, as a sitting President in command of Air Force One, steps in.
Any contestant who commits to the independent legislator agenda will get election support from the Man himself. He’ll even give it to Republicans if they’re going up against staunchly pro-corruption Dems who’ve been less than loyal in the first term. And all this very local support is his re-election campaign – or at least, its signature feature.
Pipe dream? Probably. But I did notice that 500 invites went out for Obama’s first state dinner (tonight). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) got one. Chief Health Care Reform Defiler Max Bacchus (D) did not.
Apparently, Obama is pissed about his “allies” in Congress, and how trusting them with “a broad outline and general principles” produced a general fiasco with broadstroke tarring of his Presidential agenda and authority.
The question now is whether he’s going to restrict payback to minor social slights, or if he’s going to recognize that he’s just been given the excuse to ditch the deadweight in his own party?
This break is something his original Change agenda always needed. Now will he seize the opportunity?
Agreed.
Beware demonization of “the speculator”. The line between useful assistant in the discovery process and anti-social free-rider on the exuberant wave is not an easy one to define.
Every decision contains within it risks, rewards and speculation about their likelihood. Every borrowed dollar is speculative. Every lent dollar is too.
And, yes, the “profiteers” that seek to exploit private arbitrage opportunities, even for selfish motives, can and often do perform a valuable service the rest of society. The speed the discovery process. Sometimes they act as market regulators, exposes malfeasance to the world in exchange for profits on their short. This was a large part of what happened with Enron.
None of what I have said should be applied to those who use and abuse the polis and the taxpayer. None of this applies to those whose decision making includes socialization of the downside risk while keeping the private gain. They are parasites. They poison the water.
But again. Beware demonization of the speculator.
“employs domestically”?
Ought to take a look at where so much of “our” MIC corporations have located their production, and how the stuff made here, with its groups of “high paid jobholders” and their, and their managements’, skill at creating buzz and interest-holders and all, warps the whole notion of “defense” and increases the Gaussian density of that giant money magnet.
And if you follow Aviation Week and similar tracts at all, you see that “defense” and “defence” businesses here, there and everywhere trade with each other across those silly national boundaries, sell lots of war materiel to governments and gunpeople hostile to their supposed nation’s interest, and hide their participation in a giant hoax on ordinary folk by ginning up one “leapfrog” technology after another. A lot of jungle ecology works the same way — ask a tree in the embrace of a strangler fig how that works out for it, and note how the ficuses tend to displace, one might say “eat,” all the long-lived hardwood species.
But who the fuck fucking cares?
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”
“speed up the discovery process… ex[pose malfeasance… in exchange for profits on their short.”
Gee, I thought that shareholder attention and corporate governance were supposed to take care of that, with a lot less dead loss in the “transaction.”
And who regulates those honest fellows, the Good Speculators? The “market?” And who defines into enforceableruleoflaw what constitutes use and abuse of the polis and the taxpayer? And who… , oh, never mind. What you are selling is just more of the “slack” that leads to more of the same of what we suffer now.
No sale in this store.
Gotta watch them “allies.” Sun Tzu had all kinds of advice about how to fuck your neighbor. Lots of good examples in the Old Testament. And then you might watch for smart people like old Queen Artemisia I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_I_of_Caria
Turned on her own side in a hot New York minute.
Patents are little more than a license to go to court…if you have the $150,000.00 to start the battle.
I’ve got a couple of them, and on one I made some dough because I sold my share to an honest person. The other languished in corporate Dilbert-land. Now I’ve given up on the process.
Jon,
I’m loving the thread running through your latest posts. I can truly relate.
I also think this is the first attempt I’ve seen by progressives to tap into the same anger and disappointed that has only been seen in the tea party movement so far.
I’m wondering if you can try to find how the left can tap into that sentiment that the Palin’s and Beck’s have been so good at mining.
This is NOT to say that racism isn’t prevalent in the tea party movement, nor that that movement isn’t dangerous. This is only to say that there is some real anger at the establishment. And it needs to be addressed.
Obama ran on change and on hope. Palin runs on fear and despair. But they both tap the same meme of “People vs. Establishment”.
Palin resigned her governorship of Alaska so she could run as anti-establishment in 2012. This may seem like a bad political move but it’s not. It’s as brilliant as it is cynical.
Obama has shown himself to be very right-of-center. He has not tackled transparency in government (the secretive ACTA talks are a prime and scary example), he is only putting on trial those terrorists he knows he can convict (the rest get military tribunals or are “preemptively detained”. There’s a name for that – show trials). He has done nothing to change the rules that govern Wall St. (fakken Geithner!) and health reform has turned into a sad joke (“the Public Option is like suspenders.” riiiiiight…..)
Obama is very much NOT a progressive or even a leftist in any meaningful sense. He is not pursuing any change at all in Washington. He is continuing every single bad policy that the Bush administration put into place.
In effect he has hijacked the change/hope votes of yesteryear. And the only reason he can count on winning in 2012 is that people will (rightly) fear a Palin administration more than a 2nd Obama term.
So Palin vs. Obama is a lose-lose proposition for progressives. It’s also a lose-lose in the fight of the People vs. the Establishment. Obama will not change Washington from within. And Palin will only try to turn America into the totalitarian Capitalism that works so well in China.
The angry, uneducated right has been hijacked by fear-mongers. The hopeful progressive left has been hijacked by the incumbent administration.
Despite appearances, the “permanent Republican majority” is still alive and kicking in Washington. It’s just that some of these Republicans have a ‘D’ next to their names.
I’ve been calling on this blog to put Obama’s feet to the fire from the first week of November 2008. To make sure he lives up to the promises of his campaign.
I’m glad to see I’m no longer a lone voice in a crowd of change/hope euphoria.
There is real anger in the Tea Party movement. There are also some good arguments for small government (more transparency, a woman’s right to choose, electronic surveillance). The progressives would do themselves and this whole planet a great service if they could tap some of that sentiment and wring it out of the hands of the Palin/Beck’s of this world.
Here’s hoping.
just found this:
http://www.freshjive.com/propagandist/31/hope-is-fading-fast
I think it ties in rather poignantly with the closing of my previous comment.
And who said “progressives” are all just wishy-washy people without much passion?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/25/807830/-You-Are-Losing-Me,-Kossacks.
Again, how do you herd cats? There’s not a common thread of thought or belief or understanding that’s present in a large enough part of humanity to pull us all together even if the cost of that brownian motion is species suicide.
And if you want to start ‘em young, or plan some strategy, or just give free rein to those impulses you feel stirring, g’wan down here and pick up a set or three…
(I understand I am very distantly related to the founder of this business, but can honestly disclose that I have absolutely no interest in it…)