The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: November 2010 Page 2 of 3

Bush would have endorsed Obama if asked

From the FT:

“The venue was the Oval Office. A group of British dignitaries, including Gordon Brown, were paying a visit. It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor… Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate… ‘I probably won’t even vote for the guy,’ Bush told the group, according to two people present. ‘I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.'”

And why not, it’s not hyperbole at all to say that Obama is Bush’s third term.  He has embraced Bush’s wars, Bush’s approach to executive power, Bush’s civil liberties doctrines and Bush’s economic doctrines.  The differences exist, but they are not significant.  In almost every way that matters, Obama took Bush’s constitutional order and institutionalized it, giving it a bipartisan imprimatur.

In Flanders Field

by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The economic trap the 1st world is in

For years I’ve been saying the plan was to Japanify.

Japanify is another way of saying “extend and pretend”.  You pretend the banks and the rich aren’t broke.  In the Japan scenario, you slowly pay down or write off the bank losses at a pace which doesn’t wipe out the shareholders or bondholders or bank.  Japan could do that, because Japan is a net exporter: there is money coming in to Japan.  Of course, doing so led to over a decade of a lousy economy for Japan, but it was feasible.

Nations like the US can’t do it, not just because the US is a net importer, but because it’s bleeding all over the place, losing high value jobs, industry and running down infrastructure.

The 1st world as a whole is trying to Japanify, but because most nations aren’t net exporters, they’re adding a heaping side order of austerity on top of it.  Everyone is trying to slash expenses on ordinary people, so they can funnel money to the top, and avoid forcing rich people and corporations to take their actual losses.

So, take as much from the public domain and turn it into monopolistic profit centers for private enterprise (for example, the health care bill, mandating purchases of a private product with no price controls or unregulated credit card interest rate and fee increases), slash spending on things which can’t be turned into profit centers, and make sure that banks and other corporations aren’t forced to take losses.

To bring it home, you have New York Governor-elect Cuomo saying that his first goal is to take out the NY unions – ie. to get wage and benefit concessions out of them.  You have a huge push against teachers unions, both to reduce costs and to turn eduction into a profit center (money for corps).  You have the push to slash SS and Medicare (entitlements) and so on.  And on the top end, to keep low tax rates for rich people and even decrease them more.

These are two sides of the same coin – extend and pretend doesn’t work for most western nations the way it did for Japan.  To put it crudely, Japan still makes stuff.  The US makes less and less, Britain makes squat, Greece makes squat, Ireland makes squat.

To extend and pretend, if one wanted to do such a thing (one shouldn’t) requires a real engine of economic growth.  But right now, if real economic growth happened, oil prices would strangle it just as it got out of swaddling clothes.

None of this is to say that there aren’t ways around this conundrum, but they require taking steps governments simply aren’t willing to take at this time.

Death and Rebirth of a Republic

(From Formerly T-Bear)

First it is “Change election funding” but to do so Law needs be legislated; but the legislature is broken.

Then it is “Elect more better™ legislators” but the political process is corrupted; the political parties are broken.

Then it is control the government but that is run and dominated by the imperial executive; the presidency is broken.

Then the courts will pass judgment but the law has been laid low, cut down by judges with nefarious agendas; the courts are broken.

Then it depends upon the citizen to act but the citizen, bereft of education, possessing no remembrance of history, no knowledge of economics, no concept of civics, no acquaintance with Law, and willfully ignorant of any discipline of substance; that citizen is broken as well.

When all is taken together and summed, the bottom line is that this extent of damage cannot be undone. At the end of the day, the interrelated complex that sustained the Republic is no longer, what remains is a body politic riddled with cancer: a cancer of lies, a cancer of propaganda, a cancer of illusion, a cancer of delusion, a cancer of self-deception, a cancer of hubris.

In the end, power abhors a vacuum, something will replace what once had a vital balance. Those in power will try to remain there and will apply greater and greater force and coercion to do so; but this too will break down as all autarchical despots ultimately do, the expense of force finally undermining the autocrat.

Maybe then, enough of the Philadelphia construct can be recalled and a new edifice built in such a manner that no individual, no group, no corporation will be allowed enough power by themselves or in conspiracy to endanger the new edifice. The life expectancy of a Republic averages about two centuries before the political impulse is spent; this Republic is no exception. Those things that extend the life of Republics were not done and profound corruption prevails.

Jobs make break even point

151,000 jobs were gained last month.  150K is the break-even point given population gain to maintain employment.  This is neither a good nor a bad figure.

Obama did NOT save the US From a Depression

Stop saying Obama saved the economy, he did no such thing. The US is in a depression (not a great depression, but a depression). All Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and Bush did was push the day of reckoning back a bit in order to save the rich, at the cost of trillions of dollars which should have been used to restructure the economy.

Why I have to keep telling people this, as they experience an absolute decline in their goddamn wages, I don’t know.

The Primary Obama Movement Begins Today

The 2010 electoral massacre is over and Democrats are licking their wounds.

Let me put it simply, what went wrong went wrong from the very top of the party.  In both political and policy terms, the President of the United States, the head of the Democratic party, created this disaster.

Nothing tracks electoral success better than the economy.  Barack Obama did not do what it took to pull the economy out of the doldrums.  This is true both with regards to the stimulus, which was too small, too larded up with tax cuts and too ineffective and with regards to the Federal Reserve, where Obama’s chosen chairman Ben Bernanke is about to drop stimulus (nicknamed Quantitative easing 2) on the economy after the election instead of doing it before the election. There was no economic reason not to do it months ago, when it would have helped both struggling Americans and Democrats.

Barack Obama took pains to let down or gratuitously harm virtually every major Democratic constituency. Whether it was increasing deportations of Hispanics, whether it was putting in a Presidential order against Federal money being used for abortions which was more restrictive than Rep. Stupak had demanded, whether it was wholesale violation of civil rights climaxing with the claim that he had the right to assassinate American citizens, whether it was trading away the public option to corporate interests then insisting for months he hadn’t, whether it was not moving aggressively on card check (EFCA) for unions, or whether it was constantly stymying attempts to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Barack Obama was there making sure that whatever could be done to demoralize the base was done.

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans think that the policies Obama pursued were socialistic, progressive or liberal.  They think this is what left-wing governance looks like.  In 2 years Obama has managed to discredit the left, possibly for a generation.

Oh no, Republicans!

The argument against running a 2012 primary challenger against Obama should be familiar to all of us.  It is the argument of fear.  The argument of the lesser evil.  Primarying Obama makes a Republican win more likely, and if a Republican president gets in, it will be so much worse for you!  No matter how bad Obama is, President Teabag will be worse.

That’s the truth.  The stone cold truth.  Republicans will be worse and a primary makes it more likely that Republicans will win.

Here’s another stone cold truth.  If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  Obama and Democrats had a historic chance to fix America.  The rich who run America, whom the Supreme Court in Citizens United gave permission to outright buy elections, could have been broken when Obama took power.  All that was necessary was to force them to take their losses.  Contrary to what apologists for wealth have told you, this would not have meant disaster for the economy, there were ways to protect regular Americans while making the rich take their losses.

Instead Barack Obama, as in so many other ways, continued Bush’s policies, and kept the rich bailed out. The end result has not only been the tsunami of foreclosure issues which still threaten to swamp the banks, has not only been trillions in dollars of taxpayer money being used to keep rich people rich (much more money than was spent on the stimulus), it has been the wholesale transfer of money from poor to rich: an absolute decline in total wages, average wages and median wages of ordinary Americans, while Wall Street pays themselves even higher bonuses than before, gives record money to Republicans and the rich pay themselves more.

America has been in long term decline for between 30 and 40 years, depending on how you count it.   It is no longer enough for Democrats to simply accept the new Republican norm every time they take power.  Accepting Bush’s wars, Bush’s economy and Bush’s civil liberties violations meant that Bush won. Obama institutionalized Bush.

This long term decline is in danger of becoming terminal.  The banks are still bankrupt, States and cities are in constant crisis, the housing crisis is nowhere near over.  Wages are dropping and jobs are being offshored.

The status quo of Democrats coming in after Republicans and accepting Republican policies as a fait accomplit must end.  If it does not, the US will experience a full-on meltdown.  Not a great depression like in the ’30s (though the US is in a Depression) but a meltdown like that which occurred in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, where the population actually declined, food was hard to find, brown outs were common, medicine was in short supply, and so on.

Any suggested policies or electoral politics which does not act to stop this terminal decline, this end of America’s golden age is unacceptable.

The price of this may well be that a Republican president gets in in 2012.  That will be bad, but if it happens it is a necessary sacrifice, because until one of the two major parties is one which will propose and then execute solutions which work, all Democrats do is slow down America’s terminal decline.  Better that President teabag gets in in 2012 and then there is a chance at a good President in 2016 than that the US have to wait till 2020 at the earliest.  And hey, a successful primary could cut this short four years, the primary candidate could win the primary and the election.  47% of Democrats want Obama primaried. That’s not because he has rock-solid support.

Obama must be primaried and he must be primaried from the left

The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down.  If the left does not do this, left wing politics and policies will be discredited with Obama.  This is important not as a matter of partisan or ideological preference, it is important because left wing policies work.  It is necessary to move back to strongly progressive taxation, it is necessary to force the rich to take their losses, it is necessary to deal with global warming, it is necessary to deal with the fact that the era of cheap oil is over, it is necessary to stop the offshoring engine which is destroyin the American middle class.

Only left wing solutions to these problems will work. America has spent 30 years, since Reagan, trying to fix its problems by going more and more right wing, and it has been a disaster.  Each additional step to the right has made the problem worse.

The first step to fixing America is fixing the Democratic party, and the first step in fixing the Democratic party is fixing Barack Obama and destroying, forever, publicly and in the most high profile way possible, the idea that Democrats can ignore and abuse their own base.  The lies spewed by corporate media figures who earn millions of dollars a year, that every time the Democrats lose, it is because they were too left wing, so more tax cuts are necessary, must end.

If you love your country, or if you’re concerned for the future of yourself or your children, primary Obama.  If you don’t, you may never get a chance to elect someone who will do what is necessary to save your country.

Why Democrats Lost for Complete Idiots

The Democrats gained control of both Congress and the Presidency in 2008.  They then pursued ineffective policies which didn’t fix the economy. They increased deportations of Hispanics. They restricted abortion rights for women.  They spat on gays repeatedly.  They betrayed unions.  They gutted civil rights, going even further than George W. Bush (who never said he had the right to assassinate Americans.)  They saved bankers who then rewarded themselves with record bonuses and salaries while average American wages actually declined.

The base was demoralized, not because the Dems went too far left, but because they went too far right.  The non-Democratic voters were angered because they elected Democrats to fix the goddamn economy and to not be George Bush, who they were sick of.  Dems didn’t do what they were elected to do.

That’s why Dems are losing – because they demoralized their own base in a base election year, because they didn’t fix the economy, and because they thought Americans wanted them to be George Bush, just a bit smarter.

This isn’t a repudiation of liberalism or progressivism or socialism (Americans wouldn’t recognize a socialist if he gave them real universal healthcare) it is a repudiation of a Democratic party which failed to fix the economy and which became identified with bailouts for the rich.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this, is, forgive me, a complete idiot.

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