Republicans Fighting for the Heart of the Republican Party

Santorum won the Iowa caucus after all, despite some alleged last minute shenanigans by the Romney supporters. But Romney clearly won New Hampshire, which is basically in his backyard. And, surprise, Newt Gingrich may pull out a squeaker in South Carolina. It's only January, and already there's been three primaries and possibly three different winners. We'll know the results by Saturday night... hopefully. The good news is that Republicans are trying to redefine their party. The bad news is that a lot of Republicans want a candidate who's as far to the right as possible.

It's clear the Republican party, after years of blunders and incompetence by George W. Bush, needs to go back to the drawing board. More important, the conservative ideas of the last thirty years simply don't work anymore. To put it bluntly, the Republican party needs to reform itself.

Of course, the notion of a Republican reformer is still a bit of an oxymoron. As so often happens in Washington, yesterday's right wing Republican vanguard is today's establishment. As an example, Santorum was a rebel when he was elected Senator from Pennsylvania. After two years, he became an establishment Republican protecting the business as usual interests of wealthy conservative Republicans, bankers and Wall Street high rollers. Hey, it's lucrative being a member of the establishment. And now, Tea Party favorite Eric Cantor is pulling the same stunt: after only one year this time, a Republican rebel has once again discovered the advantages of being part of the Republican establishment. Listen to what he says on TPMLivewire:

At a time when the Republican presidential nomination contest is growing increasingly nebulous, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) urged his party to “coalesce around a single vision with a nominee.”

It's not hard to read the tea leaves in Cantor's words. Instead of supporting an open primary process, he's telling voters to support the establishment candidate—meaning: someone who might be able to get elected. Everybody knows that neither Santorum or Gingrich is electable. Santorum represents a draconian right wing vision and Gingrich's reckless behavior does not make him fit for the oval office.

So the tea party big shots, who stopped mentioning the name of George W. Bush in 2008, want to continue Bush's policies by supporting Mitt Romney. Yep. Just what the country needs, two Republican businessmen in a row making decisions in the Oval Office according to what the hot shots on Wall Street want.

Hang on to your seats, folks. Until the leaders of the GOP reform the party, it's going to be a wild ride.

The Sociopaths on Wall Street

The ideal corporation through most of the 20th century was one that pursued profits while being reasonably responsible toward workers, the community, and consumers. Since about the 1960s, corporations have also, at least in theory, been more responsible when coming to the environment.

However, since the 1980s—some would argue sooner—there has been a deterioration in corporate ethics in many sectors. Certainly the S & L crisis, the ethical failures of the Exxon Valdez episode and the deaths and lack of financial responsibility associated with the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster—all three occurred in the 1980s—makes it clear that the interpretation of deregulation in that era was far too often synonymous with ethical lapses in the executive suite. From the end of the Reagan era until the end of George W. Bush's time in office, the interpretation has only gotten worse. Actually, in very little time, deregulation went from a need to adjust regulations to make them fairer and more sensible to becoming an outright license to break the law and defraud people in various sectors of society.

There have always been lapses among corporation and there has been debate about how much or how little a corporation should do. There have also been corporations, all along, that cut corners in order to gain an advantage over other corporations. A general rule of thumb in business is that competent people can always make money as long as everybody plays by the same rules. Unfortunately, people who are not very honest or competent or both are generally the first to look for short cuts, including favors from politicians.

The reality is that both parties are susceptible to influence peddling. Unfortunately, Republicans have pretty much made deregulation, as well as other ethically challenged ideas, pillars of their political philosophy. In addition, if an ethically-challenged business executive makes enormous profits, many Republican politicians, are notoriously slow to recognize that there is a problem (e.g., Kenneth Lay and George W. Bush). The most telling sign is that when a rational and honest Republican prosecutor tries to uphold the law, that prosecutor may find himself without a political future in the Republican party.

One of the problems with today's business world is the number of ethically challenged people who are allowed to rise to the executive suite in the first place. In Bloomberg, William D. Cohan has an article that discusses a theory by Clive R. Boddy about Wall Street psychopaths:

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of [people who] ... "lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

(snip)

He says [psychopaths] seem "to be unaffected" by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths "present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened..."

It worth recalling that John Dean has written a book called "Conservatives without Conscience." Dean was not talking specifically about psychopaths, and certainly not corporate psychopaths, who are basically a class of very smart criminals who are much more sophisticated than ordinary criminals without conscious (who in any case frequently end up in prison). But Dean was very much talking about people who are authoritarian by temperament. I would also add that people like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush strike me as extraordinarily narcissistic and are clearly among the type of people Dean talks about. For both Bush and Gingrich, life is all about them.

But today's Republican party has other other problems as well. What is it about the Republican political class that they look the other way when a Republican politician obviously lies? And why is it that they refuse to set the record straight when others obviously lie about Barack Obama (birthers) or lie about John Kerry (swift boaters)? And why is it that the Republican political class failed to notice the obvious economic disaster we were heading for as Wall Street and the banks were allowed to engage in reckless behavior?




Here's the scholarly link to Boddy's paper.

And here's a link that provide a more accessible version to Boddy's paper.

Circus Atmosphere Among Top Republicans: Donald Trump to Host Presidential Debate

The Republicans running for president are so bad that a phrase left over from the George W. Bush era comes to mind: shock and awe. Hey, it's a circus with lots of stunts, much swinging back and forth in the polls, and an embarrassing number of splats.

I suppose it began with Sarah Palin who "earned" millions by never really declaring herself a candidate for the 2012 presidential election. When Palin quit halfway through her term as governor, anyone paying attention figured she was doing it for the money. Conservatives considered that observation cynical and shoveled piles of cash into her coffers. If Palin had been serious about a presidential run, she at least could have used some of that cash to remake her image. Karl Rove showed that was possible with George W. Bush.

The first attempt by Newt Gingrich to run for president last spring was a disaster simply because he tried to calibrate himself to the right of Romney and to the left of some of the right wing fruitcakes trying to grab onto the Tea Party movement. The irony is that Gingrich is a reactionary and has been trying to pull the Republican party to the far right for more than twenty years. Over the summer, he had to take a long vacation before coming back as Gingrich II.

One of the oddest candidates initially was Donald Trump. He tried to pump a lot of hot air into the silly birther craze that conservatives kept going out of a stubborn desire to create "reality" by huffing and puffing their fantasy into some sort of straw house that was ridiculously easy to blow down. So what was Trump doing? Had his political advisers told him that being ridiculous sells? Oh wait, time and time again in American politics, the ridiculous sells quite well. The problem for Donald Trump is that throughout his life he has frankly always sounded like a blowhard. More on him in a moment.

Rick Perry has crashed. It was so painful to watch that it's probably better to simply move on.

Michelle Bachmann has made so many gaffes that I keep thinking of the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. She would have closed our embassy in Iran.

Herman Cain is a circus barker. He is also crashing in the polls. But at least
he's been entertaining. I've never seen a candidate find so many ways to twist in the wind because of his own comments. Trump and Cain have been the two circus barkers on the Republican campaign trail. They're both the equivalent of high-priced used car salesmen. Americans haven't seen too many salesmen types in presidential contests before. The first may have been George W. Bush. Bush's only claim to fame before becoming governor of Texas was that he was a president's son and that he had a knack of parting wealthy investors from their money for oil projects that never went anywhere.

But Gingrich is back—as Gingrich II. Or maybe it's Gingrich III, Gingrich IV.... One loses count. It's hard to say how far Gingrich will go. How do you predict the fortunes of such a person when Newt's claim to fame began on C-Span when he would hurl phony charges at Democrats in an empty chamber at one or two in the morning. It was a joke, a charade, a misuse of special orders, a desperate attempt for a mediocre politician to get attention. Using special orders to get something off your chest is fine. But attacking your House colleagues without telling them that you're attacking them is a sore point with a long history in Washington. But conservatives thought it was cute and Gingrich finally had a career as a politician known for his....what? Can anyone name something useful that Gingrich has done in the last thirty years?

Okay, there are still people left in the campaign and more debates. The debates, of course, have been bizarre. Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the war in Iraq and the person responsible for the image of Americans being welcomed with flowers, parades and cheers, was allowed to ask a question. This is a guy who was wrong on about one or two dozen predictions he made about Iraq. Two months after we arrived in Iraq everything that Paul Wolfowitz said about Iraq was essentially thrown out the window as useless. Wolfowitz was a cold war warrior who didn't know what to do with himself after the fall of the Soviet Union. So to stay in business and to stay cozy with conservatives, he essentially made up bullshit about places like Iraq. Some foreign policy. And a strange choice to be asking questions.

But the weirdness of the Republican run for the White House has not ended. It probably won't end until November 2012. At the end of December, for some unfathomable reason, Donald Trump has been asked to be the debate moderator. If anyone symbolizes the reckless avarice of the 1% (some say the .1%) that brought on the Great Recession, it's Donald Trump. Trump was born rich. He inherited his real estate company from his parents. I don't know how many times Donald Trump has come to the brink of bankruptcy but it appears he's never really has had to worry about losing his fortune. Why? Because the banks always bail him out. Not because he's competent, but because...well, that's just what they do. Long before President Bush had to bail out the banks, the banks for twenty years had been bailing out Trump. Donald Trump is a bona fide member of the privileged 1%. He's not a banker, but long before the banks expected to automatically be bailed out, Donald Trump was already leading the way. And he's asking the questions.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Decline of the Republican Party

Republicans have a hard time accepting responsibility for their blunders. Charles Krauthammer, for example, is still trying to justify the war in Iraq years after it became obvious that the war was a perpetrated fraud, a war that was utterly unnecessary and irrelevant to the capture of Osama bin Laden and the dismantling of al Qaida. The United States wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, with billions quite often unaccounted for. That does not include the ultimate cost of the war.

And Republicans wonder how we got into the deepest economic slump since the 1930s.

Years of deregulation by Republicans and a few of their Democratic friends left the financial sector as about as unregulated as a gambling saloon in 1880s Tombstone, Arizona. The reckless beneficiaries of Republican deregulation were investment bankers on (gasp) Wall Street. Do Republicans really not know what Occupy Wall Street is about? To this day, most of the people responsible for the meltdown have not been held accountable.

The phony rage of the Tea Party movement, largely financed by the 1%, and for the 1%, is largely a resurrection of the John Birch Society (one of the founding members of the John Birch Society is the father of the ultra-conservative billionaire Koch brothers who own Koch Industries). In the 1960s, the John Birchers saw communists under every rock and were radically right wing. Like the John Birchers, the Tea Party folks also have trouble dealing with facts. For example, the debt the U.S. has run up in the last 11 years was not because of welfare, medicare, social security, or student loans. The debt was the result of Republicans refusing to fund two major wars. In twenty of the last thirty years, it has been Republicans not Democrats who have recklessly driven up America's debts. For eight years, Clinton had a surplus. Republicans who consult sources other than Fox News and Rush Limbaugh know this.

Look, I know plenty of hardworking Republicans who vote for Republican politicians—those same Republican politicians are glad to take their votes and money without giving much back. It's a weird world. What people need to remember about the power brokers of the Republican Party is very simple: the Republican Party is the party of bankers and privilege. There aren't that many people who are bankers and who have sweet heart deals courtesy of Congress, state legislatures, and Republican presidents. So in the spirit of P. T. Barnum, Republican leaders cajole a lot of people with odd promises that they half-heartedly keep.

People like Charles Krauthammer work hard to make us miss the obvious. In a recent column, he wrote:

To the villainy-of-the-rich theme emanating from Washington, a child is born: Occupy Wall Street. Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over.

These indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees have decided that their lack of gainful employment is rooted in the malice of the millionaires on whose homes they are now marching — to the applause of Democrats suffering acute Tea Party envy and now salivating at the energy these big-government anarchists will presumably give their cause.

Krauthammer lays it on thick—stereotypes, mythologies and all the rest. I'm almost sorry that he doesn't work for our side. Except that over the years he's become a little loose with the facts. It's the only way a conservative can operate these days. There was a time when a conservative could be rigorously factual and argue effectively. William F. Buckley was such a conservative. But Buckley, despite all the debates he so infuriatingly won—at least on debating points—had a weakness, and he knew it. But he exploited the decency of his opponents who either didn't think in certain terms or were too classy in that era to point out the obvious weakness in Buckley's arguments. That the underpinning of Buckley's philosophy was a shameless selfishness. William F. Buckley did not care if the system that so benefited the rich was unfair. He was, however, a little embarrassed by the underpinning of his philosophy. When cornered, he would admit that selfishness was essential to his type of conservatism, but he would say it quietly, in few words and move on quickly. That is the underpinning of the philosophy that dominates the Republican Party. Remember: I'm not talking about Republicans who are farmers, fire fighters and shopkeepers, etc.; I'm talking about high-powered bankers and the privileged, the people who game the system (I'm not talking about George Baily who ran a decent savings and loan; I'm talking about the other guy). The reality is that the Republicans who control the Republican Party care a great deal about the law, as long as it benefits them, and includes a lot of zeroes in the checks they receive.

Krauthammer truly doesn't understand what he's saying. He invokes Steve Jobs, an entrepreneur and job creator (though Jobs loses points in recent years for sending a fair number of jobs overseas). No Democrat I know has a problem with real job creators. Republicans relish creating mythologies about make work projects by Democrats, but Republicans are the ones who create phony jobs for party hacks like 'heckuva job' Michael Brown of Katrina fame and the private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ironic that Krauthammer rails against an English degree. He himself began with a political science degree (though he moved on). That kind of silly name calling doesn't get us anywhere. In any case, isn't name calling an old-fashioned method for changing the subject?

The subject is that Wall Street not only screwed up the economy but no one has been held accountable for the fraud that was committed with the financial derivatives that were based on mortgages and ultimately the fraudulent system of bonuses, commissions, and paybacks for pushing as many home loans on Americans as possible regardless of the creditworthiness of the home owners or the credit worthiness of the banks, investment bankers and mortgage companies peddling the worthless derivatives. The financial collapse did not have to happen. It was not a product of an economic cycle. It was purely a product of lax government control, greed and fraud.

What was pathetic is that in early 2007, when it was clearly possible to do something, reasonably responsible Republicans—who nevertheless bought into the conservative economics of the last 30 years—stood like deer in the headlights, hapless, clueless and incompetent. The Tea Party Republicans are clearly not an improvement.

The people paying for the financial fiasco on Wall Street are not the banks, not the 1%, not the people with privileged government connections, and certainly not the Republican lobbyists doing all they can to protect their wealthy clients. The people paying for the fiasco are the 99% trying to earn a living.

Republican Fiasco: Choice Is Between Bad and Very Bad

The Republican pragmatists refuse to stand up. For all practical purposes, the pragmatists are politically dead in the Republican Party. By blackmailing the American people, the tea party Tories are about to give us either a bad deal (a compromise where Republican right wingers get most of what they want) or a very bad deal (where Republicans get almost everything they want). That's assuming the tea party zealots don't simply cause the US to go into default, in which case, it's anybody's guess what will happen next.

Even the wealthy billionaires who paid for the tea party movement are beginning to wonder what they have unleashed.

Healthy economic activity in the modern world depends on pragmatism and it depends on reasonable expectations. Do not expect the economy to do well if Republicans create chaos while also killing jobs and the economy.

Tea Party Tories vs. Republican Pragmatists

The Plain Dealer carries a Washington Post article that briefly mentions one of the most despicable acts I've ever seen by the U.S. House of Representatives:

The Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened Aug. 2 government default.

The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans...

In Washington, there are very few Republican pragmatists left. Over the years, I have often disagreed with Republican pragmatists, but—this has to be said bluntly—at least they're not nuts like the tea party Tories. Of course, there are different kinds of Republican pragmatists. Some are moderates, some are conservative. But they're not totally nuts.

There were conservative pragmatists during the Reagan era who listened to the conservative radicals of the era but refused to throw millions of poor and middle class Americans under the bus. The conservative pragmatists did damage but at least the damage was limited.

There were moderate Republican pragmatists during the 1960s. Some of them were courageous. Despite putting rules in place for this and limitations on that, they helped pass important legislation of the era that ultimately benefited a large majority of Americans.

For those of us who were paying attention, there were certainly radical conservatives in the 1960s who were totally nuts. Some followed an angry George Wallace. Some were members of the ridiculous and much caricatured John Birch Society (I have previously written how John Birch members would hand out dimes on Halloween along with right wing leaflets for children to give their parents).

To repeat the above, on July 19th, 2011, the nuttiness of the tea party Tories manifested itself in a vote in the House to cut the US budget by $6,000,000,000,000. Pardon the zeroes, but to simplify, and repeat once more, that's $6 trillion dollars 'trimmed' from the US budget. Right wing Republicans in recent years have found all kinds of cute ways to make something unreasonable sound just fine. Cutting $6 trillion is not fine. There are two issues here. The first one, which is actually the more critical issue in the long run, is that such a budget cut would increase the power of the super wealthy and decrease the power and well being of everyone else. It would continue the erosion of democracy that we have seen in the last ten years.

The second issue is the one that hits home if voters bother to think about it. Cutting the budget that severely means putting a lot of people out of work.

If you don't have money for teachers, you put a lot of teachers out of work.

If you don't have money for law enforcement, you put a lot of police officers, agents and investigators out of work.

If you don't have money for fire trucks and overtime during fire season, that's a lot of fire fighters out of work and lot of property destruction.

If you don't have money for highways, you put a lot of highway workers out of work and you pay a lot of money and repairs for tires and vehicles.

If you don't have money for research, you put scientists and engineers out of work who are needed to make the US competitive.

If you cut down the number of people in the military, you put tens of thousands of soldiers on the street without a job because the budget for helping them get the necessary education, health care and housing is too pitiful to do them much good, since all of the above people would also be out of work.

Since early 2007, when Bush was still president and failing to mind the store as banks and financiers ran amuck, most Americans have experienced economic troubles that our country has not experienced since the 1930s. Those troubles will continue if Republicans keep cutting jobs at the state and federal level. Private industry cannot absorb the number of people who would be out of work if the tea party Tories at the state and national level continue to have their way.

In the end, the tea party folks are phonies. They have far more in common with Kenneth Lay, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump than they do with average Americans. The tea party folks don't care about you and I. They care about the wealthy, the privileged, and the well-connected. Real American patriots in 1776 were fighting against the rigged and gamed system that the British Tories were pulling on Americans with the substantial help of George III. A rigged and gamed system is exactly what tea party Republicans want more of.

The Senate, with the help of the White House, appears to be leading the way to a less onerous bill (with a crucial nod from some pragmatic Republicans), though that bill is not likely to help us move forward through what is likely to be a difficult period in the next few years. But it is preferable to the bill tea party radicals want to pass. 'Preferable,' but largely useless in terms of what our country needs.

In the end, thanks to the tantrums of the tea party radicals, we're in trouble. There is no way for our economy to continue to move forward without serious attention to our infrastructure and considerable reform of business as usual.

Tea party folks are business as usual Republicans. They make noise, but at the end of the day, they shovel billions into the pockets of those who need it the least and those who continue to ship American jobs to other countries such as China. We cannot solve our economic future by leaving it to corporations that make useless toys, finance costly scams, or treat Americans as easily manipulated cash cows, while leaving millions of people out of work.

Rupert Murdoch: The Kingmaker and Political Manipulator

Rupert Murdoch is a Republican politician. He doesn't hold office, but he's a politician, nevertheless. He doesn't sit in the House of Lords but he acts like a Lord with all the privileges and powers that go with office. But not a Lord in the British House of Lords as its been in the last 100 years or so. He's from the House of Tories, circa 1776. He's tea party. Except, of course, the tea party Republicans are really Tories defending lies, corruption and privilege to the hilt. They want to kill Medicare, but pretend on Tuesdays and Thursdays that they don't. They want to kill Social Security but pretend on Mondays and Wednesdays that they don't. They want the economy to fail under Obama, but pretend that they don't on Thursdays and Saturdays.

They do, however, admit that they want to cut the budget to the bone. And that makes them job killers seven days a week.

But I digress, though Lord Murdoch is certainly a tea party Tory if there ever was. He was a Tory in Australia, where he was born and inherited a small newspaper empire—and privilege. He was a Tory in the U.K., where he began to accumulate wealth—and privilege. Being greedy, he moved on to the U.S. and remains a Tory both in the U.S. and the U.K.

I sort of met Rupurt Murdoch once. We were invited to the same event along with many other people. I never said a word to him, nor did I have any desire to do so. But I watched as he entered with his entourage and his enormous ego, dripping with disdain, not only for his sycophants but even for those at the event. I watched the sycophants vie with him for attention, nervously and aggressively, while Murdoch played a kind of power game with them. The group and their 'Lord' went to the farthest corner away from everyone else and did not pay the least bit of attention to the event they were invited to. They were all more important than the rest of us. These were people from Fox News and, who knows, perhaps there were two or three people from the British tabloids that Murdoch owns.

All too often the ethics of organizations reflect the ethics of the owners. The tabloid scandal in the UK undoubtedly flows from Murdoch's values (see Carl Berstein's article in Newsweek). It's apparent he likes to twist arms, particularly if he can make a lucrative deal. He was hoping for a lucrative deal through British Sky Broadcasting. But he appears to have overreached. Here's just a small taste, from the BBC:

Under pressure from the entire British political establishment, Mr Murdoch has also dropped plans to buy out the rest of British Sky Broadcasting.

And on Friday he saw Rebekah Brooks resign, the chief executive of his UK newspaper business News International - the very executive who he explicitly wanted to keep in the job.

Now Mr Murdoch's business faces investigations in the UK and potentially the US and Australia, risking further revelations that could harm his reputation.

Make no mistake. Mr. Murdoch is a bean counter. There is no way that he could have failed to notice where the money was going for some of the illegal activities of his so-called 'reporters.' To get 'scoops' as often as his reporters did can only happen in a corrupt environment where reporters feel free to break rules not so much for newsworthy, need to know stories, but largely as an instrument of power.

Anyone who doesn't think Murdoch is willing to throw his weight around to get what he wants, take note of this story on The Huffington Post:

Under assault in a phone hacking scandal, News Corp. has met a self-imposed deadline for reporting its 2011 political contributions online.

(snip)

The company's board approved a new disclosure policy for its political giving in April after two donations by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian mogul who controls the company, raised concern among shareholders. Murdoch gave $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association.

That's a lot of money for a political campaign from a single donor. I strongly oppose the rich and powerful being able to make such huge contributions. You cannot have a democracy for long if wealthy 'Lords' have that much power. The real patriots of 1776 felt that way. They were being hindered by the Tories in America and the Tories in Britain who acquired their power through birth, privilege and corruption. And those Tories didn't mind breaking their own rules to accumulate more power and wealth.

Some might argue the the scandal in the UK has nothing to do with Murdoch's behavior here. Think again. Here's another story, from the AP:

The AP is reporting that the Justice Department is looking into the allegations that News Corp. hacked into the cellphones of 9/11 victims. We're told to expect a statement from DOJ shortly. More when we have it.

These days, the leadership of the Republican Party is trying to turn the United States into a third world country. The rich get richer and everyone else falls further and further behind as consumers get screwed and jobs get sent to China and elsewhere. There's no excuse for this behavior. We are a democracy and though it doesn't feel like it sometimes, we're still a free people. For the hundreds of millions who live in third world economies, they barely manage the necessities of life and they rarely feel free. Instinctively, without knowing what a third world economy was, the patriots of 1776 were fighting the very policies that even today would turn us into vassals of the rich and powerful.

The paragraph above makes the essential point of this post. But it's worth noting one last point. The scandal in the UK is proof of what many of us have know for some time: Fox News is the product of the best bullshit that Mr. Murdoch's money can buy.

The Priorities of Republican Politicians Are Not Yours and MIne

There's nothing ethically or politically pure about either major party in the United States. But the Republicans these days make a point of specializing in protecting the super wealthy, largely because they want to enjoy some of the same privileges themselves.

Talking Points Memo has the story:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

I don't mind talented people making money. But giving wealthy people money they don't need by cutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, cutting jobs and cutting back on services is outrageous. Where is the sense of outrage in this country?

Do people realize that corporations are holding billions of dollars in reserve that could stimulate the economy and create jobs? Where is the outrage? If these guys are going to sit on that money—a good percent of it is Bush's bailout money, by the way—then yes, we ought to tax it to get the economy moving again.

Do people realize that global warming is real and most of these fat cats are sitting on their asses doing nothing so they can have a few more bottles of $350 wine and swing a few more sweetheart deals with the help of politicians like Paul Ryan? Where is the outrage?

Paul Ryan doesn't care about people like you and me. Neither do most of the other politicians in the Republican Party. What they care about are the people who can buy that $350 bottle of wine and fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

When is it going to dawn on people that the tea party folks are Tories? They're the folks we fought in 1776 who wanted to rig the system for the rich and powerful and the privileged few?

Job Killer: Just Another Republican Politician

It's starting to dawn on Americans that Republican politicians are so obsessed with tax cuts for the wealthy (so they can buy more plants in China), that they're killing jobs during the worst unemployment America has faced since the Great Depression.

The Washington Monthly has the story on the Republican governor of Florida:

Florida’s wildly-unpopular far-right governor, Rick Scott (R), traveled to a retirement community in Central Florida yesterday known for being the most Republican retirement community in the state. Scott was there to sign his new state budget, which helps demonstrate his priorities and commitment to looking out for his most vulnerable constituents.

(snip)

All told, Scott’s budget throws 4,500 Floridians out of work as a way to help lower unemployment. No, I don’t understand it, either.

If the unemployment rate gets stubborn about falling in the next few months, just remember Florida governor Rick Scott (R) and a dozen other governors who don't care if they throw people out of work. Their job is to help the people who pay their bills: wealthy conservatives who could care less what's going on in America.

Newt Gingrich: The Classic Right-Wing Republican

Unlike most right-wing Republicans, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, is actually smart. Of course, that has not translated into a trip to the White House. The reason that Gingrich has not fulfilled any number of ambitions is largely due to the lack of a moral compass. That's actually another way of saying that he doesn't really believe what he says.

One of my favorite sites, The Mahablog, has a post quoting Mr. Gingrich, the former representative from Georgia, who manages to tie himself up in knots with his own words:

A lot of people are snickering about this pronouncement from Newt –

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

As Joe Klein said, “There is genius in this: no other human had located the secular humanist wing of radical Islam before.”

My goodness, Newt uses all the popular devices in that paragraph. He mentions his grandchildren, patriotism, atheism, Islam, secularism and a slight reference to "My Struggle," otherwise known as Mein Kampf.

No doubt touching all those bases is required after reading any number of reports by Republican right wing focus groups. But Newt has a problem. He's never been able to make up his mind which group should be the scapegoat used for enabling his political ambitions. Should it be unions? Gays? Immigrants? Muslims? Socialists? Rational people? All of them?

Newt Gingrich became a politician when communists and Russians were the convenient scapegoats—convenient indeed given the behavior of the Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union fell, the life of the right wing conservative became difficult. It required work to figure out who to blame from month to month.

Mind you, like most right wing Republicans running for office, Newt Gingrich has no solutions. Perhaps it requires empathy to actually care about the people of the United States and then to identify the problems real people are facing. And then to think about what might be done about them besides looking for a convenient scapegoat, which incidentally has never been particularly successful at improving people's lives, though it usually works out well for the wealthiest Americans since their taxes usually get lowered and the government throws more money their way, even if they don't need it. Most right-wing Republicans know exactly who their real customers are and who's paying the bill. Like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich is raking in the dough.

Is Newt Gingrich's quote above cynical? Of course it is. This is a family man who handed his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital. This is a responsible politician who shut down the government because he didn't like his seat on Air Force One. This is a moral crusader who tried to impeach a president for having sex with an intern, while he himself was having sex with an intern. This was a brave young politician who hurled accusations on the House floor against Democrats who refused to answer him back, largely because Newt was talking at 1 in the morning to an empty House on C-Span. Moral crusader indeed!

And yet, after all is said and done, it is a mistake to underestimate Newt Gingrich. I don't believe he's really running for president. But he just might be running for Vice President, with thoughts of being another Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush drove the U.S. economy into the ditch. Today's Congressional Republicans are doing their best to kill jobs (with lots of help from right wing Republicans in places like Wisconsin).

The Tea Party folks, of course, are completely out of their minds. It's pitiful that they misunderstand the American Revolution. United we stand, divided we fall, is not about politicians saying my way or the highway but about cooperating on our common problems in a pragmatic way. Most average Republicans I know are just as patriotic and American as other folks. But the Tea Party people, for all the noise they make, sound like British Tories trying to protect the corrupt privileges of the wealthy and well-connected than average Americans trying to move forward into the 21st century.

The GOP: Angry and without Solutions: Part II

The betrayal of the American people by the governor of Wisconsin is another bizarre event in our nation's recent history. Here's a pathetic comment by the governor, according to Reuters:

Fourteen state Democratic senators have left the state to deny the Wisconsin legislature a quorum needed to consider the controversial proposal.

Those senators have "failed to do their jobs," Walker said on Fox Network's "Fox News Sunday."

The Republican governor seems to be confused about the economic trouble in Wisconsin and elsewhere in America. It was Republican George W. Bush and his friends in Congress who destroyed the economy, not Democrats. It is Republican crony capitalism that is undermining the income of 90% of Americans. It is Republican leaders who are doing their best to make sure Republican plutocrats and the corporations those wealthy people control become even more wealthy. And what what will those plutocrats do with their money? Believe it or not, they'll create jobs....in China.

The unions know these are hard times and are willing to negotiate concessions. That's not the issue. The issue is that workers have rights and a governor or a political party cannot wish them away. That's the line in the sand that if Americans allow Republicans to ignore, it will end America as we have known it all our lives. Republican Governor Walker thinks destroying the middle class is a solution. A solution to what?


Update: The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a billionaire who is the sugar daddy for a lot of right wing Republicans. Murdoch doesn't care much for American workers. So it's insulting to American workers when The Wall Street Journal runs a cute survey for its mostly conservative readers:

Should state employees have collective-bargaining rights?

Ohio and Wisconsin are considering a bill which would strip state's public employees of most collective-bargaining rights. What do you think? Would the end of collective bargaining for public workers means new savings and efficiencies for taxpayers? Or would it be unfair to state worker.

The question is a con job. It is designed to divide American workers against one another. The real question is whether American workers still have rights, period. That is the only question that is important. Has anyone notice the unemployment rate lately? Has anyone noticed that Republicans are cutting jobs and putting people out of work? Has anyone noticed that Republicans have been giving more and more rights to corporations and that more and more corporate rights hamper the rights of working Americans?

Unions were started for a simple reason: people noticed that conservative employers overvalued what they did for their employees and undervalued what their employees did for them. We either return to a greater degree of fairness in the workplace or the United States becomes a third world country. If you care about your family and your children, stop supporting Republicans who take their paycheck from Republican billionaires.

Republican Con Job May Succeed

President George W. Bush is responsible for bailing out the banks and Wall Street. He was also responsible for the economic meltdown because of a laissez faire ideology that got out of hand during the real estate bubble. Fraud was being committed and Bush looked the other way. This is a fact and it's quite obvious that everyday Republicans aren't much interested in the facts these days. Hence, the economic crisis of the last three years (actually five, if we go back to Hurricane Katrina) is somehow being blamed on Obama. The same business types who created the crisis and cheered the laissez faire policies of Bush are handing hundreds of million dollars to Republican candidates who claim Obama handed billions of dollars to Wall Street and somehow caused our economic troubles.

Let's put it another way: Republican hypocrites who are railing against Wall Street are in fact being financed by Wall Street. Cute game, and Republicans may get away with it for the simple reason that millions of Americans can't be bothered by facts these days.

Here's another reality check: Obama might have pulled us out of the recession a bit faster if he had behaved more like a Democrat and less like a Republican. The idea that Obama is a socialist is essentially laughable. The healthcare reform bill, as an example, fell far short of what a proper healthcare program should do. In the meantime, Republicans kid themselves that health insurance companies actually care about the American people. Many executives of the big insurance companies have the equivalent of monopolies in their states and are not shy about milking Americans for the same type of fat corporate paychecks that both rank and file Democrats and Republicans complain about in reference to Wall Street. It doesn't matter where the insurance companies are located. They are Wall Street, listed by the brokers on Wall Street and are in cahoots with the ethically challenged individuals who seem to dominate Wall Street.

And Republicans are taking hundreds of millions of dollars from, you guessed it, Wall Street.

Republicans Organize Grassroots for the Wealthy and Flirt with the 19th Century

The tea party mad hatters are threatening to take the United States back to the 19th century—but, the way things are going, these folks may be flirting with the 17th century when emperors, kings and various aristocrats forced average people into fighting for them so that the emperors, kings and various aristocrats could have a little more power and wealth for themselves and their heirs. In the Thirty Years War alone, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people died for the sake of a few hundred powerful people. It took ordinary people two or three generations just to get back to where their grandparents had been.

Timothy Egan has a post on the growing irrationality of a large number of Republicans (but is it irrationality or simply a stubborn refusal to do some homework?):

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, who are notorious for uttering facts more by accident than by design, are only partially responsible for the current state of affairs. Certainly people like Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove manage to time their utterances to add kindling to the fire of right-wing anger. Never mind for a moment the damage news outlets not owned by billionaires like Murdoch are doing by not pointing out the outright lies. The fact is that the tea party people are being organized and some curious people are paying the bills. Here's a post from The Mahablog:

Kate Zernike writes for the New York Times that the “tea party” movement is largely being organized and funded by FreedomWorks, which isn’t really news.

FreedomWorks staffers are going around the country training the teabaggers how to be useful political tools and get out the vote for FreedomWorks candidates. It is this organizing that is behind the several upsets in recent Republican primaries, in which “tea party” candidates upset long-entrenched Republican incumbents.

(snip)

FreedomWorks itself evolved from another organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy, created in 1984 by the Koch Foundation with help from Big Tobacco. Joshua Holland of AlterNet has called FreedomWorks a “Wall Street front group,”, although I think it’s probably more accurate to call it “astroturf for hire.” FreedomWorks works with a number of PR firms to manipulate public opinion for a number of right-wing special interests.

According to SourceWatch, its funders in 2007 included –

Armstrong Foundation, $20,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, $80,000
Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, $100,000
Sarah Scaife Foundation, $200,000
Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, $20,000

In other words — grassroots, my ass. What’s behind the “tea parties” are the same mega-wealthy familiy trusts that bankroll everything else that’s right wing in America.

The New Yorker has an article on a particular pair of right-wing billionaires who are behind the tea party folks, the Koch brothers:

[The Koch brothers own] virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. ... Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill....

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.

Many Republicans, when they aren't complaining about immigrant and Muslims, continue to believe that the biggest danger to America is big government rather than big business. The Koch brothers show how unproductive that belief can be. Keep in mind that if the United States takes global warming seriously and turns to alternative energy in a major way, the oil giants will still be pumping oil and the coal giants will still be mining coal for many years to come. Switching to alternative energy is going to take time. There is still a lot of money that big coal and big oil can make, and a lot of work for those in those industries (however, very rapidly, there will also be many workers needed in alternative energy and the infrastructure projects). Rationally, the billionaires and other big investors who own coal and oil ought to know all this. Business is supposed to be rational, right? But greed and power do funny things to people. It seems people like that can never have enough. It's clear that right-wing billionaires have an itch to throw their weight around.

In the meantime, people who deal with facts are getting uneasy. I live in Northern California and I learned something new about global warming this month. All over the world, we have been seeing record heat this year. Russia, still an important breadbasket for various nations, had record heat and drought that has drastically affected its agricultural output (I know, the Republican with his head in the sand is complaining that this has nothing to do with him).

But we have also been seeing other things. We have seen record floods in Pakistan and China. And yet, despite the record heat around the world, a very few places like the western counties of Northern California have experienced a very cool summer. Cool? Yes, and there's a reason for it. And it does not contradict the climate scientists. The interior counties to the east are experiencing long periods of record high temperatures and when the conditions are just right, the heat rising in the interior areas is allowing the marine layers to flow farther inland.

There is a reason the scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming. Most of the effects in the years to come will be rising temperatures but there will be any number of weird side effects around the world. We are seeing these things far earlier than we thought we would and it's only 2010.

Climate scientists are doing a lot of modeling trying to understand what is happening. The science is powerful but it is not exact. An example of powerful science was the development of the atomic bomb. In the beginning, no one knew exactly how much the first nuclear weapons would yield. Before the first explosion at White Sands, the scientists did their calculations and came up with a range. A few calculations suggested nothing might happen. One or two calculations suggested the Earth's atmosphere might catch on fire. The great bulk of the calculations were somewhere in between. But even the calculations near the actual power of the bomb had quite a range. It turns out the actual explosion was a little bigger than most thought it would be. We know nuclear weapons are real. Only a fool would say they're not.

Climate science is a less accurate science than physics but not by as much as one might think. Still, the calculations the climate scientists have made so far have not been entirely correct. So far, they have been underestimating the effect and speed of global warming. Some scientists are trying to get ahead of the curve and taking more seriously the possibility of worst case scenarios. For an article on the growing odds of worst case scenarios, check out this post at Early Warning on the probability distribution of various temperature scenarios.

In the Guardian, Bill McKibben has some thoughts on the record summer heat:

But this is no longer an environmental battle. As this summer demonstrates, if you're concerned about development, climate change is issue No 1 (how much development is going to go on in Pakistan, now that its bridges are all gone?). If you're concerned about war and peace, climate change is issue No 1 (when Russia stops sending grain to Egypt and Nigeria, and when wheat prices start to rise, what do you think comes next?). If you're concerned about the future, then climate change is issue No 1 – because this summer is a tiny taste of what the future is all about. So far we've barely raised the earth's temperature a degree, and that's caused all that we've seen so far. But climatologists assure us there's four or five degrees more by the century's end unless we work with incredible speed to end the fossil fuel era.

The Tea Party crowd is determined to turn the Republican Party into the American Taliban. If by Taliban we are talking about fundamentalism, xenophobia, self-righteousness, a turning away from rationalism toward authoritarianism and an inward turn toward the past, there can be no doubt the United States has a problem. The question this fall is whether enough Americans will join right-wing Republicans to form a majority or whether Americans will turn away from the kind of nonsense that has never done our nation any good.

After 75 Years, Social Security Still Threatened by Republicans

The Democrats are celebrating the 75th anniversary of Social Security. At a time when Republicans are doing their best to kill pensions for workers, social security is more important than ever for widows, the elderly and the disabled. These are the hidden citizens of America, most of whom have worked hard all their lives. These are the people Republicans would like to forget. Democrats know better. Here's the story from The Boston Globe:

“Social security was something that my grandfather viewed as a key part of his legacy, just as universal health care is going to be a key part of President Obama’s legacy,” said [James] Roosevelt in a conference call Friday afternoon with reporters and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine.

Roosevelt and Kaine pledged to protect Social Security as a public program, especially in light of cries for privatization this election season from Republicans like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

As far as I can tell, the primary reason Republican politicians are pushing for the privatization of social security is that they want campaign contributions from conservative stock brokers who would obviously have a piece of the action. This, of course, is not about helping the American people. This is about raw politics, power and greed. Nothing more.

I have no idea what to make of people like Sharon Angle. Here's an AP article where she's peddling Republican talking points:

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle says the nation's Social Security system needs to be privatized, and that it was done before in the South American country of Chile.

What does Sharon Angle know about Social Security? Does she know the history of workers in our country? How do people like Sharon Angle get nominated? She has repeatedly said things in the past few months that reveal a lack of knowledge across a wide area of subjects. So obviously, after a series of blunders, she's now being stage-managed by her Republican advisers at this point. Who's advising her? At two or three removes, I suspect sociopaths like Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich are peddling this stuff. If the word, 'sociopath,' seems strong, note that Gingrich's ex-wife quotes Gingrich's staff as saying "he's a sociopath, but he's our sociopath" (It's not the only time the word has been tied to Gingrich). Is that what people want? Republican puppets who spew all the talking points without having the foggiest idea what they're talking about?

I hate to be harsh but I recently had to read a paper by a young person who got bamboozled by a lot of nonsense being posted on the Internet. This person has no stake in the social security 'debate' and simply used the Internet for research. If one simply Googles the words, 'is social security bankrupt,' the problem quickly becomes apparent. The sky is falling crowd of Republicans has dozens of papers attempting to scare people into believing that social security will go bankrupt in 2010, 2012 or 2016. Again, I would prefer to take a more thoughtful approach, but when you read the stuff, it's just fraud, lies and nonsense.

One could argue that the Great Recession that was brought to us by George W. Bush might have been deep enough to damage Social Security. But in fact Social Security has weathered the crisis fairly well. Here's a story from the Los Angeles Times about the recently released annual report of the Social Security Trustees:

In recent years, during which conservatives have intensified their efforts to destroy one of the few U.S. government programs that actually works as intended, the report's publication has become an occasion for hand-wringing and crocodile tears over the (supposedly) parlous state of the system's finances.

This year's report, which came out Thursday, is no exception. Within minutes of its release, some analysts were claiming that it projected a "shortfall" for Social Security this year of $41 billion.

(snip)

Before we get to the bogus math behind that statement — which doesn't actually appear in the report — let's look at the encouraging findings by the agency's trustees, who include the secretaries of Labor, the Treasury, and Health and Human Services.

The trustees indicated that the program has made it through the worst economic downturn in its life span essentially unscathed. In fact, by at least one measure it's fiscally stronger than a year ago: Its projected actuarial deficit over the next 75 years (a measurement required by law) is smaller now than a year ago.

When one sees crocodile tears from Republicans, be sure to look closely for the dollar signs in their eyes. They keep thinking of the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars that might flow in from those stock brokers wanting to cash in on the privatization of social security.

Now these guys won't set up those private accounts for free (why do you think they're salivating?). But they were certainly ready to charge their fees back in 2005—except that Bush wasn't able to pass social security privatization. Too bad. Think of all that money investors might have made between late 2007 and early 2009 during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Those are funny folks who run the Republican Party these days.

Republicans Are Trying to Kill Me

Sorry about the snarky title to this post. Unfortunately, it's true. I don't mean that the average everyday Republican is trying to kill me. On the other hand, many very conservative Republicans who go to the polls every election aren't paying too much attention to facts these days. Nor do these same voters recognize how few good ideas their leaders have had for many years now.

Let's begin with a fact that came close to killing me: health care is broken and has been for twenty years. Republicans leaders in Congress could care less about this simple fact. For one thing, they have too many wealthy campaign contributors who work for the insurance companies and those contributors don't want their cash cow disturbed.

So what does this have to do with me? Simple. I work as a free lance writer and editor. It's never been easy to get health insurance even in the best of times. Sometimes I have lucked out simply because sometimes I have gotten health insurance through my wife's employer. She's in a profession where it's common to change employers from time to time. For technical reasons I can no longer get health insurance from her latest employer. So I tried to apply for health insurance through a company that had a deal with the AARP. I thought it was a straightforward application. Little did I know. A few weeks after I got the application, I got a letter from the insurance company that said I had to call such and such a person. The person was a nurse working for the insurance company. She asked some detailed questions about my health history. Two weeks later I received a letter denying me health insurance because of a preexisting condition that has now existed for over 30 years. That condition has probably cost me less than $3,000 over the 30 year span and most of the money was spent on periodic blood tests. I kept thinking back on the nurse and how little regard she seemed to have for her profession. She was working for bean counters instead of people who believe in providing a good service for their clients.

Nearly two years later—last month—my wife and I decided to move to a little larger rental. We decided to hire movers this time but there was still a lot of work to do. Being a writer, for example, it's natural that I have a lot of books. Boxes of books can get in the way during a move, so I rented a small storage space to store the books until after the move. Our last place has stairs and I found myself getting a bit winded after taking down a load to my car and going back up the stairs. Sometimes my left shoulder started getting sore. If I simply stopped, the shoulder pain went away. I tried to be more careful and started taking my time. I thought maybe I was beginning to show my age, but otherwise I was fine. Or so I thought. I was wrong.

At one in the morning, I finished an editing job and got ready for bed. I'm a night owl but normally I finish my jobs around midnight. But it had been a long day and I had been a bit sluggish. I got ready for bed and a bunch of acid suddenly erupted up my esophagus. I get acid reflux sometimes, though an over-the-counter medication I take usually does a good job of controlling the problem. My shoulder also started hurting a lot, particularly around the chest.

I couldn't sleep, so I went in the living room to sit in a chair, thinking that might help. It began to occur to me that maybe I had a bigger problem, that maybe more than acid reflux and a sore shoulder was going on. I didn't want to think about it. It was early Saturday morning and no place I could think of was going to be cheap. And besides, that pain I felt when I went up the stairs always went away. And I thought a glass of water and some Tums and a little patience is all I needed and I would be fine.

But after a couple of hours the chair grew uncomfortable. I went back to bed, lay there awhile, and broke out in a sweat. I threw off the blankets, sat up and finally my wife asked if something was wrong. I explained about the pain. She trusted my explanation since I usually know my body pretty well. But I wasn't being honest with myself. For one thing, I hate false alarms. For another, I couldn't even think where to go. I couldn't afford to go anywhere. I simply couldn't afford to have a problem. So I waited.

If Republicans had not stalled and played games on health care, if a few Democrats—behaving like Republicans— had not waffled for so long, I might have had insurance by now. I would be paying several thousands dollar a year for it, just like everybody else. Health care should have been passed a year ago. Insurance for preexisting conditions might have become available by this past January. Republicans literally might not have been trying to kill me on the night I had a heart attack and waited and waited because I had no insurance.

My wife finally drove me to the emergency room. Luckily, it was less than a mile away. Luckily, they have a first-rate heart clinic. Luckily, they got to me in time, pumped me with heparin and wheeled me into the heart clinic where I received a stent. I stayed in the hospital for three days. I was lucky, my new doctor thinks I'll heal, though it's not exactly going to happen in a hurry. But the bill? I don't want to even talk about the bill. It's big. I try to watch my money. I try to save. But I've never seen a bill like that. Actually, there are several bills and they haven't stopped coming.

I don't want to hear from Republicans that I'm fussing about nothing, that I just have to know how to manipulate the system. That's bullcrap. It's a full admission that health care in our nation is broken. Will the new health care program work? Maybe. It needs to be stronger than it is but Republicans and the few Democrats who behave like Republicans watered it down too much. They lied to the public too much. They are still lying to the public too much. These days Republican leaders are paid to lie. The theme of Republicans this year is that our country is failing. It's an insulting proposition, particularly given the games that have been played in the last thirty years. Think of it: they want President Obama to fail. They want our president to fail. That is tantamount to wanting our nation to fail.

I have Republican friends who are horrified by what happened to me. I have one friend who worried that an argument we had back in June might have contributed to my heart attack. I had to assure him that it didn't. But I don't know what to think. You can't keep sending jobs overseas, you can't keep buying oil from foreign companies, you can't keep letting American economic sectors run amok (think oil and coal), you can't ignore the paramount importance of developing renewable energy sources, you can't play one group off another, you can't shovel buckets of money into the hands of people who are already wealthy and expect a majority of Americans to do well. It isn't going to happen. But that's where we're headed if Republicans get back into power. They have no ideas except old ideas that have not worked.

A few days ago, I put my name on an email list to receive an application for insurance for those people with preexisting conditions. I guess I have two preexisting conditions now. Needless to say, I need the insurance. And today's Republican leaders have done nothing to assure me that they're not trying to kill me the next time I have a serious health issue.

I'll say it one last time: I know I was lucky. But I keep thinking of the ones who waited too long, the mothers and fathers, the hardworking people who had no insurance. This is not the way our country should be. We need to start moving forward again, not backwards.

Republicans: Leading US to the 19th Century

These days Republicans in Washington aren't just conservative, they're outright reactionary. Now Republicans want to strip voters of some of their right by calling such a move a return to states rights. Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo has the story:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is calling for a strong re-assertion of states rights against Congress -- in the form of a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the direct popular election of Senators, and go back to the pre-17th Amendment setup of state legislatures appointing them.

It seems Republicans are launching a campaign to return to the late 19th century when the rich were filthy rich and pockets of the middle class found itself slipping into poverty and the really poor were living in slums in every corner of the land. One of the problems Republicans have with health care is that it's likely to ruin some cozy state monopolies that some insurers have thanks to their political friends. Keep in mind that history doesn't talk much about the late 19th century, a period dominated by Republicans and corruption as well as extremes of wealth and poverty (it got so bad that it took a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, to clean it up).

Ironic how much today's Republican leaders talk about free enterprise while rigging the game in smoke-filled back rooms. Uh, isn't that one of the reasons the 17th amendment was passed? To take the selection of senators out of smoke-filled back rooms and give the choice to the people?

Democrats aren't perfect. No one should pretend they are. But our country is in bad need of reform. With Democrats, our nation has a chance of moving forward. With today's Republican politicians, we have none. Proof? With the backing of many Republicans currently in Congress, our nation went backward under George W. Bush. We can't afford more Republican failures.

Republicans Still Pushing Social Security Privatization

For all the noise that Republicans make about the health care bill that just passed, the truth of the matter is that today's Republican leaders care far more about their rich friends than they do ordinary Americans. Oh sure, at election time Republicans like to drive around for a few minutes in an old pickup during a political rally. Of course a half hour after the rally, they go back to their Mercedes a few blocks away and head home. Then these Republicans get on the phone with their rich friends and ask what they can do for them before the bushels of money arrive.

The problem is that rich Republican donors are not only getting more conservative themselves but a pile of money now comes in from rich folks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who multiply their effect by having their legions of listeners stuff envelopes with enough money for a politician to stay in business for years, in or out of office. Hey, look how much Sarah Palin is making these days now that she's no longer governor of Alaska.

Republican politicians on the airwaves are very good at stirring up fears and making lots of irrelevant noise, but they have swung so far to the right that they're now a bit fuzzy on reality. It's amazing that they're still trying to peddle social security privatization. In Hawaii, here's a story about Charles Djou, a GOP candidate:

...he said that President Bush had the right idea by addressing Social Security, and said the concept of voluntary personal accounts “deserves examination,” but wasn’t willing to say he supported a specific plan because he said that Democrats would take him out of context and attack him for wanting to destroy Social Security.

Uh, Republicans want to destroy social security but don't want Americans to think that's what they're doing. Gotta love that logic.

Paul Krugman is always worth reading since he easily and quickly cuts through a lot of Republican flim flam. Economists like Krugman deal in real numbers as opposed to fictional numbers written down on a cocktail napkin (this actually happened during the Reagan years). The word 'privatization' is a public relations nightmare and Republicans are doing their best to sell the same privatization idea while using language that's warm and fuzzy and fraudulent. Here's what Krugman says about Rep. Paul Ryan who likes attention and loves playing with numbers and words for the Republican cause:

...Ryan’s claim that diverting a substantial share of payroll taxes receipts into individual accounts does not constitute partial privatization of Social Security [has a bit of] history here.

Back when the Cato Institute first began pushing for individual Social Security accounts, it called its push, well, The Project on Social Security Privatization. As the Bush administration got ready to make its privatization push, however, it became clear that “privatization” polled badly. So the project was renamed The Project on Social Security Choice. And Republicans began bristling at any suggestions that they were proposing privatization, calling that a slander. Really.

Wait, it gets better. Cato engaged in Orwellian tactics — deleting the term “privatization” from older web posts and even from records of old conferences. But they were sloppy; there were traces of the true history throughout. I don’t know if they’re still continuing the practice.

In any case, Ryan’s attempt to deny that what his own movement used to call privatization is, in fact, privatization should settle the question of his sincerity.

Right wing politicians are always sincere, until they're caught making things up. But then there's another route when doing politics. Act confused. Former moderate Republican Chuck Grassley had this to say about social security privatization:

(Caller) LONA: Senator Grassley, I am a Democrat who has voted for you many times. I appreciate your service to our state. I want to know if you still support privatizing Social Security?

SENATOR GRASSLEY: I was never in favor of privatizing Social Security, but I was in favor of giving people a choice. People could, uh, could, uh, under what we are talking about, although it never got into a bill, so I can’t, you can’t, you can’t tell me, you aren’t telling me, I mean I just want to say generically that I introduced a bill to do any of this stuff that I am telling you, but we were trying to negotiate in 2005 where people could stay in traditional Medicare, not Medicare, Social Security as it has always been, continue down that road, or they could take 1 percentage point, 2 percentage points of the taxes they pay in and they could have the government put that in a separate account for them, say like the federal employees do with their 401ks, for example. But the federal government would manage it. When you use the word privatize, it means that we would not have the government running Social Security and we wouldn’t have Social Security, I have never been for that.

Got that? But it still sounds like a giveaway to stockbrokers on Wall Street. If privatization had been passed by Republicans in 2005, America would have lost its shirt in 2008.

The more I read about today's Republican leaders, the more obvious it is that Americans need to send more Democrats to Washington. Republicans need to reform their party, push out the lunatic right and start advocating real solutions. Until then, the Republican Party is not fit to lead.

America Enters the 21st Century at Last: Health Care Passes

I have a pre-existing condition but it's always been my firm belief that it's really nobody's business. Unfortunately, because I tried to get insurance on my own a few years back, the insurance industry knows more about my health than most of my friends and colleagues. That offends the hell of my me. These days I worry a lot more about big business than I do my government (that is, when it's not overly controlled by business interests and cronies, which happens every time the Republicans get elected).

For many reasons, I have not devoted as much time to the health care debate as I would have liked. For one reason, our nation faces some bigger issues that can't wait much longer such as jobs, revitalizing our economy, energy and climate change. But health care reform has passed and I rejoice. Despite the obstruction, the spin, the foot dragging, the lies, the stunts, the name calling and the 1001 shameful acts of the Grand Ostrich Party and its ridiculous leadership, America is moving forward again and we have a health bill.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has it right: the only thing everybody is going to remember ten years from now is that health care reform finally passed in March of 2010. Here's a bit of what he says:

Then the debate dragged on over many months. The pace slowed in the early summer. Then there was the town hall Crazy (tm) of August. And from there we know the rest -- the ugliness, close calls, the shuddering collapse of morale after January 19th. But the truth is, nothing matters but the final result. No one remembers the politicking in advance of Medicare or Social Security or really anything else. There's either a reform law or there's not. That's why, even though it's still a momentous event in political circles, the 1994 run at Health Care Reform might as well never have happened.

Even over the last two days you've seen a shifting of perspective as all the drama and angst of recent months recedes before the reality of final passage. There's no denying this is certainly the biggest and by almost any definition the first major social legislation in the United States in almost five decades. (Congress passed Medicare in 1965.)

Today, when David Frum wrote that this was turning out to be the GOP's Waterloo...

I don't know if this is the Republican Party's Waterloo or not. They have nothing to offer these days but games and tricks and lies and tons of money from their corporate friends. I still have Republican friends and I shake my head that they can't see what their leadership has become. They cannot accept that Bush and his cronies almost destroyed the economy out of sheer stupidity and greed. For twenty years, elected Republicans have been swinging further and further to the right. That is a fact. The obvious clue are the number of Republicans in the leadership who felt Reagan didn't go far enough. Some feel that Bush did not go far enough. A ridiculous few are sorry Dick Cheney wasn't president.

I root for Obama because if he fails, we're in for rough times. Even if Democrats remain in power in Congress, Republicans are hoping the Supreme Court can cause trouble. The Supreme Court has already shown its willingness to believe that corporations are more important than people.

Corporations are fictions designed to limit liability. There's nothing wrong with that in theory, as long as corporations act in the public interest. But the latest economic crisis that began in 2007 was a direct result of corporations who could care less about the public interest. They lied and bullied their way to wealth and many of them are unrepentant.

Any person who thinks the Republican Party is going to tackle the people who got bonus money is a fool. Republicanism has always been the same as big business. In recent years, they have incorporated and manipulated people on the far right while laughing all the way to the bank. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were two of them.

The United States does not need more corporatism and it does not need more from the American Taliban. We certainly did not and do not need an unholy alliance between the two.

What we need is to stop making excuses. Our economy has slipped. We have made mistakes. Now we have done this from time to time in the past. One of our great strengths is recognizing when we have made mistakes, correcting those mistakes and moving on again. We are in danger of losing that capacity to move forward. If we are not careful, we could start falling rather swiftly if we don't grab reality by the horns, with both hands, with our eyes open and our minds clear.

There's still work to do.

The Problem with Republicans in Washington, D.C.

The biggest problem in Washington is the simple fact that only about six or seven rational Republicans are left in the Senate. And only three stepped forward to vote for Obama's stimulus package while the other three or four caved in to the radical right (though they may join Obama on other votes). Keep in mind that around the nation, there are rational governors and other Republican officials who clearly support the stimulus. Rational people know our nation is in deep trouble and they know that right wing conservatives who hope President Obama fails are complete fools. Republican obstructionists in the Senate and House are not on the side of average Americans. They are certainly not on the side of the Republican 'base' we hear so much about. If these Republicans were real leaders, they would sit down with the 'base' and explain the mess we're in and the work we need to do to get out of it.

What's worrisome is that there also seems to be a disconnect on Wall Street. Here's a quick economic assessment about investors in today's Los Angeles Times:

Wall Street has been busy focusing on companies' quarterly numbers and the developments in Washington. Now, investors are faced with finding less obvious answers to the question "What's next?"

Any jitters about what might be the next major bit of news to drive the market could extend the back-and-forth trading seen in the nearly three months since the Standard & Poor's 500 index finished at an 11-year low Nov. 20.

Stocks fell sharply last week to end at their lowest levels since November as investors factored in the stimulus bill and looked to other uncertainties about the economy.

If we set aside the inane quality of most financial news stories that are usually nothing but a conventional boilerplate about the day's financial news, this sounds like restless herd behavior, like people looking to other people for leadership. Today, there is no leadership in the private sector.

I'm going to add another somewhat unnoticed factor: there are still a lot of investors out there, usually elderly, who have no clue how much the economy and the markets have changed. I know investors who have no computer or no internet connection who are still doing everything themselves. Instead of continuing to invest in the stock market as they have been doing, it's obvious they should have been putting everything into CDs in the last year. The point is not whether the market will go down further—it easily could—but that we're in uncharted waters. That doesn't mean, however, that there aren't plenty of facts out there to help figure a few things out. Here's a key point made today by Paul Krugman:

Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?

Krugman's point reminds me of my oldest brother who was very pleased a few years back as the value of his home kept rising. That is, until he started thinking about retirement and what he could do with that money. The answer was: not much. The price of everyone else's home was also rising. As long as money kept flowing in from places in Asia, people had the illusion of growing wealth. But it wasn't real. And that is the problem with the Republicans in Washington. Republicans are infatuated with deregulated free market ideology as well as the wheeler dealers who grab headlines. Whatever the free market once meant, it has slowly been transformed over the years into the free-money-for-well-connected-rich-guys market. Loan fraud, ponzi schemes, no-bid contracts and insane bonuses have been the rule in recent years.

Ideally, senators and representatives are sent to Washington to serve the people, not their egos and back pockets. Some Democrats and some Republicans have always been guilty of abuses. In recent years, however, the Republicans have turned self-interest into an art form. They even act indignant when Barney Franks hurts their feelings (all he did last fall was tell it like it is). So let's list the problems with the Republicans:

1. They either fail to acknowledge the enormous crisis we're in or they barely acknowledge it. ("The fundamentals of the economy are sound," said McCain a few months back before taking other erratic positions.)
2. If they acknowledge the crisis, they are unwilling to admit the role that deregulation and lack of oversight has played. And they are still adament, despite evidence to the contrary, that more tax cuts for the rich will turn things around.
3. If they blame anyone, which is always the fallback of authoritarians who finally acknowledge a problem, they blame Democrats, immigrants, poor people, low income home buyers or messengers like George Soros. Republicans are emotionally invested in policies that have failed. They cling to those policies despite their obvious failures. Republicans once prided themselves as the party of pragmatists but they are pragmatists no more.
4. There is nothing clever about tax cuts but Republicans are obsessed with them despite obvious issues. Tax cuts do not pave our highways. They do not educate our kids. They do not provide alternative energy. They do not fund unbiased pure research that can lead to new solutions. Take out 'tax cuts' and put in 'corporations' and not much has improved (don't get me going on privatized roads and schools which are usually a fiasco; actually, just look at Iraq). Corporations of this era rarely care about the public interest. That is what we, the American people, have allowed them to become.
5. Now here's the bottom line and I can't emphasize this enough. If the so-called big brains who lead the Republican favor doing something about the American economy, it's generally in the direction of turning the United States into a third world economy. These are the same clowns who thought the neoconservatives had something intelligent to say about foreign policy.

It can be argued with good reason that our country does best when we have a two-party system. But we have a problem. One of those parties, at least at the national level, has become totally dysfunctional. It has no solutions and it has no ideas. It doesn't even have a clear understanding of what is going on in the world. The right wing side of the Republican Party still has money and it still has big mouths. And it seems committed to doing everything it can to obstruct any effort that might address our problems.

The forty percent of the Republican Party that is not right wing has some thinking to do. The only way to shut down nonsense from the Republican right wing is to put them out of business. The only way to do that is for the more sane, pragmatic side of the Republican Party to refrain from aiding and abetting fools who thought Bush was a great president. More important, it would help to stop paying the salaries of right wingers whether they're in Congress or in think tanks. Those who are not Democrats need to think long and hard about how to rebuild a viable second party. By the way, the 'base' is not as stupid or as difficult to reach as some seem to think. Despite the phony bipartisanship calls of the Republicans while they obstructed any meaningful discussion of the crisis we're in, we still need people to come together to some extent in our country—that includes at least some of 'the base'—while having real dialogue based on real facts with some serious thought about the enormous problems facing all of us. The United States is in crisis and too many people either do not want to deal with that fact or they want to play games for their own self-interest.

The American people quite literally cannot afford another George W. Bush, nor can they afford the Republican Party as it now exists. The Democrats, no doubt, could use an opposition but that opposition needs to be based on real ideas, without scapegoats, and with a reasonable understanding of where we are.

I didn't ask for Bush to be a failed president. The fact is that his failures have cost me money. Those failures have cost nearly everyone I know. Now I still think it's possible to dig our way out. I certainly hope so. I know it's possible that we have become the Titanic and that we have hit the iceberg of our own complacency. It certainly seems the rich, with their huge bonuses, are already sailing away from the Titanic in their fancy yachts. That wouldn't leave much for the rest of us except for the balloons from the party Republicans have been throwing for 28 years. Those balloons, of course, wouldn't help much. They would be too full of Republican hot air. Not too useful if we had to jump in the cold water.

It will take more than Barack Obama to turn our economy around and deal with our other issues. But I will say this: every American better hope President Obama succeeds.

Bailout Has Been Changed to 'Rescue'

The White House has changed 'bailout' to 'rescue.' So, instead of bailing out the crooks on Wall Street, we're going to rescue the crooks on Wall Street. Hope everyone feels better now.

I doubt any decent bill that addresses our systemic problems as well as providing help for those who really need it can be passed in the current environment. However, some sort of stopgap bill is probably going to have to be passed just to get us to the first week in February. Obviously, the less spent the better.

Not surprisingly, the current crisis is bringing out the bottom feeders: Newt Gingrich is back in the news and is as eager as ever to dominate right wing authoritarians, too many of whom occupy seats in Congress. They seem to remember who got them there. Here's the Huffington Post:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was working aggressively behind the scenes to defeat the Wall Street rescue plan minutes before he himself released a public statement in support of the package, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported on Tuesday.

Yep, the same M.O. as usual—one has to give him that. Gingrich is one of the many reasons why we can't expect much seriousness from the House Republicans, though we still have to wait to see what the Senate Republicans will do.

A reader asked if there is a relationship between the credit crisis and the price of oil. The answer is yes and no. Because so many politicians, economists, bankers and corporate people don't fully understand the energy situation, the answer is largely no. These people do understand that large sums of money have been pulled out of the American housing market and its many faulty subsidiary investment schemes largely because overseas investors, mainly from Asia, need oil and are not just buying oil but trying to secure long-term sources which requires sizable investment in Africa and Asia. They do get that much. And they get that high oil prices are slowing down various sectors of the world economy (some understood it well enough to speculate dangerously and recklessly on oil). But they think of the current situation as temporary. And, in one sense, perhaps it is, but in the next twenty years we are likely to have an increasing number of these 'temporary situations' unless we recognize we have a problem and start dealing with it. So the answer is yes, but not according to those anesthetized by the usual market ideology.

In the meantime, the energy we need to run our economy still comes from oil. The oil industry, like any major business sector (well, more than most), has always had problems: oil spills, dry wells, production delays, refinery fires, financing problems etc. But we're entering an era where every problem is magnified much more than in the past. That is because the easy days of oil are over. We're in the hard days now. Here's the first of two stories from Rigzone:

As of September 29, 2008, 52 of the 3,800 offshore oil and gas production platforms have been confirmed as destroyed. Initial estimates are that the 52 destroyed production platforms produced a total of 13,300 barrels of oil per day and 90 million cubic feet of gas per day. Currently, MMS has no information on whether any of the destroyed platforms will be rebuilt by any operator.

Rebuilding platforms can be very expensive. Here's the other story:

From the operators' reports, it is estimated that approximately 57.1% of the oil production in the Gulf is shut-in. This shut-in figure for oil increased from yesterday’s figure due to operators’ errors in reporting for September 29, 2008. As of June 2008, estimated oil production from the Gulf of Mexico is 1.3 million barrels of oil per day. It is also estimated that approximately 45.7% of the natural gas production in the Gulf is shut-in.

Although it's not as bad as 2005 after Katrina, that's still a serious drop in oil production until everything gets back up (minus most of the 52 platforms). But I wouldn't want to guess whether oil prices will continue rising, falling or staying flat. Falling production usually means higher prices. But if the economy is sagging, that means lower prices. We're in an era of turbulence and turbulence at any moment is not easy to predict.

In the meantime, Washington has become a lunatic asylum so I'm not going to criticize the few sane people, almost all Democrats, who are trying to deal with an impossible situation. A real solution to the current crisis would require enough votes to overcome Bush's veto. Since a sizable proportion of House Republicans are stark raving mad and are perfectly willing to hold our economy hostage out of sheer spite, or because Gingrich said so or because Pelosi hurt their feelings, the Democrats are probably going to have to hold their nose on a ugly compromise of some sort just so we can reach next February with the economy reasonably intact. Here's some useful perspective from The Mahablog:

...from what I have read a large majority agree that the Administration’s basic approach is deeply flawed.

However, Congress more or less tweaked Paulson’s approach rather than try something completely different. They improved it mightily, according to many. But my understanding is that the smarter people in Congress figured the more conservative members would dismiss the smart approach outright. So instead of the best bill, they put together the best bill they thought they could sell to the right-wing troglodytes in the House.

And it still didn’t pass.

(snip)

As Paul Krugman and others say, probably all that can be done now is to patch something together that will keep the economy limping along until a new administration and Congress is sworn in. And pray that will be an Obama administration, because McCain clearly is out of his depth on this issue and will be no better, possibly worse, than Bush.

No one should forget that this is Bush's bill offered just weeks before an election. Bush is, after all, the leader of the Republican Party and ought to be able to get his party to go along. His heir-apparent, John McCain also supports the bailout, or so he says when he isn't talking about how strong the economy is or how he needs to suspend his campaign so he can get his photo op at the White House. And needless to say McCain too is having trouble getting his party to go along. Do we really want these same Republicans back in January with McCain as president? S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion summarizes the situation rather well:

So, the feeling among Pelosi and House Democrats yesterday was that if Republicans wanted a bailout, they should vote in substantial numbers to pass it, making the effort clearly bipartisan.

As the vote was held, Democrats saw many Republicans weren’t up for that. So, seeing no reason to stick their own necks out when Republicans wouldn’t, more and more Democrats voted against the bill as well. Thus, the defeat.

Today, House Democrats and Republicans are said to be working for a revised version of the bill, one that will attract the dozen or more additional votes needed to pass it.

House Democrats should explain their refusal to go out on a limb to benefit the Bush administration and Republican colleagues unwilling to do their own part.

House Republicans should put up or shut up.