Bozell, Boehner and the "Big Government" bathtub

Some years ago, L. Brent Bozell III (who now prefers the more proletarian “Brent Bozell” said his aim was to shrink government until it “can be drowned in a bathtub” – a very disturbing image indeed, but the sentiment is embraced by significant numbers of Republican anti-government extremists. Forty years ago, the same folks would’ve excoriated such statements as unpatriotic, but they’ve realized that anti-government policies make it easier for them to loot the Treasury, following in the footsteps of their heroes Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, whose similar policies led to the nation’s highest deficits and economic crises during their terms. It’s no accident that the economic conditions were first described as the worst since the collapse of the early 1980s (as a result of “Reaganomics”), and then when conditions grew even worse, the next historical landmark was the Great Depression, a result of Coolidge’s letting his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Carnegie open the public coffers to his cronies.

We’re now undergoing an economic catastrophe on a scale heretofore undreamed of – and it’s resulting in a accelerated shrinking of government – among other dire consequences. The economic pain, loss of jobs and record bankruptcies are among the factors which lead to the Republican losses in the election and the worst approval level of a departing President since Nixon (another Republican!). Can the government fit in Bozell's bathtub yet?

The stimulus bill, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” passed the House yesterday. It represents the best hope of mitigating the worst effects of the devil-take-the-hindmost, unregulated economic policies pursued during the last eight years, yet not a single Republican voted for it. It goes to the Senate today, where it faces an uncertain future. Its reception can be predicted by the remarks of Senate Minority Leader John Boehner, who criticized sections providing for rehabilitation of the Capitol Mall in Washington, and also those providing for sex education, saying that he doesn’t see how those provisions create jobs. I fail to understand how landscaping, mowing, raking, trucking, and everything else the Mall project would involve wouldn’t create jobs. I also fail to see how sex education could occur without hiring teachers, materials producers, printers, etc.

Boehner’s complaints made little sense until I read the 645-page bill and realized he made no mention of Section 2102, providing a one-time emergency payment for Social Security recipients – which certainly does not create any appreciable number of jobs. Nor did he mention the Section 3001, which provides for health insurance for the unemployed, or Section 3003, providing temporary optional Medicaid coverage for the unemployed – neither of which create jobs. Why didn’t Boehner draw attention to those provisions? I think the answer is self-evident: pure politics. The Republican can’t stand to see regular folks get jobs – even if they are raking leaves – but they’ll give billions to their friends the investors, so they can spend the money acquiring other businesses. And the Republicans have always stood against sex education in any form except "abstinence" (which is actually sex dis-education).

In general, the Republicans complaints center around the assertion that the bill provides too much “spending” and not enough “tax breaks”, variations on the “trickle-down” economics theories they’ve consistently championed, and exactly the theories which led us all to this dismal juncture. It’s clear that despite the election, and despite the economic agony their policies have caused, they’ve assumed a stance of bare-knuckle opposition to anything the new Administration will do. Boehner, Rush Limbaugh (who prays for the failure of the new Administration), and their allies have not wavered from their ultimate purposes: to shift power from the U.S. Government to the global corporate structure; to obscure the workings of the democratic process and mislead the electorate; and to make the rich richer and punish the poor. The conceits of the Obama presidency: Hope, Change and Justice, and the hopes of people around the world, already mean nothing – nothing – to these extremist Conservatives. Around Washington, for them, it’s business as usual – the business of deceit, obfuscation, and force. It mirrors their foreign policy, and we can expect the same results. I share the in general global relief at Bush's departure, but we liberals have to get over ourselves and prepare for an ugly few years, courtesy of the extremists.

Obama's win; McCain's loss

It's a quarter to ten on election day eve, and it looks like Obama's going to win. The Right has already been positioning itself to attribute Obama's win to an anti-Bush backlash, saying "no Republican could've won" in the current economic climate. It's been sad to watch Senator McCain expend his political capital and, to some extent, his reputation, by engaging in an exceedingly ugly campaign. His choice of Sarah Palin perturbed the thinking Republicans, who began distancing themselves from McCain and Bush. Their reward was, predictably, approbrium from the faithful. But the accusations of being a socialist, an "Arab", a Muslim, and a terrorist appealed to the irrational Republicans, and the hate evident in McCain's hand-chosen audiences eroded McCain's image as man in control. The Republican establishment is counting on persuading the voters that Democrats as tax-and-spend big-government types, and the Republicans as small government, fiscally responsible types. It looks like, finally, the voters might not buy it.
It's troubling how the war vanished from the public debate when the stock market collapsed. Like a child distracted by a shiny object, their own perceived self-interest commanded their attention. But long after the economy recovers, the war will still be with us. And it will have spread.

This is a system?

We now are witness to the slow-motion collapse of major sectors of the global economy, led by the mortgage sector in the US, soon to be followed by the credit card squeeze and the car loan crunch. No one should be surprised; for years our economy, stretched as tight as a balloon skin, has been deeply shaken by minor events, such as Alan Greenspan's use of the phrase “irrational exuberance”, attacks on minor oil production facilities in faraway places, or a stray 30.06 round accidentally fired into the Alaska pipeline. The IMF, World Bank, and various countries have dumped tens of billions of dollars on the market, to little avail. The interest rate has been repeatedly cut – notwithstanding Japan’s sad story of cutting its interest rate to zero twenty years ago, with no significant effect on their markets. In the face of such undeniable frailty, the public keeps being reassured with nostrums revolving around a “jump-start the economy” theme. This is a system?

Let's look for a minute to the housing credit situation and the stock market. Many homeowners are not able to keep up with mortgage payments, and banks are faced with acquiring title to hundreds of thousands of homes; this would be a financial disaster. On the other hand, when all those homeowners labor and pay their mortgages, the bank takes that money, and pools it with lots of other home owner's money (or debt, actually), and sells it to the secondary market, usually other financial institutions. They, in turn, agglomerate this debt into a variety of funds and other derivative financial instruments and it gets reinvested in yet a tertiary layer of investments. At the top of the investment chain are the hedge funds, which are restricted to very wealthy investors or institutions and have far fewer restrictions. The promise of the homeowner to pay one bank has now been combined with others into a promise from one - or many - financial institutions to pay their investors back on their investments into, say, housing. The billions of dollars in investments (that is, of the homeowners’ debt) are at risk, stretched to the breaking point, but invested in and flowing to ventures of all sorts all over the world.

So the solution is to give money to the beleaguered homeowners, not to keep them in their homes for their own sake, but thereby to protect the institutional investors. Foreclosures have been rising steadily for years, but the losses could thus far be shifted onto the homeowner, who lost his house (and bank could resell it). Those days are gone. There are too many foreclosures, and the possibility of their combined loss has perturbed the global economic system. So some money will be given to the homeowner – just enough to keep them in their homes, and their jobs, in fruitful service to other interests further up the financial food chain.

And, one could say, meeting their legal obligations. After all, they signed up; shouldn't they bear some responsibility for getting in over their heads? Perhaps, but indictments have already been issued for deceptive and predatory lending practices. We can let the justice system sort that out. Forbes magazine though, doesn't want to wait; they squarely put the blame on the consumer, for not spending enough money. They should be out purchasing washers and dryers and automobiles and furniture, and this is how they are to be expected to spend the rebates.

But ordinary folks may choose, or be forced by straits, to make other decisions, such as spending it on food and energy. A recent poll by Harris Interactive commissioned by Commerce Clearing House (a private legal and economic publisher) indicated that fifty-four percent would spend the rebate to pay down debt, twenty-nine percent would save it, and only seventeen percent would spend it.

It seems in my case, and that of many others, that I am merely a conduit for the money - from the government, through me to the bank, and then up the financial ladder, to the exceedingly wealthy (who are not known for their patience or reluctance to complain).

Overshadowed in the press by these rebates are the giveaways to business. They total "only "$44.8 billion dollars (out of $152 billion) and they come in the form of raising the amount of “deductible Code Sec. 179 expensing” (“expensing” is the cost of depreciable personal tangible property used in business), nearly doubling it from $128,000.00 to $250,000.00, it’s highest level ever. There also is provision for raising the ceiling at which the deduction benefits start to phase out (making more businesses eligible), although the rules do exclude huge corporations. They do not rule out luxury cars, though; the new rules provide for $11,000.00 as first-year depreciation on business-use vehicles purchased in 2008.

States stand to lose billions in revenue from these “business incentives” because of linkages between federal and state tax codes. When “bonus depreciation” (one of the incentives) was passed in 2002-03 many states “unlinked” in whole or in part, to avoid the revenue hit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts that much of the stimulus will be dissipated through resulting budget cuts or tax increases at the state level.

Now let’s go back to the stock market for a final note. New Federal Accounting Standards Board rules require that financial institutions disclose how much money they have invested in the tertiary markets. People will get their first idea of just how vulnerable these institutions are to losses in these markets. This is a particularly bad time for losses in the brokerage houses right now – they need the money. One of the major brokerage houses has set aside more than twenty billion dollars for bonuses to their hedge fund managers – some of the individual bonuses are to exceed one billion dollars. These are the people we’re protecting from financial ruin, not the homeowners.

Saints! Preserve Us!

The pope created a new saint in Brazil yesterday – Friar Galvao, an 18^th-century monk to whom is attributed over 5000 miraculous cures (only two of which were recognized by the Church). His cures were effected by writing Latin prayers on tiny pieces of paper that, when swallowed, allegedly remedied a range of diseases.

The pope’s predecessor, John Paul II, beatified or canonized more “saints” that all of his predecessors combined.

This return to crass magicalism is a desperate attempt by the pope to retain believers in a church whose membership, both clergy and laity, is declining. The Catholic Church’s explanations of its god, the world and its people (and their morality) have collapsed when evaluated rationally and philosophically. The Church’s weltauschaung has become more and more abstruse, trying unsuccessfully to comport with “facts on the ground”.

So the Church is retreating to more and more preposterous claims in an effort to sow more superstition among the credulous.

The two “miracle” cures attributed to Galvao took place before he died in 1822, when medicine was still, by any measure, primitive. To make an assertion about diagnosis, Galvao’s intervention, and sequelae, at a distance of 185 years is absurd. It would be absurd even if he practiced some sort of medical procedure on them, to say nothing of his giving them magic pills.

This whole charade belies the real question, which is, why do people believe what they want, rather than what they must? The planet is poisoned by religious/magical thinking, ensuring continued violence in the name of, and justified by, some god. And as long as such thinking remains unchallengeable (which it is practically by definition), superstitious people can swallow baloney such as: “The smartest thing the Devil did was to convince people he didn’t exist.” Bumper-sticker reasoning like this, embraced by tens of millions of people, guarantees that religious slaughter will proceed apace, as it has for the last 2000 years.

Of course, thinking like this wasn’t invented 2000 years ago by the Catholic Church, but the Church has perpetuated, justified, encouraged, funded, organized and rewarded slaughter better, more efficiently, more brutally and more thoroughly than any force in history. It’s the premier crime against humanity, and the pope is bringing all his immense resources to bear to make sure it’s perpetuated by generations to come.

that sinking feeling

The democrats are going to succumb to an orgy of fratricide brought on by the choice between Hilary Clinton, a woman who has the brains and determination but who lacks all else, and Al Gore, who is the only person in either party who is qualified to be President. The republicans will run John McCain, who will easily win and continue the Republican policies of wealth redistribution and authoritarianism at home, and belligerent intervention abroad, to the dismay of liberals who will vehemently object (to no avail), and many moderates, who will say nothing. Conservatives, as usual, will display their peculiar (and characteristic) combination of bitterness, retribution and gloating.

Rounding up the usual suspects

Laying the groundwork for laying the blame continues. Last week, speaking before the American Enterprise Institute, Presidential candidate John McCain said that when we went into Iraq, he expected it to be easy. He expected the troops to be greeted as liberators. He was, he said, right on both counts, but then Iraq got "badly managed". So, it's the manager's fault (as if the policy weren't doomed from the start).
A couple of days ago, Senator Lindsay Graham said that he's worried that President Bush's proposal of "surging" with 18,000 more troops isn't "enough". So the failure is going to be blamed on those who vote against the "surge". Both McCain and Lindsay are positioning themselves for a post-U.S. Iraq, when the colossal failure will be pinned on anyone but those responsible.
I've also heard the deteriorating situation in Iraq blamed on the press, which didn't portray the "true situation". And the dissent, which undermines the morale of the troops (who apparently are smart enough to figure it out for themselves). And the Iraqi Prime Minister, who didn't "step up to the plate." And lately, the Iranians, who exported it. Who will be added to the list next?

McCain, Kissinger and Blair, but no Three Stooges jokes

From this weeks Harper's Weekly (Nov. 21, 2006):
Senator John McCain said that American troops in Iraq were "fighting and dying for a failed policy"; Henry Kissinger said that he didn't believe a military victory in Iraq is possible; ... Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been "pretty much of a disaster,"

John McCain, by using the phrase "failed policy", obscures the evil of this "policy". It was a policy adopted over the objections of knowledgeable people, dictated by neocons who felt, logically, the being the sole remaining superpower, there would never be a better opportunity to grab the reins of history and fashion it to their liking: where all live under a freely-elected representative government and share in the wealth created by enlightened capitalism. Of course, such hubris makes one reel, but more tragically, the makers of this policy have no ear for the lessons of history. Their constant conceit is that, given a choice, anyone would choose the Western democratic tradition. This shows a glaring and utter lack of comprehension of the differences between Us and Them. To call those differences "cultural" even understates how fundamental those differences are. And by the way, wealth, like matter and energy, cannot be "created", only accumulated. To say that capitalists "create" wealth is wonderfully niave, childish, and essentially magical thinking. It also help maintain the fiction that the wealth are somehow different than the rest of us. They're not, but they may be luckier. The wealth is this country is primarily inherited.

Henry Kissinger is right, as right as anyone who can predict Xmas on the 25th of December. Where was he three years ago? Two cheers.

And when Blair calls the intervention a disaster (my recollection is that he merely agreed with someone who did call it a disaster; it's a small distinction perhaps, but an important one), he's just wrong. The war has (predictably) cascaded from a disaster to a catastrophe. While commentators dance around the obvious by calling it "sectarian violence", no one calls a spade a spade - it's a religious war that will continue to claim lives. I leave it to you to ponder what percentage of those who hear the phrase "sectarian violence" even know, let alone care, what "sectarian" means.

But the Right does sense this will be a very long haul, if one can judge from the preparations to lay the blame elsewhere. Obviously, whoever gets to withdraw will come in for the lion's share of the blame; it's the perfect fit. As in VietNam, the argument will be "If we'd only stayed in, we would've won. But we cut and run." It's handy because it can never be disproven. But other scapegoats are available, and already targeted; I have read that it's the fault of the press for biased reporting and the populace for believing it. All of the VietNam excuses are being deployed in a growing chorus of dissembling, and its success is directly related to the loss of American historical memory. The Left has a tenuous control of foreign policy now, but only by virtue of the brute force of the ballot box. If the Right gets another chance, we'll all go right back to the same "failed policy." The policy will change, but minds haven't.