On the Contrary

President Obama had a town hall meeting on Wednesday and he took on the hard questions about health care.  He answered them well and took the opportunity provided by these venues to fully explain his plan and the alternatives.  As soon as it was over in TV land, it was back to the Michael Jackson saga.  Continuous coverage of his death and the mess his life was is non-stop.  Please stop it.

What is most enlightening is the pandering going on by the media, anyone black, entertainers, and anyone else who is afraid to raise obvious questions about “the king of pop”.  It also shows us that worship of celebrity is so much more important in our society than a real examination of one’s real worth to society.  Case in point is all the fawning over what a kind and loveable person Jackson was.  Really?  That certainly was his image, but it is too dangerous to enter the territory to really examine what by any measure was a disaster of a life right now.  You might look out of touch.  But since I have been out of touch with popular America for most of my life, here goes.

Okay he could sing and dance.  And he could do it with the very best of them.  But let us not confuse the entertainer with the person, which is of course exactly what we are doing.  By all accounts Michael Jackson left his affairs in a superb mess.  The children are fathered (and for that matter mothered) by who?  Do they in fact have legitimate birth certificates, and what person in their right mind would leave the children he professed to love so dearly in total legal limbo?  His mother or Diana Ross for guardians?  Dad cut out of the will.  That ought to tell you something.

Then there is his financial mess of an estate with an estimated debt of half a billion dollars.  Kind of makes your little credit card problem very small potatoes.  In all fairness, it is possible that royalties and memorabilia will make this up in the years to come (not to mention owning half of the Beatles song collection).  Those who knew him said he could not brook discussions on economics.  Okay, hire someone.  But the trust thing was another indicator of a truly disturbed personality.  His entourage was always changing and there were continuous reports of fallings out with A or B. He had so many doctors, it was obvious he was prescription shopping.   But he was an artist and artists are temperamental.  Or he was a jerk?

Then there is, of course, his strange behavior with children, which if you were profiling a child molester, he would fit it perfectly.  Of course he was not convicted, but like O.J., that doesn’t make him innocent.  If I had his money, I would never have settled the cases he did settle out of court when my reputation was at stake.  Maybe his fans want to believe he was asexual, but where there is smoke there is fire.  Meanwhile nary a disparaging word is echoed as the press and anyone who can get airtime pines on about the wonderful Michael Jackson, his troubled life, his recently discovered will, and of course the secret wives coming out of the woodwork.  And the reality is who cares or more importantly who should care?

So what does all this tell me?  It tells me that our celebration of celebrity has robbed us of our important reasoning skills.  It shows me that the press is nothing but an echo chamber of the conventional wisdom and popular trends.  It shows me how many people will do and say anything to get face time on our TVs.  It shows me why most Americans cannot have an intelligent discussion about health care, or energy policy, or gays in the military, reforming the banking system, or the way forward in Afghanistan.  It tells me why people listen to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative demagogues.  It tells me why people still listen to Vice President Cheney, and why we elect such morons to represent us in Congress who get nothing done.  It tells me that critical thinking skills are a rare commodity these days.

Enough about Michael Jackson!  I am having serious withdrawal from the regular news otherwise titled “Republicans Say the Stupidest Things and Nobody Ever Flinches”.  But since about mid-day yesterday, it has been non-stop.  Okay Michael Jackson was an interesting and troubled man.  Back in his prime, when he hadn’t altered his appearance to the truly bizarre, he was an amazing entertainer.  But he was not a world leader and his coming and going is going to have no impact on world events or our future except on People Magazine and Variety, or if you held some of his debt.  But let’s just say the coverage is warranted.  Have you listened to it?

I kept waiting for the pool cleaning guy to call in about his close and personal relationship with Michael.  I can’t believe the number of people who did have a close relationship and yet hadn’t seen him in years.  Maybe he waved at them over a crowd at a restaurant.  What kindness!  What a tender moment! Then there was the sameness to all the interviews and that sameness which I started counting is how many times the work “I” was used.  Maybe that just comes with the territory with show business people.  Everything in the end revolves around self.  Of course who could miss Al Sharpton.  I was wondering when Jessie Jackson would show up.  I am starting to believe that the voting rights act was a product of Michael’s career.

Then there was Keith Olbermann’s description of the massive crowds at UCLA medical center.  The problem with this one, at least based on the TV coverage, was that there were only several hundred readily visible.  Then Keith waxed on about how this man had impacted so many lives and thus the crowds.  I was wondering if it was just the same crowd that gathers at a crime scene, car wreck, or burning building.  Then, of course, was the coverage of the  coroner’s report which told you nothing and then the nothing was analyzed ad infinitum.  Then bring on some talking head expert to tell you what you just heard.  The reality is we will know nothing until the toxicology reports are completed in 6 weeks, so can we move on?  For my money he probably did die of a heart attack brought on by the stress of being in debt, trying to make a comeback, and over use of pain killers (because the rich can’t suffer pain like the rest of us, they are too important).  But we shall see.

But this blog is not to denigrate Michael who certainly was a pop icon, maybe one of the greatest.  This blog is denigrating the unbelievable amateurish and boorish coverage of his death, focusing on every minute detail, most of which they got wrong, and broadcasting interview after interview that was anything but insightful, much less truthful.  You really start to understand how they can be so easily manipulated by political hacks when you watch this kind of mush that masquerades as news.

But maybe I am showing my age.  Had this been Van Morrison I would have been glued to the TV.  I guess celebrity is in the eye of the beholder.

President Obama has made some great strides since taking office and it has been quite a change from the Bush years.  He has had some unparalleled challenges and he does seem to be changing the direction of the country.  Having said that, there are some real changes that he is ignoring or failing to address, and these failures could eventually undermine his administration.  They will undermine his administration because if he is seen as just another politician who fails to tackle the tough issues by limiting his actions to what is politically expedient instead of what is right, our faith in government will be further undermined.

I believe his heart is in the right place on most of these issues, but he is getting infected with the “bubble” logic of Washington which loses sight of what’s right in the cloud of what seems politically possible.  Sometimes what is politically possible is not any better than doing nothing if it will not bring about real change.  So here is my list and challenges to the President and I am not pulling any punches.  From my point if he doesn’t soon sort these issues out, he will have failed at real change which is standing firm on our American ideals:

• Gay and Lesbian Rights – You promised to end don’t ask, don’t tell and have done nothing while good, loyal, and heroic Americans are being run out of the service.  Even Dick Cheney can see gay marriage has merit.  Yet you still can’t see that until this is a national right, there is no equal protection under the Constitution.  For a professor of Constitutional law, you deeply disappoints me especially when you confuses your religious beliefs with our Constitution.  Allowing these injustices to continue while you fail to exercise the political courage to do something about them is unconscionable.  Where is your leadership Mr. President?
• Abortion Rights – It is clear that the killing at the clinic in Kansas was terrorism, plain and simple.  It is also clear that the anti-abortion people have fomented this hate campaign and their tactics are clearly blatant intimidation the Bush administration allowed to fester.  They are being successful because they are depriving women of a legal procedure that they have a right to.  So where is your outrage?  Where is your political courage to stand up and call this terrorism and to protect the legal rights of women seeking abortions? Where is your leadership Mr. President?
• Single Payer Health Care – There is only one real change to our health care system that has any hope of working and that is a single payer system.  Some fall back government system if the private system fails is just kicking the can down the road one more time and setting us up for failure.  When do you stand up and look us in the eye and tell us what has to be done instead of pining for some bipartisanship in the sky that is destined to fail?  It is time you came out swinging for what will work, not what may play into the Republican’s hands. Where is your leadership Mr. President?
• Reforming the Banking System – There hasn’t been any.  We have bailed them out and not made the boards or their executives pay the price for their bad decisions.  The reform for derivatives to make them transparent has a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through.  I understand the need to save the banks, but now they must pay.  We own them.  Let’s break them up so they are never too big to fail again.  And by the way Mr. President, where the hell were you when the bill to allow judges to adjust mortgages in a bankruptcy proceeding went down to banking lobby?  Do they own you too?  This was the one thing that could have really helped homeowners.  Where is your leadership Mr. President?
• Torture and Detainees – Once again you are starting to look like George Bush lite.  First, get on with releasing and declassifying everything.  If you don’t, Republican obfuscation about its effectiveness will never be put to rest.  It is not behind us and it never will be if you continue on this path.  There must be an investigation and responsible parties held accountable.  There is no other way in a nation of laws.  There can be no indefinite detention or our right to habeas corpus and due process is no longer a right.  If there is an exception, then the right no longer exists.  It is only a right if you don’t make it an exception.  You of all people ought to know this.  Hiding behind some judicial process is not the intent of our Constitution.  Detainees must be tried or released and we must have the courage to live with the consequences.  Otherwise our whole system of government has no meaning.  Where is your leadership Mr. President?  Where is your courage?
• Terrorist Surveillance Program, Military Commissions Act, and the Patriot Act – These are all abominations enacted by President Bush and a frightened Congress who sold out our Constitution when they were threatened with fear for their safety.  It was the greatest example of the lack of moral and political courage this country has shown since the internment of the Japanese since World War II.  Instead of overturning many of these abominations, your attorneys have been upholding them in the courts making the same arguments about national security overriding Constitutional rights that the Bush administration did.  When are we going to restore our dignity and demonstrate the courage of our convictions by stopping this travesty Mr. President?  Have you succumb to the argument that to be safe we must jettison our most cherished beliefs?  Where is your leadership Mr. President?
• Energy and Climate Change – Have we stalled in mid-stream?  Since gas prices have fallen, where is the energy plan that will not only get us off oil, but save our planet?  We are coasting and I see no focused plan.  Are we drifting along until the next crisis?  We need an aggressive 10-year plan.  Okay then, how about an aggressive 20-year plan, but the point is where is it?  Are we even moving toward it?  I fear we are losing momentum Mr. President.  Where is your leadership?
• Secrecy and Abuse Photos – Here is where I really feel you have lost touch with your roots.  Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have a bill to make the pictures of detainee abuse an exception to the freedom of information act.  Any bill from these two ought to be suspect just for starters.  Their point, which apparently you and Secretary Clinton seem to agree with, is that by releasing these, you may put some of our people in jeopardy, therefore they must be suppressed from public release.  THINK ABOUT THIS! The precedent you are setting is that if our government does some horrible or embarrassing thing that might, if known, put Americans at risk, it should never be released.  This is the same logic that Dick Cheney uses to justify torture.  If it will save American lives, it is justified.  I was an American fighting man and I did not fight so you could suppress the truth because it’s painful.  I fought so that our government will be transparent, that we know what the government does in our name and we can take action at the polls if we don’t agree.  THIS IS A VIOLATION OF EVERYTHING WE BELIEVE IN.  IT TARNISHES WHAT MAKES FIGHTING FOR THIS COUNTRY WORTHWHILE. You are trading safety for our right to know.  If, because you think not signing this bill you will putting some American lives at risk, you sign it, you will be denigrating everything I and many others fought for.  We will take the risk.  It comes with the territory.  If you don’t understand this, then we elected the wrong guy.
• Finally the Deficit – A recent study showed that our out of control deficit is only 7% due to your stimulus package and 3% from your agenda on health care, education, energy, and other issues.  Most of the deficit comes from the tax cuts of the Bush years (33%) and from Bush policies like the war in Iraq.  37% is from the business cycle and the increased spending for the safety net.  About 20% of the deficit comes from your extension of Bush policies like the war in Iraq and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 and the bailout of wall street.  The Republicans are using this deficit as a fear card, yet they have no plan to curb it since they want even more tax cuts.  The author of the study had a simple conclusion:  “The solution, though, is no mystery.  It will involve some combination of tax increases and spending cuts (for everyone).”  Unlike California, which is about to commit suicide by not raising taxes to invest in their future, when are you going to look the American people in the eye and tell them they have to pay their way?  Where is the leadership Mr. President?

Okay tough language.  We know he has made great strides in many areas and are we just asking for too much too soon?  My answer is no.  These are fundamental values that must be stood up for.  Otherwise we will make changes at the margins, but we may loose what is unique to being American.

I was invited to a dinner (barbecue) on Sunday and about half of the little town of Placerville was there.  Placerville is a funny little town with a real social pecking order, one I have never been part of.  I remember one year at a local gathering when one woman high up in that pecking order asked me, “and just who are you?”  Nobody.   I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t politically connected, and I certainly could not do anything for her so I was nobody.  Actually at the time, I was a lower level bureaucratic lackey working for the federal government, somebody to be pleasant to, but let’s check out the room and see who is really here that is important.  If you are not one of the movers and shakers (and movers and shakers is a relative term in this very little conservative community), someone you went to high school with, or go back 30 years, well, you just don’t really count for anything.  That’s okay, because I have made a few good friends here and there are always exceptions, but all I am saying is the social scene is, well, stunted.  Intellect or diversity is to be avoided as one might say something inopportune or impolitic for this conservative little town.

But I wasn’t at the party for more than a few minutes when the host was telling me how Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had caused the housing bubble and meltdown.  And he had seen a YouTube video of President Bush warning about Freddie and Fannie.  So I said to him, “Did you see Alan Greenspan’s testimony before the House Banking Committee when Henry Waxman asked him if Freddie and Fannie were the cause, and after stammering, he replied, No”.  Of course I knew he hadn’t seen it.  But he wanted to have breakfast with me so he could “explain it to me Lucy”.  So I did a bad thing this morning.  I sent him the video of the hearing along with an analysis of “Flat Earthers” trying to pin the blame on Freddie and Fannie by Dean Baker of TruthOut.org and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.  I sent him some recommendations for reading including George Cooper’s The Origin of Financial Crises, and Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics. I also sent him a couple of economic blog recommendations like the Baseline Scenario where real economists discuss the current trends in economic thought about our problems.  No I don’t think he will read any of it.  My frustration is that I do and it doesn’t count for anything.

I guess my selfish little point here is that I take the time to really understand an issue.  If you have read my blogs, Micro and Macro Economics you will know I do my homework.  And that is what is so frustrating when I engage in these discussions.  They haven’t.  Let me give you another example from the party.  A friend of mine made an off-handed remark that anything government manages they screw up.  Now the fact that I dedicated 31 years of my life to the federal government, or that I worked with some truly professional folks both in the military and in the Corps of Engineers, some who died trying to protect the public was totally lost on him.  And of course the discussion was about a single payer health care system.  So I said, what do you think Medicare is and it is about 30% less expensive to operate than private insurance firms.  He said he didn’t believe it.

There you have it.  If you don’t agree with the facts, just ignore them.  So I am thinking why do I bother.  These are nice people and I enjoy their company, but when it comes to their understanding of the real issues that are facing this nation, they have been selectively listening to their favorite radio talk show host, and have read nothing.  They have not taken the time to challenges their beliefs or dial into other experts and consider their opinions.  They are all fans of junk science and don’t really understand the difference between it and real honest to god research and peer reviewed findings. They select their facts to suit their political beliefs (I am not going to pay no stinking taxes to the government that screws everything up) than to let the real facts inform their politics.  If they can find one fruit loop with a PhD to agree with their opinion, well, then there you have it.  As Susan Jacoby, in her insightful book, The Age of American Unreason, put it so well, we have multiple sources of our news these days and we can just pick the one that agrees with our political opinion.  It saves all that thinking and questioning stuff which is so bothersome.  So why should I bother anymore?

So I don’t think I am going to.  First off, it is rare that we are standing on neutral ground.  I read voraciously.  I challenge my ideas by reading people who don’t agree with me, and as an engineer, I am always looking for “root causes”.  That is lost on them and I might as well be “the man on the street” whose opinion is based on the same sort of selective myopia that they participate in.  It has been a long time since I have found anyone who can discuss issues on a level that is really intellectually challenging to me.  That, I am afraid, is a function of where I live.  In other words, I start thinking where do you start with this argument since they have not really examined it themselves.  They have choralled some opinions that supports their beliefs and they are not going to listen to any others.  There is no use asking if they have read this or that because they haven’t.  If you reel off facts and figures from well established and proven studies, they just refuse to believe it.

So I am not going to try anymore.  I will just be one of those people who nods and smiles and talks about the weather.  And in a few years I am going to move somewhere where intelectual stimulation is not just in a book, newspaper, or PBS.  Isn’t that sad?  Well I still have my blog and once in a while my son challenges me, so I guess life isn’t so bad after all.  There is still wonderful jazz and a good glass of wine.  Eventually they will see the light.  Then they will think it was their idea.

The conservative mantra is that over regulation of business by government kills innovation and makes our businesses less competitive.  There are actually two sides of this coin, because Democrats are just as guilty of this mindset when they claim they are protecting local jobs.  But do either of these sides ever consider that their protection of business and the status quo of business as usual is actually stifling innovation and making our industry, what’s left of it, antiquated?

What got me thinking about this is was a story in the New York Times describing how China was now has the lead in clean coal technology.  Now I would be the first to tell you that clean coal technology is mostly an oxymoron because no matter how you burn coal, CO2 is still a byproduct and there are other energy choices for us that bypass this problem of sequestering CO2.  But then you have China whose energy industry is primarily coal and you realize that in the short term, this is the most viable way of controlling greenhouse emissions.  So with the estimated largest coal reserves in the world, and 50% of our energy presently being produced by coal fired power plants, how come we are not the leader in clean coal technology and we could be selling this technology to the Chinese?

Well, the answer to that question is what I suggested at the start of this piece.  Businesses mostly have a very short-term view of profit.  Their stock prices and maximizing profits for shareholders is their primary goal, and any change to their industry that impacts their short-term profit is to be avoided at all costs.  Bottom line here is that most of our industries fight innovation and upgrading if it impacts the bottom line.  In many ways the business model that is being driven by stock market prices and maximizing short-term stockholder profits is, by definition, short term and counter productive to long-term health.  Enter our politicians who because they are driven by either conservative ideology, or short-term votes, and of course the money they can raise to obtain those votes, have exacerbated this stifling of innovation and growth.

First we have conservatives who feel regulation just adds cost to doing business, makes businesses less competitive, and stifles innovation.  So they have fought government energy regulations that might, in fact, actually make our industries more competitive.  Look at the cap and trade proposal to put an incentive into the market place to be more energy efficient and decrease green house gases.  The argument you hear is that this will just add costs to businesses that will be passed on to the consumer, and in affect be like a new tax (note the pejorative use of the word tax as in any tax is bad).  What they are really protecting is the status quo that inhibits innovation.  China on the other hand is requiring that every new coal power plant be built with this new technology; expensive now, and extremely cost and environmentally friendly in the future.  That is why they are leading in the clean coal technology.

Then there are the rust belt Democrats or the Southern Democrats who are either slaves to the industries that fund their elections, or to the workers in industries that will be affected by regulation.  The obvious example here is the automobile industry.  Had the government been successful at establishing tighter gas mileage standards many years ago, we might actually have cars that are competitive with foreign imports.  The biggest hurdles to doing this were the Democrats from Michigan.  But in a misguided effort to protect industries in their state from regulation, they have in fact signed their eventual death warrants.

In this new world that neither Republicans or conservative Democrats seem to be able to comprehend, it turns out that regulation may in fact be the engine that drives innovation and makes our industries competitive.  This is a whole new paradigm for the way we think about government intervention and regulation of businesses.  But sadly, the Chinese are leading the way, while our stuck-in-the-20th-century politicians continue to protect the status quo and sound the death knell for many of our industries.  Maybe in world where everyone is looking to maximize profits in the short-term, only the government can provide the incentives for business to invest in their future.

Yes I will get a Vine/Wine Friday up soon.  I am in the middle of another proposal and they are all consuming.  But the news the last couple of days has also been just too rich.  After eight years of the Bush nightmare and the disappointment I felt when at least 51% thought he was doing a great job in 2004, the chickens are coming home to roast.  What is really fun is watching the rats deserting the Republican ship of Bush.  The rats would be the people who voted for those fruit loops and now refuse to accept their responsibility with what has been wrought.  And what is most enjoyable is watching people start to realize what the 49% of us got (actually 51% but the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the vote) way back in 2000.  These people were fruitcakes and incompetent morons and now it is out there for all to see.  I am in memo heaven.

First there are the tortured (no pun intended) legal memos using circular and illogical rationalization to justify the unjustifiable.  Then there were more memos that told us they were looking to torture before they had their first prisoner.  Now we are finding out, well some of us have known this for years, that they then went hunting for torture tactics and the professionals in the SERE training told them the stuff they wanted was torture and that it was ineffective because it would illicit anything they wanted to hear, and finally it was not appropriate for intelligence gathering.  But here is the crux of the whole Republican experience:  THEY ONLY LOOK FOR WHAT THEY THINK THEY ALREADY KNOW!

Oh god, I love this.  It is raining crap all around them and they are still in denial.  There were weapons of mass destruction and they would ignore anything but that answer.  So what if we are in a war without end in the armpit of the world?  Okay, maybe there weren’t weapons of mass destruction, but then there was a beachhead for democracy in the Muslim world.  Did you see the protest of Afghan women who don’t think its okay to be owned and raped by their husbands?  Don’t you just love beachheads of democracy?  Oh let’s not forget cutting taxes and low regulation.  Our ship of economic prosperity has run aground on the rocks of reality and what do we hear?  Clinton and the Democrats did this to us!  The Democrats have been the most emasculated bunch of wimps for the last 12 years and could not manage one orchestrated filibuster to the Republican madness and now they are responsible for all this grief?

But the fog is lifting.  John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann have both denied global warming and use the argument that carbon dioxide is natural and could therefore not be harmful.  Okay I will give that John thinks cows fart carbon dioxide, but still the point was made that natural equals good even if it is methane.  Arsenic and mercury are naturally occurring and they are deadly.  On did I mention the plague and malaria?  Those would be God’s gifts to us as other natural phenomenon.  Aren’t you people out there thoroughly embarrassed that you elected these fruitcakes?

So what are the Republicans reduced to?  Well we can’t possibly be civil to world leaders we don’t agree with and need to wag our…, well you know what I mean, at them to prove our manhood.  Conservatives are shocked, shocked, shocked I tell you that the FDA is letting 17-year-olds get the morning after pill without a prescription.  How could government allow this?  Aren’t these the same people who argue that government should stay out of our lives?  They also argue that we are all entitled to a family assault weapon.  Now I can almost see this considering my vineyard gopher problem, but I will just stick with my rocket launcher. The good news is that I may be able to acquire a tactical nuke soon from Pakistan after we have invested billions in those folks to fight the Taliban to no avail.  Aren’t things turning out swimmingly?

So as the sun sets on a Friday night, I have my wine glass firmly clutched in my hand, and the Republican myth dies a slow and agonizing death, I cannot help smiling.  As one of my favorite professors in college used to say about an elegant equation, it is a beautiful thing, but Mother Nature is a bitch and reality sooner or later seeps in and then things get messy.  So Republicans, know what I know:  Life is messy, there are no simple answers, and change is the nature of the beast.  But there is the one thing I know that is a constant and that is good wine.  I have an absolutely exquisite Syrah from the foothills as I write this.  It never lets me down.  You conservative Republicans (are there any other kind any more?) ought to try it.  I know your world is crumbling around you, but you need to chill out.  We will all be better for it, your world crumbling that is.  Carpe Diem.