On the Contrary

I see we have another killing spree in Orlando, Florida.  What we need is more guns so more people can shoot themselves in the crossfire.  More continuous coverage where nobody knows anything and speculation will masquerade as news.

In the New York Times this morning there were two editorials that set out what is the conventional wisdom about the recent election and what it portends for the Democrats and the other probably more to the reality of the situation instead of the conventional wisdom.  Sadly the nation moves usually on conventional wisdom, not reality which has been badly mangled by the media which tends to bend to the conventional wisdom without questioning some of its underlying assumptions.  To be sure, the media rarely speaks truth to power. They are too afraid to lose their access if they actually challenge these people.   Least we forget Iraq, death panels, socialize medicine, and I could go on indefinitely.

David Brooks in his editorial, What Independents Want, was pushing what I consider the conventional wisdom, albeit, inaccurate.  He accurately noted that there was a swing in independent voters toward conservatives, but he then identified the effects as the cause instead of the real root cause.  His premise was that independents think that President Obama “is moving too fast.”  He cites the economy (the real cause), increasing distrust in government, fear of the deficit, too much government regulation, and probably the accommodation of Wall Street by the Democrats (this one is right on).  Then of course he recommended to his conservative brethren that we should get back to the basics of small government and let businesses do their thing, and fail if they must (read wall street).  He did get one of these things right:  “Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order within which they can lead their lives.”  Problem is his conservative prescription for that will only fail as it did last time around.

As always the devil is in the details and one should ask David how he would have handled the bank crisis back in 2007 and what should we do now to make sure the whole economy is not threatened.  Would we do that with less government and fewer regulations?  Same with health care or the climate/energy bill.  If less government is so wonderful, why aren’t these problems already solved after eight years of Republican control?  The real issue here is that the economy is not improving and all the rest, distrust in government, less regulations, etc. are a result of the lack of improvement, not the cause of the problem.   The one thing I always find astounding is that when things are going bad, why do the voters want to bring back the people who got us in this mess and have no ideas for our future?

The other editorial was from Paul Krugman, Obama Faces His Anzio, where Paul identifies what I think is the real problem.  It is not that President Obama has tried to do too much, but he has been too timid with what he has done.  His intrepidation caused him to implement policies that are only minimally effective.  The bank crisis was averted, but then he started accommodating the bankers and real change was not effected.  The stimulus bill by his own staff’s estimation was too small.  He has compromised or watered down what he was going to do and the result is very little progress.  Paul compares this to the Anzio Beach fiasco in World War II:

“The World War II battle of Anzio was a classic example of the perils of being too cautious. Allied forces landed far behind enemy lines, catching their opponents by surprise. Instead of following up on this advantage, however, the American commander hunkered down in his beachhead — and soon found himself penned in by German forces on the surrounding hills, suffering heavy casualties.”

President Obama was elected on a change agenda and then he didn’t.  Mr. Krugman’s final summary is where I think the truth really lies:

“If the Democrats lose badly in the midterms, the talking heads will say that Mr. Obama tried to do too much, this is a center-right nation, and so on. But the truth is that Mr. Obama put his agenda at risk by doing too little. The fateful decision, early this year, to go for economic half-measures may haunt Democrats for years to come.”

Well, as noted, that is what Mr. Brooks is saying already, but I am with Paul on this.  President Obama was too timid and without some real backbone from the Democrats between now and 2010, I believe he may have wasted his chance.  The conventional wisdom summarized by Mr. Brooks is gaining speed, and if the Democrats cannot do something to improve the economy, the conventonial wisdom will prevail and we will have the same failed policies voted back into office in 2010.

Or you could title this, nothing really ever changes.  I am sitting in my chair with my knee up (ruptured Patellar Tendon) listening to NPR (National Public Radio) and I hear Carly Fiorina, who is going to challenge Barbra Boxer for the California Senate seat, say,  “We need to cut taxes and reduce the deficit.  We know how to balance our own budgets so why can’t Washington.”  In another piece I hear a Republican Strategist tell NPR that the lesson from the election is that the Democrats need to be more bipartisan and that John Boehner will work with the Democrats on a health care bill.  Both of these statements are beyond outrageous.

Let’s start with Carly.  She had a disastrous run at HP as CEO where she was widely criticized for mismanagement and her bullying leadership of one of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies and then was ousted to return the company (HP) to profitability. (CNN)  Then she became an advisor for economic policy for John McCain, but her ego got out of control when she told two separate interviewers that neither member of the Republican ticket would be capable of running a company.  (Huffington Post)  This would be the woman you want to send to Congress to get things done?  She would be just one more of the dinosaurs up there.

But let’s look at her standard conservative mantra of cutting taxes and reducing the deficit.  Now unless I am confused, cutting taxes reduces cash flow into the treasury, i.e. increases the deficit. Remember, that is what George did. Oh, I forgot, flow down.  Once taxes are lower, then revenue flows into the Treasury.  Problem with that is it has never happened and our tax rate on the rich is the lowest it has been since 1931 and the recessions continues.  But wait.  She will cut spending by removing waste.  Well name names sweetheart and you will find that one person’s waste is another person’s lifeline.  The biggest wasteful program is military spending and I’ll bet that is not on your chopping block.  And just what are you going to do about all that infrastructure spending that we have put off for years and now needs major investment.  As I like to say the devil is in the details.  So if we fall for this again as another example of conservative free ride-ism, we deserve to slowly fade as a great country. She would be a disastrous for California and the nation.  If this stuff doesn’t sound like the Republicans in 2000, we really do have memory failure.

Now for the bipartisan approach, are we that dumb?  The lesson here is that bipartisan to Republican means the Republican way.  After the Stimulus bill, the health care bill, the climate bill, what we should have learned is that they don’t want to play unless it is their rules.  But even more relevant is that their solutions are what we have been doing and as a result we are in a mess.  So we should bring them into the process and water down real change so that nothing ever changes? The Republican Party is the party of corporations and status quo.  The status quo is destroying us.  So lets bring them back into the process so we can do more failed things harder?

I don’t know, but if these messages that these Republicans are selling catch on, we are truly doomed as a nation who cannot learn from their mistakes.  There are no easy solutions to our problems and they are going to take sacrifice from all of us to build a better tomorrow.  Buying into the conservative shtick is just another attempt at denial of our basic problems and how we got here.  It is really time to put these people and their ideas where they belong, on the junk heap.

Well the pundits will tell you that with two Republican governor wins in the election race yesterday, the tide is turning from the Obama revolution.  I am not so sure.  It should certainly be a wake up call for the Obama Administration and Democrats in general, but more about that in a moment.  The one thing I can never figure out is the thinking of the voters.  The conventional wisdom will be that voters were unhappy with the lack of success of the Democrats on addressing their problems so they voted for the Republicans.

But where did those problems come from?  If we are talking about unemployment, the economic down turn, bankrupt state governments, then it came from the last bunch of Republicans they elected before the Democrats were swept in.  So if the Democrats are having a hard time moving things forward, especially with all the obstructionism by the Republicans, and politics looks like business as usual, lets bring back in those guys whose philosophy and policies brought us this nightmare in the first place?  Okay, maybe the issues were more local, but to bring back in people who support demonstrably failed policies is like beating your head against the wall because you have a headache.

In upstate New York, this was a no-brainer.  A Democrat won after 150 some odd years of Republican control because conservative Republicans misunderstood the idea of divide and conquer.  This is supposed to apply to your opponent, not to your own party.  I think that people in that district are still Republican, but when outside forces tried to come in and tell them how to think, the response was predictable.  How does this result impact the radical rights future endeavors?  I don’t think they are rational and they will continue with their attempt to purge the party of moderates or anybody who thinks rationally.  It is the very definition of ideologue.

Finally, one could say that this was a defeat for the Obama Administration in New Jersey.  I have no sympathy for the Democrat in Virginia as he tried to distance himself from Obama.  You know, lets out Republican the Republicans.  He deserved his fate and Virginia deserves their fate in a throw back to a religious nut who thinks women belong in the home.  Good luck with that.  But in all this, there was a real lesson for the Obama Administration, although one I doubt they will learn.

That lesson is simply this.  Speeches don’t get it.  You had better start delivering what you promised.  Right now you have not delivered and you look like politics as usual.  I have to laugh when I get one of those “net roots” email (yes, I sent Obama money during the presidential election) asking me to do something or get out my wallet again.  My thought is, I will when you finally do any of the things you promised.  Using the State’s Secret defense to hide what really happened after 9/11, doing nothing for gays, continuing Bush policies we all hated, expanding our role in Afghanistan, are all things that you don’t need the Republicans to do something about and you have done nothing.  When you do, I might get interested again.  I think many of his independents voters feel the same.  He campaigned with a bang and governed with a whimper.  When he starts fighting for me again, then I will start fighting for him.

The message ought to be loud and clear to Democrats.  Stand tall and fight for real change, not some bipartisan half measure that fizzles.  Don’t try to appeal to independents by trying to go Republican, but stand up and fight for what you believe in.  Compromising with the Republicans will lead to failure.  The Administration could start with health care.  The bill before Congress is a half measure with a small sliver of a public option.  So President Obama could stand up and get engaged or he can watch his Administration fade into the sunset.  If he continues to get co-opted by politics as usual, trying to accommodate failed policies, and not understanding he is leading a fight for the heart and soul of America, he may destroy for a long time to come the real hope he rekindled in 2008.

My biggest concern is that they won’t get the message.  As they all dance around patting themselves on the back for a baby step in health care, the rest of us are thinking, “and you call this real change?”.  As Dennis Kucinich said on the floor of the House the other day, “Is this the best we can do?”

First, if you read my blog on “A New Stimulus Package and Conservative Obstructionism“, apparently Paul Krugman, who may I add has a shade more credibility than I do on the subject, wrote essentially the same thing about the need for a new stimulus package.  See Too Little of a Good Thing.

Second, the other important editorial was Tom Friedman who hit on a theme I have poorly described as the “Vision Thing”.  In his editorial, More Poetry, Please, he pointed out that most people are confused about what President Obama really believes.  They see his policies as this and that, as opposed to a cohesive whole toward an end goal.  He calls it the narrative thing and I think he has hit on the critical issue of our times.  Instead of seeing health care reform as a social program, or cap and trade as a tax on all of us, President Obama needs to weave this into a narrative about how these programs are part of the whole fabric of our future, not just separate programs.  Best said from his Op-ed:

“But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed.

‘You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.’”

Talk about getting to the essence of the issue.

I am a little person.  No not in stature, I am a fairly big guy, but in political impact.  I have none.  I have always been a doer.  I make a fairly good living because I am good about the details of making something work.  I am fairly perceptive at what is actually going on, but generally I have lived in the shadows of those who chart the strategic course of things.  Generally speaking, I have found my strategic sense, much better than those that are in charge. At least most of the roads taken are not the ones I would have taken, and the results for our country have not turned out well. I saw my frustration at being dismissed as a little person being played out on Meet the Press and CNN’s GPS. It was a contrast in all that is wrong with how we think and I wonder if anybody noticed it?

Fareed Zakaria had as his guest Matthew Hoh, who recently resigned from the State Department Staff in Kabul in protest over our policies there.  Matthew was a marine in Iraq and then a State Department staffer in Afghanistan.  So he saw the area, its conflict, and the people from the ground level.  He was a little person dealing with the day-to-day realities of what really is going on over there.  He actually had to carry out and deal the realities of policy.  Apparently he was offered a position on Ambassador Holbroke’s staff, but in the end he realized that he would have little effect on policy and the direction we were headed would result in more deaths, both Afghan and American, with nothing to show for it.  The transcript of the interview is available at CNN.

What Mr. Hoh described was the reality of Afghanistan.  There is no Afghanistan people as such, just a very rural country with local tribal communities that resent all intrusion into their lives, whether that is the Afghan government, foreign fighters, or the United States.  These people don’t want to be protected; they want to be left alone.  The war as he saw it was an ongoing civil war that has been going on for more than 35 years.  We were simply taking a side in that civil war, and more troops would mean more insurgents, and the war will go on forever.  He found no parallels to Iraq where it was a more urban community where control was greatly simplified.  This is a gross summary and if you care about where we are headed, if you care about those brave Americans we send over there to die, you need to read this transcript or watch the interview.  His final observation is that we need to reduce our presence, not increase it:

ZAKARIA: What will happen if we do not go with the McChrystal plan, or we go to a very small troop increase? What will the troops who are there now do? And should we actually draw down some of these troops?

HOH: Oh, I do believe we should draw down. I do believe we should recognize we’re in a civil war. I do believe we should recognize our priorities are the defeat of al Qaeda and the stabilization of Pakistan.

I’m by no means a Pakistan expert. But increasing troops is only going to fuel insurgency. We need to stop our combat operations in areas where we are fighting people only because they’re fighting us.

Otherwise, it’s going to be 2013, we’re going to look back four years, and we’re going to say, what have we accomplished? What did we get? What was this worth? What did we get out of this?

We might be able to stabilize the Afghan government in five to 10 years with a lot of resources. I believe we can militarily defeat the Quetta Shura in two to three years with a lot of resources and a lot of dead.

However, is it worth it? What do we get out of it? What’s the benefit of us doing it? It doesn’t politically defeat the insurgency in the south. And it doesn’t, more importantly, it doesn’t defeat al Qaeda.

Then I watched Meet the Press and the discussion between Pundits David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell (just back from Afghanistan), and Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski about Afghanistan.  The country they were talking about was not the same one that Mathew Hoh was talking about.  Miklaszewski talked as though General McChrystal was a personal friend and that all they needed to do was to provide security for the people.  The construct of what Afghanistan was all about was totally different from the reality that Mathew Hoh presented.  And then I got it.  These people know nothing except the image that has been carefully crafted for them and the narrow confines of their own experience.  They have no on-the-ground, in the dirt, personal experience of the reality there.  They are important people.  You have to get really dirty to really know something.  They are creatures of what they are told, not what they have experienced.  They view Afghanistan through the lens of their own experience instead of the alien reality of the real Afghanistan  and what is possible there.

So Matthew Hoh is one of the little people.  He sees reality as it is because he has had to live it, not through the lens of a need for victory, or military supremacy, or some belief in a quick fix or political ideology.  He spoke truth to power and they tried to co-opt him by stroking his ego with a promotion up the chain.  He saw it for what it was, selling his soul for ego with little chance to effect change.  He is only a little person to those in power.  To the rest of us, he is indeed a very big person.  He did not sell his soul for power and advancement.  Thank you Mr. Hoh.

From my perspective there is one more important lesson here and not just about Afghanistan.  It is about how the little people get co-opted when they speak truth to power and how those in power who can really make a difference are mostly those that sold their soul to get that power.  They are not in power to make major changes, but to carry the flag of those who co-opted them.  How else do you explain our Afghanistan, financial, economic, energy, and climate policy?  The way forward is obvious.  But those in power don’t like those answers.  Those damn little people.

Remember that our conservative friends were totally against the stimulus bill.  Then they loaded it up with tax breaks saying that only creating private sector jobs would do any good.  Now they are saying it failed to create the number of jobs promised.  Apparently all those tax breaks weren’t all that effective.  What was effective were the jobs that were not lost in each of the states, especially teaching jobs due to stimulus money.  So let’s just think this through.  You know, apply logic instead of emotion and ideology.  Remember that except for three Republicans, the rest wanted to do nothing.  “Let them eat cake.”

First of all let’s look at cutting taxes to stimulate the economy.  If we were in a mild recession, this might not be a bad idea.  If people weren’t loosing their jobs, then giving business an incentive to hire or replace equipment might be an effective way to stimulate demand.  But in the current situation, there is no demand because the economy is shrinking* and people are losing their jobs.  Why would I hire someone or replace equipment for demand that does not exist?  In other words, in an extreme recession, why would I take the risk on expansion when there is no one to buy my increasing inventory?  I would venture that if you made the tax rate 0% right now, it would not have any impact except on Wall Street where they bet on derivatives, not create capital for new businesses.

Let’s just take little old me as an example.  When I get a consulting check, I sock 37% away for taxes that I have to pay quarterly.  37% is what I have computed over the years to make sure I don’t owe anything come April.  Now if you reduced my taxes from earnings to zero I would have a nice chunk of change I could spend, and so the theory goes, I would stimulate the economy with this spending.  The trouble with this simple minded conservative thinking is I would not spend it.  Times are tough and I am not sure when the next job is coming so I want as much money stashed away as possible as a pad for the future.  No stimulus there. This is generally what economists will tell will happen with tax cuts in a severe recession, but if the only thing you know how to say is tax cuts, then, well, you prescribe it no matter what.  It’s all you got.

So if demand is shrinking, and tax cuts are not going to stimulate private spending, what you have left is public spending.  Oh how conservatives hate this.  The usual complaint is two parts.  It increases the deficit and government jobs are not real jobs that sustain the economy.  So let’s take one at a time:  It is very true that this spending will raise deficits, but so will tax cuts.  Either way the effect is the same on the deficit and our treasury.  Oh but private jobs are self-sustaining while government jobs are dependent on continued spending.  Well, yes and no.

First of all there are no private jobs to be had and they are shrinking.  So the government has a couple of choices.  It wants to stimulate the economy by giving the economy money that will be spent.  That means you give it to people that will spend it, people on the margins.  That generally means you fund state programs.  That is why the job numbers created are teacher’s jobs that would have probably been cut.  You also fund help for indigent (social programs) and that money is also spent.  Is that stimulative?   Of course it is since those people spend money that fuels private sector jobs.  Without it, many more jobs in the private sector would have gone away just further shrinking the demand and the problem.  Same result is achieved with construction/infrastructure projects.  The benefit of this kind of spending is that not only do you at least keep the economy working, you get something for your money, either in your kid’s education (teachers jobs), or needed infrastructure improvements.

To the question of are these make-work jobs that are dependent on continued government spending, the answer is not really.  The government is trying to maintain the services and infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy until the tax base can once again support these critical services.  The private sector is moribund.  There is no other option.  Well that’s not quite true.  You can follow the conservatives lead and just let the economy collapse and sooner, or more likely later, things will restore themselves.  The collateral damage is not their concern.

Their concern and bogeyman is the deficit.  Okay it is a concern.  But they don’t bat an eye about billions for Iraq and Afghanistan, they don’t see the defense industry as a government program, and they wouldn’t hesitate to cut education, health care, or whatever to support these giant programs.  I don’t think it means a hill of beans to have the strongest military in the world if our economy is a shambles.  Is the deficit something we should worry about?  Of course, but right now we have to get things moving or the deficit is going to get much worse than what this spending will cause.  Later on we will have the fight with conservatives once again to set reasonable tax rates to pay off the borrowing we need to do today.  It is called shared sacrifice which is totally alien to their mind set.  They are on the wrong side of almost every issue because their ideology has constipated their brains and of course the status quo (those that got rich in the existing climate) pays them not to think.

And yes we need another stimulus, as the first one was too small and not targeted to things that would fuel the economy with spending.  Thank you conservatives for that.  That includes some of those moron conservative Democrats that the press continues to falsely refer to as moderates.  This stimulus package or whatever they want to call it, ought to be more focused, to help those out of work (extending unemployment) and real investments in tomorrow. Forget about bipartisanship because the conservatives will try to keep anything from happening.  They will scare the rabble with the fear of deficits while setting the country up to bankrupt the poor.  Nothing ever changes and you would think sooner or later people would wake up to going nowhere.

*While the economy grew 3.5%, most of that was due to replacement of inventory, reduction of workforce , and longer work hours, while unemployment continued to increase.  Even the Stock Market has figured this out as it fell on the weak outlook.  Things are going to get worse, not better without a new stimulus plan.

The President has a “difficult” decision to make on Afghanistan.  In my mind the difficulty is in doing the right thing as opposed to the easy thing.  It amazes me that anyone listens to John McCain who is demanding we honor General McChrystal’s request, who never saw the war on the ground in Vietnam, still thinks it was winnable, and had the Iraq war totally wrong.  He and others pushing for the easy way are the same folks who told us Iraq would be a cakewalk.  After all they lament, the general in the field has spoken so why don’t you honor his request?  The answer to that is fairly straightforward:  The general was given the mission to win the war and asked what do you need?  What do you think he wants?  But one has to step back and say, how many more troops for how long, how much will that cost, and do we have both a military and a public that can support that?  Oh and of course, is it worth that cost?

Tom Friedman, in his column, Don’t Build Up, answered these questions better than I could.  Probably the most insightful part of this editorial was his assertion that all the great strides forward between warring parties has been made by them, not some outside force.  That includes the “Awakening” in Iraq when the Sunni’s were already throwing out the Al Qaeda thugs and we just leveraged them.  Makes you pause when you recognize that our partner in Afghanistan is a totally dysfunctional government.  But what I found even more interesting was politburo minutes unearth in Russia of Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, speaking to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986 about their war in Afghanistan.

“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.” He went on to request extra troops and equipment. “Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.” (Transcript of Defeat).

Sound familiar?  Why then is it the easy decision to just send more troops?  Because politically, like the Russians, it is almost impossible to recognize our limits, if necessary admit defeat, and move on.  The trouble with making the easy decision is in the details.  How is the country going to afford this while nation building at home is our top priority?  How can a volunteer military and very few continue to bear this burden?  But what about all those generals and their advice?  They want to win; it is in their blood.  They were wrong in Vietnam and they are wrong now.  They are wrong because winning on their terms simply isn’t worth what it will cost us.  This is a political decision, not a military decision and is why we do not blindly follow general’s advice as the Republicans are urging.

Will President Obama summon the courage to do the right thing, instead of some political compromise to nowhere?  Well if what you hear coming out of the White House is that there will be some compromise additional troops, then no he will not summon the courage to ignore the politics.  He will once again try to accommodate everyone, and in the end promulgate another failed policy.  Whatever he decides, he certainly will have to support what he is doing by a detailed plan on the end game.  If he actually followed Tom Friedman’s advice he would face extreme criticism from the right on being weak.  But it was false bravado and weakness from these same actors that has us bogged down in this quagmire.  Real strength would be a President who knows our limitations, decides how to best move this country forward, and ignore politics of a failed policy that will kill more young Americans.

Finally let us remember what Afghanistan is.  It is a 5^th century country run by a mobster.  The government by all accounts is part of the problem.  The Taliban are estimated at 20,000 strong and they are not some foreign invader.  Yes they are aided and abetted by Al-Qaeda, but as long as we are there, we are the issue.  So the reality is this is a 20 to 40 year problem.  We need to decrease our footprint, spend our precious treasury more effectively on keeping the Taliban out of total control, while we help in humanitarian efforts to educate the people so they can solve the problem themselves.  That is not more troops.  More troops is just kicking the can down the road over the bodies of more and more young Americans who will have died in vain.

Oh, and one more thing we continue to ignore.  The Taliban are a creature of our own creation.  We thought it was a good idea to provide religious fanatics with guns and rocket launchers so they could depose the Russians.  Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

On Meet the Press on Sunday, conservative Joe Scarborough was in a discussion about if the Republican Party is fracturing and he made this comment:  “ …when I, when I ran in 1994, the Republican Party on the state, national and local level tried to run against me a moderate Republican. And I’m not talking, I’m not talking abortion or gay marriage, I’m talking taxes and spending, small government.  That’s great to reinvigorate the base.”

So other than the wingnuts who see black helicopters and socialism everywhere, the conservative revival according to Joe and many Republicans, will be based on tax reduction, minimal federal government spending, and small government, which is code for few regulations.  What I can’t figure out is why doesn’t anyone challenges this ideas as exactly how we got into the mess we are in today.   The Bush administration passed a tax break that emptied the treasury and set up our wild out of control deficits.  Oh by the way, this same administration and the Republican Congress went wild on spending including the Iraq war with absolutely no control.  Finally they couldn’t reduce the size of government so what they did was emasculate its ability to regulate and manage its affairs.  The outcome was disastrous from Katrina to the financial meltdown.  We have had no energy plan, no infrastructure investment, no climate control policy, minimal spending in R&D, assuming that somehow the market would solve all these problems.

Now one can surmise that all these tenets of the conservative mantra are based on faith in the market system and capitalism so lets examine this system and the conservative beliefs in it.  This can be summed up as let the market place, through capitalism, operate with a minimum of restraints and our economy will be humming.  But anybody who really reads Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations understands that there is no such thing as perfect competition.  Regulations didn’t come first.  They came after gross abuses mandated them because of the public outcry.  Labor laws, safety regulations, environmental laws, truth in lending laws, monopoly laws, banking laws, handicap access, minimum wage, all come to mind.  Companies that worship capitalism are always maneuvering to stifle competition so that they will have an eternal competitive advantage.  Government’s role is to level this playing field and to curb the worst abuses.  Conservatives totally miss this.

So the bottom line is that regulations are necessary to level the playing field, keep honest competition a reality, and prevent unrestrained capitalism from abuses to the environment, labor, safety, you name it.  Now I will be the first to admit that there are many regulations that are counterproductive but at this juncture in our mess, it is clear that regulations and an effective government to carry them out are a given.  Then we can perform a careful assessment of what works and what doesn’t, and refine those regulations.  But a philosophy carried out in reality that hates government and all regulations will just return us to the Bush mess of 2007.

So much for the small government and few regulations.  What is required is effective government, but that is not what conservatives believe in.  Quite the opposite, they see government as “the problem”.  A philosophy that ignores reality is bound to fail when put into practice.  Does anybody remember the lessons learned from George Bush?  Oh, I know, most conservatives avoid confronting these realities by saying George wasn’t a real conservative.  It is denial at a humongous level.  It is humongous because I hear every day people say they don’t want government to run something.  They fail to understand that almost everything they have today from clean and adequate water supply, a reliable transportation system, to their education and medical insurance in old age is a direct result of government action.  They only remember the failures or hindrances they perceive, not the overall impact.

Now on the tax and spend mantra, what is meant is low taxes and little spending.  But as I have pointed out in other blogs (See Republicans Aren’t Evil are They?), investment is the lifeblood of businesses, so why wouldn’t it be the lifeblood of a country.  Low taxes in themselves are not an elixir.  Many studies have shown that lowering taxes too much has a detrimental effect on the long-term health of an economy just as raising them too high.  The other side of this coin is deficits.  The deficit is large and further growth of it scares everyone.  But we got that debt as noted earlier, not by investing in our future, but in tax cuts for the wealthy and failing to pay for proper investments in this country.  The conservatives would dry up any investment in our future and in fact mortgage our future on the present.  It’s called selfishness.  As noted in a News and World report, the USA has fallen from fourth to ninth this year as a rating of the richest countries in the world.  This has been a direct result of conservative economic policies we have followed for the last eight years.  The article notes that this is not because of the recession as other countries are quickly recovering and we are not.

Some of these measures that were evaluated to determine our status were jobs, poverty, education, economic growth, competitiveness, prosperity, health, and happiness.  Now we are falling in all these measures after eight wonderful years of conservative economic policy.  The deficit is scary, but we are going to need to make investments in the short term to create cash flow in the economy.   Unemployment will increase, along with foreclosures.  States see shrinking revenues for the foreseeable future, which means more cuts.  The fact that companies are showing more profitability will not solve these problems.  They aren’t selling more; they have reduced staff and work longer hours.  The stock market reflects the faux profitability of these companies and economists use these numbers to say we are in a recovery.  But if demand continues to shrink, no one is going to hire.  The real recovery will be when people have jobs and their purchasing power grows.  Right now it is continuing to shrink.  Simply reigning in government spending is going to worsen this cyclic problem.  That spending needs to be directed where it will be most effective and that is not in tax cuts.

So if you like where we have been, and you will if you are in the top 1% of income earners, then continue the conservative economic approach.  If you want to see us get out of this mess, then we need to think about new ways of doing business.  This is going to take smart investment by our government, and reasonable tax policies to implement this policy.  Instead we have conservatives promising us a return to wonderland if we will just re-embrace conservative hate-government, cut taxes, and spend little. I am not gullible enough to tell you that the Democrats have the answer, but we have tried the conservative approach and it has failed miserably   If you are that stupid to try it again, you deserve your fate.

Joe Lieberman has told the Democratic Party he will not support overide of a filabuster and will side with the Republicans on the Public Option. Strip him of any Chairmanships and power he has and throw him out of the caucus. He is a Republican and when the Democrats finally realize that he has always been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they will be stronger for it.