On the Contrary

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.

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.

On Meet the Press Yesterday, David Gregory was conducting an interview with Tavis Smiley and Joe Scarborough and he ran a clip of the Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, on his show last week making a statement about the virulence we were seeing in the Town Hall Meetings:

SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK):  Well, I’m, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in, in our government.  But we’ve earned it.  You know, this debate isn’t about health care.  Health care’s the symptom.  The debate is an uncontrolled federal government that’s going to run–50 percent of everything we’re spending this year we’re borrowing from the next generation.

MR. GREGORY:  That’s what–wait, hold on, I want to stop you there.  I’m talking about the tone.  I am talking about violence against the government. That’s what this is synonymous with.

SEN. COBURN:  But the, but the, but the tone is based on fear of loss of control of their own government.

(End videotape)

Then David then asked Tavis Smiley to comment:

MR. GREGORY:  Fear of loss of control over their own government.

MR. SMILEY:  This is…

MR. GREGORY:  Is that what’s out there?

MR. SMILEY:  No.  This is not about angst, this is not about anger, this is about hate.  There is a, there is, there’s a set of folk in this country–thankfully not, not, not everybody–but there is a group in this country that does not, will not accept a legitimate Democratic presidency, Joe, under any condition.

Here, I think, caught in a blinding flash, is the whole crux of the radical right’s thinking from the birthers to the screamers at Town Hall Meetings.  They are unwilling to participate in a democracy if they are in the minority.  In other words they do not believe in the implicit contract that the majority rules if they are not the majority.

Remember the woman wailing I want my country back?  I  thought I had just got my country back after the 2008 election and her attitude was that if the liberals won the election then it is time for revolution because they are having none of that.  This in embodied in the “I am going to wear my assault rifle on my shoulder to their Town Hall meetings so they are intimidated.  These people have no intention of accepting majority rule or leadership by progressives even though progressives won the election.

I always said the Republicans and the conservative philosophy was anti-democratic.  I just never though they would be so blatant about it.

This Sunday with the visit of Pakistan’s President, Asif Ali Zardari, and Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, to the White House, it was predictable that they would appear on Meet the Press.   What was also predictable with these two leaders is that we are in a world of hurt.  First and foremost these two guys are ultimate politicians and that is exactly what a nation does not need when it is facing critical choices.  As in our own country the choices are big and scary.  If you are trying to stay in power by mollifying the greatest number of your constitutes, the choices you make are going to be less than the change needed.  When facing real crisis, leadership needs to be bold and these guys are quietly treading water in a flood of trouble.  Take the Swat valley compromise that has totally collapsed as the reality of the Taliban rule is finally dawning on the Pakistanis.  But considering that this hoped for peaceful compromise threw the rights of the Swat valley occupants at the mercy of the Taliban, we can see how desperate and morally bankrupt the Pakistani leadership is.   In Afghanistan, President Karzai cannot seem to admit any error in his leadership while the real problem is government incompetence and corruption leading to a Taliban resurrection.  We are in deep doo-doo.

George Stephanolopous on ABC’s This Week was interviewing John McCain and once again I thank my lucky stars he is not the president.  John faults Obama with not coming out with a full plan to close Guantanamo before announcing the closure.  With thoughts like these we would have had nothing happen under a McCain Presidency.  Had President Obama laid out the reality of closing Guantanamo (charging those that can be charged, releasing the rest, and some in the U.S.) it would have been too big a pill for most Americans to swallow.  Set a date, work out the details through comprise and debate.  McCain pointed out that 10% of releasees have returned to the battlefield, but George, as usual, failed to challenge this number and have McCain name names.  The reality is one or two have.  Considering the recidivism of our own prisons, either way this is a great number.

John still thinks the Republican Party is a big tent organization that can attract new members if it just hews to its basic principles.  John still cannot face that his basic principles are exactly what are being rejected by most Americans as they see their country in disarray.  The round table discussion was sad, because these are all journalists of yesterday.  There was not one iota of an original thought, except maybe from Robert Reich when he question how our economy was going to recover since we can’t go back to wild lending.  They couldn’t stop interrupting each other as they pressed old solutions to old problems or in the case of George Will, trying to make some non sequitur conservative point.   Please, I am begging you.  Find some young blood that sees the world as it is, not as it was.

Fox News Sunday had Newt Gingrich on and his ability to dissemble always amazes me.  What he cleverly does is lay out a premise (all detainees at Guantanamo are criminal terrorists) and then lays out a solution that is imminently rational if you buy the premise.  The premise however is fatally flawed.  He wants to investigate Clinton lawyers and was shocked, shocked, shocked that attorneys that had represented terrorists (his pejorative term) in private firms were asked to work in the government under Obama.  Gee, I guess Newt will decide for us which people are entitled to due process and anyone who does not agree with him is unpatriotic and should be barred from government service.  There were so many over simplifications and outright misrepresentation of events in this interview that went unchallenged that it is hard to call this a real interview.  Enough of Newt Gingrich.  Anybody who thinks he brings anything new to the table does not understand a political egomaniac.

On CNN’s GPS (Fareed Zacharia) the Dali Lama was interviewed, but I got nothing earth shaking other than soon people will figure out that violence is not the way.  Well we humans have been around for about 40,000 years now and maybe it will just be a little longer.  Probably more revealing was the debate between an American, a Pakistani, and an Indian which allowed you to start to understand the complex web of distrust between India and Pakistan that paralyzes action on both their parts to solve the Taliban problem.  They are continually posturing themselves for the best position when America does withdraw and they see every move as how to gain an advantage over one another instead of mutually supporting each others stability as the best way for peace.  Maybe the Dali Lama was right.

The  final interview was on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer with Darth Vader.  But i will write a whole blog about that one because it was just too rich.  Another Sunday I should have spent wine tasting.  Oh well. 

Another Sunday morning getting the straight story from our tireless media, or is that tiresome?  So I watched my usual compliment of morning news shows and got filled up with a lot of nothing.  Well there is always one exception, but I will get to that.  So without further ado:

• Arlen Specter was the guest on Meet the Press and he did not disappoint.  I do have to hand it to David Gregory, he is getting better.  He asked Arlen all the right questions and Arlen did not dodge any of them.  Arlen is definitely a Republican in the Democratic Party.  Well not the new incarnation of Republicans, but even the moderate kind are still going to be a real hindrance to change.  I am not sure what the Democrats got out of this deal if he is going to vote as he always did.  The big one is health care and he is against a government single payer system along side private insurers.  This is change?  So exactly why is President Obama going to go to Pennsylvania and campaign for this guy?  The reality is that Arlen Specter is where the Republicans were back in the 80’s and I am not sure what we would gain from trying to recreate an era that isn’t worth recreating.
• The other two guests were Joe Scarborough and Ed Gillespie, both Republicans, who were there to talk about resurrecting the Republican Party.  This was also a topic on CNN with John King.  There was no new ground here.  Joe and Ed have obviously been drinking the Republican Kool-Aid.  They think that if the party gets out of the social issues, then the conservative message can be a big tent again.  They pointed out how in the 70’s the party was left for dead, and the same in the early nineties, but they made their comeback and it will happen again.   Uh Joe, Ed?   The world has changed and small government and miniscule spending doesn’t address this new world.  The social issue of abortion, gay marriage, and religion, are not the Republican Party’s big problem.  Their problem is that the conservative mantra of small government, free markets, and cutting taxes don’t address any of our real challenges.  If they did, they would have valid alternate strategies to what the Democrats are proposing. Sadly they think that present day Republicans just lost their way allowing deficits (mainly from cutting taxes) and big government (but little regulation). The reality is that the message no longer is viable.  I wonder why reporters don’t challenge them on this instead of going along with their fiction that they just need to find a new spokesperson.  Oh well.
• Then there were the endless discussions about who President Obama would choose for replacing David Souter.  I have to tell you I hate these discussions.  They are akin to metal masturbation.  No that is not quite correct, they are mental masturbation.  It is like sitting around listening to guys talk about the perfect football team.  It means nothing and it gets you nowhere.  Instead of endless what if scenarios why don’t we just let the President fill the position and then we can carefully dissect that person and ask all kinds of inane and embarrassing questions instead of wasting them on pretend candidates who may never make the cut.  Oh I forgot.  Watching the NFL draft is great drama so I guess this fills airtime.
• Let us not forget the discussions/hysteria about the swine flu.  Oh forgive me.  For the morons who think eating pigs is dangerous, it is the H1N1 influenza.  We have had one death in the United States and the way we are reacting to this, I am beginning to understand the panic around 9/11.  Thank god we have not had another terrorist attack or judging from our over reaction to this minor scare, we would have been burning the constitution in the street.  I grant you it can be scary, but in the meantime can we just stay home if we are sick, sneeze into our sleeves, and get on with our lives?
• Finally, Fareed Zackaria on CNN’s GPS interviewed Defense Secretary William Gates and this guy is one down to earth and honest human being.  We are very lucky to have him as our Secretary of Defense.  Afghanistan is a very difficult problem and listening to Secretary Gates let me know he knows what I know.  As I listened to his descriptions of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and what was really possible there, I know that we are in good hands.  He is keenly aware of the Russian experience in Afghanistan and understands that troops are not the answer.  We are in for a long ride, but our troops can be very proud of their leadership.

So another Sunday morning talking about going nowhere fast.

As is my habit on Sunday, I try to watch the Sunday news shows to see what the topics of the day are and how the press is covering them.  It was an exercise in futility.  There was Larry Summers on Meet the Press explaining that we would not relieve any constraints on Cuba until we get tit for tat.  The first question you have to ask is why is Larry Summers commenting on Cuba?  Shouldn’t that be Hillary?  Secondly, that is exactly the policy we have followed for the last 50 years that has been such a failure.  Then there was Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard commenting on CNN that this policy was wildly successful because Cuba has never been a threat.  Cuba a threat?  I think if you define success in this manner (much like we have never been attacked again by al-Qaeda in the U.S. after 9/11, therefore everything we have done is the right policy), then you can justify almost anything.  The fact that the Cubans are not free gets left out of the equation.

Then there was the discussion of whether President Obama should have been civil to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.  Since Chavez has said some outrageous things about the United States, we should act equally childish and see who can be the bigger diva?  Isn’t that exactly what President Bush did and just gave Chavez ammunition?  Anyone who is an experienced negotiator knows that the first key element to negotiations is to establish mutual respect.  If being civil is a disadvantage, I don’t want to live in the world these people think is appropriate.  Bring on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a model for our way forward.  At least in President Obama’s news conference, he took this whole foolish discussion on and set it straight.

So why can’t our news media see common sense?  Why do they continue to focus on these frivolous issues and arguments?  I think the answer here is that our news media is woefully out of touch with where most of us are now.  They continue to parade the same old tired pundits on the screen locked in the Washington bubble while most of us yearn for some new thinking.  We have witnessed the old approaches fail and we want to try something different.  But our news media continues to give the old arguments and old politicians a forum for throwing out old ideas and protecting the status quo.  What are Dick Armey and Tom Delay doing giving the country advice on the way forward (Meet the Press and Hardball)?  They are the kings of a failed approach. What the hell do they have to say to us about anything?   Well it would appear that the only people interested in what they have to say are the press.  The rest of us are thinking, “Done that, didn’t work, got a new idea?”  At least Gloria Borger on CNN said one common sense thing, “President Obama is trying a new approach to see if it will work.”  What an insight!  The country is in a mess, the old solutions don’t work, and most of us are willing to try a new approach and see if can work.

My point is simply this:  The talking head news media is focusing on political back and forth that most of us have moved on from.  Most Americans are looking for a new approach and our media is focused on yesterday’s arguments.  For instance in the Cuba discussion, what if the U.S. just ignored Cuba.  Forget the carrot and stick.  It just gives these dictators someone to blame for their problems.  Just open up the country to free trade and travel and let events take their own course.  What a novel idea.  But the discussion you get is the old carrot and stick.  Where is the discussion about new ideas?  These are not going to take place as long as we continue to give the same old talking heads and pundits the microphone.  So please stop it.  The job of the press is to challenge these old ideas instead of giving them a podium from which to bore us to death with them and pretend they are somehow stewards of old wisdom.

I guess change is a scary thing for many people.  That in my mind is why the Republicans sound so shrill today and desperately want to establish the old order.  It would also appear that our media can’t stand change either as it would change the whole dynamic of their coverage and discussions.  They would have to bring in some new people with new ideas and do something new.  As evidenced by most of today’s discussions, they are resisting it mightily.

Note:  One exception as always was Fareed Zackaria’s GPS where he was asking real and substantial questions about our way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  There is a real fear that Pakistan could become a failed government.  What he doesn’t give us is politicians with some ideological bent, but thoughtful diplomats (Richard Holbrooke) and knowledgeable journalists who can give us a real sense of the issues and what is possible.  And of course let us not forget Rachel Maddow whose show is breaking new ground for being rational.  It is such a breath of fresh air.

What is on everybody’s mind, the Economy, was the focal point of discussion this Sunday morning, but the discussion was more political than policy based.  On Meet the Press we had Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer laying out familiar political positions.  Yawn.  The round table discussion was a little more interesting in that they included Liaquat Ahamed, the author of Lords of Finance, who raised the issued that back in the 1920’s the failure of a major European bank was really the beginning of the Great Depression.  He raised the issue of the collapse of the Eastern Europe Economies and the fact that while we are looking inward, this is a global crisis and focusing on saving us may not save us even if we do all the right things.

On GPS we had an eclectic group led by Niall Ferguson (Assent of Money) who was arguing that our expanding of the deficit to solve the slow down in our own country will actually exacerbate the problem as it robs capital from the rest of the world.  What they didn’t tell us was that if that is the case, what is the way forward.  David Frum was trying to make the point that this wasn’t the Republican’s fault.  I do think they made a very valid point that the real problem is global, but decisions on how to solve it, whether in China or America, is political and thus locally focused.  Meanwhile John McCain is railing against the earmarks in the budget (less than 3%) as though this is our problem.

Reliable Sources took on the real issue of whether the press and CNBC were trying to use instantaneous market fluctuations as unfair evaluations of the President’s policies.  The answers were sadly predictable based upon the pundit’s political persuasion.  The automaton from the Washington Times (conservative Washingtown voice) thought it was just fine, while the rest of the pundits thought we may need to step back and wait and see.  She (the Washington Times blogger) even tried to play down the Jon Stewart satire of CNBC’s financial predictions that went bust (See Two Pieces of Wisdom from Jon Stewart).  Sad that politics blinds us to our own failures in logic, myself excluded of course.

So what have learned?  Not much.  Apparently most Americans are looking for a quick fix in America for a global problem that will probably get much worse before it bottoms out.  What we really need is to understand just how serious the problem is, that the problem and the solution are global, and a general agreement on the way forward.  The political arguments we are having are the cart before the horse when we should first listen to dueling economists and historians so we understand the problem. What we are getting now is moderate steps in one direction, amid political arguments that we are all tired of.  When the Sunday shows start bringing in historians and economists, maybe then the political babble will end and we can have a rational discussion about the way forward.

For what it is worth here is my two bits:  Ignore the Republicans.  Doing what Herbert Hoover did in 1929 is not a way forward.  They are locked in their political ideology and their ideas, or lack thereof, are a result of mental constipation.  It is a global problem, but I am not sure that the U.S., even if we knew the correct solution, could bring the EU and China along.  The one example we have of getting out of this is the Keynesian solution, which is deficit spending.   When we did massive borrowing to run World War II, we did it all internally by borrowing from our own citizens.  The conventional wisdom is that we will be borrowing from the Chinese this time and they may redirect their money to their own problem, forcing us to raise interest rates to get the required cash.  Unless you haven’t noticed things are getting very bad in China and unrest is quite possible.

Having said that, we could always print money which causes inflation, which if things get bad enough, may not be such a bad idea since inflation forces people to buy things since they need to spend their money before it is devalued.  At any rate I think we need to proceed with the Obama solution which has three legs; stimulus, banks, and housing, only much more aggressively.  As Tom Friedman wrote in one of his columns when he described the scene in Jaws where one of the major characters (Richard Dryfus) sees the shark for the first time and tells the boat captain, “we need a bigger boat”.  Well, we need a bigger stimulus package.

The next stimulus package will be about the size of the last one, but forget the tax cuts and focus on investments that will create jobs that will be about the economy of the future.  That would be infrastructure, education, energy, and climate.  We need to get that in place right now and the only infrastructure spending would be either repairing what has to be repaired or new green transportation systems.  Continuing to build transportation systems that are petroleum centric is counterproductive.

For the banking system, ditherating is not an answer.  The fear of a domino effect must be overcome (or ameliorated) and we have to identify and remove the bad debts out of the system (along with the present management structure).  Investors, bondholders, and taxpayers must all share in this burden (read pain).  Whether this is some form of the bad bank/good bank scenario or nationalization, it must be done quickly.  One aside here:  One guest on GPS raised the issue of class anger in the United States.  We let the rich get richer because we believe the lie that we would all profit and they squandered everything.  It will be imperative that those who profited from our downfall are seen to pay dearly in fixing the system or there will be rioting in the streets.

Finally the same medicine is going to have to happen in the mortgage industry.  Decide on a reasonable interest rate for all loans, say 4%-5% and establish it.  Then re-evaluate the market worth today of the property and reset the principle balances.  Use a liberal value assuming some middle ground between the present principle balance and a realistic actual worth.  Those that can qualify for these new loans, then fine.  Those that can’t get foreclosed on.  Waiting for the marketplace to do this under foreclosures just extends our problems.  Note that this is almost a double-edged sword because once this is done, much of the banking problem settles at what those toxic assets are really worth and what the federal government should insure them for.  This not only settles the worth of the Collateral Debt Obligations (CDOs) but the Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) and allows us to estimate the real worth of these investments.

Okay, maybe these ideas are a little naïve considering the complexity of the problems, the interconnectiveness of our economies, and the impact of global problems, but why aren’t we having this discussion instead of endless discussion about what is politically possible instead of what needs to be done and making it politically possible?

As much as I see this as a global crisis, and although we need to stay engaged and try to work with the EU and China to solve the problems, the real place where our actions can make a difference is at home.  The critical issue is that this must be our focus and we need to get on with it, aggressively.  Any other delay or Republican obstructionism, and we are doomed. Note there is a bright side.  If we have a global depression, Iran won’t be able to afford nukes, North Korea will starve, and Al-Qaeda will be broke.  This says to me it is really time to start solving our own problems instead of saving Iraq and Afghanistan from themselves by emptying out our treasury.

As my usual habit I watched the Sunday news shows and once again was appalled.  Meet the Press had a good interview with Secretary Gates about Iraq and Afghanistan, although entirely predictable.  What could have followed was a discussion of what is really possible there with some experts on Iraq and Afghanistan.  But, alas, we then get the pundit echo chamber discussing both this topic and the economy.  Too much personality and not enough intellectual substance.  I could have turned off the sound and been 100% correct on what each would say.  Reliable Sources is suffering the same fate.  As long as they use journalists to discuss how journalists are performing we are going to get circular and self-reinforcing arguments based upon their political leanings and the conventional wisdom of Washington.  Okay, Okay.  Wisdom and Washington used together is an oxymoron.

When I say echo chamber what I mean is the same old political arguments that most of us are past, but the media is still focusing on, repeating the talking points of each side.  I yearn for a subject matter expert’s view of the policies instead of political flacks or pundits.  There were several exceptions however.  I got part of the interview of CNN’s John King with Democrat Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii where John just let Representative Abercrombie answer the questions without interrupting him with questions.  It was refreshing to hear complex questions being posed, and the guest allowed to fully respond in a full and reasoned way.  Maybe John King should have moved to NBC and taken over Meet the Press.

As usual the real information and learning was with Fareed Zacharia of CNN’s GPS.  Fareed’s two focuses were the Taliban/Jihadists and the economy.  He asked a really profound question about if we should have two different approaches to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  His view was that he lumped under the Taliban all the fundamentalist Muslims who want to implement the Sharia but are not interested in attacking the West, and under Al Qaeda, all those jihadists who want to wage warfare with the West.  His point was that lumping them all into one group and waging war against them might be counterproductive.  The ensuing discussion made clear that there is no coherent agreement on the Muslim community from there is something inherently wrong with the underlying religion to all Taliban are jihadists.  Think about this discussion another way:  The way forward in Afghanistan is dependent on how we see this issue.

But real clarity both on the economy, Afghanistan, and conservatism came in the next discussion with Martin Wolfe and Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.  Martin Wolf is associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London.  He made short work of his criticism of the Obama administrations economic recovery plan.  To Wit:

• The stimulus package is required, but too small.  We need to spend $700 billion this year alone to stimulate a $4 trillion deficit in spending.  It is a world recession and we can’t think small or parochial.  This year we just need to get money in people’s hands and next year do the infrastructure thing when appropriate projects are shovel ready.  He did not say, but implied that tax cuts to business were a waste of money since without demand, they are not going to expand.  This crisis is not going to be solved by private demand and spending
• The banking bailout has been too little too late with no clear direction.  Banks have to be recapitalized and although he shuns the world nationalization, they have to be taken over and restructured, which in essence is the same thing.  The Obama administration has been way too timid and needs bold action before the situation gets much worse (See The Bank Problem)
• The mortgage crisis cannot be solved by just adjusting interest rates and must address principal balances.  Depending on your social goals, you can do this one of two ways, either through the foreclosure route (people lose their homes), or through a program of renegotiating the loans with adjusted principles based upon market evaluations.  Either way, principal balances have to be brought down to the reality of their deflated worth

Note that all of the above indicate bold action and we have yet to see that out of Washington.  Mr. Wolf’s view is that the economy won’t wait.  I could not agree more (See Fire the Generals).

Fareed had invited Prime Minister Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada, because Canada is in much better financial shape than the United States.  Mr. Harper was blunt about why.  The current crisis was because the lessons of the 1920’s went unheeded.  Unregulated capital markets will lead to pyramid schemes sooner or later.  In Canada, not only do they much more strictly regulate the banks so they couldn’t over leverage themselves with risky investments, but they regulate the mortgage industry so the types of risky loans that finally came back to haunt us were not allowed.  He also made the point that while he is not a Keynesian, he understood that the problem is global, protectionism is counter productive (buy America), and that private spending is not going to solve the problem, and he supported the stimulus package.

Think how different this is from our own conservatives who hate the stimulus package and were the leaders in laissez-faire government.  Could it be that there is another model of conservatism that is, uh, should I say, conservative?  How refreshing.  Here is the prime example of the difference between a true conservative that we use to know, and our brand of conservatism in this country today that is just radicalism (hate government, cut taxes, and protect my share of the pie at all costs).

But finally Mr. Harper left us with one other thing to mull over in regard to Afghanistan.  When asked if he would contribute more support to Afghanistan, he said he would have to know what our strategy was and what our end game was.  His reading of history had told him that there have been ongoing insurgencies in Afghanistan throughout history and no matter what we do, it will continue.  If this is true, what is an acceptable end game?  Isn’t it interesting that the conservative party in Canada is making sense and asking important questions while here in America they have gone off the deep end?  Just another rainy Sunday listening to the talking heads and thinking about where we go from here.

Usually I write this blog with a general theme in mind, but Bits and Pieces are things that may seem unrelated, but lend to the overall malady in our country today:  So here are this weeks gems:

• I usually watch Meet the Press, Reliable Sources, and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on Sunday with snippets of CNN’s State of the Union.  Except for Fareed, I had to turn them off.  On Meet the Press, David Gregory is no Tim Russert.  One of Tim’s great attributes was to let the guest fully answer a question without interrupting, in a sense letting them speak for themselves and giving them all the rope they needed.  David seems to have an agenda when he continually interrupts to challenge an answer.  He needs to step back and let his guests answer the hard questions fully without his constant interrupting to challenge, usually using the other side’s talking points.  By doing this he is being controlled by the opposition instead of conducting an insightful interview.
• Meet the Press also failed in their round table discussion as it was a reflection of the Washington echo chamber instead of reasoned consideration of the issues.  If you just repeat the arguments being made by politcal hacks, what good are you?  The hot button issue was the Obama mortgage bailout plan and the anger that some abusers might benefit.  But they focused on the anger, reinforcing it, instead of looking at the plan’s pros and cons, and alternatives, if there are any to the plan itself.  It was a waste of time, did nothing but reinforce misplaced anger, and did not inform.  Could they have one economist to bring some rationalism to this discussion of emotionalism or the political opinions of the day?
• Reliable Sources is usually a discussion of how the press is treating a specific subject, not the subject itself.  I lost interest when it was about Roland Burris, the lady who had the litter of kids in California, and other non-sequiturs.  I just don’t care.  Both of these people are just sideshows to the real issues we face and I don’t care if I ever hear of them again.  Illinois, get your house in order, and California, we already have enough mouths to fed which we can’t afford.
• Then we get to the bright light which was Fareed Zakaria’s GPS.  Here we had a real discussion about the efficacy of further military adventures in Afghanistan, the economy with real economists, and then a discussion of both the economy and world affairs in Asia from experts living in those areas.  It was the difference between the Washington echo chamber (just political talking points being rehashed) and real discussion of real ideas.  What a breath of fresh air.  I suggest for those who missed it, read the transcript (GPS).
• California is in big trouble and the recent settlement of the budget resolved nothing.  Once again we are hamstrung by small minds when they negotiated away the 12¢ tax on gas giving up $2 billion in revenue per year.  Since gas went up to $4/gallon and is now down around $2.50/gallon, who would have noticed the 12¢?   Yet this tax  would have created a fairly consistent source of revenue for the state that would also reflect our long term goal of reducing global warming.  In addition there is still borrowing in the plan to make ends meet.  Just how deep a hole do we want to dig?  We need a new State Constitution that gets rid of the mandatory spending, dumps the two-thirds majority for budgets, and gets rid of the term limits.  Why is the obvious so hard to do?  I do like the idea of open primaries and a rainy day fund.  It is a start.
• Governor Schwarzenegger noted recently that California (He is an acknowledged infrastructure fan) had a long-term transportation plan which is why the state is way ahead of any other in implementing high speed rail, but the nation does not.  If we continue to let Congress piece meal fund their states for transportation, we are never going to have an integrated, cost effective, and multi-modal transportation system.  Oh I am sorry, that smacks of government planning and is evil.  What was I thinking?
• The Republican’s lunacy of denying the stimulus money is based upon a short-term belief that all we need is tax cuts and the giant deficit they created just can get any bigger.  As one Republican recently said on CNN that went totally unchallenged, “We all know that only businesses create jobs, not government.”  They are oblivious to what happened from 1929 till 1945 as the government spending created almost all the jobs because businesses could not stimulate demand on their own.  Almost all economists recommend deficit spending right now, with a long term plan to deal with the deficit when the economy is back on its feet.

Finally I would like to leave you with a letter that was in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday that kind of puts the whole Republican tax cut strategy into perspective (short term, painless, benefits the wealthy, and is ineffective):

“A comment on a blog included a long list of what a tax cut cannot do:  A tax cut cannot provide police protection.  A tax cut cannot provide a fire department.  A tax cut cannot build a road.  A tax cut cannot provide Social Security and Medicare.  A tax cut cannot provide care for the disabled and other vulnerable members of our society.  A tax cut cannot create city parks or preserve areas of our country’s natural beauty.  A tax cut cannot build schools or hospitals…and the list goes on.

As George Lakoff, professor of linguistics, suggested, we need to reframe the word “taxes” to take away the negative connotation.  Taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society, one that does not feed selfish greed but cares for our children’s future, for those less fortunate and for the common good.”  Adeline Hope, Berkley, CA

The Republicans and their ideology are living in another time, still believing the Reagan Myth (which is a myth of giant porportions since he grew both the size of government and size of deficits), and Hoover economics which requires no sacrifice or long term plan but then miserably failed.  It is a strategy, as it was in the early 1930s, for total failure.  It appeals to the masses because it asks nothing of them, which is its appeal, while transferring wealth to the wealthy which simply makes things worse.  Haven’t we had enough?  Have we learned nothing?

I am going to start focusing on the economy, especially since the Conservatives have started beating the drum that the New Deal failed (see Republican’s Talking Points:  The New Deal Failed).  It is such a lie, and will further weaken our country if they succeed.  Our biggest problem is that most of the population doesn’t read so their knowledge and understanding of where we have been is minimal, probably fating us to repeat the failures of history.  But there were a couple of items in the Sunday talk shows that need some clarity:

• On Meet the Press David Gregory is still no Tim Russert.  David’s biggest flaw is that he is still a creature of the conventional wisdom and has a hard time really challenging respected pundits of that conventional wisdom.  In particular, Paul Gigot from the Wall Street Journal was arguing that the Federal Reserve had pushed $2 trillion into the system and that this will have the desired effect down the road, no matter what Congress does.  What he is really arguing is that there is no need for a New Deal and that we should focus on the tax cuts, “I think a, a tax cut, a big corporate rate tax cut, for example, or an across the board tax cut would be a lot more stimulative than this public spending, which has to come from somewhere.”  I wonder where he thinks the cash for the tax cut is coming from? I have several thoughts here:  First our infrastructure and its ability to support a vibrant economy in the future is degrading.  So what is his plan for investment in these things?  I’ll give you a hint; he doesn’t have one.  Second, isn’t this tax cuts for the rich again?  How does this help considering the tax cuts they got over the last eight years?  What about the GAO study that shows that two-thirds of businesses don’t pay taxes?  Finally, looking at the Japanese experience and other stagflations, monetary policy never cured the problem without the extra help of massive spending.  In other words private spending is not enough to get the economy going.  Why doesn’t anyone challenge these “pundits” of yesterday’s conservative economic ideology that is all based upon flow down economics, with these facts?  Like I said, David Gregory is no Tim Russert.
• CNN did some really good reporting over the weekend on the economy, especially the film on the deficit called I.O.U.S.A, which showed how the deficit ballooned under Ronald Reagan, was actually coming down at the end of the Clinton years, and has tripled under George W. Bush.   What all this demonstrated was that conservative economic ideology is a road to devastation, but played into the conservatives hands to make you afraid of the deficit so that the short term spending required to stimulate the economy will be tempered by this fear.  In almost every other show, deficit spending was advocated with a mixed message.  This was especially exemplified by host Christine Romans of CNN who would mouth the words, “we need to increase the deficit in the short term”, but the sighs and eye rolling (body language) was giving the stronger message of be afraid.  What really drove me crazy was that although everyone seems to agree that at some point we will need to reign in the deficit, no one had answer for how.  It is a legitimate question for the press to ask what that plan is, it is not legitimate to let the “loyal opposition” criticize the Obama plan, and not give their own plan for this.  As I noted Sunday (The Dismal Science), World War II began the biggest deficit spending as a percentage of GDP we have ever experienced and healed the Great Depression.  The Obama administration will not have the advantage of this kind of focusing event so that people understand that the short term is our future.
• Then there was the discussion of the Israeli/Hamas war on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS.  After some lively debate, one of the guests, Hanan Ashrawi from the West Bank, a moderate Palestinian was asked a direct question:

ZAKARIA: Hanan Ashrawi, you are a Palestinian moderate by everyone’s acknowledgement. So, let met ask you, what do you want from Israel, from the United States right now? What do you think would bolster your power and influence in Palestine and in the region?

ASHRAWI: I think there should be an immediate, immediate cessation of violence. Stop the assault on the Palestinians.

People don’t see this as an attack on Hamas, which is, of course, a large movement with a small militia or military wing. And a regular army cannot defeat irregular forces, as you know.

And the casualties and the victims have all been, on the whole, the innocent civilians. This has to stop. Men, women and children are being killed. Whole families are being obliterated.

This is very, very painful. And it is creating a sense of anger, hostility, extremism among the Palestinians, and tremendous pain and suffering.

Let’s find quickly, quickly a solution that addresses the real issues, that addresses the real causes. We cannot afford anymore a business-as-usual approach to peacemaking.

She said nothing.  Where was the risk taking to find a solution?  What she said was stop the violence and then find a solution.  Isn’t that what has been done in the past in this ever spiraling circle of violence?  Here is the problem in a nutshell.  It is time to let violence run its course.  When people get desperate enough, then they will compromise (Disproportionate Response?).

Another week where hard questions are being either dodged or not asked.  Oh well…