On the Contrary

“There was a time when Americans could think on such a scale and get it done. We used to be better than any other nation on the planet at getting things done. It would be tragic if the 21st century turns out to be the time when that extraordinary can-do spirit disappears and we’re left with nothing more meaningful and exciting than lusting after tax cuts and trying to pay off credit card debt.”

This quote is from Bob Herbert’s Column Saturday, The Human Equation.   He lays out the case that things are a mess and getting worse and the real issue is unemployment.  He is wishing for a real national jobs program like when we built the highway system or sent a man to the moon.  He even suggests how to pay for it, but notes that our Republican friends (and many Democrats) just don’t think big anymore.  It does no good if the market stabilizes and banks are saved if no one has a job.

Unless you have been asleep, and apparently most in Washington are, you will have noticed that the economy is getting worse not better.  Just read the headlines from the paper on Saturday.  In California (and I would guess elsewhere) mortgage defaults are rising and these are from people with fixed rate mortgages.  Just what do you think happens when you cut state wages by 30% (forced furloughs) and cut back on almost every program?  Even in my little town of Placerville, many business owners are talking about shutting down as business has fallen way off.  We are just beginning to see the real recession and it is only going to get worse.

Those morons on the 24/7 news/business shows are still watching the stock market and they judge the economy by its ups or downs.  The stock market is so detached from the real economy and it is amazing no one has figured that out yet.  All you have to do is understand that if there is nothing we are making and selling to the rest of the world, people are not going to have jobs and what the stock market does is irrelevant.  Note that the New York Times ran a story on Saturday about how the tight rules on mortgages is preventing people who are a good risk from getting mortgages.  In other words, we have fixed nothing.

What is really sad is that the lessons to be learned from the Depression were all out there for all of us to see and we ignored them.  President Obama saw we needed a stimulus plan, but then let the Republicans railroad  and eviscerate it.  I listened as one of the faithful explained that we could not afford another stimulus package and what we need is another tax cut so that business will invest and grow.  Let’s see.  Isn’t a tax cut a decrease in treasury funds, just like what would happen if you expend funds out of the treasury in a stimulus bill?  Second, if there is no demand (and it is ever shrinking) your return on profits from a tax cut would also shrink and why would you invest it to expand your business in a shrinking market?  Faith is an amazing thing isn’t it?

So what is the message here?  We failed to learn from the Depression and we are cowered by our fear of taking a risk for our future.  We have failed to fix the banks, make a real investment in our future, or solve any of our real problems as we tinker around the margins.  We have let Republicans with their mindless belief that now is the time to be frugal tie our hands and it is going to lead to a real depression.  Hang on folks, here it comes, and you asked for it.  The once great nation of the United States is a cowering child afraid of the future.

Rush Limbaugh said on Tuesday, “if he (Obama) fails, all of us are saved.”  The trick in this is the word all.  If all means fat white men who have run Wall Street into the ground and gotten rich on the Bush Tax cuts, then he is absolutely right.  If he is talking about the other 98% of us, then he has got it all wrong.  I listened to another white Republican Congressman (are there any other kind?) explain how what President Obama is proposing will ruin our country by destroying innovation as government takes over running everything.

Not withstanding that any government takeover simply brings in new management and financial backing, until the assets can be re-privatized, just what great innovations is the Congressman talking about?  Would that be the innovation of our domestic automobile companies whose cars are now not wanted by anyone?  Would that be the same CEO’s who don’t believe in global warming and therefore have no energy efficient cars?  Would that be those wonders of innovation that came up with selling debt as a way to run our country into the ground?  Would that be the leaders of Wall Street, those pinnacles of business acumen, that didn’t see the expanded leveraging and investment in CDOs as very risky enterprises?  The only company I have seen truly being innovative lately is Apple and nobody is suggesting we take them over.  Or would that be those wonderfully innovative Republicans whose answer to $4/gal gas is drill baby, drill?

Let’s face it, we have had unfettered business enterprise for at least the last eight years and it has been an unmitigated disaster.  So this little problem with the economy is a bump in the road and we need to get on with business as usual?  What is wrong with these guys?  Global warming doesn’t exist (see George Will who is supposed to be an intellectual but apparently does not understand science and cherry picks his facts to suit his beliefs) while the world watches the poles melt?  Tax cuts to business will spur the economy when everyone is being laid off and no one is buying?  Better yet tax cuts and caps on spending will help the deficit?

Here is the bottom line:  Republicans do not have a clue on how to lead.  Their whole ideology is that the market place will work its magic and we just need to keep government from interfering with its invisible hand. It’s about a free ride where all you have to do is cut taxes for the rich and everything will be fine.  Oh, and I forgot, we need to project our power by the use of military force.  My how all of that has worked out so well.  So when the market place is not working, the invisible hand may be in the invisible pants playing with itself, and military force in the role of diplomacy has proved to be a bottomless morass, they are out of ideas other than to just how do we get back to the good old days when we were getting rich and the rest of nation was sliding slowing into oblivion.

So when these guys spout their tried and failed policies, try to seed fear, and hope you don’t ask questions, ask how will they will fund, or help fund our children’s education.  Ask them how they will fund the needed investment in our infrastructure.  Ask them what they are willing to invest in alternate energy research.  Ask them if they still believe global warming is a mirage and what is wrong with having those who pollute (like coal burners) pay for the damage they cause.  Ask them why if unfettered industry is so innovative why have we done nothing about energy independence or why our automobile industry is on its last legs.  Ask why, if our bankers are so smart and proposed regulations are a power grab by the government, who should regulate these bozos.  Ask them how more private insurers competing with each other is going to help the millions who are losing their insurance or reduce the costs of business who have in the past, been burdened with these costs.  What part of denying claims and cherry picking enrollees will help all of us get health care?

My point is quite simple.  The Republicans cannot come up with a good idea because they can’t shed their failed ideas.  Until they finally come into the 21st century and recognize that their approach has failed and quit trying to fit failed solutions to new conditions, they look like fools.  Maybe they always have been fools, but rich, well paid fools who made fools of us.  Shame on us.

Watching the Republican Party gyrations this week and their attacks on anything Obama, I have come to the recognition that all that is left in the Republican Party are lunatics escaped from the asylum and still refusing to face reality.  But let us not ignore our misanthropic media which fails at every turn to note the hypocrisy or lunacy of these attacks and report it with a straight face as though these are valid charges.  But I digress.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) said that she wants residents of her state “armed and dangerous” over President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce global warming “because we need to fight back.”  But it gets worse. She said that “Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people — we the people — are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”  So she doesn’t like the outcome of the election and therefore will not abide by it.  I wonder what part of democracy she doesn’t get?  Oh I forgot, all of it.  Remember, she is the one who thinks liberals are un-American and should be investigated.
• Then there is the whole pack of them that are complaining that if the Democrats use the reconciliation process to pass their budgets bypassing the filibuster, it is a wholesale mugging of the government process.  My how memories are short.  Let’s see, there was the Bush Tax Cuts, or as Senator Sanders, an independent from Vermont asked, why reconciliation was such a good idea when it came to giving tax cuts to millionaires but such a bad one when it comes to trying to provide health care to average Americans.  Then it was used to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.  All this by the Republicans who thought majority rule was good enough for these issues.  Hypocrisy has no bounds.
• Then there are the claims by House Minority Leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s proposal for new powers to regulate and if necessary take over financial institutions other than banks constitutes “an unprecedented grab of power”.  Oh really?  Should we continue down the unregulated path we have been on.  Should we leave these institutions in the hands of those morons who got us where we are?  Part of the problem is that financial institutions like investment firms and insurance agencies no longer act in traditional ways.  So we should follow the lead of the Republicans whose laissez-faire policies got us to where we are?
• Then there is the claim that the Obama’ budget is a giant step toward socialism.  Please!  Providing health care for all citizens is not socialism, it is our moral responsibility.  But Republicans have been on the train of prosperity for years without ever paying for a ticket.  They have gotten their free ride on the backs of every single hard working American citizen.  Now we have to face the problems that have been building and pay for our passage forward.  They don’t like that.  Paying one’s fair share and investing in the future is something they never had to do before.  It’s un-American.
• But the biggest lunacy is the “Republican Budget Alternative” which contained only 17 pages, no numbers, but to be filled in later.  The promise is a carefully crafted plan of tax cuts and capped spending to get the deficit under control.  Are these people lunatics?  The only thing keeping the economy off life support is spending by the federal government since both the States and our citizens are cutting back.  If you want to see our economy really go in the dumper, cut federal spending in a time when there is no other spending and more and more people are losing their jobs every day.  How does this compute on the “reality” scale?  But better yet is the idea of cutting taxes to save our budget and stimulate spending.  Even if businesses get a tax break, they are still going to layoff their employees if no one is buying.  Meanwhile with less money coming in, the deficit balloons.  Anybody remember the last eight years?
• Last but not least there is the RNC Chairman Michael Steele told who told CNN that he would contemplate a presidential run if God told him the time was right. He also claimed to have strategically planned his squabble with Rush Limbaugh, in which he called the radio talk show host’s work incendiary and ugly. See it is all in his master plan to end up in the loony bin.  The man is delusional.  Is this the best they have to offer?

So as we enter into some of the most important debates in our history to try to right our country, the opposition party is not making sense and has become irrational.  It is really sad when a whole national party is so wedded to their ideology that when circumstances change, they cannot adapt to change and just become totally irrelevant.  Problem is their irrelevancy is holding the rest of the nation back from our future.  Hopefully this is becoming abundantly clear.

There have been dire warnings that the worst thing you can do with a stimulus package is to be too timid.  They have come from both sides of the political spectrum.  Any historian/economist will tell you that both the Japanese lost decade and the Depression suffered from relapses or failed recoveries because the stimulus was too small.  The warning is to err on the side of stimulus.  The fear card played by the Republicans to limit the deficit they have already made almost intolerable, will be small potatoes if we really do slip into a lost decade.  So what did we get from compromise, bipartisanship, and fiscal responsibility?  The answer is a watered down bill very likely to fail.  Actually it played right into the Republican’s hands.

We have the great majority of Republicans wanting to do nothing or just rely on tax cuts.  If you don’t care about the country, this would have been a great way to go to finally prove the bankruptcy of these ideas.  But with a stimulus bill that has been emasculated (sorry Alice), they have set the Democrats up to fail and then claim they were right, and for the gullible (swing voters/red staters), the Republicans will get their votes in the next election.  The only up side to this is that the final crash will be later when they finally can put all their failed ideas back in play and then it will be patently obvious this stuff is nonsense.  Of course this outcome means we all suffer in the meantime and for a long time.

Who was in the driver’s seat on this bill?  Three “moderate” Republicans or the gang of three.  In other words after an election the Democrats won handily, we are still at the mercy of Republican ideology and it will be the death of us.  They cut out aid to states that would directly save jobs, health care to the poor, and aid to education.  What the hell were they thinking?  This is our future and they want to give people a tax cut so they can buy Ipods and other imported goods?  Actually they also included the $70B cost of eliminating the alternate minimum tax which is really a $70B cut on stimulus because Congress would have approved this in another bill.  I think most people have yet to understand that we are at the edge of a great depression and they are not ready to really do this right.

When I listen to the pundits and other various fools, what I hear is that bipartisanship is good and so is compromise. So maybe this bill is just right.  No, it isn’t if one side is patently wrong and that has been demonstrated over the last eight (40?) years.  Incorporating failed ideas into your plan for the sake of compromise is shirking your responsibility to the American people.  We are standing at the edge of the precipice and so we should sorta-kinda not lean too far out?  We should be withdrawing from the edge with all available speed.  We progressives have been led by people who are too timid and are afraid to lead.  And their fear will be used against us by the Republicans.  It has been the Achilles’ heel of the Democrats for the last eight years and it will be their downfall if they don’t grow a spine and draw a line in the sand.

This bill is a compromise to nowhere and things will get worse.  It will only muddy the argument of what is the right policy.  Sure it will save some jobs and do some good, but in the end it is not big enough or bold enough to move our economy in the right direction and it will continue its decline.  If I were in charge, I would have crafted the bill that I thought would be best structured to save our economy (loose the majority of the tax cuts and increase infrastructure spending) and then I would have jammed it down their throats.  If we are stymied in the Senate by the filibuster so be it.  The right way or no way, but not the wrong way.  There is just too much in the balance to not go full bore.  It is time to call the Republican’s bluff.  Let them be held responsible for the destruction of the country.  The longer you wait to finally draw the line in the sand, the harder it is going to be and the worse our situation will be.  By the way Harry Reid is no leader.  It is obvious that he tried to steamroll the House Democrats.  I hope the Democrats in the House vote it down.

Stay tuned because this bill was too small and timid, and within six months there will be a new stimulus package because the first one wasn’t enough.  The costs will be greater because we didn’t do it right the first time and it will take a bigger jolt.  Trouble is, because the Democrats lacked the courage to challenge the Republicans this time, they will be emboldened to throw up more road blocks.  Baby steps to nowhere are a journey to oblivion.

I am beginning to wonder if the cable news media is anything but an echo chamber for the Republicans and timid Democrats when it comes to the stimulus plan.  What is most disturbing to me is that we seem to be a nation of Alzheimer suffers.  We can’t seem to remember the last administration and the policies that are now being touted by Republicans to save us was the cause of the problems we are in.  The same Republican tactics that got us into the Iraq war and the same media failure to vet Republican claims are once again leading us down the road to disaster.

Thankfully President Obama finally came out of the shadows last night and started to poke obvious holes in claims the Republicans are making that are patently false, yet the media has been unable to address:

“We’re not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that in eight short years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin. We can’t embrace the losing formula that offers more tax cuts as the only answer to every problem we face, while ignoring critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, the soaring cost of health care, failing schools and crumbling bridges, roads and levees. I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV – if you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction.”

So why doesn’t the media ask these Republicans why their plan of total tax cuts isn’t just the same medicine that got us into to this fix?

The Republicans have said “this is not a stimulus package, it is a spending bill,” trying to relate government spending to some evil world destroying monster to which President Obama replied, “What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point! No seriously, that’s the point!” Once again media, isn’t this the obvious point?

He also pointed out that many of the things the Republicans want to rip out of the bill are the very things that we need to pursue.  He used the example of the government buying hybrid cars.  Doesn’t that stimulate the manufacture of energy efficient cars and reduce the cost of our dependence on foreign oil?  This morning it was reported that the Republicans were trying to rip out the funds for Amtrak.  We are once again the nation of small thinkers.

I guess what is so amazing for me is that we have two excellent examples of what we should be doing.  The first comes from the Depression where massive government spending was lifting us out of the Depression until Roosevelt bent to conservative fears that the deficit was getting too big and reduce his spending throwing the country back into a deep recession, finally rescued by the spending of World War II.

The other is the Japanese experience in the 90’s (New York Times).  Again it was massive government spending that finally got them moving.  And the primary lessons were that social spending got the biggest bang for the buck followed by infrastructure spending focused on our future needs (not bridges to nowhere).  These lessons are being misrepresented by the Republican spinners in the media for which the media is either far to undereducated or timid to be able to challenge these ideas and once again, false claims stand as facts.

Democrats, get a pair.  We know what will work and if you continue to gut the bill to get Republican buy in, it will be self-defeating.  Make the arguments, craft the bill to help, and if the Republicans defeat it, let them face the nation as the economy goes off the cliff.  They are playing hardball partisan politics and it is time to call their bluff.  It is time to end their failed economic ideas once and for all.  This isn’t some one-upmanship game, it is about a prosperous future or being a third world Republican failure.  Forget the bipartisanship if it requires incorporating bankrupt ideas.  We are in a war for our very existence.  Take no prisoners.