On the Contrary

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 starting to get really disillusioned.  To understand what is really going on, one has to step back from the media which is focused on their incestual chatter and conventional wisdom and look at what is really happening.  From analysis of the stimulus package to what to do with your money, we are getting advice and sage wisdom from people who are repeating the same talking points over and over again.  Barack Obama had it right when he said the earth has moved under their feet, but even he fails to understand what that really means.

I have expressed my disgust at the economic stimulus package which has been gutted as to be totally ineffective by trying to cater to the Republicans.  Paul Krugman this morning eloquently laid out that argument in the New York Times.  I guess what is most disturbing is listening to Republicans gain traction on their failed economic ideas and watch Democrats try to make nice with them while they are in the process of creating a massive economic train wreck.  It is the same tired arguments we had during the election and apparently the election settled nothing.  I guess we will have to be lying in the wreckage of the train wreck before we finally get it.

But there are other things which need to be done and I am afraid we are backsliding.  Here is my list of things that could and should be done immediately:

• Stop air bombardment in Afghanistan and Iraq – Whether by drone or by aircraft, this policy of fighting a guerrilla war with proxy bombs kills innocents and is counterproductive, not to mention immoral.  Collateral damage is by definition failure in a war for peoples hearts and minds.
• Never, nunca, torture, ever – The whole premise of torture is that under extreme pain someone will tell you the truth.  It is a false premise.  They will tell you what you want to hear and that has nothing to do with the truth.  In the movie “Taken” the hero wires up a guy to the power gird to get him to tell him where his daughter is.  The guy spits in his face so he lights him up and he spills his guts.  Really?  I would have given him a convincing lie and it would have worked out better for the bad guy.  Oh, did I mention the moral argument for you Jesus freaks who think this is a good idea?
• Close Guantanamo and no “special trials” – If you buy the argument that there is evidence that is so secret that you just have to believe the government, it is the end of justice as we know it.  Our system of justice has evolved over 2000 years beginning with the Greeks and evolving into what we have today.  This is no time to deny that wisdom.  Find out what evidence there is, prosecute or release.  I am tired of watching “good” Americans clamber for a lynching.  Note that fool Lindsey Graham, who everyone thought was such a peach coming up with the military tribunal system, is also giving us wonderful advice on our economy. Any more help from him and we will finally hit bottom.
• Iraq and Afghanistan – The war party is over.  If most of you actually knew how much we were spending over there you would be appalled especially looking at the major whining that has gone over some of the minor items in the stimulus package.  Time to set a date and be out.  We simply can’t afford it anymore and why do we want to prop up nations that don’t believe in women’s rights?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be part of bringing another theocracy into the world.
• Cuba – Just End the blockade and get on with normal relations.
• Marijuana – Just get over it, legalize it like alcohol, control it, and tax it.  It’s here, everyone uses it at one time or another and we are wasting precious time and resources playing cops and robbers.
• Immigration – Note this one has fallen out of view with the economic crisis.  That should tell you it was never really a problem in the sense that Mexicans were taking jobs away from Americans.  Get a reasonable program in place that legalizes those that are here, makes guest workers easy to accommodate, and does not punish their children because their parents brought them here.
• Get over the moral approach – Whether Cuba, Marijuana, or Immigration, this moral conservative approach to these issues has been bankrupt from day one and still we continue doing stupid counterproductive things.
• Refocus incarceration of criminals on rehabilitation – We have the largest gulag in the world.  Our approach to this problem is to take criminals and throw away the key.  In California the budget for prisons will soon exceed our budget for schools.  Something is not working so why do we continue to do the same stupid things.  Because conservatives use the fear card and the masses fall for it every time.
• Healthcare – I listen to more stupid discussions about how to provide universal healthcare than one can endure.  Watch my lips:  SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM.  It is the only thing that has worked elsewhere and yet once again conservative America holds us back from the obvious solution to an ever increasing problem.
• Abortion, gay marriage, and flag burning – Non-issues.  We have reasonable laws restricting abortion, but this issue is really about the basic right of women to control their lives.  Gay marriage is also a human rights issue as flag burning is a free speech issue.  If you don’t approve of any of the above, don’t do them, but don’t utilize government to take the rights away from others.
• Religion and Government – They don’t mix.  Religion is basically about faith and the definition of faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.  Our government of free debate and majority rule (don’t forget minority rights) is based upon the ideas from the Enlightenment that rational thought and discourse could convince the majority to do the right thing.  Get the disconnect?  One uses reason and logic to arrive at the appropriate course of action and the other ignores reason and logic to continue beliefs that belong in the dark ages.
• High Speed Rail – Build it and start focusing all big transportation projects on mass transit.  What part of petroleum dependence don’t we get?

So we muddle on going nowhere while conservatives continue to tell us they have the right path.  What appalls me is that anyone listens to them anymore.

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.

I have to totally agree with Bob Herbert (The Same Old Song) on this one, why do we care what they think.  Is our memory so short that we don’t remember how we got here?  The Republicans are demanding, in a bipartisan way of course, their way or the highway.  They had their way for eight years and it has almost bankrupt us.  Their spending ways have left us with nothing in the bank to spend our way out of our coming Depression when we now need to spend.  You would never know they got clobbered in the last election because they ran up the deficit and have nothing new to offer for a failing economy except tax cuts that don’t work.  Now they claim they are the force to keep us on the straight an narrow?  Not one Republican voted for the stimulus package after compromises on tax cuts were made in their favor.  One would think that after their twelve years of stewardship in Congress they would see the error of their ways.

Today they were misrepresenting data on how effective tax cuts are on stimulating the economy (not very).  Of course the media, once again not having done their homework, didn’t know the facts so they just let these misguided souls prattle on (see Depression Economics).  Note how we are getting political arguments again as a substitute for news instead of subject matter experts who might actually clarify the issues.  But in the same vein there was Chris (Catholic) Matthews implying that the money in the bailout for family planning was the government trying to control the number of children you have instead of giving poor families choices.  Who doesn’t think preventing unwanted children is an investment in our future and reduces cost in Medicare, childcare, incarceration, food stamps, and welfare?

But what is it about eight years of failed tax cuts that does not enlighten Republicans and those morons that listen to them?  I keep pointing out the GAO study that showed that two-thirds of businesses pay no taxes (CBS News) so why doesn’t any one ask how a reduction in zero taxes is going to help?  Of course our friends in the Republican Party obfuscate this fact also by saying we have the highest corporate tax rate in the modern world.  That is true, but nobody ever asks what the effective rate is (that rate after all those loopholes are applied, hence the two-thirds who pay no taxes).  The cutting tax religion is just that, a religious faith whose underlying belief is not informed by reality.  It didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time, but it fits into their free ride beliefs (we can get out of this without sacrifices by allowing trickle down from the rich if the rich get richer).

So what gives here?  Why can’t they and their conservative base get it?  Well here is the basic difference between conservative (not moderate) Republicans and Democrats.  These conservatives basically believe in their bones that anything government does is done poorly if at all and is an infringement on their freedoms.  This belief is not informed by reality, which is an advantage for the Democrats, but is to their disadvantage because they can’t see that this belief is a religious faith and still think these Republicans can be reasoned with.  The reality is government does some things really well, and other things very poorly.  What it can do well and what it does do well is a function of the talent of its managers and the flexibility we give them to perform their jobs.  But these distinctions are lost on these conservatives.  In their imaginary world the failure of FEMA during Katrina had nothing to do with Brownie or the gutting of the organization.

So we have the spectacle of the President trying to bring them on board and in the process, watering down the stimulus package to make it less effective, and the result was that it was a waste of time.  House Republicans live in narrowly defined districts that are inhabited by their base, the Know-Nothings.   The game isn’t over yet as Senate Republicans have to appeal to a broader audience and therefore must be a little more reasonable, but if it were up to me, I would change the bill to be as effective as possible (move much of the tax cuts to infrastructure), dump the concessions, and get a bill that might actually work.  I think you can still change the tone in Washington without compromising your values and catering to failed ideas.

Sooner or later we have to just say it.  Conservative economic theory has run its course and compromising to cater to their ideological needs is making our situation worse.  We can’t afford to fail.  It is time to march in a different direction and leave the Republicans to stew in their juices.  Besides, they have Rush Limbaugh to lead them to a world I would not want my children to grow up in.

Oh, and one last thought:  when the Republicans were grabbing microphones that our media obligingly provided them without any critical analysis of what they were saying, did you see anything but white people?  We are a mixed race nation, but the Republican party and their ideas are squeaky white.  It is a world that doesn’t exist anymore.  Somebody ought to tell them.

The late Molly Ivings, that great columnist and humorist from Dallas Texas, was once asked how a girl brought up in the South in the Republican Party could be so liberal.  Her answer went something like this, “When I realized they were lying about race, I wondered what else they were lying about.”  Conservative belief in their ideology is tightly engrained in their pyschy.  They can’t afford to let it go or they would have to ask themselves what else they have been wrong about.

President Obama in his inauguration address told us what we all should know:  “But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Apparently the message was lost on many who want an easy road forward.  They missed the whole point about this not being easy and even more important, they missed the point that the world has changed:  “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…”

What demonstrates this very clearly is the same old Republican obstructionism in their complaints about the economic stimulus plan.  They want to be in charge, they want to do the same stuff that brought us here and was rejected in the last election, and they think that if President Obama doesn’t roll over there is no bipartisanship.  But you expect no less from these low-life scoundrels.  Just keep reminding yourself who got us here and even though the bailout bill is not perfect (see The Economic Stimulus), it is a start.  But what is coming to the forefront is that we are not ready for the hard work, courage, and bold action necessary to bring about the change necessary to save us.  Here is my evidence:

• The Democrats are working way too hard to achieve bipartisanship agreement on the stimulus package when the compromises they make with the Republicans further waters it down and makes it less likely to succeed after passage.  The tax cuts in this bill are a bone thrown to the Republicans, but a big one of 37% of the total package.  They are inefficient for stimulating the economy and give us nothing for our money spent.  Democrats need to have the courage of their convictions and write a bill they think will really help (move the money to infrastructure).  As it is they are giving the Republicans a chance to water down their bill and then claim victory if it fails to stimulate the economy because it is too timid.
• When President Obama signed his executive order to close Guantanamo and to end torture, the cries went up that we would not be safe.  I have addressed this in detail in my blog (What Part of Get Rid of Guantanamo Don’t You Get), but to make long story short either we have values or we don’t.  Those who want to throw out the law so they can feel safe are moral cowards.  They don’t have the guts to stand by their values and except the consequences.  There is no other way to look at it.
• President Obama not only asked EPA to revisit allowing states to set their own greenhouse gas limits, but moved to raise the mileage standard by 2011.  Let the shrieking begin.  The auto industry, you know, those guys who have run themselves into the ground with poor decisions, starting shrieking how this would be their downfall supported by their paid for politicians.  This is just too much to bear in these hard times.  So when do you guys come into the 21st century and retool with a car we want?  When it was the good times you made the same argument.  Hard decisions don’t wait and those that can make this transition will be around for a while, and those that can’t wouldn’t be here anyway.  Just exactly what were they going to do with the bailout money, continue building their gas hogs?  The climate and our dependence on foreign oil won’t wait any longer.  What part of this don’t you get yet?  Recovery is a bitch isn’t it? (New York Times)
• Energy policy is producing some dissidents in the Democratic Party.  Republicans by definition are dissidents.  The argument is quite frankly who are the winners and who are the losers.  The mid-West, dependent on coal and manufacturing, wants a much more slow moving program that does not disrupt their economic life.  The West and East want, well, you have seen California’s approach to capping green house gases.  It would seem at first blush to be prudent to move carefully, but global warming and our dependence on foreign oil are not moving carefully.  Sooner or later we have to make hard decisions to move us away from our failed path and in those decisions some will be losers.  So far we have not shown the moral courage to face the hard consequences of hard decisions.  We are still addicted to the Republican free ride. (New York Times)

There will of course be more to come and the whining and shrieking will commence again, “It’s too hard, we can’t do it now, it hurts too much.”  So I will ask you all, if not now, when?  We already lost eight years.  Every day we lose is a day we lose.  It is now or never.  It is going to hurt and some apple carts are going to get over turned.  Isn’t that what President Obama said?  Where the hell is our courage?  Do I sense some gutless wonders out there hoping for gain without pain?  That is what we got from the Republicans with trickle down economics and it has been a disaster.  Didn’t you all say we were on the wrong path?  Where is your courage to face change?  What I see is a bunch of gutless wonders.