Opinion-Columns.com

BAILING OUT WOODEN ARROWS WITH WOODEN NICKELS

According to the gurus over at Wikipedia, “A wooden nickel, in the United States, is wood token coin, which are usually issued by a merchant or bank as a promotion, sometimes redeemable for a specific item such as a drink. Wooden nickels were most commonly issued in the US in the 1930s, after the Great Depression.”

Which is fine (as far as it goes), although in the sense of the current bailout of fraudulent and specious investment vehicles, it seems the wooden nickel is upon us almost before the fact. We have been snookered out of our underwear before the game began.

Investment ‘vehicles’ are well named, invented as they are to drive off with your money. In case you missed the point of the failure in the House of Representatives to pass Hank Paulson’s giveaway to his former partners in crime over at Goldman Sachs, it was to provide political cover for the coming election, while allowing the Senate to unashamedly lard the legislation.

Seldom does the Senate step in ahead of the House, but paid-off Senators were well paid and only a third of them are standing for reelection. Thus are leaders made. Such is the power of a corrupt two-party system that badly needs a viable third party to disrupt partisanship where stalemate and power-plays have all but replaced representative government.

Hope for a future lies in meaningful coalition governance. What we have allowed in Washington simply will not suffice. Consider what Nancy Pelosi (rhymes with Bela Lugosi) has given us for this month’s monster under the bed;

(Rescue Sweetened With Tax Incentives, by Cecilia Kang, Washington Post)

The House of Representatives yesterday approved $107 billion in tax breaks for businesses and consumers as part of a sweeping financial rescue package designed to stave the credit crisis.

Saddled onto the 450-page bill is a provision to shield as many as 25 million Americans from the alternative minimum tax and $18 billion in tax credit extensions for wind and solar energy production.

Yet to appease lawmakers and make the bill more attractive, several more prosaic tax provisions are included, according to a government budgetary watchdog group.

Saddled. Well chosen metaphor. Indeed, the nation’s economic horse very nearly sank to its knees under the load. Any vague hope that “the best Congress money can buy” would seek anything other than its own unending grip on Democratic dominance (under an Obama administration) sank as well.

Pelosi, who has an absolute majority in the House, said, “We were dealt a bad hand; we made the most of it.” This witless Speaker of the House has made nothing but excuses for the deplorable job she has done since the 2006 mid-term election gave her what she wanted and cannot find a way to use—control.

In the week that was, last week’s $700 billion refusal became this week’s acceptance--larded with an additional $150 billion in earmarks and other buried treasures. Republicans have been watching all year, like cats at a mouse hole, for a bill that could not be refused to which they could attach pet legislation.

They got it this week on a platter, thanks to the Pelosi-Reid dumbo combo. Less able 'leadership' has seldom haunted the halls of Congress. Republicans are not always civic-minded, by by god they are able and showed it by their expansive mood.

(Time Magazine) Paulson's original request was barely three pages long, whereas the bill passed today runs well over 400 pages.

Pork, of course, is not exactly speech-writing, but it does take language and language takes pages. Fortunately, that language was at the ready, loaded, primed and parsed, eager to be fired so everyone could go home and leave the mess to Obama or McCain. With change like this, who really cares who occupies the White House?

(Washington Post again) NASCAR will be able to write off racetrack costs over 7 years and manufacturers of wooden arrows for children will be shielded from an excise tax applied to other shafts. The NASCAR provision was introduced by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), who voted in favor of the bill.

Nice job, Mike. That certainly bails out the auto-racing industry, which grosses more than any other organized sport and is awash in profits. A friend of mine, just today, sent me a pretty good idea--that those in Congress be required to wear NASCAR-like uniforms, so we could readily see their sponsorship. I don't know the attribution, it's not original with him, but it's pretty accurate and (would be) funny if it didn't cleave so close to the bone.

The bailout package also provides tax rebates on rum imported from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and tax credits for economic development on the island of American Samoa.

"In the midst of a debate over a historic bailout package, Senate pulled out an old bag of tricks: piling billions of dollars of unrelated legislative provisions into the package and daring the House to reject the bailout again," said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Many of these provisions are tax extenders that have been waiting in the wings for months, hoping for a legislative train to leave the station."

The bill passed the House yesterday 263 to 171. It was a last-ditch effort of sorts for proponents of renewable energy to get tax provisions extended before they were set to expire by the end of the year. Those extensions, estimated at $18 billion, had repeatedly failed to pass legislative muster in both the Senate and House over the past year.

The tax breaks in the legislation total $149 billion over 10 years, and are offset by $42 billion in tax increases. The hikes include a new levy on hedge-fund managers who avoid taxes by transferring income offshore, a provision that would raise $25 billion over 10 years.

It was an absolutely bi-partisan effort. Everyone got their hand in the till, regardless of race, creed, gender or political affiliation. No cause was too large ($150 billion in tax breaks) or too small (39 cents on wooden arrows).

(Bloomberg) Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden [D] and Gordon Smith [R], will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.

Senators Widen and Smith can’t get any more bi-partisan than that.

(Wikipedia) It was during this (depression era) decade that some banks and chambers of commerce in the United States issued wooden nickels with expiration dates to mitigate difficulties faced by merchants in making change at times of instability.

Wooden arrows—wooden nickels—guess we’ve now seen the closing of the circle. We can hope, but not be assured, that the circle is not a noose in disguise.

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Media comment:

• Houston Chronicle-Equal treatment
• Boston Globe-Benevolence amid an orgy
• National Post-Canada-Bailout bill more about shafts than building confidence
• Guardian-UK-Now Wall Street may shun $700bn bail-out
• The Australian-Australia-Paulson bailout won't impress sceptics

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION--THE PANTS SUIT DEPARTS, BUT THE SILLINESS LINGERS ON

It’s silly-time at the Democratic Convention in Denver. That’s largely what political conventions are all about, but as the nation sinks further into chaos, silliness seems just a bit more—silly.

(Washington Post Many Clinton Supporters Say Speech Didn't Heal Divisions DENVER, Aug. 26) Hillary Rodham Clinton's most loyal delegates came to the Pepsi Center on Tuesday night looking for direction. They listened, rapt, to a 20-minute speech that many proclaimed the best she had ever delivered, hoping her words could somehow unwind a year of tension in the Democratic Party. But when Clinton stepped off the stage and the standing ovation faded into silence, many of her supporters were left with a sobering realization: Even a tremendous speech couldn't erase their frustrations.

Rapt, were they? Still frustrated, are they?

It might possibly be that they have misunderstood what politics, political conventions and the democratic process is all about. They may have thought a woman in the presidency was more important than doing the more difficult work of re-dedicating the nation to its Constitution.

There was Jerry Straughan, a professor from California, who listened from his seat in the rafters and shook his head at what he considered the speech's predictability. "It's a tactic," he said. "Who knows what she really thinks? With all the missteps that have taken place, this is the only thing she could do. So, yes, I'm still bitter."

Bitter about what, Jerry? Bitter about a catastrophic, unending and unfunded war; possibly about Guantanamo or abu Ghraib? Does your bitterness stop at Hillary losing out in a nationally contended primary campaign, or is there enough left over for torture, the retirement of dissenting generals and flag officers, kangaroo courts, waterboarding and the relentlessness of civilian spying?

Possibly, tactics are what will save the republic.

There was JoAnn Enos, from Minnesota, who digested Clinton's resounding endorsement of Barack Obama and decided that she, too, will move on and get behind him. "I'll vote for [Obama] in the roll call," she said, "because that's what Hillary wants."

What Hillary wants. That’s your criteria, JoAnn? What Hillary wants has displaced in your mind the need to revive by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation an entire country? Mouth to mouth, e-mail to e-mail, door to door, friend to friend and living room to living room, America’s abandonment of the Geneva Convention needs to be spoken of. George Bush’s replacement of military and civil police by Blackwater thugs ought to register as prioritized criteria, along with extraordinary rendition.

Whether or not it’s what Hillary wants, you might ask over a small Obama fund-raiser in your backyard, if tax relief to the wealthy really makes sense while sticking the nation with a $10 trillion debt. Is the Bush push to privatization of essential government services important? Does the abandonment by presidential decree of environmental laws strike a chord?  Does illegal legislation by agency appointment and the equally illegal and excessive use of signing statements come into play?

Or is it all about Hillary?

"She hit it right out of the ballpark," said Terie Norelli, New Hampshire's House speaker. "I've never been prouder of a Democrat than I was tonight." Norelli said the speech made her want to work hard for Obama. "She said it better than I ever could have: Everything I worked for and that she worked for would be at risk if we do anything less."

Agreed, Terie. It was a remarkable speech. But as seems to be the mission of the Clintons, she did her share of damage, dangling her name and intentions until way past the last moment, building personal drama at the cost of unity.

For his part, Bill just can’t get over a world-class case of petulancy. We have forgiven you Bill, for dragging your wife and the presidency through the embarrassment of stains on dresses. Can’t you, for God’s sake, forgive us our choice of someone other than Hillary for president?

Go find Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandella. Sit down and have a cup of decaf. Perhaps the strongest voice and the most articulate campaigner in the Democratic party, you have so damaged Barack Obama that you can’t even redeem your singular credentials by campaigning for him. Shame on you.

But Clinton's performance fell far short of the panacea the Democratic Party had desperately hoped for, delegates said. Some worried that, after Clinton's public withdrawal, more voters might defect for Republican John McCain or simply stay home.

"I'm not going to vote for Obama. I'm not going to vote for McCain, either," said Blanche Darley, 65, a Texas delegate for Clinton. Darley wore a button saying "Obamination Scares the Hell Out of Me."

"We love her, but it's our vote if we don't trust him or don't like him," said Darley, who was a superdelegate for Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Well Blanche, it certainly is your vote. But it’s your country as well and it has never been in more trouble.  Your distrust of Barack Obama (however you define that) apparently trumps your distrust of a politicized  Justice Department, overrides Bush’s and McCain’s extortion of state and city police departments and gives you faith that fencing in our once free and open country under the guise of terrorist threat is a good idea.

Not liking him allows the enactment of a disastrous and unconstitutional Preemptive War Doctrine, answerable solely to the president. Did you even know that, Blanche? Or were you blinded by the yellow pants suits and the hope of a woman president? Voting down unprecedented secrecy in government is a more important cut of cloth. Privatizing (for profit) huge portions of the nation’s military is the true Obamination.

Just what is it that frightens you about Barack?

Weeping, Dawn Yingling, a 44-year-old single mother from Indianapolis, said that the speech was "fabulous" but that she still isn't going to work for the Obama campaign. "She was fabulous, nothing less than I expected. It's hard to sit here and think about she would have accomplished. We're not stupid -- we're not going to vote for John McCain," she said. But she'll limit her campaigning to a House candidate. "It will take a Congress as well as a president. That's what I can do and be true to who I am."

True to who you are?

C’mon Dawn, wipe your eyes, put aside your petty grievances and think for once in your life about something that transcends who you are. Does who you are, celebrate the waste, theft and failure to account for hundreds of billions in ‘war’ spending? Do you stand proudly for abandonment of foreign policy in favor of unilateral decisions that re-ignite the useless, wasteful and disproven strategies of cold war? The replacement of America’s tradition of political argument, with sloganeering and demagoguery, is part of why Hillary lost in flashes of anger and hubris.

It seemed a particularly resonant moment Tuesday night, which marked both Women's Equality Day and the 88th anniversary of women's suffrage.

Listen up. It’s not about women.

This election and the next several to come are about saving the nation from self-destruction. If the women of the Democratic Party can’t get that through their emotionally charged adoration of Hillary, they will have contributed to the loss. They ought to go out and buy a woman's book, The End of America by Naomi Wolf and learn something about what they have at stake. Then get busy and save it.

When asked what kind of nation the founders had given us, Benjamin Franklin famously said,

“a republic, if you can keep it.”

That question was asked of Franklin by a woman.

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Media comment;

• New York Times-Clinton Delivers Emphatic Plea for Unity
• Fox News-(Bill) Clinton’s ‘Candidate X’ Analogy Stirs Questions About His Obama Support
• Christian Science Monitor-Clinton speech moves Democrats toward unity, but hasn’t clinched it
• Guardian-UK-US election: Hillary Clinton calls on supporters to rally behind Obama
• CNN-iReporters laud Clinton speech as a grand slammer

AN ADVOCACY PROBLEM IN THE "WHAT'S NEEDED" DEPARTMENT

It hardly seems normal (or acceptable) to read in separate articles in my morning's Washington Post, that federal facilities right here in our country are running too short-funded to protect themselves. This, while Boeing and Northrop haggle over who is most deserving of a $40 billion contract for refueling planes. Further along in the tanker piece, one must suspend belief to choke down the admission that an end-contract for these planes may well exceed $100 billion.

$100 billion and yet the Federal Protective Service had its budget slashed by--who else?--Homeland Security. These guys (and women) protect nearly 9,000 Federally owned and leased buildings. The FPS used to be part of the GSA (General Services Administration), but that was in the days before this privatizing-crazed administration outsourced everything from V.A. services employees to armed guards and foreign quasi-military thuggery.

Security Provider Cuts Patrols
Federal Protective Service Faces Financial Problems

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; B01

The police agency in charge of protecting many federal buildings is so short-staffed that it has cut outdoor patrols aimed at detecting suspicious individuals and car bombs, according to a report to be released today.

Well, what the hell, they're only suspicious individuals and suspected car-bombs, so what is that compared to the actual, known and recognized lobbying activity carried on daily in support of weapons. We gotta have weapons, people. Weapons are the only way through this era of planetary discontent.

Which brings up the question of advocacy in a government that has become so diffused and downright opaque in its character that no one knows who is running the show. Congress writhes in the impotence of no longer even knowing whom to subpoena and is forced instead to bore itself and its constituents in waves of meaningless committee hearings.

When it, tremblingly gets itself together, draws itself to its full height, puffs out its chest and actually serves a summons, it is ignored. Not only ignored, but dismissed without penalty. The list of powerful no-shows is long and infamous, running out the clock in the waning days of a presidency as well as a Congress. In circumstance after circumstance, from terror to torture, from collapsing bridges to a deteriorating National Mall, from contracting theft to congressional enabling, we have allowed our nation and its protections to be quietly slid out from under us.

Alarmingly, distracted as we are by American Idol, there is no advocacy for the deteriorating bureaucracy that runs the nation's business. Bureaucrat has become a dirty word and privatize has taken its place, although it is the hardworking Washington bureaucrat who kept us afloat in the years before Ronald Reagan made of him a laughingstock. Consider what privatization has brought us in the way of

• a military that cannot fight and includes bloated weaponry programs designed for wars that will not be waged
• a badly-named and unfortunately directed department of homeland security (I refuse to dignify it with capitals) that wastes money, squanders resources and loses its talented leaders while constantly bumping into the furniture on issue after issue
• a nation where rhetoric replaces reality, where bridges collapse on the way to fiscal responsibility and schools graduate the illiterate while leaving no child behind
• a business community shackled to the vagaries of investor-return, that ravages corporation after corporation in the name of quarterly profit, where no one is left to answer the phone.
• a service-industry oriented society where the taped message "your call is important to us" has replaced any interest in the customer service for which they are named
• the numbing daily assault on our sense of fairness and justice as one after another after another of our cherished values is crushed beneath a ceaseless lack of advocacy

The Washington Post continues;

. . . The protective service provides security for more than 1 million federal employees at about 9,000 buildings in the D.C. area and across the country. Caught in a cash squeeze in recent years, the agency has reduced its staff by about 20 percent, to 1,100 officers, the study said. They oversee about 15,000 contract security guards at the facilities.

. . . The report traces the protective service's difficulties to its absorption by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The service lost a $139 million annual subsidy it had received as part of the General Services Administration and slid into financial turmoil. The protective service responded by reducing officers and focusing them on overseeing the contract guards. The service said it would seek help from local police forces in responding to crime at facilities.

The report criticized that strategy, saying that it "has diminished security at GSA facilities and increased the risk of crime or terrorist attacks" at many buildings.

At many facilities, officers no longer patrol to prevent or detect crime, the report said. As a result, "law enforcement personnel cannot effectively monitor individuals surveilling federal buildings, inspect suspicious vehicles (including vehicles that could potentially bomb federal buildings) and detect and deter criminal activity," the report said.

The service also reduced officers' hours at many locations, the study said. Adding to the difficulties, many of the service's security cameras and X-ray machines have been broken "for months or years," the study said.

The report highlighted problems with contract guards, who generally work at fixed posts and do not have arrest powers. Oversight of the guards is inadequate, with some posts inspected less than once a year, it said.

In one incident, armed security guards stood idly by as a shirtless suspect wearing handcuffs on one wrist dashed through the lobby of a federal building with a Federal Protective Service officer in pursuit. The building was not identified in the report, but officers speaking on the condition of anonymity said it was a court-services facility in the District.

This is what neo-conservatism has wrought. Born of a reactionary response to the '60s counter-culture, conservatism panicked and dropped its pants to the likes of Norman Podhoertz and Irving Kristol, these 'new' conservatives who advocated the ignoring of America in an orgasm of foreign intrigue. Between this disguised liberalization of the old wire-rimmed glasses conservatives and the advent of the Harvard Business School's reverence for quarterly profit, America has steadily tanked.

For my own part, I am no teary-eyed liberal. Participant in all or part of eight decades, I believed then as now in being left the hell alone, doing the nation's economic dishes instead of stacking them in the sink and dusting under the beds of infrastructure. I do not believe in

• selling off the country's Interstate highways,
• allowing the airlines to destroy the safety and efficiency of air travel,
• outsourcing our military to Blackwater and Haliburton,
• bribing our congressional representatives
• or holding harmless the thieves and crooks who have hijacked American business for their own gain.

For over three-quarters of my life I held the belief that conservatism depended upon actually conserving something and I hold that belief today, even after the shame that every Republican president since Richard Nixon has brought to the term. Under their tutelage, we no longer have a currency that means anything, have become the largest debtors in the world, lost our manufacturing base, are well on our way to losing agricultural leadership as well and have steadily degraded our society into an orgy of selling each other whatever cheap crap can be imported from China--all in the name of neo-conservatism.

My old daddy taught me that you pay your bills, work hard, treat people fairly and make your way as well as possible through the life you were given to live. How he hated FDR's New Deal, not because the country was stronger than that but because he felt institutionalized charity denigrated and trivialized the private concern we all felt for one another as citizens.

Now his--and my--conservatism has been twisted and perverted into a state where it is no longer recognizable.  We have become the unwilling and unwitting victims of political hype and demagoguery of the worst kind--chained to our fate by the thievery of language. Mistaking the back-slap brand of  compassionate conservatism for something that actually conserved, we have had our roads, bridges, sewers, currency, rights to privacy, ecology, our world reputation, safety and international regard cashed in and traded for a lifetime of debt.

If you think Barack Obama will be able to pull us out of our fifty year slide into irrelevancy, I wish you well and hope you are right. I will vote for him because he is--above all--an advocate.

Amazingly, in this changed world where up has become down, he sounds very much like my old daddy.
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Media comment;

• GovExec.com-Study documents dangerous security gaps at federal buildings

"Having Been Unable to Strengthen Justice, We Have Justified Strength"

That's a quote concerning justice and strength from the dim past of 350 years ago--another proof that not much changes across the pages of history--by philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal, dead since 1662.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes in the Huffington Post; "The Democrats are feeling empowered -- in part -- by the resounding echoes of change that is ringing in their ears."

That would be a hopeful message, if it were true. But what is more likely to be ringing in their ears is a phone call from Squibb or Martin-Marietta. Meanwhile, what rings in the ears of the electorate (the 55% that is left of it) is the apathy and incompetence  of the long-awaited congressional control by Democrats.

Ehrenreich is not easily dismissed. She was a regular columnist for Time, currently contributes regularly to The Progressive and has written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications. Author of some 20 books. The lady knows the territory and, to her credit, has not become inured to echoes of change ringing in ears.

We've seen the first act of the play yet to come, titled "Democrats Back in Charge." It's had a bunch of bad 2006 reviews. Spencer Tracy had it right about stage presence; "learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture."

Thus far, Democratic control has yet to achieve either goal. At a time when Democrats need desperately not to act like Democrats, Harry Reid tries to morph from wrestling-coach to statesman. It's just not in the man from Nevada. The hand is a bust. Pelosi, all wriggly and giggly from her moment of fame has shown herself to be too partisan a dominatrix of House discipline to serve her country in time of need. 

• We are no closer to getting out of Iraq than before
• The uncontrolled (and disastrously un-admitted) real estate bubble has imploded in a mire of  fraud and conspiracy
• Health care is an issue for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
• Impeachment of the most criminal administration in the history of the country remains 'off Nancy Pelosi's table.'
• A small and unheralded, largely unseen military dies on a daily basis to prove the unprovable staying of a headstrong president's course
• This new and toothless 'Congress of change' can't even enforce its will to bring testimony from a successfully defiant executive branch

Pelosi and Reid are terrified, not of impeachment (or the fantasy that it will complicate election 2008), but of their personal roll in the Democratic complicity that an impeachment trial would reveal. Every single step of the way, the Bush administration's murky wreckage of American ideals was approved by Democrats.

The ongoing whine that Pelosi & Co just can't get past a need for 60 votes in the Senate is ample evidence. Republicans were in exactly the same position. Had Democrats the will, had Pelosi and Reid the guts, Bush would never have been able to run off with the country.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay at least had the guts not to give a shit. They stood there, guns blazing and dressed the theft of American politics as a Contract With America. Had Bush and Cheney not been so heavy-handed, the Gingrich-DeLay legacy would not yet be at risk.

American government has been on the take for decades, mainlining the intravenous drip of special interest money until the body politic tumesced from bloat. Democrats were (and are) in on the deal, a consideration that sets the stage for massive disappointment once November has come and gone. (Which November of which year has recently become a question, since we seem to have gravitated toward multi-year campaigns)

"Change" is a feel-good, but meaningless word. Defined as "Become different in some particular way, without permanently losing one's or its former characteristics or essence."

Parse that, baby. Become different (Democrat rather than Republican) without permanently losing former characteristics (power, greed) or essence (the best government money can buy). Justice doesn't happen to be a part of change in this context and we are full-circle, back to the brilliant observation of Pascal that in the absence of justice, strength will suffice. Or the promise of strength, the hope of strength, the vision or the image of strength, when strength itself has proven too costly.

This self-servingly constructed framework of government under whose foot we find ourselves has to be ripped apart and reconfigured to serve society. We need to pull the money out of legislating and I don't see a program (or even an admission such a thing exists) on the part of national or regional candidates.

I am uninspired that the very legislators who have pounded together these lobbyist- congressional- military- industrial- pharma- agri- oil complexes (nail by nail, like Jesus on the cross) are the ones upon whom we must rely to tear it all down. Don't ask a theologian to tear down the church.

Barack can't do that, nor can Hillary or John. Only citizens in the streets can do that and they are busy at the moment, lowing like cattle behind the fences government has erected for them. Unless.

Unless it all comes down on their (and our) heads in a massive failure of the American and world economies, a financial disaster of the breadth and scope of 1929. That would, essentially, change all the rules as it did in the aftermath of the Hoover administration, a time not too unlike our own.

There's little purpose in speculating on that scenario. If it happens, it will not be a subject of speculation, but one of reality and the cards will fall as they may--but certainly, they will fall.

I find it personally interesting that, in the wake of the most frightening upheaval Wall Street has faced in recent decades, that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke have contrived (some might say conspired) to keep the Dow-Jones happily above 12,000. They have done that by irrationally, unsettlingly and without precedent, opening the money pumps to private investment banks. The money in that pipeline does not exist. They printed it.

Your and my house, car, furniture and lawnmower is worth half today of what it was when George Bush took office.

You will not be aware of that, because it is not likely you have reason to keep up with international currencies. Within the United States, all seems well. The waters are quiet. Outside America, a financial tsunami has taken place and the dollar is on the brink of collapse. No one wants our currency. No one wants our debt. No one wants much of anything America has chosen to export in the past seven years.

It seems that, having failed to strengthen justice, we have pulled off the double-whammy of failing to justify strength as well. Meanwhile, the two candidates upon whom we pin our faintest of hopes in the most perilous of times, have descended to a controversy over which among them is or is not elitist.

The government we demand is, unfailingly, the government we deserve.
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Media comment;

• USA Today-Poll shows no change in Pa., Clinton up by 6
• Kansas City Star-Obama, rivals spar over 'elitist' remarks, but voters see nuance
• CNN-Congress wants to jolt economy - again
• Spiegel Online-Germany-The Madness of Ben Bernanke
• EuroNews.net-France-G7 finance chiefs push for financial market transparency

Smash the Presses Before Ben Bernanke Starts Printing

In about a year it will be the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the nickname for post-WWI Germany and a moniker forever connected with the hyper-inflationary economy of Germany. That circumstance lead directly to the democratic election of Adolph Hitler and WWII.

In 1914, the German mark was worth about 25 cents, or four to the dollar. Nine years later in 1923, Germany had printed itself enough marks to make 50 million of them worth exactly one dollar.

Fed to Make $200 Billion Available To Lenders
Bank Seeks to Loosen Credit
(Neil Irwin and David Cho, Washington Post Staff Writers, March 8, 2008)

The Federal Reserve took strong action yesterday to restore order to frazzled lending markets while a new report showing unexpected job losses underscored the toll that credit markets are taking on the economy.

The world's financial plumbing is so clogged that the central bank sees a need for new steps to clean it out to prevent severe damage. Mounting panic in the credit markets is making it harder for Americans to get mortgages and is increasing the rates they must pay on credit cards and auto loans. Even solid businesses are finding it difficult to raise money to expand.

Ben Bernanke, who is the current chairman of the Fed is hardly a plumber. One can only wish he was.

Under his tutelage, we may as well take the book from the left hand of the Statue of Liberty and replace it with a can of gasoline. A torch in one hand, gasoline in the other, the perfect metaphor for an American economy so distorted and so finance-driven, it hardly deserves the name.

"Send us your investors, your huddled capital funds"

We are no longer a capitalist society and have not been one for some years now. We are an interest-rate dependent consumer society and the sole, wheezing, smoking engine left to support that house of cards is consumer confidence. Essentially, the American dream has become a confidence-game (noun: a swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property).

The immediate problem is that a massive sub-prime mortgage fraud has sucked us dry of the basic fuel necessary for staggering on--confidence. There ain’t none left. The tank is dry.

Ben Bernanke is going to fill ‘er up on money. He and George Bush and Henry Paulson have connived between them a ‘stimulus package to bolster the economy.’ If you look up ‘bolster,’ one meaning is to support and strengthen and another is to add padding. I leave it to your judgment which definition most closely defines giving each taxpayer $300 to $1,200 of his own money to goose the economy in the sole interests of the above-named public officials' personal friends.

None but the Washington Post (deprived in these days of cutbacks of any true financial writer other than Steven Pearlstein) could possibly swallow without a fit of coughing, the swindler’s excuse that ‘the world's financial plumbing is so clogged that the central bank sees a need for new steps to clean it out to prevent severe damage.’ Who on earth fed WaPo that line? Certainly it was not vetted by Steve. I don’t doubt he choked on his coffee when he saw it.

The Fed said it will make $200 billion available to financial institutions in an effort to ease a crisis of confidence that is making it harder for families and businesses to borrow money.

"They're recognizing that financial markets aren't functioning well, and that that creates risks to the real economy," said Vincent Reinhart, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former senior Fed official.

Where do they get these people? Can I get a job at the Fed?

Financial markets have been looted, Ben. Wake up. This is not about families and businesses, this is about pumping up the worthless investments hedge-funds created. It’s about papering-over the hole in the missing billions before their major institutional investors sue them for fraud and send the whole crop of $100 million a year criminals off to Sing Sing.

Bernanke’s $200 billion is merely the camel’s nose in the tent. He proposed to create (read that print) $100 billion a month to prop up the banks for at least a year, but essentially for as long as it takes. Another ‘surge’ in an unwinnable war--anything it takes to get George safely back at the ranch before this whole swindle collapses on his head. Every 12 months (unless it’s not enough), Bernanke proposes to add $1.2 trillion to a money supply that totals approximately $7 trillion.

And the sworn duty of the Fed is to prevent inflation. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

The dollar this administration has contrived to devalue by approximately half during its brief term in office, is now to be further demolished by stimulating, diddling, futzing with and printing their way over the edge of the cliff.  The printing press is to monetary policy as Viagra is to maintaining an erection. The one gives you a sore dick, but the other turns the United States into Argentina.

"A lot of what we've done has been mostly just to offset the tightening of credit that has arisen because of the financial situation," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in congressional testimony last week.

Instead of simply cutting interest rates further, the Fed responded to this latest crisis yesterday with carefully targeted measures. The central bank said it will auction $100 billion to financial institutions, injecting money into the banking system by trading cash for troubled securities. The Fed will also make another $100 billion in cash available in exchange for securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, trying to restore confidence to the market for home mortgages.

The problems are the latest wave of a crisis in debt markets that began in August and reappeared again in November and late February. This crisis is one major factor in a pullback by consumers and businesses that has driven the economy to the brink of recession, or possibly over it.

• Lie #1: Offsetting the tightening of credit is (for Ben) easier than tightening the handcuffs on the criminals who profited from this fraud on the taxpayer.
• Lie #2: Measures were not carefully targeted, but recipients were. Wall Street will get its plumbing unclogged and you, dear taxpayer, will get the bill for it. (Before all this manipulation was factored in, your personal share of ‘unfunded debt,’ including tax breaks to the rich and an untaxed war, is—as of 8pm today-- $30,967.40. Family of four? Pony up $123,868.96.)
• Lie #3: No one is injecting anything. They are not ‘trading for troubled securities,’ they are buying bad debts with your tax money. They are bailing out criminals, so that no one will call them at their game, which has been to fleece the American public and blame it on ‘market conditions.’
• Lie #4: Bailing out Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae does nothing to restore confidence to the market for home mortgages, it merely supports fragile government backed institutions, who have been part of the game—again, with your dough. The same money you don’t have to pay child-care and health-insurance.
• Lie #5: There was no August crisis in debt markets. In August, we had the first indications of a purposeful financial fraud, committed against investors by a consortium of co-conspirator mortgage salesmen, mortgage bankers, bond rating companies, investment banks and hedge-funds. This will probably turn out to be the largest and most damaging Wall Street fraud ever to bring down an economy—far larger than the 1929 crash.
• Lie #6: A misnamed and lied-about ‘crisis,’ cannot possibly be a factor in anything other than the continuing cover-up of massive financial fraud.

Six lies is a lot of lies to pack into three paragraphs and 161 words. Amazingly, the WaPo failed to call a single one of them. No major newspaper in the United States has been carrying this as the widespread crime that it is. Steven Pearlstein has come the closest, which is why he no doubt spit coffee all over his office when he read the piece.

There is a cure for all this sickness and greed and fraud, but it will not be found in the halls of Congress, the meeting rooms of the Fed or within a new administration, no matter how much ‘change’ is promised.

Attempting to repair a half-century of financial malfeasance is as dreary a chore as trying to ‘fix’ communism. Just as Ronald Reagan never ‘won’ the Cold War (the wheels finally came off, while he happened to occupy the office), Bernanke, Paulson and Bush haven’t a clue about what to do. Other, that is, than run around with a torch in one hand, gasoline in the other, trying to calm crooked markets.

"The Fed has been running around putting fingers in dikes," said Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial. "Without that, the dike would have imploded, and water would have been spilling in."

Diane is closer to the truth than any of them. The dike will indeed implode and therein lies the only viable cure. An international crash.

The world danced around the Argentine problem, the Mexican difficulty and the Asian unpleasantness, but the financial capitals of the planet are not strong enough or flexible enough to waltz their way past an American crash.

From the ashes, we may be sufficiently humbled and perhaps even wise enough to do the things we haven’t courage enough to accomplish now;

• Oversee the absolutely uncontrolled hedge-fund industry that triggered this mess
• Disconnect business and industry from the IPO as a borrowing mechanism and send them back to traditional loans at traditional banks
• Do away entirely, completely and irrevocably with leverage
• Disabuse the investor of the charming fairy tale that uncontrolled growth is anything other than the definition of malignancy
• Return corporate stock certificates to their intended purpose of investment, rather than speculative instruments
• Make criminal the offer of stock options as incentives to management
• Consider laws initiating minimum-term (3-6 month) investment requirements to reduce the volatility of markets
• Tax capital gains as ordinary income
• Do away with the income tax
• Re-institute logical trade tariff policy

Those would be a few things that could be successfully accomplished following a crash. Add to those massive government investments in infrastructure, schools, public transport, alternative power sources, the de-corporatizing of agriculture and re-planning of our auto-centric and dehumanizing suburban sprawl.

Taking back control of the investment community would prevent the flight of scarce capital from the have-nots to the haves. Infrastructure investment, reorganizing agriculture, instituting tariffs and killing off the income tax are positive ways of creating good jobs at good wages. There is simply no political will to accomplish any of these goals, otherwise they would hardly have gained the half-century momentum that set us up for the current financial landslide, avalanche, tsunami or metaphor of your choice.

Meanwhile, someone please take the keys to the currency-printing presses away from Ben Bernanke.
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Media comment;

• Bloomberg-Most Read on Bloomberg: Carlyle; Bernanke on Mortgages; Ambac
• New York Times-When Ben Bernanke Speaks
• Financial Times-UK-Mortgage principal forgiveness will meet resistance from servicers
• Bloomberg-Paulson Says Deal `Very Close' With Congress on Housing Bill
• Wall Street Journal-Trichet Urges Dollar Unity

Elite? You Got a Problem with Elite?

Immigration—everybody’s hot-button issue--and America is once again arguing across the metaphoric back-fence and having the very devil of a time trying to balance fairness and equity.

The End of War

Not the end of conflict, certainly not the end of fighting . . . but it is worth considering that as we blindly multiply our efforts toward a supremacy-gap between ourselves and the rest of the world in military hardware, the enemy is dissolving before our eyes. What can we possibly be thinking? More to the point, what can the rest of the world possibly think we are thinking?

DEFINE 'GRAPPLE.' DEFINE 'STIMULUS.' WHAT THE HELL, DEFINE 'WHITE HOUSE!'

What a hoot.

Congressional lawbreakers and the pResident in the Ovalist of offices are all standing around the flattened body of the U.S. economy, run down like an errant rabbit by the 16-wheeler fraud that came roaring out of both parties.

"Free Speech" Winnows the List of Candidates

Winnow (noun) The act of separating grain from chaff.

If we are indeed winnowing, then America has been winnowed into three guys left standing on the Republican side and two Democrats. Something like 5 out of 24, depending on who you count. Whether they are wheat or chaff depends upon your point of view.

Why a Democrat President Hasn’t a Chance to Save the Nation

Joe Stiglitz is no dummy. He’s a member of the Columbia University faculty (although we can probably forgive him that) and 2001 Nobel Prize winner in economics.