Mining the middle class

Save the children! Protect the rich.

By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

You can see it coming a mile away.

President Obama's blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission to reduce the deficit and debt is going to recommend cutting what is left of federal spending that is not eaten up by Wall Street, the war machine and corporate welfare.

Expect the "painful choices" to be announced by a sad but stern president about three months after the congressional elections.

And the justification? It is the "grasshopper" argument trotted out again last week by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: We Americans, especially the baby boomers, have been too good to ourselves and eaten up our children's future. Bad people! Shame on you.

It is a lie and a diversion.

Unlike many Europeans, average Americans do not have a four-day work week, six weeks of paid vacation, months of maternity leave, free day care, affordable health care, low-cost college education or fully paid retirement at 55 and 60.

What American families have is two jobs or more - if they can find one - low wages, wiped out savings, high costs of everything and expensive credit debt from Wall Street to mask the reality of their growing poverty.

And the administration, congressional leaders and the Federal Reserve - Wall Street's bank - are working in sync to dupe the American people into supporting more of the same.

There is an alternative.

One part of that alternative is for the states to bypass the federal government and form state banks, modeled on the hugely successful Bank of North Dakota, to create a river of new, locally directed credit, investment and jobs, and generate unprecedented new revenues for the states' general funds.

But while some states are now following North Dakota's lead out of the trap of either higher taxes or slashed services and crumbling infrastructure, the first and scattered results are a year or more away. Something must be done now to address the nation's most urgent need - jobs.

Only the federal government can focus the resources required to create the jobs needed now, on the scale required.

Fiscal hawks, small government advocates and tea party patriots who think an across-the-board attack on government is what is now most urgently needed must think twice, and decide where to focus their attack.

Yes, the federal government spends too much; but on what? The inescapable answer is Wall Street, the war machine and corporate welfare.

The "slap-on-the-wrist" fines of Wall Street proposed by the administration are chump change. They are about headlines, not justice.

Tax Wall Street and take back the nation's stolen wealth - all of it, with interest. This alone would be sufficient to put millions back to work in productive infrastructure projects of lasting value, with billions left over to start paying down the debt.

Don't stop there.

The U.S. "defense" budget is now as large as that of all other nations combined. (You must, as the wild spending defense establishment does not, add to defense appropriations the billions buried in the budgets of other federal departments)

The Defense Department lists officially more than 700 bases in 152 foreign nations. But independent experts such as former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson put that figure at as many as 1,000 bases.

There are 12 U.S. bases in Columbia, and Johnson reports an incredible 38 on the Japanese island of Okinawa, and dozens now ringing the former Soviet Union. To what purpose?

The demise of the Soviet Union ought to have yielded a "peace dividend," an opportunity to scale back U.S. forces in those regions, not increase them. And what is the threat from Columbia? An army of Hugo Chavez' thugs marching through Mexico to invade Texas?

As for the U.S. forces on Okinawa, do we expect the Chinese to sail a several million man army across the Pacific to invade California? All China need do to overcome the United States is wait while we go bankrupt for the sake of Wall Street, the war machine and corporate welfare.

An example of this corporate welfare is about to make news. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 set up a federal fund to clean up oil "spills." ("Oops! We got a little oil on the floor there. Sorry.") But it limited the liability of the oil companies for damages to $75 million in each event.

Will Mr. Obama and Congress insist that BP and its contractors pay the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars in damages caused by their catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, or will that bill get passed to U.S. taxpayers, like the bailout?

To save the children and the nation, this generation must indeed take action to pay down the deficit and debt, but not on the backs of a beleaguered middle class, retirees and those now hanging by a thread from the so-called "safety net."

The productive alternative is to cut the mindlessly out-of-control "defense" budget, go after the stolen loot on Wall Street, hold corporations accountable, harness the states' assets in state banks and put America back to work at good wages.

But this is not what this administration, Congress and Wall Street's "widely respected" talking heads and media flacks will propose.

Their policy? Save the children, protect the rich!

Go back to sleep, things are fine

The monster under the bed

By: MIKE KRAUSS
Bucks County Courier Times

The headlines keep coming about the U.S. economic recovery, the bogus statistics fed by worried leaders to a national media, meant to put an anxious nation back to sleep.

"Now, now. Don't you worry. Mommy and Daddy are here. There's no monster under the bed."

Except there is.

Another tidal wave of home foreclosures is building. One in eight once creditworthy Americans are now behind in their mortgages - a record high number. As states slash spending, more layoffs will follow. Public education will take the biggest hit. U.S.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan warned that between 100,000 to 300,000 public education positions are in danger.

And that is the estimate from the capital of feel good news.

In a few weeks, the 700,000 census workers hired with stimulus funds will be out of work.

While Whirpool announces another U.S. factory closing, moving 1,100 more jobs to Mexico, there is another wave of outsourcing building, reaching beyond already decimated U.S. manufacturing.

In a new book, Outsourcing America published by the American Management Association, the authors cite a University of California study which concludes that 14 million white-collar jobs are vulnerable to being outsourced.

"These are not only call-center operators, customer service and back-office jobs, but also information technology, accounting, architecture, advanced engineering design, news reporting, stock analysis, and medical and legal services."

Without jobs creation, the U.S. economy will continue to collapse, as massive U.S. foreign debt puts the nation at frightening risk of economic blackmail - if not all out economic war - at the hands of the nation's biggest creditor, China.

That's the monster under the bed. And Mommy Washington and Daddy Wall Street know it. And their plan? A White House/congressional commission to go after what little of the people's taxes that is not spent on Wall Street, the war machine and corporate welfare.

Tough love, Washington style.

"We told you about all those treats you gave yourself - good wages, homes, savings. Now see what you've done! You behave, and go to bed."

"But, Mommy, Daddy! That was my allowance money. And remember that nice man from the bank you introduced me to, with the credit cards? You said it was OK."

"Now that's enough! You do as you're told and right this minute."

But Mommy and Daddy are worried. So are their friends.

At a cocktail party in March with the Moodys ("Wasn't it sad when they got into all that trouble with those 'inaccurate' credit ratings they gave the Morgans and the Sachs?") Mommy and Daddy heard the Moodys say that their friends in the U.K., Germany, France and Spain "are all at risk of soaring debt costs and will have to implement austerity plans that threaten 'social cohesion'."

They put it out of their minds. But then their friends from Greece called, desperate for a loan.

Then they remembered that when they went on vacation to Europe just last year to a castle Mommy really liked ("Maybe next year with your bonus, we can buy a castle like that," Mommy pleaded with Daddy), their hosts at the International Monetary Club and the Bank for International Settlements Club warned of "adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion," and that "violent protests could break out in countries worldwide."

That really worried Mommy and Daddy, but then they talked to that nice couple, the Pentagons, and found out they weren't worried at all.

"Well, they were worried, dear, but they have a plan," Daddy reminded Mommy.

And the Pentagons do have a plan. Turns out they already have their kids in training all over the world - they have a really big family - learning how to deal with undisciplined children.

The Pentagons' cousins at the War College told their grandfather the admiral, "An economic crisis in the United States could lead to massive civil unrest and the need to call on the military to restore order." To that end, 20,000 soldiers are under the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), including 4,000 already in the United States "to work with civilian law enforcement in homeland security."

Mommy and Daddy didn't mind that they had to get rid of an old law that prevented U.S. armed forces from deploying inside the United States, or that the president gave himself the authority to take over the states' National Guard units.

"Only those noisy, tea party types worry about the Constitution any more," Daddy explained to Mommy. "That's just a piece of paper."

Mommy doesn't like those tea party people. She read in the papers that most of them are white, older, and have more money and education than many of the other parents she likes now.

"I mean, really! The nerve of those people," she told Daddy.

So Mommy Washington and Daddy Wall Street will do what good parents do and make sure their kids behave, even if it hurts them -the kids, that is.

Go back to sleep. Things are fine.

Feeble Reform

Break up the big banks

By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

The six largest Wall Street firms now control assets equal to 60 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The gap between the incomes and wealth of the richest and poorest Americans is now greater than in any developed nation, and many third world, third rate nations. The wealth of the United States is daily more concentrated in the hands of ever fewer Americans.

This concentration of wealth has led inevitably to a concentration of political power in the same hands, now accompanied by an arrogance of power not seen in the United States since the days of the last robber barons.

The legalized bribes funneled to federal office holders through the system of lobbying and campaign finance regulations are but one example of this breathtaking arrogance.

Now Americans are learning that widespread criminal fraud born of this arrogance - and not the workings of a free market, as has been fatuously argued by the crooks - crashed the lives of tens of millions of Americans.

So what do we do?

The obvious place to start is by attacking the concentration of wealth and the resulting concentration of political power. There is an opportunity at hand: the financial “reform” legislation pending before the Congress.

Sadly, this opportunity is being turned the same way health care “reform” was turned.

At the start of the health care debate, Mr. Obama invited the health care industry to join him. When he did, he gave up half the field. The industry then poured millions into lobbying and campaign contributions in the Congress and pushed reform back to its own goal line.

The result was legislation that will drive tens of millions more Americans into the same failed system – under threat and penalty of law – and leaves health care costs and industry profits unchecked.

Mr. Obama is repeating the same failed strategy with reform of the finance industry. He has invited his “friends” on Wall Street to join him; possibly because he is a slower learner than widely believed, or possibly because his administration is staffed top to bottom with Wall Street agents.

One indication of how close are the ties between Obama and Wall Street: Goldman Sachs has hired Gregg Craig to defend it against the recent civil indictment brought (By one vote!) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Until January, Mr. Craig was White House counsel, the president’s personal lawyer.

But however Mr. Obama settled on his financial “reform” strategy, the one essential measure is off the table – breaking up the big banks.

The lobbyists are pouring millions into the GOP to fight any change, so that what little emerges from the Democrats, who are getting even more millions, can be passed off as a “victory” for reform.

Worse, whatever watered down new regulation survives will be enforced by the Federal Reserve, which is not just figuratively in the pocket of the banks, but is actually owned by the banks, which are in fact its shareholders!

In the end, all the underlying incentives and causes of the crash of 2008 will be preserved. Writing in the New York Times, Gretchen Morgansen explains the inadequacy of the proposed legislation.

“The central problem is that neither the Senate nor House bills would chop down big banks to a more manageable and less threatening size. The bills also don’t eliminate the prospect of future bailouts of interconnected and powerful companies.

“Too big to fail is alive and well… Indeed, several aspects of the legislative proposals sanction and codify the special status conferred on institutions that are seen as systemically important… The bills would encourage smaller companies to grow large and dangerous so that they, too, could have a seat at the bailout buffet.”

She concludes, “The leading proposals would do little to cure the epidemic unleashed on American taxpayers by the lords of finance and their bailout partners.” By “bailout partners” Morgansen means the Bush and Obama administrations, the congressional leadership and Federal Reserve.

The first and essential step to restoring the prosperity of the American people is to break up the six big banks that now control 60 percent of the wealth of America. Limits must be set on the total assets and wealth any bank controls and taxes placed on the profits they generate from financial “products” that produce only vast private gain, but nothing of use to the American people.

The freed up capital and taxes can then be re-directed into creating jobs that produce goods and services of real use for the American market – which is still an enormous asset.

When Wall Street’s control of the wealth of America is finally limited - and not before - it will be possible to confront its control of the U.S. government. Americans can then begin to undo the transformation of the most productive nation on earth into a nation of anemic consumers, to be preyed upon by profiteering, transnational corporations and all the Wall Street wanna be’s in London, Zurich, Dubai, Delhi and Hong Kong – the global club of parasites in pinstripes.

First things first: break up the “big six” banks and put an end to the “too big to fail” blackmail. If this Congress cannot find the backbone to get the job done, Americans must replace it with one that will.

April 27, 2010



***************

By Barry Grey
Global Research

President Barack Obama went to lower Manhattan Thursday to deliver a message to Wall Street: Your profits and bonuses will not be disturbed by the regulatory overhaul making its way through Congress.

In a deferential speech pitched to top bankers in the Cooper Union audience, Obama urged what he called the “titans of industry” to call off their lobbyists and “join us” in passing his so-called reform. The subtext was that the White House and congressional Democrats had already removed most of the provisions to which the bankers objected, and were prepared to go even further in accommodating them.

The speech came less than a week after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicted Goldman Sachs, the most profitable Wall Street bank, for defrauding its clients in order to cash in on—and encourage—the collapse of the subprime housing market in 2007. Obama did not mention the indictment. Nor did he suggest that what he called a “failure of responsibility” on Wall Street included criminal activities.

Among those in the audience to whom Obama appealed was Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman, who attended the event to underscore his contempt and defiance of the SEC.
It was also a week in which the top five banks reported combined profits of more than $15 billion for the first three months of 2010—a huge increase over the previous year.

As the Goldman indictment makes clear, these profits are bound up with rampant fraud that helped crash the financial system--driving millions in the US and around the world into unemployment and poverty—followed by trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and virtually free credit from the Federal Reserve.

Obama took pains to affirm his obeisance to capitalism. “I believe in the power of the free market,” he declared. “I believe in a strong financial sector …” To reassure Wall Street that his financial overhaul would not impose serious restrictions, he said, “We do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered by even modest protections against crisis, or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation.”

There was no suggestion that a single banker or trader should be held accountable for the social catastrophe he helped create. Yet less than two months ago, addressing the US Chamber of Commerce, Obama hailed the mass firing of teachers in an impoverished school district in Rhode Island as a positive educational “reform” measure. “There’s got to be a sense of accountability,” Obama said.

With complete cynicism, Obama and congressional Democrats, with the assistance of the media, are presenting their regulatory proposals as a sweeping reform comparable to the banking measures implemented by the Roosevelt administration in the Great Depression.

In reality, the Senate measure, like the bill passed last December by the House of Representatives, proposes certain marginal changes in the way government agencies monitor financial firms, but does nothing to reverse the deregulation of banking carried out over the past three decades, which dismantled the restrictions imposed during the 1930s. It introduces no structural reforms to limit, let alone ban, the speculative practices that have become central to the accumulation of profit and personal wealth by the American ruling class.

Obama and the congressional Democrats have rejected capping executive pay or banning credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles and other exotic forms of speculation that played a major role in the financial crash and global recession.

Provisions to regulate derivatives markets, a major source of profits for the top Wall Street banks, are loaded with loopholes and exemptions. A financial consumer protection body will have no power over 98 percent of banks or any car dealerships, and will be subject to a Federal Reserve veto.

The most important innovation in the House and Senate bills is the establishment of a procedure for the government to wind down large financial firms, including insurance companies and other non-bank entities, whose failure could trigger a systemic collapse. This is being billed as an end to “too-big-to-fail” financial companies and a guarantee against future taxpayer-funded bailouts.

It is nothing of the kind. The proposal would institutionalize government rescue operations to protect the interests of bank executives, shareholders and creditors and the wealth of the financial elite as a whole, ultimately at public expense. It is designed to keep the banking system in private hands while preparing for the inevitable consequences of allowing the banks and big investors to continue “business as usual,” i.e., another financial crisis on the order of the crash of 2008.

In his speech on Thursday, Obama declared that “a vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts.” This is a lie. The administration-backed bill passed by the House would give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, with the consent of the treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve, the power to “extend credit or guarantee obligations … to prevent financial instability during times of severe economic distress.” This amounts to a blank check to use taxpayer funds for future bailouts.

Obama has continued Bush administration policies that, far from reining in Wall Street, have strengthened the power of the biggest financial firms. The share of all banking industry assets held by the top 10 banks rose to 58 percent in 2009, from 44 percent in 2000 and 24 percent in 1990.

Nothing other than a license for Wall Street to continue stealing from the American people could possibly emerge from a political system dominated by an all-powerful financial aristocracy and awash in corruption and bribery. The financial industry has to date spent $455 million to lobby Congress on the financial overhaul.

The securities and investment industry has thus far handed out $34 million for the 2010 election cycle. Goldman Sachs is the second biggest corporate donor to political campaigns, after AT&T.

Since 1989, the bank’s political action committee and employees have given $31.6 million in campaign contributions, two-thirds of the total to Democratic candidates.

The financial industry funded Obama’s presidential election campaign to the amount of $15 million. Goldman was Obama’s single biggest donor, giving nearly $1 million.

One indication of the ties between Wall Street and the White House: Gregg Craig, who until January was Obama’s White House counsel, has been hired by Goldman Sachs to defend the firm against the SEC indictment.

Barry Grey is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Missing: An Employment Strategy

State Banks
By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

The collapse of the American middle class continues.

While administration officials and members of Congress running for re-election peddle bogus unemployment statistics and claims of recovery the way Wall Street peddled worthless mortgage securities, another tidal wave of home foreclosures is rolling past the subprime borrowers and deep into the once credit worthy.

As CNBC’s Diana Olick reported, almost 8 million Americans are now behind in their mortgage payments. The real estate industry monitor, Irvine Housing blog reported that one bank alone, “Bank of America, which currently forecloses on 7,500 homes every month will see that number rise to 45,000 by December 2010.”

No wages and low wages are taking a fearful toll in the U.S.

Based on the official Department of Labor unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, there are 14.8 million unemployed. But add in those who have stopped looking for work, or are getting by on part time work, and the dimension of the catastrophe comes into view. The AFL CIO puts it at 25.5 million Americans.

A sobering analysis in The Atlantic magazine recently described how long term, widespread unemployment is resulting in “a slowly sinking generation, a remorseless assault on the identity of many men; the dissolution of families and the collapse of neighborhoods.” The author concluded, “(Americans) are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe.”

To arrest this collapse, America needs jobs. It is the most urgent national priority.

Jobs create taxpayers and tax revenue, a demand for goods and services and more jobs. Jobs reduce the costs of unemployment, welfare and health care. Jobs shrink the deficit and debt. Jobs keep families in their homes, protect children and maintain communities. Jobs create hope.

America needs jobs. Infrastructure on a massive scale – the forgotten promise of both political parties in 2008 – is the place to start. Millions can be trained now for jobs in infrastructure and the supply chain of goods and services.

Partnerships of community colleges and the private industry which will need the new hires can provide the training.

The growing legion of the unemployed who are already better educated and trained – veterans coming home to no job, recent college graduates – will find jobs in the management and professional services required to support a large scale, long term infrastructure initiative.

America needs jobs, but it does not need to wait for Washington to create them. There is an alternative.

While almost every state in the nation is in dire financial straits and slashing spending for the needs of people, North Dakota is posting $1 billion surpluses. Since 2000, the state’s GNP has grown 56%, personal income is up 43%, and wages up 34%.

How does North Dakota manage to swim against the tide? The answer is that North Dakota is the only state with its own bank. Apart from returning about a third of a billion dollars to the state’s general fund in the past ten years, it has invested in businesses, infrastructure, start-ups and education.

The bank has on its books all the assets of the state, which are leveraged to create new credit and investment. Most states have similar assets to put in play.

For example, the State of California owns about $200 billion in real estate, roughly $62 billion in investments and has more than $100 billion in projected 2010 revenues. Reasonably leveraged, that asset base could support almost $4 trillion in loans – a river of new credit and investment.

California is instructive because the City of Los Angeles is now asking the feds for a loan guarantee backed by a voter approved sales tax – not another unfunded hand out – to get going on an ambitious plan to expand an electric rail line. The Washington Post reported that this project will create 150,000 jobs.

This is the scale of job creation America needs. But Washington has no such program to help California or any other state. Again as reported in the Post, efforts to create a National Infrastructure Bank have gone nowhere since first proposed in 1994.

There are no photo-ops for check-bearing members of Congress, just that boring banking stuff.

A State Bank of California could provide the loans, loan guarantees or direct investment needed by LA. State banks all over the nation could do the same.

The implication is revolutionary. The American people can bypass Wall Street and Washington and get on with a decentralized, locally directed recovery of the nation's stolen prosperity.

Even if smaller states such as Pennsylvania or New Jersey (where this column appears) had access to only one tenth of California’s state assets, it would generate $400 billion in credit and investment in each.

Pennsylvanians can rebuild unsafe bridges, crumbling highways and dilapidated water treatment facilities, renovate parks and cherished national monuments to world class status, modernize transportation systems, transform waterfronts, blighted urban neighborhoods and abandoned small town centers, build or renovate schools and health centers - and put people to work on the scale required.

The idea is catching fire. The legislatures of half a dozen states are taking steps to create a state bank. As of today, candidates in Florida, Oregon, Illinois, California, Washington State, Vermont, and Idaho have platforms which contain this game changing proposal.

Americans need jobs. They do not need and cannot afford to wait for Washington to create them.

State banks now!

Health Care for Corporations

Insurance dodgers headed to Canada?

By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

There are two ways to look at President Obama’s effort to reform health care in the U.S. One is that it is a sell out. The other is that Mr. Obama has taken a page from President Nixon’s playbook.

The sell out argument goes like this.

Prior to the legislation, health care in the U.S. was dominated by a system of private insurance characterized by out-of-control costs, driven by: a lack of primary care physicians, little or no competition among insurers in most markets, soaring prescription drug use and costs and a malpractice racket run by ambulance chasing lawyers, with the added costs of the resulting “defensive” medicine of endless tests and consultations.

The major feature of the legislation enacted by Mr. Obama and the Democrats is that it drives tens of millions more Americans into that system.

Drug manufacturers are supposed to lower some prices, but will of course raise others. The lawyers have been left unmolested and the insurers have been busy raising premiums, including among the young and healthy, to set a new floor for prices before millions more are forced to buy their policies.

It is true that insurers have been asked to insure the already ill – at higher premiums – and to please stop canceling coverage on technicalities.

But those two proposed “user friendly” measures will have to be policed and regulated. By who? Almost certainly, by federal regulators dominated by the industry, just like Wall Street and all the other “regulated” industries.

That’s the sell out argument. The other is more subtle.

The one provision in the “new, improved” U.S. health care system that will without a doubt be enforced is the requirement that all Americans have insurance – whether they want it or not – especially the largest group, the young and healthy. That is something the insurers will insist on. Corporate profit is at stake. And in the U.S. today, corporate profit trumps all.

Who will do the enforcing, and how?

Perhaps a new federal bureaucracy: the Health Insurance Compliance Division of the Department of Justice? More likely, the job will be outsourced to private contractors, set up by the insurance companies to bully consumers into accepting a new fraud – policies with “low introductory rates” and deductibles and co-pays so high, they will never be used.

I mean, there will be no incentive to offer a good product at a fair price. This is a sellers’ market. “These schmucks gotta buy one!”

But, how to ferret out the insurance dodgers?

Require proof of insurance on all job applications? That’s a no go. There are no jobs to apply for. Submit proof of insurance with tax returns? Again, with no jobs and income to report, or money with which to pay, especially among the young, lots of Americans will not be filing for a while. Submit proof of insurance with an application for a driver’s license or renewal? That may work. For most Americans, mass transit is not an option.

Or perhaps send inspectors onto college campuses and into workplaces? Random insurance checks on the highways, at baseball and football games or when boarding an aircraft?

“We got an insurance dodger here, officer. Lock him up!”

And how to make sure illegal aliens sign up and buy? There are millions, and the insurance companies will not want to leave them out.

However it is done, this enforcement is very likely to be as unpopular as the draft during the Viet Nam War. Which brings us back to Nixon.

Nixon wanted to end the Viet Nam War. His problem was the “hawks” on the right in his own party, the same crowd that wanted Eisenhower to nuke China, go to war with the Soviets in Eastern Europe and with Egypt over the Suez Canal.

Nixon needed a counter weight. He got it when he ended the exemption of college students from the draft, which mobilized the white middle class to oppose the war - the previously “Silent Majority” whom Nixon called out to support his war end-game, even as they were mobilized to hasten its end.

The man had a very sly sense of humor.

If compulsory insurance is as onerous as it is likely to be costly, “Obamacare” may mobilize the troops to end private insurance and institute a single payer system as candidate Obama promised.

It took the very able Richard Nixon his entire first term and more to get out of Viet Nam. If Mr. Obama comes back before 2012 for changes in health care that actually strike at the profits of the insurers, drug manufacturers and ambulance chasing lawyers, you will know he had a strategy to actually change and reform U.S. health care, and did not just sell out.

But either way, there will be time to decide how to deal with the insurance draft. Because it will be as unpopular as the military draft, there is no way it will be enforced until 2011 – after the Congressional elections.

Plenty of time to figure out a strategy: elect a new Congress to help Mr. Obama finally get the job done, or buy a one way ticket to Canada.

Mike Krauss is a writer and international logistics executive, and a former office of PA county and state government. Reach him at mike@mikekrausscomments.com

A Hijacked Political Process

HIJACKED
To take back the ship, control the money

By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

There has been a lot of commentary describing the U.S. government as “gridlocked,” or “frozen.” Typical was a recent cover story in Time Magazine by a professor of “political science and journalism” who sought to explain “Why Washington’s Tied Up in Knots” and what to do about it.

According to the good professor, the problem is that the federal government is held hostage by partisan and polarized political parties, incapable of the cooperation required to get results. His call for cooperation was echoed on the next page by former GOP congressional leader Newt Gingrich.

What rot. There’s lots of cooperation and plenty gets done in Washington.

Republican Gingrich worked side by side with Democrat Clinton to set up the Wall Street casino. When Wall Street crapped out, Presidents Bush and Obama and both parties in Congress joined forces to bail it out. And both parties are cooperating brilliantly to insure that no one responsible for the looting of America will ever be held accountable for their actions, let alone be prosecuted and sent to jail.

Democrats and Republicans together approved with almost complete unanimity a U.S. military budget that is now larger than all other nations combined.

For over thirty years, presidents and congressional leaders of both parties have labored shoulder to shoulder to defend corporate profit and the wealth of the wealthy from the threat of good wages, affordable health care and a rising standard of living for ordinary Americans.

And they get results:

Wall Street and America’s super wealthy have an ever larger share of America’s corporate profit and private wealth. It required taking the jobs, homes and savings of tens of millions of Americans, but Democrats and Republicans working together got the job done.

American manufacturing has been decimated and the good paying jobs sent abroad. The new health care legislation protects the profits of insurers, drug manufacturers and ambulance chasing lawyers. A gargantuan military is deployed mindlessly around the globe to feed the insatiable appetite of defense contractors while the public schools fail.

This is possible not because the two political parties are partisan, but because they are bought, and work in lock step to protect their buyers. In this they are abetted by much of the national media, now owned by corporate conglomerates whose profits are protected by the government they “report” on.

The teamwork is almost flawless.

Perhaps the best way to understand what has happened to the United States is to think of the nation as a ship, a modern luxury liner. The ship has been hijacked, The captain and crew have gone over to the hijackers.

For a while, the passengers didn’t notice. Meals still got served, the toilets worked and there was lots of entertainment for the entire family.

But suddenly, all the things the passengers thought they had paid for are available only for an additional cost; while the captain, crew and hijackers are living it up on the penthouse deck with the passengers’ money.

The passengers will have to fight to get the ship back. It is all about the money.

For example, the first remedy proposed for the mock-ill described in the Time essay was to hold open primary elections for candidates for president and Congress, no more caucuses, so that independent voters can moderate the extremes of right and left that now dominate those elections.

But the real problem is not Republican and Democratic candidates with starkly different views on the issues. Clear choices are not inherently evil. The problem is that these elections cost a fortune, and to raise the money the candidates of both parties must turn to the hijackers and take their orders with their money.

Open primary elections without lower election costs and an alternative source of funding is a half measure that will accomplish little.

The second remedy proposed in the Time essay was to create more issue focused media forums with civil debate and pointed discussion. I almost laughed when I read it. This is the sort of wishful thinking that perhaps only a professor of political science and journalism could propose with a straight face.

What is possible is equal access to the media, so that all candidates can get their message out. But again, it must be affordable and paid for.

Finally, the Time essay asked readers to imagine the many benefits if federal elections included lots of “latter day (Ross) Perots, cranky, independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done.”

This bordered on the infantile. Ross Perot was a billionaire with lots of his own money to spend. And while crankiness has a certain charm, as a rule it is not an asset when dealing with a nation as complex as the U.S., world leaders as touchy as the Chinese and enemies as ruthlessly immoral as terrorists.

What is needed are seasoned leaders with the experience and political skills their jobs require. The United States has no shortage of such people. But the cost of elections and the source of funds either drives them from the political process or drives them into the waiting arms of the profiteers who have seized control of American government to protect their wealth.

To take back the ship, Americans must take control of the hijackers’ arsenal – the money now flooding the political process.

Tea Party To The Rescue?

A war that must be waged: Cleansing a corrupt system

By: Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

Americans do not need a poll to tell them that President Obama has lost the confidence of a lot of their fellow citizens - including many who voted for him - and that Congress is disliked almost to contempt.

How did this happen?

The unavoidable answer that Mr. Obama and Congress wish to avoid is that the Wall Street bailout appears to these same Americans as a wholesale sell out to unprecedented fraud and greed, and this has poisoned the well of public trust on which democratic government ultimately depends.

On account of this, the president has lost support for the initiative with which he is most closely identified - changes to health care. Mr. Obama is being punished for legitimizing that fraud and greed.

To be sure, there is a lot of confusion about the purposes, implementation, funding and impact of the health care legislation. It lacks the focus Mr. Obama promised and that, had he delivered, would have made the legislation more easily understood and perhaps more widely supported.

But the argument made most often now by proponents of the legislation is that Americans who oppose it have been hoodwinked - a nice way to say they are too stupid to know what is in their best interest.

Quite apart from the contempt for the people this expresses - which has not gone unnoticed - this argument intentionally avoids the reality: many Americans no longer trust Mr. Obama or the leaders of Congress in either party, and they are striking back.
But Republican leaders who think a defeat for Mr. Obama and the Democratic leaders of Congress is a victory for them are whistling in the wind. A plague on both their houses.

That seems to be the position of the Tea Partiers who, to the extent they have a prescription for the future of America, are united in a common disdain for a central government they no longer trust, and in fact seem to fear.

But the Tea Partiers are so far as unfocused as the health care legislation they oppose. The nearest they come to a policy - a direction - is a reverence for the Constitution and an implied argument that the biggest problem of the United States is an unconstitutional, over-reaching federal authority that threatens individual liberty.

But a reverence for the Constitution and individual liberty will not be enough to rescue the American people from the ongoing catastrophe of decades, which threatens individual liberty far more than federal authority.

The crowning achievement of the Constitution is not limited government. It is representative government. And the great catastrophe of America is not any policy of the federal government - health care, war, education or the rest - but rather that the process by which those policies are put forward and enacted is hopelessly corrupted and unrepresentative of the American people.

Some in the Tea Party recognize this and are examining the political process as never before, perhaps for the first time. They understand that political parties are the tools that the people of a democracy use to get their hands on the machinery of government. They are thinking about trying to get their hands on the GOP.

Good for them.

The social conservatives of the religious right pulled off the same trick in the 1980s. And if all that now happens is that the GOP ceases to be a party obsessed with claims to moral superiority, and becomes instead a party devoted to the politics of limited government, that is at least a step in the right direction.

But at the same time, the GOP is trying to figure out how to swallow the Tea Party. Which one is the cat and which one the canary is not yet clear.

If Tea Partiers want to rescue America, they need to focus not only on the short-term process of getting their members into the GOP at the level of precinct committee people - which they have correctly identified as the controlling if comatose authority of both political parties - but they must also focus on the laws that govern federal elections.

Specifically, there must be wholesale changes to both election law and federal campaign finance law, which together serve to protect incumbents and drive candidates of both parties into the waiting arms of the entrenched, mostly corporate interests who fund their campaigns, and then surround those elected with an army of their henchmen and lobbyists who dominate administrations and the legislative process.

People and candidates are important. But America's corrupted political process will go on electing corrupted officials and producing corrupted legislation until that process is refashioned to represent the broad majority of the American people - and not only the few who now control it.

This is the war which must be waged.

March 19, 2010 02:11 AM