Stupidity or Incompetence?

Each time Obama talks about reducing spending on the U.S. military, the Republicans carry the water for the Pentagon and declare that this puts American safety in jeopardy. Only two logical underpinnings can explain the enormity of the Pentagon budget. Maybe the U.S. really DOESN’T need to spend 10 times more than any other nation on earth on its military in order to be as safe as everyone else, in which case our level of military spending is just plain stupid. Or else, we DO need to spend 10 times more in order to be safe, in which case our military is just plain incompetent. It’s one or the other.

What Would John Cameron Swayze Say About This?

The United States of America, 2011. After ten years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military (funded with 700 billion dollars a year of national treasure) is hoping to get out of the war with a draw. Victory is a word that’s never uttered because it’s so far removed from reality. The enemy for ten years has been a ragtag bunch of third world insurgents numbering less than 70,000— with no munitions production facilities, no industrial manufacturing capability, no heavy armament, no air force, no navy, no transportation infrastructure, no advanced technology, and absolutely no money flowing into its coffers. In fact, no coffers. Think David and Goliath with Goliath backed by astronomical amounts of American taxpayer money.

Back home, in the second week of September, 2011, the leading Republican candidate for the upcoming presidential election is found to have mandated vaccination of all 16 year-old girls in Texas against cervical cancer just to do the bidding of the vaccine maker, Merck, in return for substantial corporate monetary contributions. Democrat politics is equally inept. A solar panel start-up company has just declared bankruptcy after squandering half-a-billion dollars of “stimulus” money pumped in by the Obama administration. Polls show public approval of government is at 17%. “Official” unemployment stands at 9.2%, but the real unemployment rate is twice that high. Housing foreclosures have never been more numerous in all the nation’s history. U.S. corporations and small businesses are holding more cash than ever, but say they won’t invest in jobs or infrastructure upgrades until they can have their faith in government restored. Nobody expects that to happen anytime soon. And 84% of total American wealth is owned by the top 20% of wealthy Americans.

If John Cameron Swayze had reported news like this back in 1954, the American public at that time would have overthrown the U.S. government, even if it meant flirting with Soviet Communism.

The Civil War Won’t Last That Long

This is personal, so I’ll just say it flat out. “I don’t love this country enough to try and save it from the new angry and resentful breed of Republicans”. I haven’t been what you’d call, “a patriot” since the 1950s, and seeing as how the American public has some input into the fate of the country, I feel that The United States pretty much deserves what it gets. And what America will probably get in 2012 is an all-Republican government with a Republican president, but this is better than the alternative.

The alternative isn’t Obama. He wouldn’t last that long if he was re-elected. The alternative to Republicanism is civil war. No president in United States history has been as aggressively hated as Obama, and it started the day after his inauguration when conservatives across America went out and stocked-up on hand guns and assault rifles and ammunition. To their credit, they haven’t opened fire just yet.... outside of Arizona, but if they can’t get their way at the polls next year— if Obama beats their guy or gal in the election, then In Rick Perry’s popular shit-kicker vernacular, “they’ll get ugly on him”. No way in hell would they peacefully tolerate another four years.

I could actually vote Republican in 2012, if I could vote for Chris Christie or Jon Huntsman, but Christie is too intelligent to even want the job of president, and Huntsman is too intelligent to get the nomination from the party of Perry, Palin, and Bachmann. Most Republicans now seem to value only angry fundamentalism and extreme conservatism, which means that their candidate will be an extreme conservative fundamentalist, and almost certainly angry and ignorant as well. So I won’t be voting Republican. I will vote again for Obama as I did three years ago, but this time I really don’t want him to win. I don’t want the street riots to start. Not that the civil war would last that long. It would be over in a day or two. The Republicans have all the guns. And I wouldn’t be anywhere in sight. I don’t love this country enough to resist angry Republicans when they have guns in their hands.

CPAC Calls for the Deployment of Michele Bachman’s Flying Monkeys

In a cosmic coincidence of timing, the once-in-a-century historic revolution in Egypt occurred simultaneously with the annual CPAC convention in Washington DC, allowing television viewers to get a side by side comparison of angry citizens in two different nations as they vented their wrath and hatred focused on their respective presidents. Clearly, the CPAC crowd would have been just as thrilled as the Egyptians if Barack Obama had stepped down from power on Friday along with Hosni Mubarak. The fact that Obama was duly elected by a rather substantial majority of voters in a totally democratic process— this didn’t seem to be a reason to cut him any slack within CPAC, and it raises a question. In America, do we love and embrace democracy? Or do we love and embrace the IDEA of democracy? For the past twenty or so years, I’ve seen both political parties in Washington heaping constant and glorious praise on the idea and theoretical concept of democracy, even as they manifest contempt and disgust for the constraints of an actual democracy in operation.

This is something for Egypt to keep in mind as that country now strives to build its own democracy. I’m not sure that, among the democracies of the world, the United States of America is the very best example for the Egyptians to copy.

Ungovernable? You Bet!

During the last ten years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the human race (whatever the culture) has pretty much become ungovernable, and this week’s revolt in Egypt helps prove my point. Blame it on the Internet. Even back at the inception of the Internet more than two decades ago, the really smart people realized that this new way of sharing knowledge was inherently seditious, and there’s no doubt that— if the governments of the world had known then what they know today— the Internet never would have been allowed to flourish. Even the best futurists back then, however, could never have predicted the impact of social mediums like FaceBook and Twitter, and WikiLeaks.

For ten thousand years or more, governance has always been a delicate dance between government and the governed. The United States, over the last 235 years, has arguably done the best job of consistently getting this balance right, but even this nation has experienced some monumental hiccups. Coming out of WWII, I believe that the American people were far too compliant and trusting of their government. The delicate dance was unbalanced, and McCarthyism and Vietnam were two pathetic results, both fueled by a government that exploited paranoia about communism and citizen trust to prey on the governed. The HUAC congressional outrages of the early 1950s could have been stopped before they gained any traction by just a few well-placed riots and a press that was willing to explain what was happening. Facebook and Twitter would have had a monumental influence as well.

The last two years have shown us street riots in France and Greece and England and Tunisia and, now, Egypt— but most Americans still think that it could never happen here. I say, “Wanna bet?” The U.S.A. is dead broke. The ultimate solution to the deadbeat status of the country is new taxation, most likely in the form of a national sales tax on everything but groceries and medicine. Problem is, now you’ve got the Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already), and these are some of the same self-proclaimed patriots who rushed out after Obama’s election and stocked up on guns and munitions in quantities never before seen by the American arms industry outside of a wartime setting. They weren’t doing this just to boost the economy. Wait and see what happens if the U.S. government, led by Obama working with the Republican congress, decides to try and implement a national sales tax. Wait until the Tea Party gun owners all simultaneously get cheesed off about a second presidential term for Obama, and they network with each other on the Internet. Wait until there’s a convergence between a new tax policy and a mindset that believes Obama is a Muslim and foreign-born (and did I mention that he has dark skin and kinky hair?)— and all of this is played out within a poorly educated, white trash population of people who can’t find a job or pay their mortgage. You think it can’t happen here? Guess again.

WTF is Up with Sarah Palin?

I’m starting to really enjoy Sarah Palin. Really. She provides just the right mix of amusement and astonishment that I used to get from a fresh copy of Mad Magazine back in my teenage years, but even publisher William M. Gaines could never have dreamed up something as outrageous as the cartoonish diva from the frozen North. Tuesday night in Obama’s State of the Union speech, Palin must have felt that she hit the mother lode. In the President’s slogan, “Winning the Future,” she saw the acronym WTF, and she made the connection with the same three letters used on her favorite communication medium, Twitter, as raunchy shorthand for “What the Fxxx?” Then Palin immediately posted a video and a tweet to let all her fans know how clever she is. Watching the video, it’s obvious that she was experiencing the same snickering titillation that a pre-pubescent child feels when it first learns that the word, “pussy,” has a double meaning.

Months ago, I decided to give it a rest with Palin on my blog. To use an old cliché, writing about her was like wrestling with a pig. It just made me feel dirty, especially when I knew that the pig actually liked it. But as I said, I’m starting to enjoy her more and more. You don’t hear much from the Democrats about her these days, but now the Republicans have taken up the charge. I think I know why. The Tea Party is a very real problem for the Republican Party, and since Palin seems to be the de facto leader, taking shots at her has the effect of clipping the wing of the Tea Party movement without overtly offending the Tea Party constituents. And god knows, she is such an easy target. I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. George W. Bush was not exactly a modern Jeffersonian version of presidential genius, but Bush was intellectual light years ahead of the Tundra Tootsie.

Obama’s “Sputnik Moment”— a Flawed Analogy

Born almost four years after the launch of Sputnik, Obama should be forgiven if he shows a somewhat naïve understanding of that galvanizing event. The fact is— October of 1957 and January of 2011could not be more different in terms of American capability and motivation. Sputnik was not so much a Soviet triumph of superior technological ability as it was an American blunder based on bureaucratic infighting and outright government departmental incompetence. Once the U.S.A. got serious about orbiting a satellite, this nation had the Explorer in orbit just 84 days after Sputnik.

Only 12 years previous, we had emerged from WWII with half of all the world’s GDP and half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, as well as the world’s pre-eminent rocket scientist in Dr. Wernher von Braun whom we had obtained from Germany. Moreover, we had the world’s highest scientific and mathematical literacy levels in our workforce as a result of having the best educational system on earth. We could make anything, and we did make everything, and compared to every other nation we were wealthy beyond measure. With an income tax rate at 90% on the richest Americans, the U.S. Treasury was awash in money that we could spend on going into space, or creating an interstate highway system, or anything else that suited our fancy. In 1957, the only thing keeping us from going into space was United States Government policy.

The Eisenhower administration had decided that the space race should be waged within this country as a friendly rivalry between the military services (sound familiar?) The Navy had the Vanguard satellite and the Army had the Explorer, but because the Army launch vehicle for Explorer was a converted ballistic missile, old Ike thought that the Navy project would be less likely to ruffle Soviet feathers. Vanguard was given the inside track, but when the pathetic little Navy rocket exploded on the launch pad, Ike took the leash off of Wernher von Braun and his Army ballistic missile team, and they had Explorer up in orbit almost overnight. As for American paranoia over Sputnik, and the national perception that the Soviets were somehow superior to us— nothing about that situation was based in reality.

Which brings us to January, 2011. Americans are NOT paranoid (unfortunately), and most of us carry a perception that we are somehow superior to every other nation. Nothing about that situation is based in reality. The thing is, thanks to our own widespread ignorance and a school system that fails to educate, we are just too stupid to see that the “Sputnik Moment” is not at all analogous to the present state of affairs.

What is Sarah Palin Telling Us About Herself?

Here’s the only statistic that we need to know. The top 1% of the American population owns 34% of the personal wealth in the country. Financial inequity like this doesn’t exist in any other developed nation on earth, and historically this kind of outrageous distribution and concentration of wealth has usually been associated with African dictatorships and banana republics and Iron Curtain oligarchies during the middle of the last century.

In her newest book (according to excerpts leaked this week before the book’s publication) Sarah Palin has said that Barack Obama sees America as unjust and unfair. Since this wasn’t meant to compliment the President, the clear implication is that Sarah sees America as just and fair, and this isn’t surprising given the fact that she is being paid a million dollars per episode for her new reality show featuring the Tundra Tootsie and her family frolicking in their home state of Alaska. Sarah is rapidly worming her way into that top one percent, and I’m sure that this looks perfectly just and fair to her.

What we are seeing in America is, in the light of history, a familiar picture. Nations in decline always show the same indicators. The flags get more numerous (yes, the definition of flags includes all those obnoxious little ribbon loops plastered on the back of automobiles). The patriotic parades and celebrations get larger and more passionate. The rhetoric gets more disconnected from reality, and eventually a dangerous, and often cartoonish, demagogue emerges promising to lead the failing nation into a new dawn. Enter Sarah Palin. Following in the footsteps of Imelda Marcos or Eva Peron, insisting all the while that she's not really a diva, Sarah Palin seems to see herself fulfilling some kind of queen-like destiny as she exhorts the peasants to take up their torches and pitchforks so she can lead them out of modern American serfdom. The thing is, most Americans are just dumb enough to go along with it. I wouldn't bet against her.

Total Victory (But Not Recently)

65 years ago today, the Japanese formally surrendered to the United States, ending World War II. It would be the last time that a wartime foe would unconditionally surrender to us, although it would certainly not be our last war. For the last two days, some of my conservative friends have been behaving as though this total wartime victory happened just last week as they complain about Obama’s end of combat in Iraq, acting like they think it should have ended like just World War II. That fact is, a lot has happened between those two events.

We left the Korean peninsula in 1953 leaving the power and prestige of our enemies, the Chinese and the North Koreans, undiminished in any way. But Eisenhower was president then, and he was a Republican. We left Vietnam in 1975 after having been defeated ourselves, leaving Ho Chi Minh victorious and 58,000 of our young men dead for no good cause. But Gerry Ford was president then, and Ford was a Republican. We pulled out of Lebanon in 1983 having achieved nothing whatsoever but the loss of 241 Marines who died while sleeping in their own barracks. But Ronald Reagan was president then, and he was a Republican. We left Iraq (the first time) in 1991while George H.W. Bush (another Republican) was president, leaving Saddam Hussein and most of the top Iraqi leadership firmly in place to fight another day. That could hardly be called “unconditional” surrender on their part.

What makes Obama unique is not that he is ending a war under conditions that are worse than when the war started. All U.S. wars have ended that way for 65 years. What’s unique is that Obama is the first president to go through this frustration who happens to be a Democrat. And by the way, he’s also black. That’s why my conservative friends are upset.

Whatever Happened to Murphy’s Law?

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” That’s Murphy’s Law, and most of us over the age of 30 probably heard it for the first time in high school. Whether we knew it or not, it was our first brush with philosophy. But then, like so many other iconic principles from the 20th Century, it just went away.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, an endless parade of “glass-half-full” happy talkers and human resource motivators and self-help gurus bombarded us with platitudes like “Failure is not an option,” and “Life rewards the risk takers,” and “Success is just a matter of learning to manage the expectations of others.” Murphy’s Law was deemed to be too pessimistic and negative for this new culture that preached unbounded positivity in all aspects of modern life. The final nail in the coffin was Y2K. Never before had a potential calamity been subjected to study and pre-planning with such attention to ultimate disastrous consequence as this predicted failure of the world’s computer systems. But then, when midnight December 31, 1999 arrived— nothing bad happened. Everything that could go wrong, didn’t go wrong, and Americans mistakenly assumed that Murphy’s Law no longer applied. Then came the 21st Century.

In the last decade, America has suffered through the Stock Market plunge of late 2000, followed by 9/11, followed by Enron, followed by the embarrassing and pathetic military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the in-flight destruction of the space shuttle, Columbia, followed by Hurricane Katrina, followed by the real estate bubble collapse and subsequent epidemic of home foreclosures, followed by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and skyrocketing unemployment, followed by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, followed by an instantaneous 1000 point drop in the DOW. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s the disgusting, dirty little secret that many wing-nut Americans see the election of a black President as yet another tragic failure in “the system.” What all of these events have in common is that they came as a complete surprise to just about every American, including the people in high places who were being paid big money to avoid being surprised. Surprise is what you get when you ignore Murphy’s Law. Only the surprise of Hurricane Katrina was excusable.

So now, as we enter the second decade of this dysfunctional 21st Century, it should be evident to everyone that Murphy’s Law is still alive and well. It’s always been true that the failure to imagine and anticipate a downside betrays a shallowness of intellect, and this is the case now more than ever before. Recapturing our healthy sense of modern reality means ignoring the happy talkers, and realizing that failure is not optional— it’s inevitable, and appreciating the fact that carnival magicians are the only people who can reliably count on achieving success in their chosen profession simply by managing the expectations of others.

Nothing is “For Sure” Anymore

There’s no such thing as a farfetched idea anymore, and people who are young enough to have grown up with the Internet don’t even know what the term, “farfetched idea” means. The Internet changed everything.

There was a time when certain ideas and beliefs were so preposterous that the vast majority of people rejected these notions, and the people who did actually believe the unbelievable were labeled as “crackpots.” Believing that the earth was flat, or that a new living man could be constructed from dead body parts, the crackpots, as portrayed in those early films, were usually old codgers who lived out beyond the edge of the hamlet until the townspeople eventually came at night like an invading army carrying fiery torches and pitchforks. But not anymore.

The townspeople don’t object to anything these days— even if you believe that Obama was born outside of the United States, or that childhood vaccines cause autism, or that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, or that we need our gigantic military to defend America’s freedom, or that melting glacial and polar ice doesn’t equate with a temperature increase, or that the Apollo lunar landings were staged here on earth, or that America can “drill baby drill” its way to energy independence, or that the entire American economy and foreign policy has always been controlled by a tiny cabal of ultra-powerful men who operate in secrecy off the radar of the public and the media.

Pick your own paranoia and wrap it into a crackpot theory. The townspeople will never come for you with torches and pitchforks because you’re no longer alone, no matter what you believe. Thanks to the Internet, any person with any idea or belief whatsoever can connect with other people of a similar mind. This builds a coalition of like-minded activists who soon become numerous enough to be classified as a real honest-to-goodness minority group. And as everyone knows, it’s unthinkable to question the beliefs of a minority group. This is why there are two sides to every issue, and I do mean EVERY issue. Nothing is “for sure” anymore.

The problem is, real life has a one-sided reality to it that can’t be changed by contrary belief.

Examining Just Why, Exactly, Sarah Palin is Electrifying

From the years 1932 until roughly 1964, citizens of the U.S.A. felt positive about their Federal government, and for the most part they invested trust in their elected leaders. But this was only a brief anomaly in the long history of our country, and it ended with Watergate and the Vietnam War before it could take hold and flourish. For most of our national history, the opposite sentiment toward Washington has prevailed and from the earliest years of our Republic, Americans historically viewed their government with suspicion, and even outright contempt. So I guess you could say that the Tea Party movement is really a throwback to another time. What’s new is the emergence of Sarah Palin.

Given this high percentage “anti-government” sentiment, it’s surprising that Sarah Palin hasn’t gained more traction with her message of suspicion and distrust of Washington. Recent polls put her disapproval rating at 55%, with fully 71% of Americans saying that she is unqualified to be the next President. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville.

Never, in my recent memory, has so much adulation and applause been given to such simple utterances about simple-minded solutions to galactically unsolvable problems. Evidently, to be in lockstep with the Tea Party, one needs to believe that a speaker is “electrifying” and “galvanizing” when they observe that the United States Government spends too much, by borrowing too much, in order to deliver too little in the way of problem solutions. Knowing this, Sarah Palin is able to rally her troops by overstating the obvious about Washington. Okay, now we know that the Tea Party “gets it” — the Federal Government is inefficient, and generally doesn’t work as well as it did in the past. The thing is, mainstream Democrats and Republicans “get it” too. The only difference is, Republicans and Dems don’t feel that such self-evident truths are “electrifying.”

My politics are, admittedly, schizophrenic. My objection to Bill Clinton molded me into a rabid Conservative, then eight years of George W. Bush transformed me into a flaming Liberal. And after a year of Barack Obama, I’m now a dejected cynic who believes that America is basically ungovernable, and that even an outwardly decent and intellectual person in the Presidency can have very little positive effect on the problems that face the country today. Sarah Palin, we are told by the Tea Party members, should be elected as our next Chief Executive because she shares a certain folksy commonality with the average person. To this I reply, “Not so fast.” My advice is to go out into the street and talk to a lot of common, average Americans, and then ask yourself if you want your grandchildren to inherit a world that is shaped by the common, average American.

For the record, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were considered to be aristocratic at that time, and there wasn’t a single man among them who would have qualified today as a common average American. I suspect that none of these founding fathers of our country would fare very well in today’s modern Tea Party, and as the Tea Party goes, so goes Sarah Palin.

America— More of an Economy than a Society

There’s an old adage that says, “When two men fight over a woman, they want the fight more than the woman.” And the thing that I remember personally from college is that food fights were never about food. Never! Which brings me to the town hall meetings and the so-called “Tea Parties,” all of which have absolutely nothing to do with healthcare legislation or big government. America just wants a fight. It’s that simple.

My wife and I have spent quality time in two-thirds of the nations on earth over the last twenty or so years. As we've learned for ourselves, without exception, all of the OTHER countries of the world see themselves as (first and foremost) a society. Even the places like China and Burma and Iran get the picture— that the glue of societal common bonding can help citizens cope with even the most oppressive and harsh of national governments. By contrast, we in the U.S.A. see our country as an economy (primarily) and a military superpower (secondarily) and societal considerations are relegated to tertiary status at best. Once I came to realize this, I also realized that obsessing about things like healthcare or big government was as futile as obsessing about impending death just because I'm getting older. So America will now have to make its way without my guidance and input.

The nations that have universal healthcare (this is everyone but the U.S.A.) all started with the premise that ALL citizens would get healthcare. This was the only piece of the puzzle that was non-negotiable. For the most part, none of those other nations got it right when they started. Certainly, none of them achieved perfection on their first try. They each tinkered with their plans and changed the functions and features until they made it workable, with the result that the many different nations have many different systems today for managing and funding their health care. But they all did what they had to do to reach the fundamental goal of universal coverage. We, by contrast, start with a budget (we're an economy, don't forget) and then we ask ourselves what we can afford.

In my lifetime, I've watched America enthusiastically plunge into three wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq) and nobody, liberal or conservative, ever said we should slow down until we knew all the details. And god knows, nobody ever questioned the cost. We're a military superpower, don't forget, or at least we see ourselves that way. Of course, this makes it hard to explain why we can start wars so easily, but why we can never seem to win those wars, but that’s a topic for another blog.

So let's not kid ourselves about the healthcare issue, or about the rage that fuels the town hall meetings and the Tea Parties. Obama's healthcare plan is full of shortcomings and vagaries and imperfections, but this wouldn't matter if we saw ourselves as, primarily, a society above all else. But we don’t. America wants this internal fight simply for the sake of internal fighting, just like the food fights in college. This is why I’ve repeatedly predicted that there will be another civil war, although probably not in my lifetime. This isn't a matter of swinging pendulums. Those irate idiots (on both sides) at the town hall meetings will not be satisfied with a swing of the pendulum. Someone on each side of the abortion issue has now been murdered in cold blood simply because someone on the other side of the issue wanted to end the debate, so on the microcosmic level, the civil war has already begun. I’m going to just stay the hell out of it, because The United States of America isn't worth it anymore.

It’s Sad to Watch an Elephant Die

It fills me with a tinge of sadness, seeing the Republican Party as it tries to spin the defection of Arlen Specter. It’s like watching an elephant die— literally. It was exactly six years ago this week that I, too, made an abrupt switch and turned my back on the Republican Party and conservatism because it no longer made any sense to me. Last night as I watched The News Hour on PBS, everything about that decision came flooding back to me.

Reporting from St. Louis, PBS anchor, Gwen Ifill, was interviewing local citizens in the nation’s heartland to get their thoughts on Obama’s first 100 days in office. Not surprisingly, the liberal slant of PBS had generated a rather rosy picture, and so to offer some balance, she interviewed an unabashed young supporter of George W. Bush. He said, “I don’t trust the government to solve the nation’s problems. The government should just get out of the way and let the American people do what they do best. I trust the American people.” He actually sounded like Ronald Reagan. If his words are taken at face value, the stupidity of what he said is simply unbearable. Bernie Madoff is an American person. Trustworthy? Not on your life. And all those CEO tycoons of Citigroup and AIG— along with the other American people on Wall Street who devised subprime loans and credit default swaps— presumably these are the American people we should trust to solve our economic problems. There are more than 13 million American people currently unemployed and looking desperately for a job. I wonder if they would like for the government to just get out of the way and let them pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I doubt it.

It all comes down to this— conservatism today is nothing more than a systematized nostalgia for the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Back then, conservatism worked. We had a clear enemy, The Soviet Union, so Reagan could denounce big government and get away with it because he could create millions of jobs by pouring billions of dollars into the military budget for defense projects. News flash to Reagan conservatives— the government and the military are the same thing.

In Reagan’s 1980s, America still had the world’s largest manufacturing base for durable goods. Not so anymore. In the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism and global warming and the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries— all these problems were off the radar screen. The 401K was only invented in 1982, so almost all American jobs offered the potential for a retirement income as a fringe benefit. As a result, only a comparatively few people were heavily invested in the stock market, and for the most part these were wealthy people who actually knew what they were doing when it came to finance. And as for China— the word that best described China in the 1980s was “quaint.”

This is the world that modern conservatives want to recreate. I, too, yearn for those days, and if the world could go back to the way it was then, I would be a conservative Republican in a heartbeat. But things change, and the days of Reagan are as gone as Hugh Hefner’s virginity. Modern conservatism is best defined by its champions. There are the raving egomaniacs like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who are easily dismissed, but there are also reasoned, brilliant men like George Will and David Brooks. I personally admire George Will and David Brooks, but with all due respect to these men, I personally believe that conservatism today is mostly for the weak minded and the overly nostalgic. It’s sad to watch an elephant die.

Why Anti-Capitalism is a Good Thing

Wars are fought with more than just guns and bombs. In addition to these tried and true instruments of destruction, economic and financial “meddling” to disrupt an enemy economy has always been recognized as another effective lethal weapon. During WWII, European countries on both sides of the conflict flooded each other with counterfeit money to devalue the currency of the opposing side. In the late 1980s, toward the end of the Cold War and after the early ascendency of computers, all Pentagon WWIII war gaming included plans to hack into the Soviet computers which controlled the Soviet economy. Even today, as we’ve chased down Al Quaeda enemies following 9/11, a major part of our anti-terrorist strategy has been to go after their funding. And now we’re dealing with the fallout of destruction caused by a relatively small number— fewer than 20,000— Wall Street insiders who put personal enrichment above loyalty to country or old-fashioned American patriotism. What these people did in the name of American capitalism was nothing less than an act of war, and if these guys had been foreign nationals, then a proper response by our government would have been to bomb the capital of their host country into oblivion.

I contend that the “financial products” bombs that have been dropped on America by Wall Street have caused broader and deeper misery across the nation than the death and destruction of 9/11. Any system can go too far in a negative direction, and capitalism is not immune to this, and right now American capitalism has gone too far and it’s more of an enemy than a friend. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was on a rant in defense of capitalism, accusing President Obama of trying to dismantle capitalism. With his $400 million dollar bankroll, Limbaugh can be counted on to be on the wrong side of any economic issue, and yesterday was no exception. If Obama is anti-capitalism at the present time, that’s a good thing— at least until the economy is fixed. Right now, the capitalists are America’s enemy.

Please— No More Optimism. Enough, Already

Only 52 days on the job, and already President Obama is taking heat for his public attitude about the economy. The rap on him is that he is insufficiently optimistic, and that he fails to reassure us with “happy talk,” and Tim Geithner comes in for the same criticism. The United States is entering another depression, but Americans still don’t get it. They still look for optimism and happy talk in their leaders, failing to understand that these are the very qualities that got us into this mess.

The blame for the economic meltdown has been pinned on “gimmick” financial concoctions like sub-prime mortgages, and credit default swaps, and bundling of toxic assets for foreign consumption, and sale-lease-backs, and derivatives, and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and the list goes on and on. The fact is that all of these “deals” were nothing more than the bricks and mortar of the failed economic structure, but the foundation underlying the whole process of economic decay was the mindset of the managers and directors and VPs who concocted these financial instruments in the first place. You can almost hear the echoes of their voices as they went about their work, saying things like, “The market rewards the risk takers,” and “Failure is not an option,” and “It’s just a matter of managing expectations.” They had prepped themselves by reading books authored by management gurus— books that preached the value of unbridled optimism, and that taught the techniques of happy talk. They had advanced through their careers under the mantel of human resource honchos who rewarded them for their optimistic outlook. These were not evil men. They were simply misguided optimists and happy talkers living in an era when these traits were ingrained in American management DNA, and when the genes for critical thought had long since disappeared through the process of natural selection.

And now, even as Americans head for the poor house, they still seem to want the same old fluff. God help us. Maybe Obama is that rare individual who knows only too well that his ideas can fail, and who is too honest to tell us otherwise. He displays something called, “critical thinking,” and fifty years ago it was a trait that was valued more than optimism. Maybe a good old-fashioned depression will bring it back into vogue.

Who Do We Listen To?

Barack Obama and Tim Geithner know the best way to fix the economy. So does John McCain, and so do his Republican colleagues. And without a doubt, the people who have the best handle on a financial fix are the folks who call in to talk radio. These talk show callers, and the hosts who take their calls, are always on the cutting edge when it comes to solving any problem whatsoever. The only problem that seems to avoid solution is the fact that everyone disagrees. So who do we listen to?

Prior to 9/11, a man named John O’Neill knew about the impending doom that awaited the people of New York. As the FBI’s top expert on Al Quaeda and Bin Laden, O’Neill had connected the dots, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the exact date of the planned attack, and he was killed in the World Trade Center that fateful day. What makes this story relevant to the financial crisis is that John O’Neill was ignored by his own agency, the FBI, as well as everyone else who could have made a difference. To me, it’s a sure bet that there is some bright person out there who absolutely knows how to get our economy started again, and it’s an absolute certainty that his ideas are falling on deaf ears. It always happens this way.

Limbaugh says, “Compromise is Just for Gutless Liberals.”

Here’s the deal. America can cast its lot with Barack Obama or Rush Limbaugh. It’s one or the other. Everyone reading this blog knows Obama, but for anyone who is unfamiliar with Limbaugh, they need to tune in by radio for three hours each day where this onetime Missouri hillbilly pontificates on everything from politics to health issues to societal trends— armed, intellectually, with nothing but his own uneducated opinion and bias. A few years ago, during the Terri Schiavo episode, Limbaugh even became a self-proclaimed expert on neuro-biology. Here’s why knowing about Limbaugh is important— Republicans buy into what he says. When you understand Limbaugh, you understand the poverty of Republican conservative ideology. And here’s why that’s important—Republicans are standing in the way of the government’s feeble attempt to fix the broken economy.

The economy is declining into uncharted territory, something akin to entering a black hole. Lessons learned during the 1930s don’t apply today because America, back then, was a manufacturing economy, and today it’s a service economy. The fact is that nobody— not even Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz—knows what will work to turn things around. The Democrats think the stimulus infusion should be massive government spending, but they don’t really know if that will work. The Republicans think there should be plenty of tax cuts, but they, also, don’t know if that will work. History is of no help, here. Under Bush we had both tax cuts and massive spending, and the result was our current mess, and there’s no way of knowing if things would have been different had Bush left out one or the other. As of right now, the stimulus infusion is stalled because Republicans are insisting on tax cuts, and Limbaugh is telling them that, “compromise is just for gutless Liberals.” Meanwhile, Obama still wants compromise. Obama or Limbaugh, It’s one or the other.

Ann Coulter’s Hidden Agenda

Conservative columnist, Ann Coulter, is making the rounds of the morning talk shows promoting her new book— yet another in her long series of tomes devoted to bashing Liberalism. I don’t recall the title of this newest offering, but it doesn’t matter since the writing of it was clearly nothing more than a therapy exercise to help her deal with her emotional devastation in the wake of the last national election. These Conservative people are having a really hard time with our newest incoming President.

Coulter’s latest tact is to blame Liberalism for the high percentage of mothers who are raising their offspring as single parents. Her outrageously-incendiary claim is that every problem in America stems from single motherhood. Here’s the idiocy of that position, given Coulter’s Conservatism. She represents an ideology that is against sex education in the schools, and against abortion even in the case of rape, and against the easy availability of birth control methods for single girls. Her answer to the problem is abstinence, even though study after study shows that the abstinence pledges are a waste of time when it comes to reducing illegitimate birth rates.

Given that the topic of fatherless families has been around for at least two decades (and for a dozen of those years the government was Republican and Conservative), my question for Ms. Coulter is, “Why Now?” What’s her agenda in raising this issue at this time? I believe that there’s more, here, than meets the eye. With more than half of all African American babies being born out of wedlock, this issue of absentee fathers is an issue that doesn’t showcase black American culture in the best light. Nobody disputes that, not even black Liberals if they’re being objective. And in case anyone hasn’t noticed, our incoming President is part of the black American culture. Ann Coulter’s agenda isn’t about Liberalism and single moms, it’s about Obama and his dark complexion. As I’ve said many times before, just because radical Conservatives don’t dress in white getups anymore, that doesn’t mean that they’re not sympathetic with Klan ideology.

It's Now Official

It’s now official. Yesterday, the members of the Electoral College met inside the 50 statehouses around the U.S.A. to certify the results of the November 4th election. This is a routine procedure that takes place every four years, and yesterday the event was remarkable only for what DIDN’T happen. The electors didn’t hesitate in the least.

For the last five weeks, the legislators who make up the Electoral College have been besieged with mail urging them not to ratify the election of Obama, on the basis that he was allegedly born in Kenya and is, therefore, ineligible to hold the office of President (see my blog of 11/11). This mail was generated by “the usual suspects”— those members of the political fringe who always think they have the inside track to the truth because they’re tuned into the voice of God, or the EIB network, or short wave radio. On one of last Sunday morning’s political talk shows, a pundit completely astonished me by giving a name to this fringe element, calling it “the Palin, Hannity, Limbaugh crowd.” Those of us who rant in the realm of blogs can get away with labels like this, but I never imagined that a mainstream TV talking head would utter such a phrase. If the fringe can actually be marginalized, maybe there’s hope for national unity, after all.

See also: Was Obama Born In Kenya? (11/11)