Supreme Court’s Gift to Corporations: The U.S. Military

Cameron Salisbury

It’s not easy to establish a clear line in history between the time when American democracy belonged to citizens and when it was lost, but wars give us starting point.

The first wars were fought over ideas. There was the Revolutionary War in the 18^th century and then in the 19^th century, the Civil War ‘preserved the union’ and ended slavery.

In the 20^th century came the wars for national imperialism.  First, Teddy Roosevelt’s wars in the Philippines and Cuba, then WWII which more or less accidentally resulted in imperial expansion.

After 1945, the U.S. was very good at waging war but no longer so good at winning, so we kept practicing.  Wars waged against Korea and Vietnam failed to accomplish anything but massive destruction on somebody else’s land, ratchet up the hate index for the U.S., and give the Pentagon an excuse to exercise its military muscles and escalate its budget.

Increasingly, especially since the implosion of the U.S.S.R. in 1989, the U.S. military has been used as a tool to interfere in the politics of smaller and weaker nations, to intimidate and harass, to make the world safe for corporations, which is also known euphemistically as ‘making the world safe for democracy’ and ‘protecting American interests.’

The U.S. has been the only and unchallenged superpower since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Relieved of the need to protect the world from ‘the communist threat’, citizens expected the defense budget, larger for many decades than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined, to finally yield to common sense.  Americans anticipated a peace dividend in spending that reflected the irrelevance of the military sink hole and left room to support the economy, education, and social programs.

It didn’t happen.  New arguments were created, like the wars in the Middle East, or exploited, like 911 or the earthquake in Haiti, to keep the bloated military budget growing.

First responders, U.S. style, are not the Red Cross and not the Salvation Army, but U.S. soldiers armed to the teeth patrolling the streets of a devastated city, supposedly protecting the dead, dying and starving, but transparently marking territory, protecting the regime from imaginary encroachment by other countries.

One of many riveting scenes during the past few weeks was the black faces and skeletal bodies pressed against the airport fence in Haiti awaiting distribution of the tons of food and water piling up on the tarmac. Face to face with the desperate, on the inside of the fence, was not USAID, not the State Department, and not FEMA, but the U.S. military, locked and loaded, ready to do whatever necessary to keep the provisions safely away from those in urgent need.

The grounds of Haiti’s presidential residence, located directly across the street from a hospital, eventually filled with marines and U.S. helicopters carrying medical supplies that waited indefinitely for distribution as people died and the marines in charge hung out until they had approval from higher-ups.

As reports from the rest of the world trickled in through the BBC and Al Jazeeraz, we learned of the complaints generated in country after country by the high handed arrogance of the U.S. military controllers of Haiti’s one-runway airport who seemed intent on refusing entry to any plane that did not display the insignia of the U.S.A. Eventually, according to one report, the airport was turned into a military base and all non-U.S. flights were rerouted to the Dominican Republic.

We heard the international community voice the fear that the U.S. military was once again using aid as a pretext to extend American imperialism. Sri Lanka’s insistence, after the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, on prohibiting entry to the U.S. military began to seem quite rational, even to Americans.

Does any of this sound like it could be President Barack Obama’s doing?  He is the calm, reasoned, constitutionally designated commander in chief of the military, but is he in control of it?  Or has the military, like its budget, been allowed to run amok?

Military spending, including discretionary and nondiscretionary is now closing in on 50% of every tax dollar the federal government spends.  Nevertheless, it’s the financing for America’s social fabric, education, social security, Medicare and aid to the poor, that is scheduled for reductions.  The massive, irrational, tax subsidies for the military and defense contractors make most of us unwilling collaborators in the coming reckoning.   (For more dismal information about the U.S. military and the weapons industry go to www.globalissues.org.)

Today, the U.S. military brazenly supports the corporate agenda, from the oil wars in the Middle East to the juntas in Central and South America that regularly replace democratically elected presidents with puppets that international elites, including the U.S. corporate sector, find less likely to support challenges to plutocracy and fascism.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court, demonstrating once again that it is no tool of democracy, handed corporations unlimited control of election advertising in the warped pretense that money equals free speech and that corporations are people.  The case the Court was deciding, whether an ad about Hillary Clinton was prohibited corporate interference in an election, was not directly related to its ruling. Dispensing with precedent on corporate funding of elections was apparently something that the right wing of the Supreme Court just had to get off its chest.

So now, instead of the U.S. Congress being an occasionally unreliable agent of international corporations, it is on track to become a wholly owned subsidiary.

With complete control of Congress comes complete control of the U.S. military, all its appropriations and all its weapons industries.  Today, the sale of armaments internationally is done promiscuously; it is a mere profit center to bolster CEO salaries and shareholder return.

Arms sales are often made to small or developing countries that could never afford the stratospheric expense if not for U.S. foreign aid dedicated to that purpose.

So, when China reacts with unshirted fury to weapons sales to Taiwan, as it did last week, some might wonder who to blame–the U.S. government or the profit motive of Boeing, Lockheed or Microsoft (yes, Microsoft).

Thanks to the Supreme Court, it shouldn’t be too long before that blurry, officially unacknowledged symbiosis between government decision and corporate action resolves into sharp clarity.  China can then confront the less than neighborly behavior of a corporation and it will indeed be the same as taking on the U.S. government, no questions asked.

Just as NAFTA, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been extensions of America, Inc., the new and regulation-free power of corporations to buy elections may create a U.S. military that is another nifty new international profit center for big business.

Multinational corporations are free floating, rootless, entities and will soon be the new sheriffs in town, with a guaranteed, ever expanding, tax payer financed military strong arm.

Local protesters?  Use Homeland Security to finish creating a police state and disappear them.

That pesky open internet?  Get rid of it.

Monsanto’s Round-Up resistant super weeds strangling the food supply?

Drug pusher GlaxoSmithKline hawking another deadly concoction for another made-up disease?

Resistance in the Middle East to Exxon’s coveted oil pipeline through Afghanistan?

Privatize social security?

With control of Congress, corporations will have the money- their own and ours – and the military manpower to handle any challenge.  They will also have the CIA, education, social security, Medicare and the rest of America’s institutions in their hands: All the goals of globalization, thanks to the Supreme’s gift, on an expedited timeline.

 

Foxy Knoxy and the Flying Marines

Cameron Salisbury

Amanda Knox, the 22 year old American undergrad studying in Perugia, Italy, has been found guilty of murder in the slaying two years ago of her British roommate, and sentenced to 26 years in prison.  It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely perp or a less likely outcome.

Amanda, who had worked three jobs to pay for her trip to Italy, had no history of violence and was shocked, after she volunteered to try to help the police, to find herself interrogated late into the night and physically abused to coerce a confession that the police, in time-honored and apparently international police fashion, decided to get from her.

There was no physical evidence linking her to the murder. The man whose DNA and blood were found all over the scene had already been found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 30 years.

The case against her was based on ephemeral evidence that must have seemed fantastical even to the Italian authorities. For example, the blanket thrown over the body, which prosecutors said would have been done by a woman, not a man, therefore made her guilty.  Or because, they said, there had to be more than one murderer. Her lapses during the interrogation were turned into proof of guilt rather than the mistakes of a frightened, novice scapegoat.  They concocted a tale of sex, drugs and violence that any fiction writer would have envied, and the British and Italian tabloids lapped it up.

As the character assassination grew more lurid, the tabloids created an alter ego for Amanda whom they named Foxy Knoxy, a promiscuous, drug addicted and drunken party girl.  The young woman they put on trial was Foxy Knoxy, and neither Amanda nor her attorneys could help her.

The jury was not sequestered.  The case was tried by a panel of judges and the verdict, we hear, was not unanimous.  Nevertheless, unless an appeals court overrules the lower court, Amanda Knox will be living a nightmare for the next 26 years at the expense of the citizens of Italy who, by all accounts, are more than willing to pay the cost of housing her in their prison system

What is going on here?  The conviction of this girl was such a transparent travesty that it seems clear that something else must be happening, as though the anger directed against her belonged somewhere else.

When it came to the facts, the guilt or innocence of Amanda Knox was not actually on trial.  It’s more likely that she was a stand-in for long simmering rage in Italy against the U.S. military residing there.

At the end of WWII American soldiers took up permanent residence in Italy, Germany and Japan.  It was the real, in earnest, beginning of the American empire which has since expanded to virtually every corner of the globe.

While host governments rationalize the financial benefit provided by the U.S. military, local citizens generally have an unadulterated and undisguised antipathy.  It is they who are up close and personal with the daily reports of drunken brawling, rape, murder and property destruction, as well as the arrogance and disdain of foreign youth wearing uniforms who treat them with a profound sense of entitlement and disrespect.

No place has been more vocal about their hatred of the chaos that accompanies American military occupation than the residents of Okinawa, Japan.  With good reason, they are so adamant that the Americans go somewhere, anywhere, else that it has even made news in the U.S.

Despite the best, and usually successful, efforts of the military to cover up crimes committed by soldiers against local residents, the only people left in the dark are Americans.  The citizenry of every country housing U.S. soldiers is well aware of atrocities committed by mostly young men who commit criminal acts and are abruptly shipped home and beyond the reach of local authorities.  Our military makes every effort to protect American soldiers from the consequences of their own behavior.

And that’s what they did with the incident of February 3, 1998, in Cavalese, an alpine ski town in Northern Italy.

That was the day that marine pilots flying at 500 to 600 miles an hour and 260 feet off the ground sliced the cable of a gondola carrying 20 skiers down a mountain in the Alps. No one on the gondola survived.  The dead suffered horrific injuries and could only be identified from the effects they were carrying.

The plane few back to base where the pilots initially feigned surprise that they had caused any damage. It was the ‘Who, me?” defense.

Both the plane’s speed and low altitude were violations of military policy, as was the pilot’s destruction of the cockpit video.  The deaths caused by the pilot’s  hot-dogging were violations of Italian law.

The plane’s crew was hustled back to Camp LeJeune, N.C., where the pilot was eventually accused, quaintly, of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman and dismissed from the armed forces.  There was no criminal prosecution and the U.S. government has never compensated the victims.

Needless to say, the Italians were outraged.  Unfortunately for Amanda Knox, it seems they still are.

Blowback faces American citizens around the globe for crimes committed by those acting for the U.S., including its military.  Tourists and travelers from the U.S. are fundamentally not safe in almost any foreign country.  After 9/11, we might ask if our government has foreclosed the option that we can be safe anywhere.

 

The Mindless Class: The Left’s Evil Twin

by Cameron Salisbury

Who are those people?  They look like ordinary citizens but they act like maniacs, screaming at members of congress who want to discuss health care coverage for the tens of millions, including themselves, who are either uninsured or may become so tomorrow.  They shout gibberish into the microphones of reporters, things like “I don’t have a job.  I don’t have health insurance.  Keep the government out of my business!”   No one could make this up.

They spread incomprehensible nonsense about President Obama’s birth, and prevent their children from listening to a U.S. president, THEIR president, speak to them in the classroom, as other presidents have in the past.

At first glance they seem to have sprung from the media’s imagination, manufactured to placate the mindless and fill time between stories devoted to happy talk about Wall Street and the ‘recovering’ economy.

It’s a strategy that has worked perfectly well with any number of other nonsense issues.  Currently there’s swine flu, a subject that fills up hours of broadcast time with over blown, irrational scare tactics for a disease that appears slightly less lethal than the common cold.

Before swine flu there was SARS, once sold as a major public health threat, which vanished from the airways and our memories without a trace; Bird Flu, which on a slow news day can still be jimmied up for an evening news cast; and any number of sex scandals used primarily to generate ill-will among the mindless and eliminate political actors disliked by the corporate media, like Eliot Spitzer who posed a major threat to the likes of Bernie Madoff .

There is lots of pandering to the vacuous about missing and murdered young women, whom the media much prefers over missing and murdered young men, or the utterly inconsequential acts of buffoons like Joe Wilson.

But nothing makes better television than mindless outrage with home made signs.

Is there any method to the collective madness of the tea party goers, or are the red-faced, eyes-popping insurrectionists just the close-minded, self centered nincompoops they appear?

Maybe both.

Hannah Erendt coined the phrase ‘The banality of evil’ to describe the daily capitulation to depravity in Hitler’s Germany. Her premise was that Hitler’s enablers, like Adolph Eichmann, were not sociopaths but ordinary people who substituted the will of the group for their own judgment.

Adolph Eichmann was one of the Nazis responsible for shipping Jews and others to Hitler’s concentration camps and gas chambers.  When brought to justice his defense, like that of virtually all war criminals, then and now, was that he was only following orders.  He had no particular feelings for or against those whose deaths he arranged.  He did it because he was told to; it was his job.

He did it because he was part of a group whose members all believed that mass murder of ‘others’ was ok.

Like others of the mindless class, Adolph Eichmann acquiesced to groupthink because he had either no capacity to think for himself or was simply too pathologically lazy to make the effort.  His judgment and his conscience were farmed out to his preferred collection of sociopaths.

When the group makes all value judgments, the life of the member gets much less complicated. There is no need to obsess about right or wrong. No need to consider the lives of others, the impact of personal decisions, the requirements of a sustainable neighborhood, the future or the past.  No need for morals, scruples or principles and no place for self doubt.  The group takes care of it all.

If we accept the premise that everyday, garden variety evil is the narcissistic need to escape the turmoil of thinking, the world of the mindless comes into better focus.

It’s no secret that the Progressive Left seems to have a monopoly on internet blog sites.  While sites like this one team with original writers sharing their ideas, the Right, deprived as it is of originality, creativity, and the ability to put a logical thought or a coherent sentence together, readily embrace marginally demented spokesmen who are given the power to reach millions by the corporate media, people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. These surrogates mirror the frustration and fear of the mindless class who get a fleeting sense of belonging and power as they channel their own destructive anger into a larger destructive force.

The Republican Party serves the interests of a tiny percent of Americans but gets around 50% of the vote in every election.  The great majority of those who vote Republican are voting against their own welfare.  If not for their intellectual emptiness, they’d likely be part of us.

Most of today’s tea party participants are mini, mindless, Adolph Eichmanns.  If their tactics, abetted by media collusion, successfully promote their negative agenda on health care, they will have accomplished the nearly impossible task of winning on a position that makes them losers.

The Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, standing in for civil society, refused to accept the idea that people can escape responsibility for their actions by blaming the group.   The court did not regard the refusal to think a viable defense.  Each criminal was punished alone.

But his victims were still dead.

 

As GM Goes …

Cameron Salisbury

With the government-mandated bankruptcy of one of the largest, longest-lived, and, until recently, most profitable manufacturers in the world, the takeover of the U.S. economy by the same East Coast forces that destroyed it is now complete.

The speed with which GM spiraled into insolvency was breath taking. Less than 18 months ago, just as the horrifying effects of Wall Street’s malfeasance were becoming clear, GM was profitably selling SUVs, making money for its shareholders and paying big ticket CEOs far more than they were worth, just like Wall Street.

Suddenly the rules changed.  In a spectacular reversal, GM was deceptively accused of failing to sell what consumers wanted to buy, of being out of touch and out of date, of having too many built in personnel costs which made them unable to compete with foreign auto makers whose short history in the U.S. left them free of pension liabilities.

The piling on was not done by vaudeville comedians as we might have expected.  No, in a priceless ironic twist, the proximate cause of their downward spiral was the economic wreckage brought about by their accusers: Wall Street and Congress.

Bankruptcy was immediately proposed as an option because, Wall Street-Washington decided, it was the only way to scrap the gains unions had made for pensioners, employees and their families and millions of others around the world.

No one said the words ‘unions busting’ right out loud.  They tidied up their intent by calling it a problem of ‘legacy costs’, giving an antiseptic feel to creating poverty by fiat.

The most viscerally determined for a GM bankruptcy were senators from the anti-union south who had been instrumental in subsidizing the establishment of foreign auto manufacturing in their own states.

When the Wall Street cabal was put in charge of dismantling the giant, pensioners and health care benefits were automatically toast, as were suppliers, many dealerships, all factory workers, and hundreds of thousands of families.  The successful, final sell out of middle class laborers was heralded by the new, rock bottom wage agreement struck with the crushed UAW which brought American auto workers in line with the low pay of foreign competitors.

Thanks to Wall Street and their elected enablers, the American manufacturing sector and its middle class wages have evaporated, almost as though they never existed.

No one has to be a fan of GM to understand that it was part of the last of the once-dominant American industrial sphere; to understand the importance of manufacturing to a healthy economy; or to understand that the real loser is the middle class which now has millions fewer jobs and livable incomes which are not coming back any time soon.

The American middle class was essentially created by automotive unions and the reluctant Big Three beginning in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1950s.  Everyone, on all continents, wanted the hard won wages and benefits the unions had wrested from the mighty industrialists and, to a large extent, they got it.

The middle class, which took root in all the western industrialized nations, was one of America’s most successful exports.  People all over the world had the money to buy American clothing, German cars or French champagne.

Every country used trade barriers in the form of import taxes to maintain a level playing field for its middle class and to protect national prosperity.

The formula worked well for 50 years until the marauders in charge of the free for all known as American capitalism found a way to take it all.  Not satisfied with great wealth, they wanted humongous wealth, sort of a corner on the wealth market.

At the top of their hate list, always and forever, were unions.

The campaign to destroy unions and usurp middle class prosperity started in earnest in the 1990s when Clinton’s White House pushed successfully for the passage of NAFTA, which was quickly followed by other free trade agreements.

Free trade meant that factory jobs could be outsourced around the globe to places with negligible labor costs and unprotected workers.  And then, voila! those cheap foreign made goods could be re-imported to the U.S. duty free.

The uneven playing field became the law of the land.

CEOs pocketed the profits cheap foreign labor provided and CEO pay went through the roof.  The penalty for dismantling a once vibrant industrial base was gone, replaced by unimaginable riches for those at the tippy top of the income pyramid.

American workers didn’t fare as well.  No longer in a position to bargain with management for the cost of their labor, they accepted whatever they were given and were happy just to have a job.  Earnings stagnated, inflation climbed, purchasing power eroded.

Cheap imported goods, an economy awash in credit, and declining real wages paved the way to disaster for millions of Americans struggling to cope with economic factors beyond their control.

Both unions and the middle class were headed for the trash bin of history with the full knowledge and consent of the governing class.

Workers in other parts of the world were equally vulnerable. Beginning in the late 1990s, factories and employees were discarded with reckless abandon in country after country, as capital moved to the next hot spot of miniscule wages and nonexistent worker protections, first Mexico, then Thailand or Vietnam or China.

In the U.S., each announcement of a factory closing, jettisoned employees, or increased outsourcing was met with a rise in the Dow Jones, accurately reflecting the hostility of capitalists for the worker.

As Wall Street revels in its taxpayer financed wealth bubble, foreclosures on Main Street escalate; reports of stress-induced suicides, homicides, child abuse and domestic violence increase; families move in together and try to make cramped living conditions work; tent cities sprout everywhere.

Millions have made their first ever trek to the unemployment office; seen their possibility of retirement vanish with their 401Ks; taken a pay and benefit cut; or were jolted with the realization that they and their families no longer had health insurance.

But a worse catastrophe may be in hiding in the shadows.

On Wednesday, June 4, in front of a congressional committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went public with the plan he had held close to the vest since his endorsement of the trillion dollar taxpayer giveaway to his Wall Street friends.  He says the U.S. must “maintain the confidence of the fiscal markets”, i.e., protect the interests of the Wall Street thugs and the banks-too-big-to-fail by imposing austerity measures on the U.S. population.  He wants major cuts in all public spending, including Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, education and health care.

With the big manufacturers facing bankruptcy and the Bernanke, Geithner and Obama triumvirate feeling the need to shred the safety net, it’s conceivable that the middle class slide will not end simply in a lower standard of living, but in poverty and civil unrest.

 

Bernanke’s Hammer

by Cameron Salisbury 

 

If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

 

And so it is with Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, the entire East Coast financial establishment, innumerable Ivy League economists including Paul Krugman, and people who really should know better, like the media, Congress and the President. 

 

Truly mindless fuzz continues to flow out of Washington, accepted as gospel by both its inhabitants and the media. For example, there’s the idea that the worldwide financial crisis can only be solved by the same institutions and people that created it; that the banking sector needs lots and lots of additional money and political support to solve problems that trillions of dollars so far have not; that months of nonexistent positive results means only that we haven’t handed financiers sufficient loot; that the failure to bail out Lehman’s is what caused this whole mess; that reinvigorating casino capitalism is the way out of the dilemma; that public outrage shows that the rest of us just don’t get it. 

 

Worse than senseless, the nonsense that passes for conventional wisdom in the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C., is worrisome on a number of levels.

 

As the International Monetary Fund and Timothy Geithner, an IMF director in a recent past life, can attest, rioting and revolution can be created in virtually any country as they were deliberately, again and again, in Asia and Latin America.  All it takes is ethically questionable economic policies designed to shift wealth upward and impoverish the nation’s population.  Citizens are shut out of the decision making process

 

Geithner is an experienced pro at abetting economic conditions that not only give windfalls to the wealthy but also cause chaos in the streets. The fact that he is well aware of the potential impact of his plans must be one reason for his careful opacity when discussing his – I mean, Treasury’s –agenda.  

 

Geithner, in collusion with Bernanke, wants to resurrect the casino sinkhole that has come close to hollowing out the world economy.  They want to repackage mortgage backed securities and other toxic garbage and sell it to investors through the TALF program, with the American taxpayer guaranteeing investors success.

 

No one could make this up.

 

Someone in charge should finally be getting the message that was roundly ignored when Geithner’s tax larceny came to light during his confirmation hearing:  He is the wrong man for any public job.

 

Ben Bernanke’s interview last Sunday on 60 Minutes was an object lesson in the deadly tunnel vision and groupthink at the top of the policy-making food chain. He insisted that the way to get the economy moving again was to give Wall Street financiers and bankers more funding to stimulate the credit market.  He seemed functionally unaware that trillions of tax payer dollars have failed to resuscitate anything but the bank accounts of CEOs and big investors–both national and international.

 

Bernanke advertises himself as a student of the Great Depression and has concluded that that entire episode would have been a nonstarter if the government had immediately bailed out the banks. Sound familiar?  Does it make any sense?

 

In 1930, the creation of the FDIC was still almost 4 years away.  Savers had no reason to believe that their money, a symbol of their security and their future, would be safe in a crisis, and indeed it was not. Had the FDIC been in existence guaranteeing deposits in 1929, there would have been no destabilizing runs on banks and the crisis of confidence that started the devastation may never have occurred. 

 

Bailing out depositors is in no way related to bailing out banks.

 

As long as deposits are insured, banks are fungible- which is proven every day as U.S. banks go under and are seamlessly absorbed by the FDIC, deposits, debts and all, consumers usually none the wiser.

 

As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke had access years ago to methods that could have reined in an out of control financial sector.  He used none of them.  In his words, “Mistakes were made.”  Apparently, no one is responsible.

 

He also failed to acknowledge that countries like Germany, which have refrained from looting their taxpayers to bail out the wealthy (much to Paul Krugman’s consternation ), have citizens who are doing better than we are because of their social safety net.  I could find no mention of any tent city for the homeless in Germany.  There is a growing number of them in the U.S.

 

Bernanke’s hollow attempts at populism – his declared anger at AIG for their misuse of tax money; his insistence that he is Main Street and not Wall Street – only underscored the impotence of the Federal Reserve as he has configured it.

 

Bernanke insisted that the trillions of dollars that he has authorized for bank bail outs are newly printed bills and not taxpayer money. That’s because there aren’t enough taxpayer dollars to go around. His unchallenged insinuation was that the new money is therefore cost-free for the nation, like it exists in some parallel universe.  Are we being punked?

 

Bernanke’s most mind blowing assertion during the 60 Minutes interview was the analogy he used to explain the necessity for the tax payer bailouts of the wealthy. He said it was like a neighbor’s house on fire because the owner had accidentally fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.  “The fire might endanger your house, too, so you call the fire department.”He said He He  

 

Oh, really?

 

Here’s the real analogy: A group of thugs breaks into your house and deliberately burns it down while the police look the other way.  The last thing you expect is to be forced to pay those delinquents for their smoke inhalation.

 

What you do expect is help while you rebuild the house: unemployment insurance for the duration, health care coverage, pension and social security protection, credit guaranteed by the government at reasonable rates. You want better police protection and severe punishment for the miscreants.

 

It’s OK with us if Wall Street, the banks-too-big-to-fail, and all the gamblers that kept them in business, wash into the Atlantic. We know that the bankers will be replaced by more responsible owners, by default. They could not possibly be replaced with LESS responsible owners.

 

Sixty Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley called Bernanke the smartest kid in the class, just like the media labeled Geithner a few months back.  

 

Couldn’t make this up.

 

The Stimulus and The Confidence Game

by Cameron Salisbury

The Sears appliances I bought last summer came with great teaser financing from Citibank available only if I took out a new credit card. The interest rate on the card was a bargain at only 19% because of my sterling credit history. The accompanying disclosure statement informed me that the rate could go as high as 32% if I screwed up and went over my credit limit, paid late, missed a payment, acted badly with any of my other creditors, jaywalked, yelled at my kids or did anything else they frowned on.

Their disclosure statement was not required to tell me that if I paid no more than their monthly minimum my balance would double every few years.

Last week, along with a notice that their interest charges were going up, they sent a note defending the increase by shamelessly blaming the current tough economic climate – the one that they have relentlessly and unapologetically done so much to create.

Everyone knows that U.S. consumers have put away their wallets. But while American consumption and the use of credit cards is dropping like a millstone, the total amount of outstanding debt remains ominously, bizarrely, unchanged (Federal Reserve, release G 19). Because the unregulated credit industry is allowed to change the rules, their interest rates and conditions, and your indebtedness in the middle of the game, spending less does not mean owing less.

In Detroit, the elderly freeze to death when their gas is turned off. In Florida, the formerly employed live in cars for months and longer. Roughly one in nine homes are now vacant and no one seems to have a good handle on whatever has become of the foreclosed families.

The evening news is filled with stories about the newly unemployed, the newly uninsured, and those watching in their living rooms feel a chill of recognition. They look so much like the rest of us. How long before we’re a part of, instead of a spectator at, society’s unraveling?

Despite the illogical daily bluster of the Wall Street swindlers, their academic and government enablers and TVs talking bobble-heads, the trillion dollar bail out of the financial sector, has not, will not, and cannot solve the nation’s economic problems.

All that ever actually sustained our financial system was an illusion that has evaporated: confidence in the protective capacity of our government and regulatory systems. The most critical obstacle to economic recovery now is the national sense of alienation from the institutions and the government we once thought would protect us from the capitalist crapshoot. The public’s deep sense of anxiety, distrust and betrayal, the crisis of confidence, will not be fixed until our institutions are, with or without full employment.

During the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt initiated regulatory reforms of Wall Street and the banking industry that restored a battered nation’s faith in the future. With the introduction of the Social Security safety net to protect the unemployed, the aged, the disabled and the widowed, the launching platform for the ‘American Century’ was in place.

It lasted 50 prosperous years until Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II systematically deep-sixed as many of those guaranteed protections as they could get away with, and handed the levers of the nation’s well-being to privateers. American economic power shifted from a manufacturing base to the mainly East Coast, mainly Wall Street, financial sector. Anti trust laws were decimated and mergers infested the economy leaving consumers with fewer and more expensive choices as well as declining wages and increasing responsibility for themselves, their families and their future. Now, corporations reign anew, the safety net is in tatters, and people are scared. Again.

Thanks to our politicians, much of the way back has been sealed off.. Shoring up American workers and American jobs is decried as ‘protectionism’ by the same lost souls in the media and government who brought us ‘free trade’ and the current national and personal catastrophe.

There won’t be a return to the American century, but there can be a good life in our future, and a workable transition now, if we strengthen the safety net while we work for re-regulation and responsive politicians. Here are my suggestions:

First, people thrown out of work by Wall Street grifters and their government enablers deserve a little dignity in the form of a guaranteed income for the duration. Unemployment benefits should be extended until the economy recovers, possibly ten years. Pay for it by yanking back, clawing back, and redirecting the $1.7 (so far) trillion bail out for banking and Wall Street hucksters whose behavior throughout has been the very definition of criminal, a fact that only our politicians seem to misunderstand.

Second, the banking system must be reformed from the ground up. The American people are starved for honesty, accountability and transparency in finances that now seem out of their hands and out of control. Bring ethics, reason and capitalism back to the financial sector by letting banks that have driven themselves into bankruptcy fail and regulating the new ones that form. Stop using the American taxpayer to protect the lawless from the results of their own behavior.

Usury laws must return to the financial system to keep credit users from being thrown under the bus by rapacious and unpredictable creditors, and to lessen the sense of chaos in the social fabric.

Third, stop foreclosures by freezing the teaser rates for anyone who still has a job and a house they want to keep. Our wealthy bankers can afford to make a reasonable profit instead of a windfall on every transaction, but if it can’t, well, taxpayers should foreclose them.
The feds have a huge problem with buying toxic mortgage assets because no decision maker wants to admit that they have no value. If derivatives were ‘marked to market’, investors could lose big time, and politicians Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner certainly don’t want to inconvenience the wealthy. Better to stick taxpayers with a fairy tale and let us restore those fortunes.

In return for our unwilling largesse, the least bankers can do is ‘mark to market’ personal mortgages so homeowners are paying on actual value instead of the false prices created by the policies of the banking system. The banks have it coming. Couldn’t happen to nicer people. Besides, what else are they using their bailout billions for?

The most recent ‘stimulus’ theory, that banks should reconfigure mortgages to 31% of a person’s income with the Treasury subsidizing the difference up to 38% of income, is crazy. We don’t need to provide additional taxpayer dollars to hedge funds. Banks should lower mortgage payments to 31% of income because we’ve already given them boatloads of loot! Like all the other bits of insanity drifting out of the fog in Washington, D.C., this one is on track to become the latest citizen-financed boondoggle.

Fourth, health care must be provided to the increasing numbers of uninsured by federally funding Medicaid and taking the burden off the fiscally drowning states. We must also rethink Medicare. To control costs we’ll have to give up the outdated, corrosive and costly third party payer system as well as the flagrant violation of common sense that prevents the government from negotiating drug prices. It will require political will and WE – you and I – have to supply that. It can’t be trusted to anyone else.

Fifth, forget the stop-gap teensy tax cut drivel and permanently eliminate the payroll tax on everyone making less than $75,000 a year as well as on the vulnerable small businesses that provide so many jobs. That will put another 7.65% of personal earnings into the economy and give businesses another 7.65% of payroll to use as needed.

Now that’s a stimulus!

The payroll tax is unconscionably regressive, hitting hardest those making the least. It should be replaced with a tax on all earnings above the $75,000 threshold, not just wages, and it should not be capped. That should guarantee the future of Social Security and eliminated one endless, tiresome conversation from the national discourse. Instead, maybe we can begin to discuss the cost of keeping military bases in 100 countries. Or we can talk about how to elect a responsive government.

Contributing their share to the Social Security system seems like the least the wealthy can do given the massive financial rewards they’ve received from the political and economic stability our tax dollars buy them. Not to mention the tax dollars that are now restoring their fortunes. I’m sure they’ll be happy to do their part.

That’s my plan.

In the meantime, I’ve cancelled my Citibank credit card.

 

Gupta for Surgeon General? Geithner for Treasury? Obama for Irrelevance.

It’s hard to believe that the ‘Change We Can Believe In’ candidate could have morphed into the ‘Are You Kidding Me’ man before he was even inaugurated.  It usually takes a little longer before we catch on to the fact that we have been hoodwinked by yet another amateur.

 

Obama’s early choices for cabinet positions and other posts were questionable from the start.  What is Hillary ‘We’ll Obliterate Them’ Clinton doing as the designee for Secretary of State?  Why is pit bull Rahm Emanuel the new chief of staff?  Why would a  ‘change’ administration keep holdovers from the Bush years? 

 

But, as events are now showing, worse choices were yet to come.

 

The nomination of a CNN lightweight still in his 30’s to be the top doctor in the U.S. simultaneously insults professionals in the fields of medicine and public health.  It demonstrates a shallow understanding of important issues by the new man in charge and his posse that is unnerving. 

 

Sanjay Gupta was probably the only medical spokesman the bunch had ever heard of because he appears on TV.  It’s a leap to believe that on-air exposure makes Gupta an expert at something besides reading a teleprompter.  The transition team would barely have had to scratch the surface to find respected, knowledgeable and experienced professionals who could handle the job without a back-up editorial team or pancake makeup. 

 

You can almost visualize the thought process that went into his selection: The transition team is sitting around discussing possible appointees for surgeon general. None of them know personally any public health leader. CNN is playing in the background and a  presentable looking young man begins a segment on health care.  Of course!  Make him the top doc!  We’re probably lucky they weren’t watching Scrubs.

 

Timothy Geithner’s consideration for Treasury Secretary exceeds the bounds of the ridiculous and encroaches on the borders of serious derangement.

 

Geithner was at Treasury in the 1990s, where he was heavily involved in the multiple IMF-inspired financial disasters in South America and Asia.  Then, during 2001-2003 he was at the International Monetary Fund as director of policy development.  IMF policies have been nothing less than abusive to desperate economies around the world.  In the quest for high returns for investors and in the service of a deeply flawed ideology, country after country was thrown into turmoil, complete with riots, by IMF demands. (Well documented in Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine, and others.)

 

There’s more.

 

According to Geithner’s biography, he was named president of the NY Federal Reserve in 2003.  He became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee and a member of the influential financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.  In short, Geithner was part and parcel of the current economic meltdown in the U.S.  He was also instrumental in saddling the U.S. taxpayer with trillions of dollars in bail out money to save institutions that are now proving beyond salvage, like Citigroup.  Preoccupied with using public money to subsidize his East Coast friends, he has done nothing to rescue the average citizen or the economy.

 

Geithner’s failure to pay taxes is arguably his greatest travesty.  If confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury he will become boss of the IRS, an organization that routinely dismisses employees for lesser transgressions than Geithner’s years of tax-paying chicanery.  He will become the appointed director or an agency that wouldn’t hire him. 

 

His Washington enablers want us to believe that Geithner is being  victimized for an ‘innocent mistake,’ as Obama called it.

 

Oh, please. 

 

According to IMF records, media and online sources, the chances that Geithner could have accidentally forgotten to pay $34,000 in employee Social Security/Medicare taxes is nil. 

 

The public is nor privy to a complete accounting of Geithner’s multiple years of tax-paying flimflam, but we do know that during Geithner’s tenure the IMF reimbursed their employees, separately and specifically, for the payroll tax with explicit admonition that it was to be forwarded to the IRS.  They also had a staff person dedicated to assuring that taxes were paid. None of that stopped Geithner from pocketing it. 

 

That was no ‘innocent mistake.’ 

 

That was tax fraud.  Instead of being nominated for Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner should be doing a perp walk.

 

The usual sequence is that we elect people who use their office to commit crimes and defraud us.  This time we have the opportunity to get a jump on the time table with a Treasury Secretary whom we know in advance is a cheat.

 

We’ve also learned more about Obama than we wanted to.

 

 

 

 

Requiem For Israel

by Cameron Salisbury

Israeli bombs rain down on Palestinian homes. U.N. schools are obliterated, relief workers are murdered, small children cling to their dead mothers for days before they are lucky enough to be rescued alive. In some neighborhoods, the smell of death lingers in the air as Israeli troops advance deeper into Gaza and more heavily populated civilian areas in retaliation for annoying but largely ineffective rocket fire. It is a world-wide public relations disaster, even among the notably clueless United States citizenry.

As a horrified world watches Israel demonstrate its military supremacy over a poor and unarmed population, something else is happening. If you listen closely, you might hear a sad death knell in the distance, and it isn’t for the Palestinians. What we may be witnessing now is Israel’s slow motion suicide.

In the late 1940s following World War II, the territory then known as Palestine and now known as Israel was handed by the victorious allies, free and clear with no strings attached, to the traumatized Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany, thereby creating a Jewish home state. Complicating matters were the Palestinians already living there.

Predictably, with the new nation of Israel created by fiat, by people who neither owned the land nor consulted those who did, it came with deeply embedded seeds of turmoil. The future of Israel depended on how they handled those seeds. They could choose friendship and reconciliation or they’d get the opposite, unending conflict.

When the Palestinians were given neither a voice nor a vote – nor compensation – as they were forcibly evicted from land that had belonged to them for centuries and herded into overcrowded, poor, refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, the die was cast.

Israel has enjoyed only brief, wary, interludes of peace since. The war-with-no-end illustrates beyond question the abject failure of Israel’s international policy during the nearly 60 years of its strife-ridden existence, its superior, American-made military capacity a useless menace.

Palestinian fury is now a violent, bottomless abyss shared by other Arab nations.

And Israel is a small heavily armed island surrounded by a sea of seething Arab bitterness.

Ringed by enemies, Israel could hardly survive alone, and it didn’t have to.

Israel’s best friend and consistent enabler is the United States, which underwrites Israel’s survival to the tune of approximately 3 billion American taxpayer dollars a year, dedicated almost entirely to buying armaments for use against Israel’s neighbors. Arabs hate the U.S., too.

Because Israel uses American dollars to buy its military prowess in the U.S., Israel is essentially the middle man between Uncle Sam and American weapons manufacturers, as well as an outsourced Middle Eastern military arm of the U.S. government.

The world is now changing rapidly, and for Israel that poses several troubling prospects.

First, a number of former third world countries, especially in Asia, have been developing with lightning speed and require increasing amounts of oil from the Middle East. Ominously for Israel, its Arab enemies find themselves with increasing leverage and a growing number of nascent allies, countries like China and Russia, who have little regard for the U.S. or its pet projects. Vladimir Putin is on record drawing a line in the sand, threatening retaliation for any aggression against Iran or Syria.

Worse, Israel’s strong-armed backer, supplier, and buffer has come upon hard times. The U.S. is currently battling a financial meltdown due at least in part to Arab fury at our complicity in the continuing geopolitical upheaval in their lands. Although nearly unreported by the U.S. media, Osama bin Laden has been quite clear in his demands that the U.S. withdraw its forces from the Middle East and relinquish its support of Israel in exchange for safety at home and abroad. What would U.S. citizens say if they knew?

Even before the U.S. went into its current economic dive brought on by that hotbed of capitalism, Wall Street, the downward spiral had begun. Government finances were stretched thin by the Bush-and-cronies mismanagement and ‘war on terror.’ Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent destroying and rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq in addition to the costs of maintaining a military empire around the world; in addition to the very expensive government bureaucracies now needed to defend the ‘homeland’ against terrorism; in addition to a domestic social services sector in meltdown with the increasing demands on Social Security, unemployment levels anticipated soon to reach double digits, and the concomitant increases in the need for unemployment insurance, food stamps and Medicaid.

And that’s just for starters.

America became a debtor nation with the advent of NAFTA and the decimation of the domestic manufacturing sector. Economists say that America is now bankrupt in all but name.

So far the U.S. response to its long simmering economic crisis has been less than confidence inspiring. A massive and speedy infusion of newly printed money was tossed into the economy, which could never have resolved the trouble caused by an out of control financial sector but could be depended upon to cause other problems. Like the devaluation of the dollar. Foreign investors, the props of the American economy, are racing for the exits, leaving behind trepidation about the next chapter in U.S. history.

None of this is good news for those in foreign lands whose borders depend on American strength. The days when the U.S. could reliably determine the world order are vanishing along with the days when oil producing nations can be kept in line with threats.

Unless Israel can get a solid grip on its own independent future, and soon, its days may be numbered, too.

 

Detroit vs. Wall Street: The Trillion Dollar Class War

by Cameron Salisbury

If anyone doubted that a class war is in progress, hidden beneath a variety of euphemisms, like ‘bail out’, ‘downsizing,’ ‘outsourcing’ and ‘NAFTA’, their doubts can now be given the decent burial that they deserve. There has been no more blatant act of class antagonism in recent memory than the apparent willingness of Congress and Wall Street’s appointed grifter, Henry Paulson, to let a major part of the American manufacturing sector die.

The difference between a diffident Congress respectfully requesting a teensy bit more information before handing Henry The-Sky –Is-Falling Paulson a $700 billion authorization, in record time and with no strings attached, stands in stark contrast to the hostility and derision directed at Detroit’s auto executives, who are responsible for actually making something useful and who are requesting a $34 billion guaranteed loan to help get them through the harshest economy in memory. An economy in freefall, by the way, that is the direct and immediate consequence of Wall Street and its Washington, D.C., enablers.

Until recently, auto manufacturers were selling their big, profitable SUVs, making money for shareholders and being applauded by investors. Suddenly, Wall Street speculators hijacked the oil industry, transportation and food prices skyrocketed, the economic core of the country, the homeowner, went into Wall Street-induced foreclosure, and before Detroit could turn its massive ship around and concentrate more of its attention on hybrids, SUVs were collecting dust on new car lots. A lack of foresight? Yes. Just like millions of homeowners who tried to get ahead of the curve. Just like the Congress that had deregulated so many markets that corrosion had seeped into the financial base forming the substructure of impending economic doom.

The auto executives were told that they couldn’t get a government loan without a specific plan detailing how they would use the funding. With a brand new set of standards that had been notably lacking when Paulson’s railroad came through, Senator Pelosi made clear: “No plan, no money.” Despite the negligence and incompetence of banks, Wall Street, and the U.S. Congress which have caused an international crisis that will certainly bring U.S. hegemony to an end, Paulson was never asked for a reasoned, intellectually honest plan for his bail out billions, which, as events quickly showed, he couldn’t have provided anyway.

Senators, deep in the depths of hypocrisy, castigated the auto executives for flying to Washington on private jets.

They suggested that the auto honchos step down from their jobs so that new management could be put in place.

The auto executives were even asked if they would forego their salaries for the requested loan.

None of these subjects was broached with Wall Street surrogate and ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Paulson.

The sight of U.S. Senators conducting a withering assault on representatives of the manufacturing sector was a sad spectacle made surreal by the participants themselves. The U.S. Congress and its approval of one free trade agreement after another has made virtually all American industry, with its environmental safeguards and middle class wages, noncompetitive in the global market. The entire industrial sector is well on its way to having a Southeast Asia or Mexico zip code. Legislators talk as though the U.S. manufacturing sector is a dispensable nuisance instead of a sign of strength, and when South Carolina’s republican governor Mark Sanford says the American auto industry is unnecessary (PBS, 12/3/2008), we have to wonder if this was their intent all along.

Richard Shelby, R-Ala, has been the most derisive of the industry’s critics. However, as USAToday noted on December 2, his state is home to Honda, Toyota and Hyundai plants, and has given $650 million in tax incentives to foreign manufacturers. The South in total has handed them $3.2 billion.

Critics say that auto workers are paid too much. If we’re talking about the CEOs there is no argument, although they are scarcely in the same league as Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who made $83 million in 2007, or Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein at $54 million.

The workers themselves make about the same as employees at Toyota and Honda, about $26 an hour. The real difference lies in the legacy costs of the Big Three. Although nonexistent at the foreign automakers with their new manufacturing operations, Ford, Chrysler and G.M. have decades of history including retired employees, pension and health benefits obligations. Added together and divided by the current workforce, their hourly employee cost of operation, they say, is $70. Politicians want Detroit to do away with its high legacy costs by ‘restructuring’ or declaring bankruptcy and letting a judge do it for them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Detroit’s auto industry is largely responsible for creating America’s middle class. Kicking and screaming, the auto companies in the 1940s and 1950s worked with their unions to provide decent pay and benefits. Then – voila! -their employees could not only buy the cars they made but also housing, appliances, and clothing, too. Because of the health care and pension benefits eventually built into their contracts, auto workers became some of the most economically secure citizens in the world.

All workers wanted what Detroit had made possible. Before 1960, the pay and benefits in the industrial sector had become the gold standard for every employee across the country. The quality of life of the U.S. middle class had become the envy of the world.

About 30 years ago, automakers began to take seriously the inroads being made by foreign manufacturers and, in the interest of remaining competitive, began serious efforts to ‘restructure’, that is, reduce the number of employees, pay and benefits. Free trade agreements beginning in the 1990s made circumstances nearly untenable for employer and employee. Detroit went into a downward spiral.

Now, with Washington politicians demanding that auto makers jettison their legacy obligations and cut wages, many in the ‘elite’ classes gleefully anticipate the complete annihilation of the remnants of the hard-won, historically unprecedented, social contract between employer and employee. With an estimated 3 million jobs at stake, this could mean the extinction of the remaining middle class wage earner and pensioner.

The devolution of the middle class coincided with the financialization and securitizaton of the economy, as money handling became more esteemed than making things. Free trade coincided with the announcement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the beginning of every evening news broadcast.

Now, the middle class is vanishing, facilitated by politicians who have enabled the death of unions, rewarded outsourcing, passed free trade agreements, annually increased the numbers of H1-B visas, deregulated the securities and banking industries, actively laying the groundwork for declining incomes and endlessly repetitive financial scandals.

If Congress decides to cut loose one of the last of the major U.S. manufacturers it could have enormous consequences for national security, not to mention the well being of millions of Americans. As our elected champions hand trillions of taxpayer dollars, without challenge or conditions, to a grossly negligent financial sector, it will signal a final chapter in a class war lost by those in the middle.

 

Repairing the Congress-Citizen Disconnect

by Cameron Salisbury

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s ‘emergency’ $700 billion bailout was authorized in record time by both houses of Congress despite the opposition of an estimated 80% of U.S. taxpayers, each of whom seems to have contacted his/her legislators more than once. For days, Congress was flooded with emails and calls with one message: No Wall Street bail out! When the bail out was fully funded, with lightning speed but no hearings, logical justification or concrete plan, it became clearer than ever that the opinions, wishes, demands of the electorate are scarcely worth the cost of the ballots they cast.

Although the immediate cause of the current economic meltdown was the deregulation of Wall Street, banks and the financial services industry, this was far from the first time that citizens have been sold out by elected representatives doing the bidding of Big Business. In fact, dismantling the regulatory/consumer safety net and throwing the taxpayer under the bus has become a way of life in Washington.

We prefer safe drugs. Instead, we get FDA approval of drugs that sicken and kill us. When the body count reaches a boundary of tolerance, they are withdrawn until Big Pharma’s lobbyists can wrangle them back on the market. This game earns billions for Big Pharma and is worth every calculated penny they pay lawmakers and their victims.

We prefer safe and fuel efficient vehicles. Instead, we get what the auto makers decide to serve up, and that is neither notably safe nor fuel efficient. Detroit’s auto industry is now insisting that they are entitled to their share of the buy out billions. They were part owners of Congress long before the current economic crisis, so what they want now is simple payback.

We prefer a sane and reasonable energy policy. Instead, we are held hostage by an unregulated energy sector that rewards run-amok speculation. In 2008, speculators single handedly raised the price of oil to the extent that the economy threatened to grind to a halt. After the price of food, consumer goods, and transportation skyrocketed, after we were left with a lowered standard of living and Congress belatedly threatened action, they crawled back into their holes and oil prices returned to a semblance of normal. Today, with the tacit approval of a complicit Congress and in conjunction with the rest of the economic crisis, the damage done by Big Oil’s engineered bubble appears irreversible.

We prefer an ethical, honest government that understands the need to protect the economy, the environment and citizens with responsible regulation. Instead, we get the likes of Henry Paulson and Nancy Pelosi, so heavily subsidized by their corporate sponsors that they lose sight of public accountability and, I suspect, their own consciences.

How else to explain an AIG? Even in the Land of Bail Out Oz, these delinquents are in a class by themselves, done in by a highly lucrative and utterly irresponsible insurance swindle called credit default swaps. There is no rational justification for rewarding this 21^st century casino, and the gamblers – whom they prefer to call ‘investors’ – who kept it in business, with one cent. And yet, their heavy lobbying has paid off, once again, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars even as they continue to throw expensive parties and, like the rest of the bail out jackpot winners, hand billions in bonuses to their amoral managers – whom they prefer to call ‘Wall Street elites’ – who are at the root of the turmoil. It would make as much sense to throw a few billion at Starbucks and Caesars Palace.

Will anything change with a new administration? We have clues. President-elect Obama was among the first to say the bail out was needed immediately, no questions asked, no second thoughts about disregarding the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. If he had any concerns about the outsized, poorly reasoned giveaway to the reckless greedy, or to the concept of a Wall Street bail out as absurd as it was intellectually dishonest, he never showed it.

And this episode wasn’t the first clue. As others have documented, President-elect Obama’s voting record has been enough to give most supporters pause, as were his speeches at various high dollar fundraisers during the campaign. The myth that the Obama campaign was financed by legions of individual $10 donations is belied by his campaign disclosure statements (www.opensecrets.org).

Obama’s first, immediate, appointment was Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Emanuel is a temperamentally volatile man who never met a war in the Middle East that he didn’t want the U.S. to finance and then star in, and he never met a free trade agreement that he didn’t love. Does he sound like a first round draft pick in a ‘change’ administration? Or does he sound more like a plant preordained by big donors to further their own agendas?

It seems likely that Barack Obama is the best person for the presidency that we could have elected. He is a reasoning, intelligent man of goodwill, a difference of light years from the mean-spirited, short-sighted, unapologetic corporate hustler that he replaces.

But it is naïve to think that he is not caught in the Washington money game or that whatever remains of his ideals, after four years in the Senate and a presidential race, are not prone to extinction by the groupthink that inhabits the East Coast.

Even with Barack Obama as the president elect, our democracy remains fragile, its future uncertain. Here are a few is ideas on how we might restore it.

First, everybody knows that private money should get out of politics. Barring that, politics should get out of Washington.

So, first, close Washington down. Zip it up and return it to the Indians or give it to the Smithsonian for a cautionary display of how not to do democracy.

Elected representatives have shown themselves spectacularly incapable of managing the public trust when they flock together. Grouped, away from the voters who sent them, they make easy prey for corporate predators dispensing lots of money. Events repeatedly show that it is nearly impossible for most of them to rouse their brain cells to independent activity in a crowd. We need to get them out of their noxious geographic comfort zone and send them home.

Given the current economic crisis, we should expect lawmakers to willingly relinquish their cushy, expensive Washington pads and establish primary offices in their home states, among their friends, neighbors and voters. They could thereby patriotically save the taxpayers at least part of the money they gave away to Henry Paulson. They would have an allowance for staff, offices and limited travel. All meetings would be conducted by telecommunication, like it’s the 21^st century.

Further, lawmakers will be reminded daily, up close and in person, of the wishes of those who brought them. There won’t be another misbegotten, taxpayer-financed, Wall Street bailout when directives are delivered by the irate face to face and in the same time zone.

Although this plan will not keep lobbyist entirely at bay, it should make their lives considerably more difficult, a big plus.

Next, the talking heads residing in the New York-Washington corridor should be banned from the air waves. They talk only to each other, being elites and all, and not one of them has had an independent or creative thought in years. We don’t need any more pundits from Yale, Columbia or NYU; we don’t need Brian, Katie or Charlie; we don’t need anyone else from an East Coast think tank giving us their pompous, arrogant version of reality.

There is a continent of alternatives. Let’s get an assessment of the options to Paulson’s opinions from, say, an economist at the University of Missouri; an ungarbled analysis of the Russia-S. Ossetia situation from someone without a vested interest in getting it wrong, maybe a political analyst from the University of Idaho; let’s find people who understand the catastrophe of a toxic ruling class and who won’t lose their jobs for telling the truth right out loud. Because we’ve had enough of the smug politics of condescension.

Getting our news from the western side of the Alleghenies and keeping our elected lawmakers home are actions that could go far toward saving our democracy.

If the United States can elect an Obama, it can do anything.