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reversal, GM was deceptively accused of failing to sell what consumers wanted to buy, of being out of touch and out of date, of having too many built in personnel costs which made them unable to compete with foreign auto makers whose short history in the U.S. left them free of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

 

Trickle Up Poverty and the Paulson Railroad

                                              by Cameron Salisbury

 

This is the reverse of the way deregulation was supposed to work.  It was supposed to be trickle down prosperity, remember?  Ronald Reagan and successive cadres of snake oil salesmen repeatedly convinced our bought-out, brain dead representatives in Washington  that the way to make everyone better off – to lift all boats, they said – was to shred the regulatory safety net that had functioned so effectively since the Great Depression to protect the economy, the country and the consumer from the insatiable, creative greed of Wall Street. The sole purpose of the decades of deregulating rules and markets, every step of the way, was to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. And, boy, did it work!  When shredding the rules didn’t make the rich filthy rich fast enough, they cut taxes, too!

 

On Main Street, millions of jobs were lost as employers were rewarded by the American government for packing up and scurrying overseas or importing cheap foreign labor.  The deficit skyrocketed as Americans bought foreign goods that were no longer manufactured at home.  As oil prices ballooned thanks to Wall Street speculators, everything became more expensive, and the formerly well paid workforce, many of whom now slaved for minimum wage at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, was barely keeping up.  The recession hit Main Street but there was no talk of relief, bail out, re-engineering trade agreements, or in any way helping desperate citizens.

The foreclosure crisis was the latest blow brought to U.S. citizens by the not-so-invisible hand of Wall Street.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to foresee the reckoning that has now settled in.  When drive-by mortgages are handed out like candy at Halloween; when documentation is barely needed to prove identity much less an income; when money is thrown at people with an interest-only repayment plan; when loans are given with no down payment and then the unholy mess is passed off to securities firms to butcher and repackage as top grade mortgage backed investments and sold to trusting investors, well, everyone  remotely connected to the real estate industry could see it coming.  Everyone, that is, with the exception of investors with pension plans and 401Ks who were kept in the dark, and are now being castigated as ‘speculators’ whose losses, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson quaintly observes, they deserve. (“They were in it for the good times; they have to take their medicine when times aren’t good.”) He’s made no such pronouncement about the bail outs for AIG, Bear Stearns, money market mutual funds, Freddie or Fannie.

The pain from Main Street threatened to trickle up to Wall Street, and Paulson is doing his level best to make sure all his Wall Street friends are inoculated against it.

 

Exactly who is Henry Paulson, this white knight of Wall Street who is now screeching that, for the good of the Whole World, the Street must be protected from the consequences of its own fraud, deception and irresponsibility?  Well, until two years ago he was the head of Goldman Sachs.  Since Paulson was at Goldman Sachs as late as 2006, he is directly involved in the current circumstances of a shaky Goldman Sachs and of the Wall Street meltdown.  Bringing this fox into the hen house to fix the financial mess is nothing less than a travesty.  His conflict of interest is palpable; his complicity, transparent. He shrilly threatens Congress with an instant Armageddon if his bailout demands aren’t met NOW! and appears on every talk show that will have him to do his Chicken Little routine.  It’s been a remarkable display of overweening, self righteous, arrogance and narcissism.  There is never any voice of reason sharing the stage with him.

 

What unadulterated hogwash!

 

The scare tactics that railroad decision makers into instant action with no time for responsible discussion are the way that the Patriot Act was passed and Homeland Security established. It’s the method of a huckster.  And just to make sure everyone understands that they’re being taken for a one-way ride to the edge, Paulson insists that his decisions are not to be reviewed by ‘any court or any administrative body.’  Wouldn’t that make him king?  Unprecedented.

 

We have some questions.

 

First, if Lehman Brothers didn’t need bailing, why did Bear Stearns?  Was Bear Stearns just the first of many bad decisions?

 

Second, the Federal Housing Administration, a stodgy, effective agency of the U.S. government, has been ethically and efficiently helping people buy homes for many years before anyone had ever heard of privatizing profits and socializing losses through the likes of Freddie and Fanny.  Why does Paulson want to bail out those corrupt, badly managed, agencies? Let the FHA take over their function and flush away those poorly conceived travesties.  No Bail Out!

 

 

He also wants to bail out private money market funds, to save the big guys who could have had insured deposits in a bank money market but chose to go for a better return. Are you melting with sympathy yet?  Who is next?  Starbucks?  What utter idiocy.  No Bail Out!

 

 

If Paulson’s next questionable proposition, that AIG needs to be saved to keep the world’s financial system from crumbling, is true, why hasn’t the federal government moved in lock, stock and barrel and tossed the bums out? If AIG is so important, it clearly needs the adult supervision sorely lacking in its private sector management, the type of management provided everyday by the maligned federal bureaucracy. The federal workforce is among the most ethical, intelligent and corruption-free set of workers anywhere.  Why?  Partially because they work within a set of strict regulations. 

 

Why do taxpayers need the bail out that Paulson is trying to railroad through congress?   What is there to gain? What is he saving us from? 

 

Pension plans and 401Ks have already taken their hit.  The foreclosure crisis shows little sign of abating. Does he think that he can save American financial hegemony if he just taxes us enough?  Too late.  No country, no international institution, will trust Wall Street or the American financial system again for a very long time, bail out or no.  So No Bail Out! 

 

Our overweening financial hegemony is a thing of the past, and the value of the dollar is quickly following. If Paulson wanted to save Wall Street, he could have made a good start during the decades he spent there by firing his lobbyists.  But that was never what he wanted.  What he has always wanted is the utter freedom to act recklessly and have the taxpayer pick up the tab.  And it’s a last gift that he wants to leave his friends before he leaves office with Bush.

 

So here is an idea or two on how we might solve the problem of the Wall Street-Washington ‘elite’, as they so nauseatingly like to think of themselves, who have done us so much damage.

 

First, abandon Washington.  Let it return to the swamp from which it arose or turn it into an extension of the Smithsonian.  Help to balance the budget by keeping all congressmen and senators home in the districts that elected them. Their constituents will have daily contact with them, making sure the elected ‘elites’ remember who brought them. The elected will be given a budget to maintain local offices, their staffs and for limited travel.  All communication will be carried out by teleconferencing and other nifty 21^st century techniques currently used by many organizations. One of the numerous benefits of this plan is that the lives of lobbyists will become significantly more difficult. 

 

Second, ban the appearance on national airwaves of any expert, pundit, or talking head living in the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C.  We don’t need to hear from even one more political analyst from NYU, economics professor from Yale or China expert from Columbia.  We don’t need Sally Quinn’s fatuous Washington gossip or Brian Williams’s intense eyebrows.  Since they only listen to each other, being ‘elites’ and all, not one of them has had an original thought or creative idea in years. 

 

The people who are capable of a realistic sense of the health and well being of the country live inside the country, not on the Atlantic edge.  We should get our economics analysis from a professor at the University of Iowa, our assessment of the S. Ossetia situation from an unbiased analyst from the University of Minnesota, a discussion of the real meaning of the Wall Street fraud scandal from someone at, say, the University of Oregon.  You get the idea.

 

With an unknown number of Henry Paulsons running amok through the East Coast government and media, its time we shifted our class of experts far away from their old geographic comfort zone.

 

Send an email to your senators and congressman now.  Go to http://www.congress.org for easy access.  Say it in small words that they will understand.  No Wall Street Bail Out!  No Paulson Railroad!

 

 

Barack, Joe: STOP IT!

by Cameron Salisbury

Without a doubt, you are two very nice guys.  Anyone would like to have you for friends, have you over for dinner, go to your parties, sit down with you and discuss current events. Unfortunately, you are not running for best friend.  So STOP IT! Now! Unless your campaign develops a harder edge, and you acquire weapons for dealing with your street tough opponents other than your reasoned civility, your victory may be another missed Democratic opportunity.

 

Remember 2000? That was the election that Gore lost when a majority right wing Supreme Court, in a fit of dementia, said so.  It was a breathtaking subversion of democracy that will live in infamy, but Gore was such a nice guy that he never raised his voice against the decision. When Karl Rove flew Brooks Brothers thugs into Tallahassee to intimidate election workers, Gore maintained his fastidious silence and wouldn’t let his campaign spokesmen comment either.  Ditto when Jim Baker painted the Democrats as anti-American when they tried to enforce federal election laws regarding absentee ballots. Al Gore, in all his niceness, effectively sold out the majority of voters and the nation. If Gore had not rolled over at every step in the process, the history of the early 21^st century might read differently.  Our future as a nation might be different, too.  But, then, he was a nice guy.

 

And then there was John Kerry and the election of 2004.  As Kerry was telling his campaign workers that they were not to comment on the sorry Bush record of using daddy’s influence to evade military service during the VietNam war, Republican goons were putting together the swift boat ad questioning Kerry’s patriotism and calling a real hero, a liar.  Kerry, a nice guy to the core, could never bring himself to call a well dressed bully a thug.  He, too, lost the election despite being smarter, better prepared, and less beholden to the forces of evil, also known as the oil companies and their henchmen, like Dick Cheney.

 

It’s been very nice of Barack and Joe to remind voters of their respect and admiration for McCain, a great American, they say.  But there has been a notable lack of bonhomie coming from the other side. So do us a favor, guys, and STOP IT!  McCain is a great many things that should inspire contempt rather than glowing praise and there is evidence that his health is more marginal than he wants us to believe. So no more praise, please. Talk to your audience about the Republican candidates in terms that matter.

 

While it makes pragmatic sense to steer clear of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, as well as her mother’s decision to put the hapless girl in the spotlight as a sacrifice to her own ambition, it makes less sense to tell your staff that anyone who alludes to Palin’s self absorbed agenda will be fired.  In fact, I think I hear the muted laughter of high-fiving Republicans right now.  We understand that Barack was born to an 18 year old who was probably unmarried, but you don’t call ‘Just Say No’  a sex education policy.  Palin is a walking, talking neon sign for Republican fuzz and hypocrisy, yet your campaign treats her like fragile glass.  STOP IT!  She’s a politician! Even without mentioning Palin’s family life, your campaign should be capable of finding a way to discredit her.  There are sooooo many issues to choose from.

 

And another thing.  In attacking your record and in representing their own, Palin and McCain aren’t engaged in ‘misrepresentation’, ‘misstatements,’ ‘exaggeration’ or any of the other media fuzz designed to hide the truth, and which, so far, you are condoning with your silence.  So STOP IT.  They are liars as everyone paying attention knows.  So you can use the word.  L-i-a-r-s.  Try saying it out loud.  According to media reports they are planning swiftboat ads against you, so you need to step up both your passion and your vocabulary.

 

The problem is that neither Barack nor Joe are as implacably, fanatically, angry as their opponents, and we’re fast reaching a point where the high road will have to be option and not a calling.  But who is there to take on the rabid Republicans?  Hillary refuses to engage Palin, choosing instead to concentrate her remarks on both members of the ticket.  Joe “I-don’t-do-zingers” Biden is saying the right things in his own colorless way, apparently relying on his big smile and affability to get him to the vice-president’s mansion. Barack is being his aloof, cerebral self, discussing the issues without fire or passion, occasionally sounding as though he was reading from a boring script.  

 

At the moment, no one is galvanizing the Democrats even though there is a popular, smart, political genius pacing the sidelines, camera-ready, media savvy and anxious to take on the lies, distortions and slick Republican nonsense, as well as the media, and with quotable flair.  Bill Clinton could be the Democrats best friend in this election and he does do zingers, so, Barack and Joe, why are you keeping him leashed to the sidelines ala Gore and Kerry?  STOP IT!  Put him to work today! Let Bill Clinton put McCain/ Palin into the sound bites that neither of you are comfortable with.

 

What is the difference between a pit bull and a Democratic candidate?  One is made of papier-mâché.  You choose.

 

 

 

Obama’s Veepstakes: The REAL Dream Team

by Cameron Salisbury

 

 

Now that the national guessing game has turned to Obama’s vice-presidential possibilities and commentators everywhere are discussing their lists and preferences, it’s time for some serious vetting.  Despite the competence and accomplishments of those on the lists, many are obvious nonstarters. 

 

Hillary, for example.  A few months ago the media was propelling her as almost a sure thing. They gleefully proclaimed, over and over as they are wont to do, that her addition to the ticket would combine her strengths with Obama’s. A Dream Team! What’s not to love? Little has been heard of this inspiration since Jimmy Carter matter-of-factly noted the obvious:  it would also combine their negatives.

 

Onward.

 

General Wesley Clark makes a lot of lists.  However, the fact that he’s a four-star general and a Rhodes Scholar can’t compensate for the awkward feel he brings to the Democrats.  Although he’s now a convert to the progressive cause and has been a good friend and supporter of Hillary, he’s made statements in the past that sounded right-wingish and his opinions on a number of issues when he ran for president in 2004 were muddy.  Despite his keynote address at YearlyKos, we might be pardoned for wondering who he really is. 

 

Kathleen Sebelius, twice elected Democratic governor of red-state Kansas, also seems to make everybody’s list.  She has done tough-minded work for conservation and civil rights in her state against pressure from a Republican legislature. But given a national audience after Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address, she failed to cash in on the golden opportunity.  The image left in the mind of the viewing public was not of strength, resolve or the vice presidency.  Stuff happens.

 

Janet Napolitano (AZ) has been another noteworthy Democratic governor in a red state.  Despite her resume, it doesn’t seem reasonable to expect that the addition of a female, any female, to the ticket with a black man is going to boost Democratic chances.  Remember the misogyny on display during the primary season?  Ms Napolitano is only 50.  We should see more of her in the future but now is not her time.

 

Senator Joe Biden and former governor Bill Richardson suffer from the same electorally fatal condition:  Failure to excite.  Biden is one of the more hawkish Democrats, which will not play any better in the national election than it did in the primary season. 

 

Richardson makes much of his Latino roots, ignoring the immigration hot button and seeming not to understand, as Obama does intuitively, that ethnicity is not a suitable qualifier for national office.  Further, he publicly and unnecessarily betrayed his good friend Hillary by endorsing Obama, and Hill’s supporters have long memories. Richardson seems to lack good judgment at crucial intersections.

Several lists contain the name of Senator Evan Bayh, (IN) for reasons that are entirely unclear.  He’s another legacy politician – the son of long-time Indiana Senator Birch Bayh.  He likes tax cuts and the Wall Street Journal likes him, leading some to wonder if he is actually a closet Republican. If he left his senate seat, a Republican in his very red state would be selected to replace him, jeopardizing the Democrats majority in the senate, such as it is. Worse, he and Obama seem to share little of the same vision.  

 

Another you’ve-got-to-be kidding prospect who makes a surprising number of lists is Senator Chuck Hagel (R,NE).  His main qualification seems to be his strong anti-war position which apparently compensates in some minds for his solid Republican  credentials.

 

With Senator Jim Webb (VA), we’re getting closer.  Senator Webb is a charismatic, no-nonsense, don’t-b.s.-me, type that Democrats have hungered for. He is pro-choice, pro-prison reform, and supports same sex unions.  He is nearly as disdainful of John McCain as he is of George Bush and Little George’s war. So far so good.  But if he were Obama’s running mate, Republicans would make sure that he answered for his past misogynistic comments at a time when plenty of women are incensed over the treatment Hillary received during the primary.  Webb has said that “women can’t fight” because they are biologically unsuited for combat; he called the Naval Academy “a horny woman’s dream”; he derided the Navy’s attempt to clean up its act after the infamous 1991 Tailhook sexual harassment scandal.  Jim Webb for Secretary of Defense, maybe, but not for vice president. 

 

And now for the real contenders:  Senators Sherrod Brown (OH) and John Edwards (NC).  Both are economic populists, opposed to the war and against free trade as it is now engineered.  If Sherrod Brown stepped down from the senate, the Democratic governor of Ohio could appoint another Democrat to replace him. Not to mention that Ohio is a delegate-rich state.  But few outside of the Beltway and Ohio have heard of him.  To make him a positive addition to the national ticket would require some effort.

 

John Edwards, on the other hand, is a known quantity. As a result of the polling that was done during his losing presidential campaign, we know that Edwards has the priceless advantage of being both well known and well liked. The polls repeatedly showed that he was the single Democratic presidential candidate who could beat any Republican challenger, any day of the week, across the board – a remarkable fact that the media never saw fit to mention in their public relations blitz for Hillary and Obama.

 

Obama is currently looking unbeatable.  His choice of a running mate may be almost irrelevant to his chances of winning the election, which gives him the opportunity to create a ‘dream team’ to run the country based on his own political and economic vision.  He doesn’t have to compromise by slotting a running mate to attract the greatest numbers of delegates or for the sake of symbolism.  Adding a John Edwards, or even a Sherrod Brown, to his ticket would help to reassure his base of his real intentions as he tacks to the right on more and more issues, like NAFTA, gun control, wiretapping and campaign financing. 

 

In fact, at the rate he’s now modifying his positions, he may need all the help he can get by Election Day.