Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Obama’s Progressive Street Cred

The selection of Rick Warren for the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration is troubling, to say the least. Many progressives are rightly outraged at the selection of a man who is virulently anti-choice and homophobic. Yet, this is only the latest in a series of Obama decisions that has left many progressives wondering who it was, exactly, they voted for. Apparently, “change” looks a lot like the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel is back. So is Eric Holder, formerly Deputy Attorney General. Most conspicuous of all, Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State. A bevy of liberal-but-not-quite-progressive apologists have tried to explain away all of Obama’s decisions. Here is a list of some of their justifications:

• Obama is pursuing Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach. Authors of this justification also cite Lyndon Johnson’s phrase: it’s better to keep one’s enemies “on the inside, pissing out” rather than “on the outside, pissing in.” By keeping his enemies in the White House, those enemies are not in Congress or on K Street trying to defeat his plans.
• Remember how we all said for six months that Obama’s qualifications don’t matter? Not so much. As such, he’s surrounding himself with a group of people who have experience working in a presidential administration, and the last Democratic presidency was Bill Clinton’s, so it only makes sense that he would choose people from there.
• Obama is sneakier than he seems (think I, Claudius, I suppose). He’s putting a lot of center-left (and, in some cases, center-right) Washington establishment politicians in key positions to pay lip service to that establishment. Don’t worry, it’s only a front. The real reforms are going to happen, but from behind a veil of mainstream non-reform. That’s the only way he can get things done down there.
• Obama does not want to continue the divisive politics of George W. Bush. Even though it might anger those on the hard left, Obama would rather heal and reconcile than punish.  Turn that cheek!

Some of these justifications are disturbing. The last one, that Obama should be conciliatory instead of punitive, is put forth by people who believe that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration should not be investigated. The country needs to heal, they say. It’s time to get on with the business of the United States, where “business” is defined so as to exclude investigations of the previous administration. Of course, this logic ignores the fact that the law has been broken. As Glenn Greenwald has observed, politicians are more than ready to throw the full force of the law at marijuana dealers, but when it comes to prosecuting their own, politicians are equally ready to be lenient, even though the marijuana dealer harmed no one and the politician may have, oh, I don’t know, been responsible for torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping at the least. When crimes are committed, they should be investigated and prosecuted – not just for poor people, but for everyone, including politicians. For Barack Obama to suggest that Bush administration criminals should go free is to suggest that politicians live in a special class above the reach of the law. It also encourages more illegal activity in the future, once it is known that the government won’t prosecute those activities.

Furthermore, it’s not even up to Barack Obama to decide what is or is not investigated. The cult of personality surrounding him is great (in fact, it contributed to getting him elected), but even though we like him we must not forget that, as the president, he has constitutional limitations. It was irresponsible for the media to even ask what Barack Obama thought about Joe Lieberman being kicked out of the Democratic caucus. On November 5, Obama’s life as a senator ended, even though he didn’t officially resign the position until three weeks later. The president has absolutely no say – none! – in the operation of Congress. It would be different if Obama were acting in his capacity as a senator, but after winning the presidential election, especially in a nation eager for a new leader, any notion of Obama acting solely in his capacity as a senator would be extremely naïve. Obama must repudiate the unconstitutional powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself, either through complete fabrication or malicious misreading of constitutional law.

Given his opinion of things like same-sex marriage (he tactfully says that same-sex couples should not be allowed to “marry” as such, but then says that they should have the same rights as heterosexual couples), NAFTA/CAFTA, and Israel, no one could confuse him for a true progressive. Obama’s apologists rationalize his decisions by pointing out that Obama never claimed to be a progressive at all!

Or could they? George W. Bush’s method of saying-without-saying is well-documented. While he never explicitly said that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, there is definitely a reason why, in 2001, virtually no Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible, but in 2003, one third of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Could it be that Barack Obama, whose campaign P.R. was spectacular, performed the same saying-but-not-saying function? Yes, it is entirely possible that Obama clothed himself in the cloak of progressivism while still wearing the mainstream Democrat’s clothes underneath. He has suggested massive new spending on entitlement programs, but he wants to increase the size of the military. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, but he voted in favor of retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the administration in warrantless wiretapping. His foreign policy goals consist of using real diplomacy instead of threats, but he voted in favor of NAFTA. He wants to provide government health care for people who have no health care, but he stops short of suggesting a universal-payer system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s. Obama’s positions are a wash: for every progressive-sounding idea, there is another conservative-sounding one to balance it out.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that Obama never suggested anything, but that he was forthcoming about his non-progressive credentials. It could be that we, the progressive Americans, were so thirsty for a change that we latched onto the only candidate (outside of Dennis Kucinich) who even brought up the issue of health care reform (at those early Republican primary debates, not a single candidate brought up the issue of health care), social reform, and getting out of Iraq (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards failed on at least one of these). We projected onto him the candidate we wanted him to be, ignoring the fact that he was not that candidate. Did we set ourselves up for disappointment? Yes, that is possible, too.

And then there’s the argument that all this complaining is pointless, that Obama isn’t even the president yet, and we should all just wait and see what happens on Jan. 20. Well, Rick Warren will happen Jan. 20, and that gives me even less optimism that, at noon on that day, Obama will suddenly throw aside his centrist mask and shout, “You fools! You thought I was just like Bill Clinton! But you were wrong! Free health care for everybody!” Agreeing to take part in Warren’s Saddleback (which sounds dangerously like “bareback”) debate with John McCain, Obama could conceivably have been seen as paying lip service to evangelical Protestantism, just like every president since Nixon has had to do. But putting Warren on the bill for Inauguration Day? Imagine if George W. Bush had hired Hillary Clinton to give a speech at his second inauguration. Yeah, it’s like.

Most troubling in my opinion, though, is Obama’s own insistence, ever since March of 2007, when he announced his candidacy, that he is not an ordinary politician. His grassroots, fifty-state strategy was unparalleled in its success. His speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was intelligent and it treated the American people as though they, too, could understand long speeches that contained nuanced thoughts, as opposed to the Manichean sound bites of George W. Bush. His political maturity happened after the Vietnam War era, and, as Andrew Sullivan has suggested, the very core of his being is not instilled with a reflexive fear of Republicans and conservatism.

Conservatism demands the acknowledgment of a false dualism in every aspect of life, with the promise that conservatism will lead people to the correct side of this duality. Democrats buy into this framework and then try to argue the opposite side. The true progressive would never let the Republicans frame the debate and then proceed to work within their ill-conceived framework. To the progressive, there is no debate about whether or not health care should be free, or if there should be a premium for minimum services, or if the government should control it. The answer is: the current system of privatized health care doesn’t work and it should not be repaired, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama appeared unafraid to work outside the existing framework and create a new framework that works in the interests of everyone. “Should it be a public solution or a private solution?” is not the correct question. “What solution is best for the country?” Now that’s the right question. It’s a question that Obama appeared to be asking during the campaign, but one that is being substituted by justifications for increasingly conservative behavior.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Former First Lady & A Guy Named Tim

With his announcement of the national security team yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama materially completed his cabinet and White House staff. There are of course more appointments to be made, and some of those are promised to be Republicans, but the major positions of the new Administration are now mostly known. You’ve seen it written in many other places already, but it bears repeating that this is a demonstrably pragmatic-looking Administration, at least in terms of its top personnel, though the “centrist” label is far better-deserved for the cabinet secretaries (whose independent power has gotten out of whack under Bush-II anyway), than for the actual White House staff, from whom the policy initiatives are supposed to flow. A run-down of exactly what we know and what we may expect is in order at this point:

By far the biggest appointments announced so far are on the domestic policy side Timothy Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury, and, on the foreign policy side, Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. The Clinton appointment has of course roadblocked the recent coverage of the transition–dripping as it is with Shakespearean pathos and the veiled prospects of poor message discipline, in-fighting, leaks, and even the chance of fresh new scandals.

With this selection, Mr. Obama demonstrates once again that he is willing to take calculated risks on the political side of the ledger if the end result is to channel the productive energy of a one-time rival in his favor. And if you hesitate to agree that this can be a very, very favorable strategy indeed, just go back and look at some of the things that were being written in late July about Joe Biden. Indeed the best part of the decision, from Obama’s standpoint, is that whatever drama emerges from this move will redound to Clinton’s detriment rather than his own. Obama’s credential as a disciplined manager who evokes strong loyalty and all but leak-proof message control is permanently punched–while the reputation brought to the situation on the same scores by the Clintons is…well…not quite as distinguished. If Mr. Obama finds himself in the worst-case scenario of having to fire Mrs. Clinton, few will remember back to these past days and weeks as an invitation to question his judgment in picking for the job.

But if the Clinton appointment is the one garnering all the news, the Geithner appointment is surely the one that tells us considerably more about just what sort of Administration the new team promises to be. Geithner is neither a liberal firebrand nor a Chicago-style political crony (the two things we were promised by the radical right to expect from Obama’s inner circle). What he is, instead, is a uniquely qualified individual with a full resume aimed specifically at the job. As President of the New York branch of the United States Federal Reserve, Mr. Geithner’s current position straddles the fence between the regulatory function of the Fed (all district banks regulate the banking activity in their districts) and the monetary policy side (since the New York bank, in particular, enjoys permanent standing on the Federal Open Market Committee, where the money supply is raised or lowered by simple majority vote).

The most visible of the Treasury Secretary’s jobs in the next Administration will be to account for the bailout money that has been shoveled willy-nilly at the financial sector over the past few weeks and to more prudently spend whatever of that money is left (which won’t be much). But the ongoing job of the Treasury Secretary–to raise the necessary bond revenue from deficit spending–is likely to become a significant challenge in the next four years, as both the Social Security Trust and the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China find it increasingly difficult to purchase new bonds at the daily Treasury auction. Once this simmering crisis erupts onto the scene, perhaps within the first two years of the incoming government, Geithner’s track-record as a cool head on the FOMC, and his proven credential as a provocative, outside-the-box thinker will serve us all, regardless of party affiliation. It promises to be a very difficult assignment, and essentially no one is as qualified to fulfill it right now.

There is at all events a desperate need for a fresh look at the question of regulatory oversight of the financial markets, and on this front as well, Mr. Geithner scores high marks for taking just the sort of pragmatic, centrist approach to such questions that the Obama appointments are receiving so much attention for in general. Clearly, the Bush/Paulson approach has left the nation’s financial system in tatters–but it’s not obvious to even some of the most liberal thinkers on the subject that a return to the days of Glass-Steagall wouldn’t exacerbate the problem by serving as a disincentive to capital. It’s a poignant thought to consider for the pro-regulation crowd that many of the best-performing securities during the current bear market would have been illegal before Glass-Steagall was repealed. However one looks at it, the Geithner nomination is a laudable, perhaps even brilliant decision. Call it two for two, if you must, though there have certainly been others outside the scope of this particular column.

Oh, and there’s one last major element of aplomb to Mr. Obama’s galaxy of selections made thusfar: Geithner, who might otherwise have had one of the most visible (and probably controversial) tenures in the history of the Treasury, doesn’t like publicity. He’s a wonk, just as all the district bank presidents in the Federal Reserve system are wonks. So how does a President who wants the most effective performance from such a key player do his part to help ensure that’s exactly what he gets? How about by nominating an ambitious, headline-hungry formal rival for Secretary of State?

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? A Police Officer’s View on Drugs

For 28 years, I served as a member of the Vancouver Police Department, and spent most of that time at the street level, in and around Vancouver’s poorest area commonly known as “Skid Road.” This area is Canada’s poorest postal code zone. It is an area of cheap fleabag hotels, bars, and drugs. The only people who reside here are those whom society has cast aside because of disability, personality disorders, or sheer bad luck. It has been like this for at least 50 years. Only the faces and preferences of the addicts have changed.

Quite early in my career as a law enforcement officer, it became very obvious to me that the most dangerous drug was a legal drug. That drug is alcohol. Every riot, every disturbance, every assault, every serious late night motor vehicle accident, every homicide, and every sexual assault almost always involved alcohol.

Where were the horrific crimes caused by drug addicts? They were there, but generally speaking they were non-violent property crimes and prostitution. It has been estimated that somewhere between 75-80% of all property crimes are committed by addicts. This begets the question that most policemen in our major cities have asked themselves countless times: why not treat addicts for their addictions, not as criminals, and supply their drugs temporarily until they get help. Apparently, a significant reduction in property crime, reduced jail costs, and lower medical costs is not a sufficient answer.

The biggest question, which really changed my thinking toward the criminalization of drugs was, is why do we persist with laws that guarantee that serious criminals will become immensely rich, powerful, and violent toward any other criminals who stand in their way. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profits for the gangsters. U.S. history teaches us of a parallel situation that occurred during alcohol prohibition in the early twenty century, when gangsters became rich and powerful supplying bootleg alcohol. Al Capone’s South Side Gang and similar gangs murdered whoever stood in their way. The crime rate shot up 200%. Finally, when alcohol prohibition was canceled, most of the gangs disappeared as the profits were gone, the murder rate returned to what it was before prohibition, AND everyone didn’t become an alcoholic overnight!

Let’s ask ourselves a question. If heroin and cocaine were legal, would you use them? Virtually everyone says no, which is really no surprise if you think about it. We also know that up until the 1920s these substances were legal. Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol was the drug of choice to the Victorians. Today the percentage of drug addicts, by which I mean those unable to function in society due to their addictions, remains the same as before there were any drug laws. Hardly a round of applause for the billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 80 years. Indeed if drug prohibition were a business that received payment for its results, it would not have lasted a year.

Everyone fears change, and one of the big fears of the general public is the fear of drugs becoming more readily available to our children. Today most of our children can in fact more easily obtain drugs than they can obtain liquor. The gangsters make sure this is the case by ensuring that dealers are present outside most of our schools. These dealers pay no heed to our children’s health, and they often have little knowledge of the substances cut with the drugs or even strength of their products. Drug prohibition causes this situation to persist.

If we look at the history of tobacco, we know education works. Tobacco eventually kills 50% of all regular smokers. Tobacco is legal. Yet through common sense and education, tobacco smoking is down by two thirds from thirty years ago. Education works, but only if honestly given. This spring I was approached by a grandmother whose granddaughter had phoned her in real distress. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been running the D.A.R.E. program in her school, and she was convinced that her parents’ occasional use of Marijuana would cause their deaths. If any of the information given is flawed, kids will reject all information given to them about drugs from parents and other authority figures.

I am a member of LEAP, which is an organization of retired policemen, judges, prison guards, others involved in law enforcement ,and many others. It was founded by a former highly commended U.S. drug enforcement officer, Jack Cole. Today it is worldwide. We all believe that drugs are not good, but it is “the War on Drugs” that is causing most of our problems. This war costs 2.5 billion dollars a year in Canada and 10 times that amount in the United States. WHY?

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? What Today Means

Today is not just about voting Barack Obama into office. It’s like a national colon cleansing. Today, hopefully, we will vote to restore the rule of law and the Constitution to their rightful places. Today, we will vote to end the doctrine of preemptive war, dial down the militarism, and begin focusing on fixing the problems we have in this country rather than starting new problems in other countries. John McCain would indeed continue the failed policies of George W. Bush, but voting for Obama is not merely about making sure McCain doesn’t become president. It’s about removing the Republican Party from power and in so doing, sending its operatives a clear message that we will no longer stand idly by as our nation engages in war, terror, and torture in our names, under the moniker of protecting the “homeland.” We will no longer watch as we are told that the government is not here to help us, that we should not help each other, but that we should fend for ourselves, and if we lack the wealth or imagination to do so, then so be it.

For eight years I have not been proud of the United States. It has engaged in atrocities that I had never thought a country as grand as ours could engage in. Most cynically, the president, vice president, and the Republican Party used the spirit of cooperation that existed after September 11 (Karl Rove’s imagined memories to the contrary) as their ticket to pure, unbridled power. In attempting to analyze why things have happened the way they have, this is the conclusion I come to: power. Though we often want to ignore the more animalistic parts of our brains, the limbic systems of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others are alive and well and thirsty for control. I can think of no other explanation.

The machinery that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton designed to prevent the concentration of power is failing us as the executive asserts ever more “powers” that are not to be found in statues or the Constitution. As long as the Republican Party remains in control of the country, that machinery will continue to deteriorate.

This is not to say that the Republican Party has always been bad. It was once the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It was once the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who helped create the America we know today. Even Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency; but Nixon’s contempt for the law was his own, not the party’s.

But the Republican Party has mutated into something that none of the above people would recognize today. Even Ronald Reagan, the venerable godfather of modern conservatism, would not recognize the Republican Party. Its sleaze knows no bounds: like a feral dog, it resorts to its most primal responses when threatened. As it has sensed, over the past few weeks, that its time is up, it has tried to associate Barack Obama with terrorists, socialists, Marxists, Muslims, and anyone else it thinks are evil. When that has failed, experience has shown us that it will resort to trying to forcibly stop people from voting, by placing “observers” at polling places to question legitimate voters’ registrations (in swing states only), intentionally delivering too few voting machines to Democratic precincts, or attempting to cut Democrats from voter lists altogether.

Karl Rove’s attempts to create a “permanent majority” have led to an undeniable fact: the Republican Party of 2008 does not care about anyone but itself. It seeks to enrich itself, to place its operatives in positions of power so that those operatives can amass wealth, and most of all, power. The party that clothes itself in patriotism is, underneath the bloody flags it wears, virulently unpatriotic. “Patriotism” involves respect for the nation and its people. The modern Republican Party has nothing but contempt for the nation and its laws, especially when those laws get in the way of its quest for power. And the people? The modern Republican Party doesn’t care about anyone who is not an elite member of the party. George W. Bush would be perfectly happy to throw Joe the Plumber to the sharks — if, that is, he didn’t need Joe’s vote.

And then we come to soldiers. Time and time again, President Bush has shown that he doesn’t care about soldiers. He wants meat that can absorb bullets in his ill-begotten, ill-fated War on Terrorism. Once the meat comes home to its family, brimming with trauma — both physical and mental — from the experience of war, President Bush has fought as hard as he can against paying for that meat, which it turns out, is a living, breathing human being that must now be taken care of.

Today is probably the nation’s most important day in many, many years. A vote for Obama is a tourniquet to stop eight years’ worth of hemorrhaging caused by a party that couldn’t care less about anyone but itself. A vote for McCain is a vote to continue things as they have been, despite his protestations to the contrary. McCain has demonstrated — not the least through the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate — that the modern Republican Party will continue to play an intimate role in the operation of the United States, as it has for eight years. Four more years of that will run our country’s veins dry.

Barack Obama does represent change. He represents hope. He represents a return to the Constitution, a return to the values of equal protection under the law, a return to a nation that defends itself when actually threatened and not a nation that attacks other countries due to perceived threats. A President Obama will lead a nation that we can be proud of again.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Republicans, Real America, and S&M

John McCain’s arguments about Barack Obama’s tax plan rely upon a misunderstanding of how taxes work, in much the same way intelligent design proponents rely on a misunderstanding of how evolution works in order to get people to believe them. The Internet would call this tactic “FUD,” which stands for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt,” and it is largely the way McCain has run his campaign. By planting fear of Barack Obama (he “pals around with terrorists”), uncertainty about Barack Obama (he’s inexperienced) and doubt about Barack Obama (he hasn’t even done anything significant in his time as a senator) in the minds of American voters, McCain can focus more on the qualities Obama lacks than the qualities that he, McCain, possesses.

On Meet the Press Sunday, McCain said that “CEOs” of companies like FedEx pay a 35% marginal tax rate. This is an intentionally misleading statement; CEOs do not personally pay any taxes for their companies. A “corporation” is created for the purpose of doing business without fear of personal liability. If the corporation incurs debts, then it is the corporation that is liable for those debts; the personal assets of the employees of that corporation cannot take the place of the corporation’s assets.

The separated assets of the company and its employees mean that the company doles out salaries to its employees. The corporation has a payroll, and employees – which includes CEOs and other executive officers – are compensated out of that payroll budget.

CEOs pay 35%? No, “CEOs” don’t pay 35%. Their companies pay 35%. They don’t personally pay anything, except their own personal taxes. A company pays 35% on its revenues. A person pays depending on his salary. Now, a business owner may decide how much to pay himself as an employee, but that does not change the fact that what the business makes and what the owner makes are separate things. As Obama has observed, 90% of small businesses make less than $250,000 and are therefore incapable of paying their owners an amount that would cause the owners’ taxes to go up. How many small business owners do you know who pay themselves more than $250,000? And if a small business owner does personally make more than $250,000, then he can certainly afford the tax increase. That’s the point of a graduated, or progressive, tax: the marginal tax rate increases as income increases because people who make a lot of money can afford to pay more than people who don’t.

The argument behind giving tax cuts to people who make a lot of money is that they are in a better position to take that tax cut money and purchase things or reinvest that money in the economy. This is called “supply-side” economics because it works on the side of people who, theoretically, provide the economy with goods and services; i.e., business-owners. Give business owners more money and they will employ more people – that is to say, people on the “demand side” of the economy. This is often referred to as “trickle-down” economics because the benefits of tax cuts given to the people at the top (in terms of income) will eventually trickle down to the people at the bottom (in terms of income).

Whether or not the trickle will ever come is unknowable. In the last eight years, we’ve seen the wealthiest classes increase in size, while the middle class has decreased in size. In 2007, the median household income in the United States was $50,740. 4% of households made $200,000 or more. 18.9% of households made between $50,000 and $75,000. In 2000, 2% of households made $200,000 or more, while 19% of households made between $50,000 and $75,000. On average, American households as a group have become wealthier, but only a small group of people has actually been the beneficiary of that wealth.

Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth around” sounds very much like the system Marx envisioned: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The question is, what’s wrong with that? To criticize a plan as “Marxist” is to deploy an ad hominem attack, an attack that addresses the person arguing but not the argument itself. Calling a particular tax plan “Marxist” does not address the argument: okay, if it’s Marxist, what does that mean? What’s wrong with that? Conservatives use “Marxist” as a proxy for “bad” without ever mentioning what is actually bad about the plan.

S&M

The “S&M” from the title of this article, as you probably guessed, is not that S&M. It’s socialism and Marxism. The word “socialist” has been bandied about of late with regard to tax plans and bailouts of the banks. Either through willful or deceptive ignorance, the people who throw this word around ignore the extant socialist components of our economy. We have a government that collects taxes at all; we have regulatory agencies that limit the things that businesses can do; we even have socialized health care in the form of Medicaid (government health care for impoverished people), Medicare (government health care for the elderly), and the Veterans Administration. Yes, our American veterans, who spent their lives defending our freedoms, are beneficiaries of socialism! Any veteran can walk into any VA hospital anywhere in the country and get treated. And you, the taxpayer, are paying the bill.

Even Alan Greenspan, champion of capitalism, was hypocritically in charge of a government-chartered bank that holds tremendous influence in the free-market economy. And he never once denounced that institution.

There was a time in American history when the economy was more capitalist than it is today. Do you remember having to memorize, in American history class, all of the various “panics” that occurred from 1789 to 1945? Every ten to twenty years, there was a “panic” that crippled the U.S. economy. Each successive panic resulting in either the passage of legislation designed to stop whatever activity caused the panic or an infusion of cash by the government. The Panic of 1907 was notably stopped by J.P. Morgan himself, whose company injected money into the economy to keep it going. The Federal Reserve Act was passed into law six years later, creating the modern-day Federal Reserve system.

The Federal Reserve System helped put a stop to regular panics, but even more important was the influence of a British economist named John Maynard Keynes. Prior to Keynes, the government was viewed by politicians and policy-makers as just another consumer. The government bought things from private industry, entered into contracts with private industry, and collected taxes. But it was still seen as being on par with a consumer or company. And as such, conventional wisdom dictated that it should act like a private company or citizen. When the Great Depression began in 1929, Herbert Hoover’s response was to cut spending and raise taxes. For an individual, this would seem to make sense: when faced with declining revenue and a worsening economy, cut your spending to save money. Raise your taxes (if you’re the government) to increase the money you can bring in.

But that only made things worse. The government, said Keynes, is far more powerful than any single consumer or corporation. With its essentially unlimited capacity to borrow money, the government can influence the economy in ways that individuals cannot. In a time of crisis, the government should cut taxes and increase spending in order to inject money into the economy. Even though this will cause the government to incur a deficit, it should be done in order to repair the economy. When the economy recovers, the government should decrease spending and raise taxes in order to pay off the debt it incurred during the recession. This process of government intervention is known as Keynesianism, and it has been employed by the U.S. government since World War II. And guess what? No more regular panics. The first economic depression since World War II was the oil crisis of the 1970s, caused by a combination of inflation and recession (something that economists didn’t think was possible, by the way).

These calls of “socialism” fall mostly on ignorant ears. Socialism is already here! If you pay taxes, you’re engaging in socialism. The question is, what degree of socialism are we talking about? Some countries have national monopolies that are endorsed or partly owned by the government. Think of Telefónica in Spain, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Petróleos de Venezuela. The United States would have to go a long way toward purchasing ownership stakes in our industries. Although, at least one industry – the railroads – are partially owned by the government. The U.S. government took control of the railroad system in the late 19^th century in order to cut down on corruption. Today, the government still owns the railroads, but not because of corruption. It’s because the costs of running railroads are so high that railroad companies would go bankrupt without government support.

Socialism is alive and well here, and it’s helping Americans in ways that they may not be aware of.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? The End of Conservatism As We Know It?

As the days pass, the news gets better and better for progressives. Republican pundit Bill Kristol had to publicly contradict himself about the efficacy of the McCain campaign strategy he once pushed for. McCain and Palin are in disagreement about whether they should create pitchfork-wielding mobs or not. Sarah Palin, an independent investigation concluded, had abused her authority as governor. That bailout bill had to pass without any debate even though it gave the Treasury unlimited power to do anything it wanted and had no oversight and no guarantees. But that doesn’t matter because any legislation is good legislation right now, and if we don’t pass this thing then the Earth will crash into the sun! Remember that one? And how, once it passed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has continued to tank, now roughly a mere 25% lower than it was a month ago?

Oh, crap. And Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

It’s not a great time to be a conservative. The party that has run the country — first the executive branch, then the legislative branch, then both — for the last twenty-eight years (with only two years completely on the outside) is on the outs. The Republican Party, once the object of admiration by even the most liberal admen for its unified, coherent image, is publicly fighting with itself over what tactics to use next.

Extreme conservatism is on the way out. Eight years of extreme conservatism has turned the United States into a shell of its former self. That stuff’s poison!

Consider that unilateral militarism has proven to be, not a force of good, but a force of confusion, corruption, and destruction. Supply-side economics has made the poor poorer, the rich richer, and the middle class smaller. The United States is no longer regarded diplomatically; a ludicrously botched war has made us the laughingstock of the international community — when, that is, that laughter isn’t interrupted by contempt. Health care costs are rising, but the response of conservatives is to let the very same market that permitted those costs to double in eight years continue as is. In fact, McCain even wants more deregulation of health care.

But that’s just a start. You get the point. As a theory of governance, extreme conservatism should never work with government, anyway. In fact, many extreme conservatives never believed the government should be there in the first place. It’s hard to do your best at a job that you don’t think should even exist. The best-case scenario would be that the government gets dismantled, everything becomes privatized, and everyone goes home to the consulting firms they started in order to get lucrative government contracts. Grover Norquist would like to drown the government in a bathtub, but not drown it so much that it can no longer sign checks.

The nation is at a crossroads, except this crossroads is over a river of liquid-hot magma. Which direction will you choose? Liberalism? Or conservatism? Make it fast because your shoes are melting, and you can’t afford to buy new ones. If this election goes the way it looks like it might go, with Obama and the Democrats handily defeating the Republicans, extreme conservatism will have to pack its bags and redefine itself in a more moderate form.

The fact that the southern vote might be in question is proof enough that something’s going on, here.

Extreme conservatism — and with it, the mantra that The Market is a powerful force to be feared and obeyed — has failed to deliver on its promises for every American. True, it has enriched a few, but that has too often been at the expense of the poor or the American taxpayer. Apologists of the completely unchecked Wild West Market want to privatize the gains, but socialize the losses. This is why we are now paying $700 billion, on the outside, for a few firms to enrich themselves tremendously. We went through this before, remember? In 2001, with Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. We put those guys away because they found new and interesting ways to purchase a $15,000 umbrella stand and then leave taxpayers with the bill once it all came crumbling down.

It’s not just people with investments who stand to win with more regulation and less reliance on The Market to police itself. Consider the 47 million Americans without health care–conservatism could continue living out the rest of its days unencumbered in the knowledge that people might be dying of curable ailments, if only they had enough money to afford them.

The people who claimed to know best are now unable to solve the problems plaguing our democracy. The Bill Kristols of the world, championing the cause of William F. Buckley, are powerless to help us get out of Iraq, fix our economic problems, and repair our world image. All they offer, to quote Joe Biden, is “more of the same.” Because it’s that same that has hurt us for so long. After a person has been punched in the face for eight years, it’s easy to find a cause for that person’s headaches. President Bush’s stock response of “trust me, I know what I’m doing” is now obviously a facade.

A weary nation realizes that the policies of the past eight years are no longer sufficient to solve the problems caused by the policies of the past eight years. Too little, too late? Perhaps, but better than not at all.

The End of the American Honeymoon

A week or so ago, when he was interviewed on several American media outlets, such as Larry King, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated implicitly and explicitly that he believed that the period of the American Empire was at an end. For a demagogue and false populist like Ahmadinejad, who is trying to please his electorate by taking a slice out of America’s pride and security, I don’t know exactly what to make out of his proposition. Does he believe that America is going to lose all influence in the world, in which case the second-tier states and nations would step in to fill our regional role? Or was he simply trying to rub our noses in our own misfortunes due to our greed and avarice? Is this like when he constantly jabs us in the ribs for our troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, basically saying to the world, “See? They can’t do everything that they claim they can do.” It’s probably a combination of all of the above. Now, God forbid that I would agree wholesale with Ahmadinejad, a thoroughly disreputable Holocaust denier, religious fanatic and possible sponsor of Hizbullah and other miltant groups in the Middle East, but I do introduce my note with his views as a sort of segway for my own beliefs on the future of America. In one narrow respect, I would tentatively agree with the unbalanced, Iranian: America is mortal. If you hit us hard enough, we will bleed. I believe furthermore that the sky is not the limit, we do not have manifest destiny from God because of the “nobleness” of our institutions, and we cannot go on spiraling upwards towards infinite prosperity. Let’s face it, America’s honeymoon is long over.

What do I mean by “honeymoon”? I mean that great immigrant urge and ideal from the 19th century that hard work, high moral standing and a wing and a prayer would take you all the way to the top. It was certainly true for America during most of that century and most of the twentieth even, but I think we’re witnessing the end of it at the beginning of the 21st. When I think of this immigrant ideal, I tend to have this image come to mind of wagon trains of immigrants surging towards the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas, their tools ready to tame the wilderness and their voices raised in a rousing chorus of “who gives a damn, we’re on our way!.” OK, so that is the last part was from “Paint Your Wagon,” but you get the idea. I have even seen their legacy first-hand on my trips out west. In the southwest corner of Colorado, in the San Juan mountains, there are holes in the mountains everywhere above tree line. These are the hard-rock mines that the miners desperately created by hand that go hundreds of feet into the spine of the Rockies. These miners often hailed from towns that were built above 10,000 feet, where the temperature on a sunny day in July rarely exceeds 60 degrees. One such town had a post office, a theater and a bowling alley at its height in the 1880s. One can either admire their ingenuity and persistence or you can pity their arrogance and idiocy in the face of Nature’s might. I tend to swing between the two poles.

I see a lot of the immigrant spirit in the conservatives of America today. They are religious, optimistic in the face of daunting evidence, opportunistic, stubborn, down-to-earth. They are also inclusive of outsiders only to a point, have no qualms about “striking it rich” at the expense of others, and are voraciously individualistic. These are generalizations, but they are generalizations with a grounding in some fact, I believe. There is something so deliciously cavalier and charismatic about the Republican Party’s optimism and sureness, I must admit. It would be charming, if it weren’t becoming so dangerously out-of-touch. Conservatives tend to get so angry by what they see as the “Europeanization” (am I coining a cultural term here?) of America, and the “frenchifying” and softening of American pioneers into lazy elites and intellectuals. What I really think underlies these stereotypes is a fear and a refusal to believe that the America of today is not quite the same America of the Founding Fathers or of even a century ago. We have run out of free land to exploit without harming ourselves or our natural resources in the process. American laissez-faire policies (for those of you despise French words so much, it means “let it go,” or “let it do it’s thing”) have exposed their ugly side, not once, but several times, in the last one hundred years, and most times, government intervention was a God-send. Americans are no longer (for the most part) fleeing religious persecution and now have found plenty of things to keep them happy and fulfilled besides organized religion. I may be unfairly called a turncoat for this one especially, but America can no longer win wars by tweaking out our armed forces with the latest gadgets and drones or by the “righteousness” of our cause or because “God is on our side.” We have experienced that the idea of the uneducated, down-to-earth man rising through the ranks to the highest positions of power is not always such a rosy American myth. Not everyman on the street should become a leader, and sometimes you need elite “intellectuals” to run elite “intellectual” enterprises, like businesses and whole countries. Lastly, and I state this one with some sincere sadness, the institutions of the American farm and small business are in serious jeopardy, oddly enough because of the very competitive, globalizing tendencies of American business which are so very familiar to the Republican Party platform. We are largely no longer a resourceful, do-it-yourself society of immigrants living on a “Main Street,” insuring that our childrens’ tomorrows will be better than our yesterdays simply because they’re “good, hard-working people.” Like it or not, America now has more in common with all the opulent, decaying empires of the past than with the robust, thriving democracy which we started out as. We need to accept the changes and reinvent ourselves without losing the better angels of our American character.

I think that two of the greatest assets which we can pull out from our old pioneer tool belt are our diversity and our adaptability. At a time when we’re so concerned about how people are getting into this country, perhaps we would do well to ask ourselves what these people can contribute to the American experience. Sometimes, when a group is bogged down in its own quagmire, the best solution is for an outsider to offer his/her perspective. American history is replete with examples of emigrant populations offering their two cents worth on the problems that this country has faced throughout its history. Definitely related is the idea of the individualistic, free-wheelin’, free-thinkin’ American inventor. Just as the American pioneers viewed a pristine valley in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado during the 1870s and envisioned a town called “Tomboy” at the very edges of what is humanly possible, so can someone today convert that same old attitude to a healthier direction by taking a fresh and optimistic attitude to the economic, demographic, financial, societal and political problems which we face today. I like to believe that even though America has changed, and not always for the best, we still have a common cultural heritage to draw from to go forward in the future. After all, the immigrant spirit transformed the spot which I am sitting on in southwestern Michigan from a sandy wilderness into the comfortable apartment and town that I know today. Being a heady pioneer doesn’t have to be all bad.

Do I believe that America is going to turn into a nation of decadent and lazy couch potatoes, more intent on what’s on their iPods and reality shows than the suffering that’s going in their own inner cities? Not exactly, no. I have more faith in us than that. Do I believe that there is nothing good in cherishing the tenets of the past and that all conservatives are ostriches with their heads stuck in the ground? As I said, that was a generalization on my part. But I do firmly believe that America has changed significantly from its youth, and that there are those whose refusal to adapt to those changes who may be holding the rest of us back. The old idea of “expansive horizons” in every sense of the image is gone. We have run out of breathing room in virtually every aspect of American life. If America is to have hope and room to grow, it will have to come through with some ingenuity and painful compromises. I certainly hope that we’re up to the challenge.

The Future of Choice

Several years ago, I spent some time as a campus organizer for the Missouri affiliate of a reproductive health advocacy group. Much of our time was spent “in the field,” attempting to find ways to engage students on a relatively conservative campus, in the crucial swing state of Missouri.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering around the website of my hometown newspaper, and stumbled across a small piece about my former employers. My state affiliate and their board of directors made a decision to disaffiliate from their national organization. This reflects a larger trend, at least in my home state, in which much of the choice community has given up on the ability to protect reproductive freedom at a federal level, and has instead turned their attentions to preserving and protecting choice on a state level.

Has the choice movement simply given up on the idea that every woman is entitled to comprehensive reproductive health care? It often seems so, when a national agenda is largely abandoned and attention is turned to preventing further destruction of the right to choose in the few states in which the right still exists, often in some highly adulterated form. The national movement focused on preserving Roe, while conservatives pushed for restrictions that served to weaken its protections at the state level. For years, this shift in strategy went seemingly unmet by reproductive health advocates, as they deigned to let the courts tackle problems and allowed Roe to become their watchword. Even in liberal states, legal protection drifted toward the center, with the passage of dangerous parental consent laws and waiting period requirements. The choice movement is only now catching up, realizing that there may be no way to protect a constitutionally-guaranteed right to choose – especially with the anti-choice extremist McCain/Palin ticket. Is the best strategy to focus on protecting the right where it is still likely to exist, even if Roe is overturned? To make sure that there are still places in this country where one can still go to terminate a pregnancy, even at great distance and at her own expense?

While painful to admit, there are advantages to this approach, one with which anti-choice advocates have had enormous success when they decided to focus their attention on state, rather than federal, law. Focusing on a state-by-state approach allows a more tightly-focused battle, a stronger message that can be tailored to appeal to the demographics of the state. Even here, though, problems exist – the horrendous South Dakota referendum that sought to ban abortion entirely was defeated only because the text of the law did not contain a provision for the life and health of the mother. Planned Parenthood and other organizations campaigning against the initiative jumped on this as a reason vote against the referendum. A wise choice in the short term, it is also an easy provision to add the next time around – and what then can they use to campaign against it? One can’t fault them for a winning strategy, but it was hardly a long-lasting one.

I receive far more material in my mailbox and inbox from my state affiliates of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, than from the national office. Whereas legislation on reproductive rights at the federal level receives attention rather infrequently, the availability of comprehensive reproductive health faces a consistent level of assault on the state level. Their efforts have been effective; several times now, they have mobilized to beat back legislation that would have made Missouri the state with the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation – even more draconian than the South Dakota law defeated in 2006.

The idea of giving up on the federal government’s ability to protect our sovereignty over our own bodies is, frankly, terrifying. However, the legislation passed over the last eight years is such that we can no longer trust it to do just that. The neoconservative political dominance of the 1990s and early 2000s brought about legislation and court decisions that allowed states to pass laws determining when physicians could perform abortions, banned specific types of abortion, and granted fetuses protection under the law. The direction of the Supreme Court, thanks to President Bush, has been set for years to come – and stare decisis doesn’t look like a doctrine the current court is determined to follow.

I’m thankful that I live somewhere now that offers strong protections toward a woman’s right to choose, but I know that, across state lines in Missouri, it’s only getting worse. At the end of the year, all but one clinic in the state will be forced to close. Referendums and state laws chipping away at comprehensive reproductive health succeed at a disconcerting rate. I know that my former colleagues, and my friends at NARAL and Planned Parenthood will do what they can to keep fighting back against the anti-choice crusaders, and I’ll continue to help them in whatever ways that I can. They’re running out of options, though, and when that day comes, there may not be a federal backup plan that can save them.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? The Navy Man and the Celebrity

On October 28, 1980, the country was in the midst of a precipitous economic decline, faced steep gas prices, felt saddled with an unpopular incumbent President, and had been recently and very visibly humbled on the world stage by radical elements in the Middle East. In the final act of their election contest, an aging and tired-looking former Naval officer took the stage for his first (and only) debate with the man his campaign had portrayed as a dangerous, impulsive, Hollywood celebrity who lacked both the experience and the soundness of judgment to respond to far-flung threats in foreign fields.

We all know what happened next.

Governor Reagan, bruised and bloodied by this tireless ad-war, came across (to many who were seeing him for the first time), as smooth, likable, and imminently worthy of the job. A few days later the election was decided in one of the biggest landslides up to that time, and, good or bad, the country has never really been quite the same since.

The story is only noteworthy in our present context because it is our present context. Pundits arguing this past week that debates have little impact on elections have cited data points ranging from the first Kerry-Bush debate (which Kerry won to very little effect on the race) all the way back to the first Reagan-Mondale debate (which Mondale won to even less effect). Those pundits have, to this author’s thinking at least, missed the story completely.

The problem is that not all election contests are created equal. John Kerry’s big debate win in 2004 didn’t have much effect on the contest because the 2004 election was a culture war, with both sides locked-in well in advance and almost no one left in the middle to persuade. Fritz Mondale’s big debate win in 1984 didn’t have much effect on the contest because, in 1984, Mr. Reagan could have taken the stage dressed only in a fig leaf and spent the entire ninety minutes speaking in tongues, and he still would have carried 39 states. To include either of these two races in a regression to determine the significance of debates, is to short-change the potential for debates to matter in elections where the electorate had not completely made up their mind about one candidate or another prior to the debate(s).

Specifically in those races where one candidate is decidedly less palatable, but the other candidate is “scary” or “new” enough to not have yet pulled away, do debates seem to afford their best chance to really shake up the dynamics of an election. In other words, an election where voters want change, but have yet to be completely convinced that they can trust this change. We’ve had three such elections since the advent of televised debates, in 1960, 1980, and 2008. And the “scary” candidate has won the first two, just by taking the stage for his first debate and not being scary. The first debate has thus been what has put the “new” candidate over this threshold of acceptability as a viable alternative to the failing status quo.

Very few among us remember how fatigued the country was with the Eisenhower Administration in the summer and autumn of 1960. Several scandals had broken more or less at once, and the Powers affair had wrought a devastating blow to American pride, prompting renowned Columnist James Reston to skewer the incumbents in language that seems more fitting for today’s scrappy environment, and also eerily adaptable to the current occupants of the White House.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Nixon could only base his argument for the job on the un-readiness of his opponent, a young, good-looking, and little-known Senator. Wisely (indeed uncharacteristically wisely), Nixon left to his surrogates the question of what effect Mr. Kennedy’s Catholicism might have on his governance. But no matter: The race was decided by Mr. Kennedy’s Presidential appearance and his calm demeanor. If there was no longer any reason to fear Kennedy, there was also no longer any reason to vote Nixon.

Twenty years later, one might have expected the sharp cookies in the Carter Administration to assume that Reagan would not play directly into their hands by throwing his bellicose weight around on stage. But Carter was unpopular not just for the devastating economic malaise that had descended over the country, but also for the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, which was first-lead on the evening news for the comfortable majority of the 555 days over which it took place. Carter’s only card was that people should be scared of Reagan. When Reagan no longer seemed scary, the public decided it had seen enough to make up its mind.

There is obviously still time for Senator McCain to break this cycle (not to mention time for current events to shift to a more favorable playing field on which he might show his strengths). But with each passing day, almost with each passing hour, it is Mr. Obama who comes nearer and nearer to passing what Karl Rove once famously referred to as “the living-room test.” Would the American public be comfortable hearing from this man, for four to six minutes a night, on their evening news, and not be scared of what he might say? It would seem the answer to that question got a lot less qualified in the minds of many voters after the first debate. And that’s a trend that Senator McCain must shatter to pieces with an act far more brazenly game changing than a “mere” suspension of his campaign, if he still hopes and expects to become our nation’s forty-fourth President.

It’s the Public, Stupid!

In the throes of what could become the toughest economic times since the Great Depression, everyone’s worried about “saving the economy.” Perhaps this single-minded obsession is a throwback to the ’92 election—many of us will remember the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”—but it’s time for a reality check.

This time, it’s not the economy… it’s the public.

On the basis of the current government’s ineptitudes, it’s best to break it down. First, there’s the war in Iraq. Irrespective of its validity or necessity, the United States has spent over $550 billion (as of August ’08) fighting to secure Iraq from insurgents, outside forces, and ultimately its own citizens. With the cost of the war growing by an estimated $200 million per day–that’s roughly $138,000 per minute—and an unknown number of belligerents and civilian casualties, the “liberation” of Iraq will ultimately cost the United States far more than the current $700 billion in proposed corporate bailouts. The damage we’ve caused to our international reputation and the fabric of the international system itself has yet to be fully felt, however.

The second major issue is the war in Afghanistan. While forgotten in many Americans’ eyes due to the overwhelming popularity of the “Bombs over Baghdad” campaign, we’re still shelling out blood and money to restore the country to normal operation. We spend $2.3 billion per month in Afghanistan —about a quarter of the Iraq War’s cost—with very little to show for it. Taliban fighters still make raids from safe havens in the mountains, or from Pakistan; at best, intelligence needs to be taken with a grain of salt; Afghani soldiers are far behind their Iraqi counterparts in training and discipline; warlords still maintain authority over many of the regions outside of Kabul; and insurgents have begun using American military tactics against our soldiers. In short, Afghanistan is analogous to the administration’s view of our economy: undervalued and teetering on the edge of the abyss.

…and then there’s the economy, with its strong “fundamentals” standing beside its collapsing infrastructure. I’m not an economist, but common sense suggests that, when half a dozen of your economic powerhouses either collapse or need rescued from their own bad decisions, the fundamentals of the economy—measured risk-taking, a sound credit line, and long-term stability, in my opinion—are lacking. Amid this turmoil, taxpayers are being asked to spend more money (that many Americans don’t have, by the way) to bail out the corporations who squandered our money in the first place. Taxpayers are also being asked to do this immediately, with no guarantee that such a corporate stimulus package will fix the problem. Oh, and to oversee the operation, Washington’s asking the taxpayers to trust the same government who lifted New Deal bank regulations and allowed such shady deals to progress on their watch.

Finally, the global demand for oil acts as a perpetual thorn in working-class America’s side. With gasoline prices surging twenty cents in a single day, then taking four weeks to return to normal, one must consider whether the record-setting profits made by petroleum conglomerates are indeed the result of peak production… or the result of taking their powerless consumers to the cleaners. Increased fuel charges, of course, trickle down through the economy: everything from food to pharmaceuticals now costs markedly more than it used to.

With all of these issues converging on the taxpayer, most people have started the Blame Game. Democrats blame the Republicans; Republicans blame Democrats; the banks blame everyone but themselves, and the public blames whomever’s closest. In reality, however, the public is the source of this mess. We’re the ones who bought into mortgages that were too good to be true; we’re the ones who put our government into office and allowed them to cow us into submission; we’re the ones who grumble at the gas pump and do nothing about it; and ultimately, we’re the ones who pay for issues that we shirk off, saying “there’s nothing I can do about it.”

And until we’re willing to fix our own mistakes, we’re right.

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