Posted inPolitics: National

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work — it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it incompetence or the quiet coup?

It's gonna be a long three-and-a-half years.

When all the autopsies are completed on the Obama administration's early train wreck, all the shoulda-woulda-coulda, this is the most salient point. Whatever eloquence the president musters on Wednesday night, it's over — or almost so. One wonders if the crew in the White House is still so dazzled by the whole West Wing thing that they don't even realize their peril, and hence the nation's peril.

We know a few things. Obama is no FDR. Not only does he lack Roosevelt's deviousness, but he also has no Harry Hopkins, Rex Tugwell, Harold M. Ickes, Adolf Berle, Tommy Corcoran or Raymond Moley. Rahm Emmanuel? Give me a break. He may be a tough guy in the tussle over office space, but he and the president's other advisers have done Obama no favors, much less provided the ideas, toughness and administrative savvy of FDR's Brains Trust and other close aides.

The closer comparisons so far are less flattering. Herbert Hoover — another brilliant,  accomplished, initially beloved public servant who froze in the headlights. and became more detached as crisis progressed. Jimmy Carter — elected in a spirit of hope and revulsion against Republican crimes (literally) who crashed early on the rocks of Congress and never recovered. Obama lacks Carter's insufferable sanctimoniousness, but he has revealed one ruinous similarity: weakness. Successful presidents are never weak.

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Posted inPolitics: National

On the edge of Waterloo

Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint says if Obama fails on healthcare, it will "break him"; it will be "his Waterloo." DeMint is right.

Those of a certain age remember the Jeff MacNelly cartoons during the Carter administration. As each day seemingly brought fresh setbacks, MacNelly's cartoon president shrank until he was a mini-me struggling amid the vast space of the presidential chair. Although he lacks Carter's tut-tut lecturing and, so far, foreign policy disasters, although Americans are proud of themselves for electing an African-American president, I sense Obama shrinking every day.

Many of the failures are not his. Obama inherited a nation in greater trouble than at any time since 1933, perhaps 1861. Not for nothing did the Onion have the headline: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." In addition to the financial panic, Obama got two wars, foreign policy in disarray, a huge budget deficit, a government that had attacked civil liberties and enshrined torture as policy. He took over a nation that is in hock to China and the petro-states, that has been deindustrialized and seen its middle class devastated by policies to serve the corporate elite. And a nation ill-prepared for climate change or peak oil — indeed, one digging itself ever deeper in the hole.

He and his party, however, continue to make critical missteps.

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Posted inPolitics: National

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

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Posted inPolitics: National

No we can’t?

Spring runs out and the American republic celebrates its societal strength and political will by regulating tobacco. That'll show the tobacco companies, long past their period of influence, and the diminishing ranks of smokers, primarily made up of the poor and disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, 10 big banks have begun repaying their bailout money to the taxpayers. Their primary reason is not to do the right thing or return to the business of funding productive enterprise. It is to gain the freedom to jack up the compensation of their 25 top executives. Like the Bourbons, the big bankers have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Unlike Big Tobacco, they not only retain their political clout — defeating an effort to regulate dangerous derivatives — but seem to largely run the federal government.

The consequences of this are manifold. The institutions that were "too big to fail" should have taught us that they are too big to exist. Instead, they have grown even larger. The secrecy of the Bush administration that led us into the Iraq fiasco has become the secrecy of the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke administration. We have only the tiniest sense of where the trillions in bailout money and "lending facilities" went, or who scratched the back of whom. We know, for example, that tax money went to help AIG repay Goldman Sachs which repaid…? You get the picture. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at least 16 percent, and millions may never regain their old earning power. Some may never be employable again outside of Wal-Mart.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The Daschle scandal

As much as rendition, the Iraq scam and the looting of the Treasury for bank bonuses, Tom Daschle makes me wonder if the coup has already happened and America is under the control of a shadow government, whatever the outcome of elections. As you know, President Obama's choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services — and point man on health care reform — has a tax problem. He failed to pay $140,000 in taxes, as the New York Times genteelly puts it, "related to income for consulting work and the use of a car made
available to him by a close friend who is also a generous donor to
Democratic causes."

We have a task of civic rebuilding after 25 years of more-or-less "conservative" misgovernance — chief on the list restoration of a fair and adequate revenue base for government, and teaching people there's no free lunch. Tax cuts are not a magic elixir. Taxes are the cost of a modern society. Daschle, like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before him, is no better than a fat Republican tax cheat — with the added hypocrisy of wanting (rightly) to raise taxes. These are the Ted Haggards of tax policy.

Yet more troubling is the window Daschle's "embarrassing" slip gives us into the permanent power elite.

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Posted inPolitics: National

How passenger rail was wounded, and how to fix it

The New York Times is a fine newspaper, but it has its blind spots. Its reporting on energy is often incomplete or downright wrong. The latter sin was not in evidence when it finally reported on the popularity of Amtrak. What’s frustrating is what the article left out or left unsaid, which makes it harder to achieve some results beyond our transportation system frozen in 1965 (and we had more trains then).

From the article:

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it
carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May
is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its
suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial
constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet
the demand.

And:

The problem is that rail has shriveled. The number of “passenger miles”
traveled on intercity rail has dropped by about two-thirds since 1960,
and the companies that build rail cars and locomotives have also
shrunk, making it hard to expand.

Only late in the story is a glancing reference made to Amtrak’s fate being tied to the whims of the federal government, and late late in the story the Times admits their boy crush President-elect McCain "was a staunch opponent of subsidies to Amtrak when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee." Indeed he wants to abolish it.

Let’s fill in some of the blanks so Americans might have some options beyond expensive and congested driving, and airlines that treat passengers like cattle.

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