Dana Blankenhorn

Avoiding Nixonism

One of my great fears for 2008 is that Democrats will simply recapitulate the events of the last political crisis, that of 1968. (Picture  of the House Democratic leadership from Firedoglake.)

This would mean the narrow election of Hillary Clinton, slight increases in Democratic majorities, followed by a host of actions supported by the political right.

That's a mirror-image of what happened after 1968. Nixon's win was narrow, the domestic agenda of his first term was liberal, and his battles against the liberal assumptions of his time made him paranoid, resulting in Watergate. The Watergate scandal delayed the changes movement conservatives desired by over a half-decade. The distance between the 57% vote share by Nixon and Wallace in 1968, and the beginnings of the "Republican Revolution," in 1980, was 12 years.

Democrats can't afford this. Americans can't afford this. The world can't afford this. We can't wait 12 years to begin the War Against Oil. We can't wait 12 years for major action against global warming. We can't wait 12 years for a return to social mobility. We can't wait 12 years for honest government.

The Democratic outrages of the present day, their repeated capitulation to Republican demands,  and their delight in power without responsibility,  are not new. The Money Party has dominated American politics almost without let-up throughout its history. What New York wants, New York generally gets.

But not always. When the crisis is deep enough, and when leaders are courageous enough, the Money Party can be beaten back for a time.

The Reckoning

We are past the time of the Good German.  We're even past asking who might be a Bad German.

The Reckoning has begun.

We forget how The Reckoning can begin before the war ends. In Germany The Reckoning began long before the Soviets entered Berlin. It was in full swing at the time of the 1944 plot against Hitler (a plot in which I recently learned a distant relative (right) participated).

So it has begun here, with George W. Bush still in office. The great hope of the Administration, the fact that will keep W's butt out of jail, is to show Democrats' complicity.

Democrats were complicit. Democrats on the Intelligence Committees, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were apparently briefed on torture and stood silent. The CIA's insistence it acted within the law, that it it was only following orders, Mein Herr, is more evidence that the search for conspirators is well under way.

Essentially our Congressional leaders are being blackmailed, in the full light of day, by the regime's leaders. Protect us and you won't be hurt, they say. And these leaders are knuckling under.

In 2006 the cry was for more Democrats. Today the cry must go out for better Democrats. Despite the risk which our major media (which is also fully complicit in torture, in war crimes, and in the theft of this nation's Constitution) will claim exists, Democrats need to wage war on their fellow Democrats, right now. Netroots Democrats must demand that those Democrats whowere complicit in these crimes be held to account, in order that those Republicans who engaged in criminal conduct be held to account.

What is at stake is our own complicity in these crimes. Your complicity. My complicity.

ObamaRomney

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called Let Obama Be Reagan.

The idea was that Barack Obama has a chance to represent the new Internet Thesis of American politics, the values of consensus, openness, transparency, connectivity and standards that define how we must approach our current problems, the values separating us from the TV past. Just as Reagan embodied the Nixon-era values of  conflict, drama, personality, and showbiz.

Now that we're at the key point in this race, with the Democratic nomination (and the Presidency) on the line, I'm afraid Obama is starting to make the mistake another candidate from 1968 made, to his eternal peril and family's torment.

That candidate was Romney. George Romney. Mitt's dad.

A little over 40 years ago, George Romney was on his way to being President, and Mitt was on his way to becoming a Republican Kennedy kid. Then he made a famous, or infamous mistake. He said one word.

Brainwashed.

This screwed Romney good, but the reason it screwed him has only become clear in the light of history. Romney said he'd been "brainwashed" about Vietnam by the Johnson Administration as a nod to Vietnam War opponents.

But the rising thesis of that time, the new assumptions of the emerging Republican majority, held that Vietnam, as a Cold War Activity, was not open to question by those seriously seeking power. Bugging out, to these voters, was not an option.

Chicken, Meet Egg in The War Against Oil

The War Against Oil is the greatest business opportunity of all time.

Everyone, from Nobel Laureate Al Gore on down, keeps addressing global warming as a problem demanding sacrifice. Their calls on government to act are couched in a way that make government appear the solution to this problem.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Free enterprise is the solution to this problem. Government can create incentives for free enterprise to get to work on this, but in the end this is a problem business will solve, or which won't get solved.

Right now there are immense opportunities in areas like efficiency, and such power sources as wind, solar and geothermal. All they need are assurances that their supply will meet with a good price. This is why I have suggested a "floor price" for energy, with those sources which produce carbon dioxide allowed to price below the floor, and below-floor prices on polluting forms taxed to reach it.

Still, there's a lot of infrastructure which must be re-built or replaced, as supplies of alternate fuels start to become significant. Hydrogen, or ammonia, make great storage media for energy. Hydrogen could be piped through current gas pipelines, ammonia through oil lines. Their energy would be released in fuel cells, with water as the primary pollutant.

Monopolist or Competitor

The difference between a monopolist and competitor is quite simple.

The monopolist cannot compete in a free market.

This is why I have always classed AT&T and Verizon as monopolists. They do not compete in free markets. They compete only in closed markets, markets with a very limited number of scaled competitors, high barriers to entry, where outrageous overhead and executive salaries are not just tolerated but encouraged. Every past effort by these companies to enter competitive markets, whether in computing or services or international, has failed.

The same is true for Carlos Slim, the Mexican monopolist whose Internet model, through TelMex, we have spent this decade importing. The Slim monopoly has done more than anything else to retard Mexico's international competitiveness in this decade. The giant sucking sound which has lured Mexicans to America in droves, yet kept the country from competing in the manufacturing marketplace, owes a lot to Carlos Slim.

Here's more proof, as if proof were needed. CompUSA, the computer retailer he bought just 7 years ago, is being dissolved.

W

In less than two months, the candidates for 2008 should be chosen.

Georgia makes its choice along most of the rest of the country, on February 5.

So let me tell you what I have been seeing, on the ground, here in Atlanta.

I have seen a few Obama signs, a few Hillary signs, a few Edwards signs. In that order. Very few.

I have seen a very few Ron Paul signs. On traffic poles. In yards. More Paul signs than Edwards signs, fewer Paul signs than Obama or Hillary signs.

I have seenKerry-Edwards bumper stickers, on cars of people who choose to recent history. I last observed this phenomenon after the 1984 election. Mondale-Ferraro stickers lived until they faded and peeled off by themselves.

I have also seen W stickers. Mainly W04 stickers like the one above. On car windows and bumpers.

I often look inside cars when I see these stickers, to find out what kind of moron would carry such a sticker, in December 2007. They're white. They're male or female, usually male. They're usually middle-aged, but I've seen several on cars driven by younger drivers -- pick-up trucks. Men only in those.

When I see the squarish W stickers, the white-on-black jobs, I look closely. Half the time these turn out to be copycat, anti-W stickers. W for Worst stickers. But half the time they're the real deal.

This tells me something important.

This Week's Clue: The New Mortgage Fraud is Political

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 49 of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of December 10.

Enjoy.

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There's a new kind of mortgage fraud stalking the land, the quick political fix.

It's a game both parties can play, unfortunately. A moratorium on foreclosures bails out thieves who signed for loans they had no intention of repaying. The industry's "freezer-teaser" plan gives the impression of progress, but it's really just a way for lenders to pick through the rubble.

Jesse Jackson has proposed that the government take on the loans which are going bad, leaving you and I on the hook for bad loans. He misunderstands what the Depression-era RFC actually did, which was mainly micro-lending to good risks, at a profit.

Here are the plain facts:

1. Housing prices have to come down. That's the only way to make housing affordable.
2. Lending practices have to be tightened. No more teaser rates, no more interest-only except to investors, and simplified documents must become mandatory.
3. Incentives need to be adjusted, and responsibilities attached to everyone in the mortgage process.
4. The criminal law must be applied for fraud by both borrowers and lenders.

It's this last which is most essential. It's obvious a lot of fraud took place here on all sides.

1. Investment bankers created crap, mixing-and-matching bad loans with good.
2. Mortgage brokers pushed bad loans on poor people, and didn't tell them.
3. Many buyers grabbed cash with both hands.

Laws are going to have to be changed, and people with gazillions of dollars in the bank are going to have to face prosecution, not just here but in other countries as well.

Here are my own modest proposals:

Belief in Evil

The nightmare I've been dealing with concerning our son reaches another climax tomorrow with an appearance at juvenile court.

After three months of this I have a pretty clear idea what happened. We're hoping for the best.

But regardless, what seems very clear is that the teacher who claims my son assaulted her believes firmly in good and evil. Especially evil.

Evil can be a noun, a verb, or a modifier. As a verb it refers to action everyone knows is wrong. As a noun it refers to the person behind that action, and may also be used to damn their character, to consign them to the netherworld of death or prison. As a modifier it's a political football as in the term evil-doer.

How many more innocents have died in Iraq these last 5 years, at our hands, wittingly or unwittingly, compared to the number who died on 9-11? Yet our leaders refer to those who planned 9-11 as evil-doers, and to our own good men and women as liberators.

It's nonsense. War is evil, no matter who does it, no matter their cause. It is all hell. It is violence, it is destruction.  It's a central lesson told by everyone who has come back from any war. The only way to justify such evil is to see the other side as more evil, so that the war becomes self-defense.

I shouldn't criticize. That's our defense as well.

Dealing with Oppression

Oppression is not something I deal with well.

It's something we're supposed to learn in kindergarten, but the ADHD kid (like me) doesn't have a mind for it then, so it passed me by. (I doubt Robert Fulghum had ADHD, since he learned these lessons in kindergarten.)

Americans in general are bad with oppression, yet oppression is a necessary evil. It's part of life. Organization oppresses the disorganized. The kindergarten classroom must be organized. The teacher has to be in charge, even when she's wrong. You're supposed to sit down, shut up and obey instruction. That's the whole purpose of the class.

This personal reality is also political. The main reason Democrats seem so wimpy (to those in the Netroots) is they have learned the hard lesson of dealing with oppression. Whether by fair means or foul they've been losing, on the whole, for 40 years, and they're used to living in the nooks and crannies of a Republican world.

That's what triangulation is all about. You assume that your own side, no matter how well-intentioned, is too extreme, and you try to fit modest reform between what you want and what you know the other side is going to do. Hillary Clinton continues sailing into the wind that doesn't blow and it drives people crazy. That's her real problem right now. Barack Obama doesn't assume the wind exists, John Edwards insists the wind can be resisted.

Polls show Obama is right -- in our guts we know the Republicans are nuts. Every one of them. Even that nice Governor Huckabee. Yet Congressional leaders keep leaning forward into the wind, as though afraid reform is going to be knocked over. Media pundits keep leaning forward, into the wind that doesn't blow. There's an Emperor's New Clothes feel to the whole thing. Washington truly seems like a Potemkin Village at times like this.

But back to me.

Inside Out

One of the most depressing stories of 2007 has not been written.

This is the trend of turning blogger outsiders into political insiders.

When Markos Moulitsas takes gigs at Newsweek and The Hill, he is figuratively moving to The Village, even if he never leaves his home in Berkeley.  Part of the process of being taken seriously is that you're pushed into taking yourself seriously. While Kos has actively resisted this in many blog posts, his writing gigs now make him a major media voice, whether he wants to be or not.

This is not something isolated to Markos. I have lately noticed many Netroots bloggers, from John Arovosis to Jane Hamsher to the Great Digby herself, start to take themselves more seriously lately. It's true that MyDD has always had an "insider" feel to it, based on an early decision to concentrate on the nuts-and-bolts of campaigning.  But these days, when I check in at any of these blogs, I often get the feeling I'm getting pronouncements, the official word, rather than just someone's opinion.