Think of this as Volume 14, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Lately I've grown as angry as the gang at Firedoglake.
It happens whenever I turn on CNBC, or read any business newspaper. There is an assumption that the Obama Administration is "anti-business," "proven" when gazillionaires like Jaime Dimon (right) switch financial support to Republicans because of the FinReg bill.
I think most Americans believe Jaime Dimon and his Wall Street pals should be pounding rocks with Bernie Madoff, not pontificating on TV, and certainly not deciding who our leaders should be. I think most feel the same way about BP chairman Tony Heyward.
I think they're right.
Regulation is not "anti-business." Regulation is crime prevention. A properly-regulated market does not "stifle innovation." It is not "socialism." Imagine Las Vegas without casino regulation. That's today's Wall Street.
A center of the conservative ideology that has ruled this country for a generation is that a law that keeps you from destroying someone with a gun must be rigorously enforced, while one that keeps you from doing the same thing with a pen hurts the economy.
A central tenet of conservative tactics is that you attack someone at their strength, or what they think is their strength.
The way you push back against what seem like heavy odds is to find a convenient enemy. (The painting is called Fisherman, by Roland Heath. From his blog, with permission.)
I've been one. It's no fun being a convenient enemy. But the convenient enemy gets no sympathy, and can be used to bulldoze through what seem like impossible problems.
More important, a President can use convenient enemies to make a larger point, and win that point, so that opponents who once appeared all-powerful become amenable to compromise or can be bulldozed.
In this President's case, his two biggest problems right now involve financial reform and energy reform. He is fortunate in that history has given him two very convenient enemies, Goldman Sachs on the one hand and Don Blankenship on the other.
I'll explain.
Republicans are re-running their health care strategy with financial reform. That is they're united in opposition, not just to a specific set of proposals but to the idea that anything can be done while Democrats are in power. The same is true with climate change legislation.
With health care, the President had to compromise-and-compromise with his entire party -- even the most rigidly opposed -- in order to get a bill passed over that opposition.
This time he's going to use the convenient enemies. He's going to win through because convenient enemies work both in Congress and before voters. No one wants to stand with the convenient enemies when voters go to the polls -- you're likely to be hung alongside them.
Even though Georgia was considered a backwater, a reliable red state filled with Angry White Men, there was enormous excitement. Both parties worked hard, yard signs were everywhere, there were rallies and people making phone calls.
Not this year. Atlanta just had its mayoral election and no one I knew cared. It's not just that a run-off was expected. There was a total lack of yard signs, few people talked about it, and I felt undecided almost before walking into the booth.
Instead of buying TV ads or hiring people to canvass, all the campaigns this year relied on robocalls, recorded messages that seemed to come from every area code around (and some that do not exist) but were in fact tapes with happy voices telling us who they were and who they were voting for.
Which is another thing about the campaign that struck me. All the calls were upbeat, relentlessly so. I wasn't told who to vote against. I was told "I'm someone you should trust and here is who to vote for."
The result was sad because turnout was low and real issues were not discussed. Everyone was rattling about crime, but the crime rate is not that high. There have been some spectacular incidents, acts of desperation by young, bored, pathetic people. But the gangs are in the suburbs now.
The real problem with Atlanta is that we pretend to be a great city but we are in fact a small one. There are just 500,000 people here, even with gentrification. We're like Tucson or Portland, but for decades we've pretended to be Philadelphia or Chicago, because we're at the center of a metro area that has grown to 6.6 million people. The efforts of Cobb and Gwinnett Counties to wrest control of the center from Atlanta have brought them Atlanta's poor, its crime and congestion. Government leaders there ignore the rot, and fearful whites move even further-out -- to Henry County in the South, Paulding County in the northwest, Cherokee County and Forsyth County to the north. They're as ignorant as they always were, so the problems will follow them there.
A few weeks ago my part of Atlanta was galvanized by the issue of crime.
A white guy of about my age, outside with a weed-wacker on a Saturday morning, whacked and now in critical condition at Grady Hospital. He's still in intensive care, but they hope he will be out in a few weeks.
Best I could gather from reading between the lines of reports on our neighborhood bulletin board is that this was a gang initiation or, perhaps, a stupid loss of temper between two guys trying to impress the same girl. The suspects at this writing are still at large and until they're caught we won't know.
Last weekend a protest demonstration was held. We went. There were about 150 people there, including political candidates, cops and neighbors.
By my count over 80% were white. Kirkwood has changed a lot in the last decade but it's not 80% white. Far from it. More like 40%. Maybe less.
More important the whites of Kirkwood are different in important ways from our black neighbors. We're wealthier. We're better educated. We're more likely to be in our 30s, 40s or 50s. We're more likely to be gay, less likely to be regular churchgoers. If we attend any service on Sunday's it's the "church of the brunch" which meets at every breakfast bar in town.
I admit to being a Rachel Maddow fanboy. I love the way she giggles when dealing with subjects that cause Keith Olbermann to spin the outrage dial to 11.
But she can also get outraged, and sometimes for the wrong reasons, as on the clip above, where she and guests protest the President's plan for "prolonged detention," outlined in his Constitution Hall speech.
I expected to be highly critical of the President's talk. There are areas here where I disagree with him. But on the critical issue of the detainees, and torture, a clear understanding of what he actually said tells me he's right.
If it is true that, as Rahm Emanuel says here, President Obama has no stomach for prosecution of past war crimes, because it would be "looking backward," it is the first enormous mistake of his Administration.
It could fatally wound his place in history.
We have seen this movie before. After the depredations of Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford decided to give the former President a full pardon, so that the country could move on.
Yet it was Ford's own chief of staff, Richard Cheney, who then devised and executed the policies of lies, of torture and of unprovoked war that now burden us. It's now clear that, in some cases, this had nothing to do with getting information. It was sadism.
Let's review. The refusal to prosecute, or even fully investigate, the relatively petty crimes of Richard Nixon led directly to the torture regime of Richard Cheney.
What might that torture regime lead to?
The Constitution today lies in tatters. Just write a memo calling it meaningless, on any excuse, and do what you want. That's the precedent Cheney used from Nixon's claim that "If the President does it it's not illegal."
We already have that answer. We have it in the rhetoric of the teabaggers, whose hatred knows no bounds. We have it in the attitudes of Republicans, who think they can turn their principles on a dime, doing precisely what they opposed a year ago, and never pay a penalty for it. We have it in the rejection of elections by Norm Coleman and Jim Tedisco.
What we have seen in the last several months is the impotent rage of Republicans coalesce into something far more dark and sinister, namely a rejection of everything Americans have believed in. The Southern Strategy has become a Confederacy of Dunces.
We can ignore it today, freely ignore it, because Republicans are now deeply unpopular, largely as a result of their continuing lunacy. But they are the "other" party today, just as they were the "other" party in the wake of the 1974 Congressional blow-out, and the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter.
The wheel of history continued to spin. It will turn, turn, turn again. What will it turn to?
Until evil tendencies are confronted, directly, and put down, completely, they will metastasize like a cancer. We have seen this in our own time. The profoundly undemocratic attitudes that caused the Supreme Court to stop a recount, that caused Bush to lie us into war, that created the torture regime, the systematic wiretapping of political adversaries and the use of that for policy advantage, it didn't come from thin air.
It came from our past refusal to confront evil head-on, from our normal desire to "move on" from the previous crisis this mindset caused.
What history will call the Second Mexican War had been going on for over a year before the President decided this week to enter the fray.
Republicans can whine all they want about the President's policy being "insufficient" but the fact is we're on both sides in this one. It's our drug market being used to buy our guns which are smuggled across our border to kill Mexicans. Increasingly, that trade is taking American lives, as American addicts seek the money for the drugs and the Mexican gangs fight for American territory.
What is insufficient, frankly, is the Secretary of State's statement that we bear "co-responsibility" for the violence. What has Mexico done wrong? They not only ban the same drugs, and seek to enforce that law with the full weight of their military might. But they also ban the guns being used to kill their people.
And where do those guns come from? From Georgia, from Texas, from everywhere in the USA where the NRA holds sway.
If Mexico a failed state? If it is, it's because the United States destroyed it. If it is, then the only way to "win" is to do to Mexico what we did to Iraq. Oh, and to do to the United States what we did to Iraq. If you don't have the appetite for that then you have to find another way.
The AIG "insurance" enabled European banks to do what they would otherwise be prevented from doing. Things are bad enough over there as it is, with Germany refusing to stimulate its economy and thus that of the continent, with Putin making constant threats about gas supplies, and French workers going on strike to put a "buy French" clause into that country's stim.
Amid all the hilarity and Pulitzer-level journalism involved in Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer yesterday is this key takeaway.
It was a feature, not a bug.
I chose this, the third part of the interview, because here Stewart gets to the heart of the matter. He mentions his 75 year old mother. She believed in what CNBC was covering up, what Wall Street was selling, what the Republican Party largely created. She lost a lot of money, and then a-wipes like Rick Santelli call these people "losers" while the guys around them are getting bailed out with trillions in taxpayer money and cheering him on.
What happened? Phil Gramm got a law changed allowing the creation of Confederate Money. He and other Republicans destroyed the wall between the casino of investment banking and the government-protected world of commercial banking. Hank Paulson and others leveraged 35-1 on this Madoff Money, and when they were finally caught last year they bailed themselves out on our dime.
Back in the 1980s, when I was terribly intrigued over the history of money, I made an in-depth study of Samuel Insull.
Insull's main contribution to history was as a scapegoat for the Great Depression. He was tried for a variety of charges during the 1930s after his own holding company, which controlled most Midwest utilities in the 1920s, collapsed.
He was found not guilty, and in fact his actions had not been criminal. After arguing back-and-forth concerning the justice of his case, I have come to the conclusion that does not matter.
What does matter is that his case was cathartic. Insull gave those suffering from the Great Depression someone on whom to vent their frustrations whose actions were related to the cause of that frustration. They gave generations an object lesson to avoid.
What Insull did was use leverage to build his empire. Leverage, the manipulation of vast sums through the application of small amounts of capital, caused the Great Depression. Leverage is also the cause of our present distress.
Unfortunately, the scapegoats we have created so far had nothing to do with leverage. Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford ran nothing but garden variety ponzi schemes, only with more zeroes than others. At worst, you can say they profited from a lack of regulation, a shortage of cops on the beat, which categorized the whole decade now ended.
What we need are better scapegoats.
We need scapegoats who teach the real lesson of our time, that leverage can be overdone, and that it must be restrained in order for the financial system to grow in an orderly way.
Recent Comments