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Introduction
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What's a word worth Wordsworth a bucket of spit, a handful of earth? even gamblers ante up to play but opinion's free so "nil" they say or at least that's my two cents worth
When the Supreme Court in Buckley ruled that free speech is just money that gushes and bundles of cash and fine turns of prose are a wash they put a for sale sign on democracy
When money is spent promiscuously it cheapens free speech immeasurably it opens the way for ticks and leeches to kill good political bills and speeches by vastly increasing lobbying intensity
Now some would weaken McCain Feingold a poor stab to keep votes from being stolen by pretending there's no public interest in watching corporate and private interests let Congress continue to loaf and freeload
The Court claimed that free speech plain is the same as funding expensive campaigns it's a pure legal fallacy that can be dispensed of with with a dictionary to claim that free speech equals paid is insane
To equate the indecent inducement of money with the chaste voice of speech is baloney all sound thought and fine nuance is lost 'mid the bullhorn of high finance even a blind child has more perspicacity
Yet in their zeal to make wrong seem right they Court'd gut and rewrite our Bill of Rights to allow a very small constituency of a wealthy well heeled minority diminish the glow of Lady Liberty's light
Giving unequal say to the worst among us destroys all hope of a national consensus pays offs and kickbacks are rigidly compulsory but free speech is fluid and voluntary no wonder our politics grow so contentious
To ensure that a corrupt few can profit abjectly access to all must be denied completely they'd lobotomize the constitution in favor of pure political prostitution as they recast free speech as pay to play
But won't moneyed interests be deprived if they lack a way to pay our pols bribes? No. Freedom's based on an individual's right to be heard not on massed capital's speech with a price tag is free speech denied
Politicians deny they vote how they're told to but money screams louder than words do clearly there's a sublime correlation between money outlays and bad legislation no one ever sells out their country pro bono
Has a Supreme Court ever been dumber at least to its typical five to four number that in its loathing for democracy rules bribes not just right but mandatory to rouse Congress from its golden slumbers
Those who'd have money and speech identical and influence peddling as normal are imbeciles all robber barons are unanimous that finance reform is traitorous a justice shouldn't kowtow to people so cynical
They'll say their hands and tongues are tied stutter stare decisis and utter previous lies if you're raised in a corrupt system when money talks you must listen when its says jump laws they say, "how high?"
Not the sword but the dollar, euro, yen, yuan and rial'll all be mightier than the pen in the beginning was the word for free now for most of us it's far too costly as political access for all comes to an end
When money's god only prayer's free as the plutocracy rapes our democracy then even truer words won't count as much as the size of bank accounts first congress then we'll be bought to our knees
But money per se is not the real enemy it's its misuse that spawns demagoguery like Greshams's Law bad money spent drives out good ideas and common sense as money corrupts politicians absolutely
To base our future on the tyranny of money rather than the primacy of ideas is lunacy it's little more than virtual suicide as our leaders abandon all pride to let Wall Street speculate with our liberty
So words aren't money and money isn't words that's the lamest logic ever been proffered though speech is aided by small sums it is completely swamped by large ones to give money more impact than words is absurd
So what's a word worth Wordsworth? free speech is of inestimable worth money's a small and tawdry thing above its own cost not worth anything that's why in the Bill free speech is first
To say that money may be limited is not the same as ruling it's prohibited whether used as bludgeon or coercion too much of it is unconducive a free nation McFeingold should be stronger not weakened
We are approaching an interesting intersection in time. Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the birth of the Republican Party. Yet in that time, remarkably, the political playing field has almost perfectly reversed. The solid hidebound South which supported Stephen Douglas and felt so strongly about it that they tried to secede and started a Civil War when they lost is today just as solidly republican as it was then democratic. The party of Lincoln has somehow become the heir to the political landscape of Jefferson Davis.
Of course most issues have changed or at least are now known by other names than they were 150 years ago but structurally and philosophically these regions have somehow kept their sociological and political identity intact. Therefore it is less the country that has changed than the two parties which are jockeying for dominance have changed their orientation. Therefore the republican party of today has become a mirror image of what it was and completely reversed the principles on which it was founded.
There is a present danger for the republicans in this. The election of Lincoln and the war that followed marginalized the democratic party for more than half a century. Controlling the South, when it tends to vote in a block against the rest of the nation rather than just as part of a broader coalition, then has not proven to be a strong position to hold.
Obviously the republican party of today is not pro-slavery. But they have made themselves heirs to that position as it has evolved through time. It has lately been the party that unreformed segregationists and anti-affirmative action, anti-immigration and states rights adherents call home. When the republican party was the chief supporter of those in favor of flying of the Confederate battle flag over certain Southern state capitals in recent years they seemed unaware of the irony inherent in that position. You are left to wonder at times if the republicans of today even remember who won the Civil War and which side they were on at the time.
Through sheer constant weak-willed opportunism those who are not only against our government but against most of what our government has done and what it might still do in the future have today gravitated to the republican party. The republican propagandists have played the card of victimhood so long and assiduously that when the majority of the electorate finally decided to enjoin the party to its own propaganda and make it the minority party it has always portrayed itself to be even when it wasn't, they have seemed surprised at this reversal of their fortunes.
The mirror comparison is not perfect, of course, for the US is a much different place now than it was 150 years ago. But when Obama, a former legislator in Springfield and a United States Senator from Illinois, self consciously portrayed himself as the natural heir to Lincoln it was unfathomable that Lincoln's old party barely even contested the comparison. They ridiculed it, as they do nearly everything in their own snide fashion, but without even bothering to insist that they were the true conservators of Lincoln's legacy. Since they knew it wouldn't be convincing they didn't even venture a try.
Naturally this betrayal of their own tradition has been a long time in germination. When the Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960's and Lyndon Johnson presciently predicted that it would mean the loss of the South for the democrats for a generation, the republicans could not have been more eager to take the bait. From Richard Nixon's conscious determination to win the South as a closet anti-integrationist, to Reagan's nod to reactionaries in the South as an virulent opponent of affirmative action, to George W. Bush's campaign's furtive efforts to smear John McCain with claims that he had fathered a black child, and now with dark grumblings about Obama "not being one of us", the republicans have massaged the Southern Strategy to a fault. They have worked hard to earn their current increasing geographical isolation and have pursued it with a breathtaking combination of verve and myopia.
Now their talk of getting back in power in an election cycle or two is fantasy. Their problems have been too long in the making to be readily reversible. And since the route they have chosen to do this is by becoming the party of "no", as permanent obstructionists, is essentially anti-democratic and profoundly un-American, it becomes even harder to take their strategy seriously. In their latest juvenile attempt to show they are clever - as opposed apparently to serious and substantive - they have tried to confuse this moniker of the "party of no" by saying that they are really the party of "know". Get it?
Unfortunately this reminds of the old joke applied by its enemies to the University of Nebraska football team (sorry Huskers). When asked what the "N" on their helmets stood for they are averred to have replied, "knowledge". So no, the party of no is not the party of know. That would require real policies, hard work and trying to re-earn the trust of the American people, all things the current republican leadership seems constitutionally unable to provide.
It was very clear, for instance, that they were probably not going to get their way on the recent health care debate. The democrats would have had to implode, something they are capable of to be sure, but not probable under present circumstances. The numbers, the momentum and the desire of the American people for action were all united against them. But by their incredibly cynical bad behavior, judgment, lies and exaggerations the republicans have tried their best to turn a loss into a rout.
If you consider the republicans of today a little more deeply, using only historical examples as reference points, the current republican party might be thought of as an amalgam of the anti-government populism of Andrew Jackson, the big business, robber baron party of Herbert Hoover and the anti-immigration and anti-integration party of the late Strom Thurmond. Their intolerant right wing religious beliefs combined with their devil may care guerrilla type political tactics - from their tantrum in shutting down the government when they couldn't get their way legitimately in 1995, to Clinton's bizarre stage managed impeachment, to the flow-through tea baggers of yesterday's news - remind us of the Know Nothing nativists of Lincoln's day, of whom he strongly disapproved and who abandoned the republican party in droves when he won.
Superficially big money, right wing religion, southern style populism and ultra nationalist militarism almost seem to hang together well enough to look like a winning coalition in some circumstances. Money, religion, anti-government fervor, anti immigration and ultra nationalism are all powerful forces in American politics. But since these subsets of voters don't necessarily cleave together naturally the republicans have always sought policies like flag burning, gay marriage and fear of terrorists to infuse their dry policy positions with strong visceral emotional context to glue these disparate forces together.
But emotion is a card you can play only so long politically without exhausting your good will, as well as your base and eventually the entire country. This is particularly true when the private actions of those shouting loudest often seem to contradict the principles they are publicly espousing. It grows even worse when these emotional issues seldom reach any clear legislative consensus or political culmination and which moreover have absolutely nothing to do with actually running the country unless you count running it into the ground. On the contrary these emotional hot button issues normally work in direct opposition to sound management of the nation's business and resources. In addition when you factor in their guerrilla political tactics, more common to a party out of power, which eventually precipitate a decline in governmental trust and effectiveness across the board, the party in charge will necessarily be blamed for the decline.
So when anthropologists look back to try to reconstruct the typical political animal of the Reagan era, republico-pythicus, to place in an unnatural history museum of the future somewhere, he might well look something like this: a slightly overweight middle aged white male ostentatiously waving an American flag with his right hand and a gun held high over head with his left. He would have a "conservative" bible tucked under one arm and a new and undigested copy of Adam Smith under the other. On his head will rest a ballcap with the slogan, "never raise common taxes ever for anything," a pro life lapel pin prominently portrayed on his shirt, and patches sewn on available spaces everywhere proclaiming all his corporate sponsorship logos and allegiances, from Haliburtan, Exxon, Fox News, etc. But this species - the card on the exhibit would explain - was a particularly delicate one unable to easily breed or adapt to climate changes and by the beginning of the 21st century it was an endangered species and soon thereafter was extinct.
A Remarkable Symmetry
In fact, there is a remarkable symmetry here. The republican reign from 1980-2008 is really quite similar to the democratic dominance from 1832-1860. The first of these was vanquished by Lincoln and the latest apparently ended by none other than his self-proclaimed heir apparent, Obama. Both of these political periods, one democratic one republican, were founded by larger than life presidents - Jackson and Reagan - who strode like giants over their times then lent their names to the era over which their parties presided. The interesting thing to note is just how similar was the basis on which they built their popularity.
Though neither was what you would call learned each had simple and firmly held beliefs. Both were rabidly, even irrationally, anti-government. Both were martial men, Jackson actually and Reagan rhetorically. Neither was noted for having humane policies favorable to minorities. Both were strongly popular, both had great hair and looked good on a horse. Both founded dead end deconstructive political movements which achieved far more in spirit than they bequeathed in legislative substance. Each inaugurated a political period which 28 years after its inception led to a deeply divided nation, their opponents' party demoralized from having been beaten so thoroughly for so long and their own party an empty stagnant shell of mindless sloganeering and vapid belligerence. In each case, after 28 years of virtually unmatched domination their party fell on hard times. In Jackson's case, after the Civil War, as I said earlier, the democrats were effectively marginalized for over fifty years.
Now in our current case the history has yet to be written, but alleged signs of an early republican resurgence fall somewhere between greatly exaggerated and totally nonexistent. The republican party today is as surly and obstreperous in defeat as they were obnoxious, arrogant and incompetent in charge. They have become the party of nullification, virtual secessionists from reality. It remains to be seen, which is certainly possible, if they can raise up a leader who can discipline this party to follow him or her and put all this flame and tantrum throwing nonsense aside and start to climb out of the political pit into which they have so rapidly descended.
Otherwise, if for instance the long health care debate eventuates in popular, enduring and irreversible legislation, which is highly likely, the republican party is teetering on the edge of the precipice of a very long decline. So far in the Obama administration their attitude was first cautionary, then inflammatory, then irrational, then shrill and now finally, worst of all, touching irrelevancy.
Just as an aside, at the same time that the basis of Jackson's and Reagan's popularity is so similar it is also true that one would never confuse the two. Jackson is an original democrat and Reagan is a pure republican. So what is the difference? For therein lies the secret in plain sight of American and probably world politics. For it is not the sameness but the difference between them which perfectly defines the eternal difference between the two parties. Quite simply it is money.
Follow the money. Jackson was against large accumulations of capital and considered it to be a threat to democratic procedures and liberty. Reagan was in favor of large accumulations of capital into private hands and considered it the proof and apogee of the success of the American free market system. This not only is the clearest, most fundamental and enduring difference between the two parties, this is the divide that can never ultimately be bridged. This is why there are two parties.
Money in one form or guise or another is at the root of 60 to 80% of every political debate and conflict in the country. It is more subliminal even than region, religion or upbringing. How one feels about the disbursement of money, which hinges on whether or not national wealth is a resource available to be drawn on by all or best kept by a chosen few, has been the most fundamental divide in all our politics from Jefferson to Hamilton, from Franklin Roosevelt to Reagan, from Obama to McCain.
Other issues may arise and fade. Wars, abortion, race, immigration, religion, national security and big government vs. small. All may tilt elections one way or the other from time to time. But along with money, the solid South is the most potent and consistent force in American politics. Money is not the reason the South has stayed the South through all this time. No one can unravel the Gordian Knot that is the southern states, not even the party of (k)no(w). The republicans crassly set out to use the South politically and have been captured by the South philosophically. It will be a very hard knot or (k)no(t) now for the party of no (or even know) to un-knot.
This is especially true as the republican right's unabated drive for political "purity" continues to narrow and winnow the base of their own support farther and farther away.
In sum, over the last few decades some of the party's' lesser lights and dimmest bulbs have made purely opportunistic decisions which the party is paying for now and may have to pay for for a very long time to come. The republicans have won the South and lost nearly everywhere else. They absolutely abandoned the expansive, tolerant, magnanimous, far sighted, unifying principles on which their party was brilliantly conceived by Lincoln, the nation's greatest president. They have replaced these fine standards with the narrow minded, selfish, greedy, torturous, divisive, fear and war mongering techniques of historical nonentities like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove along with various other ranters and ravers too intellectually small and forgettable to note.
It is painfully clear that if they are to begin to broaden their base again and become what they once were the republicans must move back to find the principles on which their party was initially founded 150 years ago and embrace them once more.
The debate over health care has taken a tiresomely predictable turn for
the worse between those in this country who have way too much and the
rest of the nation who have too little. Members of Congress, on
average numbering among the very wealthiest Americans, have their
insurance ensured and subsidized by the American people generally, with their generous pensions, for
life. They may receive treatment at military hospitals, same as the
President, and for a small fee have access to a physician at the
Capitol. Despite our generosity toward them they have no apparent
interest in offering the same benefits back to us.
Their health care is exceptional, among the very best in the world.
Ours is exceptionally bad, among the very worst in the developed world
with ten of millions afforded no reliable access to health care at
all. Their benefit package is carved in granite, ours is written on
sand. Their costs are cheap, ours are steep.
For the last ten years health care costs for the average family has
increased over wages for the average American family, 5% just last year
alone. Yet congress gives itself yearly cost of living wage increases,
sometimes in the middle of the night, to ensure that no health, or any
other, cost they may incur ever rises faster than their pay.
Yet the average net worth of Americans dropped 23% last year while the
average net worth of members of congress soared by 61% from 2004-2007.
The average median household in this country has wealth of about
$62,000. The median wealth of a member of congress is more than 25 times greater at about $1.7
million. Two of every three senators is a millionaire. And they are
paid $169,000 annually. Yet we give them wonderful health care and
they refuse to afford us comparable benefits - even with our own money
- because they say we can't afford it.
They pretend to be frugal and not want health care for Americans to
cost much but make no such "we are all in the same boat here" demands
on their own coverage. They seem far more willing to play medical
lottery with our lives than their own.
They loudly decry record deficit spending (which they are solely
responsible for) as a reason for denying spending on all manner of
necessary and needful things for the nation, while showing no
corresponding disdain or restraint for spiraling debt when it is to
support boondoggles in their own backyards - a bridge to nowhere, for
instance; an outdated weapons system that doesn't work, will never be
used and not even the military wants; or costly earmarks to fat cat
contributors to their campaign coffers.
According to the Center for Responsible Politics the top 5%of Americans
have more wealth than the remaining 95%. The top 20% own over 80% of
all our wealth. According to Edward Wolff of New York University,
income distribution in this country is much more unequal than any other
advanced industrial country. This trend has reversed direction since
the seventies when the fairness of our income distribution was among
the best and most admired in the world. Perhaps this fact alone is
the primary cause of the nation's underlying and growing discontent.
Congress is not only out of touch with our democracy they are foreign to it. They and their
supporters, just proven by the recent government bailouts, will
prosper even when we falter and the nation declines. There is simply
nothing which ties them to main street America any longer. They do not see our successful future as vital to their own. That is why
even those in positions of power who favor health care are dry, detached and academic - it
doesn't affect their own lives in the least. While those against it
are passionate about protecting their wealth from unwelcome incursions
by the poor.
The schism in today's society is greed and class based. Race is just an
emotional cover which moneyed interests and their political mouthpieces
are willing to foment only to misrepresent as populist outrage against any reform
detrimental to themselves. They will use every threat, any lie and tantrum
they can think to throw, from death panels to Socialism to Hitlerism,
to stop health care from going forward.
But it is not because they are opposed to health care per se. It is
simply because the goal of good, affordable universal health care
coverage is a symbol which speaks to a theory of government that
preaches social responsibility and equality as a necessity of
citizenship and maintaining our future prosperity. The sheer humanity of this theory is inimical to them. They would rather we stuck to the timeworn and disproven theories
of "greed is good" and "every man and woman for his or herself" as the
unifying, gathering principle upon which our nation is based and bound
to thrive. This has worked out quite well for them - and poorly for us
and the country - for the last thirty years.
This is what makes this issue so difficult for our political class to
deal with and the argument around it so cynical and surreal and unenlightening.
Congress has crawled gratefully into bed with the same fat cats they were elected to protect us
against. They have become lax and lazy under nearly thirty years of Republican rule and the
unworkable but highly self-serving theorem they operated under - no
government is good government. Now that congress must actually do something
they are lethargic and stuporous and must ultimately decide whether
they want to serve their few wealthy patrons or their millions of
constituents. Neither man nor congress can serve two masters. They can't have it both ways.
I The Strange Case of Ricci, Sotomayor and the Supreme Court
During Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings one case was frequently referenced. This was Ricci vs. DeStefano, where the city of New Haven vitiated the results of a test they had given to the firefighters of their town to determine those most qualified for promotion. The city did this because of an anomaly in the results which seemed to show, relative to similar tests given around the country, a structural bias in the test against minority firefighters.
This put New Haven in a prima facie case of disparate impact liability under Title VII's disparate impact provision. In fear of getting sued the city abrogated the test results and considered how to reform their testing procedure to make it more fair in the future. In the meantime they were sued by those firefighters, predominantly white, who had done well on the first test and wished its results to stand.
Judge Sotomayor, as part of three judge panel, unremarkably and fully in line with existing case law, when the case came before the second circuit, ruled in favor of New Haven and against the protesting firefighters. The Supreme Court overruled her decision 5 to 4.
Even though the New Haven city government found that the test was flawed in a way that would not stand even rudimentary public scrutiny the Supreme Court looked on from afar and deemed the test was perfectly fair and fine with them. They said the city's fears of being sued under Title VII were misplaced and exaggerated and thereby implied ulterior racial motivations for New Haven's actions. They chose to meddle with the city's ability to rewrite the test more fairly and insisted that it be allowed to remain in force even if it were flawed merely because it had once been given. They did this, curiously enough, on civil rights grounds, vigorously protecting the rights of the majority to benefit from an exam biased in their favor.
The oddity and questionable rationale for this decision only comes completely clear when you ask yourself if the opposite situation had existed. In other words, if the test had primarily benefited minority applicants to the exclusion of whites and New Haven had discredited its results would the conservative members of the Court have intervened to insist that the rights of the minority recipients of the test's biases, even when thought to have been fraudulently obtained, must be allowed to stand? Probably not.
In this white tinged reading of the law then whites, as the majority, are supposed to do better on tests than minorities and if they don't the results must be thrown out and if they do the results must be kept. Ironically each of these situations, though completely diametric, would be vehemently justified by those against affirmative action on the same grounds - to protest against some alleged exercise of "reverse discrimination." They use this term as if such a thing had ever been proven to be widespread, or have made any known statistical inroads in our society, such as resulting in higher pay or better jobs or a vastly improved standard of living which elevated the status of minorities unduly over the majority of whites.
Even though such a thing has never occurred conservative elements in this country have determined that reverse discrimination is a pernicious trend which is every bit as bad or worse than the actual,well documented prejudice affirmative action was designed to help counteract. Real, demonstrable discrimination against blacks and minorities ranges long and deep and wide and runs through our history like a river with many tributaries. Evidence of substantive reverse discrimination is shallow, incidental and as hard to find as a spring in the desert.
Yet given a choice it seems the conservative members of the Court have adopted the nebulous, hysterical reasoning of the voices of conservative reaction. Because in the case of the New Haven firefighters they have conspicuously chosen to accept on its face the right of the majority to profit from discrimination of the most direct and old fashioned kind - nothing reverse about it. Meanwhile in their opinion those who are victims of ordinary discrimination must continue to suffer its results without further recourse to or redress from the courts.
In this way the alleged, the incidental and the anecdotal is thought to more or less equate to long established, still evident, well documented and thoroughly insidious examples of actual discrimination that persist to this day. Instead they suggest that the only modestly successful medicine has become every bit as harmful as the original disease it was designed to cure.
This sleight of hand enables the Court, even while eviscerating affirmative action, do so while affirming its necessity - in the opposite direction. While pretending they are rectifying a great mythological wrong which doesn't exist, they are perpetuating an old one which does. They deny equality in the name of equality and gut affirmative action for minorities while affirming it for the majority - as if equality for both at once were somehow an impossibility. They do this while pretending to protect American (at least white American) rights which have never been remotely under threat from affirmative action to start with. So even though one patient is still quite sickly and the other quite robust, the ones playing doctor on the Court have decided that medical aid must quickly be transferred from the sick to the well.
Therefore, for the Court to accept without equivocation the claims of extremists who cry "reverse discrimination" as factual when they say that the rights of whites being discriminated against by minorities (as if they had ever actually acquired the power and opportunity to do this) is every bit the equivalent and some instances today even more of a threat to our freedoms than hundreds of years of historical crime and prejudice which have benefited them without quibble, complaint or rectification, is questionable to say the least. This theory lacks historical perspective and basic common sense as well as any quantitative proof to support their conclusions.
Equality under the law is a very good thing and no one would have any problem with adhering to it if there was any real evidence that it had been achieved. Nevertheless, in the Ricci case, the Court chose to make a rough guesstimate with the law of the land, overturning existing, long standing, well thought through, weighty and momentous precedents and procedures with an off-handed, bias-ridden ideological screed in legal clothing with no corroborating information or evidence whatsoever to back up their true unwritten intention - that of affirming that affirmative action is no longer needed and if it had ever been needed it should still have never been written into law.
II
Unfortunately the case they chose as the vehicle to drive their argument was very poorly chosen. The Ricci case was not a "reverse discrimination" case in any normal understanding of the term because the majority takers of the test suffered no harm and the minority takers of this test received absolutely no benefit from the actions of the city of New Haven. On the face of it, abrogating this test because of its own perceived biases was a perfectly neutral act.
Remember this is a case of affirmative action in only the most tangential way. Affirmative action only comes into play as a possible lawsuit, not an actual one. The city thought they might be out of compliance with Article VII, but no authority ever confirmed they were. They thought they could be liable to suit but were never sued on grounds of affirmative action. The city's decision was an action in anticipation of running afoul of affirmative action laws, not an actual instance of being penalized under affirmative action laws. Nor was this a quota system in any respect. Nor has there ever been, now or projected into the future, a test designed by the city to favor blacks or minorities. This is all about a test whose results, according to those who have reviewed it, were actually biased against minorities. How throwing it out disadvantages whites is a mystery unless you think that whites deserve and need a head start to succeed at tests.
Nor did this decision to scrap the test results unfairly advantage minorities. After all, to keep a prejudice from being enforced is not the same thing as reverse prejudice. Taking away an unfair advantage against you is not the same as providing an unfair advantage to you. In the same way that if the police keep someone from stealing $100 dollars from you it is not the same as being given $100 dollars free by the police. You cannot count as an especial benefit having something returned to you which was yours by right from the start. Equality is a right not a gift and certainly could not possibly represent an injustice to another merely because it is afforded to you. Therefore no advantage has been given to the minority takers of the test except to have a potential injustice being done to them undone.
Similarly, no disadvantage comes to the successful takers of the test by removing an edge they were unfairly given. No one has ever said they are suddenly ineligible for the promotions they seek, only that they may later have to recertify their worthiness by taking a exam which is a fairer test of their skills and knowledge. This can hardly be called prejudicial. By definition, leveling a playing field does not mean imbalancing it in the other direction. A fair test, by design, benefits or disadvantages no one. Making certain the playing field is perfectly level, which was all New Haven is accused of doing, if properly done cannot possibly be the same as reverse discrimination.
As for Mr. Ricci, he was inconvenienced to be sure, but he has not been disadvantaged. To simply right a perceived wrong by vitiating the results of a test judged to be flawed cannot properly be thought of as a wrong done to Mr. Ricci any more than it may be considered a singular advantage to those discriminated against to simply remove the grounds of the alleged discrimination. Even though he did not cause the discrimination he cannot properly profit from it without becoming, like a receiver of stolen goods, a party after the fact to the discriminatory process.
On the contrary, it is a peculiar notion to suggest that the decision to throw out a test which was deemed to have been ineffective and unfair, for whatever reason, to a sizable number of the people who took it could be called discriminatory to anyone. Only letting the test results stand when a large number of people who have studied it have deemed it unfair, constitutes discrimination. In this case, self-evidently, if the test bore undue biases it would become useless to is own purpose, namely finding the best candidates for promotion for the fire department of New Haven.
Remarkably then the Supreme Court didn't just strike a blow against affirmative action and a blow in favor of active, discernible discrimination but also a blow in favor of bad testing. Or at the least in favor of tests that didn't work in the way they were supposed to, to identify the best candidates for promotion in the New Haven fire department. The Supreme Court decided that New Haven didn't have the right or wisdom to control its own promotions.
By implication they also came out staunchly in favor of racial prejudice by saying that wherever it exists or is suspected of existing, it must be allowed to remain so as not to discommode the ones profiting from it. So where New Haven was trying to do the right things, often difficult and rare in our society today, the Court intervened to banish their good faith attempt to oblivion.
III
Although according to the experts the test was not irrefutably biased, there were considerable anomalies to it and enough consensual grounds to find that it was. Even if you didn't happen to believe this or believed that another test would reveal essentially the same results, it is not a bad thing for a city government, in an excess of caution or abundance of managerial zeal, to cast around for a better test to give its firefighters. It is very difficult to find anything wrong with this impulse.
Yet the Court seems as certain that the first test must be good as they are sure that any other method of choosing candidates for promotion the city may decide to employ will be prejudiced. They cannot make this assumption. This seems not to be a prescience the Court could possess, self-deifed though some may believe themselves to be. There is no evidence that they spent any real time trying to discern the relative quality of the test in question. Though there were mixed evaluations by the experts consulted by the city, no one mentioned by the Court ever said that the test already administered was ideal. All found room for significant improvement. It was on this basis that the city fathers of New Haven were operating with an eye to reform. The Court discounted all of this.
But if you cast an eye at the test you find that the anomalous results were only telltale symptoms of a larger disease.
To begin with, according to the author of the test, he stated that it was through interviews, consultations and conversations with the New Haven firefighters to determine their procedures and areas of concern that greatly informed the structure of the test. However, because the department is largely white these questions would necessarily disproportionately embody the concerns, biases and interests and reflect the make-up of the department as it presently exists and replicate these in its emphasis. This is not so much a bias on its face, but information which raises red flags in the background which speaks to a certain potentiality of thoughtless institutional bias behind the scenes.
In addition, as Justice Ginsberg points out in her dissent , not everyone had equal and timely access to the materials needed to sturdy properly and fully prepare for the exam. Some of these materials needed for study were expensive, at an average of $500 per firefighter that had to be spent in preparation for the test. Mr. Ricci's own estimate, designed to elicit sympathy but actually proving unfair access and unequal advantage, was that he invested "1,000 in preparation for the exam. Whites, as the long dominant group in the department would naturally have more collateral support, better contacts and more role models of success to emulate in a testing environment that was not perfectly sterilized from outside influence and internal advantages.
These issues were only given glancing notice by the Court but taken together are severely exclusionary. Money as a means to advancement is the structural equivalent of a poll tax levied on promotions. Not everyone has that sort of money to spend on a speculation, particularly if you have any sense that the playing field may not be absolutely fair. Taken together, poor expectation and significant cost seem almost perfectly designed to serve as a self limiting deterrent to wide and whole hearted participation by those who have historically been passed over for similar promotions in the past. On its face, to have money and connections as a constituent part of the equation necessary for promotion in the New Haven Fire Department thoroughly corrupts the entire process. And that is prior to even taking the test itself. There has to be a better, fairer process available to New Haven than this to determine those best fit for promotion in their fire department.
Yet the Court dismisses out of hand the idea that New Haven had a legitimate cause to have a concern of legal vulnerability. This is very questionable determination.
But on a deeper level it really doesn't matter if the test was unfair or not - and apparently the Court has no idea one way or the other. Because sometimes equality, like quality itself and like democracy always, is an inconvenient, messy and tumultuous thing. It's the long way around to arrive at the right place, which could have never been reached from any other direction. This is what affirmative action is. Make no mistake about it, the conservatives on the Court were not striking a blow for individual freedom, Mr. Ricci's or anyone else's. They didn't really say that the test given the New Haven was fair and good. They merely said, "So what? Who cares? So what if it was patently unfair? So what if it was? The Court said that the fairness of the test should not even be assessed.
Prejudice is a convenient, easy path, the shortest distance between two obvious points in history and time. Why bother with equality and fairness when they are so difficult to determine and hard to achieve? Why bother with a messy pursuit of excellence when mediocrity will do and is so excruciatingly painless and readily available to all? Why try for the best test, when we can settle for prejudice and for a test that will ensure the leadership of the department keeps the same ethnic makeup it has always had even as the rest of the world changes around it?
In fact, if the first test proved to be fair then the same individuals who excelled at it would also undoubtedly excel at a second exam to come. If the first test was flawed, and a second test proved it by elevating some applicants and lowering the scores of others, while it is true that some applicants may lost ground, the city and citizens of New Haven would gain and be far better off by ensuring that only the most meritorious firefighters would be promoted. That after all is precisely the reason for giving the test in the first place.
Naturally, it's also possible that the second method of awarding promotions would be even more flawed that the first in finding the best possible candidates for promotion. But there is no reason to think that this would be the case. The entire process has been open and well watched and easily observed by community watchdogs. With the lone exception of Justice Samuel Alito ( whose concurring opinion we will discuss later) no one has suggested any bad faith or nefarious intentions by anyone involved.
Other than this, It is hard to understand why the Court thought it necessary to intervene in an entirely local issue half way through its process in order to try to dictate winners and losers before the process was completely finished and any actual wrong doing was actually identified. The time to protest would have been once some tangible harm fell upon Mr. Ricci. If others less qualified in his place were promoted over him, for instance, or a second test was administered which turned out to be as biased as the first test in the other direction this would be the time for the Courts to get involved.
But to do what the Court has done in Ricci is like the governing authority of a basketball league stepping in to confiscate the game ball early in the second overtime because it just didn't like the trend the game was taking for its preferred team. Or stopping an electoral recount before it could be concluded because it was afraid its favored candidate might lose if all the votes were actually to be counted fairly.
The Ricci decision might come be known for the establishment of a new legal doctrine, "preemptive alleviation of an injustice yet to occur." Or so that some peoples' justice may not be temporarily delayed others' must be permanently denied. This is irrational and the total lack of proportionality of concern in elevating the white firefighters temporary distress and discomfort over the total lack of regard for the possibility of the minority firefighters potentially erroneous permanent disqualification from advancement - takes one's breath away. Justice delayed is not as bad as justice forever denied. The court is saying that to delay justice in the case of the promotion to Mr. Ricci is worse than justice forever denied via a prejudicially designed exam to the minorities in this case. This represents a Court sanctioned structural and ethical imbalance of major proportions.
The facts of this case, in fact, show no wrong doing anywhere. The test, though perhaps flawed, was not intended to be. The abrogation of its results in order to design a better exam materially disadvantaged no one. The existing status of the firefighters remained in place. No one was demoted, no one was replaced. No one has been unilaterally denied appointment or appointed to anything.
In the New Haven case there is very little tangible evidence anywhere to show that anyone was doing anything other than searching for the best legal option to find the best possible test to determine the best possible people for promotion to leadership positions in their fire department. All we have there was a slight bureaucratic delay common to any public process. Yet not only was a federal case made of it, but Justice Alito in his opinion thought he saw highly sinister goings on.
As if aware that the Court's desire to intervene in this case of good intentions all around was too thin a reed to land such a freighted albatross of heavy legal intention on, he tried to show bias by the mayor and one of the mayor's friends and associates, a "community activist" by the name of Rev. Boise Kimber.
Justice Alito alleged that these two had a prior opinion that the test was biased. He implies that this opinion not only informed their judgment, but that this opinion skewed the entire process and unduly influenced the board that actually made the decision to vacate the test results. This even though he knew of nor made any attempt to show that any untoward influenced was directed by these two men on the decision the independent Civil Service Board eventually made.
But since they neither instigated the questions about the test nor made the final decision regarding whether its results should be kept, it is hard to see from the available where their influence would have been either decisive or untoward. Justice Alito would seem to have it that having an opinion and vigorously expressing it publicly is prima facie evidence of wrong doing. (He also seems to find great fault with anyone who happens to be a community activist too, but that's a slightly different issue). Yet most people consider having such opinions necessary to the making up of one's mind, even while the facts are still being presented, understanding that opinions may change with changing information. An opinion, in fact, is not illegal to possess and is, in the common parlance, a thing "everyone is entitled to have one of".
If to have an opinion, even one that is politically motivated as Justice Alito infers, was tantamount to wrongdoing or de facto evidence of applying undo influence, then the fact that Justices Thomas and Scalia have well known opinions against any form of affirmative action whatsoever, would mean that Justice Alito would necessarily be unable to render fair judgment in an affirmative action case without being fatally influenced by them. Perhaps in Don Rumsfeld's ominous and eerie phrase, Justice Alito "knows more than he knows he knows" about such matters.
In any case it seems rather bad form to scurrilously accuse someone of racism in order to use them as scapegoats in a case which is being consciously used to limit our ability to fight racism.
IV
So why in the world did the Supreme Court take this case anyway? It's hard to imagine a more legally undistinguished, maladroit, almost incoherent decision than this. After all, this is an instance of extraordinary judicial activism undertaken in the name of the theory of judicial restraint. It's a case which allows a racial injustice to stand while wrapping itself in the guise of rectifying a myth of racial injustice (reverse discrimination) which is not even remotely applicable in the case they are employing to do it. All the while they are using the Ricci case as a showhorse instance of the evils of affirmative action when it is hardly an affirmative action case at all and displays none of the evils alleged. They seemed to want to do something with a case that fundamentally couldn't bear the weight of their intentions, like carting a twenty story building with a hand truck.
Perhaps, the conservatives on the Court, finding themselves increasingly marginalized politically, feel themselves more free jurisprudentially to take on controversial cases. What they fail to realize is that if the nation is moving past them politically it is also moving beyond them legally. A case like this seems almost quaint, less pivotal than passe', and in this particular case, just a little bit pathetic. It is apparently the product of a long nursed, festering resentment about progress toward racial equality. They are only emboldened to act forthrightly against it now because of its unnecessary nature, the country has moved on without them. They are trying to latch the gate of the corral long after all the appaloosas have escaped.
Their ruling is not the vigorous one in support of individual freedom and just reward for hard work that it is portrayed. Rather it is visceral, weak ruling that reeks of pique, reaction, resentment and retrenchment; a last gasp effort of a failed thesis of superiority to reinvent and relabel itself as progressive and independent. Yet it is so obviously a ruling of residual preferment for a fading white majority ruling class, class preferment and elitism and prejudice that it's more the echo of a cry from a doomed, backward leaning and intellectually vacuous world we have already left behind.
Surely they took this case too partially for political reasons. This case was less about its merits than its atmospherics. Its proponents have tried to paint it as reverse discrimination while it was obviously just discrimination of the old fashioned variety where majority preferments attempt to lord it over minority pretensions. The facts of the case then were not a indictment of affirmative action but a textbook case for the need and value of an affirmative action law. The city of New Haven tried to correct its bad test on its own without even waiting to be called to account. Self correction is the essence of preventive, educative law as the basis for a civil society. This is the triumph of affirmative action and the petty rantings and rulings of a few jaded conservatives on the bench cannot reverse it. They would have been better served by using New Haven's voluntary obeisance to the spirit of affirmative action as proof that a legal remedy was no longer needed than they were trying to prove that Mr. Ricci was a victim of reverse discrimination.
Or perhaps this case may have been chosen as a boost for conservative policies in general and against Judge Sotomayor in particular. This case was perfectly timed and designed to give conservatives in the Congress and on the talk shows ammunition in the upcoming confirmation hearing over Sotomayor. It is incredible that such a thing can even be credibly alleged, but the history of this particular Court makes it invariable that it should be. They have played politics with the law before. The weakness of their arguments in this particular case, in addition to the lack of necessity of taking on such a weak case in the first place, leave one with few good other guesses as to why the conservative justices on the Supreme Court made such a feeble hash of it.
Finally, and just for the record, Judge, now Justice, Sotomayor's ruling in the Ricci case, perfunctory though it may have been and whatever your thoughts on affirmative action may be, was perfectly correct.
Tom Brokaw wrote a book called "The Greatest Generation" about our parents and grandparents who fought World War II. How quickly we have fallen.
When Washington was nearly captured or assassinated in the plot which involved Benedict Arnold, though Arnold got away they captured his handler, a British officer with incriminating documents. Washington, after much deliberation and soul searching, with no pleasure or gloating self satisfaction, had him executed as a spy. How much thought do you think he gave to torturing the man first? After all his life was personally threatened, his livelihood and way of life was imperiled. As Franklin famously noted, "either we hang together or we will hang separately". No one had any doubt as to how critical the situation was, yet Washington didn't consider torture as an option. Why? Because he had integrity, he was civilized, he knew better. That's why Washington is the founder of a country that didn't exist before he did. He had character. When Lincoln was Commander in Chief during the Civil War his life was threatened many times. Robert E. Lee fought most of the first half of the war in the north, just a few days march from Washington. Lincoln certainly had ample incentive, if he were that kind of man, to torture rebel prisoners (or high value detainees) to discover Lee's troop movements and plans. After all, Lincoln's life was in jeopardy, the country was in danger and our very way of life was under assault. Yet there is no evidence anywhere that such a thing was ever even remotely considered - even by the troops of either side in the field - in that most visceral and passionate of wars. Why? Because Lincoln wasn't that kind of man and is now widely considered today to be our greatest president. After Pearl Harbor was attacked and Japan was running riot in the Far East, Hitler declared war on the United States too. This meant that the two most powerful military establishments, east and west, were arrayed against us. In both theaters of war, Japanese atrocities in China and German genocide against the Jews provided abundant evidence in the darkest days of the war that these nations were not playing by our rules. They wanted to kill us, enslave us, our entire way of life was in peril and under grievous assault by forces of evil and darkness. Yet there was still no torture contemplated. Roosevelt wasn't boastful or apoplectic but reassuringly calm and quietly determined. Our military prisons were humane and the rules of warfare were scrupulously adhered to whenever possible. Roosevelt is also considered to be one of our greatest presidents. If this is what the greatest American presidents did at the greatest crises in our history, why were Bush-Cheney so quick to do exactly the opposite? 9-11 wasn't a situation like that which faced Washington, who against great odds was trying to overthrow control of the world's greatest military power of his day. No, just the opposite. Bush was president of the largest and most powerful and prosperous nation on earth with military firepower greater than the rest of the world combined. To be sure, the attack against us was grievous, not strategically perhaps but in shock value it was every bit another Pearl Harbor. But the ability of the attackers to follow it up with anything as great or greater than the original attack, certainly on any kind of level which approached World War II, was nonexistent. Any ability to follow it up with more attacks at all was severely limited and even, with due diligence on our part, doubtful. Why then with a proportionally much smaller threat against our infinitely greater resources and resiliency did our leaders behave with so much less self control, integrity and courage? Of what exactly were they so petrified? To be sure those who build something have a different sort of mindset and make up than those merely called upon to maintain something that has already been built. Maintence men are of a different caliber than architects and visionaries and great leaders. Still the vast retreat from the principles we have always held dear and scrupulously adhered to in this country in the Bush administration was stark and even astonishing. The one thing they have used as an excuse, as reverse justification for the torture they engaged in, has been an imminent threat scenario of massive destruction. In an improbable "what if" situation they ask, "wouldn't you want to know if we were about to be attacked by a nuclear weapon? Shouldn't we torture then?" But this is an entirely false premise designed to deceive, a non sequitor to this particular situation because nuclear weapons were the one thing we knew our enemies didn't possess at the time and they tortured anyway. In moments of rare lucidity the Bush people seem to have been aware of the implausibility of another attack against us equal to the first. When they weren't busy trying to frighten the American people (something else unprecedented for an American leader to engage in in time of war) for extraneous political reasons they spoke candidly that the threat against us was really more abstract and theoretical than real. Cheney called it "existential". Yet Cheney was so afraid of this existentialism (and apparently any other branch of philosophy or deep thinking) that he apparently spent way more time than was synonymous with bravery hiding in bunker in an undisclosed location. Be that as it may, and all their ulterior political motivations aside, we are still left with the question. Why were they so weak, timid and afraid? Even in the only comparable situation in our recent history, the red scare of the fifties and the farcical, anti-democratic McCarthy hearings which resulted, no one claimed that all the normal rules of human decency were expendable because a few of us were afraid. But supporters of this unjustifiable cause feel that if they can lure you into conditional agreement of an extreme, hypothetical case, that torture might potentially be justified, they then jump to the distant conclusion that in every case, due the discretion of the torturers, torture should be allowed. If torture is acceptable in any scenario then it must be permissible in every scenario. Bizarre as this rationale is, it is what is being claimed today by the apologists and supporters of a torture policy which cannot be proved to have provided us with any actionable intelligence, particularly not of the "smoking gun" variety which has been used as its only legitimate justification. Conversely, torture has indisputably proven very harmful both to our efforts in the court of world opinion and to ensure the safety of our troops of the ground. All because of these policies which only resulted in very nebulous background information which might as well have been obtained by other means. The rest of the information received from torture was purely erroneous which led to false leads and unjustified fears which only hindered our ability to respond to real threats and were undoubtedly counterproductive to our ability to understand the capability of the enemy. In this case it is impossible to see that the benefits of torture outweighed the risks even in the best case scenarios put forward as justification. One of the "triumphs" in torture they do claim was apparently waterboarded eighty four times in the course of one month "after" he had allegedly given us the valuable information he possessed. This disproves the value of their argument cross the board. If they had gotten the information they claimed they got from him why was it necessary to continue to torture him? Either they didn't get the information they claimed or they were torturing just to be torturing. And then why did the CIA feel it necessary to destroy hours of video of these same sessions apologists now are claiming were so valuable and necessary and humane? Innocent people don't destroy tapes they preserve them. In fact one problem with suspending normal rules of ethical behavior is that no other ethical paradigm is ever erected to replace them. Therefore the slippery slope of possibility soon runs straight to the gutter at the bottom of the hill. This is exactly the case with the two instances of torture with which we are most familiar, Abu Gehraib and Guantanamo. Excesses were rampant in both places. Torture and cruelty became ends in themselves and quickly turned into sheer depravity. So why was our government so weak kneed? When you look at the privileged existence of Gorge Bush, never seasoned, steeled or hardened by difficulty, and the intellectual shallowness of the people in his administration you begin to approach the heart of the problem. This generation of Americans in leadership positions are soft and softness and flaccidity lead to moral decay. There was never a difficult challenge facing them which their daddies or sugar daddies or high powered connections couldn't buy them out of. They cut life's corners everywhere. The crisis on Wall Street stems from the same root cause. The money men didn't build the nation's financial power, they only inherited it and capitalized on it, living off their father's or your father's or your wealth. They don't earn money or make things, they merely play with other peoples' hard earned capital. This sense of separation from those who build things to those who only use them leads to a superficial understanding and analysis of how things actually work and how things get done. It leads to a reliance more on ideology than ethics and hard work. In government it leads to Rovian gamesmanship rather than competent government. The Bush administration along with all its mindless and corrupt supporters was small mindedness in action. In an instance like this, often people who are far removed from a fight are more nervous and fearful about its outcome than those actually engaged in the fighting. The policy makers in the Bush administration had nothing in common with the people who built this country, they are its inheritors, they mistrust our strength and the resiliency of the American people. As they have never built anything of value themselves they cannot recognize the telltale signs of the strength of a structure that others have built. Since they lack the integrity, strength of purpose and sheer fortitude that it took to create this country they are weak in the management of it and nervous as to whether it may withstand periods of great pressure. That's why they are so afraid. Such people who possess small minds cannot fathom large principles. They cannot see ahead with confidence because they cannot discern the trajectories of the past. Wracked with paranoia they overreact disproportionately to small provocation while myopically missing large warnings signs which go unheeded. They do not trust the greater instincts of others or of history because of their lack of imagination and courage and personal will power. They have so little in common with the people who have made this country great that they do not even know where to begin to try to emulate them and so in the end do not even try. Bush and Cheney inherited a system of government whose traditions they neither completely trusted nor ever fully understood. It was way too big for their limited imaginations to absorb. Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt knew the country was great and could feel in their souls that we would prevail against all odds and could afford to adhere to principles without which they knew we could not ultimately succeed. This generation as represented by George Bush and Dick Cheney are hard of heart, flaccid of mind and weak of spirit. They are soft and gutless. They don't have the integrity to adhere to principle and do the hard things necessary to be great. They are short cut artists. They are a danger to us. They are unworthy of our past. They are enemies of our future and they are foreign what has made us great. They engaged in torture not because it worked or because it was necessary. they engaged in torture not because they are tough or strong as they would have us believe, but because they are weak and afraid of things they don't understand. And they understand very little. Heroes don't torture, tyrants do. So what do we do about the Bush torture policies? Imagine if you loan a car to someone who abuses it and then returns it to you impaired just as you are going to have to use it to make a long trip. Would you refuse to get it fixed because you weren't responsible for creating the problems? Obama has inherited Bush's clunkers, his lemons and his wrecks. While it's easy to sympathize with their desire to put Bush behind them, in their rear view mirror so to speak, there are repairs which have to be made first or they will never be able to get very far down the road before the car falls apart. So of course there has to be what they are calling a truth commission or something very much like the 9-11 commission. Not out of vindictiveness but out of honest discipline. We must go on record officially and institutionally and irrefutably against such behavior or undoubtedly its proponents will do it to us again next time they have a chance. Do you believe for a second that a guy like Cheney wouldn't? Rhetoric alone does not wash the stain away. We owe it to our past and to posterity to put ourselves right with our own past to ensure that these things never happen again in our future.
Imagine Barack Obama not on a basketball court but in a corrida on a Sunday afternoon in matador tights taking his formalized bow to the crowd. More on this later but first, I admit - I have attended only one legitimate bull fight in my life, in Madrid. A friend and I went out for the afternoon. There was one matador, obviously an old hand, well known to the crowd but probably not of the uppermost rank anymore. He gave a good performance, workmanlike and precise. The crowd was appreciative if not ecstatic. Actually it was rather dull how easily the magnificent bull was dispatched, a bit sad or bittersweet. Then out came the young stud, the up and comer, the new bullfighter on the block, all flare and élan. Unfortunately the bull wouldn’t cooperate. After a few passes, the bull stopped charging and became pensive - not a good thing at a bullfight. The brave bullfighter, the toreador, magnificently arrayed in black sequined outfit tight to the form, couldn’t entice the bull forward. No matter what he did, and he waved the red cape every which way, the lonely bull only snorted and paced and eyed him with suspicion. The toreador moved closer and closer to el toro, - no doubt calling the giant beast a lot of choice, dirty Spanish names under his breath. Nothing. The bull actually backed up a step or two as the matador drew closer. The crowd was getting very, very restless now. At last the exasperated matador, knowing his moment on the big stage was slipping into farce, threw up his hands in exaggerated theatricality to let the crowd know that, in his opinion, the bull was more to blame for this unfortunate inactivity than him. Then, to at least prove his courage, he actually turned his back to the bull and fell to his knees and bent over backwards until the back of his head was nearly touching the ground. There he looked up imploring at the curious, wary bull from just several feet in front of him. Apparently the bull bore no malice or ill will to the matador, however, and didn’t try to take advantage of his vulnerable position by charging. Reckless and brave as this act was the crowd hated the bullfighter for it. They were booing now. Bullfighting isn’t about bravery, that is a given, anybody who’d climb into a ring unarmed with a massive angry animal that has big horns had to be brave – if not insane. No, bullfighting , the art of the matador, was about skill, bravery is just the price of admission. The name of this matador was Gallo de Moron. I only remember it because it is so memorable. I don’t know what happened to his bullfighting career. It may have gone well, recovered, and become spectacular, or perhaps it didn’t and died right there that afternoon. In a bar not far from the corrida afterward where my friend and I repaired for a few beers, Gallo de Moron’s name was already infamous from the live radio broadcast of the fight. You could hear it spoken with derision to the accompaniment of laughter.
As far as politics go, Obama is a pretty good matador so far. To be sure, his enemies make it easy by their twitching overreaction to every move he makes. They see red flags everywhere, even where none could conceivably exist and charge wildly and in out of control fashion at any provocation, even when they were not provoked. The republican right persists in this because they have built their careers and in some cases their lives around a number of discredited notions which they will not, or cannot, let go of. Every time Obama or anyone connected even obliquely to Obama, makes a move, particularly when it is done expertly or with grace, especially when it is done either matter of factly or cheerfully as if to taunt them in their misery, these permanent malcontents go berserk with rage. They see red again, snort, kick their hooves back in the dust and then make yet another bull’s rush forward, all out, wild, with abandon and total disregard for what will happened next. They have not yet even quite reached the point of caution and circumspection. Their supporters who egg them on can only watch in frustration as their political leaders race to the blur of red cape before their eyes pulling away again, as the swirl of dust clouds their senses and chokes their flaring nostrils; they thunder by into thin air as Obama, unharmed, gracefully pivots away to graciously acknowledge the roar of the crowd. True it’s been rather fun to watch and also rather sad, too, but it is also dangerous as well, for that is the thrill of the bullfight. The republicans know, like that bull, that they need only gore the peerless matador once to score a telling, perhaps even a fatal blow. On the other hand with each pass of futility, the bull tires a little bit more and the likelihood of their landing such a blow diminishes. And so far the Obama team has not even bothered much to fight back. Once they do, bringing out the political picadors with their lazar sharp swords to surgically pierce the bull in the back between the shoulder blades, the bull will slow further, hastening his demise. The lone exception to this was when they took on Rush Limbaugh who infamous claimed hope that Obama would fail. Commentators thought this was a mistake and distraction by Obama’s team but it wasn’t. It was quite effective. Limbaugh’s influence is more myth than reality and to lance his boil diminished him in stature considerably. Side by side with Obama he seems quite a small man. Then to watch Limbaugh's critics in the republican party have to bow and show fealty to him, one by one, has diminished them as well. When an unredeemable opponent crawls too far out on alimb it is mandatory to occasionally cut one off and watch them fall. To be afraid or too nice or too squeamish or too bipartisan to fight back is to embolden your enemies further. There must be costs exacted for each random attack or they will not only increase but eventually become concerted. This is the difficulty Clinton had. The weak kneed democratic support he had never exacted a toll for all the absurd vitriol and wild charges that filled those times and Clinton alone could never slow the continuous onslaught the republican right orchestrated against him. Until finally a weak charge hit home. Clinton survived, of course, and outlasted his enemies but the bloody messiness of the affair and the sheer measiliness of the whole impeachment process left the crowd queasy and unsettled and arguably worked against the democrats in the next election. Even though, it should be pointed out, more broadly it only hurried the republican party’s long slow slide from the pinnacles of power to the ignominy they now enjoy. Because, like the matador and Gallo de Moron, politicians must also play to the crowd. Once you lose them you never get them back. The toreador must never let them see him sweat – that’s half the battle. Reagan, for instance, eviscerated the democratic opposition with his first reconciliation budget and was never touched, though his poll numbers rose and fell, by the democratic opposition afterwards. Bush, with his very low margins for error, not being the best of matadors, was always a showboat, taunting his enemies with his limited skills until, after a – for him - promising start, he went the way of Gallo de Moron. Politics, not unlike the toreador, has its own version of death in the afternoon.
2 Bulls Rush in (where wise men fear to tread)
This is all to be expected. There was a great deal of talk at the advent of the Obama era about bipartisanship and a “team of rivals” based on the title of the Doris Kerns Goodwin book about Lincoln, but this is a false comparison. Lincoln did not invite politicians into his cabinet from across the entirety of the political spectrum but only from across half the political spectrum. There is a big difference there. There were no internal philosophical rivals within his cabinet only rivalries of personal ambition. The real rivalry in Lincoln’s time was the Civil War which washed out all other distinctions. Lincoln didn’t unite the country through the comity of his cabinet but he unified it though division by decisively defeating his opponents on the field of battle. He was a president who was not afraid of a fight when it came to the big issues which faced the country and was only mild and compliant over small matters. After the war he showed every sign of being generous in victory but while it was going on he was not. He only became broadminded after his real rivals, those who believed in slavery and secession, had been soundly beaten into submission. For Obama supporters to suggest he can get a tent big enough to invite all the republicans has always been a fallacy. He has to understand that the right, like their symbolic elephant, never forgive or ever forget. They will hate him with a passion tell the end of time just like they have always hated the last great president who didn’t do what they wanted him to do – FDR. Soft, consensus politics are great if you can get them, generosity and compromise and bipartisanship are wonderful when they occur. And it is wise that Obama always is careful to leave that door ajar to the opportunity of bipartisanship because this is always the easiest and best way forward. And very few politicians are even capable of seeing both sides of an issue much less possess the skill and capacity to gather consensus around centrist positions. That is actually the true compliment that people have bestowed on Obama when they say he reminds them of Lincoln, because objectivity and temperance were Lincoln’s greatest qualities. And it is rare indeed. But the battles upcoming, and the republicans have recognized and accepted this sooner than the democrats, are going to be won or lost through old fashioned hard ball politics. They will be cutthroat and mean spirited just as they have always been and will entail character assassination, political arm twisting, bribery, quid pro quos and deceit galore and all nuance will be swept under the rug of generality and over simplification. We have already seen the republican positions and heard the rhetorical excesses on the internet, cable and radio hardening and intensifying to a nearly absurd level of opposition and we are only several months into the Obama administration. Contrary to expectation then, counterintuitively, the softer the politics Obama plays the louder the screams of the extremists on the other side will become. Soft policy and kind words are fighting words to an extremist. They are an affront and a sign of weakness, as to them compromise is the silent sound of losing. Therefore, it is wise for Obama to present a soft face to such harsh rhetorical and partisan excess. Much like a matador can coax a bull to charge with just a slight flick of his wrist and then lets the bull wear itself out with one bull rush after another into thin air, while he, the matador, red cape tucked gracefully aside, pirouettes out of the way time after time, Obama can work their extremism to his advantage. The bulls and bullies on the republican right, always seeing red, states and otherwise, become even more outraged and out of control with each futile lunge after the twirl of Obama’s cape. This irrational behavior actually makes Obama’s politicies easier to enact. He needs these extreme components the way the toreador needs the bull to enhance and improve his own stature by comparison. Each failed bull rush often, ironically, consisting of a lot of bull, creates its own vacuum which allows apce for more progressive ideas to quickly fill up. Arguably, if the republicans weren’t always on the attack and always predictably obstructionistic, they would have to be created. That is in fact what the republicans have often done to democrats, manufacturing enemies of religion and of the state to oppose. To coax, beguile and entice the bulls in the republican party to attack has been rather easy so far. They have shown no reticence to attack whatsoever, even when they have had no plan of attack and even when they have had to manufacture their own provocations and slights to justify their outrage. To now Obama has shown all the signs of being a superior political bullfighter (in every sense of the term). By first, being soft enough to let your opponents make all the mistakes and then using the weight of their own exaggerated force against them; second, being strong enough to make them pay for particularly egregious remarks and third, to know the difference.
3 The Twenty Egg Omelet
But why is the right being so bullheaded? There is arrogance, corruption and total lack of perspective to be sure. But the simplest answer is: it's because it’s who they are. There is a story from the French Revolution which might help to illustrate. It concerns a member of the nobility at the outset of the worst days of the violence against his kind in Paris who actually played it pretty smart. He laid low for several days and then, dressed in a simple laborers’s clothing, on foot and alone and carrying nothing with him, walked from Paris unobtrusively, no doubt occasionally yelling forth shouts of solidarity with the sans-culottes he passed in the streets. And it worked. He couldn’t believe his good fortune and congratulated himself on his shrewdness to have outwitted the human rabble in the streets whom he no doubt thoroughly despised. After having safely removed himself miles from the worst of what was going on in Paris, he became tired and hungry. Feeling secure at being out of harm’s way, he stopped in at an inn to eat. He ordered an omelet. And just as would happen today the proprietor asked him how many eggs he wanted in it? The nobleman was aghast, he had no idea. He’d never cooked anything in his life. As beads of sweat began to appear on his brow he finally had to venture a reply or look even more suspicious than he already did, “oh, uh, er, uh, twenty?” he guessed. For that tiny little slip and greed for a twenty egg omelet he undoubtedly lost his head. The moral of this story is: the true nature of a man extends beyond the clothes on his back. Similarly, it’s hard not to sympathize with all the wizards of industry and titans of the financial community we’ve seen of late trying to pass for normal and pretend to empathize with the little people of the world as they say how much they feel our society’s pain at the wreckage their own arrogance and corruption has caused us. This includes the heads of automobile companies flying high priced company jets to DC to beg handouts, to the executive pay packages to the worst operaters at AIG, to all the shills and cheats who have been paraded before all the congressional inquiries trying to appear as human as you or me. to a causual observer they are just smug, confused little nonentities desperate not to have to cede their divine right to twenty egg omelets while those around them starve. And the worst of the republicans are the same. They obliviously spent the last election and since, even as their poll numbers continue to drop, refusing to grasp the fact that their old dogs won’t hunt in this world of newer, faster rabbits. People have long since tired of their cheap tirades of family values, and fiscal responsibility and sound, small effective government – after they have been in charge for years and have very nearly delivered us the opposite. And still they continue with the same bland litanies primarily designed to protect the same pockets of bloated excess their policies created in the first place. They have even lately tried to convince America that there is a great populist revolt afoot determined to fight against tax increases for billionaires. Is it any wonder that now, like the pacing bull in the ring, after his first few hard charges against this deceptively sly moving red cape target have only left him looking foolish, the republican right is confused. But can they learn? Watch them now, how they grunt and snort, throw their heads back, push their feet back violently against the sand and look even more determined this time to rush even harder, even more wildly, even fiercer and with even less of a clue than before. Because the old red flag is waving away at them so temptingly, so enticing, to their minds it is almost begging to get gored, and look ther it is again, right there in front of them, for god's sake, taunting them to charge. So who doubts it? Who doubts the next bull’s rush is coming? The republicans will oppose everything always forever, It’s who they are. And that’s why the Obama administration is going to be successful – even sometimes in spite of his own instincts for moderation - because extremists on the right keep forcing it leftward by refusing to make even obvious commonsense compromises on issues which Obama might have otherwise have been inclined to make. The radical right consider this purity and regard their wild bullrushes as noble, but they aren’t. They are just dumb and subjective and always seeking to subvert the essence of mutual respect that democracy is built on in favor of an illusory absolutism they can never enjoy. More power to them.
Super Duper Top Secret Justice Department Meeting Of the Top Legal Minds in the Country (or at least in the Bush Administration)
Bybee - OK guys said Bybee to Bradford and Yoo. We have a directive here at Justice to give our best opinion as to how to approve whatever we’re told to do. OK? Bradford - Says who? Bybee - Dick’s office. Yoo – I approve. Bradford – Me too. Bybee – OK, all agreed? Agreed, said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Bradford – OK now maybe we’ll read it and see what it actually tells us to approve of. OK, we are supposed to approve of torture. Yoo – I agree. Of who? Bybee – First, let’s review in case anyone asks. What does the Constitution say? Bradford – I didn’t know either but there’s a note attached that says the eighth article of the Bill of Rights, whatever that is, says “no cruel and unusual punishment.” Bybee – Oh well, that could mean almost anything. Yoo – Right. I see a huge loophole right away here. What if it’s not both? What if it’s cruel but not unusual or unusual but not cruel? It doesn’t say cruel or unusual so it must be both to be prohibited or as I see it all bets are off. Bradford – Good point, well taken there, Yoo. So what renders it not unusual? Yoo – I’d say anything that’s ever been done in the past. I know we’ve studied methods used against us in the past in the Korean War, how about those as a guideline for us to use against others? Bybee – Or methods used by Attila the Hun or Hitler? Bradford – Right, I see, how can they be unusual when they’ve once been done before? And we can think of others too, there’s ample precedent, Idi Amin, or Pol Pot or genocides in general, here, there and yonder. No, these cannot be called uncommon acts in the course of human events. OK then, what about cruel? Bybee – Too vague a concept. One man’s cruelty is another man’s fun, it depends on which end of the stick or baton you’re on that’s doing the beating. Bradford – Good. I like to kick dogs and pull the wings off butterflies myself, can that be wrong? Yoo – There’s a lot of people in this country right now I believe should be arrested on the spot, sentenced without trial, held indefinitely without right to counsel or being able to review any of the evidence against them, and then slowly drawn and quartered before they’re hanged. And yet there are some in this country who would deny me the freedom to do this. Bradford – That’s an out and out outrage. Bybee- Well what about punishment then? Yoo – There’s a serious problem with that too. After all, all torture isn’t necessarily penal, some is coercive, which is an entirely different thing. Bybee – True, we punish them until they tell us what we want to hear and then we stop. There’s certainly no punishment involved. Arguably it hurts it worse than it does them, at least that’s what my parents always said when they beat the living crap out of me. Bradford – Theoretically then we are trying to keep them from punishment of longer duration by torturing them harder so it can stop sooner. Bybee – Right. Our torturers merely seek a quicker end to torturing, and in that sense it’s a good and noble thing, I’d say. Downright humane, in fact. Bradford – OK, then clearly, this Constitution thing is way, way too vague on the matter to be of any relevance whatsoever to our discussion. Besides, clearly the action must be both cruel and unusual and punishment all three together against people we don’t approve of that the constitution comes into play at all. Yoo - I think that pretty well guarantees exactly never. Bybee- Exactly, then this Constitution thing is just an irrelevant rag to us here in this matter of torture before us? Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo
Yoo- What about the Geneva convention? Bradford – Gee, Geneva’s far. Bybee- I agree, too far out of our jurisdiction to apply. Yoo- Besides what’s convention got to do with it when the circumstances are so unconventional, after all we’ve been told to compromise our principles by Dick and George, what’s right and wrong got to do with it anyway? Bybee – Good point, Yoo. How about you Bradford? Bradford – What’s a jurisdiction? Yoo – Then it shall be here agreed that no international conventions shall apply to this highly unconventional national situation. And because the enemy combatants are being carefully sequestered overseas, our Constitution doesn’t apply because it’s international. It’s a catch – 22. Agreed? Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Bradford – What about if organ failure occurs? Yoo – Get yourself a piano tuner. Bradford and Bybee- Oh Yoo, ha, ha. Bybee – That’s like a pun, right? Good one. Bradford – Oh fun. Bybee- In that humorous light, organ failure doesn’t sound so bad, since we laughed out loud about it, so I move that organ failure should be allowed because because it has the potentiality of being funny to someone and may actually serve to lighten the mood of the whole ordeal. Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Bybee – OK now here’s a toughie. What if someone dies? Yoo – Ooh, ouch. Tough luck for them. Bradford – Accidentally or due to malice? Bybee – You mean malicious torture as opposed to the benevolent kind? Bradford – I mean accidentally or unaccidentally? Yoo – Ooh, nice, fine point of distinction there. Bybee – Sure I see, ipso de facto, fatso, here’s the facts, so why kill someone you are torturing when the whole point of it is to keep them just inches away from death so you can torture then some more? Yoo – Ah ha, I see. That’s irrational. So by torture has to be accidental because no good torturer who loves his work wants to see the object, er thing er- well human being, I guess, technically – he is torturing die because then his fun’ll be done. Bybee – Right, right he’ll have worked himself right out of a well paying job. Bradford – Good, great. Shrewd point. Therefore I think we can stipulate that all deaths by torture shall be by definition accidental. Yoo – Just plain bad luck. Bybee – Almost unavoidable, really like an act of God. The same God who’s on our side, I might point out. Yoo – And not on theirs we might add. Bradford – Right. OK, agreed, therefore the deaths and maiming and insanity that may result from torture must perforce, heretofore, to wit, to woo, be considered unavoidable accidents, not liable to any scrutiny or second guessing by our many enemies in this country, or and outside to. Yoo – Really, I think a simple, “oops”, or “oh, excuse me” ought to suffice in most instances of accidental death by torture. Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Bybee – One caveat to the rule here that I propose is that I say we should stipulate, thatwhatever we agree to here may be immediately widened if a new torture technique should happen to arise on TV. Namely on “24”, If Jack Bauer does something I think we can all agree that it must be good and fruitful forthe country, whatever it is. Yoo- Ooh, yeah, cool. I love that show. It’s on Fox too. The torture channel, as if just listening wasn’t torture enough. Bradford - What’s Rush say? Bybee – Actually I think we are out ahead of him on this. But I’m sure he’ll approve. As any self-indulgent, blowhard, self-centered anti-constitutional freak would. Agreed? Agreed said, Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Yoo – Just for the sake of argument then, try this one for size. Let’s say that someone while being tortured is not electrocuted, but stabbed and strangled as well? Anything wrong with that? Bybee – I’d say not cruel because not unusual enough. Bradford – Oh I don’t know, it’s fairly unusual. Bybee – It’s not unusual enough though. It has to have happened before. Bradford – You’re right, that’s been done to death. Yoo – No you still don’t get it. This would be OK because if he died it wouldn’t be cruel, the grounds would be if he had all those things being done to him, death would be tantamount to a mercy killing. And gentlemen, Yoo said, his eyes filling with tears, as he stood up, “I’ll be damned if I will stand party to anyone trying to outlaw mercy in this country.” Bybee – Here, here. Yoo. Well said. Agreed. Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Bradford – Well, by God boys, you know I think we’ve done it. In just a few minutes we’ve managed to undo centuries of American and international standards of law and humane criminal justice. And it only took us a few minutes. We’ve rewritten everything . Dick and Georgie and Donnie’ll be so proud. This will surely place our names securely in the legal annals of the United States writ large. Bybee – Of course, we’ll be legends, but seriously, no one will ever see this will they? I’ve got a judgeship waiting for me. Yoo –Good God no! We need to put this in Cheney’s vault and never let it reach the light of day. Bradford - Well maybe you’re right, I got a little carried away. If ripping up half the Constitution isn’t a pure case of our new expanded, elastic sense of national security I don’t know what is. I feel safer already knowing that for once the torturers are going to be on our side. Yoo – Besides, trust me, we are building a permanent republican majority in this country so no way any of this will ever see the light of day. Trust me. Bybee – But I believe we three can hold our heads high for what we’ve done here today. The world has been trying to eradicate torture for thousands of years. And it’s taken us just a bit of an afternoon. We have literally defined it out of existence. Oh sure, we’ll have to write it up like we worked hard at it later, and you know, gave a damn about our jobs, by putting in a bunch of legalese pettifoggery and such but for now I couldn’t be prouder of us. Bradford – Exactly. Under these rules in our country you can’t torture anybody anymore, even if you tried. Hell, not even if they died. Man that’s some accomplishment. We have ensured that no one will ever be held accountable for torturing another under our laws for as long as our laws are held in abeyance under our new secret laws. Yoo – Yoo hoo, Yoo shrieked, pumping his fist in the air. Bybee - So ordered, so moved. Agreed said Bradford, Bybee and Yoo.
Imagine a large family with twelve kids which the parents determine is to be raised according to strict free-market capitalistic principles. This would involve taking fairly well worn methods – to the victor goes the spoils, may the best boy or girl win, the devil take the hindmost – and turning them into a general childrearing philosophy. Before long in such a household all the large portions at meals, the greater opportunities at educational training, the nicest clothes, the greatest opportunities for social advancement and the most basic and overt parental affection would begin to be apportioned not according to need but to efficiency and best use. Therefore these benefits would begin to gravitate into the possession of only a few of the most promising, aggressive and favored children with the greatest perceived future earning potential. The older children would have the first obvious advantage. Their clothes and toys would be new to begin with while the younger ones would be lucky to get hand-me-downs and retreads. And because they were bigger they could simply wrest the most prized dessert portions and desirable possessions away from the weaker, younger children. But in some instances a younger child too, giving the lie to generalizations about the biggest always being best, might prove agile and quick witted, charmed or even cute enough to succeed at a level nearly equivalent to the older, more favored ones in the competition for their parents’ love and benediction. On the other hand, some older kids might not be as intelligent or as good looking or as competitive as some of the others and squander their natural advantage of age and slowly fall back in the pack of also rans. Naturally, on the down side of this familial structure, because free market forces absolutely dictate the necessity of their being both winners and losers at the competitive game of life, would dwell all the kids too weak or even just average, not pushy enough, the ones with the buck teeth and bad eyes and big ears. In addition the ones with a natural tendency to be fat or bad at sports or too philosophical to see things as quickly, or as simplistically, as the ones deemed better than them in the family, would soon be left behind in the lottery of life as well. And god help the child with an actual ailment, say asthma, or a lisp, or the one too tall or too thin, or too ungainly or too shy, etc., for they will become natural victims of the others and bullied mercilessly. For them acquiring even a crust bread and such for a meal or even a snack between meals will become an ordeal. Sure there would also be some middle level youngsters who might occasionally be afforded prominence in certain areas and deprived in others. They too, catching up to the general trend, might sometimes resort to bullying the weakest kids and rob the one with the stuttering speech and dreamy manner of one of his few remaining toys. After all, in this house the parents, unwilling to intervene in the marketplace, wouldn’t step in to stop them. In this house where success was judged solely on the basis of material goods and possessions, in general boys might have an early natural edge over girls do to their strength and aggression. But as girls mature faster, their intelligence and intuition might soon be used to mitigate some of these advantages. And in some instances, as with a previously alluded to “cute” one, an attractive girl would always have a place near the apex of the family food chain. Another facet of this structure that would quickly begin to emerge would be psychological in nature. The weaker and homelier kids would soon get so accustomed to being picked on and taken from and abused, with never a real chance to win at anything in this capitalist household, that they would soon come to resemble the roles to which they had been consigned. They wouldn’t smile as often; their voices, when allowed or forced to speak would be more halting, giving them an appearance of being slow witted; they would look over their shoulders frequently to see who was coming to take something from them; they would lack a straightforward manner and stick-to-it-iveness necessary to succeed at their chores; until they would slowly lose the will to try and become increasingly sullen and isolated, bitter and demoralized as they came to realize that they would never be rewarded for their efforts or respected just for who they were in this household of broken dreams. Why bother when bigger, better looking, more expensively educated and more popular kids would always outsmart them or cheat them of their winnings or beat them up later for the few things they had managed to pull aside for themselves? And the free market system would ensure that they would never receive redress from their parents for even the worst wrongs done to them. Their parents might sympathize to be sure but the rules of the free market which governed all their affairs could not be breached. So, they’d cry, what could they do? The plight of the parents was persuasive and heart rending as long as you chose to overlook the fact that they themselves were the ones who had arbitrarily chosen these rules to begin with. Finally, gloom would settle in and the poorer weaker kids would begin to despair and become beset with a fatalistic sense of hopelessness. They would then tend to compensate by developing bad habits. When they were young they would be bed wetters and cry a lot. Later they would sleep more than was necessary and eat much more than they should (when and if they ever got a chance), and escape increasingly into dreamworlds and fantasies and later petty thievery, alcohol or drugs, (offered to them by an upward striving lower level kid sold to him by one of the upper level kids for a nice profit).
But as for the blest of the family all would be sweet dreams and sunshine. They received not only their own portions of the best foods and preferred places at table, and watched their preferred shows on television, but received expensive gifts on their birthdays and everything else they wanted, including, if necessary by force, the best of everything the weaker kids had. They would become hoarders of unnecessary items they didn’t even want just for the pure visceral satisfaction of keeping it away from everyone else. Because not surprisingly, in inverse proportion, as the weak kids felt ever more morose the stronger kids would gradually come to feel ever more entitled and privileged and arrogant and selfish. To enforce their unjust elitist advantages they would eventually consciously deign not to help out the poorer and more deprived kids because of their fear that it would provide encouragement and comfort to them which might instill “bad” habits, even hope. The weak kids had to be taught that they would get nothing in life unless they could win it from the stronger kids “legitimately” in the game that was so securely rigged against them by the preferred kids. So they would take all the best food but, so as not to gain weight, as looks matter to them, they would waste it if they had to just to keep the other less favored kids from getting any of it. They always only left only scraps and old, unhealthy, unfulfilling and cheaply prepared fatty foods for their pasty faced, splotchy skinned siblings to fight over. Their part of the house would have all the nicest, latest furnishings, the TV’s, new carpeting and state of the art central air conditioning and heating. The other side of the house would soon like a slum by comparison, with broken plumbing, worn carpets, lumpy beds, threadbare furniture and remain as cold in winter as it was hot in summer. Their attitude as it evolved would become quite similar to those wealthy in capitalist societies who blame the poor for their poverty that they themselves have done so much to ensure. Thus in a capitalist system the victimizers start to blame the ones they have consistently victimized for their own victimization and manufacture charges of laziness and innate unworthiness in order to victimize them all over again. In the end you’re left with a house divided and severely dysfunctional. It endures this way because the weaker kids really have no choice or say in the matter. There is a family council, but they are not invited to attend and if they do are not allowed to speak. If they do speak they stutter and if they speak too much or too well they will be punished for it later by the family’s upper crust kids who didn’t to hear what they had to say to begin with. So if they want to eat at all these weaklings must continue playing the game they way it has been designed and to show respect and deference to their stronger brothers and sisters no matter how profoundly rigged against them the system is. If they rebel in any way or show any lack of respect for the process that is designed to cheat them they will be punished even more. But why you ask, wouldn’t the majority of these who were being abused by the strong minority of kids rise against these self-entitled brats and overthrow them? Some try, there are moments of tantrums and memorable cases of individual rebellion, but being weak and disunited their efforts invariably fail. Sometimes they fail to succeed because one of their own will break the quorum and turn against his fellows – and against his own self-interest – because one, they don’t believe the high and mighty kids can be beaten or two, the superior kids have gulled them with some suggested favor which might or might not be forthcoming in payment for their betrayal. After all hunger, poverty, deprivation and even a desire to be loved will always prove a reliable compatriot of cowardice. The middle area kids too, are in a quandary when it comes to an organized revolt. The bigger kids, enforced by the ultimate authority of their parents who back them, control too much of their future to be trusted if the revolt fails. So both sub-groups temporize and only suggest changes carefully so as not to upset the favored kids. So enterprise of great pith and moment are often turned awry and lose the name of action in fear of the terrible retribution that would follow if they should fail. Besides and this is the most important point of all. Just as in any capitalistic society where the authorities - the politicians, courts, media, churches, bankers and money managers – are in on the scheme, these parents don’t approve of the unionization of the lower orders. Free market rules and property rights (as they’re the only ones with any real property) as they see them are used to deny the weaker kids the right to organize as being a hindrance and impediment to the free operation of markets. Of course, the stronger kids because of their much greater allowances, resources, mobility and intelligence, etc., have many, many less obvious and far more effective ways to organize against the majority in order to protect their self interest. One could go on and on with examples but it should be clear by now that the purely capitalistic family would be riddled through with winners and losers which would very soon fall into certain highly identifiable patterns. If the sample group was large enough, as with this family of twelve, a natural curve would emerge of four potential winners, four in the middle and four at the bottom. There would be slight upward and downward mobility from one group to the one next to it, but very seldom would someone rise from the bottom to the top and vice versa. It wouldn’t be quite this simple, of course, they could mix and match and a middle boy might move up and an upper level girl fall back under certain circumstances. Each of these categories could be slightly bigger or smaller, there could be temporary, single issue alliances for specific purposes, for instances, but the general curve would remain as a primitive caste system that would soon emerge and remain static most of the time. Capitalist societies, too, just like this family, grade on the curve. Even a person who is very, very good at something, say drawing or math, if that skill is not prized or of immediate commercial benefit will not be valued by group market pressures and remain outcast and despised. Until finally it becomes absurd to suggest that this is a natural, healthy, free market at all because as positions become fixed in place it’s clear that there is nothing inevitable, healthy or natural about it. Yes, but is it efficient, don’t these favored, upper tier kids achieve beyond what was expected of them? It’s true that sometimes kids from each group, the upper, the middle and the lower occasionally reach their potential, but in fact in such a world more often than not they do not. The pampered kids at the top soon realize they don’t have to work very hard to maintain their dominance over their downtrodden brethren and become complacent and lazy and thereby invariably fail to ever work diligently enough to become exceptional at anything. The weaker kids also fail to reach their potential because they have never been afforded the possibility of ever doing so. Therefore this social structure is enervating and relatively unproductive at both extremes, top and bottom. Well how about the middle level kids? They might be thought actually to be the most well adjusted under the highly trying circumstances of their own upbringing, but often they too are ridden with such pent up jealousies, grudges and bad habits and have had to engage in such conniving ways just to survive, that they inherit an entirely twisted view of interpersonal relationships. True some are driven by the unjust situation of their own upbringing to succeed, but often it is not in any idealistic way but rather with an edge, as a by product of taking from others, or of getting even , or trying to prove something or even oppressing those later who have oppressed them. In this way the good they do for some is partially negated by the harm they invariably do others. These attitudes will never lead to the highest endeavors. In a dog eat dog free market system nothing is ever received or given away for free. Therefore it seems that the capitalistic, free market family structure is bound to be a wanton failure. I wouldn’t recommend it as the best and fairest way to raise your kids unless you want them to hate you forever. Mainly this is because capitalism, as such, is divorced from all inherently kindly human sentiment, which is never rewarded, but frequently punished by the system. Even when a kid, say in the middle tier, takes sympathy for a lower level kid and shares, the natural reaction of the subset at the top is to resent this and try to punish such behavior if it persists as an oblique threat to their own unfair system of domination. Good and generous behavior, if not stopped early, might begin to spread and may eventually even be demanded of them. Generosity and compassion are actually competitors or even enemies of free market management as they inject all sorts of extraneous considerations into the simple straightforward greed-based math of profit and loss. Capitalism is a way to circumvent traditional moralities not to reflect them. And don’t even speak of democracy. Capitalism is a sworn, direct enemy of democracy. Democracy is based on equality under god and under our laws. But capitalism is founded on the creation of inequalities of allocation of wealth in which people are ruthlessly categorized and divided into a fairly rigid class based system of winners and losers, situation and resources. These two theories work at complete cross purposes.
The Limits of Capitalism
Naturally no society can be arranged as simply as an individual family and no family would be reared as a society. Still there are a few comparisons which may prove instructive between the two. For something like what would happen to this imaginary family is exactly what we have seen happening in our country today. For in capitalism, as money breeds power and power money, their partnership soon begins to be abused. So when wealth aligns with power, for they are interconnected, seldom being found apart for long, they will soon begin to squeeze wealth from the society from the top down, including the middle class, as they rapaciously seek unjust advantage over everyone not so well endowed as themselves. For one thing, capitalists don’t believe in investment in either the nation or its people. The evidence is everywhere around us that totally liberated markets have proven that they cannot be trusted to meet the social needs and necessities of the society at large. The shortsightedness and greed of markets is legendary. For their money it does not pay a corporation to aid the poor or build a school (except superficially and temporarily for advertising purposes). On the contrary, they erroneously believe that it does serve their interests to either ignore poverty or plunder those who are less able to pay, protest, afford adequate credit, be well educated enough to demand higher wages, seek jobs elsewhere or have the resources to influence our political system to their own benefit. Proponents of predatory capitalism who persist in saying it is the poor peoples’ own fault that they are poor are perpetuating a lie. The free market absolutely guarantees and mandates a large underclass. A naturally occurring exception which always occurs eventually must be considered not an exception at all but an integral part of the equation. And so to say this is not the system’s fault, that it is natural selection or the fault of the people who haven’t worked as hard as they, is simplistic. Since the percentages are perfectly predictable and the same groups always wind up either being impoverished or enriched it can’t be an accident or lack of effort on the part of the poor people involved but an absolutely preordained function of the design of the system itself. And like a quilt too short to cover a person, in a system of winners of losers, extravagant hoarded wealth at the top of the population necessarily dries up resources at the bottom which diminishes the future of the country from the ground up which eventually threatens the security and prosperity of the middle class as well. Look at the shameless credit card business (run by those same people at the banks who have just done their level best to destroy world capitalism) which raises interest rates higher and higher to the point of criminal usury on those least able to pay extra charges. Or, the way our society dangles adequate and affordable health care just out of the reach of an entire segment of society, the way a sadist taunts a chained dog with a rubber steak, merely for the profit and amusement of the upper classes is human torture rather than policy. The same thing applies to reasonable educational opportunities, affordable drug costs, good food, adequate housing and warm clothing. What does it say about a society that is willing to first tolerate and then torment an entire, permanent underclass, merely for the convenience, pleasure, extreme profit and amusement of the very well to do? What does it say of a society that intentionally allows a quarter of its population to go poorly fed, clothed, educated and housed? If it was a family the parents would be arrested for neglect and their children taken away from them. The rich grinches’ minions mission in Washington has certainly been to do their part to keep the poor poor poor and in their place. Cheap and inexpensive labor necessitates a wide and broad lower class. Capitalism not only creates a lower class it then tries to expand it and ensure it remains as large and dependent and downtrodden as possible. There is literally a poor tax that can be seen in areas such as the gas tax and food taxes which represent far more of a poor person’s paycheck than one with many more resources. Similarly, the lottery and legalized gambling and so-called “sin” taxes on cigarettes and alcohol fall much more heavily on the poor. Furthermore, tax cuts for the wealthy not only unjustifiably enrich them directly but also dry up our ability to afford social programs and serves the dual (and desirable to them) purpose of widening the gap between rich and poor to dangerous and anti-democratic levels of unfairness. If this underclass is the cost we must pay for the great luxury of a few multi-billionaires in our midst I would say the price is not worth the benefit. The extreme societal divisions and prejudices which result are far more costly than they are worth. They have become an indulgence we can no longer afford. A society that is very efficient in its management of goods and services, but which by design, is absolutely promiscuous in its waste of human beings can only be considered callous, mean spirited and inimical to its own peoples’ welfare. Most rational humans would imagine that people are a nation’s most valuable commodity, but capitalism has had a bad history of treating people badly, even as expendable, as mere production costs or overhead, to be paid as little as possible then disregarded without another thought as to their well being. The strength of a country is not in 500 of its most wealthy people. A nation is only as strong as its weakest citizens. Extravagantly wealthy people are a nation’s burden, not its glory. They are an embarrassment to us and a sign of our decline rather than a sign of a healthy nation. They become as caricatures of hard working people and honest citizens. Money to them is like a drug, the more of it they have the more of it they want. Psychologically these titans of Wall Street are not that far removed from crack heads in back alleys. Once they are addicted to the crack of money they will commit any crime to keep its flow from being cut off. This amoral and unreasoning greed is the real reason that more and more of the nation’s extra resources are spent on remedial things, such as law enforcement and new prison construction to combat crime bred by poverty and drug dependence; reeducation and adult literacy programs because of a faltering educational system and far greater medical costs that might have been prevented with better health care availability and a better nourished underclass. All these costs are not only borne by tax funded government programs but by businesses which then pass their costs on to the public which, as additional costs, make us less competitive in the world, while decreasing the disposable incomes of day to day living at home. Positive investment in health, education and welfare rather than negative expenditures to try to clean up the messes made necessary by the lack of positive investment, to combat these social ills before they arise, would at one and the same time be far less expensive and lead to a much healthier and well adjusted society. So not only will it cost far less to help prevent and alleviate the causes of these problems than to continue to put up with them and fight them later when they have become unmanageable, it is the right, proper and most efficient way to do things. These are old lessons that were learned in the 1930’s and forgot by the 1980’s. Rules of thrift, hard work, saving for a rainy day, not living beyond your means, the value of universal education and social responsibility toward others, have all been bleached and brainwashed from our leaders’ minds. But nothing is perfect and so by the late seventies some of our social welfare system needed refurbishment and overhaul and reform. However, the choices the conservative capitalist leaders in charge of our government at that time made were astonishingly naïve, greedy and shortsighted. As if they had never read a book or walked out of doors in their lives, they decided to pretend that all social services were unnecessary, had never been needed and were entirely harmful to the people who received them and of no benefit to the greater society whatsoever. As stupid and harmful and self-serving as this evaluation was and as utterly as it has failed, these same people, or their intellectual heirs, are the same ones fighting health care and education reform and investment on infrastructure to this very day. All this long after their own shortsightedness, selfishness and wrong-headedness have proven so disastrous for all of us. A generation of progress and investment that might have been made has been squandered in debt, cultural devolution and wasted lives. Public investment in health care and education and welfare to alleviate these problems is not only a moral necessity and governmental responsibility but the best and most rudimentary route to a healthy, well ordered society and an enduringly prosperous nation. Therefore even on their own terms, as hard eyed realists and pragmatists of what best affects the bottom line, unfettered, rapacious capitalism to the exclusion of all else fails. A simplest cost benefit ratio easily proves this. But in this country we have become capitalists to a fault, or to too many faults. If one freedom is allowed all must be, even if freedom to some Americans primarily means to financially oppress and victimize other Americans. So because art and pornography sometimes share the human form as medium both must be allowed and protected. Because guns may be used for hunting and to arm an entirely mythical militia they must be made available cut rate to any real street punk terrorist thug and school shooter who might want to gun someone down. Because drug companies are profit oriented and curing poor people hurts their profit margins, poor people must be allowed to suffer and die for want of a few bucks to get an overpriced prescription filled. To protect a right which is no where near to being infringed we must allow a multitude of crimes to flourish. Because any good may be somehow theoretically threatened all ills must be allowed. So to “protect” the right of someone to shoot a deer in season whose right is not even in dispute, we allow gangs and drugs dealers and psychos to inflict massive harm and havoc on our society far in excess of what is tolerated in any other civilized nation on earth. Similar situations occur in regard to government social programs. Clearly if well run they may nip in the bud a variety of ills with small cost that if not addressed grow much larger and can only be addressed far more expensively later. Yet the same people who may nit pick various ills and minor injustices that occur in connection with social programs and therefore regard these models as fatally, unworkably flawed, profess to be unable to see all the manifold problems that accompany uncontrolled free markets and capitalism. So some people are perfectly livid that a lady can sue a fast food chain because she has spilt hot coffee on herself and convinces a jury to give her a one time only award of a million or so for her own carelessness. But the same people disgusted at this one time only legal anomaly don’t blink an eye at the ingrained corruption of oil companies in bed with the OPEC cartel, impoverishing us all by billions with exorbitant and unjustifiable prices with no free markets forces anywhere in sight to restrain them, while enriching our enemies and polluting the entire planet with far reaching unpredictable environmental consequences. On a scale of outrage one is infinitely greater than the other but somehow become equated when it serves the purposes of those making money on the oil markets to pretend the real problem is not with capitalist excesses but with a miniscule assault on capitalism by a single individual and one run away jury. Therefore the major outrage is overlooked while the minor one is decried by all the great conservative capitalist powers that be. And both sides in debates, when the two grand titles of Capitalism and Socialism, easier for people to generalize about than explain or invoke than understand, are used; always consider them to be absolutes, of a whole cloth, indivisible. Therefore a society must be either all capitalist or all socialist, without modification, nuance or restraint. Capitalism in a nation therefore means that, like the family in the prologue with which I began this piece, every facet of its interlocking interrelationships must be marketized. Where socialism requires that every aspect of life be entirely socialistic. In fact, like a family every well run nation must be composed of both elements, as no society may be either all one or all the other, they have to be blended. Any society which is all socialist or communist or all capitalist can only turn into a harmful caricature of itself. There are ample examples of communist societies that met this exact fate. They became so socialized that they became paralyzed. Now unfortunately over the last thirty years we have become a horrid example of what happens when a nation becomes too dangerously enamored of entirely unregulated free markets. Our free markets left all the details of actually managing our society underfunded and undone, before they themselves eventually collapsed under the weight of their own corruption, stupidity and unregulated greed. The irrationality of trying to mange a capitalistic society without management and without controls, “trusting” it to do the right and moral things is an absurdity every bit as obvious as parents trying to raise their children with a dog eat dog materialistic environment as their only familial philosophy. Callousness and cruelty are inbred in capitalism. Once bland devotion to money, material goods and efficient corporate structure replace basic human ethics, individuals become increasingly divorced from their own moral and patriotic responsibilities. Ethics and compassion must then be imposed from without, demanded by strong churches or enforced by selfless politicians. We have had neither strong nor moral churches nor selflessly democratic members of congress for some time. After all no moral person with an abundance of food in their possession coming upon a starving person would hesitate to share it. No one would force the starving person to fill out a questionnaire first to justify what they had done with their life to this point to prove whether they deserved food necessary to continue to live or not. Few humans would be that insanely heartless. Yet that is what our society does. A hard core capitalist will not share food with a starving person unless that person can find a way to pay for it. Unless a capitalist can make a buck on a dying person by saving them they will let them die. This is the institutionalized cruelty of our society of which some are so proud. No one but a murderer, presumably, would deny medicine to a heart attack patient who had just fallen to the floor clutching their chest in pain when the medicine is sitting on the table right next to them. But a disembodied corporation, a drug company or HMO, does the exact same thing by denying affordable heart care medication or timely service to thousands or millions or people yearly thereby causing a significant proportion of them to suffer unnecessarily for years, and finally drop dead in silence far away out of our sight at different times and places all over the country, it is accepted and acceptable. In fact it is considered praiseworthy by capitalists everywhere, and judged regrettable but necessary by its queasy defenders. We are assured that this extraordinary inhumanity is the price we must pay for free markets. Free markets demand market discipline and if an elderly person often must choose between money spent on medicine or on food, because they can’t have both, so be it. This is the devil’s bargain we must accept, we’re solemnly assured, because this rigidity is the price we must pay for free markets. Therefore if the greater good is served, by letting the little people die in despair and alone we have no choice but to not interfere in the workings of the free market system. It is not our fault or responsibility. Cruelty becomes not only necessary but admirable and its soulless, money grubbing practitioners heroes and the leaders of our country. In fact any nation which fails to provide the necessities of food, health care, education, housing and clothing on an affordable, accessible basis to all its people, to afford them the opportunity for a healthy prosperous life and a legitimately attainable pursuit of happiness, must be thought of as a failure to its own premise. Whatever its economic system calls itself, it is a failure. Its enablers, its government, its institutions, its complicit churches, its private citizens are all guilty of betraying the very principles and purpose for which the nation was founded. It is clearly unconstitutional and un-American to allow Americans to go hungry or homeless, without health care or good education in the richest country in the world when each citizen is declared to be equal both under god and under our laws. To say that this society doesn’t work but that it’s due to market forces and so there is nothing we can do about it, as if this should outweigh all moral considerations and constitutional responsibilities is a bizarre non justification of an unacceptable fact. This nation hasn’t a right to judge its citizens as to their worth. We are of, by and for the people without regard for circumstance, birth or wealth. Neither life, liberty nor happiness may be denied any one due to “market forces” anymore than due to simple prejudice or greed or crime or injustice, which are often conveniently hidden just barely under the surface of these inimical market forces. Market forces really just mean the greed and avarice of a few of our least reputable, even if its richest, citizens are being allowed by our own government to plunder and victimize the rest of society. No one is suggesting the end of fair capitalism, it is unparalleled in its efficiency in providing goods and services to the most people at best costs. If capitalism worked affectively to alleviate all of our societal problems, many of which are directly attributable to it, no one would have any complaint. But it does not service all the people all the time and only fools, crooks and immoralists can claim that it does. Therefore it becomes of the duty of a free government constituted to serve all its people without regard for their financial standing to ameliorate all these problems or neglect and deprivation where they arise. This is done through sound social policy and effective public programs. If you want to call this socailsim, fine, call it a little red wagon or a purple tailed dragon, if you want. We the people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and these are things which predatory capitalism often seeks to deny a significant portion of our population. In that circumstance it is incumbent on government to intervene only to the extent it needs to - for it’s true that government overreaction can be as counterproductive as its inactivity - to alleviate these moral failures, social ills and societal shortfalls. To smooth its rough edges and control its unprincipled aspects and arrest its miscreants. This is not even worthy of a moment’s debate.
Epilogue
The reach of this piece is too limited to take much beyond our shores. But consider that our capitalistic system through it has many flaws in our country, because it is so powerful as the world’s economic engine, contributes singularly and disproportionately on a much, much broader scale in contributing to these same problems globally. Though our own domestic problems are deeply troubling, there they help to produce millions of people who annually die of starvation and disease for lack of even the most rudimentary health care and medicine and available food which, if simple dollar figures were the only issue, the rest of the world could easily afford to provide. Historically, because they have always been in nationalistic competition, no nation has ever worried about the economy of any other nation but to want it to be weaker than is own. Nations have regularly plundered and stole from each other as a principle of state. Those times have changed. The world is so interconnected now that any crisis which affects any country, sooner or later, in ways large and small, will affect them. Therefore, pure predatory capitalism which seeks to rip other countries of their resources without giving anything of equitable worth back, are gone for good. Yet capitalists have not yet figured this out and will continue to pursue the same old predatory ways until they are stopped. There is a correlation here though it is hard to strictly quantify. But consequences for bad acts grow concentrically and become more severe the father they spread from point of origin. Consider the global financial crisis for a ready example. The last ones being hurt by this fiasco are generally the ones most responsible for creating it. Wall Street, which caused it, is being bailed out by everyone else instead of the other way around. So for every billionaire we suffer with here you may have millions world wide suffering as a consequence from every pestilence imaginable. This is the deadly math of uncontrolled capitalism when not mitigated by a much stronger moral philosophy and sound ethical and practical policies to guide it.
People who protest that the public is missing the point when they protest bonuses paid out to incompetents, the very incompetents who have wrecked their own businesses on the way to collapsing half the world’s economic system, are themselves missing the point. While no one suggests that the egregiously generous bonuses being paid out at AIG is the core of the problem causing our economic meltdown, these bonuses are certainly an unwelcome recrudescence of the very disease that is at the source of the problem. That is greed. What is occurring today is playing out exactly along the same lines as the Savings and Loan rip off the American people in the eighties – except on an even greater scale. In that instance congress got bribed into deregulating the Saving and Loans. Then the Republican White House malignly neglected any measure of oversight over the diminished regulations under which they then operated. Crooks soon infested and collapsed an entire segment of the S&L system from inside out. The government (via the Resolution Trust) brought up all the toxic and often wildly inflated assets of the failed S&Ls at premium prices, thereby letting the vast majority of the thieves get away with their thefts intact and with no penalty attached. Then the Resolution Trust bundled these newly purchased taxpayer assets at bargain prices and peddled them to other big money interests – the only ones who could afford them in bulk. This ensured sweetheart deals at low prices for their well-heeled and well-connected purchasers. Congress for its part did absolutely nothing to rectify its massive mistakes other than agree among themselves to cover up the entire corrupt mess and stick the taxpayer with the tab of up to half a trillion dollars. In short, the public got reamed coming and going. We paid high and sold low and let the fat cats on either end of the transaction reap windfall profits at our expense. Does any of this smell familiar? The current financial crisis and our government’s response to it is history repeating on a far, far bigger scale. We can already see that, amazingly, the government is trying to paper over the greed and corrupt practices at the heart of this scandal and stick the poor taxpayer with all the burden of costs and debt necessary to clean it up. Meanwhile the bankers and politicians will divvy up the winnings among themselves at their leisure. As very wealthy people and their political friends make out like bandits on either end of this current scam, the whole sub-prime mortgage-credit default swap double pyramid gambit, the taxpayer (again!) via the government that is allegedly looking after their interests is getting stuck with making a whole new category of multimillionaire. Even when the pickpockets get caught red handed with their hands still in our pockets nothing happens to them. In fact the government wants to reward them if they will just kindly take them out of our pockets. If we let them get away with it this time (again!) it will only encourage them - like ego competing pharaohs of yore - to build their pyramids higher next time and guarantee that same corrupt cycle of greedy bankers and shady pols will continue unabated. Therefore rest assured that pundits and pols and who discount public outrage over payouts to AIG are complicit in the scam in one form or another. After all, what is good about what has been done here? This isn’t capitalism, it is greed, venality, corruption, mismanagement, and stupidity. It is everything that goes wrong when the hinges come off capitalism. And yet the apologists are saying it is this tendency to theft and fraud which must be protected and forgiven and insulated from change and reformation. Greed isn’t just king any more, it has been defied. It has become God. Therefore AIG is an outrage exactly because it is the festering ugly pustule on the surface which indicates that the infection is still percolating just out of view under the skin inches below. This is exactly what the public senses, that the underlying issues which caused the venality pandemic are not being addressed at all. Greed and corruption are being richly rewarded, not vigorously deterred. The AIG bonuses, along with a myriad of other outrages on display in newspapers and newscasts daily are symptomatic that the government’s approach to the problem is less designed to solve the problem than to encourage its reoccurrence. The government bailout system engineered by Bush and Paulson and being continued by the Obama administration is named TARP (troubled asset recovery program, or something) which is an apt name because it is specifically designed (like the Resolution Trust) to throw a cover up over the whole sordid affair. All the fat cats who got well on the S&L pyramid against the public have now grown downright obese twenty years later and are doing it to us again. TARP should really be OCPP – the obese cat protection plan. Because the government system of bailouts is a “let ‘em eat cake and ice cream” plan for overeaters anonymous, it’s a “hair of the dog that bit you” cure for the incurable alcoholic. It is a tribute payment to the thieves who robbed us, it is negotiating with terrorists who threaten to murder the economy unless we pay them off, it is payoffs to kidnappers with little expectation that the victim they took will be discovered alive. The people well understand that that the people in charge of the recovery plan to this point have been far more interested in not annoying the greedy pseudo capitalist tormentors that got us into this crisis, in coddling them to murmuring approval as if our bailouts were somehow inconveniencing them, than in insulating the public from the ongoing effects of their highway robbery. The government is less concerned with fixing the wreck of the economy and in salvaging the lives of the innocent Americans who these people have so cruelly victimized than it is in shoring up the paper losses of the Ponzi artists who have destroyed so many peoples’ livelihood.
Our real problem is that all the people taxed with fixing all the problems connected to the derivatives markets were all in on its creation together. The republicans have long been so morally and ethically bankrupted as to be beyond all reclamation but the democrats ethics have been heavily mortgaged as well. Look at Obama’s crack team of economic advisors. I hate to say it, but to put Larry Summers in charge of your economic response team is to use the exact same logic that AIG is using to justify its exhorbitat pay-offs to the authors of the credit collapse. In other words we are mistaking and equating knowledge how the crime was committed with innocence of and a desire to fix the crime. There is a large gap between being brilliant and being wise. Many, many very smart people over time have proven themselves to be complete idiots. Larry Summers, we’re told, is brilliant, even indispensable, but this has never stopped him from being a fool. George Bush went to Harvard and Yale both. So educational pedigree is no guarantee of excellence. Therefore, when Larry Summers, working for his boss Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, who was allegedly working for the American people, argued together against any modicum of oversight over these newly forming derivative markets, they reached the bizarre conclusion that markets may be trusted (when?) to regulate themselves (How?) honestly (where?) and laid the foundation of this entire fiasco. The question we might want to ask is, how could anybody be that dense? Or that corrupt? The answer lies with the corrosive moral effect and inbred myopia that comes with rampant self-interest and greed. We are being led at every level in Washington by the back-scratch twins. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This equation doesn’t leave room for either democracy or logic, the public be damned. This far into the Obama administration it seems that on the economic front little has changed from George Bush, one of the most haplessly incompetent men in our history. Larry Summers and his second in command, Tim Geithner have proven far more industrious in helping Wall Street bankers cover their rear ends, where their asses-set, and abet them in getting completely away with our money without recrimination than they have ever been in bringing these miscreants to any sort of remunerative collective justice. Because if nothing else is clear in this vast dimness it is that the perpetrators of these interconnected frauds are not remorseful people. They don’t care and never will. They are amoralists. They are enemies of the public. Much as they have stolen already they are still primarily concerned with trying to get their grubby hands in the public till even today, when the public is doing everything it can to bail them out of the fire they themselves set. Even now they are doing everything they can to cheat us, singed rear ends and all. Gratitude and remorse alike are foreign to such empty people. The problem with both Larry Summers and the bonus scandal at AIG is this: can a person who helped create a problem be counted upon to solve the problem they created? The simple answer is – very rarely. It’s like paying a car bomber a premium to put the pieces of the car he’s just blown up back together on the theory that since he knows where the bomb was placed and why he should know where the pieces of the car have flown to after the explosion. The logic of this type of thinking fails on every level. The world works the other way. People who make huge mistakes are uniquely disqualified from being able to correct or even see or own up to their own mistakes or perhaps they wouldn’t have made such idiotic mistakes to begin with. And this particular instance is even worse because these were not honest mistakes. There was not only a heavy dose of irrationally exuberant stupidity involved in these financialization schemes but also a complete lapse of moral and ethical fiber inherent to them as well. This makes it doubly unlikely that any of the participants in these frauds will be able to be of any use whatsoever in trying to selflessly unravel them. In this case they have been guilty of more than just willful dishonesty, or complete incompetence, but a fatal combination of both. The capability of these people is reminiscent of the old refrain of “being blind as a bat in one eye and not able to see out of the other.” Now to expect such people as these to be able to be farsighted enough to navigate us out of the very jungle which they have just gratuitously navigated us into, when there must be far better people available to do it, is insane. This brings us back to the illogic of putting Larry Summers in charge of fixing a problem that he was instrumental in creating. It is almost impossible to reconcile that Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both eyeball deep in their obliviousness and complicity to these problems as they arose are right for the job of undoing the effects of these problems they allowed to occur. Moreover we have seen enough of them already to know where their essential sympathies lie. It is not with the American people, we are an abstraction to them, an afterthought. They speak of a public they don’t understand or particularly care for – and it shows. How in the world do you get a committed alcoholic who won’t admit he is one, to ban the source of the liquor that sustains his own habit? When Obama chose someone like Summers over someone like say, a Stiglitz, a professional rival of Summers who saw all the problems before they arose, the writing was on the wall. The Obama team will never get “it” right because they don’t even have a clue as to what “it” is. If you don’t know the root cause of the problem you are hired to fix how are you going to fix it? If you think it doesn’t make a difference whose in charge of these affairs, imagine taking your car in for repairs to the dealership mechanic who insists, for corporate reasons, that your problem is that your tires need realignment because they are trying to fix your car on the cheap. Meanwhile, while you waste your time there, you are avoiding the honest mechanic who can tell merely by listening that your car has a bad head gasket. Sure you hate the expense the second option entails but it will cost you less in the long run than hiring the company shill who has a vested interest more in serving his corporation’ interests than your own. Summers and Geithner won’t get this right because they are institutionally incapable of getting it right. They are too close to their work, too myopically involved with their own egos and circle of friends and special interests to see the larger picture from where they are. Here’s the crux of Obama’s (and our) problem. He chose poorly in an area of which didn’t have expertise. He chose “experts” in their field and overlooked the fact that they were fatally tainted by the field they were expert in. At a time crying for economic populism they are economic elitists. They are programmed to be institutionalists. It’s what the schools they were very successful in, taught them. How can they betray such old allegiances now? For Obama to put people like this in charge of reforming a system they don’t believe needs reform is like Louis XVI calling forth a few members of the nobility to tell him what is wrong with the nobility – the answer comes back, obviously – “Nothing sire. Our fundamentals are fundamentally strong.” on the eve of the French Revolution. But how does Obama get out from under his own mistake? He can hardly jettison his entire economic team this early in his term and this deep in an economic crisis without causing panic. He certainly can’t rely on congress to come up with solutions because they are deeply infected with the same mange, try as they may to pretend they are not. Plus they are too easily swayed by too many back room deals – and we know how often those things turn to the public good – that they will turn even good proposals bad. The answer is he needs to get some advice from someone somewhere outside of the beltway soon and then be strong enough to not let Summers or Geithner (as they apparently were able to do with the issue of protecting execrable executive compensation) sway him away from good ideas. Maybe he needs to look first for people who were against what was going on in Washington and Wall Street long before it was opportune to do so rather than continue to rely on those who’ve spent their entire careers neck deep in the very quicksand mire we are trying to swim our way out of. He needs to convene a committee of economic dissidents to listen to for a change. On economics he seems to have surrounded himself with functionaries more concerned with protecting their buddies and their own images and shoring up and perfuming corrupt practices rather than bringing them to an end. So far, Obama’s economic plans don’t “scour’. They don’t cut deeply enough into the tumor to excise it. In a few words his approach to this economic crisis has been superficial, facile, complacent and condescending. And in this respect, despite all his great capabilities and the strong support of the public at his back his administration has gotten off on the wrong foot in the area which is most urgent and on which the success of his entire administration may well depend. Injustices left covered up continue to fester and corrupt. In this way the cover up of the S&L fiasco may have led directly to the current financial scandals. Crimes unpunished only compound. They never go away. Therefore those who say the public shouldn’t be outraged over the egregious bonuses given by AIG to many of their worst and guiltiest employees are completely wrong. The entire government bailout plan is worse than moral hazard. It not only doesn’t punish bad behavior but positively rewards it. It plays exactly into the worst traits of the individuals and institutions that are getting the bailouts. It assumes they mean well and can behave responsibly when they have just proved they will not. It’s like giving matches to an arsonist and asking them to please check for a gas leak under your house. The recipients of these bailouts are not nice and gentle people. They are not good Americans. They are the “malefactors of great wealth” Roosevelt spoke of and if Obama thinks he can reach out in fairness to them without getting his hand chewed off he doesn’t know enough of life. These are mean, evil, greedy men who won’t be chastened by conscience or moved by doing what’s good for the country. Greed is their God, they worship nothing else.
