Republican Planned Obsolescence

     There is a common thread that runs through many of our nation’s problems today.  It may be latest seen by a cursory examination of the recent failure of congress to come to an agreement on an auto bailout.  Congress for many years in all its endeavors has unfailingly taken the path of least work, least resistance, and least responsibility toward their ultimate nexus of a policy with the least positive effect on the nation.
     Naturally some of this is human nature.  But they have institutionalized mediocrity, apathy and greed as the basic common denominators of all their activities.  They are tiresomely predictable in this pattern.  They invariably hazard the most harm to the nation by doing all the wrong things, whether of omission or commission, because they are easy and avoiding all the right ones because they are hard.
     From Clinton’s impeachment, the Iraq War, rampant deficit spending, the gutting of all regulation and oversight, their common goal is always the same – political expedience, careless irresponsibility and personal profit.  Wherever you look they are playing at governance rather than governing and it’s impossible to find an enduring, selfless, responsible or even competent act anywhere in their record.  It’s marvelous to watch how their basic theory of what’s best for the country has come to so closely resemble their own narrow self-interests that they’ve become indistinguishable.   
    Generally the republicans hide their cynicism behind a theme of superior morals and smaller government, though these are virtues they have never achieved.  Listening to their explanation for their inaction in not supporting any deal toward an aid package to the auto industry is illustrative of their method.  It was hard to escape the notion that the shifting conditions they put forward had more to do with evading responsibility for doing anything and blame for anything previously done than with any real attempt at finding a way to help solve the crisis at hand.  Meanwhile the crisis itself continues to grow in all directions, multi-dimensionally, around us.  
    Instead, they left one with the certain feeling that no compromise would have ever proven acceptable to them.  Rather, they worked backwards, like a ravenous pack of congressional dogs (which is to say like a cowardly watchdog that, the farther it backs away from the problem, the louder it barks) until they had finally fastened on a set of conditions which they knew would be unacceptable to reaching consensus with the other side.  Then they blamed everyone else for the failure to reach an agreement acceptable to them, by which they meant total capitulation to their increasingly unreasonable demands.
  
     Of course no ones like the necessity of bailouts of business, Wall Street or the automobile manufacturers.  Nobody likes the incredibly difficult work that has now been made necessary due to the sheer moral lassitude and corruption of our politicians and business leaders.  Nobody likes to have to solve problems which only arose because the people we are now tasking to fix the problems are responsible for creating them in the first place.  But that’s where we are.
    Having virtually wrecked the economy with their own vapid and puerile form of laissez-fairism, the republicans now profess themselves to be too laissez-fairist to bother trying to salvage it.  The one thing they could do – nothing – was the one thing they were determined to do.  As always, with the car rescue package it wasn’t hard to round up enough do-nothings to unite around an unprincipled position to do nothing at all.
     The republican response to the auto manufacturers’ plight is a tried and true one. They are past masters at the strange art of do-nothingism.  A favorite tactic of theirs is crippling oversimplification.  In the real world the shortest distance between two points is invariably a structural impossibility.  Easy solutions to complex problems seldom exist and when tried become a seductive trap.  Yet this is what the republicans normally demand as a starting point which evolves with increasing complexity into a general excuse for all their latter inactivity.  
    In this case, they said that the auto makers needed to essentially solve their problems and make themselves solvent and profitable prior to their receiving any financial help which could give them the breathing room to make their solvency possible.  It is the perfect republican scheme to do nothing and blame everyone else for the ensuing failure.  It’s exactly the same sort of scheme these do-nothings have perpetrated on the American people for decades.  When in doubt cavil, posture, pontificate and preen.  But do nothing.  Why do you think nothing ever gets done, or done right or once broken ever gets fixed?  
    We are living in the Age of Republican Planned Obsolescence.  Their mantra has been that government can’t work and can’t be made to work (though our entire history prior to their stewardship of it completely disproves this).  So elect us, they say, and we’ll do as little work as possible to prove that not working and doing next to nothing for our salaries results in government failure. True, it’s an odd collection of people who would seek jobs with the explicit intent of not doing them.  But they have succeeded in proving without a doubt that government with people like them in charge of it won’t work.  Their failure is their vindication.  It stands as their only noticeable success.  
    Unfortunately, this doesn’t prove the point they were making about government at all but a much older one: that which you don’t work at won’t work for you in return.  

    So not bothering to do the job they were hired to do or enforce the rules they are paid to uphold, or adjust to changing circumstances to reform problem areas and meet crises head on leads to institutional failure?  Who knew?  If the institutions they have been put in charge of aren’t carefully maintained and refurbished and upgraded over time, they will deteriorate and decline.  This is the inherent internal entropy at work in republican theory today.
    After years of republican misrule then all our institutions and departments of government are in a state of high odor and near collapse. After first bankrupting the government with trillions of dollars in debt they say there is no more money left for essential services like health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and repair.  Next they mortgaged the future of our economy to foreign nations’ banks and then bankrupted what was left of our economy with their malign deregulatory inactivity/activity.  And now they have the nerve to put themselves forward as born again fiscal conservators and claim that because of their dereliction we are now too poor and broke to be able to afford to save ourselves. 
     As the lead republican in the republican auto bailout fiasco, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is the classis naysayer.  An auto bailout may not work so why try?  It’s much less work and far more laissez-faire to not even bother.  He goes so far as to say help for automakers won’t work even as he continues trying to scuttle it thereby making his prediction of failure come true in advance.  Neat.  
    When asked about the dire effects on our shaky economy this failure would make worse, including the catastrophic potential loss of three million jobs in an economy already teetering on the brink of disaster, he gives out a silly half grin and shrugs like a dolt in a suit.  And even as the incoming government talks of spending billions more to create jobs he is sanguine about losing millions more jobs prior to their arrival, making the economic hole that faces them that much deeper and more costly to dig out of.   
    So what if another vital part of the American economy is decimated under republican stewardship?  He’s got his and doesn’t really seem to care.  There are Japanese and German and Korean automakers ready to take up the slack as American ownership dies, as if foreign ownership of our industrial base was just as good for our economy, if not better, than American ownership.
    Some apologists claim that our current problems are the result of a few errors in judgment or a few bad apple administrators.  But the failure is too comprehensive to support such a limited and benign conclusion.  After all, this administration, one by one, has gutted or corrupted FEMA, the SEC, FDA, NSC, CIA, DoD, EPA, OSHA, Interior, State, Justice, etc.  This is not just a phenomenally unlucky string of anomalies.  The civil government is the state and George W. Bush, the man we put in charge of the institution of government, is a devout enemy of it.
     On top of this, Dick Cheney, our inestimable Vice-President, has spent his spare time invaluably trying to effect the same illicit goals Nixon so ignobly failed to advance.   Namely he tried to unconstitutionally elevate the executive above the law and relegate each of the other two previously coequal branches of government to a lower level of subservience.  Of course, he was only doing this in order to commit with impunity a series of illegal acts, from engaging in warrentless wiretapping, illegal detentions, bad intelligence triggered wars and torture that he knew were all repugnant to the world and foreign our own history.  With a consciousness of guilt before the act, he realized that if the constitution were not hamstrung prior to these actions, he either might not get to do them to begin with or be held liable for them later. 
     George Bush, the innocent in the oval office, accepts no culpability for any of these failures but was nonetheless noticeably acquiescent to all Cheney’s efforts to place him above our laws.

Lazy Fairy Gummint

     Laissez-faire is an elided French term which means literally something like, “let (alone) to make or to do.”  Meaning if you let something alone it will probably do what it was going to do by itself anyway and probably do it better.  Of course, this theory has never, ever worked in its extreme form for an entire population in the entire history of the world for any extended length of time, but why should a few stray facts get in the way of an ideologue’s free lunch?  Especially when they are still standing in the chow line with their hands out and pockets waiting to be filled with what someone just filched from us.  
    Then our tactical geniuses in charge reduced this questionable economic theory to an absurdly banal and illogical level beyond what any theorists have ever dared do in the past. Laissez-faire economics becomes not limited regulation but no regulation.  It becomes greed for its own sake economics.  This new theory holds that even existing, proven, necessary, effective and long standing regulation is bad and therefore any additional regulation applied to new instruments of imminent fiscal destruction are unnecessary.  
    This is like someone who once enjoys a chocolate éclair gluttonously deciding to eat nothing but chocolate éclairs.  It’s the logic of someone who enjoys a suntan heaving themselves into the sun itself.  It is cripplingly infantile and irrationally excessive behavior.  And this tells you everything you need to now about the quality of politician we have been suffering under in Washington for years.
    And of course, in the Bush administration we have seen this bizarre version of laissez-fairism taken to its extreme and bleed out into other insane principles - such as, if less is occasionally more, it must follow that the least must always be the most. Therefore, the less we think, the smarter we are.  The less hard we work the more effortlessly things come to pass.  It is easy to start wars, plan no contingencies if things go wrong, and then sit back and watch as these wars virtually win themselves.  Since it is far easier to let our financial institutions wreck the country than it is to rein them in, obviously it behooves us to let them do it to us.  The less we debate, the greater our consensus; the more we agree among ourselves the more true our conclusions turn and when most intelligent expertise disagrees with us it just proves how much more right than them we must surely be, etcetera, etc., etc.
    By this point laissez-faire government has become Lazy-Fairy government.  They have discovered the pure, undisturbed essence of mediocrity.  It means that the lazier our leaders are the more the fairies of their indifference will arise to do their jobs for them better than they could have ever done them themselves.  It also means, how lucky for them, that though they accept their salaries, in a strange inverse ratio, they have to work less and less hard to earn them.  Magical.
     This concept that everything is easy and that anything suggesting hard work is a hindrance to a successful endeavor explains our policy in Iraq and foreign policy as well as the abysmal state of the economy.  Deficits, we’re told, don’t really matter to them because it is easier for our government to build them than it is to keep them from being built.  The latter is hard work, the former isn’t.  Lazy-fairy gummint means not only never having to make a difficult decision but (apparently) never having to say you are sorry or rectify your mistakes.
    Because, in the end, never having to balance necessity with resources and be always able to say you are in favor of cutting taxes (for a few) while never having to actually raise taxes to a level commensurate with needs, makes government service fun and profitable, hardly like hard work at all.  In the corporate world too, not working really works. Executives love their golden parachutes and automatic bonuses and exorbitant stock options because these absolve them from the necessity of actually having to do anything and work hard enough to succeed.
     Yet these are the same people who find time to preach responsibility, accountability and sacrifice for everyone but themselves.  They seek merit pay for underpaid teachers and revile the decay of moral fiber implicit (for the recipient!) for the tiniest hand out to the weakest, hungriest, poorest people in the land.  Meanwhile they’ll give away our money as bailouts to feckless billionaires on general principle with neither oversight nor demands while simultaneously begrudging a nickel or crust of stale bread or effective health care to a single mother with four sickly children.  They do these things, which might seem cruel, anti-Christian and perfectly perfidious, not because they want to nor because they are the greediest people on the planet but because they want to instill in the lower orders the same divine principles of hard work they are working so scrupulously hard to evade in their own lives.  
     One might conclude that the morals of these people are lacking, and that there is a small double standard implicit in their policies.  But that would be unkind.  Let’s just assume they are collectively dumb as a box of rocks and aren’t smart enough to discern that their entire lives are a self-serving contradiction to their own stated beliefs.

Class Chauvinism

     For whatever bizarre theory they put forward to excuse and provide cover for themselves, the pure crux of all their policies is greed and class bias.  Every bad policy put forward and good one opposed has as it core purpose the further enrichment of the very rich (among whom they hope to number themselves) at the expense of the rest of the economy, the middle class and the poor.  This is the squared root source of the dangerous economic imbalances we find ourselves struggling with today.
    How else can you explain all the time the government has spent in recent years trying to end the estate tax on the one hand while refusing to grant even a miniscule bump up in the minimum wage to the working poor?  Repealing the estate tax would represent a giant leap backwards to a permanent entrenched wealth, undemocratic privilege and create an unassailable upper class in this country.  The very thing our democratic representatives have been hired to prevent is the actual thing they have been most tireless in their attempts to achieve.  
    Somehow these ethically challenged people thought it was more important to alleviate into the far distant future the tax burden on the scions of great wealth, these lay-about heirs and heiresses, often before they are even born.  Better this than allow hard working millions to properly clothe, house, feed and educate themselves and their children today.  This is the false prejudice and high privilege that has operated in Washington recently.  Our leaders, largely quite well off in their own right, have come to see their interests inextricably aligned with the richest Americans at the inexorable expense of the remainder of the country.  
    Investing in the people of the country is the only course to national regeneration.  It is from them that future businesses, corporations, innovation and leadership will arise just as it always has before.  To the contrary, unjustly propping up existing corporations and money managers at the expense of the people at the tail end of society is ruinously short sighted.  A democratic government which doesn’t help and invest and put back and that isn’t of, by and for its own people is traitorous to the purpose of its own institution.  A nation which refuses to invest in the future of its own people paves the way to its inevitable decline.
     Unfortunately, in this emerging global economy there are many adjustments which have to be made.  Downward pressure on American wages from abroad will be a fact of life for many years to come.  This is an inescapable fact. In certain respects, pay and pensions and health care costs may have to be trimmed or at least restructured and these inherent burdens for our population collateralized throughout the economy more equitably.  
    These changing burdens and increased costs cannot be levied exclusively against the working class while creditors, executives, boards of directors and members of congress try to profit in the exchange.  The wrenching changes wrought by globalization are a national burden that must be shared nationally across the entire economic spectrum not a burden just borne by a few if we are to emerge onto a healthy economic future.  
     After all, the strength of an economy builds from below up.  You don’t rebuild the foundation of our economy by buying new furnishings for the penthouse and polishing the silver and gold fixtures.  The thieves of our future who have served as apologists for rapacious executive pay packages that serve no public economic benefit have essentially been helping to scavenge their own companies and our own economy for years.  
    Seen in this light, the dismantling of all government controls over our economy by our political class couldn’t have come at a worse time.  Just as globalization was kicking in we were stuck with a bankrupt, elitist and incompetent administration determined to dismantle all our natural democratic defenses against an increasingly uncertain and volatile macro economic tsunami.
    Yet these same people responsible for our vulnerability still resent any benefit to the poor or alleviation of stagnant middle class wages or expansion of rights and services to the population as a whole to help mitigate the economic injustices ravaging them.  In fact they jump for joy at the thought of workers’ wages and benefits being slashed and unions being crushed as if this would be beneficial for the economy even as the financial inequalities in this country are being exacerbated further by their actions.  When republicans chant, “drill baby drill” they apparently mean with them as the dentists and we the teeth.
     The ones in greatest jeopardy, the American workers, are the only ones who have been blameless here.  They have actually continued to do their jobs well while the executive class and boards of directors and financial institutions and the politicians who we were counting on to provide oversight, honesty, equal opportunity, fairness, stability and direction to our economy haven’t.  While they were playing by the rules of the game the ones in charge changed the rules without telling them and now are trying to make the workers pay for the executives’ mistakes. 
    The answer to these assorted problems, unlike Shelby and his ilk, is surely not to merely continue to cede our economic interests to foreign control.  They seem more than willing to do exactly this.  Rather than let our economy continue to erode as our debt ridden government sells the direction and management of our country into the hands of others cheap, we must breathe new life into the economy by actually working to save it and our way of life and our standard of living.
    The one thing that is not acceptable that they seem determined to continue is to place the future direction of the economy and the country into the hands of Wall Street.  Wall Street doesn’t care about this country.  Big money is no more patriotic than the weather.  When it practices what it preaches, Wall Street is the refined attar of pure greed.  Wall Street is more than happy to serve as the handmaiden of our economic decline because it will profit either way, either by buying us or selling us.  It is up to our elected officials to intercede and regulate this behavior and direct it into the best long term interests of the nation but they haven’t bothered.  
    For our government to now say that the reckless malfeasance of Wall Street was unexpected, is itself a virtual admission of the criminal abdication of the jobs we hired them to perform.  Everyone knows that there are always Bernie Madoffs out there trying to rip people off but they only get away with $50 billion dollars of other peoples’ money when the regulators have clearly crawled into bed with those they are supposed to be regulating. 
Our leaders have made a career of preaching their undivided love for the American work ethic and then punished it wherever they see it.  They have routinely rewarded incompetence, greed and injustice; groveled to undeserved entitlement and avoided anything which approaches honest hard work themselves.  Our government has sold us out such as we have never been sold out before.

It’s a Bourgeois Town

     There’s an old Leadbelly song about Washington.  A few lines of it go something like: “I got the bourgeoisie blues.  Home of the brave, land of the free, I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie.  (They’ll)…throw you a nickel just to see you bow.  It’s a bourgeois town.”
     He was talking about race primarily but economic class bias (not exclusive of race) amounts to the same thing and is what pertains today.  DC’s still a bourgeois town and anyone who seeks to transform it has to understand this.  
     It used to be that the US had the highest paid, best educated, healthiest, safest and most prosperous and productive people in the world.  Remember?  Now we have none of these.  To hear the republicans cheerfully gloat about cutting salaries and pensions and gutting jobs and job security and not even stepping up to help save troubled mortgages is disturbing at least, at worst disgusting.   Even if a great national economic retrenchment is underway, it is hardly seemly for the ones responsible for our grief still be trying to make political hay on the backs of others, even as they are still coddling (and being coddled in return) by the very executives most responsible for our economy’s current decline.  Profit is the opiate of these elite and they are addicted to our decline.
    I expected their true colors to show sooner or later.  They hid them well but now an ugly little undercurrent has finally started to surface through the elaborate disguise.  You hear the republicans and financial mavens starting to blame American workers and unions for all the troubles that they themselves have visited upon us. 
    They say Americans don’t save enough.  Save what?  They say the greedy Americans are dependent on credit cards.  Americans are maxed out, it’s true, the elitists on Wall Street have fleeced them to the limit and congress has passed regulations to aid them in their efforts.  Still, they say it is somehow the fault of the victims for being victimized rather than the fault of the crooks who did it to them or the special interest lobbyists who abetted them.
    And now, more and more, you hear these capitalist elitists beginning to begrudge the middle class for daring to desire to be middle class.  Our financial leadership is urging the middle class to cut back, though they don’t suggest such a course for themselves. 
Settle back into second class citizenry, lower middle class status, they urge.  Quit striving to surge ahead.  Forget the idea of owning your own home. The mortgage crisis is the fault of the strivings of the buyer as much or more than the dishonest greed of the lenders.   Affordable health care, higher education for your children, forget about it.  You were foolish to think you could rise so high.  These things are reserved exclusively for the wealthy not you.
    It’s time to curb your appetite for ease and comfort, job security and quell your extravagant pretensions to equality and ease.  Accept the economic decline of America and the middle class with appropriate grace.  Wall Street isn’t worried, of course, because as I say, in a global economy they make money either way.  And of course whether we are winning or losing our politicians will be well paid to stand aside and do nothing. 
Besides, American businesses can hire workers cheaper overseas.  Who cares if they are healthy, educated or well fed, housed and clothed.   This is the message of our upper crust to America via their mouthpieces in DC.  Wall Street is worth saving, because that’s where the money is, but no one else’s life or livelihood is.  If the economy for many must be decimated to save it for a few, if the lower two thirds of the economy must be dismantled so the upper third may prosper extravagantly, so be it.

    I hope the incoming Obama administration is taking notes.  It is more than just a change of political party needed to reform us.  There is an entire strand of upper crust thinking which must be squeezed from the system.  Unfortunately the TARP money, $350 billion, has already been hoarded, stolen or lost, given away with a wink and a nod to good old boy billionaires.  This program was purposely designed with no controls or accounting or accountability as a gift to the very incompetents who got us into this mess.  Placing the future of the country in such hands is nothing less than reckless endangerment.  This is a laissez-faire recovery of a laissez-faire system broken by the very people that we now are paying to fix it regulated by the same regulators who’ve never believed in regulation.   
    Obviously the Obama administration promises to be a great leap forward.  The country and even the world is hopeful.  Early signs are that his administration is top heavy with institutionalists and political types well versed in and used to operating within the existing political structure.  This doesn’t mean that they can’t change the existing institutions but it remains to be seen if Obama’s team has enough insight and objectivity to transform a system that has produced them.  
    Unfortunately Washington is still a bourgeois town.
    My point of emphasis here is this: it is always easier in the short term to do the wrong things and generally far, far more costly in the long term, than the right ones.  We have many politicians in Washington today who have built their entire careers cohering to this simple premise.  This entire culture must be changed.  So far the democrats, even with solid majorities in both houses seem weak.  They see less interested in fighting for what’s right than in appeasing those who are consistently wrong.  
    When Roosevelt transformed a broken government he managed to locate enough unique people from outside Washington’s orbit to leaven prejudices of those from within it.  It’s easiest to think outside the box if you weren’t in the box to begin to begin with.  Theoreticians from inside a structure are fine when imbued with real world experience and ideas from outside.  This is the charge given to the Obama administration.  As they are well aware, the election is not the end but the beginning.  The hard work starts now.  The window of opportunity which seems open so wide will close quickly.  If reforms don’t go deep enough a great opportunity will have been lost for another generation.