Stuff and non-stuff

Today John McCain resurrected a tape from 2001 -which would make it substantially newer than most of his ideas-that revealed Barack Obama to be – GASP ! – a thoughtful analyst of domestic history.  In the tape Obama reveals that one of the failures of the Civil Rights Movement had been that many of the disadvantaged were still economically disadvantaged.  Somehow McCain/Palin thinks that anyone who hasn’t acheived substantial wealth in this country is some sort of wasteful welfare bum and beneath our consideration.  In pandering to the delusions of the working class, this delusion that somehow you will never have any wealth because the Democrats will take it away from you, the Republicans have intensified the divisions between the haves and the never-will -haves.  It is a profoundly disturbing and shallow fallacy  that somehow a nation can have a strong economy with wealth concentrated in so few hands.  What I find breathtaking is how the Republicans have harped on the Democrats’ small-business tax plan as nightmarish.  The fact -stunning in its simplicity-is that possibly as few as 3-5% of small businesses even pay tax since their earnings are invariably paid out in the form of bonuses to AVOID the high corporate tax rate.  What we need now(and always, to be candid) are INVESTMENT INCENTIVES for businesses and individuals.  Taxes aren’t really a concern when you don’t have work…..most small businesses try so hard just to make ends meet that it is hard for them to innovate or take advantage of innovations.  Now is a time, more than any other, that we must as a nation have an economic policy of investment, investment, investment.  And not just in industries but in our children and in our schools – the dropout rate is all you really need to look at to see why we are struggling so mightily when we should be succeeding so greatly.  As the other nations of the world have begun to catch up to the U.S., we run the risk for the first time in our short history of being left behind.  We must set new priorities of education and investment, to resume our leadership not in the amount of wars fought but in the character and quality of our citizenry.  Our leaders must be positive and appeal to our higher nature, rather than resorting to name-calling and fear-mongering.  We need a nation rich in ideas, and the Republican ticket is not just devoid of ideas, it seems positively REPELLED by them

Take for example, McCain calling Obama a “socialist.”  Let’s look at one of McCain’s very few ideas:

An outlandish and unworkable scheme to buy up mortgages, spending 300 billion of taxpayer money.  Now this more closely fits every definition of socialism.  It’s just that when McCain proposes spending money it is as if he simply doesn’t know where that money comes from.  If it was for an earmark he would know that it would be coming from you and I – for this spending, though, it is ok.  He may not know how many houses he has but he certainly must have heard through the grapevine at least that they weren’t quite worth so much(particularly in one of the hardest-hit of Phoenix/Scottsdale).  So preserving the value of those houses must have made sense to him.

Of course, the campaign is so very weak on substance anyway I guess his advisors felt that any idea was better than none.  All his campaign says is”I know how to do this” over and over, without any explication whatever.   It is very easy to see how McCain finished near the bottom of his class – he has no patience for details or facts, he has no ability to see an idea through to its logical progression.

Confessions of a late-in-life political junkie

This presidential campaign may well be the richest in history – and not just because of the astounding 150mm Obama raised in a month.   At least his supporters are doing their part to keep the economy moving.  As are the Republican’s- in true George Bush spirit, they appear to have spent some 150,000 on Sarah Patriot’s fancy garb at such real american stores as Neiman Marcus and Sacks- that’s like 4 years of the average salary of the American worker-but not to worry, she will put those clothes on EBAY and sell ’em at a profit and Meg Whitman will forgive the commission and send that to some worthy Republican cause like, uhhh, redecorating Guantanamo….Am I the only one who thinks this is truly important, how can middle class people be truly represented by a party of elitists who know the only way to stay in power is to wave their magic blend of delusions and demagoguery over the susceptible folks who have been so left behind by government policies of the past forty years

 

No, what we have here has roused a long-dormant political vitality in this old 60’s radical from his torpid apathetic existence.  And what I have found has shocked me to my core – the ignorance on both sides, the remarkable need to create fictional rationales for choosing the McCain side in order not to be branded a racist in any way.  So it is  Obama’s strikingly “new” concept of asking the wealthy to pay their fair share –socialism -that strikes such fear into the hearts, those hearts of people nowhere close to the tax threshhold but who can not simply bring themselves to say” I cannot vote for a Black President.”  Or stunningly, as it was voiced to me today “Obama is all right, but I couldn’t bear to have that woman(Michelle Obama) in the White House.  These are words being spoken by women, by educated people, by victims of racism in their own world – is this skin color thing such a big deal?  The fantasies that are woven that allow such people to justify either voting for McCain or not voting at all must be either 1. a protection mechanism so they do not have to come to terms with their own inherent racism or 2. some sort of dream-state in which an alternate reality has somehow overtaken their conscious waking mind.  So I thought I would take a look at some of the current concerns.

Socialism – aaah, the very word strikes horror into all those people who have no idea what it means. “Don’t fail to understand, Obama is a socialist – taking money from Joe and giving it to others.”

Okay – but fellas, that’s what Democracy and “It’s A Wonderful Life” is all about!  If you pay taxes almost nothing goes back to you – it goes to fund schools your kids don’t go to, roads you don’t drive on, medicare for people you have never met and prisons for those you don’t ever want to meet.  The greatest good for the greatest number.  Socialism appears when the government(usually a small group within that government) controls the means of production and distribution.  And that is certainly not what is being proposed here in any way.

• Barack has “secret ” agendas to create a massive welfare state, he is an enemy of Israel, he is -dare I say it – the”Antichrist.”   Let’s just say he’s the antibush and leave it at that.  He is a self made man who actually thinks and carefully assesses the situation before moving ahead- reading, I don’t believe, gives him that bad headache which has so limited George’s understanding of pretty much everything.  It is quite possible that Barack Obama may actually understand not just the theory but the practice of his policies.  Take for example his somewhat bizarre notion that wealthy people should pay more in taxes since they are more likely to afford it and since they often get the most benefit from those taxes as well.  We have had some form of progressive taxation over the past 100 years.

Yes I suppose it is true that people who make over a million dollars a year may have some budgetary issues but their biggest issue seems to be”they don’t want to pay more tax.”  Even if that meant living in a substantially improved world, where their workers would be better educated and healthier, living in an environment of cleaner air and water, they don’t want the government taking any more of their money.  And who can blame them?  After all, this is a government that deceitfully and unilaterally went into Iraq to fight an extremely costly war with absolutely no legal, ohh, wait, those guys are in favor of that war.  And so that sick amount of money which is today enriching the Iraqi coffers by 80 billion has ensured low literacy rates, extraordinarily high dropout rates with our nation’s children, a virtual disintegration of the jobs market(not to mention much of our decaying infrastructure) and virtually no reserves left in our tank.  The only way to deal with this situation was to encourage every conceivable lending institution to operate at full fatal leverage which eventually collapsed the global financial markets.  This has happened  while the supposedly fiscally conservative anti-government forces are in power…imagine how much worse it would be if you got some sort of, dare I say it “tax and spend liberal” in the white house.  OOh and by the way, he’s black and he has a secret plan to socialize the US and have the blacks control the white race, finally making up for some 250 years of persecution in one fell swoop.

To this I say, two weeks ago on Friday morning, we were facing an abyss in the financial markets unlike anything that I or anyone had ever seen.  At that moment it became apparent that the markets would either respond to the massive capital and liquidity being provided to them or the Free World, as we know it, would effectively collapse.  For if you don’t have banks being able to function, chaos and government breakdowns would certainly ensue, like any bad dystopic science fiction movie.  Better late than never, central banks suddenly realiized they have the ability to create nearly infinite liquidity -it was simply the terms that they had to work out and we have lived for a few more weeks and the acute stage of the illness has clearly subsided.  No question though-the patient is still quite ill, perhaps chronically so. With so much leverage taken out of the system we likely will have a slow road to recovery, but hopefully we will recover.

In two more weeks, another type of recovery, will , with luck, take place.  The recovery of our national sense of decency and fairness.  And, like all really big changes, it will take a little getting used to.  Yet America, with all its faults,remains so far ahead of all other nations in so many ways because of the strength of its system.  It is not surprising that in the midst of this global market crisis the US dollar has staged one of the mightiest rallies in memory.  We have an extraordinary capacity to right our ship and we will have an unprecedented captain at the helm

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!