Shalom, Baby!

I was deeply moved during John Boehner’s installation as the Republican Speaker of the House when he and the former Democratic Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, embraced.

I was reminded of the “kiss of peace” at a pre-game mass of Cincinnati’s Moeller High School football team on which John Boehner played center and linebacker. I was there as a guest of the teams’ coach, Gerry Faust, for whom I was negotiating a book deal before he became head coach at Notre Dame. I played the same positions as Boehner on my high school team; so I feel a certain affinity with him.

In our floating D.C. parish of the 60s, we substituted for the English kiss of peace salutation, “Peace be with you,” its ancient Hebrew ancestor, Shalom, to which we added an African-American colloquialism, “Shalom, Baby!”

Today intolerance is spreading like wildfire against immigrants from south of our borders (“illegal”), from the near east (“terrorists”), and tolerant citizens everywhere are damned as “liberals.”

I’m reminded that in the 1840s, bigotry landed hard on Irish immigrants (my ancestors); and later, on newly arriving Italians (Nancy Pelosi’s). Nor did German immigrants (like John Boehner’s ancestors) escape hatred’s scourge: In WWI a Catholic school was forbidden to teach the German language; and in WWII bigotry’s grip closed a famous German-American restaurant in Baltimore.

There is no cultural, religious, ethnic, gender, or belief group in the United States that hasn’t felt the lash of demagogues peddling hatred.

In my New Year blog, I hoped that the new 112th Congress, “inspired by the 111th," would “do as well or better, and that new members, including Republicans and their Speaker, John Boehner, will help the nation weather its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

The kiss of peace at Boehner’s installation reinforced my hope as did the near universal remorse over the Tucson Tragedy. The Republican Health Care stunt echoed some of last year’s muddy, deadlock trenches; but I was cheered watching senators and congress members from opposing parties sitting side by side to hear the President’s State of the Union address.

President Obama challenged both parties to work together to renew a forward looking, innovative edge to our nation’s economy. The Republican Party’s official response disclosed deep disagreement with some of the president’s proposals. The president believes, however, that our differences, vigorously argued in an open, collegial spirit, will yield new creative solutions to vanquish unemployment and other persistent, ugly remains of the 2008 recession.

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Keep the faith, baby!

photo credit, Flickr, CincMatt

Happy New Year!

First, to my family and friends; also,

The new 112^th Congress of the United States convening in January,

John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives,

Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, now House Minority Leader,

John Lewis, Congressman from the Fifth Georgia District in Atlanta,

Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate,

President Barack Obama,

Vice President Joseph Biden, and

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.

The 111^th Congress successfully addressed and passed, over obstinate opposition, more desperately needed, controversial legislation than any other Congress since the 89th when voter rights legislation passed in the 1960s!

I hope the 112^th is inspired by the 111^th example to do as well or better, and that new members, including Republicans and their Speaker, John Boehner, will help the nation weather its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

My Cousin Kathleen, focused on other issues, didn’t like the emphasis in my “Taming the Borrowing Beast” blog on the fact that, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . .was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." In reply, my “Nation Becoming A Dysfunctional Family” blog described election feuding over divisive issues that avoid government “addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years...

“We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people live on every city block and small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. . . . We have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.

“The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible— — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.

“Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping . . . rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this gift. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.

I have but one concrete suggestion to Republicans in the 112^th Congress:

Prove that I am wrong in claiming that little if any job stimulus will flow from the billions in tax breaks you recently won in the 111^th Congress for your wealthiest patrons and the corporations they own and control. It’s not hard:

A. Persuade your patrons to stop hoarding their enormous cash reserves such as I describe in my “Hatching a Brand New Beast” blog;

B. Persuade your patrons to spend or invest their cash reserves and tax breaks like Warren Buffet, in new enterprises that will create jobs, instead of “safe” aging enterprises approaching the down side of their secular trend curve;

C. Persuade your patrons and the state governments they dominate to stop firing, start hiring and begin serving their constituents’ needs;

D. Persuade your patrons and the media they control to stop trashing on efforts to accomplish these things and those who advocate them, like George Soros;

E. If your patrons do these things they’ll make a lot of money, avoid a class war, and like themselves better.

photo credit: flickr, rkramer62

Democrats Pay Scrooge Ransom

A New Republican Borrowing Beast is Born!

I have been waiting since the November election to see how Republican Borrowing Beast scams play out. That fearsome beast has now, despite campaign deficit reduction talk, once again been unleashed. We will continue to borrow money to reward our richest billionaires with new billions in tax breaks. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his impoverished family will continue to suffer; Tiny Tim may lose his health insurance; and the miserable Scrooge will continue to speculate, hoard money and foreclose.

Thursday, December 16, 2010 Congress finally approved, and the next day the President signed, an $858 billion extension of all Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for two years and created additional new tax breaks as well. One fourth of all income tax reductions go to the richest one percent of taxpayers. They are also rewarded with a $5 million inheritance tax exemption and reduced rates. Democrats were coerced into voting this monstrous giveaway to the rich as ransom for extending middle-class tax reductions and unemployment benefits for thirteen months. See a graphic illustration of the cost of this plan here.

In my August 15, 2010 blog, “Paper Money Makes Voters Happy,” I quoted Canby Balderston, then a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, summing up a speech at a Wharton School Alumni luncheon during the Nixon Administration:

“We will soon run out of that nothing with which to make no down payment.”

I then explained: “Despite the warnings of true conservatives like Canby Balderston and Paul Volker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Republican politicians, beginning with President Nixon, could not resist the temptation to buy elections with ever-expanding extensions of credit.”

After some details about how this works, I quoted a moving description in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by a long unemployed, decorated war veteran of how it feels trying to live on the “nothing” of which Dean Balderston spoke.

August 30 I wrote a sequel, “Taming the Borrowing Beast,” in which I pointed out: “The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets, that is, spending no more money than collectable in taxes, was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton. In its final annual quarters, that administration’s budgets yielded a surplus; that is, the federal government collected more in taxes than it spent.

“According to the still dominant business cycle theory of British economist Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), governments should take in more money than they spend during good times so that in hard times they may ease the pain by spending more than they take in. . . .

“Continuing in the Nixon tradition, President George W. Bush, at the first sign of declining economic prospects in 2001, applied a big dose of Nixon voter happiness balm with risky inflationary tax cuts to the wealthy, and, as if that was not enough, began a war in Afghanistan. In 2003, came more tax cuts to the wealthy and the Iraq war.

“Tax cuts plus war spending are wildly inflationary. They induce voter euphoria for a while—a seemingly endless feast of dollars garnished with patriotic fervor are delicious—but eventually the happiness bubble breaks, and we are at the mercy of a grouchy Borrowing Beast.

“That beast leaves us, in the words of Alan Greenspan, with choices that are no longer between “the good and the better,” but between “the bad and worse.”

How do we, an electorate addicted to an illusory prosperity from a political financing fix, tame our Borrowing Beast?

“First, as in the ‘twelve steps’ method, we have to face the fact of our addiction.

For more on this topic: “Hatching a Brand New Beast.”

cartoon credit: HikingArtist.com

The Approaching Republican Armageddon

The last flood of secret Republican political spending produced Watergate; the current deluge may have more violent, lasting consequences.

E.J. Dionne Jr. reports in the Washington Post of October 18, 2010 that Republican “outside groups that refuse to disclose their donor lists. . . are doing the dirty work of pounding their Democratic opponents in commercials for which no one is accountable. The Republican candidates can shrug an innocent ‘Who, me?’ Deniability is a wonderful thing."

And then, on the far right, Glenn Beck and his allies cast President Obama as the central figure in a conspiracy against America itself, fueling participation by the most extreme 10 percent or 15 percent of the electorate.

Their crackpot ideas, as the historian Sean Wilentz documented in the New Yorker recently, originated in the 1950s and '60s, in the paranoid theorizing of the John Birch Society. But whereas responsible conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the Birchers and the rest of the lunatic fringe back then, Republicans this time are riding the radical wave. . . .

Frank Rich reports in The New York Times on October 17, 2010, under the title “The Rage Won’t End on Election Day,” that the current “wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy’s collapse and Barack Obama’s ascension.”

The economic meltdown precipitated by forty years of financial deregulation and tax avoidance borrowing threatened the illusory security of Middle Class America; the election of President Obama stirred the sleeping violence of what we hoped was long dead racism. Republicans fired these twin frustrations with lies and cash to distract attention from culpably risky GOP financial adventurism.

The immediate consequence, as Rich points out, was a report in the Boston Globe last fall “that the Secret Service was overwhelmed by the death threats against the president as well as a rise in hate groups and anti-government fervor. In a cover article last month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that the magazine’s six month investigation found that ‘the threat level against the president and other government targets” is at its highest since the anti-government frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.”

The ugly names Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democrats have endured and that’s a mark of how well they’ve done their jobs in the face of bought and paid for vilification and do-nothing, filibustering opponents. Mr. Dionne’s report concludes that Republican candidates “can be calmly affable, knowing they have behind them oodles of secret cash and a far right that sees Nov. 2 as Armageddon.”

If you want a close-up up of current rehearsals for the approaching Republican- managed Armageddon—the thousands of violent participants and hate groups, their sordid criminal activities, and their connections with Fox News, read Intelligence Report, a monthly periodical published by the famous nemesis of the Ku Klux Klan, The Southern Poverty Law Center, now battling a gigantic resurgence of Klan successors.

Democratic voters must not be discouraged by what a gullible media reports as the “enthusiasm” of Republican voters (all bought and paid for).

You didn’t make any mistakes in 2008, and you’re going to do a grand encore November 2, 2010 and save us, once again, from secret, bigoted Republican money.

photo: flickr, bobster855, Harvey Comics

Are You Rich Enough to Vote Republican?

Being rich is not enough; only the very rich count with Republican politicians. In addition to their wealthy human base, a recent 5-4 Supreme Court majority handed them a vast new source of campaign funds. News reports are beginning to discover the infusion of enormous corporate contributions into an already well-endowed Republican effort to buy themselves a Congressional majority this November.

During the last forty years (since President Nixon), Republican politicians have been making ordinary voters happy with an illusory prosperity by recklessly inflating the amount of money in circulation. They eased bank regulation, manipulated interest rates, and, finally, W applied the most powerful inflationary “stimulus” of all, financing two wars and tax breaks with borrowed money.

The only people that benefited from Republican financial manipulations, however, were the very rich. According to James Surowieki writing in the New Yorker, “People who earn a few hundred thousand a year have done much worse than people at the top of the ladder.

“Between 2002 and 2007, for instance, the bottom 99% of incomes grew 1.3% a year in real terms—while the incomes in the top one percent grew ten per cent a year. That one percent accounted for all income growth in those years.”

But us 99% are bearing the brunt of the catastrophic economic consequences of W’s reckless tax avoidance borrowing since it came home to roost in 2007.

Most professional Republican advisors have publicly regretted going along with such risky financing. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board on whose watch W’s wartime borrowing boom occurred, now wants all $3.7 trillion of 2001 and 2003 tax breaks repealed and applied to reducing the national debt.

Now repentant deregulators read like a former celebrity list. Richard Posner, “The crisis is primarily, perhaps almost entirely, the consequence of decisions taken by private [banking] firms in an environment of minimal regulation.” David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is writing a book on “How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. Economy.”

President Obama has been forgiving—many say too forgiving—of Republican financial advisors. Timothy Geithner, who managed the Bush bailouts in 2008, is now Obama’s Treasury Secretary.

Republican politicians, however, are neither repentant nor forgiving. They’re in denial. The only song they sing, in the midst of the money meltdown their excessive borrowing spawned, is more tax breaks for their very wealthy supporters, paid for, again of course, with borrowed money. Every other kind of “government spending”—except for their endless nine-year old wars—must be sacrificed to “decrease the deficit” those wars and tax breaks created.

Obama, ever the conciliator, would cancel only $700 billion of the expiring $3.7 trillion in Republican tax breaks; that is, only tax reductions benefiting taxpayers with net joint income above a quarter of a million dollars annually would expire.

As revealed in Mr. Surowieki’s statistics, Republican politicians have, in effect, if not deliberately, been waging class warfare on behalf of the very rich against their poorer fellow citizens.

Republican are spending tons of money firing up a lot of angry people brimming with vituperation, including some armed and dangerous. I hope we survive such madness long enough for Republicans to repent cheating their poorer relations.

artwork: flickr, Patrick Hoesly

Coffee, Tea or ME, ME, ME!

This week we feature a guest blog from anthropologist and museum curator Patrick Dowdey. Reader contributions and comments are always welcome.

The primaries are over now, and we’ve gotten to have a really good look at the ‘tea-party’ movement and its candidates. A really good look: they have the media’s fickle attention in a hammerlock; you hear more about them that even celebrity canoodlings. And I think that’s my first conclusion about the TPers: many of them seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Not in the  sense that they can’t concentrate: they concentrate really well. Rather in the other meaning of the words, that they can’t ever ever get enough attention.

The “Mama Grizzly” of the TP is of course Sarah Palin, and she’s a really good example of the breed. Loves the lens, loves the cheering crowd, but terminally bored with all the gruesome old work of governance. Loud and weird is the mantra, and anything to get a rise out of people, make them look at me. And if Sarah Palin is the Mama Grizzly, Newt Gingrich is now grown into the Old Grandad. Newt is still good for a meaty quote; but for all his years in the Congress, what can he point to in the way of legislation or anything done for the American people? How much of the Contract with America did he fulfill? What have any of these people done for their constituents? We’ve forgotten how to ask these questions as we spin from rally to rally, from accusation to attention-grabbing accusation.

That’s one kind of Boston Harbor party-goer. The other kind is the monied kind, the Meg Whitmans and Linda McMahons of the new political universe. They too make a lot of noise, this time bought and paid for with their private fortunes, Whitman’s (Cali Gov) from eBay and McMahon’s (Connecticut Senate) from World Wrestling Entertainment. They don’t seem so much desperate for attention as desperate to run things, big things -- like a government so out of control as to extend health benefits to all citizens and provide unemployment in the deepest recession since WWII.

Both sets of Teepees run with the advantage of being pretty new to the major political scene, people mostly untarnished by the Bush debacle (and the Abramowitz, Craig, De Lay and Trent Lott side-debacles...BP tea anyone?) and thus able to campaign exactly the way W did without mentioning the name of America’s worst president ever. All hold out hope to people with little detail on how that hope will be realized and little to point to in the way of political accomplishment beyond campaigning successes. W was like that, good at the electronic moment, preternaturally bad at actual governance. They lead, but where?

It’s all pretty weak tea to me. Like Harry Reid, I’m a strong coffee voter, and I will gladly buy you a cup. Let’s turn off the noise and talk awhile.

Photo: Meg Whitman, credit: flickr, matthewfilipowicz

Nation Becoming A Dysfunctional Family

The most catastrophic depression since the 1930s is no time for a family feud.

Dear Cousin Kathleen:

I was delighted to hear from you even if only by way of a response to my recent blog, "Taming the Borrowing Beast," particularly, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . . was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." I was puzzled, however, at your stirring into this issue the claim that the Clinton administration "did more to promote and further abortion and overturn laws protecting the most innocent of our citizens: the unborn; so he's hardly a hero to me for balancing the budget. . . ."

However, if your question, "Which is the bigger evil?" is limited to right here and now, USA 2010 with eleven million unemployed and a deeply compromised economic future, I can answer that question with confidence.

The biggest evil is clear: It is family feuding over divisive issues that are not immediately focused on weathering the worst economic crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We can't afford the luxury of arguing about anything else. Our foolishly happy addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years leaves us, in the words of a repentant Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, with no more choices between "good" and "better," but only between "bad" and "worse."

We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people lives on every city block and in every small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. Members of our family enjoy round the world friendships, and we have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.

Our family's refusal to allow strong feelings about hot button religious, political and sexual issues to sunder friendships and family ties, can be a model for taming the current ugly, divisive style of political debate. Name-calling and exaggerated metaphors, like "murder" of the unborn, have led to the real murder of a live adult—in a church; and if we are upset by stoning sinners in Muslim nations, we might take notice of the new 'Scarlet Letters" we're pinning on some already deeply troubled women.

The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible for our contentious Irish elements — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.

Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping religious rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this talent. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.

l remember Aunt Martha's greeting to a prospective in-law. Opening the door to him, Aunt Martha, then in her 90s said, "I've been told not to discuss religion or politics with you, so let's talk about sex," accompanying her words with a 90-year old's bump and grind. Our soon to be relative responded with an equally welcoming break-the-ice belly-laugh!

Just to show I haven't lost my contentious edge, I'd like to try to soften some of your certainties, Kathleen. Justice Blackmun, the principal author of the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade, tried to resolve competing recent definitions of abortion with much older understandings. English Common Law (controlling in the United States in the absence of legislation, of which there was none until the nineteenth century) did not forbid intentionally terminating a pregnancy anytime before "quickening" (when the foetus can be felt to move).

Saint Augustine held that only God knows when a foetus becomes infused with a soul (i.e. when God breaths into human "nostrils the breath of life," that makes a human a "living being," Genesis 2:7). No human can know that until the devine "breath of life" is revealed when a live child is born. I remember when Catholic priests would refuse to baptise a foetus even to console a women who suffered a miscarriage.

I don't know when or how our current crop of clerics came to know what only God knows, but while clerical advice is entitled to respect; so too is one's own conscience. It is the ultimate human arbiter even when it disagrees with an infallible pope, or resists coercion by authorities burning heretics at the stake or denying health insurance to sinners.

photo credit: flickr, Brianna Lehman