Alice in Demo Land

Calhoun’s Cannons for Sept 7, 2012

            Three days of the Republican convention.  Three days of the Democratic convention.  And I have just one question:  What the hell happened to this country?

            Really.  How did the ethos of work hard, help your neighbor raise his barn and he’ll help with yours, build for the future so your kids will have it better than you,  get transmuted into the ethos of Ayn Rand:  Money equals success, taxes are theft, go raise your own damned barn, and the next generation can look out for themselves?

            When did we stop being a nation of hard-headed pragmatists – pay your bills, grow your business, invest in the future – and turn into air-heads willing to believe voodoo economics, the “trickle-down” fake theories of David Stockman who later admitted that he made it all up?  In a consumer/capitalist society, trickles go upward, not down.  Henry Ford figured that out years ago.  He paid an unheard-of living wage so his workers had enough money to buy his product.  No salaries, no buyers; no buyers, no factory; no factory, no Henry Ford.

            When did companies move out of what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth?”  Back in the day, Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, wrote, “The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interests groups . . .”  i.e. stockholders, employees, the community, the public, the nation as a whole.

            The Virtuous Circle resulted in and sustained the middle class, encouraged ongoing prosperity for the maximum number of people, ensured stability, kept Ayn Randian greed in check.  How quaint it seems now.  In its stead, we have Gordon Gekko, the rapacious Bainer whose overriding goal is to maximize profits for a small number of stakeholders, push all value to the first-quarter bottom line, loot the company and scamper for the Cayman Islands, with all that rapacious, short-sighted behavior rewarded by hefty bonuses and favorable back-room-written tax laws.

            How could anyone think that such behavior wouldn’t lead to bubbles and theft and corruption and crash?  Did the average American somehow think that he would be exempt from the destruction that was heading his way?  Is that why he kept voting into office wholly-owned Corporate Pols who would promise him pie then vote into law policies that would actually deliver dead flies to the working and middle class? 

            Was it because the Kool Aide the Ayn Randers were delivering was a slow acting poison?  A drug that dulled the mind so nobody noticed until it was too late? Or was it because The Big Lie always works? 

            And when did we become a country that decided Big Lies were acceptable? Lie about war, lie about Wall Street, lie about anything, since winning and holding power at any cost was the only thing that counted.  And if you were rich,  famous and brazen enough, you could get away with anything.  Who would stop you? After all, as a Republican operative once famously said, “We create our own reality.”  Is that what turned the old Republican party of fiscal responsibility and prudent conservatism into math-challenged Neo Know-Nothings waving vaginal probes? 

            So here we are, Battered Wife Nation, a country poisoned by fake reality – trickle-down “job creators,” my ass -- hammered into believing that the majority of us don’t deserve anything – no decent health care, no decent wages, no decent schools, or roads or bridges.  We were told that all that mattered were the stock market numbers and we believed that lie.  We were told that unions were to blame for our jobs being shipped overseas, so we hated unions.  We were told that teachers and firemen and government workers were blood-sucking leeches, so we kicked them into the street.  We were told that black people and brown people were either the enemy who would steal our outsourced, non-existent jobs or were “welfare queens” stealing our taxes, and we believed that.  We were told that more tax breaks for the wealthy took priority over helping our unemployed neighbor, helping the poor and the old and the sick, and we believed that, too.

            We forgot our civics lessons; if you want a better congress you have to vote in better congressmen.  Instead, we elected clueless monkey-wrenchers, ideological hacks and wing nuts, then wondered why nothing reasonable got done.  And when outrage and blunt honesty was the only sane response to the disaster our apathy and inattention had called down on upon our heads, we were told we should shut up and accept our downsized serfdom with a smiley face and grab our own bootstraps.  Pluckiness was demanded, not fierce, righteous anger.  It was Mr. Mcawber over Madame Defarge.

            So, here we sit, sick, hurting, and befuddled at the corner of Battered Wife Nation and Enough Already! with the hour late, real economics (arithmetic, not theory) and real Mother Nature (hot enough for you?) bearing down on us – two actual real realities that do not deal in lies, care nothing about ideology and take no prisoners.

            Happily, one antidote arrived at the convention.  Former President Clinton, the Big Dawg himself, got down off the porch to call out and fact- check the Republican’s false narratives with the cheerful exactitude of a finger-waving schoolmarm. So now we’ll see how many people were tuned in and paying attention and how many were watching football on another channel.

            Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how and why we got into this mess in the first place.      

                 

Requiem or Renewal?

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for July 13, 12

Remember, democracy never lasts long.  It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

                                                                 John Adams

If we’re going to make it until November without shooting holes in the flat screen TV, I think we need a few new rules if we’re to keep our sanity.

First, dump the words “job creators,” when referencing rich people who don’t want to pay the same tax rates as their secretaries. That’s one of those made up fake Frank Luntz words designed to mislead and deceive.  Rich people are not job creators.  Here’s who’s a job creator: Joe Izzywick, works down at the last tool and die plant in Akron, drives an old Chevy truck.  Joe wakes up one morning and says, “Hey, I need a new left-hand framestam.”  So he goes to the hardware store and buys the last framestam on the shelf and the store owner calls his supplier and says, “We’re out of framestams,” and orders more.  At the framestam factory, the owner says, “Dang, I’m getting these orders for framestams and we’re at our maximum production limit now.  I’d better hire somebody to make more framestams since apparently there’s a run on the things.”  So he hires another framestam maker.

That’s the job creator -- Joe Izzywick, not some rich guy with his piles of tax sheltered money squirreled away in the Cayman Islands. Make sure Joe Izzywick has enough money in his jeans to buy framestams and your economy will hum.  Old Henry Ford knew that.  He paid his workers a higher than normal wage at the time because he wanted to make sure they had enough money in their jeans to buy his cars.  Henry Ford’s workers were job creators, not Henry Ford.

Next, just gracefully bow to the end game of the Roberts Court’s “Citizens United” decision:  America has gone from a country ruled by an aristocratic, landed gentry, to a Jacksonian one-man-one-vote small-d democracy and is now going back to a country ruled by wealthy landed, corporatized gentry once again.  Unlimited money in secret PACS don’t have too much bang for the buck in national Presidential races, but they sure do pay off big time in the down-ticket races to control Congress and the Senate.  Those seats can be targeted and bought for a relatively paltry amount.  And once you own those congresspeople, paid for, lock-stock-and-barrel, you can write the laws yourself ALEC-style and garner for yourself all kinds of swell legal loopholes and paybacks – it’s a corporate lobbyist’s wet-dream without the expensive lobbyist. Buy direct and save!

This game plan works well at the local level as well.  If your community’s ripe for some company coming in to build a huge mega-mart store but public sentiment and the elected officials are opposed to such a scheme, don’t be surprised to see a long game at work when new city council candidates appear fully funded with a campaign coffer stuffed to the gills with undisclosed PAC money.  Change the city council and you change the planning commissioners and shortly thereafter a megastore arises in the middle of town while the townspeople wake up and scratch their heads and wonder what happened.

The new Roberts Rules is what happened.  So we all might as well kick back and amuse ourselves setting up local guess-the-jelly-beans-in-the-jar type betting pools; Whoever comes closest to guessing the exact price of their new “elected” officials wins the pool.  

I know, you’re whining now.  You’re probably feeling abused and bruised and badly used.  Like your society and government is out of sorts, off track, failing, out of control.  Like suddenly this isn’t the America we used to know, so people keep muttering about how we have to take our country back.  But back from .  .  . what?

Sadly, there is no “back.”  For thirty-some years Americans have voted themselves into nothings. With each election we continued to devalue the Commons we were once a vital part of, we swore allegiance to NoTax Norquist and defunded our schools and infrastructure (and the future of the next generation), we voted people into office who began the process of moving money from the middle class up to the 1%, we off-shored our own jobs, then blew the last of our savings on the newly de-regulated Wall Street casino. (Who needs Glass-Steagall? The free market will solve all problems!)  Step by step, vote by vote, we turned ourselves from being productive, responsible citizens into a bunch of needy losers, annoying poor people, excess baggage, an unneeded drag on the economy.  In short, we made ourselves irrelevant.   

We the people, without the “we” part.  So here we sit.  All us job creators, all us defunct former citizens, watching somebody else's new game with new rules. And a seriously unlevel playing field filled with the finest elected officials money can buy, all for critical election choices coming up:  Continue the transformation to a full blown corporate aristocracy or  switch direction towards a quasi-Jacksonian, demi-corporate, smaller d democracy that at least pays some attention to the peasants. 

An interesting turn of events, you say?  Well, yes. So, place your bets, my fellow serfs, place your bets. The wheel is spinning.

 

   

  

O.K., Rick, Let's Do That

In the GOP debate last night, candidate Rick Perry said, "Maybe it's time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like, 'Let's get America working again and do whatever it takes to make it happen.'"

Whatever?  O.K. President Obama will present a jobs package tonight, so let's see how many Republicans will vote for it.  The jobs package will be a "whatever." Shall we place bets on the votes?

Want more "provocative language," here's something that all the GOPers who are babbling on about "job creation" need to remember:  Jobs are created from the bottom up, not the top down: Demand, then supply. 

A manufacturer of widgets doesn't wake up one day and say, "Oh, look, I just got a nice tax break, I think I'll go out and hire 10 people to make more widgets, even though nobody's buying my widgets because they have no jobs and no money to buy widgets and so I've got a warehouse full of widgets I can't sell, but with this nice tax break, what the hell, I think I'll just go make more of them that I can then store in another warehouse."

Or, as what has actually happened too many times, "Oh, look, nice tax breaks for moving my widget company off shore, so I'll lay off all my American workers, hire Indian workers and make bazillions of widgets to sell to the Chinese, then lobby Republicans in Congress to vote to get even more tax breaks on all my nice profit. After all, I'm a 'job creator!'"

So please think about that "provocative" reality the next time you hear some GOPer talking about "job creation" and "job creators," and "job creating tax breaks."

Thank you.