What’s Going On Here?
This is a three part series on where we are as a country, where we want to be as individuals, where we should be as both, how we think we can achieve both and how that will be reflected in the coming elections.
What happened, how did we get into this mess and what do we need to do to get out of it?
I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore! I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore! I’m mad as hell…
That was most of us as the 2008 election approached. We had watched in horror as the warrior party sat back after many warnings and let 911 happen, Then we watched as they overreacted to 911 by invading a country to kill a man. That resulted in our watching and sometimes encouraging, our practically illiterate president as he used the great lie; weapons of mass destruction, to get us into another war with Iraq. Finally everybody realized it was because he was embarrassed that his father didn’t finish the job in Desert Storm. To top this off we had to sit by and watch the implausible tableaux of our duty-dodging president dressing up in his Halloween uniform and declaring, “Mission accomplished,” when it hadn’t even begun.
We were only beginning to get the point when we watched a great American city disappear into the bayous, pushed down into the mud by stupidity and more incompetence, but the final blow to our vapid acceptance was when after running up a trillion dollar deficit the powers in power allowed their Wall Street cronies to crash the economy while still extracting huge bonuses to add to their personal wealth.
So 2008 was inevitable. Everyone except a few staunch far Right types saw the problems and Obama won by a comfortable margin. If he hadn’t been black he would have won by a landslide, maybe as much as 70%. But he was black so he just had to settle for a comfortable margin. But the people who put Obama in office didn’t want just a president. They wanted a messiah. They expected a messiah and when they didn’t get a messiah they were pretty pissed off. In fact they are right now trying to treat this messiah just like they treated the last one. What they don’t realize is that Obama isn’t the messiah, he’s the president and so far a pretty good one.
Let’s see. What did they get? In his first 20 months in office, Obama, with nothing but opposition from the Republicans, has put in place a Stimulus package that has helped slow down the economic crash instituted by the Bush Administration, a Health Care bill to try to stop the Insurance Companies from stealing from every American they are supposed to be insuring, an education bill to try to raise our pathetic level of education to at least the level of your average Eastern European emerging nation, closed down the war effort in Iraq and instituted economic controls aimed at keeping the banks and Wall Street from repeating their greedy screw-up and once again plunging the economy into depression. This is already more constructive legislation than either of the Bushes or Clinton crafted in twenty years.
So what kind of reaction did all these achievements get? Well the far left screamed that Health Care was flawed, that we should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, that he had done nothing about Guantanamo and that stopping the growth of unemployment at 9.7% wasn’t enough, that he should have it back to half of that by now. The far right on the other hand, screamed that the Stimulus hadn’t put everyone back to work, that Health care should be repealed because otherwise their Insurance stock will go down and that the same is true for the economic controls. They want to keep all of Bush’s tax cuts but offer no solution as to what programs to cut to make them work. Oh yeah, and they have little or nothing to say about education or the economy because they understand neither of them. They do agree with the far left that stopping the growth of unemployment at 9.7% wasn’t enough.
Now we have an election coming up with the ultra far Right energized out of their minds by the Tea Party people who want to throw out government even as they collect social security and Medicare, drive on roads and fly from airports provided by government, are protected by police, fire and hospitals paid for by the same taxes they don’t want to pay and send their kids to schools that are there because government is there to build them and pay for the teachers.
The far Left wants better Medicare, better schools, more cops and firemen and lots of other programs to help practically everyone with a runny nose. Of course they don’t want to pay taxes either. Nobody wants to pay taxes but everybody wants to benefit from the stuff taxes provide. Of the major Western Industrialized nations only New Zealand and Switzerland have a lower income tax rate than we do. I don’t know why New Zealand is 2% lower than us but it’s obvious that Switzerland doesn’t need taxes when it has all the worlds illegal money stored there.
Frustration with the economy is the leading element in the country’s current antipathy toward their government. This is as it should be. There is nothing more important to a family than being able to feed and house itself. Washington can’t ignore this frustration and they know it but so far they have not been able to solve the problem. The Republicans are claiming that Obama owns the problem and to a great extent they are right. He is the president, and therefore he owns all the problems that the country faces. But he didn’t create the problem so he shouldn’t be blamed for its existence only for its continuity. The people who should be blamed for its existence are the same people who are now trying to block Obama’s efforts to solve the problem. Why are they trying to block him? Because they don’t want him to succeed,at anything. They don’t care how much the country suffers as long as Obama fails. This is the same situation that prevailed during Clinton’s second term. That led to Bush & Cheney getting into the White House for eight years of lies, inefficiency and general screw-ups.
The background is simple. Eight years of Bush policies promulgated two bad wars, unregulated chaos in banking, real estate and Wall Street, along with errant tax policies that turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit that led to economic collapse and mass unemployment. That’s what Obama found when he walked into the White House. Let me repeat that because it’s very important. The economic collapse of this country already existed when Obama took office. He did not create it. He is trying to put an end to it. On January 20th 2009 what had been Bush’s problem, became Bush’s legacy. It was now Obama’s problem and he set out to solve it, along with health care, which though desperately needed, had been ignored by a list of previous presidents long enough to fill this page.
The problem of the economy had to be solved fast because some of the biggest pieces of the economy, many of which had created the collapse, were about to crash and burn, dragging the rest of the economy down with them. The Republican’s had seen this coming and so with the help of Barney Frank, a Democrat, had created Tarp. It probably kept us from a 1929 style depression. Obama seeing that Tarp had helped slow the collapse initiated Stimulus a logical extension of the earlier program. The object was to accomplish two things. One was to give industry and Wall Street a shot in the arm with funds that would keep them operating until they got their balance; the second was to give individuals the same shot by supporting salaries for essential workers who would otherwise be laid off and by extending unemployment for those who lost their jobs. This worked, it prevented the collapse of more businesses and it slowed the growth of unemployment. If Obama had sat on his hands the way the Republicans would have liked, unemployment would have probably ended up at the 25% level of the depression not the 10% at which it was stopped. Of course, as soon as the Stimulus passed, without the help of one Republican, the Republicans discovered the national debt, something they had ignored for the last eight years. They began screaming that we had to reduce it and that the only way to do that was to cut taxes and cut programs like the Stimulus. Of course when they are asked what programs should be cut they can never come up with an answer. That was proved on recent weekends when ranking Republicans Cornyn, Sessions, Boehner and McConnell all drew blanks when asked that specific question.
The fact is, that the Stimulus worked and if it had been larger it would have worked better. It hasn’t eliminated unemployment but it has certainly stopped its rise. The proof that it, like TARP worked is that both are now widely seen as unnecessary. More than the financial assistance that it gave, it sent a message, a message that the government would back the system. We ended up with a bad recession instead of a 1929 type depression. The final bill will be a fraction of the original $700B TARP or the $800B Stimulus because the financial system has recovered enough so that the government will eventually make a significant profit on its investment in America. All of those would–be demigods in the frantic far Right who are screaming about TARP and the Stimulus adding to the deficit and bankrupting the country should stop with the big lie and grab hold of the big facts.
But how do we get out of the housing and unemployment debacle? Going back to the economy of 2008 is impossible. We were in a binge spending cycle and the binge has ended. Current policy wants to get people to start spending again but that is, I think, unrealistic. They have been terrified by the recession and are exhausted by the constant fluctuating predictions and arguments. Giving them tax breaks will not accomplish spending. Tax breaks will be used for savings and paying down personal debt so no matter what we do now consumption will stay low. That means that another way to stimulate the economy must be found. That way is employment; getting people off the dole and getting them back to work.
To do that we need a long-term strategy based on employment rather than consumption. Our infrastructure is in a shambles, our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling down, our water is getting less and less potable, our power grid no longer supports the needs of the country, our energy is being created by the wrong fuels, our high speed rail is almost non-existent, our broadband is in desperate need of expansion and we need money for higher education and technical training to support all these services as well as blue collar workers to build them.
Regardless of what the Republicans contend, the Stimulus worked, it stopped the economic free fall and stabilized the economy. What it hasn’t done is help the economy recover. Why is that? Well to start with it was too small. One third of the $800B, the money needed to fix the infrastructure and create jobs went to support the Bush tax cuts so that they would not add to the deficit. The rest was split up into extending unemployment, paying the salaries of essential service workers like cops, teachers and firemen, and shoring up our manufacturing base. What would have happened to our teachers, cops and other essential service employees if the Stimulus hadn’t happened? Would GM or Chrysler still be open? These are the questions, along with a lot of others, for which Republicans have no answers.
We need to put people back to work. For that we need to invest in both our infrastructure and the new technologies being created in the fight against global warming. The banks and Wall Street have the money to do this but instead of lending the Stimulus money that was supposed to create jobs and spur the economy, they sat on it and created outrageous executive bonuses, proving that they haven’t learned anything and are still nothing but a bunch of greedy slobs who desperately needed the recently passed economic regulations to be twice as strict as they were. Despite their thoughtless, self-serving actions they and the Republicans were surprised and bent out of shape when Obama forced said regulations down their throats in hopes that they could be restrained from gambling away the country’s future.
So even though tax-payer’s dollars bailed them out, Wall Street and big industry aren’t willing to help get the country’s workers back on the job. The biggest creators of jobs in any economy are small businesses and our greedy bankers won’t lend to them, even as Wall Street refuses to invest in new industries that will create new employment and help solve the ecological problems that the world is facing. Why? Because these big time entrepreneurs who are supposed to be leading our country’s recovery are wetting their cowardly pants and blaming it on not knowing what taxes they will have to pay in the coming months. This is pure BS. The difference between profit and loss is never taxes because you don’t pay the big taxes until you have profit. Taxes account for the difference between profit and huge profit and the greedy bastards of the business community refuse to be satisfied with a decent profit. They want a huge profit even if it means that others have to go without.
So where does that leave us? With Government spending; a solution that the Republican’s say they hate but which they have created by not helping to force the banks and Wall Street to do their job. Pumping money into financial products does not create employment, it may create profits but that just means more money for banker’s bonuses. Financial products, derivatives and the like do create higher stock prices and dividends but they don’t create one job and what we need now are jobs. Everybody likes dividends but right now we need jobs and jobs only come from physical production.
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