Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

U.S. Domestic Policy

GOP: The Grand Obstructionist Party, Part I

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Some of us thought the Democratic Party won the last election. Eight years of the Bush/Cheney fiasco and the budget-busting, deficit-building, war-mongering GOP-led Congress through most of those years had taken their toll on virtually every part of America and in November the people spoke. But the just-completed “debate” on Obama’s recovery plan makes it clear that the GOP refuses to accept both the results of the election and the fact of their mind-boggling eight-year mismanagement of the country’s affairs.

Obama has won this round in the fight to get the economy off its back but at some cost to his view of bipartisanship, and hopefully considerable cost to the American people’s trust in the intentions, courage and judgment of the Republican Party. The recovery program proposed by Obama included a mix of tax cuts, infrastructure spending, other employment-related programs, investments in historically underfunded health and education programs and funds to maintain needed relief programs for the unemployed and underemployed. Based on past experience there was never much of a sense that the tax cuts would be especially productive but they were included to move toward Obama’s apparently mythical bipartisanship.

But in this time of national crisis the GOP produced a bunch of whining know-nothings, committed to pure obstructionist behavior. They wedded sarcasm to ignorance in cherry-picking minuscule pieces of the bill to criticize while working to gut any spending that might advance the interests of the American people. For some it seems hard to remember when President Clinton built huge budget surpluses which Republicans have turned into the largest budget deficit in the country’s history – due largely to ill-advised tax cuts for the very rich and a trillion dollar war, which the GOP eagerly funded.

What would they have us do? Boehner, McConnell, Kyle, Cantor, McCain et alia do not have a clue. They mumble about tax cuts, which they tried under Bush and which increased the budget deficit and made the very rich a bit richer; and they cry about spending money after wasting past and future trillions on the Iraq mess.  But at the end of the day they have no ideas, only the capacity to do all possible to obstruct and drive the country into ruin in the hope that they will get another chance to enrich their pals and further their narrow interests at the expense of the country’s future.

The Obama stimulus package is surely only a down payment on what is necessary to turn the Bush/Republican economy around. The fact that three GOP Senators forced reductions in education-related spending while increasing tax cuts in the bill is an indication of trouble to come as they will no doubt continue to obstruct until the country is in total free-fall and then hope to move in to finish their task of turning American into their own banana republic.

Bush Gives the Country the Finger

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“Well, we only have one president at a time. My problem is, at a time of great crisis and [massive] mortgage foreclosures. … I am afraid that overstates the number of presidents.” – Barney Frank

Say what you will about Canada’s “prorogue” approach to delaying a change in leadership, it still beats the U.S. approach. George W. Bush’s presidency is all but over – but he will have had over two months since the election to join with his lame duck Republican brethren in the Congress to screw the country as much as possible. Barney Frank may wish to consider whether he really wants a full-time Bush presidency.

For Bush the time between the election and the actual change of government has become a time to rape the environment, pad the pockets of his pals in the banking sector, implant his discredited ideology on as many parts of America as possible and set up sleeper cells in every federal agency where the eight year onslaught on American interests can continue until the new administration can – literally – flush them out.

Among Bush’s already in place regulatory actions needing reversal are the limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, and the decision last year to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

Bush’s last minute efforts to totally soil his legacy include the opening of some 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, the reduction in outpatient services for low-and moderate-income people covered under Medicaid, reduced access for reproductive and family planning care through a new rule permitting workers to refuse to perform abortions, dispense birth control pills, or even provide emergency contraception in rape cases, the revision of OSHA regulations that make it more difficult to limit on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals, and the erosion of the Endangered Species Act. In addition, Bush opened up some 800,000 hectares (2m acres) of land in Rocky Mountain states for the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. And the list goes on.

Meanwhile, as Bush fiddles among the burning ruins, the Republican members of the Senate have determined that while they could give $300 billion to banks over a weekend with absolutely no strings attached they cannot bring themselves to support the automobile industry which employs hundreds of thousands of Americans with a $16 billion loan. They prefer to watch the industry go into bankruptcy and the American economy to crash further into disaster in order to destroy the autoworkers union and keep their right wing ideology pure.

A tale of two elections – Part 2

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Among the many interesting but not earthshaking side effects of the Obama election is an overdue tempering of a kind of understood superiority that had taken over the Canadian view of their way of governing when compared to that of the US for the last decade. After all about ten years ago, US politics was completely dominated by a grotesquely overblown miserable little sex scandal of the old kind that ruined the final years of an otherwise apparently more than capable president, only to be followed by a most curious piece of vote counting that brought to power an obviously incapable president who was even re-elected. During the same period Canada was governed by a series of mediocre leaders who made everyone wish for just a touch of the intelligence, charm and cold determination of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. But when the same people looked south, it was clear that Ottawa was a centre of charisma and excellence when compared to whoever was sitting in the White House.

It may well turn out that Barack Obama will not be able to fulfill the great hopes that have inevitably been placed on him (probably nobody could), but he’s already done a great deal just by winning this election. Now the world can stop dumping on the Americans for not even being able to run their own fair elections while telling every one else to become democratic, and Canadian commentators can stop preaching to them about their lack of benevolence towards the downtrodden, while ignoring the often scandalous state of their own aboriginal communities. Because while the Americans, against all odds, voted for someone named Barack Obama to be their leader, a smaller percentage of eligible Canadian voters confirmed, in the most boring election in memory, the re-election of a prime minister whose name they could scarcely remember after his first term in office.

A Tale of Two Elections

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The Canadian election was called 6 weeks before the vote on Oct. 14. the day after Thanksgiving, and has provided journalists and media types with plenty of largely vacuous material to keep them employed for the period. Among the specialties of the Canadian six-weeks are the two debates among the now 5 major party leaders, one of whose parties has never had anyone elected, first in French and one night later in English. The spectacle of 3 native English-speakers attempting to use their various levels of high-school French (from pretty primitive to B plus) to outargue two very smart native French speakers provides a certain amount of sadistic humour, but wears thin after 15 grueling minutes. And then vice versa on the next evening, since amazingly none of these five leaders is as bilingual as thousands of kids attending French schools in Vancouver, not to mention many scores of thousand bilingual Chinese speakers. In the long run, it seems clear that this election, despite all its energy and windbag rhetoric, will not change the makeup of parliament very much at all, and there will be another minority government.

The US election with a set date, on the other hand, has gone on seemingly forever and cost scores (hundreds?) of millions of dollars, something which does not seem to have been mentioned in the current financial crisis, where that money might have been used for something more useful, like hiring more inspectors and controllers of financial institutions. But for all its own brand of windbagging rhetoric, a huckstering media performance, and sideshow shenanigans like a vice-presidential debate, the US system does allow the main candidates to give some indication of what they are really made of, something hard to argue for the Canadian system. It is an exhausting process and a youngster like Obama should have a real advantage over an old warrior like McCain, but the old soldier seems to be hanging in there quite admirably and ultimately the vote should come down to which of the two convinces more people of the superiority of their view of the world, assuming they put functioning ballot boxes in states like Ohio and Florida, and that the Palin fiasco doesn’t lead to comicall voting patterns. You’d have to be gambler to bet against Obama but at least the game seems to have been played on a level field.

What do economists do, anyway?

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Okay so the economy of the world is going to Disneyland because the economists advising the US government on how to regulate the flow of money apparently don’t know their ass from their elbow. Or are they simply in cahoots with the CEOS who got millions of dollars for having bankrupted their firms on their watch? Or could it just be total incompetence, or the display of the emperor’s new economic expertise clothes? Should they be forced to read Hans Christian Andersen stories, instead of economic comic books? After all George Bush has an MBA from Harvard, the same super-elite US university that Canadians, who have regulated their banking system so this can’t happen, call America’s McGill. And he certainly doesn’t know anything about the topic. Why drag down McGill’s reputation? My real question is therefore: What the hell do economists do if they know buggerall about economics? Couldn’t we save a lot of it by just getting rid of this profession?

ON THE NEW U.S. ECONOMY

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Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.   –   John Maynard Keynes

As the U.S. economy falters due largely to lending practices that at best were idiotic and unethical and at worst illegal, the government has decided it needed to step in, and has done so at a potential cost of $700 billion. While not as much as the Iraq War has cost surely this must cement George W. Bush’s reputation as the worst American president of all time. This in spite of the inevitable stories in the press seeking to find good things to say about him as his administration slowly, ever so slowly, sinks below the surface.

The following are responses to the government’s bail out project from two of Politicsandpress’s correspondents.

Item from our European Correspondent:

“Hey, hey Ben + Hank finally came up with the plan to end the “turmoil”. Of course it involves having our grandchildren repay the Chinese who will fund it. It really is better than the previous final solution of getting all the worlds central banks to “inject” $180b into “the economy”. That was a good one. Some pundit summed it up for me: ”Having discovered that the brakes don’t work the bankers have supplied the car with a louder horn.” But this new one that Ben + Hank are going to “…work ALL WEEKEND perfecting” (the sacrifices these men make for us) is the one our grandchildren will pay for.

As I understand it from the press its premise is:
“…a comprehensive approach to address the illiquid assets on bank balance sheets that are … the underlying source of the current stresses in our financial institutions and financial markets.” (And all this time I thought the underlying problem was that Amercuns weren’t repaying their debts.)

Anyway, the way this will work is:
“…the new [taxpayer of the future] entity would “purchase assets at a steep discount from solvent financial institutions and then eventually sell them back into the market” through an auction.”

Cool. Buy stuff that is worth nothing (a debt that won’t/can’t be repaid) and later sell at a tooth fairy auction. Ben + Hank expecting to make money on this? Break even? Non-inflationary? They’re not even bothering to tell those lies.

So anyway, anyway, I am all for it cause it kicks the can down the road to a point after which I will have kicked the can.

Washington, DC responds:
The “market” just loves kicking the can. Investments go bad due to the ingenuity of the greedy little men in the world of finance [and the ignorance of the man of the street] with a large helping of gumm’t indifference – and oh yeah add the disastrous balance of trade – and the result is a $500, or is it a $800, billion bailout by our grandkids – ain’t capitalism wonderful? I’m hoping this will put a stop to the religious fervor of the followers of Milton Freedman and his laissez faire capitalism – well, that is too much to hope methinks, how about putting a dent in it.

West to Alaska – the Globe looks at Gov. Palin

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With 100% credit to the Toronto Globe and Mail’s resident poet John Allemang

PALIN COUNTRY

Please call us rednecks, ’cause we’re proud
To be so rough and rude and loud,
And act in ways elitists think
Proves that we’ve had too much to drink
In some dead-end Alaska dive
When, dude, it just shows we’re alive.
We love our church, our kids, our beer,
Can tell you right down to the year
That God put Man upon the Earth,
Know life starts well ahead of birth,
Don’t give a damn about the arts
And stay away from foreign parts
Until the moment that we’re sent
As John McCain’s vice-president

The great thing, when your neck is red?
Nobody cares what’s in your head –
The voters seem to like ’em dumb,
So why not play a hockey mom
Who hunts and prays and procreates
To govern these Unites States?
If you can drive a snowmobile,
The people, bless them, think you’re real,
And in the end who needs a brain?
Just tell your kids they must abstain,
Pretend that when your rule’s ignored
It’s some great gift sent by the Lord,
And prove you’ll go to any length
To make such redneck fault a strength.

California burning

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There is no shred of good coming from the out of control fires up and down the coast and in the northern mountains of California, except that there are still many courageous and daring firefighters willing to take on the filthy and dangerous business of trying to control them. So far it has been a torturously futile attempt as lightning strikes start new fires long before the worst of the old ones are contained. For anyone who has spent time in places like the Yolla Bolly or Trinity Alps mountain preserves or the wilderness area east of Big Sur (not to mention easily accessible Big Sur itself), as my brother and I often have, it is a tragically sad spectacle to see these beautiful places being destroyed for at least many decades. For as natural as lightning burns have always been, bringing in long-lasting good with the temporary bad, these fires seem different. They are way too early, they are happening because there has been no rain in many parts of central and northern california since the winter, and there is not enough available water to fight them in a co-ordinated way.

These are the canaries in the coal mine of climate change and big, beautiful (for the most part) California is surely one of the most vulnerable places on earth as much of it has been built in almost desert-like locations which must import water to sustain life on the scale that has been placed there. And water is what California does not have enough of, particularly southern California and especially the megalopolis of San Diego to Santa Barbara. For decades the waters of northern California and the diverted Colorado River have kept these places water-solvent but that time is coming to or has already reached an end. 20% of the California budget is devoted to pumping the waters of the north to the south, especially from the Sacramento River delta, whose dikes are now considered under a greater threat than were those of New Orleans before they broke. If the salt water of San Francisco Bay breaks through into the fresh water of the delta, the nightmare scenario, it is hard to imagine the future of Los Angeles. It is in any case hard to imagine how a life style pushing rice field agriculture, green lawns, swimming pools and golf courses can be tolerated,as it should be perfectly clear by now that water is the most valuable of all commodities for life – gas is incomparably less important – and that in southern California it is being wasted in an intolerable fashion. There are no replacements – the Colorado River is being siphoned dry by all the states it runs through. Neither Oregon nor Washington have any water they are going to spare for their wasteful southern neighbours, and it is against the law to export water from water-rich Canada, even if it were so inclined. San Diego is now setting up desalinization pilot projects, but this process causes many problems of its own and cannot solve the basic one – much more water is being used than is available. Perhaps Governor Arnie, who seems to have a good understanding of the problem, can convince some of those professors at his best universities to come to grips somehow with this really existential problem..

Obama speaks at Wesleyan as Belichick joins Hall of Fame – Sports and Politics, part 3

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Just when it seemed that the US Democratic primary campaign was going to sink into the quicksand of complete disinterest, Barack Obama has made a deft move that is sure to focus attention on more interesting topics than the exact delegate vote not including Michigan, American Samoa, the Virgins Islands and Florida. My brother and I, lost in the snows of the tundra, haven’t been able to grasp the nuances of that mathematical formula. What we have figured out is that Middletown, Connecticut will be the centre of world attention this afternoon as Obama steps in in relief of his stricken brother-in-arms Ted Kennedy, who will be sitting in the first row as his stepdaughter graduates from one of the premier US East coast elite liberal Arts universities and his son celebrates the 15th anniversary of his graduation. But Wesleyan is also probably the premier elite small university in another area: sports, and my brother Doug thinks that Obama is hoping to gain stature by being in the presence of some of the heroic figures who are already in the Wesleyan Hall of Fame as Bill Belichick joins it along with legendary marathon runner Bill Rodgers.

But it is not only Rogers and Belichick, the winner of four Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and the most successful football coach in recent NFL history, who will be present, but also former Wesleyan student and current arch Belichick nemesis Coach Eric Mangini of NFL’s New York Jets, who will be there for his fifteenth reunion. For Wesleyan is the only university to have produced two current NFL coaches, and Doug and many scouts feel that Wesleyan’s combination of intellectual depth and athletic grace has led to the development of a number of quarterbacks wearing the red and black, who would surely have dominated the football fields of America if they hadn’t gone into more scholarly pursuits.

So give credit where it is due. Obama has made a very smart political move by moving into this territory. He will surely deliver an excellent commencement address, and do his friend Ted a favour while doing it, even if his own elite university background is limited to mainstream Harvard. But with any luck, the sports journalists will also be there to keep watch over Belichick and Mangini, and to see how Rodgers is running along these days. Obama can relax in the afterglow of some heavy hitters from the world of sports, whose chumminess would be most helpful to his popularity among the blue collar working folk.

Campaign 2008: Riding the Road of Trivialities

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As the interminable Democratic campaign for president drags its weary ass along the Trivialities Turnpike it is worth asking how the hell we got on this road to begin with? Serious issues abound – the failed Iraq War, a looming failure in Afghanistan, a weakened NATO unwilling to push the fight in Afghanistan, a weakened American military, a dollar in the proverbial toilet, an enormous budget deficit, a looming or actual recession, shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security, rampant international distrust of the United States, a non-existent Middle East policy – and the list goes on.

And what are we being fed by the media? John McCain’s barbecue menu and the great spitball fight between Senators Clinton and Obama. The press moves from spitball to spitball, manufacturing intensity on fundamentally trivial issues. They capture the public’s interest and create temporary shifts in polls that then feed the horse race mentality of a press unable to focus on the real issues that determine the state of the world and of America’s declining quality of life. Do we really care all that much that Geraldine Ferraro thinks Senator Obama is “lucky to be black?” Or that Senator Obama’s former Pastor has said some stupid things mixed in with a justifiable rage over much of what America has done to blacks for over 200 years? Or whether Bill Clinton plays his typical cheap tricks? Are those the only kind of issues that can capture the American peoples’ attention? Are we really so ignorant of the world or so lazy that we cannot put the effort into thinking about serious issues and identifying trivialities for what they are? Or have we simply turned it all over to a shallow, irresponsible press?

For a lengthier and stronger look at these concerns see Matt Taibbi’s latest piece on his website: The Smirking Chimp – here is a taste:

We can’t focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we’re constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. – Matt Taibbi