They Protest, We Email.

 

I've been kicking the horrific numbers of proposed jobs lost during the past week. On Monday morning, we started the week with announcements from a number of companies that 43,000 jobs were going to be cut; later in the day that number was revised upwards to 70,000. That is one hell of way to start the week.

We hear on Friday that the new number of jobs lost would be in the neighborhood of 100,000, that's one hell of a neighborhood and it seems that the light at the end of the tunnel just may be an oncoming train.

I am not an economist, but I am beginning to think that of all jobs in the world, the only ones that fail upwards are the pundit class, Wall Street CEO's and economists. Nice gig if you can get it.

The sectors involved are varied; from Caterpillar, Inc. to Pfizer, from Boeing to Chico's, a Fort Myers, Fl. women's clothing outlet. That last one may not seem important, but if you're one of the 500 who will lose their jobs, it's important enough.

It's clear that before things get better, they are going to get a bit worse. According to CNNMoney .com on January 29:

• The U.S. economy lost 2.6 million jobs in 2008, according to government reports. This includes 21,137 mass layoffs, a seven-year high. In a mass layoff, 50 or more workers are laid off at a time.
  

And from the same piece:

• The job market isn't expected to get any better any time soon. The Council Board forecast two million job losses for 2009.
  

I know I may have taken a rather circuitous route to get to the title of this post, but it seems to me that wedapeople could or perhaps should do more to register our discontent.

From the AP: January 31, 2009

MOSCOW — Thousands of protesters rallied against the government in cities across Russia on Saturday, reflecting mounting anger over the nation's economic woes.

The protests, among the largest yet, posed a challenge to the Kremlin, which faced little threat from the fragmented opposition during the years of oil-driven boom.

The largest march took place in the far eastern port of Vladivostok, where about 3,000 people denounced the Cabinet's decision to increase tariffs on imported cars. Some shouted slogans urging Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign.

And from FT.com:

By Ben Hall in Paris

Published: January 29 2009 09:11 | Last updated: January 29 2009 23:17

At least a million striking workers held demonstrations across France on Thursday in protest at the government's reform programme and its response to the economic crisis, demanding extra help for ordinary families in place of state aid for the banks.

 

Now, I'm not sure if the Russian and the French protests will bring about the needed changes, but I have to believe that, at least in the case of the French, mobilizing one to two million people to take to the streets will at a minimum bring to the table some strength in negotiations.

In the case of the Russian protests, Putin has to take into consideration that Russian workers are not to be taken lightly.

Now that we have a new administration in place, we must keep their feet to the fire. President Obama has his Economic team in place and I think he deserves some time to try and wrap his head around the problem at hand.

I will give him the benefit of the doubt, but I must say that I am somewhat underwhelmed by his choice at Treasury and about some of his advisors. Larry Summers has already made his presence felt in the under emphasis on infrastructure spending and Geithner has been handed the wheel to the shipwreck he failed to see coming. These are people who for the most part live in an echo chamber reinforcing their own ideas and sadly, not allowing different ideas to find root in their imaginations.

They take to the streets, we email…one of the demands of the French workers is that the government provide… 'extra help for ordinary families in place of more state aid for banks'…what a concept.

I do not pretend to know who the French classify as "ordinary families', but I would suspect that their measuring stick is very much like ours, people who do what is expected of them, and in return they expect the government do what is expected of it.

The Russian protests are demanding that the government step down because of the worsening economic conditions. They were met by riot police

They take to the streets…we email.

 

I honestly believe that except for a handful of people in the upper reaches of government, especially our representatives, have no first hand clue what it means to be without a job, to not know if the next decision is to pay the mortgage or buy medicine. Let's not forget that some of the most vociferous rants against universal health care are from the very same Senators and Representatives that receive the health care they would deny the rest of the population.

The very people who are in charge of the economy are, for the most part, members of the same country clubs as the bankers they are trying keep afloat. It's a funny thing when I read or hear that such and such bank, insurance company, brokerage house is too big to fail, and yet they get bigger and bigger and yet, still they fail.

 

They protest…we email.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Failed Obama Presidency

 

The last eight years have for the most part been part and parcel; a massive exercise in greed and manipulation. From the highest reaches of government and finance, we have witnessed excesses that were the norm back in the days of the robber barons.

The rampant abuses are reminiscent of an uglier time in our history; the arrogance of wealth and power is now seen as the perks of being one of 'the boys'. This arrogance is seen daily in our political leaders and the so-called giants of Wall Street.

In 2000, George W. Bush was selected as the heir to the Presidency; just as in some of Europe's oldest monarchies, ability was trumped by being a member of the lucky sperm club. As is the norm in monarchies, one's aptitude or lack of same only becomes a problem when one is called to perform above one's ability, and as he have seen over the past years, he fails stupendously.

As an electorate, we missed the opportunity to 'throw the bums out' and instead chose to 'stay the course' and returned the same idiots to office and expected a different outcome; a sure sign of electoral insanity.

Many of us were criticized for our lack of enthusiasm for our elected officials, the problems in government were manifold; unqualified people were making decisions that would have a lasting effect on us. The Abu Grahib and Katrina scandals laid bare the horrible truth. We were on a ship without a rudder.

In 2006, it seemed like we were coming to our senses, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives was replaced by a Democratic one, but it was still business as usual.

Which brings us to the 2008 election, on the Republican side, it seemed like they were all trying to bring us kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century with their emphasis on more laizzes-faire economics and a nativist turn that would have scared even the Know-Nothings. I would not have been surprised to see the retread of the Alien and Sedition Act of the eighteenth century.

Then came Barack Obama…skinny black guy from Chicago by way of Hawaii, and Indonesia. A one term U.S. Senator from Chi-Town, he really shook things up. He denied the heir apparent the chance to run for president (pissin' off a bunch of folks, among them Hillary, Carville, the PUMA's, Chris Matthews, the Sunday Talking Heads, just to name a few).

November 4^th, 2008 and January 20^th, 2009 are days that will be marked forever in the history of the United States; not only did we undo the Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House of Republican, we also managed to elect the skinny guy from Chicago, we also swore him in as the forty-forth President of the United States.

Many things happened in 2008 that made this possible, McCain and Palin, the Wall Street bubble that had been threatening to explode finally burst, and then there was McCain and Palin. I just can't thank that old' maverick enough!

This brings us to the title of this post: The Failed Obama Presidency.

He has been in office for less than ten days and yet we still have all these problems to deal with.

• Wall Street has not recovered the five thousand points that it lost over the past two years. On the contrary, it seems as if it has stagnated. The Masters of Ponzi, which may be a new post graduate degree, Madoff, Nadel et. al are not in jail, they are under house arrest. Roger Thain, late of Merrill Lynch spends over a million dollars to redecorate his office. All this and more.
  
• Universal Health Care has not been passed…we who voted for Obama, must ask ourselves whether or not we have made a colossal error in voting for him. It's called leadership!!
  
• The so-called 'Stimulus' bill is still tied up in Congress even though we own the House and the Senate. The fear of being bold seems to have taken hold, now is not the time for the timid.
  
• The Middle East in its current iteration is impossible to maintain, the inability to see this problem as a human rights issue is what is clouding the solution. Israel cannot maintain its territorial integrity as it stands today; the risk of a nuclear confrontation is too high. The Palestinians lack an honest broker that can be bold enough to suggest a radical solution. A two state solution is not a solution at all, a negotiated one state solution, in my opinion, is the only way out. It is a bold and radical proposition that deserves a chance.
  

There is an element of sarcasm in what I call 'The Failed Obama Presidency'; we've become so accustomed to immediate gratification that we've forgotten how long it took us to get into the position we find ourselves in. The issues we face today had its origins during the Reagan administration, they were exacerbated during the first Bush presidency and they were made worse during President Clinton's 'Third Way' when the DLC managed to turn the Democratic Party into republican 'lite'. The dismantling of The New Deal protections for workers continued apace throughout the Dubya's administration and culminated in what we are facing today, malfeasance on Wall Street, crooked politicians, and ideologically driven opposition whose heroes are small minded and lacking in their civic and patriotic duties.

The Obama Presidency can only succeed if it takes the bull by the horns, this is what I voted for, and it is also what the American people expect from the 'skinny black guy from Chicago.

 

There you have it…or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Two Centavos

Well, here we are again, another year has passed, a new beginning is on the horizon and all is not well in the world. We seem to start each year with the bestest of intentions, we resolve to do better by our families and friends, we promise to take time out for ourselves and embark on that self revelatory journey we have hope will lead us to that spiritual awakening we know is just around the next bend, just beyond that next hill, just on the other side of that cloud.

I'm going out on a limb and make my do or die projections for the year. I have a very scientific, data driven process that can only be describes as such, I bend over and with my nose touching my knees reach back and pull them out you know where…this being a family show and all, I won't go any further into detail; suffice to say my process is as accurate as all other psychics, clergy, soothsayers and the like. Although I must admit I missed that whole 'let's elect a black guy to the highest office in the land'…and for disclosures sake, I voted for the guy.

So here it is:

• The Republican Party will continue to self-destruct. They will insist that the only remedy that will work is one where only the right people get hand outs and the rest be damned. Sort of a return to the middle nineteenth century or as Scrooge would put it and I paraphrase; are there no poor houses, are there no debtor's prisons.
  

  
  

• The right wing of the right wing party will of course claim that all this Sturm und Drang is affecting us because we have not given the gods their due.
  

  
  

• Gay folks will be able to get married. Yep! It's going to happen, although I can't for the life of me figure why they would want to enter into a failed institution. Let's face it; marriage offers little benefit other than a tax break and making your parents proud, or not... What I believe should happen is to change the laws in order to allow homosexual and heterosexual couples to benefit from their commitments to each other. Allow the partners to make decisions concerning their children, their health care and all other decisions made daily by people who define their partnerships by whether someone in clerical vestments or dark suits bless their union. So let's be clear, Gay people will gain the right to marry, unfortunately they will also have the right to divorce, but that's another story for another time.
  

  
  

• Although we voted for the black guy from Chicago (and before anyone gets a little too wound up…he and I are very similar in complexion) no one should even begin to think that racism is dead in America, or the world for that matter. The ugly truth is that people will, and still are, judging folks by 'the color of their skin and not the content of their character'. We can count the number of Black and Latino elected officials at the local level and come up short.
  

  
  

• The issues in the Middle East are so far from any equitable solution that I expect it to get worse rather than get better. Israel believes that it has the divine right to this territory and the Palestinians believe that they too have the same right. The Palestinians are living, if you can call it that, hand to mouth, amidst rubble and privation, parents burying their children and children burying their parents. The cradle of the three great religions is becoming, or rather, has become a cauldron of bitter recriminations that must surely sadden Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The two state solution proposed by the Western Powers will not see fruition in 2009. It is my opinion that the only solution is a one state democratic Israel with a negotiated repatriation of displaced Palestinians, after all, they too have a historic claim to the land.
  

• In 2009, France will be cool once again. Seriously, they have the best food in Europe and some of the best chocolates too.
  

• In 2009, Microsoft will attempt to re-invent the wheel. Windows 7 will make Vista look cool. They still haven't learned the lesson that people will pay for upgrades to their Operating Systems, but they don't want to have to buy new PC's every time Balmer hiccups. It makes no sense.
  

• Apple will survive even if Steve Jobs does not. Too many talented people there.
  

• So begins another year, lessons learned and some ignored; fret not though; the ones we did ignore have a nasty habit of coming round again
  

  
  

On a personal note…I will try very hard to…aww the heck with all that…I will continue to love my wife…my sons and daughter…my beautiful grandchildren…and follow the doctor's orders.

There you have it. Or not

It's My party and I'll Cry if I Want to

Sophia Nelson writes in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post...'It's my party, but I don't feel part of it'...and goes on to say how she pretty much had to hold her nose in order to vote for then Senator Barack Obama, and seems to suggest that the only reason the Senator won the election was because of the disaffection felt by Black and Latino voters to the Republican Party.

The Republican Party she describes existed for only a short period, a period of less than a hundred years, when it began to align itself with the most extreme elements in the American political landscape. The modern Republican Party, at least since the late 1940's has been the party of exclusion, isolationism, and xenophobia. There seems to be this tendency among Republicans that their party has been the party of progressive growth with a commitment to diversity. Where is the justification for this delusion?

Let's call this hallucination for what it is; at no time in modern history has the Republican Party made any real effort to reach out to the so-called minority community. Those who did come to the Republican Party, in my view, were practicing what I call ' political Darwinism', or rather, they become big fish in a small pond. They are held up as useful tools in order to appeal to some sort of 'pull yourself up by your boot-straps' fable. The role of class cannot be underestimated in this discussion of the Republican Party. Let's not forget that the so-called 'progressive' wing of the party is the 'country club' or Rockefeller wing of the party.

Yes, I said "class", that elephant in the room that no one seems to notice even though that elephant has been at the center of racial and class strife since at least the Goldwater years. The revisionist view of the GOP would have you forget Joe McCarthy, Goldwater's' eagerness to bomb the hell out the Vietnamese and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and let's not forget the Birchers, the KKK in Indiana during the twenties, and on and on. Sophia Nelson would have us believe that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove really had the interests of African-American and for that matter the interests of Latino\as at the forefront of their ugly political machinations.

Now, the Sophia Nelsons' and Michael Steeles' of this world would have you believe that the Republican Party of the 1850's is the party we should be remembering, and not the more modern iteration; the Jesse Helms wing, or the not so subtle appeals for 'law-n-order' during the Nixon campaigns. that finally exposed the Democratic Party of the south for the racists that they were.

Sophia Nelson notices that out of the more than 2000 delegates, only thirty-six or so were African-American, and I would imagine that the number of Latino\a delegates could not have been much more. Voting against one's own self-interest has always fascinated me, I don't understand the disconnect that must occur in order to continually identify with a group that has made no secret of its' disdain for the African-American and Latino community.

Will President Obama be able to salvage a successful first term with all that needs to be done, i have no clue. However, looking to the Republican Party for solutions in the twenty-first century is a little like fixing your toilet by installing an outhouse in the back yard.

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The Obama Paradox

I believe that we watched the unraveling of more that twenty years of the so-called conservative ascendancy, or as Fred Barnes quoted W.D. Burnham, Professor Emeritus at The University of of Texas at Austin in the Weekly Standard, November 2004..."If Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time. Referring of course to the 'permanent majority' being bandied about by the leading lights of the right wing, DeLay, Limbaugh, ad nauseum. They were partially correct.

The terrorism card did not have the desired effect, in spite of the 'dog whistles' within the McCain\Palin and the outright lies of the 527's acting on behalf of the Republican right wing. However it is my opinion that the religion card is still in play.

The Obama Paradox is that while the campaign was able to GOTV in communities largely ignored by the Republican Party, it also brought to the voting booth many of the socially conservative elements of both the Latino and African-American population.

The sad truth is that while many people who voted for Obama\Biden voted proactively to bring the past twenty some odd years of political disgrace to an end; there are a good number of people who are still uncomfortable with the idea the of "gay" rights, as if those rights rights are somehow greater than those afforded to us by our Constitution.

It is not fantasy to believe that a member in good standing at your local Black Church in Oakland can vote for Obama\Biden on the one hand and then pull the lever approving Prop 8 with the other, or that while a Latino or Latina in Orlando may be chanting Si Se Puede, that they too would be approving Amendment 2.

We are doing a decent job at exposing the 'Terror" card for the cynical tool it is in the hands of right wing demagogues.

Now we should work just as hard in exposing the cynicism that 'religion' is playing in our national discourse of human rights.

There ya go.

update: the money poured into the pro Prop 8 movement in California was largely funded by the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, and that good ol' standby, Focus on the Family.

later update: The Florida Amendment 2 moneybags seems to be limited to the Southern Baptists Convention

Originally posted at Talkingpointsmemo.com, TPMCafe on November 6th, 2008

Unlucky or Just Plain Incompetent

I almost lost my lunch when I read the following two days after the Presidential election;
"Historians: Bush presidency 'battered,' 'incompetent,' 'unlucky'
So says CNN on Thursday, November 6, 2008
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/06/bush.legacy/

That there is any discussion on whether the presidency of George W. Bush was unlucky seems to be the leif-motif of the true believers in this failed administration. That the Bush administration used it's sense of destiny to push an agenda espoused by the Christian Right is an historical given. From the appointment of political hacks like Monica Gooding who used political fealty and religious litmus tests to make hiring decisions in the Department of Justice to the clearly incompetent Michael Brown to head the FEMA response in New Orleans, the term "unlucky" is not a word I would use to describe the train wreck of the last eight years.

The CNN report found at the following link http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/06/bush.legacy/ attempts to make the case that all the Bush administration is the victim of some unforeseen mojo that will be better explained through the passage of time.

Now I will agree that the temptation to foresee how any particular administration will be viewed in the future is an exercise in Nostrodamian tea leaf reading, but there a few things that I can state with a degree of certainty; it is not the "unlucky" things that may or may not happen that determines the character of an individual or an administration, it is the response to that "unlucky" event that will reveal the true grit of an individual, a community, or an administration.

It was not the attacks on September 11th that defined us as a nation, it was the response of the community and country that came to the aid of the stricken that showed our true colors; a people who will stand together to heal a national wound.

It was the incompetent response to that tragedy that will mark Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who with their own agenda to re-fight the First Gulf war, led to four thousand plus Americans and untold thousands of Iraqi's to die and allowed Bin-Laden and his cohorts to escape into the Tora Bora area. The net effect is the trashing of the Geneva Convention rules against torture, maintaining secret rendition sites, and establishing an POW camp in Guantanamo, Cuba.

It was not the "unlucky" turn of events that led Hurricane Katrina to strike with such ferocity that left New Orleans no better than a waste land, leaving many dead and countless others homeless.
It was the incompetent response to that event by the Bush Administration that will forever define the old Reagan adage..."I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

This presidency is the logical progression of those intent on destroying what little is left of the New Deal programs and undoing the benefits that Union members were able to achieve.

The current financial crisis is the outgrowth of of the Reaganite Club for Growth policies that permeate not just through the current administration, but with the tacit approval of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Unlucky or just plain incompetent?

Gimme a break!