Who votes for what and why

I read a very informative book: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by historian Colin Woodard.  It's observation is that each part of our country was founded by different people with different ideas and valules, and that over time those ideas and values have remained pretty much intact and have created their own cultures that have endured.  His point is that there is not one United States, but rather there are nine distinct cultural nations in the U.S., all of which vie for political power each election.


The heart of liberalism is the cultural nation of "Yankeedom", started in New England and spread across the land in its particular way; and the heart of conservatism is the Deep South, started in South Carolina and spread in its particular way.  The other nations align to greater or lesser degrees with these polar opposites as the times change.  


I am posting my summary of this book, so this is a longer than normal post, but I think it is an interesting summary of our cultural and political landscape.  One final note about these cultures.  I don't believe that any of our cultures are written in stone, and that they can evolve and change as the times change.  But, here is a pretty interesting fingerprint of the America:

AMERICAN NATIONS:  Colin Woodard – 11 rival cultural centers of North America 2011

LEFT LEANING TOWARD DEMOCRATS, LIBERALISM:

YANKEEDOM

• Founded in Massachusetts 1620
• Calvinists, Puritans
• Reform minded public protestants
• To found a religious utopia on earth
• Came as families, community oriented
• Salvation of society, not individuals
• Believe freedom is more for the community than for the individual
• Drive to improve the world
• Social engineering, social justice emphasized
• Mission to impose their ways on everyone else
• Turn everyone into a Yankee
• Faith in government
• Government is an extension of citizenry
• Local political control
• Common good, government to improve people’s lives
• Intolerant of corruption
• Protestant work ethic
• Men judged by hard work and righteousness
• Frugality, thrift, cleanliness, punctuality
• Individual self denial
• Common people, with an aristocracy of the educated
• Education, literacy valued
• Rebel against arbitrary authority
• Environmentally concerned
• Opposed to military expansionism
• Lead the Democratic Party

THE LEFT COAST

• Colonized by merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen from New England who arrived by sea and controlled the towns, and by farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Appalachia who dominate the countryside
• Yankee faith in good government in the cities
• Common good
• Social reform
• Peace movement
• Cultural revolution
• Environmental movement
• Gay rights movement
• Reform minded
• Individual self-exploration
• Discovery is valued
• Believe the world can frequently be reinvented
• Salvation of society not individuals
• Global information revolution
• Battles libertarian-corporate agenda of the Far West
• Oppose military expansionism
• Lean toward Democratic Party

NEW NETHERLAND

• Dutch colony, 1624
• Global commercial  trading society
• Private enterprise
• Free trading
• Self made men are the elite
• Materialistic
• Profitability ethos
• Speculative ethos
• Invented modern banking
• Invented modern corporation
• Men judged by material achievements
• Upward mobility
• Open to immigrants
• Raucous
• Multi-cultural, multi-ethnic
• Haven for heretics, freethinkers, cultural avant guarde
• Intellectual freedom
• Internal bickering and negotiation
• Great universities
• Freedom of the press
• Reform minded public protestants
• Salvation of society, not individuals
• Opposed to military expansionism
• Freedom of inquiry
• Lean toward Democratic Party

RIGHT LEANING TOWARD REPUBLICANS, CONSERVATISM:

DEEP SOUTH

• Founded by Barbados slave lords 1670
• Modeled on slave states of ancient Greece and Rome
• Saw enslavement as the natural state of the many
• Politically polarized on racial grounds today
• Oligarchy, Radical disparities of wealth and power
• Desire one party oligarchy with colonial style economy
• Aristocratic privilege
• Leisurely pace of life for the aristocracy to develop refinement, culture
• Subsidize oligarch’s businesses
• Cut taxes for the wealthy
• Least democratic of the nations
• States’ rights
• Fights federal power
• Fights taxes on capitalism
• Fights organized labor
• Fights environmentalism
• Fights consumer protectionism
• Authoritarian society
• Wants a compliant, low wage workforce
• Order and obedience are valued
• The poor existed to support the oligarchs
• White supremacy, contempt for all “inferior races”
• Contempt for the middle class
• Religion important
• Salvation minded private protestants
• Support wars
• Lead Republican Party

TIDEWATER

• Founded by the younger sons of southern English gentry
• Jamestown, John Smith 1607
• Desire to reproduce the life of the semi-feudal English manors
• Tobacco plantations, indentured servants, then slave - haves & have-nots
• Values authority and tradition
• Personal honor, duels
• Leisurely pace of life
• Salvation minded private protestants
• No towns, schools, local governments
• Little respect for public participation in politics
• Little respect for equality
• Nation in decline, losing power to Midlands neighbors
• Support wars
• Lean toward Republican Party

GREATER APALACHIA

• Founded in early 18^th century by rough, bellicose war ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, Northern England, Scottish Lowlands
• Came from a condition of near constant war and upheaval
• Warrior ethic, combative, will fight anyone who tries to lord it over them
• Extreme individualism
• Men judged by their toughness and ferocity
• Aggressive military, support wars
• Lampooned as rednecks, hillbillies, crackers, white trash
• Backcountry people, beyond rule of law
• Opposed to strong, central government controlled by elites
• Egalitarian
• Taxes low, schools sparse, government slight
• Suspicious of aristocrats
• Suspicious of reformers
• Opposed to strong labor unions
• Maximize freedom rather than increase wealth as top priority
• Clan based
• Honor based
• Salvation minded private protestants
• Lean toward Republican Party

IN THE MIDDLE, AMBIVALENT, SWING NATIONS:

MIDLANDS

• Founded by Dutch Quakers
• Utopian colonies
• See humans as essentially good
• Welcome many nations and creeds, immigrants
• Tolerant
• Multicultural, multilingual
• Organized around the middle class
• Society should be organized to help ordinary people
• Middle class ethos
• Thrift, sobriety
• Neighborliness
• Skeptical of top down government intervention because they escaped tyrannies in Europe
• Distrust of big government
• Reject hierarchical authority
• Government is an unwelcome intrusion
• Moderate politics
• Practical politics
• The key swing vote in every election
• Timid and ambivalent
• Not militaristic, expansionist
• Moderating force in politics

EL NORTE

• The oldest nation, founded by Spanish missionaries and soldiers, 1560
• Catholic opponents of Protestantism
• Overwhelmingly Hispanic
• Mexicans are the progeny of Spanish and Indian unions
• Hybrid between Anglo- and Spanish- American
• Independent
• Self-sufficient
• Work centered
• Adaptable
• Ruled by oligarchy over the peons
• Obedient, respectful
• Self sufficient, independent ranch hands, cowboys
• Lean toward Democratic Party

FAR WEST

• Environmental barrenness more important than ethnicity
• Treated as an internal colony to be exploited for natural resources
• Reviles federal government interference, but demands federal government largesse
• Run by the corporations exploiting the natural resources
• Libertarian-corporate agenda
• Want the federal government to get out, leave us alone, give us money
• Rarely defies their corporate masters
• Industrial base grew as a result of WWII and Cold War
• Hostility to Federal Government
• Independence of the cowboy ethos
• Extreme individualism
• Allies with deep south sometimes
• Lean toward Republican Party

MOSTLY IN CANADA

NEW FRANCE

• Founded in 1604
• Mixed society, embraced Indians
• Cross cultural marriages
• Tolerant open society
• Down to earth
• Egalitarian
• Consensus driven
• The most liberal on the continent
• Multicultural

FIRST NATION

• Far northern Canada
• Environmentalism
• Limited sense of ownership
• Sharing society

It is a fascinating book and worth the read if you are interested.

"The Other Guy" is winning for the Republicans

Mitt Romney is winning the Republican nomination.  He is trying to become "The Other Guy."  


If the election is about Obama, The Other Guy will either win or lose depending on how things are going for Obama in November.  Romney's biggest strength is that he is a generic Republican, the kind that often beats Obama in polls.  When they ask about Obama vs. specific Republicans, Obama wins because most specific Republicans are disliked for particular reasons.  But when asked about Obama vs a generic Republican, Obama often loses depending on how the country is feeling about the country, the economy, Obama's leadership, etc.  Since most of what Romney says is not believed anyhow, he morphs into the generic Republican, becomes The Other Guy, and has the best chance to defeat Obama in November.


All that the Republican primary elections are showing the country so far, as far as I can tell, is that the Republicans have only unpalatable offerings to make for the presidency, and the one winning is the one where people dismiss what he says as things that he doesn't really believe.


Romney might be a competent manager of the country, but he is certainly no visionary.  If you think he doesn't believe what he says, then he becomes an inkblot test - he becomes whatever you wish him to be.  In a way, that is how Obama ran four years ago, undefined and believed to be a multitude of things to a multitude of voters, many of whom became disappointed because he wasn't who they projected him to be.


If people actually listen to Romney and vote based on the silly things he is saying, he will no longer be just The Other Guy, but will be someone who represents actual policy possibilities, and he too will be rejected.  But, for now, he is just The Other Guy.

I'm OK, you're to blame

Bill Moyers has a new PBS show that examines the financial crash.  It is well done and persuasive.  Moyers and the Left have concluded that the financial collapse was caused by greedy capitalists in the financial industry.  And they are right, as far as they go with the question.  


Someone named Charlie Campbell (I was unaware of him) writes in an article labeled "The thrill of blaming others" in Salon.com:


In 2007, the world entered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It had been caused by the bursting of the American housing bubble, leading to the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The fallout was global, and saw plenty of scapegoats targeted – from rich bankers and their bonuses, to short-selling hedge fund managers thought to have profited from the downturn, and chief executives whose self-interested, rash decisions led to this calamity.


A lot of what the financial industry did should have been illegal, it certainly was unethical.  But it is no surprise that Moyers and the Left blames Capitalism and Big Business for the Great Recession.  


Blaming the financial institutions is easy to do, and there is a lot of behavior that was disgusting.  But do we do it to let ourselves off the hook?  Campbell continues:


How much easier it is to attribute responsibility to them, rather than face the truth of our own involvement. The notion of collective responsibility is one that we prefer not to engage with. Only those who were financially very prudent can exempt themselves from blame. The rest of us were happy to run up more debt than could be sustained for long by a banking system that depends, like so much of institutional life and commerce, on public confidence. 


You know, what caused the financial catastrophe was us, the common folks, the vast millions of the masses, so many of whom went on a debt binge - credit cards and mortgages, any way possible to live beyond our means.  The bubble was us.  The Government mandated lower mortgage standards in order to get more people into homes; the mortgage companies eventually lowered the standards to ludicrous lows in order to make millions for themselves; the financial companies created super-complex financial instruments out of them in order to make billions for themselves.  But, it was us, the people, who lost our bearings and decided that so many of us had to live beyond our means, on credit, on the bubble, until it collapsed.


The real solution isn't just stronger banking regulations or breaking up the too big to fail financial institutions (although I support that).  Or to put a leash on the exuberance of the government trying to use government powers for social engineering purposes which always ends up with unintended consequences (although I support that too).  


The real solution is for us, the people, to find ourselves anew, and find that our value is not in our money or possessions or expensive adventures, or outside of ourselves in any way.  To find out that the true wealth of life is in discovering the eternal virtues within ourselves that give life meaning and can never be found in the bottom of our wallets.  This is not something that the government can mandate, it is a cultural and spiritual shift that I think we are in the process making.


Mr Campbell is actually writing about the psychological urge to blame and scapegoat others to avoid looking at our own culpabilities and failings.  It is bad enough that we duck our own responsibilities when we scapegoat others. But, more disturbing yet, is what happens to ourselves when we do so:


Ultimately, we make scapegoats out of those we have come to believe are incapable of suffering – we dehumanize them, making them easier to hate. We create the idea that these other people are inferior to us. That develops into the idea that they therefore deserve their treatment. We deny them the same capacities for thought, emotion and values as us, and treat them accordingly. We can do this consciously or unconsciously, but the results are the same.


We stop seeing them as human beings so that we can blame them and find a way to think of ourselves as good and right and blameless and not really responsible for ... whatever we need to avoid thinking about and being responsible for.  


And so we arrive, once again, at our political system, where those on the extremes of the political spectrum see the world in very comforting terms:  each side see themselves as human, and see the ones they scapegoat and blame as less human, incapable of suffering, and deserving of attack and destruction.  If only THOSE people would all disappear, no... would all be destroyed!!! then life would be soooooo goooooood.  Say amen! And click the "contribution" button to the candidate of your choice.  Isn't it funny, but THOSE people just never seem to go away, no matter how often we have elections.  


I think real change in our world comes through individual growth and change which spreads through example rather than the ballot box.

The Fall of Communism made the West overconfident in unfettered Capitalism

Reading an interview of novelist Robert Harris, who wrote a novel about the forces that crashed the financial markets, "The Fear Index", provided one of the most succinct summaries of what happened that I have come across:


“As the years go by, we begin to see the shape of the last 30 years or so. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a terrific boost to belief in the free market—a lot of regulations were lifted, and there was a kind of hubris about what the markets could do…This era collided with the digitalization revolution, and it does seem to me that the financial markets slipped out of control—of government control and, to some degree, almost of human control.” 


This makes a lot of sense to me - that it was an overconfidence in the power of unfettered free markets that led to the cognitive capture of politicians, regulators, ratings agencies, the financial industry itself, and last but certainly not least, homeowners and wannabe homeowners.  That overconfidence led to reckless and risky behavior that ended catastrophically.  And that overconfidence was a function of the triumph of Capitalism over Communism.


There was certainly a crisis of greed, but it was a greed that was the madness fueled by the kind of irrational enthusiasm first exposed in the great tulip mania in 1600s.  Wikipedia notes:


"At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman."


This, of course, was a bubble that burst, to the detriment of many.


I believe that what happened is that the financial industry figured out the same thing that the government figured out long ago - where the money is.  And where the money is is in the middle classes. 


When government needs money it raises taxes.  Some seem to think that taxing the two or three hundred thousand people who make a million dollars or more raises a lot of money, and it does, but not nearly as much as taxing the vast scores of millions of people in the middle classes.  


In the same way, the financial industry discovered that they could transfer billions of dollars to themselves from middle class homeowners and those who could be convinced that they must become homeowners or they would be left behind.  So, the financial industry fed the housing bubble with ever riskier and unsound mortgages.  But, more importantly, they spread the belief that the markets would make us all a lot of money.  Many of them certainly did make themselves unbelievably wealthy.  


I am mindful of what Warren Buffet said in 2008 when on a discussion panel about how the financial industry could clean up the mess that it caused.  He said that we had to remember who these people were:  they weren't in their industry to benefit the world, they were in their industry to make money, and that is all.  Making money is important to most people, but having and making money be the only goal leads to things like the near collapse of the financial markets and the world economy by people, many of whom to this day feel no guilt nor regret about what they did and who they are.  Their measuring sticks for their value is their how much money they make and have, and how they contribute to society is simply not on their screens.  Strange indeed.


However, millions in the middle classes lost their livelihoods and lost their homes.  Unfortunately, the story is still playing itself out.  False beliefs are terrifying things, they can lead very large percentages of people down false paths following destructive hopes, and they can cause a great deal of pain and destruction.


The fall of the Soviet Union and the exposure of the failure of Communism really didn't mean that Capitalism was some kind of infallible wealth creating system.  Some of the faithful, true believers in unfettered capitalism have yet to learn that lesson, and that is unfortunate.  


Perhaps this election can help clarify the distinction between the fatal flaws of unfettered capitalism which quickly devolves into exploitive distortions of the markets, and the power of a well regulated economic market that creates the space for the power of capitalism to do its magic and create wealth and benefit society - especially the middle classes.

Obama shines

I watched State of the Union speech last night.  I thought Obama sounded confident, purposeful, inspired and inspiring, practical, reasonable, and presidential.  I thought he sounded like a good man to have as president.  I think his campaign is to be one of being a sane, common sense person who would like people to listen to reason and work with him to find ways to govern the country.  I thought it was a good speech.  I think, and hope, that he may be finding his voice, understanding his job, and ready to take on the hard core right wing in such a way that he can bring the country along with him enough to be able to put together a workable government next year.  Maybe I'm just under his spell - charmed? - by him and his speech, but I am feeling hopeful that things have a chance to get better in government.  That, and of course, the fact that he is running against either a human lizard, Gingrich, or a charisma-less management consultant incapable of inspiration, Romney.  


As for the Republicans, even the National Review Online had an editorial against Gingrich, on the grounds of his personal cruelty.


"Any Republican nominee will draw criticism for being too biased toward the rich. Not every Republican nominee will be attacked for cruelty in his personal life."


I have been rooting for Romney among the Republicans because I want to see the Republican voters reject the Tea Party and Social Conservative extremists.  I believe that if the Republicans end up with an extremist candidate not only will they lose, but they may destroy the party itself.  And I don't believe that is good for the country.


I still have hopes that the new political entity, Americans Elect, will end up nominating a legitimate centrist that would be interesting to me.  I intend to participate in that process in hopes of creating real support for candidates that are not captive to the extremist wings of either party.  I think that a strong showing by a self proclaimed moderate political movement would be very beneficial to the country, and should move both parties back away from their ideological extremes.


One can dream...

The Deep South votes for The Lizard

South Carolina started the Civil War, and it looks like it is still pretty angry.  The Republicans gave Newt a victory in their primary election yesterday.  As best as I can tell, they voted for him because he expresses their anger at the rest of America.  


That's fine by me.  I still think Newt will destroy himself long before he gets the nomination, and that Romney is a disciplined, organized, determined man who will win the nomination.  


If, indeed, Republican primary voters decide that they want a candidate who will be nasty and punishing to Obama during the campaign, then I say let them go for it.  Newt Gingrich cannot possibly be elected president.  He is an unappetizing, mean, bullying lizard and the American people will not want to have to look at his venomous little eyes lecturing them on what is wrong with them for the next four years.  


It is actually possible, I believe, that if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich that not only will they lose the presidency, but they may end up destroying the Republican Party itself.  After eight years of W's presidency that ended up creating the Great Recession and making a bumbling botch of the war against terrorism, I am not sure that the Republican Party will be able to survive the kind of vicious, opportunistic, grandiose, deluded attacks on Obama, the media, and much of the American populace that Gingrich would wage.  


If you are filled with hate, I guess you want someone who is filled with hate to represent you.  But, hate is not much of an attractor, it is a repellent, and not only Newt, but the entire Republican Party may well crash and burn in the process.

Why vote for Obama?

Now that the Republican nomination is essentially over except the shouting (getting cable TV ratings, getting publicity for failing candidates for future TV and book gigs, getting revenge, getting a few more moments in the spotlight before fading from view) it's time to be grateful that the Republicans are offering a relatively moderate candidate who is offering a standard conservative agenda, but who is not a livid culture warrior, an avid ideologue, a lizard, or an extremist nut-case.

That being said, what about Obama?  The center-right blogger, Andrew Sullivan, offers reasons why he supports Obama now.  He supported Reagan in 1980 and Obama now, just as I did and do, because the times, they are a changing, and different times require different politics.

Why vote for Obama per Andrew Sullivan, as he writes in Newsweek?  Because of his record (rather than the ideological spin from either the Right or Left):

• ECONOMY:
• He gets a 12 month pass in office after the economic meltdown because economies take time to shift course
• Banks - he focused on stabilization of the financial system rather than the exacting of revenge
• Since the job collapse bottomed out in the beginning of 2010, the economy has added 2.4 millions jobs (more than the net jobs created by Bush)
• Overall government employment has declined 2.6% over the past 3 years (compared with 2.2% decline in the early years of Reagan)
• The stimulus put a bottom under the free fall of the economy and prevented a second Great Depression
• Cut taxes, a third of the stimulus was tax cuts
• Cut the payroll tax (social security tax)
• Grew non-defense discretionary spending only half as much as Bush

• OBAMACARE is actually a moderate center-left program, not socialist:
• Based on the individual mandate, which was pioneered by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation
• Does not have a public option desired by the Left Wing
• Has health insurance exchanges similar to a proposal by Nixon in ‘74
• Sets standards and grants incentives for states to experiment,
• Provides universal health care that is controlled rather than the old law which mandated that all hospitals accept emergency-room patients anyway

• FOREIGN POLICY
• Seeks long term strategic advantage rather than bellicose headlines
• Sought and killed Osama bin Laden
• Decimated al Qaeda
• Is winning the propaganda war, plummeting al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world
• “Leading from behind” has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role

• DOMESTIC POLICY - Practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics
• Extends a hand to his opponents, is rejected, moves to a moderate liberal position without being tarred as an ideologue, except by the extremists, of course
• Refuses to wage a culture war
• Offered to cut entitlements, but was answered with a refusal to raise any taxes at all

There is much that I am disappointed in about Obama.  Especially, for me, his refusal to take the Simpson-Bowles reform and try to turn it into law.  Many on the Left are disappointed that he is not the liberal crusader that they are.  Many on the right fear him as the liberal crusader that the Left wishes that he were.

I think the real fear the Right Wing has is that Obama is transforming the country and moving it away from the politics and culture that dominated for thirty years since Reagan's inauguration.  What they don't see, or don't want others to see, is that he is doing it as a moderate, center-left president rather than a fire-breathing left wing ideologue.  The Right Wing knows how to fight their ideological mirrors on the Left Wing.  So that is how they see and represent Obama, as one of them, but Lefties rather than Righties.

I haven't decided who I am voting for yet.  I still am very interested in what the process created by Americans Elect will produce as an alternative to both parties.  But, for now, Obama looks better than Romney, and much better than any of the hard core conservatives trying to beat him.

I am not sure how he governs in the next four years though.  He hasn't been able to reach across the isle, and he hasn't shown the stomach for confronting and beating a bellicose opposition.

Perhaps the Republicans will so sour the nation that they will give a victory to Obama and give him a more accommodating House and Senate.

One can dream...

The Romney Miracle

Michael Gerson, a center right editorialist on the Washington Post, pointed out yesterday that it is something of a miracle that the candidate who is decisively winning the Republican nomination is the relatively moderate candidate rather than one of the extremists.  


This is the Republican Party that has become the most conservative I have seen it in my lifetime.  They have been completely uncooperative and obstructionist when dealing with Obama and the Democrats over the last three years.  They give every indication that they would look at both Bushes and even Reagan as too moderate to suit them.  The Republicans in congress have been fanatically right wing with no give or compromise to them at all.


Beyond Washington, the conservative commentariat are loudly and passionately extreme.  Rush Limbaugh rails against the liberal media for promoting the non-conservative candidacies of Romney and Huntsman.  Who knows what extremes Glenn Beck is spouting? but one certainly imagines that he has no regard for RINOs like Romney.


So, what is going on?  I think the Tea Party's moment has come and gone.  I think that the Republican primary voters are revealing that they are not as extreme as they are portrayed to be.  Certainly, the loud ones are on the extreme in the Republican Party, same as the loud ones are on the other extreme in the Democratic Party.  But, to borrow an old phrase, it may well be that there is a "silent majority" in the Republican Party that is tired of the extremist polarization and paralysis wrought by the Tea Party, the Social Conservatives, and those in the Republican Party that see demonization of liberals as some kind of morally justifiable strategy.


I think that another symbol of this shift from extremism to moderation is the fate of the inventor of demonization by the Republicans as a way to take over the government from the Democrats - Newt Gingrich.  The nastiness that Newt pioneered when he led the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 has come back to bite him.  Demonization became the acceptable strategy.  But, of course, it became acceptable on both sides of the isle as a result, and our politics have become so polarized that it is sometimes painful even to witness.  In a lovely bit of irony, Newt himself was hoist on his own petard, as PACs supporting Romney demonized Newt and knocked him off the lead in Iowa.  It looks like Newt is done, but he is nasty and vindictive enough that he is going to continue to campaign, and I presume he will be ever escalating his venomous attacks on Romney out of revenge.  


I still wish that the overt moderate, Huntsman, could win the nomination, and he is apparently going to continue his campaign.  I like that, just in case the vengeful Newt and the hard core conservatives manage to destroy Romney, Huntsman would still be alive to receive the moderate and independent Republican votes.  


But I really want to celebrate that the leader of the presidential candidates for the Republicans is relatively moderate, not a hard core conservative.

Hoping for Huntsman

I know it's a very "moderate" thing to do, but I really do hope that Huntsman surprises everyone and gets a very big vote in New Hampshire tomorrow in the Republican primary.  That could bring him lots of money to campaign on, and I think he would make a good president.  I especially like that he is the only candidate, including Obama, who has a plan to break up the too big to fail financial institutions.


Huntsman is the overtly moderate Republican, and Romney is the covertly moderate Republican.  I can live with a Romney win, especially if he wraps up the nomination and puts the more hard line conservatives away.  


If the Republicans run an extremist right winger they don't have a chance, but I would hate for the country to risk being run by the nasty and unstable Gingrich, the dim bulb Perry, or the theocratic social conservative Santorum.  (Paul is too loony to even worry about)


It is time for a little magic to drop into this campaign season, and a big Huntsman showing would be just that.

Romney wins Iowa, and probably the nomination

The big news in Iowa is not who won, Romney and Santorum, but rather it is who lost, Perry and Gingrich.  Only Perry and Gingrich had any chance of beating Romney to the nomination, I believe.  The rest are niche candidates that get their moments in the sun and fade quickly.  Perry proved himself to be inadequate to the task, and Gingrich proved himself to be too burdened with his toxic and unreliable personality to be able to take it all the way to the nomination.  Both will probably try to recover and will continue their doomed efforts, but I think it is over for them.


Another way of saying that is that the Tea Party is losing its death grip on the  Republican Party.


More to the point, the Republican nominating process is pretty much over.


Of course, the world will step in and have something to say about who is our next president.  Things will happen, and Obama and Romney will have to respond to those things.  In 2008, Lehman Brothers went down and the country had to try desperately to keep our financial system and economy from collapsing.  McCain and Obama each responded differently, with Obama looking like a calm head in the midst of a crisis, and McCain looked like a man who would panic and make things worse rather than better.  I think that was a big factor in McCain's loss in 2008.


I still hope that Huntsman gets legs in New Hampshire and can overtake Romney, but that seems to be a very remote possibility.  Huntsman is the only candidate talking about breaking up the too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-manage, too-big-to-regulate, too-big-to-rate financial institutions.  And I think that is one of the biggest issues that faces us.


Another hope I have is that Americans Elect will succeed in their nominating process and produce a moderate, centrist candidate who can change the way we nominate our presidents by taking the process away from the extremists of both parties and creating a process that appeals to the independents, moderates, and centrists.  It is more than time for pragmatic, problem solving leadership rather than presidents who are ideologues or captive to the ideological extremes of their parties.

To create jobs, break up the too big to fail banks

It could well be that the most meaningful way to create jobs in America is to break up the too big to fail banks.


When even the conservative leaning New York Post's Charlie Gasparino calls for the too big to fail banks to be broken up, you know the time has come for a good idea to be implemented.


The monster banks are against this, of course.  They want to return to the good old days where they make scores of millions of dollars for themselves individually if their over-leveraged, hyper risky activities succeed, but stick the taxpayers with the losses if they fail.  


The regulators and rating agencies were unable to see inside the labyrinthine risky business models prior to the financial meltdown, and I have no doubt that they have the same problems today.


It seems to me that businesses that are too big to fail are also too big to manage and too big to regulate and too big to rate accurately.  


Gasparino offers the obvious recommendation: 


The obvious way to force the banks to get small and fast is to again split commercial from investment banking — that is, making it so that no bank can roll the dice in the securities markets if it wants its deposits backed up by federal insurance.

His analysis is that this would finally free up capital for making loans to small and medium sized businesses - which is where job creation comes from.


So, what can the Federal government do to create job?  Stimulus spending has only limited results, and reducing taxes adds to an out of control deficit, but breaking up the too big to fail banks might actually be very helpful.

Is Gingrich already fading?

It could be that the Gingrich surge is already over.  I hope so.  He is a very smart, articulate, persuasive, reasonable sounding (until you actually think about the consequences of some of what he says), inspiring ... lizard (who thinks he is a T-Rex).  


I think it was Bill Clinton (who has his own integrity issues) who said that people vote for whom they want to invite into their living rooms for the next four years.  I can't imagine having to watch this slimy reptile for the next four years on my living room TV.  Ultimately, it is not just issues and the glibness that elects a president.  Character counts - a lot.  And way too many people, conservative people as a matter of fact, are warning against the integrity and trustworthiness of this man.


I think the Republican primary voters are in the process of figuring that out.  


I expect that the Gingrich alternative to Romney is petering out.  I suppose we have to have a Ron Paul run up in the polls next.  


It will still probably come down to Romney, although I continue to hope that New Hampshire pushes Huntsman into the lead.

S.E.C. Charges Fannie and Freddie with Fraud

Finally, the S.E.C. is charging top Fannie and Freddie executives with fraud.  It seems pretty straightforward to me.  In 2007 Fannie told investigators that it had just 0.2 % of its portfolio in subprime loans, but it actually had 11% at the time.  Freddie told investigators in 2006 it had only $2 - $6 billion, but the S.E.C. says it was more like $141 billion, or 10% of its portfolio.


These lies were a big part of the story that led to the financial meltdown, and of course, the government had to seize control of them later to keep them from collapsing.  


I would like to see prosecutions and real consequences for these people as well as for the executives of the giant, too big to fail financial institutions.  Mainstreet has certainly paid the price for their mistakes in taking out loans they couldn't afford.  Many more in mainstreet paid even bigger prices in unemployment, lower wages, lost opportunities and the other punishments of the Great Recession.  It is time for the super powerful and politically connected in Wall Street and government to be held accountable for their creating this entire mess in the first place.

The end of our war in Iraq

It is worth a moment to pause and be grateful that our war in Iraq is officially over. 


It looks like our objectives were met.  We drove al Qaeda out if Iraq.  We overthrew the dictator, Saddam Hussein.  We satisfied ourselves that they would not threaten the world with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.  And we kept the country together long enough for it to establish some form of representative government that has a chance of being able to keep relative peace in the country and stand on its own internationally.


I wish the people of Iraq the best of luck as they stumble along the path of democracy.  I hope that they present an inspiration to surrounding Muslim nations.  And, most of all, I strongly desire that they do not become the home of terrorist threats to the U.S. and the West.


I know that the Middle East has huge problems ahead, and the tangle of forces make things very complicated there, but this is a day to be grateful and hopeful.


Good luck to them and to all of us.

Can Obama be the new Teddy Roosevelt?

Over a month ago, I asked "Where is Teddy Roosevelt When We Need Him".  It looks like Obama has been thinking the same thing.  He just gave a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the same place TDR gave a defining speech 101 years ago.  Like TDR, Obama laid out a progressive message, which is at its essence that capitalism today has been stolen by the super powerful, just as it had back in TDR's day, who have eliminated the essence of capitalism itself - competition and the growing of the economy.  


Roosevelt was famously the "Trust Buster", who restored competition to the capitalist system.  But, Teddy Roosevelt was temperamentally suited to take on the oligarchy of his time.  He wasn't called the "Bull Moose" by accident.


Obama seems to understand that the country is in the grips of a new anti-capitalist oligarchy today.  He seems to have the right ideas about what is wrong.  I'm not sure he has the right ideas about what the solutions are, and I am even less sure that he has the temperament to confront and defeat today's oligarchy.


TDR wanted to give the people of America a "Square Deal", FDR wanted to give the people of America a "New Deal", Obama just said he wants to give the American people "Fair Play, a Fair Shot, and a Fair Share".  I expect this will morph into a campaign slogan of giving the American people a "Fair Deal".


I have been wondering how Obama could run for re-election.  He certainly can't run as a post-partisan, reach-across-the-isle president because he has proven that he is incapable of pulling that off.  The only thing left is for him to run as the president who can force the Republicans to buckle under to his will and leadership.  As a result, we have this excellent kick-off speech.  


He will have to follow up with actual, strong willed, confrontational executive action opposing the Republicans in 2012 to prove to the people that he is up to that job.  And he will have to convince more than just a slim majority to re-elect him.  He will have to win a substantial victory in November and create substantial increases in the House and the Senate.  


Of course, he may have an ally in this impossible task - the Republican Party - who may accommodate the president by running an un-electable nominee like Gingrich.

Gingrich and the re-election of Obama

As the Republican right wing activists continue their search for anybody-but-Romney, they have now landed on Newt Gingrich.  The Republican campaign so far has been ideal for Gingrich since it has been an endless parade of debates, and Gingrich's main strength is his ability to speak with apparent authority and expertise.  


But, there is so much more needed from a president, and from a presidential candidate, than good communication skills.


If the Clinton presidency taught us anything, it is that character counts.  And Gingrich's character is highly suspect.


One thing the Obama/McCain campaign taught us is that managing a campaign organization matters.  It matters as to how well the campaign progresses, and it shows something about how the candidate will run the executive branch when elected.  And, by all accounts, management and organizational skills are pretty low on Gingrich's talent list.


Ultimately, though, it comes down to a question of what the campaign in 2012 will be about.  If the campaign ends up being a referendum on Obama's performance in the White House, Obama loses.  But, if it becomes about the Republican challenger, then Obama wins.  And if Gingrich runs, the vast majority of the campaign will be about Gingrich:  his character, his opportunism, his insincerity, his lack of moral substance, his inevitably exaggerated claims of importance, his predictably ideologically extreme and unrealistic proposals, etc. etc. etc.  I believe Gingrich is much like Trump in that they are both narcissistic megalomaniacs too filled with their own grandiosity to be anything but off-putting to a very large majority of voters.


So, ultimately, I think it will come down to Romney, although I really do hope that Hunstsman can do well enough in New Hampshire that he can ultimately take the nomination.  Then I think we would have a real campaign between two substantive candidates who are not extremists. 


And, beyond that, I have real hopes that Americans Elect can offer a third party centrist candidate that can take the election away from the extremist wings of each party and give the country a new way of getting good candidates on the ballots of all the states.

Scarcity Consciousness and Overindulgence

The developed world is going through a terrible financial collapse and economic  crisis, and I think it is no coincidence that we are also in the midst of an obesity epidemic.  I think that part of the cause of these problems is that so many people live in a scarcity consciousness.  But it manifested in strange ways.  If we think that there isn't enough, then whatever we have may not last, and we think that we need to gorge now out of fear of famine later - on food, drugs, material goods, homes, cars, planes, yachts, all kinds of stuff.  Voila: housing bubbles, Wall Street uber-greed, obesity.


Even more central, I think, we overindulge when we try to fill empty holes within our sense of ourselves.  These types of holes are bottomless and can never be filled with material stuff. However, if we think that a true sense of abundance comes from a sense of being full and sufficient as we are, with no need to stuff stuff into ourselves in order to feel safe, or prosperous, or enough, then we have no need to live a life of overindulgence.  This is no small task, of course, but it could be the real task we face as a part of growing ourselves into mature adults, being enough as we are, without being trapped inside a scarcity consciousness that is always trying to fill ever empty holes within.


At the heart of the housing bubble and obesity crisis in America and the West may be a psychological and spiritual crisis.  Psychologically, if we can be filled with a regard for ourselves based upon internal character strengths and qualities, we can sense ourselves as full rather than empty, and we won't be needing things from the outside.  Spiritually, if we sense that we are filled with the love of the Divine and have access to the Transcendent, we can know that we are complete and do not need to prop ourselves up with stuff to feel like we are enough.


Ultimately, I believe that the crises that the developed world faces are not political, but psychological and spiritual.  And as such, political solutions won't be able to get to the heart of the matter.  But, this might be really good news, because rather than having to rely on the political system to elect the right politicians, we can solve our own problems by growing psychologically and spiritually as individuals.  I expect that the real change we are seeing in the world is that we are in the midst of that process.

The Fall of Giants

I recently finished Ken Follett's historical novel "The Fall of Giants."  It is the first of a trilogy that he is writing on the twentieth century.  It is, as expected, completely absorbing and it brings the history of WWI alive. 


I think we are at a time similar to a hundred years ago, when WWI was looming on the horizon.  Big changes are coming as institution after institution fails, the "Giants" falling today go from the tyrannies of the Middle East, to Berlosconi in Italy, to some of the financial giants of Wall Street (more to follow I am afraid as their over-leveraged, high risk ways have still not ended), to the legitimacy of government regulatory agencies, to so many things.  I actually think that in America both political parties are at risk of committing suicide and may fade into oblivion.  


The change that happened as a result of WWI was the end of the rule of aristocracy in Europe.  The Communist revolution overthrew the aristocracy in Russia, of course, but I think that the days of the aristocrats was over for the rest of Europe as well by the end of the war, especially after the terrible mismanagement and bumbling of the aristocratic leadership had propelled the European nations into the war in the first place, and the management of the war was so inept in the second place, and the negotiated peace was so destructive in the end.  The aristocracy lost their ruling power as a result of their demonstrated incompetence and inhumanity.  


And the world was never the same.


The terrible price that the world paid for this liberation from the inherited, landed aristocracy was 37,446,904 casualties, with total deaths of 8,528,831. It's hard to even imagine.


Now, we are in the grips of another group of aristocracies that are badly mismanaging their responsibilities and are causing real hardships for the people of the world.  The financial collapse has put millions out of work, and entered the developed world into an era of financial pessimism.  


The left blames Wall Street and the financial institutions of the world for their reckless risk taking and seemingly bottomless greed, and they are right.  The right blames government for their being in bed with political benefactors and they are also right.

The entrenched aristocracy has become the unholy marriage between finance and government, and the result is fortunes for the super wealthy, power for the politicians, and hardship for the majority.  Both the Tea Party, who rail against the overpowerful government, and the Occupy Wall Streeters, who rail against the 1% are expressing pre-revolutionary angers.


I hope and pray that we don't end up with millions dead and economies that are totally destroyed by the time that the institutions that are being overthrown are finally finished.  I don't think massive wars are needed, but big changes are coming.  


The end of corrupt aristocracies is ultimately a good thing.  Let's have it be fairly smooth and elegant.

The political crisis in Europe

George Friedman of Stratfor points out that the economic crisis of Europe is really underpinned by a political crisis.  The European elite have dedicated themselves to a united and peaceful Europe ever since WWI and WWII's terrible devastation.  They concluded that the way to a peaceful Europe was to create a prosperity zone of Europe, where all of the nations had it in their own economic interests to be intertwined and dependent upon each other for their own prosperity.  They adopted a Europeanist ideology.


The Europeanist ideology promised prosperity and peace.  There has not been some form of unifying identity to Europe beyond these two promises made by the elite leadership of Europe.  


But, the financial crisis looks like it it ending both prosperity and peace.  The financial crisis has shown the structural inadequacies of the Eurozone and the common Euro - one currency - but many governments and many fiscal policies.  So, when Greece and Italy owe huge debts that they can't pay, the solution offered by Germany is deep cuts and dramatic austerities for the Southern European countries.  


There goes the prosperity for Southern Europe.


And, there goes the peace as well between Southern Europe and Northern Europe.  The North blames the South for their prodigal irresponsibility, and the South blames the North for setting up a financial system that created huge exports into the rest of Europe by creating a free trade zone and a relatively inexpensive Euro.


The question that arises is what happens to the leadership in Europe?  Do the people continue to elect the same kind of elites who are committed to a united Europe, even if it means drastic cuts in their governments?  Or do they go for more populist and more angry leaders who want to overturn the existing political and financial system that seems to see solutions to the debt crisis in terms of austerity and pain for the people, while leaving the elites quite comfortable, thank you very much.


Big changes are likely to be coming in Europe.

Greece started Democracy, is it showing the way it ends?

 Is Greece showing the world the inevitable, tragic fate of Democracies?  Are we all doomed to follow Greece's corrupt footsteps? 

It seems to me that the cancer at the heart of the Greek crisis is the personal corruption and entitlement of the people themselves that is almost beyond imagination.  Apparently, in Greece it is culturally acceptable to pay little or no taxes, and at the same time demand that the government employs a huge majority of the people and provides an amazingly generous benefits system.  This is not a failure of government so much as a failure of the character of the Greek people.

The great Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his masterpiece "Democracy in America" in  1831 when he visited America to see for himself how Democracy worked in America.  He was mightily impressed, but he had a couple of very key warnings about the weaknesses of democracy.  

The first warning is when the people figure out that they can use the government to get goodies:

 “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville

America is a little over the 200 year mark already.

The second warning points out that a democracy is only as good as the people who make it up:

“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” 
― Alexis de Tocqueville

It looks to me like Greece has fallen prey to both cancers:  the people voted in governments that promised and delivered more services than they could pay for, and the character of the people themselves became dishonorable, as they seem to feel totally entitled to very generous entitlements and are offended by the notion that they should pay for them with taxes.

Is democracy in Greece and the PIIGS of Europe about to collapse because the people will only elect governments that give them stuff?  Is their democracy doomed because of a crisis of character of the people themselves?  Is the U.S. following in those dishonorable footsteps?


I think America will rise again, just as it did from the Great Depression and WWII.  I deeply hope and pray that the ashes won't be as devastating now as they were then.  I have faith in the young Millennial Generation coming of age today to create a world anew, as did the Greatest Generation a cycle of generations ago.  I trust that the Boomer Generation can and will provide vision and meaning to this younger, powerful, creative, energetic, cooperative, and productive generation to create our economy and politics anew. I expect America will find itself and take its lead in the world in a new, not yet imagined way.  I have hope and faith in the power of the very idea of America and democracy.


I think that we don't curse the darkness, but light a candle, one spark at a time, starting with ourselves - creating a light of integrity, responsibility, honesty, and character.  We each can be a spark of kindling that sets aflame the renewal of America, democracy, and the world.

Landslide in Mississippi

I have reason to be optimistic that the grip of the Tea Party, the Evangelicals, and the more extreme wing of the Republican Party is starting to slip.  Mississippi just rejected the "Personhood" amendment by a landslide, 59% to 41%.  Issue 26 would have defined a fertilized egg as a person, thus, of course, making abortion illegal.  


If you can't get abortion outlawed in Mississippi, which I presume is a state pretty much on the more extreme end of the conservative spectrum, I would say that a woman's right to choose is still quite safe, and will stay so in perpetuity.  


The ideological extremes always over-interpret political trends.  When the country turned against Obama and the Democrats in 2010, the far right thought it was the Tea Party that caused the turn.  In fact, the far left thought so too, out of fear that their opposite extreme would take over the country that they had thought they had captured just two years earlier.  


But, if fact, the Tea Party cost the Republicans control of the Senate, it seemed to me.  Because of radical Tea Party candidates in Delaware, Nevada, Alaska, and New York, all of whom lost, the Senate stayed in Democrats' hands.


Now, the far right continues to believe that the tide has turned and the country is ready for a new revolution and embrace a tax-cutting, deregulating, abortion-ending, anti-gay, government slashing new reality.  But, I think that quite the opposite is happening.  I think that the country is getting a taste of their righteous and inflexible despotism and is being turned off by it.


Good for the good people of Mississippi for showing, once again, that even though the far right is very passionate and very loud, they do not get to dictate people's choices and lives.   

The 1%

The Occupy Wall Street movement, or the We are the 99% movement, speaks to a real issue in the country and the world, but it's violence and nutty fringe puts me off.  It is no surprise that the Loony Left has joined the protests in Oakland, Wall Street, etc.  It seems to me that they live in a paranoid fantasy world with Good Guys and Bad Guys, and they give their personal lives meaning by hating and fighting the Bad Guys.  It has been said that the movement has no coherent agenda, but that is primarily because the agendas that are spoken by the protesters are old fashioned far left revolutionary rhetoric that has long ago been dismissed by America and the world.  The failure of Communism never seemed to reach into the brains of some of the loonier elements of the protesters.  


I have no problem with how much money anyone makes.  The more the merrier. Good for them.  It is part of the freedom of America and the freedom of the capitalist economy.  People are free to make fortunes.  That is a good thing.

The only problem I have with people making fortunes is if they do so by damaging others.  I clearly have a problem with meth and heroin dealers making their fortunes because they do so by the ruination of millions of lives.  I have a problem with criminals of all types who create their wealth by hurting others.  I have a problem with the fortunes made by the reckless financial industry who found ways to pull vast sums of money out of the middle class's pension funds, homes, and lives by creating financial casinos that generated personal fortunes for them, but ended up creating the Great Recession and scores of millions of unemployed in America and the developed world.   


But, do I have a problem with the 1% per se?  No.


The left wing Mother Jones magazine published an interesting chart showing the makeup of the upper 1%.  The top category is non-financial executives, managers, and supervisors - 31%.  Next is the medical profession at 15.7%.  Only then does the financial sector show up at 13.9%.  Then you get lawyers, engineers, scientists, real estate, entrepreneurs, arts, government, farmers, teachers.  


How does it become such a wide range of people?  They get their wealth via investments, primarily.  Their money makes them money.  


So, I hate to see this political movement call upon the old, tired and toxic appeals to envy and jealousy. I think the financial industry still is in need of reform by regulation and oversight because their unfettered actions and greed have crashed the economies of the developed world, not because they are making too much money.  The outsized fortunes that the financial people are making come from an incentive system that rewards financial transactions that put the economies of the world at risk rather than do what the financial industry is supposed to do, which is support and spur the economy.  It has become out of balance.


The key question in my mind back in the '80s when the Left Wing was so upset by the spirit of Reaganism was this.  Which is better, a system that allows the top end to grow its wealth 300% and also allows the lower and middle classes to grow their incomes 2, 3, 5% - or a system that has the upper end stay the same or lose wealth, but the lower and middle classes also stay the same or lose income.  I think that describes the difference between Capitalism (everyone grows but the top grows faster) and Socialism (everyone stays about the same but slowly declines in a stagnant system).


We ended up with an overly deregulated capitalistic system where the top end grew by leaps and bounds, and the lower and middle stayed very much the same.  The expanding economy didn't lift all boats, as it turned out.  


Finding the balance is always the result of competing ideas and political forces.  We had nearly thirty years of Reaganomics which crashed into the wall in 2008.  We are experimenting with Obamanomics now with his attempt to grow the government and control the markets.  The angers on the Left and Right today are largely inchoate, naive, and fairly stupid.  But they speak to real issues to balance the need for growth and freedom to innovate and create, and the need for the society as a whole to feel they are operating in a fair world that isn't stacked against them.

Corzine never learned a thing

In an amazing display of total unwillingness to learn the bitter lessons of the financial collapse of Wall Street in 2008, Jon Corzine has bankrupted a company that he recently took over:  MF GLobal Holdings Ltd.  


He did the same things that Lehman and Bear Sterns had done not long ago.  He leveraged his company to the hilt and beyond, taking massive and reckless risks, on the bet that he could become fabulously wealthy (which he already was anyhow) and make his new company one of the Big Boys of Wall Street.  His company was smaller than the Too Big to Fail financial giants, so he apparently slipped under the radar of the new regulatory system and found the unsupervised license to risk it all.  


He failed.  In fact, it looks like he may have done more than risk it all, he may have risked more than he was legally allowed to, as there are hundreds of millions of dollars of clients' moneys missing, and the suspicion is that he used clients' money for the companies proprietary trading.  Jail time?  


The story is the same as in 2008.  An out-sized, hyper-ego, testosterone crazed, super macho superstar thought his own brains and instincts were infallible, and he Bet the Farm expecting to generate billions of profits for the company and hundreds of millions for his own personal wealth.  And nobody had the courage to stop him.  The company founder, the institutional shareholders, the board of directors, the auditors, all of them were mute or powerless to oppose the super-aggressive Corzine.  


Corzine had been the top dog at Goldman Sachs (and was forced out in 1999 by Hank Paulson, apparently), then he became the Senator and then the Governor of New Jersey.  But the voters apparently were less that overwhelmed by his brilliance, and they fired him from both jobs.  He decided to make his comeback in Wall Street.  Fortunes were lost, as well as 3000 jobs.  


The bad news is that the Jon Corzines of the world are still crashing through china shops in Wall Street.  The good news is that it is harder for them to make the kinds of fortunes that they did prior to the Lehman Brothers collapse, as it appears that the new regulations are actually dampening the risk taking of the financial giants on Wall Street.  Thus, Corzine was forced to lower himself to take over a smaller player on the promise he would turn them into the next Goldman Sachs.


I think the point is that there is never going to be an end to hyper arrogant, ego-maniacal, super risk taking men who think they are the exceptions and who are confident that they alone will discover the keys to the financial kingdom.  To me the solution is to create a legal and regulatory system that can work to keep the damage that they do contained to themselves without cratering companies and countries with their reckless arrogance.

Hope for debt reduction?

In a miracle of bipartisan sanity, a group of 40 House Republicans asked the Supercommittee of 12 to consider raising revenue, and a group of 60 House Democrats asked the Supercommittee to explore entitlement cuts.  

It is blindingly obvious to me, when we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that we spend, the we must do both - raise revenues and cut spending.  The Republicans have been locked in a death spiral of tax-increase-avoiding ideology, and the Democrats have been locked in a death spiral of entitlement-decrease-avoiding ideology, and the country careens toward financial disaster.

I was also very pleased to see that the Supercommittee had both Simpson and Bowles, and Rivlin and Dominici testify before it.  They were very clear.  The Supercommittee should NOT cut the deficit by the $1.2 trillion over ten years as they had been tasked by Congress.  They need to cut at lease $4 trillion instead. 

If the Supercommittee takes these messages to heart and offers a major, bold program that includes revenue increases and entitlement cuts and saves $4 trillion over ten years, and the 40 Republicans and 60 Democrats break ranks with their ideological masters, this country has reason to hope after all.

I send them my prayers.

Where is Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

Thomas Friedman  writes today about a $285 million dollar fine against Citibank for fraudulent derivative trading.  Like Goldman Sachs, Citi put together a billion dollar package of toxic mortgage-backed securities and collateral debt obligations, half of which were specifically chosen as likely to fail.  They sold this dreck to others while at the same time they shorted their own product so as to make money as its value collapsed.  They were being soooooo smart.  They made money off of fools dumb enough to trust them, and they made money off of the toxic assets that they were dumping as their value disappeared.  

I certainly don't care how wealthy anyone becomes in America.  What I very much care about, however, is when people become wealthy as a result of damaging others.  The financial industry management became wealthy beyond imagination at the expense of their clients, and at the expense of all of us who are now living in a world of near Depression created by their recklessness and avaricious greed.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are fairly incoherent and populated in part by fringe elements that are pretty ridiculous.  But the object of their anger is legitimate.  Arguments by the ruling financial oligarchy that increasing taxes on them won't solve the country's terrible debt problems is true, but not particularly meaningful.  Pretty much everyone knows that a terrible injustice has been done to the middle class of America and the world.  The lack of graciousness and remorse by the perpetrators of that injustice is very grating to many.   A couple of centuries ago the French turned to guillotines as their expression of anger towards their ruling aristocracy.  America won't go to that extreme, I am sure, but I think we need to see a government that can bring some justice and closure to this very dark chapter of history. 

I have long been quite conservative in financial matters, believing that the free market was the goose that laid the golden egg of prosperity and created the middle class in America and the developed world.  That belief has had to be re-evaluated after 9/15/2008 when Lehman went bankrupt and the financial industry's rape of its customers and extraction of billions from the middle classes for its own private fortunes became exposed.

Where is Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?  The Bull Moose was the trust buster.  We need a similar force to break up the too-big-to-fail financial institutions.  I think Bush and Obama were right to rescue the financial industry, but it is angering to me that they didn't break them up and strip them of their enormous, policy controlling powers while they rescued them.  On a human level I want to see scores of greed-bags put in jail.  But much more important to me is to see the size and power of the financial industry reduced to their proper size and function.  The financial industry is supposed to be a support for business and industry, not an end unto itself.  I want to see future MIT engineer and science graduates go on to become engineers and scientists, not continue to go to Wall Street to play the game of creating massive wealth for themselves at the expense of others too stupid to see how they are being raped by them.

I am still a firm believer in free markets, but the financial markets are no longer free.  They have been taken over by a criminal element who have so much influence over our government that even their criminal activity is legally sanctioned.  

It is time for the new generation of youth, which I believe to be similar in nature to the Greatest Generation of the '30s and '40s, to rise up and clean up the mess they have been given.  It is in them that our hopes for the future lie.  If all they want to do is follow in the footsteps of the gen-xers who put making money above all else, then the future of America is not a happy one.  But, if they can take their enormous talents and cooperative, collaborative instincts and turn them into real creativity and real wealth creation, as did their similar Greatest Generation cohort, America will be reborn once again and rise from the ashes and soar as the Phoenix.

Queens welcomed

You know that something has officially arrived when the British Royalty sanction it.  The leaders of the British Commonwealth (16 countries) have just unanimously approved the rights of daughters of British monarcha to be the next monarch.  This is kind of a formal recognition of what is obvious, that women are the equals of men in the law, even the laws of succession of the British throne.  


Given that three of the longest lived monarchs in England's and Britain's history are women:  Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II, this doesn't seem too radical even for the Britain.

Cheers!