mdibrezzo's Posts (2)

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Winning!"

Posted by mdibrezzo on April 22, 2011 at 12:13pm

What does corporate America, the Democratic Party, Wall Street, the banking industry, trial lawyers, teacher’s unions, various czars and government bureaucrats, SEIU and even the Republican Party all have in common with Charlie Sheen?  Well, duh!  Winning!  They’re all of them, winning of course and they’re probably tired of pretending like they’re not special, like they’re not, all of them rock stars from Mars!

And it’s just that simple.  Congress struggles trying to pass an additional 1.65 trillion dollars of deficit spending.  It would appear that the main stream corporate and political establishment along with a delusional Charlie Sheen are indeed winning and will continue to win as long as those of us in the middle class can be forced to pay for it.  And in so far as winning implies someone else is losing, who might we infer the losers to be?  Did I mention who is paying for it all?

Well let’s just say it isn’t Jack Welsh’s General Electric.  And, as if to begin drawing a pattern, it isn’t Whirlpool either, or any of the new, publicly subsidized energy companies, or electric car companies.  Go ahead stick a propeller on your hat and the chances are the government will send you a check.  If you can tie a battery to it and happen to be a group of Chinese investors we will call you a company and you’ll make a tidy fortune shortly before going out of business leaving who else, but the American tax payer holding the bag.  

Every government policy denotes winners and losers.  Now do you begin to discern a pattern?
Outside of politics none of it is required to make any sense as none of it is intended to withstand the vigor of serious examination.  How could it?  The science is flawed and as if that weren't enough, the outcomes were always predestined to be erroneous due to the absurdity of the mathematical assumptions.  In fact, the very business models themselves are only viable as long as the government keeps pouring in revenues and subsidies, which are simply and again, but more tax payer monies by another name.

To ask what all these political initiatives have to do with money borrowed in the tax payer’s name is to examine what we have allowed our government to become.  Ponzi schemes and outright fraud can easily be made to look enough like poorly executed business plans.  Invariably, when the music stops the money is gone with little to no effect on the supposed stated purpose, but the political constituency always lingers wrapped in some moral imperative, waiting for the next gravy train with an air of indignant impatience.

Meanwhile, the history of poorly administered government programs seem to accomplish little other than to prove liars and cheats sure can figure.  And in case you’re wondering, there is no law only politics and politics is the art of constituencies and coalitions.  Politics is all about money.

And it’s tried and true politics, the confiscation and redistribution of other people’s money.   As President Obama himself has reminded us, elections have consequences and in case you’re wondering where we are going with all this, well unlike Charlie Sheen and our elected, public officials and all the special interests they represent; the middle class isn’t winning.  They are beginning to realize more government isn’t the solution.  Government is the problem.  

As if further proof of all this fraud, theft and waste, putrid, political corruption and rank, governmental cronyism were required and before we completely lose sight of the topic of Ponzi schemes, ask yourself what distinguishes the Social Security Administration from Bernie Madoff‘s operation.  The only discernable difference is that the Social Security Administration’s fraud is being operated under the color of authority, which is, but another way of saying at the direction of our elected officials.

Every “Reasonable,” read establishment voice (Winning!  Winning!) to include media analysts, or talk show hosts on just about every broadcast, or cable network are attempting to influence events.  That’s their job I suppose, to control the public discourse, as in advising the general, public disposition.  They provide an odd mixture of "News" and entertainment and I would postulate, they are there to control, mold and shape public opinion.  They control the public discourse by editing and by the selection of topics and commentators and at this particular juncture, the sum total of their collective wisdom happens to be against a government shut down.  So much for a diversity of voices in a pluralistic, open society.  Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem to think a government shut down would be counterproductive, albeit for different reasons.

And yet, so many Americans disagree.  Perhaps it is precisely because they are not rock stars from Mars and they certainly are not winning.  They are losing in fact and they are painfully aware of it.  A significant percentage of the American workforce is unemployed and even more are underemployed with little prospect for improvement.  Overall they tend to be pessimistic about the future, the country in general and most troubling of all, their children’s future.  Even the most responsible, disciplined and successful among them have already lost a rather large percentage of their savings and have been forced to watch helplessly as their homes have deprecated in value.  

The real estate market has yet to determine a bottom as banks refuse to acknowledge losses on non performing mortgages.  This accounting gimmick is exactly the route Japan’s banks took when their real estate bubble collapsed.  That was over fifteen years ago and the Japanese economy has yet to recover.

Meanwhile the Federal Reserve, on behalf of their primary clients, America’s largest banks continues to depress and hold interest rates well over two points below effective zero.  The spread allows banks to purchase T Bills and to build up reserves, which is to say further shift the burden of their financial collapse onto the backs of the middle class, a good many of whom are already under water, struggling to barely hang on.  

Never mind that the most irresponsible and speculative participants have long since just walked away from impossible mortgages on properties with declining values.  With little, or no skin in the game, they were always just in for the ride.  It’s as if children were induced with narcotic candy to sign impossible financial contracts and now their parents were being held liable under force of law.

The Federal Reserve’s determined debasement of the dollar in favor of the banking industry and the resultant inflation has accounted for the loss of well over twenty percent of middle and lower, working class savings so far.  In most cases, these savings represent the better part of a married couple’s life’s work, which can’t and won’t be replaced.  Interest income, which an older generation relies upon to supplement Social Security benefits so as to support themselves in retirement and to pay the inevitable medical expenses has been confiscated, or more directly, stolen, once again under the color of authority and transferred to the big banks and Wall Street's financial industry.

It’s been well over a decade now the Fed has been playing hide the ball with a duplicitous policy.  Their congressional mandate is to maintain a stable currency and minimize unemployment.  They have willfully demurred on both in favor of reestablishing the profitability and viability of the big banks and favored financial firms.  Do you think it coincidence that Wall Street’s big banks and financial industry got the TARP funds while the American people get to stand in the rain after the train wreck? 

The prospect of hyper inflation continues to alarm the WSJ’s editorial board even as food and energy prices squeeze the middle and lower classes in the here and now and the unemployed continue to stare into the abyss of a jobless recovery.  A government shut down occurs to some of us as a damn good thing and the sooner the better.  Maybe we might be able to catch our breath, if the government were to shut down?

Maybe some of the establishment (Winning!  Winning!) needs to feel a little more of our pain?  House Speaker John Boehner and the Republican Party don’t want a fight.  That‘s understandable, but they are going to get one anyway.  If they don’t fight the Democrats in the school yard; they will fight the Tea Party on the way home in the primaries and maybe in the general as well.  Politicians always want to be all things to all people, but the Republican Party can’t serve two masters at the same time and they sure aren't serving our interests.

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2012 Michele Bachman

Posted by mdibrezzo on April 21, 2011 at 11:02am
The President’s State of the Union speech may be in the news cycle, but 2012 is the real date certain and Michele Bachman, for her part was prescient and quite astute to position the Tea Party’s response to the President as separate and apart from that of the Republican Party.  The actual response itself only further served to underline the distinction. Ms. Bachman spoke to and for the people who just happened to put the Republicans back in office.  

Republican Congressman Ryan by contrast offered profuse and repeated condolences to “Gabby” as if the shooting in Tucson had anything at all to do with the State of the Union, or the Republican Party‘s plans going forward. Conversely, Ms. Bachman spoke directly, critically and unambiguously of the Administration’s failed policies and the pressing need to fix the economy and deal with the deficit.  She spoke of we the people and the crisis facing our nation.  
Congressman Ryan by contrast offered poached eggs on melba toast.  Perhaps tomorrow he seemed to promise, the Republican Party might offer us a pat of margarine.

From the Republican perspective, all of this is understandably vexing.  The implications of positioning the Tea Party Movement outside of the Republican Party clearly makes them uncomfortable.  Nonetheless, as much as Republicans might like to pretend otherwise, they are neither of, nor did they spring from the Tea Party movement.  Nor were they necessarily the people’s choice in the last election and Ms. Bachman is correct to further position the movement by drawing the distinction.

The Republican victory in last November’s elections was simply the result of our institutional, default setting, historical and structural.  Again, Republicans would like to pretend otherwise, but as a class of political professionals they do so at their own peril.  They are certainly welcome to become part of the Tea Party movement, or they can begin to position themselves with an eye to co-opting and thereby undermining the movement.  Those are the choices.

Michele Bachman’s separate response demonstrated that both she and the Tea Party remain poised to serve notice of termination.  Republicans simply will not be allowed to serve two masters at the same time.  The  political calculus and calculations will be shrewd and I wish the pols luck with all that, but outside the mob is milling and they are comprised of voters.

A successfully germinated seed, the Tea Party must now take root and establish itself firmly in the political garden of good and evil.  It’s either that, or  fall victim, choked and squeezed out by the likes of Trent Lott and Karl Rove.  It can be a tricky business stirring up the little people and it would appear that’s exactly what the vested interests encouraged in a frightful and hasty response to the radical and determined agenda of the Obama Administration’s proposed social revolution.  

And while it is generally understood that any approaching juggernaut tends to focus the mind, it is also true that this time the establishment response may have been too cute by half.  Parts hastily sewn together, the body politic of revolution past was laid upon a table and the table elevated up into a stormy, media night and when the monster moved, it became clear to everyone that indeed, life had been created.  Now, to the chagrin of these same political operatives, this political, popular Frankenstein has taken on a life of its own.  

He’s off to Congress in a new twist to an old story, what?  And it’s no good expecting the villagers to act as a posse, to restore the old order for he is of them and they he.  It was out of their historical graveyard after all, that his corpse was disinterred.  It is rather amusing you’ll have to admit, watching as the village folk hand the monster a pitch fork, another the torch.  That’s the downside, the moral hazard to being part of a ruling class elite.

Inevitably, rulers tend to lose touch with the people.  The initial degree of separation will widen.  Words such as open, pluralistic and democratic tend to fall away meaningless when decisions are made by an elite under the real time duress of crisis. It is reminiscent of a Las Vegas casino in that the owners expect the house will always win.  Otherwise the business model wouldn’t exist.  And make no mistake, this collection, coordination and direction of public resources, which is government is a business model all its own, big business and it’s run by and for the elite ruling class, but financed by you, the tax payer.

The question, like some proverbial worm suddenly shorn a quarter of its life savings has turned.  At least that is the concern of these same elites.  They would prefer the American people roll over and go back to sleep now that the Obama agenda seems checked, their own, parochial purposes temporarily served.  But the two party system has played “Monkey in the middle” with the American voter one too many times.  Or like Caesar will the political establishment, the arm of the ruling class continue to thwart democratic reform through the covert and nefarious tactic of divide and conquer?  They most certainly will, if they can get away with it.   

They just might want to be careful what they wish for this time.  Tunisia has shown us how quickly a political order can be upset.  Egyptians have taken to the streets with great effect.  Here at home the weather is about to change again and there can be no doubt, but it’s a hard, cold rain that’s going to fall.  That will not enhance stability.  The first fifty years of this century were always about managing the decline as well as the weaknesses as we change paradigms and it hasn’t been going especially well.  Both political and business incompetence in conjunction with an over riding, base corruption has brought us to this present juncture of systemic financial crisis on the verge of collapse.  

The supposedly, leaderless Tea Party Movement seems to be developing a leadership all on its own and very nicely too, thank you.  And depending on where you sit, that will mean Congresswoman Bachman and Senator Paul will either become a very big problem, or our very salvation.  The time is 2012 just as the time was once 1776 and as any student of American colonial history can tell you, our “Founding fathers” were forced to run hard just to catch up with the American people so they could lead.  “Time and tide…“ as they say, "...wait for no man."  Much less a political party and so be it today.
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