The Winds of Chance and the Hurricanes of Disaster
By David Glenn Cox
A recent poll found that 57 percent of Americans favored capitalism compared with 19 percent that viewed capitalism negatively. That’s down from 70 percent and up from 9 percent.
My honest opinion is, "You ain’t seen nothing yet."
We have a Democratic President, a Democratically controlled House and Senate and we have zero progressive politics. We have the most moderate Republican President since Nixon who calls himself a Democrat, and if he fails that failure, when visited, will be upon all Democrats. All of us who call ourselves Democrats will be forced to wear the horse collar. This is why liberals and progressives like myself are apoplectic with the President’s centrist policies. The argument of "but Ben Nelson...," and "but Blanch Lincoln...," won’t count for a hill of beans. Failure is failure so why not at least try true Democratic policies?
I’m past sick and tired; I’m angry now. I’m tired of reading day after friggin' day about families losing their homes. I’m angry because it doesn’t have to be like this. The foreclosed homes in many cases end up in the hands of the FDIC, which gives the banks credit to be reimbursed for their loss. So if the government ends up with the property anyway, why are the banks throwing people out into the street? To get their money quicker. Then the banks can buy the house back at a discount when the FDIC auctions it off.
The American people, the homeowners, the mothers and fathers are completely ignored by a system designed to give aid and comfort the banks. FDR’s Homeowners Loan Corporation was just the opposite. They bought the loans from the bank and refinanced them at a lower rate for a longer term and cut the banks out of the equation. That’s progressive politics, what we have now is the Bush program retooled and repackaged but ready to serve the banks with zero down payment and a money back guarantee!
Depending on who you ask, we are in a depression. We are, in my opinion. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, says that we are on the cusp of a depression.
What does the administration say? We are working on it. Gosh, it would be so much worse if we didn’t do what we did. So don’t worry, be happy! We’ve offered tax cuts to business to employ more workers. Record numbers of unemployed, record numbers of home foreclosures, record numbers of commercial foreclosures, record numbers of bank failures, alarm bells should be going off because we the people are in deep, deep trouble. Still we get this: "States can’t count on the federal government for more budget bailouts, the heads of President Barack Obama’s debt commission told governors. States expecting Congress to authorize more assistance are 'going to be left with a very large hole to fill,' said Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform."
Hoover or Obama?
"While it will be necessary in public interest to further increase expenditures during the current fiscal year in aid to unemployment by speeding up construction work and aid to the affected, I can not emphasize too strongly the absolute necessity to defer any other plans for increase of Government expenditures."
Hoover or Obama?
"Our people are responding to these impulses in remarkable degree. The best contribution of government lies in encouragement of this voluntary cooperation in the community. The Government, National, State, and local, can join with the community in such efforts."
They’re both Herbert Hoover, but you couldn’t be sure, could you?
The President’s deficit committee is saying control of the deficit is more important than the wellbeing of children, the elderly and the states. That’s pure Hooverism. Hoover didn’t cause the Great Depression, but he sure became the hood ornament for the depression with his wrong-headed solutions. His concern was with deficit spending while families were going hungry and people were freezing to death in the streets. Living in a nice warm house with a comfy bed and three squares makes it easier to decide that deficit control is more important than public assistance.
So where do the states turn as fall arrives and the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder? Who do the thousands of teachers and police and firemen turn to? Where do the students turn? How do we save ourselves by cutting our throats?
The same deficit committee plans cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and raising the retirement age to 70. Why not raise it to 170? When FDR founded Social Security part of its purpose was to take people out of the work force. Poor people work until they die and if you can take ten or twenty million out of the economy you make room for younger workers and build a decent society in the process. You shrink the number of workers and wages rise. That’s progressive politics!
FDR’s New Deal sent WPA money to the states and the states decided what projects would be undertaken. Now if you happened to have had a big-mouthed Republican congressman who complained about WPA money, I wouldn’t wait on the check. The administration argued, "Why should we be in hurry to send checks to states that didn't want the money in the first place?"
No one on capital hill ever said, "What a nice man" about FDR. He was a ball buster and an arm twister.
There is something catastrophically wrong with the current Democratic administration. They’ve sided with banks over homeowners, with corporations over unions and sided with health insurance companies over patients and providers and the term that comes to mind is Trojan Horse. I see an administration that runs for office with Democratic platitudes and once elected picks up where the last administration left off.
Think I’m crazy? Well, dig this!
"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, citing the threat of a double-dip recession, is asking President Barack Obama to curb new regulations and sell some government-owned resources to raise revenue.
"The Chamber, the biggest lobbying group for U.S. business, plans to release a letter to Obama tomorrow that will also urge him to 'make clear' he will extend (the Bush) tax cuts that are set to expire and lower taxes on corporations, said Stan Anderson, a managing director at the Chamber’s Campaign for Free Enterprise. The letter will be discussed at a 'jobs summit' the group will hold in Washington."
Oh, but that’s just the Chamber of Commerce.
Bloomberg- "Wealthier Americans stand to gain from an election-year fight over extending trillions of dollars in tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush.
"The cost of continuing the tax cuts for the most prosperous Americans would be about $55 billion for one year. By contrast, Democrats and Republicans have battled for months over extending aid to the long-term unemployed, with a $34 billion price tag.
"'Anybody who wants to obstruct right now is in paradise,' Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in an interview yesterday."
Wyden also said that a short-term extension (of tax cuts) arising out of brinkmanship was possible, though it would be a hard sell to Democrats who "don’t want to ratify another round of Bush tax cuts" that they have long opposed.
Hide and watch, the Bush tax cuts will live again.
I believe that capitalism is an engine but an engine without a governor will tear itself to pieces. Not sometimes, but every time.
I believe that government's role in our lives is to protect and maintain our financial wellbeing. Throwing the weakest and the poorest to the wolves in financial hard times to protect the deficit is an abomination. It is indecent and unforgivable and smacks of fascism.
So it seems the question of belief in capitalism is really a question of belief in America’s two party system. Capitalism worked fine in the 40s, 50s and 60s until Republicans deregulated it and Democrats decided that "Me Too" was a good campaign platform. We are in deep, deep trouble and a Democratic administration that thinks the way out is through centrist policies and accommodation with the other side is either delusional or a fraud.
"We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.
"Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.
"We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.
"In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government." (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)