Obama: America's greatest president since Lincoln

When he took office, Barrack Obama inherited two wars, banks suffering a near fatal hangover from a binge on power and greed, a meltdown in the financial system via a faltering economy and unrealistic expectations, unions that still fight for responsibility without accountability, a political system that trades integrity for mediocrity by promoting ignorance, and a population that believes each of us and all of us are entitled without consequence as the common good is trampled by shouts of "where's mine?!?"

And now, from left and the right, come accusations of him of not doing anything.

Health reform. Major economic calamities probably averted. Wars winding down. A shift in responsibility back to where the founding fathers intended it to be, to the Congress. Which just now is blaming Obama for not preventing them from spending too much money.

And he got Bin Laden. For a great account of that, read this story in The New Yorker.

Obama was coolly giving no hint of pressure that weekend as he participated in a black tie dinner and checked in on the operation. Our president has more cool than any 20 of the whiny pundits who are now throwing rotten tomatoes. And he ended the operation by thanking the men involved and without putting up a "Mission Accomplished" banner in a photo stunt on an aircraft carrier. Imagine that. The man also has class.

Oh. What? You weren't paying attention? You all need all those stunts to know what to think?

Obama has always held that Congress has a job to do and should do it. The left says this is lack of leadership, and the right says he is failing the country. In fact, his methods have accomplished much that is visible, and prevented some disasters that, because they were not experienced, tend to be discounted.

More importantly, he has forced some accountability back to the institution where laws are made and votes are taken. Just the way Jefferson and Adams and the others intended it to be. "Lead from behind" has become a way of mocking this president. It also may be his way of forcing others in this country and around the world, those acting like privileged adolescents, to step up and do what they need to do.

I believe Obama may go down in history as the greatest president since Lincoln, and I say this on another day of a severe stock market dive (long overdue, by the way, and reflecting many things, few of them overtly political.) Some medicine does not taste good, and it is time we stopped blaming the doctor.

Maybe not. Maybe all of you are right, that Obama can't lead, that we are doomed, and that it's always the other guy's fault. But I don't think so.

Time will tell. Not the headlines of this week or this year, but of several years, and decades. Because that is how long it takes to see the impact of actions on a country as vast and complicated as ours.

Class warfare

In the Wall Street Journal last week, a writer whined that Republicans, at least, had not resorted to "class warfare" in the debt ceiling/budget debate. More of this sentiment can be had from Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

Mr. Heninger is not opposed to class warfare, mind you: very recently, he blamed the working class' faltering morality for their lower-drifting standard of living. But Mr. Henninger is a hypocrite and a mouth piece, and what can one expect of an employee of a (formerly great) paper now owned by that ultimate advocate of class warfare , Rupert Murdoch?

Yes, teachers unions have harmed education. We all get that, Mr. Henninger. That does not mean that banks and insurance companies and big pharma have not abused the power of their purchasing power in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate to declare war on their customers.

The fact is, there IS a class war going on, and banks that pushed "liar's loans" are no less at war with the general public than tobacco companies that used cartoons to sell cigarettes to poor children and lied under oath about the results of their own research into cancer, all the while shifting the health cost of the addiction onto the taxpayer.

You don't have to call that class warfare. But it fits.

Or Golden Sacks, which managed to get taxpayers to bail them out (directly, and through AIG) into a year of great profits, while our local banks had to stop making car, house and business loans. Golden and others tranched their way into unforgivable risk with our money. Lost it. Then got us to pay them back. Some of them should be in jail, and that they are not is because they have wealth and power.

You don't have to call that class warfare. But it fits.

That the wealthy class cries out that their victims should not indulge in "class warfare" is an old tactic, often employed: "Thou shalt not speak any truth that I label the speaking of which as immoral." This gives the wealthy ownership of the playing field, and the rules, while they rip us off and try to get us to stop talking about how they have rigged the system.

It is sophistry, casuistry and it should be confronted as such.

We call foul. Corporate kleptomaniacs are hurting America. It was George Bush and his gang, not Barrack Obama, who put this country into this great financial peril. It is the bitterness of the right wing, exposed too often as amoral extortionists (Enron was NOT the exception), that we hear now in these laments about class warfare.

Yes, we need education reform. We also need bank reform. We need campaign finance reform. We need Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court. And we need real journalism in America.

I want a dumb pipe

I don't want to be a captive of AT&T or Verizon. I want them to serve me.

In Europe, the owner of T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, prohibits its subscribers from using Skype in its terms and conditions. AT&T and Verizon would love to be able to impose the same terms and conditions here.

What's it going to be, Congress? Oregon representatives DeFazio, Wu, Walden, Blumenauer and Schrader need to stand up and protect the market from the power of the duopoly. You too, Wyden and Merkley. Be heard on this.

I love the iPhone, and I love my Evo 4G and my Nexus S. I think it is wonderful to be able to buy these phones with all the features preloaded and have a two-year contract and a high value added by Sprint or AT&T or Verizon. They should be able to sell that.

But I want more choice. I want to be able to use the phone I want in the way I want and pay a fair price for access that I control.

I don 't want AT&T or Verizon to dumb down my phone so I can't use it on my home's wifi network the way they do now. I want to use my home's broadband conveniently to make a call and not be forced to kludge a solution.

I don't want AT&T or Verizon to cut sweetheart deals with Samsung or HTC or Motorola so that I can't get the phone I want to work on the technology I want, the way they do now.

I want to pay for megabytes I choose to download and upload, and not be forced to pay for data sent by automatic programs that AT&T or Apple or Google have loaded on my phone that suck up my personal data and sneak it to their servers without my knowledge.

I don't want NFL or NASCAR or anybody else's bloatware on my phone, or at least be able to get rid of it, which I can't do now. At what point does "protect network security" become an excuse for "keep competition out?"

And by the way, I want to pay for my call minutes in tenths: a call that lasts two minutes and six seconds should be billed at 2.1 minutes, not three, which is nothing but a 30% theft by the phone company.

If the telecom's don't want to become "dumb pipes," then I want our government to ensure, through the mechanism of the free market, that I have the right to choose a "dumb pipe" for my mobile phone and data services.

In fact, I need to be able to choose between two dumb pipes, either GSM or CDMA technology. I want to be able to use any phone I want on whichever pipe that I choose. I want to own the phone, and be able to customize it in any way that I want, use it in any legal way that I want.

The current system is being abused, protections for the consumer are few, because the market has failed to be transparent enough to drive the abuses out through the mechanism of consumer choice.

That will get worse if the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is approved.

We need competition in the market place and a government that has reduced barriers to entry into the market of access to airwaves, "spectrum," that is owned and licensed by "We the People."

Our founding fathers would have been as outraged by the threat of corporate power as they were of royal power had such a thing existed in their day. It is up to us to stand up and demand our rights in a this new world. We do this by protecting the free market, doing what we need to foster competition and freedom of choice.

It is time our representatives in government took the threat to the future of communications seriously. We cannot let the consolidation continue by those who seek a monopoly. It is bad for markets, bad for America.

Hooray for Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) who earlier this week held a news conference urging regulators to block the deal, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). Thank you for your free market stance that helps small business and consumers.

Power corrupts, even the economic power of private enterprise. The best antidote for that corruption is competition, functioning markets, and effective oversight.

Wake up.

Verizon is complicit

In a story (read it here) on May 24, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline "These Companies Hate the AT&T/T-Mobile Merger," it was noted by reporter Shira Ovide that Verizon, which would drop from largest to second largest wireless company after AT&T swallows T-Mobile, has not come out against the proposed merger.

Duh.

Ovide notes the Verizon CEO is saying only “We’re not going to get distracted by this.”

Ovide refers to analysts who opine that the reason for Verizon's calm reaction is that "Verizon Wireless ... could get a lift if AT&T strips low-cost rival T-Mobile from the market. At the same time, AT&T could be distracted for a year or more securing all the necessary government clearances for the deal, and then integrating T-Mobile into the fold. The lull might help Verizon poach subscribers from its biggest competitor."

Sometimes it is hard to believe what passes for journalism. Distracted? Please.

One would think that a reporter from the Wall Street Journal would understand the value of a duopoly (like a monopoly, but with two) to one of the duopolists. In other words, if AT&T becomes the only GSM wireless company, and is able to hammer suppliers and gouge consumers, then Verizon, as by far the largest of the CDMA wireless group, would also benefit. Even without direct collusion.

Markets require competition to work effectively. AT&T and Verizon are doing everything they can in the media, in Texas, and before the U.S. Senate to cloud the issues.

"We don't know if the market is best served by three or four carriers," burbles one wireless exec. "If we don't have more spectrum, ambulances will be unreachable," growls another from AT&T.

Nonsense. This merger is about AT&T sucking up spectrum now, dollars and dollars later, from a distortion of a market that rides on licenses to use airways owned … by… us.

We need more choices of which carrier to use, not fewer choices. We need three or four GSM carriers, and three or four CDMA carriers, for there to be a truly competitive "free" market. There is less competition if there are only three, if Sprint hobbles along as a distant 3rd, or two if Verizon sucks up Sprint.

Verizon is sanguine about the AT&T and T-Mobile merger because Verizon executives know that even as number two, they will still get a larger slice of porker pie than they do now, even if it is not the largest one on the table.

The U.S. government should protect consumers and small business and refuse to go along with this merger. Communication is the economy's lifeblood now more than ever. Republicans should live up to their ideals of doing what is good for business, and that does not mean just doing good for one of their largest political donors. Where the hell is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

AT&T was broken up once before. We should look at this power grab as a reason to consider doing it again.

Republicans are anti-business

The right wing is still pushing the message, "government is bad, people are good." Less government, lower taxes, more freedom, let free markets work.

The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.

But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.

Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.

Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?

"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.

Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.

In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.

Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.

Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.

The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."

Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.

They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.

So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.

Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.

Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.

Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."

There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.

And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.

Monopolists harm America

A number of politicians (mostly Republican) have come out in support of the AT&T / T-Mobile merger. But their arguments do not make sense. Primarily, they cite benefits to America of competition in wireless before the merger. These very benefits would decrease if the merger goes through, despite false promises by AT&T.

These politicians are not in favor of the "free market." They are advocating a consolidation that would be bad for the market, and bad for America, while benefiting a monopolist in an industry where freedom is vital for economic security.

America has had to act against monopolists and oligopolies in the past. It needs to be vigilant again, and do what it must to preserve competition in the market place. Like railroads and the oil companies two centuries ago and AT&T itself in the last century, a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile would result in less innovation, higher prices, and less freedom of information. This process is common when new technologies foster a consolidation of power.

In fact, we need more communication companies in America, not fewer. We need more competition, not less. Much of the innovation in America's communications industry came after AT&T was broken up last time.

AT&T and T-Mobile both run on the GSM technology, most common in much of the world. The other two major carriers, Sprint and Verizon, run via CDMA. By allowing only one major player on the GSM side, there will be no one to challenge AT&T if a technological innovation comes to GSM.

AT&T would be the sole buyer of GSM technology in the U.S., giving it monopolist power over cell phone makers and software providers, to the detriment of consumers.

It is extremely expensive to build out a new cell network, acquire customers and put in place a cell phone company, and nearly impossible to acquire radio spectrum on which cell phones communicate.

In economics speak, the "barriers to entry" into the market are extremely high, and would be more so if dominated by a company is as well-heeled and politically powerful as AT&T.

Communications and information flow are the life blood of our nation, and becoming more critical every day. Control should not be allowed to slide toward fewer and fewer companies, especially when vertical integration may allow them to control what we see, how we see it, what we can buy and how easy it might be to find it.

It is naive to think that AT&T in that position would not use its power to fill its coffers at the expense of anyone and everyone. It would be its duty, in fact. We expect companies to make the highest profit allowable under the law.

For these reasons, government must preserve the free market in any way it can, and right now, the best way to do so is to deny the AT&T and T-mobile merger. The alternative, over the long run, is some form of regulation, which would have fewer benefits and higher cost.

If T-Mobile is to be sold, it should go to another company -- Google or Apple come to mind, though there may be issues there. Berkshire-Hathaway, perhaps. But its independence should be preserved.

In a market as difficult to foster competition as mobile communications, a market as critical to our future, America can not afford to allow monopolists to gain control.

The Snide

We have now seen how much arrogance money can buy. And it's not a pretty sight.

Donald Trump, will you please sit down and quit disturbing the other children?

Donald Trump is a racist. He is a bully. He is a joke of his own making. He is not very bright, and has that irritating middle school narcissism shared by other half-bright wing dings like Sarah Palin.

In fact, there is something just so middle school about that whole clique of Palin and Trump and Bachmann and to a lesser extent, Boehner. Something about the way they back bite, curl their lip at the rest of us, say stupid things and accuse people who point out the stupidity of "hating" or being envious or something else unrelated, like, or, or, or like, you know, they have a bad complexion and their mom, you know, drives an old Ford.

As if they get to say what they want and not be challenged because of who they are.

They get their slavish friends to nominate them for class president because, like, you know, they will put on just the most fabulous dance and play their favorite music, you know, and like if those other people don't like it they just should have been elected and maybe not come and they are just such a drag anyway ...

It's not that they are on the right: There are many, many wonderfully astute thinkers on the right, men and women with good ideas and the ability to articulate them. And it's not that the left doesn't have its own heaping helping of hubris.

But instead of a debate about ideas, we have these plastic Barbie and Ken dolls with their plastic smiles and plastic hair saying stupid things about ... birth certificates? Whether kids who knew him in elementary school remembered the president?

Oh, just shut up. You are tiresome and annoying and if you didn't have money or self generated momentum, no one would bother with you. Very few of those paying attention are friends. They don't really like you, either.

Can anyone, anyone? really compare Sarah Palin and Donald Trump to Obama? To Bill Clinton? To George H.W. Bush? To Eisenhower? FDR? Lincoln? Jefferson, etc?

Ever since the simulacrum Ronald Reagan, senile for a good portion of his presidency, was in office and the right realized it was only necessary to have an image of a president to be the face of policy, an actor instead of an actual person, we have suffered this train of Presidential presenters from the right.

Somewhat like news presenters, standing in front of a camera wearing a slicker in a hurricane, posing as journalists. Speaking of which, to the so-called journalists of America: WTF?

Needed now more than ever, you have ceded your responsibilities to Fox and the Huffington Post? Why are Al Jazeera and Jon Stewart the most reasonable representatives of the Fourth Estate? Where are you? Where have you gone?

Rep. Boehner to sell highways

House Speaker John A. Boehner wants to sell key U.S. highways to private interests that contributed to his reelection campaign.

Interstate 5 from Mexico to Canada would be cut into four sections and "privatized." The first section would run from Mexico through Los Angeles; the second from Los Angeles to Redding, Californa; the third from Redding to Portland, Oregon, and the last from Portland to the Canadian border.

"The sale of this underutilized asset will help with the deficit," Boehner said. "Private enterprise will do a better job."

"Transportation is under attack from both state and federal governments," Boehner said. "These bureaucrats have never set foot in a car factory, and many of them don't even like to drive."

Boehner also says the new owners of the blacktop should be able to set separate speed limits for individual vehicles. The proposal would allow Transport Inc. to "sell" higher speeds to the drivers of BMWs and Mercedes, while limiting the speeds of vehicles from other manufacturers. The same would be true of larger vehicles, such as trucks.

Some independent truckers have worried that the owners of Transport Inc., which has put in a bid for the Oregon section of the interstate, also own trucking companies. They say that Transport Inc. could set higher speed limits for their own trucks, or even limit the number of competing trucks from smaller companies.

"There are other highways if they choose to use them," Boehner said of those concerns.

He also said these complaints actually come from regulators in Washington who oppose the free market. “We see this threat in how the (govt.) is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the highway system,” Mr. Boehner said.

The idea that competition might actually be reduced by monopoly ownership of I5, constructed largely with federal highway dollars, did not concern the Republican.

“The last thing we need, in my view, is the US Department of Transportation serving as traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over trucking companies who have been serving their communities with transportation for decades,” he said to loud applause.

For more on Boehner's remarks, see this.

Boehner's calculating ignorance

If one needs more proof that the Republican Party capitalizes on the venality of its more vulnerable members (yeah, I know, given Sarah Palin that's hard to believe), Republican leader John Boehner provided it this week.

This Sunday on "Meet the Press," host David Gregory asked Boehner if he thought Obama was a Christian and a citizen. Boehner said he did. But about the conspiracy nut jobs who think Obama is a Muslim and was born in Kenya, Boehner said "... it's not my job to tell the American people what to think ... The American people have the right to think what they want to think."

What a facile, manipulative thing to say. Of course people have the right to think stupid things, and not just Americans. The question was whether Boehner has a responsibility to "inform their ignorance," in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course he does. He is not a national leader if he does not. Facts are not matters of opinion or preference. If we can not agree on simple facts, we do not have "One Nation indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for all" (the original wording of the pledge).

But Boehner is not a national leader, he is a right wing flack who would rather use ignorance to further a shallow political agenda. "Informing their ignorance" is politically inconvenient; correcting that ignorance might allow people to think more calmly about more important issues.

"... he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong," said Jefferson. In saying it is not his job to speak truth to his troops, by hiding behind a shallow rhetorical gimmick, Boehner shows the world what he is, and what the Republican Party has become.

In this, Boehner has more in common with those who spread lies and hate about America than he does with the founding fathers of this great nation.

Bank reform and Golden Sacks of crap

Too big to fail is just what it means: any financial reform that leaves standing commercial institutions that are "too big to fail" is doomed.

Any reform that fails to bring these monsters down to a size where they can be controlled, instead of them controlling us, fails to protect the American wage earner.

And just to be clear, breaking up the giant oligopoly banks is about as "free market" a policy as we can envision. Government is not the enemy of business, but it is a referee and protector of the market. When one player, like Goldman Sachs, becomes so powerful that it can successfully manipulate the economy in which it plays, the market is broken and needs reform.

Large investment banks command an horrific percentage of corporate profit in the U.S. (as opposed to our beleaguered and important community banks, the ones that would provide loans to you and me if Chase and company had not sucked up all the dollars). Read more here.

They buy and sell politicians of each major party with a stroke of a pen. They send their minions to work for the regulators. They profit from our hardship.

It is time to recognize that, like the oil and rail monopolies of the past, large investment banks need to be brought down to a size that would allow for greater competition, more transparency, and to allow the market to punish any them, even with failure, for bad decisions. They need to be broken up and a stable, competitive market restored.

The current proposed legislation does not go nearly far enough.