Dishonest Greg Walden

Rep. Greg Walden has shown his core dishonesty so flagrantly that even Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives (Walden represents AT&T, drug companies and the insurance industry) are backing away from his smell.

The news is everywhere, but we offer this story from Oregonlive, the online version of The Oregonian. Essentially, Walden attacked a part of President Obama's budget that was to reduce the deficit. It has to do with how cost of living increases are calculated and was initially proposed by Republicans.

So Walden trying to use it to get seniors angry at Obama backfired and caused Republican leaders to call Walden immediately on the carpet.

Walden is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, in charge of raising funds for Republicans to get elected, so he is in campaign mode and did this for cheap political points. Walden is the type of political hack that gives politics its stink: the destructive, tear-opponents-down-any-way-you-can kind of nonsense that voters across America rejected last November.

That's aside from being in the pocket of corporations which profit from monopolizing services essential for Americans (look at his record and draw the lines right back to market-destroying activism).

But there is much to enjoy here. For the act of attacking President Obama, Walden not only faces the wrath of House conservatives and leadership, but at the same time was labeled a "Rino" by conservative action committees for opposing something that would reduce the budget deficit.

Central Oregon should be part of an effort to refuse Walden another term in Congress so he can go to work lobbying for AT&T and make the income he deserves from work that he loves.

Careful, Mr. President

Mr. President:

Two things in the news over the last couple of days concern me. First, your proposal to Republicans on avoiding the fiscal cliff includes $1.6 trillion in tax increases and $50 Billion in stimulus spending. This seems like a bit of a “cram down,” as in something you cram down your opponents throat.

Given the stonewalling and muck Republicans drug you through with the avowed goal of making you in their words "a one-term president," I don’t blame you. Not one bit. Giving them a knuckle rub probably feels pretty good.

But is it right for the country? We are coming out of the recession. To avoid becoming guilty of everything the Republicans said you already were guilty of in terms of potential damage to the economy from fiscal imprudence, now is the time to think about going after the deficit in a year or two, not adding to the debt.

You rescued the ship, now steady as she goes. The deficit is not a single-generation problem, it is a problem for our children's grandchildren. Saving the country for them would be a legacy worthy of Lincoln, and only you can do it.

My second concern is you opposing the bill that would grant work visas for 50,000 educated foreigners who could greatly benefit the United States. Whoa… really? These are the very people who will build the very economy of the future that you have supported, another move that could cement your legacy. 

Please reconsider. Yes, different people make different contributions. A PhD from India will contribute more than a maid from Guatemala. That does not mean the PhD is worth more as a human being, only that their contribution will produce greater returns. If you have to give up one for the other, just do it, as we say out here in Oregon.

Finally, I am going to tell you to be wary of the advice of friends in your second term. Many will be looking for payback, others will be looking a political windfall. Success for you doesn't work like that. Yes, they stood by you and were often right. Smart people, they helped redirect the pendulum and were invaluable. But you are in danger now of being pushed too fast in a direction where we are already gaining speed.

Slowly, sir.

Oh, Mr. Ro-money

On Tuesday night I stayed up for the final election results and saw Gov. Romney's concession speech. I was impressed, actually, and for an entire day felt that America may have actually had a choice between two qualified candidates. And I was done with this election.

Then came Wednesday. Then Romney proved he was just as out of touch as has been written here, as he was portrayed by the Obama campaign, as voters finally decided. We got his unvarnished opinion, given with nothing to lose, nothing to cover. On Wednesday, Mr. Romney proved he was not right for America. Read it here.

According to him, Romney's loss was due to gifts of education to students, gifts of medical care worth $10,000 a year for them poor Mexicans, gifts of free abortions to women. Obama gave those gifts and that is why he won, according to Romney. Why, the responsible Romney couldn't compete! He had the interest of ALL Americans in mind when he guaranteed free money to the top 1%. My god, what a putz.

Romney lied when he apologized for the remark that 47% of Americans were freeloaders. That is exactly the fiction he believes and that is how he would have governed. He just repeated it to the nation through his disappointed campaign contributors. Romney planned to make life harder for the poor and decimate the middle class in the foolish belief that the top 1% are the only social class worth coddling.

Other Republicans are trying to put as much distance between themselves and Governor Gaffe as they can, but Ro-money has already given Democrats heavy artillery for the next election. That may be too bad, because by then we may need the austerity and good ideas from the right.

Good ideas, not the posturing, lies, half-truths, and misinformation spread by the Romney campaign and rejected by more than half the country in 2012.

America, we have much to be proud of this week.

Four reasons why Romney lost

Pundits across the political spectrum are analyzing, dissecting, and opinionating why Mitt Romney lost the election to be President of these United States.

They are making it far too complex:

1) No tax returns. C'mon, what's with the off-shore bank accounts?

2) No plan. Magical thinking is not a plan.

3) No honesty. Etch-A-Sketch was the only truth spoken by the Romney camp.

4) Obama won. The Dem's brought game and Karl Rove brought… nothin'.


It's time to move on.

Romney promises time travel

Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney promised yesterday that he would guarantee time travel to all Americans by the end of his first term.

"Any American who chooses to travel through time will be able to do so. This is a freedom and America was built on freedom. Only I can do this for America and I have a plan to do this for all Americans."

Asked what that plan might be, Romney said "There is no reason for me to go into the details. If I provide any detail, my opponents, who oppose me and therefore oppose time travel, will simply start picking apart my plans and prevent me from getting elected and being able to provide the time travel I have promised all Americans."

Romney went on to say that "President Obama has failed to deliver on time travel. He has held America back from exercising their freedom to travel where they want, when they want. It is time for a change."

Questioned whether time travel was even possible, Romney said "I don't believe just in the possible. I believe in the unlimited possibilities of the American people. My experience in the private sector provided me with the experience to create jobs. That is what this election is about, the jobs I have experienced and my experience creating jobs. Millions of jobs for hard-working Americans.

"My opponent, the president who some worry might not have been born in America, does not like jobs. He does not want people to have jobs. All he wants is big government, voters who want free stuff and will never vote for me so screw'em, and no time travel for them, either."

Romney's running mate Rep. Paul Ryan was speaking to Council for American Families when told of Romney's new promise. 

Ryan said that time travel should first be offered to Americans "who want to go back and undo bad choices, make better decisions. Even in cases of justifiable rape, rather, where the claims of a raped woman can be justified after they are proven by the evidence gathered at the scene, as it were, which would be much easier with time travel, that woman can now choose whether she gets pregnant or she might even choose to keep herself out of harms way before the alleged rape even occurs."

Ryan said time travel could even result in the prevention of pregnancy when the fetus grows up to be homosexual. "No abortion and and no deviant. That's a win-win," Ryan said.

Romney did say his concept for time travel is based on the idea of "getting government out of the way of companies that will provide jobs for everyone and the safest, most cost efficient travel through time the world has ever known. Free markets provide competition that works to free markets from excessive government regulations that prevent the freedom to compete that all Americans demand and deserve," Romney said.

"The president, who once said that he favored opportunity for all Americans in a socialistic effort to redistribute wealth through progressive taxes that I never paid anyway, opposes Americans having jobs or traveling through time."

The Obama campaign was cautious in their response. "That Governor  Romney promises time travel by the end of his first term makes sense of so many things," said David Axelrod, Obama campaign spokesman. He would not elaborate.

The politics of humiliation

Writing for the New York Times on Tuesday, January 23, 2012, Thomas L. Friedman cautioned Russian leadership:

Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow…

I can't be the only reader struck deeply by the irony of Friedman's words. Russia? He was writing about the United States of America!

That's what the Occupy Movement was about. That's what the Tea Party is about. It's about humiliation. It's about the existence of special classes of people in America who get to live by different rules, who have to obey fewer laws, who do not have to face consequences for their actions.

Friedman writes: "…nothing spurred the protests (in Russia) more than the daily experience of Muscovites having to sit in traffic while a car with a flashing blue light carrying some Putin crony behind tinted glass speeds past. 'It is all about dignity,' said (Aleksei) Navalny. 'Who are these people? Why don’t they care about our rights? It doesn’t matter at all how good a career you build. You will stand in this traffic, and these people and their sons will drive past you with their blue lights.' ”

Who are these people in America who get to profit from manipulating our mortgages, get bailed out with our tax dollars and take a small bit of their huge bonuses to buy a Mercedes that cost more than the houses repossessed by my local bank?

Who are these people who lie to Congress while flaunting the so-called free market with monopolies on medications or cell phones, who corrupt congressman from Oregon, who write obscure state laws taking away the rights of the average man and spend millions of their obscene wealth buying state legislators to pass them?

The Koch brothers want us to breathe the foul pollution of their profit and go without health care when it starts to kill us. Goldman Sachs wants the keys to our bank and for us to admire them when they run off with our money. Rupert Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal want us to consume the crap they charade as news so we will be unable to vote as the informed citizens idealized by Thomas Jefferson.

Murdoch has broken privacy laws and he is free. Executives at Goldman lied to Congress and they are free. The Koch brothers should be jailed for crimes against democracy, and they are free!

It's humiliating. The privileged of America have their laws and impose a different set on us. The "Bush Dynasty." The very concept is nauseating. Since when did America succumb to adulation of royalty? I don't care if it is a Bush or a Kennedy: when did the name grow to mean more than accomplishment?

The right wing has successfully portrayed poor black Americans, Latinos and illegal immigrants as special classes who don't have to live by the rules. Those who believe these groups are privileged need to trade places with someone living in the ghetto or barrio whose children live a far harsher life than many can even imagine.

The left wing has fumbled the ball every time they point at the "one percent" and then get hit with the charge of "class warfare." Get over it, Liberals. Yes, it may be class warfare, but it wasn't the lower classes who started it. It was bankers flouting a system they own to rake in hundreds of millions while many of us can't afford to see a doctor.

The poor white guy driving a pick-up with a gun rack to one unemployment line after another is as tired of the humiliation as the poor black mother unable to buy a car to get to a job. They are on the same side. The wrong side. The humiliation side.

My pet phrase has been that unless you give people opportunity, they will take it with either a ballot or a bullet. Clever, but inadequate. Friedman puts his finger on it exactly. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in politics.

It's long past time to bring that message home.

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.

Net neutrality and Republican pandering

It appears that Republican knee-jerk support of giant corporations over the rights of ordinary people remains intact.

In an article from BBC News (read it here), it was noted that six Republican senators have introduced legislation to punish the Federal Communications Commission for keeping oligopolies from choking off access to the Internet.

Oh, they dress it up. They say there is no apparent problem.

Yeah, there is no apparent problem when the door is open and the horses are still in the barn. There is no apparent problem because the handful of companies which own mobile access to the Internet haven't yet figured out how to turn their oligopoly into a powerful force.

It is as if three or four companies owned all the interstate highways in America. They get to decide who gets on, how fast everyone should go, and perhaps they charge their friends less than they charge the average driver. Which enriches their friends, who kick back money to the highway owner, who then buys himself a politician, who resists any attempt to make sure everyone can drive on the roads.

Folks, regulation is not by itself a bad thing. Monopolistic oil companies had to be broken up. AT&T had to be broken up. Once you could only buy a telephone from AT&T. A good argument can be made that much of the innovation we saw in communication was due to the competition caused by the break up of AT&T.

Don't equate corporate pandering by the Republican Party with being pro business. Regulation can assist business when it fosters competition by preventing a concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Greed and power will always exist, and one role of government is to make sure that consumers and businesses get a level playing field.

It's about power, stupid

The truly strange thing about the war over the "public option" is that it is probably the most market oriented facet of the whole health care reform package. The wrong guys support it, the wrong guys are opposed.

Normally, the left would simply resort to regulation: "Though shalt not charge more than..." and screw up the economics of health care more than they are screwed up.

"At a minimum, there should be very strict regulation of all insurers, on and off the exchange, to promote competition and fair prices and substantial subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance..." editorializes the New York Times, again illustrating how the left doesn't "get" economics. To promote competition you don't regulate insurers, you guard the markets, reduce "barriers to entry," etc.

There are many market forces in place that drive up the cost of health care "as a system." Doctor owned diagnostic centers, for example; lack of competition in any one geographical market; insurance oligopolies; no standardized charting.

The antidote is to introduce forces that can systemically drive down prices, and that is best achieved through competition. That competition is best enhanced with public options, consumer choice, consumer consequences, all of which are lacking in the current environment.

And maybe for that reason alone, the brains of the Republican right are so opposed. The public option might actually work, because it really is a market-based tool. A tool they should favor.

On the other hand, if they can kill the public option and force the left into its comfortable role of law-based decision making, they will be able to point out that the left does want to deny choice, favors government over the individual. It is a long term strategy to get back into power.

The administration needs to grab this process. It can not be left to the right, nor the blue dogs, nor the far left. This administration is in a unique position to take all the good ideas and rework the health care landscape, with or without "compromise." Their plan could be the compromise.

There are many good ideas out there. Public option. Co-operatives. Tort reform. Transportability. Elimination of rules that limit plans to "in-state." Standardized, transferable electronic records. Perhaps they all need to be given a chance.

It is time to get to work.

The health care onion

First, there is the debate about fixing this nation's health care. Inside that, there is the debate about the health care debate, whether it is being rigged. Inside that, there is the possibility that Republicans don't care so much about health care, but want to hand Obama a loss. Any loss.

Where to begin?

First off, the lie that we have the best health care system in the world needs to be dismissed. We do not have the best health care system in the world. Look up the statistics on your own. Infant mortality? We rank ninth in the industrial world. Efficiency? Thirty percent of our health care dollars go into the paper work war between doctors and insurers. Etc.

Add to that the power of corporate oligopolies; the drug companies, insurance companies, the physician-owned hospitals and groups of prescribing docs who own radiology centers, etc. We have a recipe for profit, not efficiency nor patient care.

It is important to realize that there is a difference in our "health care system" or lack of it, and the quality of care one might receive from an excellent doctor. That may indeed be world class.

But that is not what we are talking about.

One of the really wrong ideas in this debate is that "the market" will provide health care. It won't. Markets need a tight relationship between money spent and service received. You don' t have a rational market where the payer for service (insurance companies) is not the recipient (patient) of service. Patients want the best care available. Insureres want the lowest cost.

And yet, one of the closest ideas we have to bringing "market" dynamics to the table is being thrown away. Having a "public option" would fit quite well with market economics. If the public option is no good, it will fail. If it is good, it will help bring down costs, while still allowing people to choose.

And we already have "public options." Medicare. Medicaid. Most of the noise about the "pubic option" is based on fear that the gravy train won't stand up to real competition.

Even sending our poor to hospital emergency rooms is a form of "public option." An insanely inefficient option. It slows down "emergency" rooms. It is expensive. It shifts costs, so that those of us with insurance fund the system by paying $6 for a single aspirin. That is a "public option" of irrationality.

It is amazing that Republicans are again able to convince people to scream against their own interests. The men and women working at the gas station and the sporting goods store and driving truck, the retired, and certainly those who have been fired from jobs where they had insurance, should support health care reform. But misinformation, fear mongering and the politics of hate (look at those screaming faces) remain effective weapons.

We can't afford to spend more of our income on health care. It is breaking our finances, draining our future. We can't leave our neighbors without health care: That is immoral.

The time has come to look at alternatives.

Greenspan's warning

“If the pernicious drift toward fiscal instability is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization, the current account adjustment process could be quite painful for the United States and our trading partners," warned Alan Greenspan on Sunday, October 20 in a speech on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings (read it here).

There is cause for great alarm in that sentence. Partly because of the incompetence of Bush/Cheney. Partly because of the tendency of both Democrats and Republicans to pander.

The “drift toward fiscal instability” is the deficit that Cheney/Bush has run up during its term of office. They are not conservatives. They are statists drawing power from the moral right. They favor a big government profiting special interests, they have run up huge deficits with tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy while not paying for their war in progress.

The left is not much better. Their hatred of other people’s money makes them economically illiterate. If they get control of government on an agenda that includes opposition to liberal trade, Greenspan’s “protectionist reversal of globalization” could launch another worldwide recession.

At the end of which, China will be even more clearly the most significant economy in the world. If we start banning their T-Shirts, they may stop buying our debt. We need them more than they need us, and some of the recent market chaos may be related to China’s displeasure with our politics. We did not need to fete the Dali Lama.

The Law of Comparative Advantage proves that trade makes all nations wealthier. Protectionism extended the depression and made it worse. Democrats need to recognize that by trying to save in California jobs more cheaply done in Mexico, we hurt U.S. consumers, Mexican workers, and U.S. workers who can not make things for sale to a Mexico that can not pay for them.

Greenspan is giving us another warning. We are walking an edge. Only by more wisdom than we seem to possess, and a great amount of luck, shall we avoid a fall.