Tag Archives: elections

Political Rants

Let us prey.

Couple of things to comment on this week. I’ll be brief – it’s a holiday, for chrissake.

Unforced confession. George W. Bush has been hawking his memoir for the last couple of weeks, proudly admitting that he personally authorized the use of waterboarding – a torture technique he considers legal because his legal advisors told him so. “I’m not a lawyer,” he told Matt Lauer in one interview. How far would that get any of us in front of a judge?

No one seems particularly bothered about this, but Bush’s proud admission, along with Cheney’s, is basically a declaration that our justice system is in a shambles; that the law applies only to the powerless and that cruel and unusual punishment is acceptable. Torture is a violation of U.S. statute and of international conventions to which the U.S. is both a signatory and a primary participant. Waterboarding is torture; it has been recognized as such since the days of Torquemada and before, I’ll wager.

Bush and Cheney have admitted their guilt; bragged about it, in fact, with the arrogance of men who know they are safe from accountability. The Justice Department should act upon these admissions without any thought to political expediency. That is not how the law is supposed to work. You break the law, you face justice – that’s how. Mr. Holder? Do your job.

Money rules. The results are in, and the winner of the 2010 election is corporate cash, by a landslide. The financial industry, health insurance lobby, and energy industry mad a massive investment in Republican candidates, both before the Citizens United decision and after, and they’ve certainly gotten their money’s worth. An astounding $3 billion was spent on composing the 112th congress; far more than in the 2006 cycle or even the 2004 presidential race. This piper will be paid, with interest, using the means at the disposal of any legislator; blocking, repealing, watering-down, stalling, inserting poison pills, defunding, delaying, and all of the tactics we’ve seen over the past two years.

Who are the winners? Just watch network or cable television for ten minutes and you’ll see them, preying on the public mind with their multi-million dollar ads about “our energy future” or what you should “ask your doctor” about. That’s who we need to defeat in 2012, and we’d better start working on it… yesterday.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Payback time.

The election is barely past us and corporate America is already knocking on our door for the rent.

Speaking of timing, former Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the president’s commission on deficit reduction, have agreed we should gut Social Security, Medicare. Well, there’s a surprise – both have an execrable history of animosity towards these quite successful social programs. (Simpson’s contempt for elderly people is palpable and disgusting, and he never misses an opportunity to toss a rhetorical brick at them.) Of course, their proposal also calls for tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Again, no surprises there.

This is just the latest chapter in the attack against the poor, working class, elderly, and infirm that has been underway for decades in this country. Time and time again they have sought to undermine Social Security, to loot its trust fund, and to convert it into something it was never intended to be – an instrument for the creation of private wealth. Social Security is a supplemental guaranteed retirement program and, as such, an extremely successful one. It has kept elderly people (at least the ones who did not retire on a mountain of money, like Simpson) out of poverty for seven decades. Likewise, Medicare has not only made the elderly more financially secure, but it has also improved their quality of life in demonstrable ways. Not for nothing that these are the most popular social programs in America.

It may mean little to Simpson, Bowles, and many who share their views that people they don’t know will have to work until 68 or 70 and do without adequate cost of living adjustments in their old age. It sure as hell matters to me, and I imagine to many others as well. Social Security is not on the brink of bankruptcy – far from it. They just want to use its revenues to cover our government’s bad decisions with regard to financial regulation and foreign policy – decisions that have cost trillions of dollars over the last decade alone. Now we are being asked to pay for those criminal actions. There can be only one answer to that.

Don’t know, but we may have to take a page out of France’s book. If it takes standing in the street to protect the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, it’s goddamned worth it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Turning Japanese.

Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha.

Okay, so… here’s the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn’t the most “outside of the box” thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts – 30% or so was tax cuts – to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then.

Of course, that spending package worked by all measures… but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the “failed stimulus”, even though its lack of broader effectiveness was largely due to their stonewalling. Now the voters, in their understandable anger at this failure, have put the Dems out and, by extension, House Republicans back in charge, so any correction of this is extremely unlikely. So… it looks like we’re headed for Japan in the 1990s – a zombie economy, staggering along for the next decade, suffering from our unwillingness to take bold action. The deficit hawks have gained the upper hand for the nonce, and that is not good news for the rest of us.

Not that the G.O.P. House will seriously move to cut the deficit. As of yet, they have been unable to name even a few billion dollars worth of cuts they would be willing to make. Not to mention the fact that they seem determined to continue boring the hole through the treasury that Bush started with his tax cuts for the rich and famous. If they do that and succeed in repealing the health care legislation, we’re effectively talking about another $1.7 trillion in debt added on to what they claim is a staggering total already. Does that sound serious to you? Perhaps they’ll try to resurrect Dubya’s Social Security privatization plan to underwrite such largesse to the wealthy. (Since their successful House campaigns were floated by post-Citizens United corporate cash, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.)

Here’s my suggestion, Mr. President. Take that $700 billion tax cut they want to give to the wealthy and propose adding it to the cuts for the bottom 97%. Let them vote against that one.

luv u,

jp