State of the Status Quo

The State of the Union address is an odd and atavistic piece of political theatre. I know of no institution other than the United States Congress that gives itself a standing ovation for doing absolutely nothing. Stand up, clap, sit down, clap, stand up – you get the idea; it’s about as silly as your average high school graduation ceremony. Watching men and women who can’t agree on anything -- and will without a moment’s hesitation screw one another, not to mention the people whose interests they purport to represent – laughing, smiling and yukking it up is disgusting.

To be honest, I missed Dick Cheney’s scowl and George W. Bush’s tortured sentences; I missed the stark contrast between good and evil, black and white, cowboy and Indian; I missed the hubris and the absolute certainty that Bush displayed in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

As my seven-year-old daughter says, “Those were good times, bro, good times.”

Well, not really. It’s not comforting or inspiring to know that the leader of your nation is a corrupt moron.

Obama did his best to stem the naked Fear that is sweeping across the land. The fat is deep in the fire and most people are hip to the fact that the “stimulus” package alone probably won’t succeed in lifting the nation from the doldrums. Obama said as much. But then, Obama said a lot of things; some that made Democrats leap to their feet, others that were designed to reassure Republicans that he isn’t a crazed Marxist intent on dismantling American capitalism.

Obama didn’t throw out words like “Accountability,” “Responsibility” or “Private Enterprise” by accident.

He didn’t talk about reducing the size of the Federal deficit by chance either, even though the odds of that happening in the next few years are longer than the odds of the Oakland Raiders winning next year’s Super Bowl.

Democrats wet their pants when Obama laid out a three-legged strategy for an American renaissance: energy independence, health care reform and a renewed emphasis on education. I can’t disagree with that trio, but the pragmatist within me knows it’s easy to propose such initiatives, and next to impossible to turn them into effective legislation. In this country, nothing is harder to change than the status quo. Americans don’t do what’s sensible and morally right – Americans do what’s profitable.

How much interest do you think American energy conglomerates have in renewable fuels when the petroleum status quo pays them handsomely; they will fight tooth and nail to protect that Golden Goose. Same goes for health care. Obama didn’t specify what his health care reform plan might look like, though the only sensible, cost-effective system is Universal care like that found in every nation in the industrialized world. But again, American insurance companies have an enormous profit stake in the status quo, no matter how sick, broken and inefficient it may be.

There’s a reason we’ve been talking about Universal health care since Harry Truman occupied the White House, just as there’s a reason we’ve talked about alternative sources of energy since the early 1970’s. If the lobbyists, shills, PR flaks and congress people have their way, we’ll be talking until 100 million Americans have no medical insurance and gasoline costs $8.25 a gallon.

You don’t believe that corporations would place their narrow interests above the interests of the nation as a whole? When the camera cut away from Obama and framed John Boehner and Eric Cantor, what do you think those two gentlemen were talking about? “Reform health care! Sure, sure that will happen when pigs sprout wings and pigeons stop shitting on statues.” Boehner and Cantor were having a grand time swapping strategies to protect their campaign contributors from any measure that smacks of “reform.”

Other than when he mentioned “clean coal,” a fantasy on a par with Ronald Reagan’s infatuation with the Star Wars missile defense shield, Obama made the kind of speech we’ve come to expect from him. I want to believe that Obama can inspire the country to wake up and make meaningful changes, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

The Lords of Nyet

What are the Republicans drinking? Or are they all smoking opium smuggled in from the fields of Afghanistan? Or is crystal meth their drug of choice, the substance that makes them so obstinate and stupid?

From Washington DC to Sacramento, from the Federal stimulus to California’s budget fiasco, the Republicans are the party of No, Nada, Nope, Never and Nyet.

In the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the early 1930’s – a meltdown caused by pig-headed Republican policies that even the Oracle, Alan Greenspan, now admits were nothing more than smoke, mirrors and blind faith in the Free Market Gods – all Congressional Republicans have to offer is more of the same. More tax cuts. More lavish spending on weapon systems that will not rid the world of Islamic terrorists. More shredding of the social safety net and attacks on those dreaded “entitlement” programs like Medicare and Social Security.

More hocus pocus, in other words.

Out here in California, the Republicans are even more crack-addled and brain numb. For more than 100 days, Republicans in the Assembly and the Senate have held the budget process hostage, staunchly refusing to face the fact that a projected $41 billion deficit cannot be erased by spending cuts alone. While the Governor and Democratic leaders have toiled in the trenches to devise a mix of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to save the state from insolvency, Republicans have simply refused to go along because many are wedded to nonsensical pledges never to raise taxes under any circumstances.

Never. Ever. Never. Ever. One hand on Bible, the other over heart, read my lips and bow before bronze statues of Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh. We can’t cross Grover or Rush because they will tell everyone on the screwball Right that we’re Liberals and Socialists. And then we won’t be able to hop from the Assembly to the Senate and then to a Constitutional post…not that any of us are seeking a career in Government
...no, no, we believe in the sanctity of the Free Market and the glory of Private Enterprise, but someone has to protect the people from the Democrats and their never-ending lust for tax increases and Big Government.

Never, ever, because Republicans know that it only takes one or two crusaders to derail a dysfunctional budget process that requires an onerous two-thirds majority to pass a dime’s worth of tax increases.

The new Republican leader, Dennis Hollingsworth, elected just over twenty-fours hours ago to replace a colleague deemed too pliable, is a staunch anti-tax crusader, not to mention a mathematics whiz who seems to believe that spending cuts alone can wipe out the entire $41 billion shortfall.

Nobody knows how the Republicans will accomplish this feat of fiscal alchemy, or why they have waited 100-plus days to divulge their master plan to free California from the shackles of “big” government. Will they shutter our prisons, close our schools, padlock our parks and recreation areas, seal our harbors and ports, and decree that society as we’ve known it is over and from here out it’s every man, woman, child, dog, cat, parakeet and zoo animal for himself or herself?

Hell yes, survival of the fittest, Lord of the Flies.

Stop Talking, I Can't Understand You

Every time I turn around I see or hear someone jabbering into a cell phone. Everyone’s talking, talking, talking, but I wonder if anyone is listening. Talk is cheap and easy; listening takes effort and concentration, and in this nano-second age who has time for that? No, we’ve got to keep our game on, 24/7, win the point, the debate, the argument or the match and there simply isn’t time for understanding.

So, standing in line at the drug store, waiting to pay for a prescription that would be free in England and costs $40 here, I’m listening to the guy in front of me talking to someone – his girlfriend, I presume – about his thoroughly crappy day, which started with him dropping his Starbucks in the gutter when he tripped over a sleeping homeless person. I won’t repeat his opinion of homeless people or what should be done with them, but it’s the same fate that befalls stray dogs when nobody claims them from the shelter.

Then I get home and Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, a player I love to hate because he never produces for the Yanks in the clutch, is talking to Peter Gammons from ESPN about his use of “Performance Enhancing Drugs,” or PED’s as they’re called, when he, Rodriguez, was with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez, recipient of an obscenely large multi-year contract from the Rangers, felt enormous pressure to prove that he was worth it, and with the MLB culture being what it was at that time – with just about every name player ingesting, mainlining or rubbing their muscles with magic cream – what could A-Rod do but join the parade to the trainer’s office, the counter at GNC, or the trunk of some pharmaceutical rep’s Buick? Under those loosey-goosey circumstances, not to mention the strength-sapping heat of Arlington, Texas in August, how could A-Rod have stuck to the straight, narrow and honest path? A-Rod couldn’t specify what he took or exactly how he obtained what he took, but he was sorry for his fans, the game of baseball which has made him richer than Midas, and all the kids out there who idolize him. Biting his lower lip like a 3rd grader in the principal’s office, A-Rod said he just wants to turn the page and do all he can to win a World Series for New York. “And you’ve been clean since 2003?” asks Gammons. “As a hounds tooth,” replies A-Rod, and we’re supposed to believe him.

Which is sort of like believing that George W. Bush read more than one book a year or that Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, cares more about taxpayers than he does about his cronies in the finance industry. Lying used to be something of an art, but like listening, lying has gone the way of Honor, Fidelity and the Sony Walkman.

Geithner doesn’t believe the Federal Government should ask too much of finance executives for fear that the executives won’t play ball, but isn’t this scenario closer to the truth: the balance sheets of so many American banks are so negatively lopsided by an orgy of speculation, greed, and gross mismanagement, that the banks have no choice but to play by whatever rules the Government demands?

The public clearly wants harsher penalties and more accountability from the recipients of Federal funds, but when the fox is standing guard at the henhouse door, which is what always comes to pass in America, what the public wants is irrelevant, even though it’s our money being tossed down the septic tank that Wall Street has become.

When Obama surrounded himself with Robert Rubin, Geithner and Larry Summers, I knew the deal was done and that nothing much was going to change on the economic front. Don’t get me wrong, even surrounded by some of the same people who helped sever the connection between banking fundamentals and real assets valued realistically, ushering in the great Ponzi Scheme that our economy was until it imploded last fall, Obama is better than the Bush/Cheney junta.

But let’s cut the endless e-mail and text messages from the Obama Machine, telling us how different things are now that Barack is in the Oval Office. Yes, the style is different, better, but the substance hasn’t changed – it’s just been re-arranged on the big conference table in Wall Street’s Board Room.

An Abbreviated Honeymoon

Man, that honeymoon ended quickly. The wedding day bliss evaporated before the bridegroom got his tuxedo back from the dry cleaners. The poor guy hasn’t finished unpacking yet and his bride is already nagging him about leaving the toilet seat up and his dirty socks under the bed.

Did you really think it was going to be one of those happily ever after stories? This is no fairy tale, folks, this is blood-sport, American-style. Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners – or perhaps crows is a better description of the way Limbaugh speaks – that he hopes Barack Obama falls flat on his liberal face; Congressional Republicans, cowed and demoralized after being whipped at the polls last November, find new life in being the party of No; talk show blabbers like Sean Hannity are aghast and offended by the tax problems of Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle.

Hocus Pocus, presto and abracadabra, the felonies and foolishness of the Bush/Cheney regime are forgotten. The criminal doings of Bush/Cheney at home and abroad make Tom Daschle look like a convicted jaywalker and Geithner like an altar boy whose only crime was knocking over a chalice full of wine. After eight years of fraud, waste and abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon blush and Ronald Reagan wet his Depends, the Republicans are suddenly hell bent on protecting the American people from wasteful Government spending. The party that for six of Bush’s eight years ladled out pork like the pot was bottomless, have suddenly found their inner fiscal conservative.

Have ye hypocrites learned nothing?

The root of the problem for the Republicans isn’t the stimulus plan – it’s Barack Obama himself. Obama has more charisma, grace and smarts in his left pinky toe than John McCain, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner combined; the only venue where John Boehner can energize a crowd the way Obama does just by walking onto the stage is in his dreams. We’re dealing with frightened old white guys here that desperately want to protect the status quo. They want to bring Obama to ground by showing him the way power in Washington really works. The message is that soaring rhetoric and adoring crowds is one thing, navigating DC’s piranha invested waters without losing a limb is another. GOP leaders want to rub Obama’s nose in the dirt of the Rose Garden and prevent his Administration from developing any momentum; they call this deliberate sabotage Principle, but everyone save Rush Limbaugh’s devoted flock calls it Republican Politics As Usual. This is the game the GOP plays while average citizens lose their homes, their jobs, and their retirement nest eggs.

McCain, McConnell and Boehner know that if Obama’s stimulus plan were to slow the economic meltdown in the short run, and lay a new foundation upon which a more just and broad American Dream might be built in the long term, that the GOP could find itself on the power fringe for two or three decades. Were Obama to achieve a few solid legislative victories and gain momentum, an appetite for real and deeper change might take root, and tilt public policy in favor of average citizens rather than corporate elites, investors and the well-to-do.

And we can’t have that in America, can we?

Absolution of the Titans

I admire the Titans of American Finance and you should too. In the Great American Casino, otherwise known as our Economy, they’re the winners and the rest of us are the losers. Our best and brightest leave the finest universities in the land, flock to Wall Street in search of wealth and power; these are clever, cunning, driven men and women who go after what they want with the same single-minded obsession with which Hannibal Lecter sought human flesh. The Titans buy low and sell high, own beach front homes in the Hamptons and luxurious apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, travel first class, own season tickets for the Yankees and the Giants, and pay for it all with platinum credit cards. Even low on the totem pole Titans make as much in a year as the average American wage slave makes in a decade.

Ah, the mystical world of high finance, stocks, bonds, derivatives, numbers and symbols sliding across tickers from New York to Hong Kong, unintelligible to the untrained eye, full of portent and opportunity for those with a penchant for risk and a wad of other people’s money to monkey with. These are Gordon Gecko’s heirs, knights of Capitalism, who ride alone along the great black river; they ask no quarter and of course give none, particularly to lazy welfare queens or unemployed lesbians. They see the world in black & white, good & evil, Mutt & Jeff, Ozzie & Harriet, Astaire & Rogers.

Like Gecko the Titans are suave, smooth, savvy and savage. Gecko may have gone down in the end, but he went out shouting, “Greed is still good.” We loved Gordon Gecko and everything he stood for much more than we ever loved Horatio Alger and his tedious tale of hard work, honesty and right living.

Right. Hell, yes. We’re Americans and we want what we want when we want it. Delayed gratification is for suckers and tight-assed kill joys. Life is short and death will not be denied, so grab the gusto and let the bulldog roll.

The Titans are master alchemists who turn coal into diamonds, single family homes into ATM machines, bogus mortgages made in Cleveland into Collateralized Debt Obligations sold in Mumbai.

Can you pull off a trick like that? Of course not, which is why the Federal government isn’t rushing to your rescue. Or mine. We’re the grunts of the American Casino, the water carriers, the serfs and sharecroppers, the tenement dwellers. Our purpose is to toil for meager wages, to save none of what we earn, and to rack up as much debt as possible. Sure, we’re free to bitch about the unfairness of it all, throw stones and beer bottles at the mansion on the hill, pin our hopes on political candidates who promise to level the battle field and repair the tattered American Dream, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the Titans are still more important than we will ever be.

Thus, the sins and crimes of the Titans are absolved. Instead of punishment, they are given coins snatched from our pockets and the pockets of our children, the pockets of their children, and the pockets of children yet unborn. The great Casino is too important to fail; the slot machines must clang and jingle just as the roulette wheel must spin and the loaded dice tumble.

Too big to fail, too cool for the catwalk. It may be good to be King, but being a Titan of Finance is many times better; kings are occasionally beheaded or contract syphilis and go insane, Titans are untouchable.