Lost

You gotta’ love the theatrical aspect of Washington D.C. politics, whether it’s the President using West Point cadets as props for his speech to justify the escalation of our Afghan war or Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explaining to Congress how the Fed rode to the rescue of the financial system.

Way to dodge any accountability and spin the myth, Ben. That must be the reason Time magazine named you as its Person of the Year. CNN reported that, ”the central bank of the U.S. is the most important and least understood force shaping the American – and global – economy.” That’s quite an understatement. Along with the intelligence apparatus, the Fed is the most secretive and unaccountable government agency, able to stonewall Congress with impunity and pimp for its member banks with steely efficiency. I guess the good folks at CNN forgot that the Fed was complicit in creating the real estate bubble – and the tech bubble before that – not to mention guilty of turning a blind eye and a deaf ear while Wall Street went on a risk binge. Some of that shame must be laid on Alan Greenspan, the former wizard-in-residence of the Fed, but Bernanke has kept the tradition alive.

Nevertheless, when Bernanke appeared before Congress recently his message was that the Fed works just fine, thank you, and further oversight of its activities would be counter-productive and might spook global investors.

And we can’t have that, can we?

By choosing Bernanke as its Person of the Year, Time magazine, a charter member of the mainstream media society, affirmed what’s important in this country: the financial sector and the almighty buck. One problem with choosing Bernanke is that the real economy of work and wages hasn’t recovered at all. A $14 trillion taxpayer bail-out may have stabilized Wall Street and worked wonders for financial sector profits, but John and Jane Public are still waiting for a hand to help them out of the ditch; city and state governments are starving for revenue and slashing services for the most vulnerable citizens; banks remain hesitant to lend; unemployment is still high; foreclosures continue; and the gap between haves and have nots is wider than ever.

Some rescue.

Fucking up the lives of average American families in the service of bankers and Wall Street gamblers is merely a misdemeanor in this country. No harm, no foul, no blood, no ambulance as Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn used to say.

$14 trillion could have purchased a lot of health insurance, a lot of teachers, a lot of shelter for the homeless, a lot of medical research, a lot of college tuition. Opportunity costs.

Lost.

The Winds of No Change

The winds are blowing but these winds maintain the status quo rather than change it.

Most Republicans wring their hands and wail about the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, budget deficits, and the burden of high taxes. If you want to see grown men and women frothing at the mouth, get the Republicans (and some Democrats, to be frank) started on the potential costs of “socialized” medicine.

These same Republicans, on the other hand, have no problem at all with corporate socialism, bloated defense budgets or open-ended military campaigns in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Republicans believe, I guess, that spending money on corporate bailouts and wars of choice enhance freedom, while social spending on Medicare or unemployment insurance or regulation enhances the role of the government at the expense of freedom.

The winds blow, but not much changes. President Obama talks a great game, an inspiring game, but appears to lack the staying power to see anything through, not to mention that he has surrounded himself with a posse of recycled champions of the established order.

Lost in the noise of talk radio hyperbole is the need to strike an appropriate balance of power between the government and business, between Capital and Labor, and between the wealthy and the poor. Excessive government interference is no better than excessive corporate socialism. Government can become too large, bloated and stifling, just as unchecked corporate power can, and usually does, lead to the reckless behavior that brought the global financial system to the brink of disaster and made life so difficult and uncertain for so many.

Republicans are suspicious of enlarging the role and power of government while Democrats, generally speaking, view government as a leveling force. But both parties are beholden to moneyed elites and when push comes to shove, big campaign contributors win, average citizens lose.

According to a recent column by Frank Rich in the New York Times, job seekers outnumber openings by a tidy 6-1 margin. The stock market shows signs of bounce – prompting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to declare that the “recession” is over. Sure, maybe on Bernanke’s street. In the real America, where people work for wages, struggle to make the mortgage and decipher the one-sided terms of their credit card accounts, afford college tuition, health insurance, gasoline, heating oil, food, electricity and transportation, the night is still dark, foreboding and full of peril.

Working Americans should be mad as hell and dead set on kicking the shit out of the first fat cat they run across. But try to disrupt the status quo and stand prepared to be attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, as protestors at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh were recently. Americans have the Constitutional right to assemble for the purpose of airing our grievances with the powers that be, but permits are hard to come by in some cities and the authorities prefer to disperse first and answer questions from the ACLU later.

The winds blow, but nothing changes.