Bifurcated democracy

By Carl 

This was an interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times:

OUR nation isn't facing just a debt crisis; it's facing a democracy crisis. For weeks, the federal government has been hurtling toward two unsavory options: a crippling default brought on by Congressional gridlock, or — as key Democrats have advocated — a unilateral increase in the debt ceiling by an unchecked president. Even if the last-minute deal announced on Sunday night holds together, it’s become clear that the balance at the heart of the Constitution is under threat.

The debate has threatened to play out as a destructive but all too familiar two-step, revealing how dysfunctional the relationship between Congress and the president has become. 

The article talks about how presidents have decided to exercise power unilaterally, like Obama's Libyan adventures (although the practice goes back decades to Reagan and even Nixon,) while the Congress has been unable to rally itself to challenge the President's usurpation of power. Either the Congress is divided (like now) or reinforces the person holding the Oval Office (as under Bush the Younger).

This is what the punditry tells us we want, over and over again: divided government. Given what we've experienced for over three decades now (absent the six years of Bush the Younger) is this really what we want? An ineffectual Congress hamstrung by the tyranny of the minority and a Presidency who usurps power like a king?

Mind you, none of this is partisan: Republicans and Democrats have been to blame in BOTH branches. Clinton was forced to legislate by executive order, much as Obama is. Both Bushes declared wars without making a firm case to the American people as to the need for them (this wasn't dominoes toppling or any such credible threat.) Reagan tossed American troops around like candy and American armaments to enemies.

In Congress, John Boehner can't even get a centerpiece of legislation passed trying to keep the party's dog-and-pony show from tearing each other up. When Pelosi was in charge, she had to placate Blue Dog Democrats, rather than muscle them into line.

Hell, about the only thing any Congress since 1990 has been able to agree upon is that Bill Clinton needed to be impeached and a bunch of Asian deserts bombed!

This has effectively emasculated an entire branch of government. Power seeks a vacuum. It's almost understandable that the president would unilaterally legislate.

Plus, members of Congress don't have to take a stand on anything controversial. Take the EPA actions earlier this year to regulate greenhouse gases. Now, long time readers of this blog know there are few people more concerned with global climate change than me. Maybe Al Gore. So while I don't have a problem with Obama taking the bull by the fumes... so to speak... I worry about the fact that Congress didn't vote on this.

Note: it wasn't voted down. The bill stalled before a vote could be taken. It's probably still in the hamper, waiting to be aired out. Look at what this saves Republicans from, say, Montana, where people believe climate change is real and a problem. The party would insist they vote against the EPA actions. Their constituencies would say "We need a better Congresscritter." No responsibility, yet they can parade around touting how angry they are that they didn't get their say.

The more a controversial issue remains undecided, and the more critical that issue becomes, the less likely it is Congress will ever actually take action. And the more likely it is they will cede that issue to the Executive branch. Fine for a liberal like me when a semi-liberal like Obama is in charge, but what happens when another Dumbya hits the Oval Office? One a little more clever?

Congress will still feel this is expedient.

But it is unhealthy. It is unhealthy for an economy, it is unhealthy for a Constitution and it is deep unhealthy for a society and its people.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

A Republican Party too conservative for Ronald Reagan

By Richard K. Barry

You may have seen this, but I need to post it to help myself stay sane, if it's not already too late.

The House Democratic Caucus has released a new video in order to encourage Congress to do the right thing on the debt ceiling. It is hardly what one would expect, given the source, or maybe it tells us all we need to know about how insane the current crop of Republicans really are.

It's a 1987 radio address by Ronald Reagan in which he raised the concern that "Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility."

As Steve Benen writes:

The point of the video, of course, is to drive home the point that [the Republican Party] is no longer the party of Reagan. Indeed, Republicans in 2011 recognize the Reagan legacy and deliberately reject it. These are folks who claim to have a religious-like reverence for "Ronaldus Magnus," but have no use for his style of governance.

I'm not even sure what I want to say about this other than the fact that one of the most conservative politicians of my lifetime is far too moderate for what has become of the Republican Party, and that should scare the hell out of all of us.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

If Republicans are looking for another Ronald Reagan, perhaps they should look no further than Barack Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Steve Benen, as many others have, makes the connection. Basically, Obama is very much in the mold of Reagan, policy-wise, particularly with respect to taxes and the economy (though also, I would add, with respect to foreign policy):

Mike Huckabee recently said, "Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible, time being nominated in this atmosphere of the Republican Party." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had a nearly identical take last year, arguing Reagan "would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today."

I agree, but what does that tell contemporary GOP officials? What should Republicans take away from the fact that, by 2011 standards, their party would dismiss their demigod as a tax-raising, amnesty-loving, pro-bailout, cut-and-run, big-government Democrat?

Or more to the point, doesn't it bother Republicans, just a little, that Barack Obama is more in line with the Reagan legacy than they are?

Given their utter lack of self-awareness, I doubt it does. Besides, their hagiography of Reagan is based largely on myth, on what they think Reagan was all about. Which is to say, they generally project themselves and their agenda onto Reagan and then revere him. It's not clear if they would revere the real Reagan, but probably not. After all, with their increasingly extremist ideology, they make him look like something of a moderate. 

So, yes, Obama is a lot like Reagan. But let's not overstate it. In terms of policy, Obama is very much a centrist who would have sought compromise with Reagan, just as he continues to seek compromise with Republicans (even if they clearly have no interest in compromise). And there would undoubtedly have been room for agreement between the two. (Who knows, Reagan may have supported Obama's health-care reform, not to mention the stimulus and bailouts, and may also have supported Obama's diplomatic-hawkish foreign/military policy. Surely Reagan would have agreed with Obama's conduct of the "war on terror," not to mention the Afghan War.)

But of course Obama is progressive in ways that Reagan never was. They may be somewhat similar in policy terms, but they are vastly different in style, image, and temperament, not to mention in broader historical terms. Both men can inspire, but Obama is more of a technocrat than Reagan ever was. And even if we grant that Obama is generally progressive, his policies are centrist and generally dismissive of progressivism, while Reagan was a movement conservative who played to the right and united the Republican Party as a party of ideological conservatism (even as his own policies often reflected a more conciliatory approach to politics, much like Obama's do).

Anyway, the point, I suppose, is that the Republican Party is really no longer the party of Reagan. As with so much else, Republicans can't grasp that basic reality.

So is Sarah Palin running, or what?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Times looks at recent developments that suggest maybe. The purchase of a new home in Arizona. A new hagiographic movie about Palin that is set to be rolled out in Iowa. Ongoing enthusiasm "beyond the Beltway" among her supporters.

The GOP establishment, and particularly those Republicans still with a trace of sanity (and a hope of winning), are clearly against her, but sanity is in short supply out there:

"All indications are that she will be in -- her supporters have an intuition about it," said Jeff Jorgensen, chairman of the Republican Party of Pottawattamie County, Iowa, where Ms. Palin came in second in a straw poll last week. "People are looking for somebody, a Ronald Reagan reincarnate, who does not seem to be out there yet."

Palin as Reagan 2.0? Please.

But Republicans are taking a look at their embarrassing field of unelectables and getting more and more desperate. Some may reconcile themselves to Romney or Pawlenty, while others may push for someone like Huntsman to get in, or maybe Giuliani or Pataki, but the right won't be happy with any of them and is already looking to someone like Bachmann to advance its agenda. And, of course, there are those, a hardcore group of admirers, who think that Palin really is the savior.

It's been my view all along that Palin won't run and I'm sticking with that now. She just has too much to lose, specifically whatever shred of credibility she has left. And yet she lives in a bubble surrounded by sycophants, and what if those sycophants convince her that America needs her and that it would be to her own greater glory were she to run? Or what if she thinks that the best way to extend her brand, a brand that has been in decline as she has become more and more irrelevant (even on Fox News), and to make even more money with an extended brand, is to run? When you look at it that way, even a crushing loss could benefit her in the long run, as she would be hailed as a martyr, with blame for her electoral demise heaped on the usual targets, the un-American coastal elites and the "lamestream media."

All of which is to say, I don't know. I thought I did, but I don't. Given how utterly self-absorbed and irrational she is, if also calculatingly focused on profiting off her brand and to that end keeping herself in the spotlight, it's hard to tell which way she'll go.

Just know that whatever she decides, it'll all be about Sarah Palin. In her world, that's all that matters.

Quote of the Day: Alan Simpson on homophobes and hypocrites in the GOP

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And, oh, is this quotable. Here's the former Republican senator from Wyoming on Hardball yesterday:

Who the hell is for abortion? I don't know anybody running around with a sign that says, "Have an abortion! They're wonderful!" They're hideous, but they're a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don't think men legislators should even vote on the issue.

Then you've got homosexuality, you've got Don't Ask, Don't Tell. We have homophobes on our party. That's disgusting to me. We're all human beings. We're all God’s children. Now if they're going to get off on that stuff -- Santorum has said some cruel things -- cruel, cruel things -- about homosexuals. Ask him about it; see if he attributes the cruelness of his remarks years ago. Foul.

Now if that's the kind of guys that are going to be on my ticket, you know, it makes you sort out hard what Reagan said, you know, "Stick with your folks." But, I'm not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, moral values -- while you're diddling your secretary while you're giving a speech on moral values? Come on, get off of it.

No one ever accused Simpson of being verbally delicate, and while he doesn't really have anything to lose, he deserves a lot of credit for telling it like it is. It's just a wonder he still calls himself a Republican. Because, let's face it, there's an awful lot more he could have said.

Here's the clip:

In union, there is strength

By Carl 

I don't think I have to tell you where I stand on the issues unraveling in Wisconsin.

I am a union man. My father was union, blue-collar, working class. I'm union, in fact, three unions. "You don't get me, I'm part of the union," as the song goes.

There's a logic here that goes beyond greed (I'll get back to that in a minute). In early American history, companies were small. Certainly, none were of the size of the conglomeratic multinational corporations that control this nation today.

In early American history, it was likely that a line worker in a factory knew his boss. He may even have socialized with him on occasion, in church or some community function. Owners were in touch with their workers. They saw first hand the abject poverty many of them lived in. Many, if not most, acted appropriately.

Some did not, of course, else how would Dickens have made a career, British or not?

As corporations agglomerated and grew disproportionately to their communities, there really was nothing to stand in their way. The "company store" of song was very real: a corporation would hire entire towns, situate them in the company's thralls, pay them next to nothing, provide next to zero benefits, and then overcharge them for buying food.

Enter unions. As unions gathered strength in numbers, they were able to force companies to deal with the plight of their workers. In union, in unity, came strength. If the union advised its members to strike, they did. Usually, they'd win concessions that genuinely improved the lot, not just of their members, but of workers across the land.

You see, when you're the 800 lb gorilla in the room, people notice what you're up to. And when the 800 lb gorilla has to share more bananas to the troops of chimps who gather those bananas, other smaller gorillas realize they'll have to pony up or lose workers and therefore efficiencies and revenues.

Even if those gorillas aren't unionized.

A curious event happened in the 1980s, one that was a long time coming, but still surprising.

PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, went out on strike.

They struck the single biggest silverback in the world: the U.S. government. Of course, they broke a law doing it (most unions give up the right to strike with regards to public service employees.)

Ironically, they did this because they felt they would have the support of the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, a) whom they endorsed and b) who was himself a former union president (the Screen Actors Guild).

Not so lucky: he promptly decertified them, effectively disbanding the union and firing the strikers.

That was the death knell for unions in America. Nevermind that our manufacturing base had been eroding steadily if slowly (and was about to accelerate rapidly ni the wake of the mergers and acquisition bubble of the 80s). Never mind that unions themselves had become pockets of corruption in many cases, greedy criminals running them, like Jimmy Hoffa.

The ill-advised PATCO strike probably was the single body blow that brought unions to their knees. If the government could fire them, then anyone would give it a try. And they did. And they succeeded, if only by filing bankruptcy (which is where the merger craze comes in) and dissolving the collective bargaining agreements as contracts null and void in the bankruptcy. Workers became mere creditors of the company, in effect.

But today, this week, this month, this year, we're starting to see the backlash of unions and union-minded people. The budget cuts that municipalities and states have been placing in effect has caused workers to shout "Basta!" and take to the streets. In Wisconsin, even the unions exempt from Governor Walker's edicts have stood shoulder to shoulder with their union peers.

In union comes strength. The firefighters remember the words of Pastor Reinhold Niebuhr: "Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love." 

Or to put it more prosaic terms, if they can screw with you, they can screw with me, so I stand with you now. 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Elephant Dung #13: Beck and Kristol trade insults over Egypt

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

The right has had a hard time figuring out where to stand on the situation in Egypt.

Or, rather, it has had a hard time coming up with a unified position, simply because there isn't one, what with some conservatives backing Mubarak (and U.S.-friendly dictatorships generally), some of them because they support Israel no matter what and Israel backs Mubarak, others lashing out against Islam as the great threat to America and asserting, without a shred of convincing evidence (the Muslim Brotherhood is not evidence), that the pro-democracy movement in Egypt is basically Iran-style Islamism, others, on the other side, still buying into Bush's democracy-promotion agenda and approving the prospect of change in Cairo.

Conservatives like to stick together. You know, like with "taxes are bad," "abortion is wrong," etc. The Iraq War ultimately exposed huge fault lines on the right. And now, with Egypt, conservatives are actually coming to blows, including two of the most prominent, Krazy Bill Kristol and even crazier Glenn Beck:

Fox News's Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.

"I don't even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy," Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. "People like Bill Kristol, I don't think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They'll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they'll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched."

Kristol this weekend took Beck to task for the latter's skepticism of the Egyptian uprising:

When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Kristol's words drew an approving nod from National Review's Rich Lowry, a rare public repudiation of the influential Fox host from a conservative elite that quietly dislikes him. 

And all this at the time of the Reagan birth centennial. What was that about some 11th commandment?

Now, there's really no contest between Kristol and Beck. Kristol's a smart guy who often knows what he's talking about, while Beck is paranoid and insane. And Kristol is right that Beck is "marginalizing himself" with this conspiracy-theory nonsense. It's good to see that Kristol, a vicious Republican operative who has never shied away from spewing nonsensical and utterly ridiculous talking points, isn't even pretending to play along with Beck.

But, you know, Beck is sort of right, too, isn't he? I mean, Kristol may talk principle but he's really all about power, about getting Republicans elected and keeping them there. Think back to the '90s, when he was the source of the Republican opposition to "Hillarycare," all because he didn't want Bill Clinton to have a victory on a key, and historic, social policy issue.

And yet Kristol isn't necessary all about power. He isolated himself in 2000, for example, with his support for the renegade John McCain and he has certainly spent much of his career in Washington, and inside Republican circles, pushing a specific neocon agenda, specifically around a neocon view of American global hegemony. That's about power, too, but national rather than personal, and I suppose Kristol has at times been willing to run counter to the prevailing winds in the Republican Party, even if, in public at least, he is generally a good team player.

Anyway, it's fun to see these two go after each other. And yet it's not just about two prominent conservatives trading insults, it's about a serious divide on the right, with Republicans unable to land on a coherent message, let alone one they can all agree with.

The situation in Egypt will slowly drift away from American consciousness and will likely have no play at all in next year's Republican primaries, but this divide and others will remain, and deepen, and Republicans, divided against themselves, might just unravel into all-out civil war.

Enjoy.

Ronald Reagan Film Festival

By Distributorcap

In honor of the Gipper's one hundred years (and of his eight years of horrendous policies poisoning this planet), we have the first centennial Ronald Reagan Film Festival. Forget the No-doz, bring Thorazine.

The United States of Goldman Sachs

By Edward Copeland 

In 2007, Charles Ferguson directed the great documentary No End in Sight. Last year, he helmed another that told the story of an entirely different type of destruction, Inside Job, only this time the war wasn't against another country, it was against the world's financial system and instead of only those actually in Iraq and their families paying a price, we all suffered for Wall Street's greed and Washington's malfeasance.

As Ferguson did in No End in Sight, he makes a very complicated subject easier to understand through his masterful presentation of the facts and history of the situation (narrated by Matt Damon here) and interviews with key subjects. It's not an easy task in Inside Job because trying to explain the mechanics of financial derivatives and its role in the economic collapse is nowhere near as easy to do as it was to show all the mistakes and blunders involved in the Iraq war.

Not surprisingly, most of the key figures such as Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, etc., refused to be interviewed for the film, but what's shocking is that Wall Street and financial service figures who do give interviews feel completely at ease showing their arrogance and defending the industry's actions.

Inside Job, briskly edited by Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, shows how decades of deregulation under presidents of both parties led to one crisis after another, each bigger than the last, with seemingly no one in Washington learning any lessons.

The film also provides fascinating tidbits such as the fact that as recently as the early 1970s bond traders' salaries were low enough, that some had to take second jobs to make ends meet. It also tells how employees of various financial firms engaged in cocaine-fueled parties with prostitutes which were billed to the companies as things such as computer supplies.

The handful of firms who would tell their clients a purchase was good while betting on its failure behind their back is staggering, though not as staggering as the refusal of regulators to do any regulating or the number of former top Goldman Sachs executives who end up serving in presidential administrations of both parties. (When Hank Paulson stepped down as Goldman CEO to be Dubya's treasury secretary, he had to sell $450 million in Goldman Sachs stock but thanks to a law signed by the first Bush, he paid exactly zero taxes on it and some say the rich are taxed too much?)

Ferguson's No End in Sight proved to be not only informative, but to provoke outrage at all of the things that were and weren't done prior to the Iraq war. Inside Job does just the same for the history of the financial collapse, especially when you see all of the names who profited from Wall Street's greed that have populated the Obama Administration, not that he invented the problem.

It began with Reagan, got worse with the first Bush, declined further under Clinton and took the big nosedive under the second Bush. Now, Obama's advisers come from the same group and Congress passes reforms without teeth because Wall Street controls what happens. Inside Job tells this infuriating story in great detail and it tells it well.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)