The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime Novel
I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves at
NOOK Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
Election 2012
By RAR
Mitt
Romney is doing a pretty miserable job, in the Republican
primaries, of pretending to be a far more right-wing figure
than he really is. Conventional wisdom says that playing to
those radical elements that show up to cast votes in
primaries is a necessary part of what one has to do to win
the party’s nomination to run against Obama. In the general
election, Romney can drop the uncomfortable playacting and
run from his natural political center. His problem has been
that he lacks the social flexibility to misrepresent himself
convincingly. People see through his clumsy guise, and it
causes them to question Romney’s character. Who is he? What
is his purpose in running for President? The
Romney-despising mainstream press has covered this ad
nauseum, which has inflated to threat status of Romney’s
otherwise laughable competition for the nomination,
particularly Rick Santorum, a true radical.
Watching the often amateurish-appearing Republican
nomination process might lead one to assume that President
Barack Obama has re-election in the bag, but wait. Obama has
had his own wandering brand of politics on display as a
sitting President for three-plus years, which has caused
many of his 2008 supporters to wonder who the devil he
is. His popularity surges to 50 percent when he goes on the
stump, but for every charisma point he garners, he loses ten
by dint of his jaw-dropping folds at the negotiation table.
He did it again this week, with the Keystone XL pipeline
compromise and his stepped-up efforts to shut down medicinal
marijuana dispensaries in states where they operate legally
under state law.
2012 Election
The Right is
Freaking - and Who Wouldn't?
By RAR
The Right Wing of the U.S.
electorate is freaking out, and as
Jonathan Chait wrote recently in New York
Magazine the reasons are pretty clear: "America will
soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by
an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and
interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s
frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency."
The coalition of which he speaks
is the growing number of Black, Hispanic and Asian voters
who are becoming a larger part of the U.S. electorate
profile with each election cycle. The series of composites
above, while only roughly representative of the statistical
data they are based upon, more or less tell the story of an
American voter profile that has undergone significant
demographic changes over the last few decades. (If this were
a more nuanced graphic it would further indicate the gender
divide, which now balances on the side of women.)
There was a time when "Whitey",
above on the far left, represented almost 85 percent of the
voting citizenry. That "Whitey"-dominated vote rather
reliably broke down the middle between Republicans and
Democrats, with slightly more men tending to vote
Republican, and many more women tending to vote Democrat.
The Black vote, which was not significant until recent
election cycles, since the 1960s has gone heavily
Democratic, with an allegiance tied to the era of the Civil
Rights movement and the sides chosen by the Republican and
Democratic parties at that time.
By 2008, the White share of
voting power had been reduced to around 76 percent of total,
diminished by the growth in minority voting blocks, and
spurred particularly by the enthusiasm for the candidate
Barack Obama in two typically under-representative
demographics: the Black and Youth votes. Both turned out big
for Obama in 2008.
But then a fascinating thing
happened in the 2010 cycle. People in the 18-44 year old
voting groups, who had played such a key role in the Obama
election, evaporated before the next votes were cast, with
vote totals falling from 54.8 million in that age group in
2008 to 31.8 million in 2010.
In the cold and deep recession,
with jobs scarce and the economy fragile, and with Obama
showing little inclination to champion seriously progressive
legislation, young people apparently lost all interest in
their still-new hero. The result was that rather than
youthful progressives calling the dance, 2010 belonged to
the extreme other side of the political spectrum, the
ultra-conservative, race-resenting, anti-government Tea
Party.
As Chait astutely observes -
"Whatever its abstract intellectual roots, conservatism has
since at least the sixties drawn its political strength by
appealing to heartland identity politics. In 1985, Stanley
Greenberg, then a political scientist, immersed himself in
Macomb County, a blue-collar Detroit suburb where whites had
abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. He found that the
Reagan Democrats there understood politics almost entirely
in racial terms, translating any Democratic appeal to
economic justice as taking their money to subsidize the
black underclass. And it didn’t end with the Reagan era.
Piles of recent studies have found that voters often
conflate 'social' and 'economic' issues. What social
scientists delicately call 'ethnocentrism' and 'racial
resentment' and 'ingroup solidarity' are defining attributes
of conservative voting behavior, and help organize a
familiar if not necessarily rational coalition of
ideological interests. Doctrines like neoconservative
foreign policy, supply-side economics, and climate
skepticism may bear little connection to each other at the
level of abstract thought. But boiled down to political
sound bites and served up to the voters, they blend into an
indistinguishable stew of racial, religious, cultural, and
nationalistic identity."
Chait goes on the write that
panic has set into the Republican Party in this 2012
election cycle and driven it to the hysterical Right.
The Republican intellectual class sees the growth in the
minority populations and their pro-Democratic voting
patterns in apocalyptic terms, with the result being that
America, as they have known it, will become swept away by
mounting waves of non-White citizens.
To panicked Republicans, this
equates to overwhelming numbers of poor people, like zombie
hordes, coming to pick their pockets. They envision a
dependent class and conjure up a trope that has resonated
with conservatives since at least the FDR Administration:
lazy poor people sponging off the rest of us.
This plays right into their
paranoid belief that the Democrats, and Obama in particular,
are determined to re-create the United States in the
European socialist model, which would further cement the
unequal relationship between the haves and the have-nots.
The asynchronous part is that the Republicans are worried
for the haves - or, probably more succinctly put,
themselves.
House Republican budget chairman
Paul Ryan talks about the debate in terms of “makers”
against “takers”. “The tipping point represents two
dangers,” he told the American Enterprise Institute, “first,
long-term economic decline as the number of makers
diminishes [and] the number of takers grows … Second,
gradual moral-political decline as dependency and passivity
weaken the nation’s character.”
Ryan and other Republicans have
deep doubts that people of color are of the same moral fiber
as was Whitey, in his purist form.
This canard usually finds as its
target the government assistance programs that in the
Republican mind benefit "welfare queens" and other gamers of
the system, a mythology going back to the Reagan
Administration and long before that. It was in the late
1960s when the first signs surfaced that well-intentioned
programs to provide low income housing and other
anti-poverty programs were yielding unintended and unwanted
results. The system struggled along as a black hole money
pit for years, draining public will and appreciation for its
initial ambitions. Dismantling the welfare system in the
U.S. didn't happen until Bill Clinton used the opportunity
to create compromise with conservative Republicans in his
first term in office, but by then the mythology of America's
dependent underclass had become cemented in the minds of the
population.
Far, far more egregious levels
of support were being enjoyed by corporations and wealthy
individuals, who were enjoying huge tax loopholes and
historically low tax rates on income. There were, and
continue to be, enormous subsidies to agricultural
businesses and to select industries, and millions passed
along through legislative earmarks, but somehow none of that
fixed in the public mind as surely as did the image of some
poor soul living off food stamps and Medicaid, and picking
the pockets of the honest working-class citizen.
DOOMED
TO FAILURE: The Republican strategy for the 2012
election has been to suppress the minority vote by putting
as many obstacles in the way of voting as they possibly can.
We have seen a spate of voter ID laws in states under
Republican control, which also include efforts to lower the
reliably Democratic youth vote.
The Republicans have further
sought to attack unions to undermine their capacity for
turning out Democratic voters on election day.
All of these actions are
stalling measures. Republicans have stalled legislation for
the purpose of killing Obama’s agenda, and to further
nurture the Tea Party discontent with Washington that they
rode to election victories on in 2010. To what end? As Chait
writes - "its last chance to exercise power in its current
form, as a party of anti-government fundamentalism powered
by sublimated white Christian identity politics."
The Republicans are trying to
leverage Obama's handling of the economy to remove him from
office, and possibly even capture the Senate. This wouldn't
turn back history - would not restore "Whitey" to his
original self - but it would buy time to make changes that
would take at least a decade to undo. The Bush Tax Cuts,
were an example of a supply-sider's dream come true,
including the built-in argument that anything done to undo
that legislation would represent an effort to increases
taxes, making it a tough political sell.
Chait argues that if the
Republicans can just tie the federal government up in knots
for another decade, maybe they can by then figure out some
way to gain a healthy share of the Black, Hispanic and Asian
voter blocks.
That is, of course, crazy think
for a party driven by "identity politics" - they would need
to build bridges of outreach to people about which they are
inherently distrustful. But in the end, the Republicans
don't have any choice. They need to figure out some way to
adjust their agenda to accommodate those of minority
interest groups.
It really shouldn't be that
hard. But first they are going to have to get over this
lunatic notion that members of minority groups are somehow
remarkably different from themselves, assuming "they" are
Whitey. Whitey has to learn that while there are struggling
poor folks who need help from assistance programs, no one
aspires to be in that situation. Americans of all ethnic
backgrounds, for better or worse, want the same stuff, much
of it superficial. They want plenty of food, nice homes,
nice clothing, good cars, spending money, leisure time and
vacations, toys, savings, security, and comfort. And without
exception, everyone knows that the only way to get that
stuff , as a friend of mine used to say, is by "digging out
of the earth, like everyone else". Otherwise put, by
developing the skills to do a job that you will then show up
for every day and succeed at.
These are not ambitions
exclusive to White people. People want the stuff that
improves their experience with living, and even if Whitey
disappears beyond all recognition, motivation in a
capitalistic society is not really going to become an issue.
The increasing pace of things doesn't really leave a citizen
with much choice other than to ride the waves as best one
can.
Those who fear that the zombie
poor are coming for them, with food stamps and welfare
benefits, need to grab a flashlight and check under their
beds. They need to finally confirm that there is nothing
there waiting to get them after everything grows darker. And
then, after composing themselves, they need to figure out
how to get on with getting along minus all the boogie man
hype.
022712
________________________
Air Force One
Snakes On a Plane
The
2012 Election seems to us at the RCJ to be the most
depressing in recent memory, and right at a time when the
nation needs fresh hope, too. It is disheartening, but it is
also intriguing, even somewhat entertaining if your idea of
entertainment is to watch the politics of personal
destruction. While the odor of mendacity is a little
overwhelming, it does seem darkly satisfying that these TV
wars are waged among people who sort of deserve all the ill
will that is coming their way, even when it is summoned by
the likes of Newt Gingrich
in a tantrum fit of internecine warfare. Gingrich's slash
and burn style has been the catalyst for a bare knuckles
brawl among guys who can't really take a punch. Striking
first and throwing questioners off script has been critical
to his survival as a candidate, given an uncomfortable
personal history that is rather like that of a grifter and
deceitful swain. Newt is a delusional egomaniac who truly
believes that he should be President of the United States,
but he is also an individual of weak character who couldn't
actually mount a real run for the office if his
wife...excuse me, life depended upon it, which it
actually seems to.
Newt is the guy for whom wealthy
PAC men bought the rights to "When
Mitt Romney Came to Town", the 28-minute
documentary consisting of interviews with working class
people who lost their livelihoods after Romney's Bain
Capital private equity firm bought out the companies for
which they worked. The documentary, available from our
Elections 2012 page, has
been derided by Romney supporters as a hit piece, but in
truth it is heartbreaking to watch. This is not
highly-produced Madison Avenue message making, but rather
videotaped conversations with people we know, and possibly
are. At this moment in history, it is impossible to imagine
that Mitt Romney could be elected dog catcher given his
inherited and personal wealth, "vulture capitalism" business
history, and his personality shortcomings. And that even
after a five-year campaign for the highest office in the
land. One wonders, watching Romney gaff his way through
routine photo opportunities, if he isn't subconsciously
sabotaging his own self, suspecting deep down that he has
done many bad things and does not deserve to become
president of anything.
This 2012 Election is rife with
weird factors:
An economy that is flat and
without a driving influence that would suggest any
immediate recovery
A weak sitting President
Barack Obama, who voters who would typically vote
Democrat no longer trust to protect their interests
against the promoters of "trickle down economics"
A slate of Republican
alternatives who are jaw-droppingly awful and, through
primary season attack ads, are bent on making each
others' flaws perfectly clear for all to see, which
would previously have been anathema to Republican
campaign dogma - previous to the earlier Newt Gingrich
and then the Karl Rove eras, that is
Republicans are actually
using populist talking points against rival Mitt Romney,
who has been robotic in his defense of corporate
personage, e.g., "Corporations are people too, my
friend..."
The Obama campaign boasts a
billion dollar war chest that practically ensures that
Obama can buy re-election despite economic conditions
that would be impossible to overcome under previous
economic-political circumstances, (Editor's Note,
030112: True at the time of this writing, Obama's Wall
Street support, which accounted for a huge share of his
donations, has since all but dried up, significantly
diminishing Obama's financial clout in this election
cycle.)
The Citizens United ruling,
that opened the door for PAC spending without limit and
identification of sponsor, has been first used against
the very Republicans whose stacked Supreme Court allowed
the debacle of campaign funding deregulation to exist at
all
Editor's Note: Add the inability
of moderate Jon Huntsman to catch on. Shortly after this
piece was published, Huntsman dropped out, his billionaire
father apparently not that impressed by Huntsman's third
place finish in his home state.
____________________
So
where is this all going? Richie Rich (Jon
Huntsman), there on the left, who managed a third
place finish in New Hampshire, the only state he has
campaigned in so far, and whose PAC money largely comes from
his billionaire father, has been flying under the radar for
most voters who have been more drawn to the flame(out)s of
Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich and Santorum. He may be the most
moderate guy in the Republican field, and possibly the
smartest, though it is hard to read anything from his
record. He was ambassador to China for two years under the
current Obama Administration, and then left that position to
run against his former boss. That storyline seems to have
possibilities that Huntsman, who is a smug and not
particularly adept campaigner, has been unable to exploit.
He was also the Governor of Utah, but he shares the "Mormon
issue" with Romney. He may be helped by the current media
campaign of three of his young-adult daughters, who have
been making the rounds attempting to bring attention to
their low key father. Attractive and energetic, they can
land a Kardashian's-type reality show after the exposure
they are getting in this election cycle. The pitch to the
networks is probably already underway.
The Huntsman strategy of
presenting the moderate alternative, being more or less
inclined to think rationally about scientific and policy
issues, and jabbing in debates, rather than dropping bombs,
may actually work. At this point, only
Mitt Romney can win the
Republican nomination, but his date with destiny may be only
days away as he faces voters in South Carolina, Florida and
Nevada, where unemployment is high and those "King of Bain"
characterizations will likely stick.
With Romney about to wade into
hell, how poetic it might seem to have the upstart Huntsman
square off against the high-minded but low-achieving Obama.
- RAR
(11212)
_________________________
Miscalculations of the Right
Republican
Candidates Go Retro with Arguments Shifting Economic Blame
to the Shiftless Poor
By RAR
Newt Gingrich, whose primary
asset is a willingness to use for self-promotion purposes
any hyperbole that may pop into his ungoverned mind, was
tossing the red meat to the high-spirited crowd attending
Fox News Channel's South Carolina Republican debate Monday
night (1/16/12). South Carolina is, after all, his last
chance to re-establish his unlikely candidacy for the
highest land in the office: a late-life attempt at
reinvention in pursuit of a job that one suspects he hardly
wants. What Gingrich really wants is the level of
recognition that he alone believes he deserves; not the kind
he got from the ethics investigations and scandals that
drove him from the House speakership way back when (1998).
Newt wants to be admired and to be paid well for being so.
Gingrich is furious at Romney
and his Super PAC buddies for running those reminders in New
Hampshire of Newt's wayward ways. They seemed almost to
deliver a death blow to Gingrich's surprising gains toward
becoming a top-tier candidate. Now, in ultra-conservative
South Carolina, Gingrich is trying to muscle his way back
into contention by going "medieval on their asses", which to
a Republican means reaching back for some old nugget from
their philosophy of greed and acquisition that has worked
for Republican campaigners before. The money-in-the-bank red
meat for die-hard Republicans is to blame the country's poor
for our economic woes. The poor, goes the refrain, are a
drain on a government system that is too large, too invasive
and disruptive to the capitalistic system, and that has no
business providing welfare in the first place.
In fact, the
social safety net programs that Republicans label as
"welfare" only account for 14 percent of federal government
annual spending. These so-called "handouts" include the
refundable portion of the earned-income and child tax
credits, Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or
disabled poor, unemployment insurance, food stamps, school
meals, low-income housing assistance, child-care assistance,
and assistance in meeting home energy bills, as well as
programs that aid abused and neglected children.
In "the world according to
Newt", the low income population in the U.S. is comprised of
slackers who have no history with nor habit of working, nor
the inclination to develop in any productive way as long as
they are living high on the hog at the government's expense.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum,
who spins a similar tale of baloney, are both apparently
un-curious idiots for were they not they would have looked a
little deeper into the problems with our economy, which have
next to nothing to do with the social safety net. (Factoid:
The Social Security Trust Fund has no problems related to
its own sustainability beyond the extent to which it has
been raided to pay for other general expenses.)
The chart below was developed by
the RCJ from Bureau of Labor statistics that are presently
showing the U.S. unemployment rate to be at 8.5 percent.
This, it is widely understood, undercounts actual
unemployment by about half, making it more likely that the
current rate is more like 16 percent. Were it to climb over
20 percent, we would be revisiting the conditions of The
Great Depression of the 1930s.
That 8.5 percent figure is based
entirely on the numbers of people who have signed up for
unemployment benefits and employment development programs.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recognizes four categories of
unemployed workers:
Workers who lost regular
employment or completed temporary jobs (4.9 percent)
Workers who left jobs
voluntarily (0.6 percent)
Workers attempting to
re-enter the workforce (2.2 percent)
Workers attempting to enter
the workforce for the first time (0.8 percent)
Those percentages are added
together to arrive at the 8.5 percent unemployment figure.
Just looking at the likelihood of sign-up from unemployed
workers in those categories - first-time entry into the
workforce, for instance, probably includes only a small
percentage of unemployed recent college graduates - gives
you a sense for how little these numbers tell us about the
overall employment picture. They don't count those people
who have exhausted their benefits and are no longer on
unemployment, even though they remain unemployed. These
workers are often classified as "no longer seeking
employment", as if that is an option, though there is a
growing population of unemployed who have become
"dependents", adding to the income burdens on other
relations. (See the chart below regarding dependents and
their relationship to "income poverty".)
The Right Wing
argument that "welfare" is bankrupting the country is
undercut by the fact that half of the unemployed population
receives no government benefits at all. In fact, while
Gingrich goes on about how Barack Obama has been the
most-effective "Food Stamp President" of all time, the truth
is that only 1 in 5 U.S. families that qualify for Food
Stamp assistance actually apply for the benefit. There are a lot of
reasons for that, but certainly stigma accounts for part of
it. Vicious creeps like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have
helped to villainize the most vulnerable of our citizens,
effectively denying benefits to people who have probably
paid into that social security system and rightly deserve
coverage.
The Right's argument is that
people just need to clean themselves up and go out and get a
job. But as this table below shows, America is filled with
working poor.
THE WORKING POVERTY TABLE
We have listed median salaries
for various positions in the four "growth sectors" of the
U.S. employment picture. We have also indicated the standard
the government uses to identify "poverty rates" in the
country, which for a single wage earner are calculated
against the number of dependents their pay goes to support.
A single worker with no
dependents must earn more than $10,890 per year to be above
the poverty level, and that figure goes up by $3,800 for
each dependent he or she supports. That means, according to
the national average, a wage earner supporting a family of
four would need to earn more than $22,350 per year for his family
to be above the Federal Poverty Level. As this chart shows,
the kinds of jobs that the workers in those four Bureau of
Labor Statistics categories referenced above can
realistically get in our current economic environment, often
are not sufficient to provide anything like financial
stability for them or their family.
No one working
near the Federal minimum wage level of $7.25 an hour is
saving money to go to college, or investing in stocks. They
probably don't get health coverage through their employment,
and so their wages are not "loaded" in the way that the
packages of full-benefit workers are, and for those who have
full-benefit packages those are becoming less robust and
more dependent upon higher office co-pays.
In our contracting economy,
those jobs in the Fast Food industry that once provided
initial employment opportunities to young people are now
often held by older workers with dependents. We are seeing
more multi-generational homes, with young adults with
children also caring for older relatives under their roofs,
adding further burden to their incomes - incomes, by the
way, that have been retreating in terms of actual buying
power for more than 40 years! Where once just getting a job
could set a U.S. worker up with a reasonable expectation of
a good life, now it isn't a guarantee of anything.
The improvements in the
unemployment picture are not even signs of recovery, but are
instead driven by hiring of seasonal workers, all of whom
will lose their jobs once their seasonal employment ends,
and the average worker can expect to then be unemployed for
around six months.
While workers earning above the
poverty level (the red sections below, which are only
carried out to seven dependents but can grow much larger)
may seem technically stable financially, none of those
single wage earners in the brown "Financial Insecurity" zone
are saving money or investing in growth opportunities. They
are probably trying to keep their head above water with
credit card debts, and some may have college loans dragging
down their financial outlook for years. They are one cruel
surprise away from sliding into the red zone, the poverty
trap, where Gingrich and Santorum seem to think people go to
kick back.
There is a generally held belief
that the $70,000 income level is the "Golden Mean", the
juncture at which people begin to exhale and relax. The myth
goes that while you can buy more stuff with incomes above
$70,000 per year, people don't generally report that their
level of happiness increases any with earning above $70K.
But even that depends upon where you live. In the San
Francisco Bay Area, a family of four living on $80,000 per
year would be functionally poor, once you back out the
area's living expenses.
The Right's
diversionary tactic that blames problems on the poor is morally and intellectually false. All that money from
government programs that goes to assist the needy is
returned directly into the economy, effectuating a straight
win-win for the benefit recipient and the public. Grocery
stores stay open and crime rates stay capped the way they
wouldn't were desperation allowed to hold sway in
high-unemployment areas.
The welfare that is not
necessarily returned to the economy is the corporate welfare
that comes from tax deductions and even massive give-backs,
often amounting to millions of dollars for well-healed
businesses. That money doesn't go back into the system, but
it often goes to buy-out other smaller competitors and to
tighten the grip on corporate monopolies, which in turn
drives down wages and creates the situation we have today,
characterized by the disintegration of the American middle
class.
The greatest error made to date
by the Obama Administration has been its failure to reverse
the failed policies that have created tax breaks for the
wealthy, while pulling back assistance to the poor.
The great
defining opportunity was this housing crisis, which could
have been solved had Obama just chosen to feed the
struggling, underwater home owners and forced the mortgage
companies to write down absurd principal amounts on loans.
All of the big financial and auto bailouts could have been
avoided, including the secret billions moved behind the
scenes to prop up the charade that this was somehow saving
the economy.
Obama failed miserably at this
moment of opportunity, when America could have been made
whole, and now we have the employment (and unemployment)
situation we have today. I mean, just study the chart
provided here
for a moment and consider what it says about our future.
While by no means a complete snapshot of our employment
reality - it does not include high earning advanced degree
holders like doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - it is
real to the extent that it reflects the majority of
America's working-class population, including positions held
by the deteriorating middle class.
(Updated 12012)________
ELECTION
YEAR FEATURE
"Any Democrat but Barack!"
An RCJ video series on candidates we would
like to have considered were the Democratic Party to actually
nominate a Democrat in the 2012 presidential election cycle. (We
get that they are going with Obama instead, but...)
__________________
Fox News
"Democrats" Urge Clinton Run
Stop
Encouraging Them!
What If We Elected "None of the Above"?
By RAR
Oh
what a weird week in U.S. politics. This was the week in
which some of Barack Obama's
few high profile surrogates, like
Newark, New Jersey Mayor
Cory Booker and former Pennsylvania
Governor Ed Rendell,
went on television and disparaged their own guy's economic
policy in harsh terms along the lines of "it makes me sick".
Reliable Democratic mouthpieces
like MSNBC's Chris Matthews
went ballistic, like a guy who suddenly realized that he is
on an island with a pariah who few will help to save. DNC
Chairperson Debbie Wasserman
Schultz isn't even on the stump for Obama, in any
consistent way, explaining this week that she had been
taking care of her kids and was too busy.
The Obama campaign has been
positioning this November's election as historic -
aren't they all - and a referendum on what America will
become in the 21st Century. The implication is that, if the
American people turn the reins over to
Mitt Romney and the
Republican Party, economic disparities in U.S. society will
become exacerbated in ways that will render the U.S.
unrecognizable from the glory days of the expanding middle
class. Just for the record, that expansion ended more than
40 years ago, and we the people have been living on
hot air (read "credit") ever since, as our national fortunes
have waned through wasteful foreign entanglements, policies
of "trickle down" economics, anti-regulation fervor, and
outright corruption in high places.
You will recall that Obama was
elected as an agent of change, but the only change he
delivered was his own retreat into a shell of
over-compromise that has eviscerated anyone's belief that he
is the leader the nation needs at this critical time. On the
flip side, Romney doesn't sell himself as an agent of change
- a role only the Democrats seem to embrace - but rather an
agent of continuity with Republican fiscal and
foreign policy.
Democrats these days seem to
like to use the term "doubling down" when a Republican, even
given the obvious results of their destructive economic
policy, decides to stay the course, defend the type
of economics championed by their hero
Ronald Reagan, who in death
has become a mythological figure of supply-side economics
regardless of the actual damage caused by his philosophical
influences. The empty-suit-and-charisma parallels
between Reagan and Obama are significant for the vessels
each have provided to host the fantasies of their
sycophants. Supporters of each, on the other hand, left with
few positive tangibles on which to hang their laurels, have
exhibited great belief in what they imagine that each
politician represents, though Obama in 2012 is a far
diminished icon from the Obama of 2008. Liberals can no
longer imagine that he is the Messiah, so all that is left
is for Democrats is to stick with him because he is of their
party. That is not a compelling rallying cry, and it is the
reason behind the scarcity of talking heads on TV promoting
Obama's re-election. No one, on the Republican side, has
much doubt about what Mitt Romney represents: More of the
Same. Romney also struggles to get anyone to act as a
surrogate on his part, and like Obama his foundational
support is all through party affiliations, rather than
personal commitment to the candidate. No one seems to personally like Mitt
Romney, and Obama seems to have few friends. Both Obama and
Romney are in the pockets of the big banks in terms of where
their policy allegiances lie.
Diminishing Returns: So why do we keep playing
this game of electoral politics that for generations has
been producing B-grade chief executive officers for the
White House? Given the far right wing politics of the
Republican Party, and the spineless nature of the Democratic
Party, are not all elections now reaffirmation of More of
the Same? More of the Same includes commitment to
voting, because it has been a hard-earned right, but what is
the value of a vote when all options can be understood to be
continuations of what we have seen to be happening, which is
not producing shared wealth?
I can feel that, in my lifetime
(as I approach 60), things are only going to get worse for
average Americans, because as a people we will put off the
hard decisions, which include making judgments about sacred
cow institutional documents like the
U.S. Constitution, which is
one of the most historic, but one of the least useful
documents in all of human history. (The original is
displayed at the National Archives in Washington D.C., photo
right.) That rattle-trap compromise, designed in 1776 to
protect the privileges of already entrenched interests and
now revered by elected officials who yearn to remain elected
officials, has produced a constant stream of civil
discontent and war that has not been deterred by
representative democracy, separation of powers, free speech,
gun rights, or even the extension of voting rights, but
rather has produced a brand of predation unparalleled in
modern human history, including massive incarceration of
select groups of citizens, execution of innocent men, mass
murder throughout the world, environmental destruction on a
global scale, export of dangerous economic schemes, economic
disparities exceeding the depravities of Ancient Rome, and
finally resulting in the rapid decline of our civilization that we in
the U.S. feel today.
Checking the Spider-Free Box: What if we put a
stop to it by refusing to check the More of the Same
box in every election this year, and instead chose to write
in None of the Above.
Web-weaving
spiders are practically omnipotent so long as they have
their sticky killing fields, but take away that web and they
are pitiful and helpless, revealed to be entirely dependent
upon entrapment and ambush.
This is what we have been
electing and re-electing: maintenance of a web of deceit in
which we the voters are the willing victims. That is not
working out very well for us, but can we ever, through
elective means, defeat the basic killing nature of that
systemic web?
There is, of course, an order of
presidential succession, established by the 25th Amendment
to the Constitution and modified several times since its
passage, which passes the office through three levels of
elected officials before getting into the nominated cabinet
positions. The current map of succession goes down 18
places, at that point elevating the Secretary of Homeland
Security to the presidency. The upper echelon looks like
this:
This all assumes, of course,
that there is an administration in place to pass the
presidency down through, but what if in November 2012 the
American people decide to choose "None of the Above" over
either Obama or Romney? One assumes that the presidency would
go to the Speaker of the House or, barring that, the
President Pro Tempore of the Senate, but what if those
offices, too, were left dangling by a "None of the Above"
write-in in their elections. This could take out the
entire House of Representatives in a single day, including
the Speaker of the House, but Sen.
Daniel Inouye is in elected office through 2014,
which likely means he would become our next president. Only
one-third of the Senate will be up for election in November,
so that broken body would remain in existence with barely
enough membership to host a quorum, as would be required to
conduct the business that would elevate the President Pro
Tempore to the Office of President of the United States.
Inouye* is the
chairman of the United States Senate Committee on
Appropriations. A senator since 1963, he is the most senior
senator, the second longest serving U.S. Senator in history
after Robert Byrd. Inouye has continuously represented
Hawaii in the U.S. Congress since it achieved statehood in
1959, serving as Hawaii's first U.S. Representative and
later a senator. Inouye was the first Japanese-American to
serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and later the
first in the U.S. Senate. At age 87, Inouye is the
second-oldest current senator, after 88 year-old Frank
Lautenberg of New Jersey. He is also a recipient of the
United States Medal of Honor, as well as other military
awards.
Imagine this load of brick
landing on the ancient Sen. Inouye, who has already
announced plans to run for a 10th six-year Senate term.
Unlike Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, Inouye would have
earned the honor of becoming President of the United
States. As a guy who has given a lifetime of service to this
nation, it seems unlikely that he would screw it up, which
is a claim neither Obama nor Romney can make, for neither
has really done anything with their lives other than take.
And both have shown little inclination to do anything other
than exploit the systems that make that possible.
What if we threw chaos into
the mix in November and forced the re-examination of all
that is America without the entrenched powers in place to
ignore public will and carry on as usual? As a citizenry, we
have been taught to fear such a disruptive influence in our
political lives. It is in part that fear that keeps us
sinking lower and lower into oblivion as a nation of people
with voting rights, but without the political courage to
exercise the power such a privilege implies.
*Daniel
Inouye passed away on December 17, 2012. This article was
added to this 2012 Election archives in July 2013
____________________________
"King of
Bain" - Part 1 (When Mitt Romney Came to Town)
Nasty political rival
Newt Gingrich has acquired the
rights to this 28-minute documentary about
Mitt Romney's private equity
firm Bain Capital, which
Gingrich will exploit for television ads in South Carolina
against nominee-apparent Romney. "The Bain Way" turned
the misfortune of others into "striking" personal gains.
"King of
Bain" - Part 2 (When Mitt Romney Came to Town)
____________
EDITOR'S NOTE:
The threat from Anonymous
(below) ran a few weeks before the Iowa Caucus, and the RCJ
ran the piece with particular interest. What happened?
Anonymous had no apparent presence at all with respect to
the Caucus, won narrowly by Mitt Romney. We would admit to
real disappointment because the "Expect Us" message was so
filled with potential. (11212)
Will
Anonymous Show Up at the Iowa Caucus?
"Expect Us"
Operation Empire State
Rebellion - Anonymous calls for shutdown of the Iowa
Caucus
(March 2011)
_________
Uncle Sam Wants...Your
Neighborhood
Obama's Re-Election Dashboard
The
much ballyhooed
Obama-Biden Dashboard
was unveiled this week, and for free one can
sign
up here. One would assume this will make positively
certain that you will be pestered from now through election
day in November to become more effectively active in
campaigning for the re-election of President Barack Obama
and his goofy sidekick, Vice President Biden.
Getting people elected, or
re-elected, is about as un-sexy a calling as a person could
possibly endure, which is why you see all of the top echelon
veterans eventually get out of the business to become
talking heads on cable news as soon as they have established
their brands. Whatever the technology, getting out the vote
is a grueling contact operation, exactly the same as being a
telemarketer or a door-to-door salesperson. All that the new
Dashboard does is provides a Web-based way to manage the
integration and organization of such operations. Barack
Obama has never really stopped being a community organizer,
it is just that he now does it through a Web-based
organization of surrogates.
Dashboard also, somewhat
sinisterly to anyone who has concerns about performance
based management, measures one individual's effectiveness
against that of others in their area. The metrics employed
to determine effectiveness relate to categories of contacts,
i.e., telephone calls, face-to-face conversations, house
parties, special candidate events, media appearances,
literature drops, and that type of thing. Electing the
President of the United States, at the grassroots
organizational level, is exactly the same as selling vinyl
siding door to door. The Obama folks are simply leveraging
the power of this Web-based organizational tool, along with
the social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, others) to
blanket cover the nation's communities with Obama baloney.
Dashboard - not a particularly
clever name, given that every graphical user interface is
called a "dashboard" - was developed by a software company
called National Field, which was created by a group who
worked on Obama's 2008 campaign and developed that year's
version of Dashboard, called my.barackobama.com, which
included a function called listServ (in C++, a method in
Java). All it did was compile the names of neighborhood
volunteers in the area, but it was easy to use and popular,
and while it has been incorporated into the new Dashboard
product - and National Field has developed Dashboard as a
generic product that anyone could purchase for use in
managing their outreach operations - there has been early
resistance of 2008 supporters to migrate to the new system.
They know how to use the old system, which is still
available to them outside of Dashboard. And in that they
hardly seem like the young turks of social networking who
drove Obama to the White House on the strength of their
cutting edge technological focus. In fact, the vast majority
of them, in a sampling of a San Francisco district, have
dropped off the radar altogether and are not participating
in the 2012 re-election effort. Those hardliners remaining
are apparently a little stuck in 2008, which in technology
terms makes them dinosaurs.
Change, it turns out, may be
something one can believe in, but it doesn't come naturally
or easily. In fact, one has to hound people into modifying
their behaviors, so one wonders why the Obama-Biden team
hasn't explored some clever way to use this rather basic
technology to influence from their elected offices.
As it is, running for office seems to be all they are
really about.
- RAR
Democrats in Transition
How Things Have Changed
Right after the elections of 3-plus years ago,
Time Magazine did a story on future stars of the Democratic Party. Then
along came the 2010 elections and "Tea Party sentiment" and the editors
of Time suddenly seemed none too prescient with their racing picks.
Their choices may still become national political figures, but right now
who among them still has momentum? The RCJ takes a look.
Tainted by her husband's lobbying activities,
pushed off the fast track
Swept aside by the Republican tide
As Chairwoman of the DNC she is in a launch pad
position
Rolled the dice for Governor and lost huge! What
to do now?
Climbing up the ladder to the top of the
Democratic Party
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD)
Patrick Murphy (D-PA)
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
Artur Davis (D-AL)
Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA)
"Prairie Cyclone"
"Iraq Vet"
"Mother"
"Reporter"
"Green Mayor"
* 40 years old
* 37 years old
* 44 years old
* 44 years old
* 43 years old
* Married, 1 Child
* Single
* Married, 3 kids
* Married
* Single
* Lost House seat in 2010 to Republican Kristi Noem after being first
woman elected from South Dakota * Comes from political dynasty of former
Governor and Secretary of State
* First Iraq vet voted to Congress (2006) but in 2010 lost to former
Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick, whom he defeated in 2006
* Quickly rose to Deputy Whip in the House, youngest subcommittee boss
(Cardinal) on the Appropriations Committee
* Was succeded in his Alabama House seat by Democrat Terri Sewell
* Former Mayor of San Francisco
* Georgetown law * Washington lawyer
* Now an attorney, running for Attorney General of Pennsylvania
* Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee
* Left House to run for Governor, lost in the primaries
* Harvard degrees, former Federal Judge Clerk and Assistant U.S.
Attorney
* Issues: energy, agriculture, bio fuels and rural access to broadband
* Issues: Veterans, cell phone rights for enlisted, getting out of Iraq,
improving federal contracting
* Issues: Child safety
* Harvard degrees, former Federal Judge Clerk and Assistant U.S.
Attorney
* Issues: Hybrid automobiles, wind power, government efficiency, public
housing, gay rights
* Reserved personality but firey speaker
* Reputation for tough leadership, intelligence, political savvy, vote
counting experience, and fund raising
* Issues: Cuts to public housing programs, protection of Black Belt
areas