There is a full-blown debate going on in, of all places, the Republican Party about the failings of the governing, corporate-sponsored kleptocracy. Not so on the Democratic side. Spared a primary battle, the incumbent president need not defend his economic record, which is basically a redo of the save-Wall-Street-first stance initiated by his Republican predecessor.
That bipartisan establishment consensus, in which the enormous power of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve was harnessed to bail out the financial industry swindlers while ignoring the plight of their victims, has been challenged only on the Republican side, where the libertarian Ron Paul has tapped into the enormous populist rage among voters.
There is no comparable dissent among leading Democrats, who have been loath to take on Barack Obama's embrace of crony capitalism--that fatal melding of Wall Street wealth with Washington political power--the way Paul and even Newt Gingrich have powerfully challenged Mitt Romney, the GOP's Obama doppelgänger.
Yes, doppelgänger, and please don't try to scare me with those hoary tales of how Romney is the second coming of the far right on social issues, when his entire tenure as Massachusetts governor proved quite the opposite. The issue in this campaign is the economy, and on that, by the time of the general election, there will be no serious substantive difference between the two major parties' candidates. Both will squarely be on the side of the financiers who created this crisis.
The attacks on Romney's association with the rapacious Bain Capital could apply with equal force to the Clinton administration veterans whom Obama has entrusted with managing the nation's economy. The list begins with Lawrence Summers, who pocketed more than $8 million in Wall Street loot during the period when he was a top economic adviser to the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. Summers received $5.2 million from the D.E. Shaw private equity fund, which was up to the same sort of shenanigans as Romney's Bain Capital.
Imagine the outrage among Democrats if a President Romney were to rely on three successive chiefs of staff with résumés as steeped in banking greed as those Obama has appointed. The first to guard the gate to the president was Rahm Emanuel, whose political career was generously backed by Magnetar Capital, an Illinois hedge fund that was a major purveyor of subprime mortgage-backed securities. Then came JPMorgan Chase's William Daley, paid $5 million a year as the representative of that company in Washington, working to soften Obama's already tepid efforts at reregulating the banks. And now, Jacob Lew, another Clinton-era retread who made himself wealthy between Democratic administrations by being COO of Citigroup Alternative Investments, specializing in betting that people's mortgages, which other branches of Citigroup sold, would go belly up.
What has changed in American politics is that the growing army of disenfranchised stakeholders now fit as comfortably within what has been thought of as the plutocratic Republican Party as within its faux-populist rival. In an attempt to exploit the palpable populist anger in the Republican base, Romney's opponents, as The Wall Street Journal reported, opened a "Pandora's box of bitter attacks" claiming "in his business career he was a corporate predator, a heartless shredder of companies and jobs and the personification of all that is wrong with capitalism. ..."
It is a line of attack that has worked because, as the Journal's Gerald F. Seib points out, "Today's Republican Party has become steadily more blue-collar, more populist and more influenced by voters who act as much like independents as Republicans. All of that makes the idea of attacks on capitalist behavior arising from the traditional party of capitalists a little less bizarre."
The stats to back up that assertion are compelling; according to exit polls, 75 percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire had family incomes of below $100,000, and almost half did not have a college degree. It was from their ranks and among the nearly half of voters who identified as independents that Paul and third-place finisher Jon Huntsman pulled much of their support.
National polls support the notion of a more populist Republican base, and as the combined results of WSJ/NBC News polls over the last year show, blue-collar voters were slightly more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats. Most startling was the finding from those same national polls when respondents were asked which party was responsible for the economic crisis: "Republicans were precisely as likely as Democrats to blame 'Wall Street bankers.' "
But as the presidential election is now shaping up, voters will not be given a choice to rebuke Wall Street by either major party. Expect razor-thin differences between Romney and Obama on the key issues at the heart of our economic crisis--the ravages of predatory multinational corporate capitalism that turns the nation state into a vehicle for ill-gotten gain, mocking both Adam Smith's claims for the invisible hand in a truly free market and the assumptions of Jeffersonian democracy in which governance is in the hands of the common folk who are also stakeholders.
All the populist sputtering about the bailouts ignores the fact that there was no realistic alternative to government intervention when Wall St crashed the economy. Bush tried the Herbert Hoover-Ron Paul approach when he let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt. The stock market immediately took a nose dive.
Obama has made a big mistake in not prosecuting the fraudsters that crashed the economy. Perp walks for Wall Streeters should have been the first step in making sure this kind of massive ripoff does not happen again.
Our ship has gone down, and we're all floating around in the ocean. Two ships appear in the distance.
The blue ship is tossing out bicycles and the red ship is throwing live hand grenades.
A bicycle will not help me but a grenade will kill me, so I guess I'll swim toward the blue ship and hope for the best.
But I know Democrats will fight tooth and nail to prevent the elimination of Medicare, Social Security, public education, and other programs I think are extremely beneficial. Republicans will strip these programs and shift these dollars, not to addressing debt and deficit, but to tax cuts for the "job creators". And just basing what would happen with what DID happen, America did not see any long term benefit from Bush tax cuts other than debt that is still owed due to reduced tax revenue.
So as America weathers a decade or more of economic woe (and we will), I don't want there to be a generation of Americans who come out of this with no Social Security pension and Medicare insurance available for their golden years. I don't want school vouchers given to fund part of the private school tuition for the wealthy, while leaving behind in even more severely under-funded public schools, the majority of American
What has occurred is that traditional "populists" that used to be part of the democractic party have moved to a Republican Party that now appeals to those for whom social issues are at the forefront and who see government and "big city liberals" as the enemy. Democrats have abandoned their tradtional base for the upper middle class and Wall Street, where they have found a funding bonanza. Republicans have cast the Democrats as liberal elitists who are trying to tell the Southern states and middle America how to live their lives.
But to suggest that the Republican Party is "populist" is to buy into the con job they have perpetrated on middle America. It is a social issues, anti big government shell game to enlist people in the movement to aid the wealthy by lowering high income tax rates and gutting regulations in the name of free enterprise.
=What's remarkable is how little Obama's sell-out of the voters who believed in his message of "hope & change" is discussed in the media. Instead, of course, it's all about the "horserace" for the Republican Party's presidential nomination; nothing about issues, just about "who's ahead."
=As the OWS movement and the support for Ron Paul, despite his considerable
baggage," point out, the majority of Americans want to restore some balance in our political-economic system (e.g., stop giving tax cuts to the rich and paying for them by shortchanging the rest of us); but we have no place to go, certainly not in either of the major political parties.
1. Our financial system (including the central bank) is broken.
Not only did the Fed side with Wall Street (at the expense of taxpayers), but it completely failed its regulatory duties in 2004-2007 when bankers were reaping and pocketing undeserved profits. Gold standard may not be the final answer, but it would be a great start of the discussion about the future shape of our monetary system.
2. Our military is overstretched.
This one is obvious. We simply do not have the money to police the whole world. Either the world chips in and helps with the costs, or we reduce our forces to its basic function - defending our country.
3. Politics needs to become more local
Ron Paul wants to abolish some Federal agencies and transfer their responsibilities back to the States. Decisions are always best made locally. Local folks know their problems way better than some anonymous bureaucrat in DC. Recent events in Europe show clearly what runaway centralization entails.
Ron Paul may not become our next President, but he is a much needed spice in our political diet.
It is more important than ever that we vote for Dems for House & Senate and for Governorships. They are the ones who vote on and pass bills. Show up. Vote.