Mr. Moderate

Anybody who believes we ought to just adopt the proposal put forth by Secretary Henry Paulson needs to study the “Mega-Million Dollar CEO Payouts” article from ABC News. Look for Henry Paulson under Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson was paid nearly $164 million by Goldman Sachs when he left to become the Secretary of the Treasury. I’m sorry, but that smells an awful lot like a pre-bribe, given that Paulson made a “mere” $4 million the year before and only about $12 million the year before that.

Can anybody honestly believe that there isn’t going to be a good chunk of the $700 billion bailout going to help Paulson’s friends at Goldman Sachs? Even if it is just $7 billion of good taxpayer money going to Goldman Sachs, that is still a pretty good payoff for a $164 million “pre-bribe.” I rather strongly smell a rat, and I’m a long way from Washington DC!

Oliver Stone’s masterpiece movie, Wall Street, seems an appropriate centerpiece for the meltdown in global finance we are currently working our way through. We got to this point of near-total market collapse because the real Wall Street didn’t learn a single thing from the morality play produced by Stone. In spite of being one of the classic seven deadly sins, greed is still the centerpiece of Wall Street morality. In other words, the real Wall Street still plays according to the famous quote from Michael Douglas in the movie, Wall Street, where he says:

greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

To say that the people who inhabit the real Wall Street ought to know better is to understate the obvious. But when you are playing with Other People’s Money (OPM), you are divorced from the risks, and yet you get to reap a substantial portion of the reward. The ultimate in OPM is, of course, federal bailout dollars. And as I write this short piece, our government is going through the motions of agreeing on just how many more federal bailout dollars will be made available to the rich dealmakers on Wall Street so that they will go back to making deals which seem to drive all that is left of the US economy these days.

Should the federal government be taking taxpayer dollars and putting them down on the table at the new Wall Street Casino? Given the reaction to the proposals of the Bush Administration to privatize the Social Security System, I would expect that the vast bulk of US citizens would vote “NO!” But of course, it is our alleged representatives, who get huge quantities of cash from the greedy inhabitants of the real Wall Street, who will actually vote to approve this ghastly mess. Is there much doubt that Congress will go along with this requested bail-out? Probably not, but one can hold out hope for at least a little while.

Let me begin by quoting the final words of my previous blog post:

The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

In a fine above-the-fold article in USA Today, David Lynch notes that the seeds of the recent meltdown on Wall Street were sewn back in 1999 with the repeal of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

By the time of the 1990s boom, the financial services industry was campaigning to repeal Glass-Steagall, arguing that foreign rivals were hobbled by no similar restraints. In 1999, Congress assented.

“The pressure was so great that Congress really couldn’t resist it,” says economist Peter Bernstein. “Nothing really bad had happened since 1982, and those bad things that did happen were transitory.”

If important financial institutions failed, market participants and lawmakers alike felt that market forces could restore order on their own, with only minimal government aid.

Maybe they were wrong.

It isn’t just that they were wrong. This isn’t a case of bad judgment. This is a case of deliberate theft where these large financial institutions effectively socialized their risks while privatizing their profits, as many commentators have noted, among them Professor Nouriel Roubini in his recent blog post. Roubini is referenced in the Lynch article:

Former White House economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the current financial storm two years ago, has a harsher verdict. He says the USA is turning into “the United Socialist State Republic of America.”

Those may seem like harsh words to use on alleged “conservative” politicians. However, as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, there is actually very little overall difference between communism and fascism, so it isn’t surprising that a fascist Republican Party would act to socialize those business entities they feel they need to preserve in order to continue ruling the nation.
Continue reading ‘Welcome to the Fascist States of America!’ »

Few people today will realize that one effect of the Reagan Revolution was to convert the government of the United States into a kleptocracy. Now, the United States doesn’t have the usual form of a kleptocracy, which is actually denounced by the President’s Statement on Kleptocracy. In the usual form of kleptocracy, the higher the rank of the leader (up to and including the highest ranking leader of the nation), the greater the amount of ill-gotten gains which end up in the leader’s own personal bank account. That sort of thing is just a bit too obvious for politicians in the United States as the voters still have a bad habit of usually tossing out any politician who is stained with corruption. (There are, of course, exceptions to any such rule.)

The United States has a very indirect form of kleptocracy. While in office, most politicians will only receive campaign contributions from the thieves who stand to gain from the government. However, once they are retired from political office, they will receive large advance payments for a book or books they intend to write and they will receive additional large payments for speaking at meetings of (largely) thieves and others who have benefitted from the policies followed by the former office holder. But of course, there are many ways around the usual restrictions. The boldest is to simply direct the payoff to a spouse or family member, usually through the grant of a job or participation in a “sweetheart deal” where the outcome is virtually guaranteed. Many current political campaigns have accusations of this sort buried somewhere within them. And this isn’t really new. Just research the television holdings of Lady Bird Johnson and ask yourself if being married to Lyndon Johnson had anything at all to do with her owning those lucrative franchises.

The so-called “Keating Five” scandal gives us another look at how high level politicians can be bought and paid for by high level crooks. Charles Keating used political contributions and the influence they purchased to shield his crooked bank dealings from investigation by federal bank regulators.
Continue reading ‘Republican Kleptocracy’ »

While the modern Republican Party likes to claim the mantle of conservativism for itself, in fact it is about as far away from actual conservativism as it can get while still being absolutely against socialism and communism. As I explain in my earlier essay, this makes the Republicans into the modern fascist movement.

What makes the modern Republicans distinct from the fascists of old is that the fascists of old emphasized street violence to intimidate the body politic into granting them political power while the modern Republican fascists emphasize lies and propaganda in order to gain and retain political power. Another great distinction is that the fascists of old were truly interested in the success of the nation as a whole, while the modern Republican fascists are mostly interested in crookedly enriching the wealthy mob which provides the money to keep the Republican Party viable in American politics.

In his seminal book on conservativism, The Conscience of a Conservative (see the ad to the left), Barry Goldwater defined the essence of conservativism as an adherence to the principle of extremely limited government, particularly at the federal level. And the conservative philosophy, as defined by Goldwater, also contains a very strong streak of libertarianism. Today (2008), the libertarian conservatives, as represented by Bob Barr and Ron Paul, are largely abandoning the modern Republican Party precisely because the modern Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to individual liberty. True conservatives would be aghast at the huge databases of financial and personal information about every American that our government has accumulated as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” When I was part of the Republican movement myself back in the 1970s, personal privacy, particularly financial privacy, was a top concern. While true conservatives are strongly anti-crime, many were also quite upset at what the federal government was doing as part of the War on Drugs to control the health care options available to people. And, in the 1970s and 1980s, I largely agreed with the political and economic views expressed by the extreme conservative right wing as written in publications such as The Spotlight.

Where the Republican Party took a wrong turn is when it abandoned true conservativism and instead married the religious right. This was a pure power play, as true conservativism has never been a popular movement within politics. In fact, the individualism inherent in true conservativism is almost the antithesis of “a movement.” In other words, it is virtually oxymoronic to conceive of a mass political movement made up of truly conservative individuals.
Continue reading ‘Republicans: Liars & Crooks’ »

In my last post, I described why the Republican Party is a modern-day fascist party. In this post we will look at John “Il Duce” McCain and his current campaign for President of the United States and compare that with the advent of past fascist regimes, particularly that of Benito Mussolini. The key parallel is control over the media (or “press” in the days of Mussolini) and the use of intense propaganda to gain consent from the people to near-dictatorial powers for the leader.

Mussolini was himself a journalist, so he well understood how control over journalism could be used to wield propaganda as a weapon against any opposition. Accordingly, as Mussolini’s power grew within Italy in the 1920s, it became impossible for anyone to become a journalist without a certificate of approval issued by the fascist party. The United States of today is, of course, far larger and much more diverse than was Italy in the 1920s. While no single authority over journalists now exists, there are certainly spigots of control which do still exist. Among those are the great concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few media barons such as Rupert Murdoch and the fact that a single entity, the Associated Press (AP), distributes most news stories to most of the media outlets across the nation. The AP is controlled by its member media outlets, the majority of which are controlled by a small group of “media giants” (corporations which own vast empires of newspapers, radio stations, television stations, and other media outlets). While the level of control has not yet approached the veto power of the fascist party in Italy during the 1920s, there is now (in 2008) enough control to ensure that right-wing biased propaganda has wide distribution while left-wing biased propaganda is largely prevented from reaching most of the public.
Continue reading ‘John “Il Duce” McCain For President?’ »

Calling some group “fascists” is the rough equivalent of comparing the leader of some group to Adolph Hitler. In both cases, the mere use of the label “fascist” or “Hitler” is enough to cause any set of discussion or debate participants to lose their temper. And many people would see that as justified anger, as the very terms are among the worst labels which can be applied to anybody in polite company. In other words, only swear words not used in polite company, could even possibly be viewed as more justifiably intended to cause anger and outrage at the mere fact of applying the label. But I wish to consider the word “fascist” as being actually descriptive of a particular set of political and social circumstances and not as just a vague epithet to toss out at your political opponents. But before we get to that discussion, let me offer an introduction to the topic by relating some stories about my own personal political evolution over the past several decades.

I am asked repeatedly to explain why I no longer call myself a Republican even though my self-description of my political stance remains that “I am a Goldwater Republican.” This is all the more poignant today, in September of 2008, now that Goldwater’s successor in office (as Senator from Arizona), John McCain, is running for President of the United States after McCain swung his positions on most issues so far to the right that he would be considered to be acceptable to the neo-fascists who now run the Republican Party. As late as 2000 I still personally liked, respected, and would have voted for John McCain for President. But in view of his now extreme right-wing views, I can no longer stomach the man, and can only wish him less success than Goldwater had in his run to be President (in 1964, Goldwater carried 6 states and won 54 electoral votes).

The real difficulty for me today is that fascist-leaning elements have hijacked the Republican Party of my youth and what is now considered “mainstream Republicanism” is actually a sort of moderate fascism that in my day would have been (and sometimes was) justification for expulsion from, or at least shunning by, the organized Republican Party.
Continue reading ‘Republicans: Moderate Fascists’ »